In 1868, Charles Darwin wanted to create a universal dictionary of emotions. He asked 24 participants to attribute emotions to various images of a man getting electrical shocks to the face (according to Darwin the expression above is "Agony, torture, and fright"). The University of Cambridge’s Darwin Correspondence Project recreated the study using the same images:
Yes, they look like yearbook portraits from a sanitorium. But more than 18,000 participants’ evaluations have now been tallied, and the project may actually yield defendable results. And they include a dimension Darwin didn’t intend. “There are different emotional vocabularies and repertoires in different periods,” says Cambridge research associate Paul White. For example, whereas Darwin’s posse perceived the conveyed emotion in one image as “hardness,” today’s majority describes it as “bored”—a word that in the 1800s only described what you might have done to a piece of wood. Emotions, it turns out, vary not only cross-culturally but also cross-historically. You might say they’ve evolved.
The Dish 