Books of faces: Cultural techniques of basic emotions

Abstract

This article examines books of faces – serial images of faces performing a multitude of expressions – as a cultural technique employed in empirical, experimental psychological research on facial emotion. It focuses on the generally forgotten work of Robert S. Woodworth, Harold Schlosberg, Theodor Piderit, and Jean Frois-Wittmann, arguing that the media employed in their research provide the operative foundations for discrete ‘affect programs’ of ‘basic emotions’. The article opens and concludes with discussions of digital emotion recognition technologies, suggesting that the category system of emotion represented by the work of these psychologists is, perhaps, coming to an end.