my mind on books

The Walrus has a review article on evolutionary psychology, discussing or citing a number of books starting with Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and including What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture by Edward Slingerland (Cambridge University Press, 2008), plus The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative ed. by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Northwestern University Press, 2005).

The Walrus article concludes by citing recent research by Takahiko Masuda:

When presented with a smiling face against a background of contrary expressions, the Japanese, unlike the North Americans, had significant doubts about whether the face truly represented “happiness.” Much more than the North Americans, the Japanese took context into account and concluded that, despite the smiley face, an individual surrounded by unhappy people might not feel all that happy. Like the display rules Ekman had formulated from his own analysis of American and Japanese cultures, Masuda’s work points to what might be termed “context rules” that affect the actual experiencing of emotion.