Was "Facial Expressions of Emotion" A Misleading Term? Revisiting Hinde's Question Through Ecological and...

The classic discrete emotion-discrete expression framework has been foundational in research on facial behavior and continues to provide useful predictive tools in certain contexts. Yet both proponents and critics increasingly acknowledge that its underlying assumptions limit theoretical and methodological progress, prompting efforts either to broaden the repertoire of basic emotions or to expand the descriptive range of facial behavior. In this article, we examine the enduring emphasis-across research and applied settings-on static prototypes and perceptual judgments drawn largely from WEIRD populations. Using empirical examples from production and recognition studies, we show that facial behavior and emotional experience often display greater variability and contextual dependence than this framework anticipates. We outline several avenues of inquiry grounded in ecological and interactional principles that can complement existing approaches and support more nuanced accounts of facial behavior across diverse contexts.