Fear: Across the Disciplines

3. HOW DID FEAR BECOME A SCIENTIFIC OBJECT AND WHAT KIND OF OBJECT IS IT?

51 Ruth Leys WHEN ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, terrorists killed more than three thousand people in their attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, for Americans in particular the world suddenly became a much more frightening place. Insecurity became the norm as the Bush administration ’s new Department of Homeland Security used its color-coded terror alert system to orchestrate and manipulate the public’s fears. Among the many consequences of 9/11 has been the flow of federal funds to scientists committed to finding ways to identify terrorists before they can act. One of those is Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has devoted his career to studying facial expressions and is working on methods of surveillance designed to read the telltale involuntary facial signs that betray the potential terrorist’s deadly intentions. Ekman’s goal is to reassure us that we don’t have to be frightened by the tendency of human beings to dissimulate, because science can be counted on to reliably distinguish authentic facial expressions from false ones, genuine from feigned.1 In this chapter I examine the theoretical assumptions and methods HOW DID FEAR BECOME A SCIENTIFIC OBJECT AND WHAT KIND OF OBJECT IS IT? 3 52 Ruth Leys informing Ekman’s approach to the emotions and facial expression. I offer my analysis as a contribution, from the perspective of the history of the human sciences, to our understanding of one major strand of research in the United States that has helped shaped the science of fear. Ekman’s is not the only game in town; in fact, as we shall see, there are signs today of a growing opposition to his research program from within psychology. But for the last thirty years he has exerted, and indeed continues to exert, a powerful influence. Not only do psychologists and neuroscientists routinely cite his experimental findings but, as a consequence of the striking recent growth of interest in the emotions and affect in the humanities and social sciences, his work has begun to attract the attention of scholars in philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, literature, and related fields. Among those who share many of Ekman’s presuppositions is the celebrated neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In the course of this chapter I shall be discussing an important case, investigated by Damasio, Ralph Adolphs, and others, of a young woman who, it has been claimed, is unable to experience fear because she has an abnormal brain. More precisely, the patient suffers from a genetic disorder that causes bilateral calcification of her amygdala, a subcortical group of neurons widely held to be implicated in rapid emotional responses, especially fear. Crucial to Damasio’s interpretation of the case has been his use of methods developed by Ekman to test a person’s ability to judge emotional expressions. In particular Damasio has employed a set of pictures of people intentionally presenting, that is, posing, such expressions drawn from Ekman’s portfolio of such items in order to evaluate the deficits in his amygdaladamaged patient’s skill in judging threatening faces. I find Ekman’s pictures at once interesting and puzzling (figs. 3.1 and 3.2). One of my aims is to make such images historically intelligible while also bringing out what seems to me their sheer strangeness as scientific documents. EMOTIONS AS NONINTENTIONAL STATES: TOMKINS’S AFFECT PROGRAM THEORY When in the 1960s Ekman began studying nonverbal behavior, including facial expressions, the emotions after years of neglect were just beginning to become a topic of renewed concern among scientists. Ekman started his investigations at a time when one psychologist in particular , Silvan S. Tomkins, was proposing a new way of thinking about the affects. Influenced by several important trends in the human sci- How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object? 53 ences, especially a resurgent interest in Darwinian evolution and the rise of cybernetics, Tomkins turned his back on the then-reigning orthodoxies of psychoanalysis to advocate instead a Darwinian-inspired biological theory of the emotions. Tomkins argued that there exists a small number of basic emotions defined in evolutionary terms as universal or pancultural adaptive responses of the organism.2 He proposed that there were eight or nine such basic emotions, namely, fear, anger, distress, disgust, interest, shame, joy, and surprise. (He later added contempt.) Tomkins described the basic emotions as discrete, hardwired, reflex-like “affect programs” located in the subcortical parts of the brain...