Last week’s evolutionary psychology seminar was on the topic of emotions, and why we have them. There are six basic human emotions (and some of them are shown in many animals as well). They are happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. Across the globe, people of all cultures and backgrounds produce the same facial expressions for each of these, and they are universally understood. In our seminar, there were very few happy faces (it was Friday afternoon in January…), but not too many sad, angry or scared people. One of the papers we discussed was on the reasons disgust would be useful for our survival. To demonstrate the feeling and to evoke the facial expressions, students were offered a dish with dried mealworms and crickets (produced for human consumption…).
