The eye seems to receive most notice. As Perez says: “The eye is one of the most interesting and attractive of objects; the vivacity of the pupil set in its oval background of white, its sparkles, its darts of light, its tender looks, its liquid depths, attract and fascinate a young child....”[[18]] The mouth also gets much attention, especially when in movement; I have sometimes noticed a child who is looking into the eyes turn from them to the mouth when the person commences to talk: the flashing of the teeth then adds to its interest. The voice is also the object of close observation. The intentness with which a child listens to it, the quickness with which he learns to distinguish different voices and different inflections of the same voice, and the fact that vocal imitation precedes other sorts, all show this. It cannot fail to strike the observer that observation of these traits is not merely casual, but a strenuous study, often accompanied by a frown of earnest attention. The mind is evidently aroused, something important is going on, something conscious, voluntary, eager. It would seem likely that this something is the storing up, arrangement, and interpretation of those images of expression which remain throughout life the starting-point of personal imaginations.
The wrinkles about the eyes and mouth, which are perhaps the most expressive parts of the countenance, would not be so noticeable at first as the eyes, the lips, and the teeth, but they are always in the field of vision, and in time their special significance as a seat of expression comes to be noticed and studied. M. appeared to understand a smile sufficiently to be pleased by it about the end of the tenth month. The first unequivocal case of smiling in response to a smile was noticed on the twenty-sixth day of this month. Even at this age smiling is not imitative in the sense of being a voluntary repetition of the other’s action, but appears to be merely an involuntary expression of pleasure. Facial expression is one of the later things to be imitated, for the reason, apparently, that the little child cannot be aware of the expression of his own countenance as he can hear his own voice or see his own hands; and therefore does not so soon learn to control it and to make it a means of voluntary imitation. He learns this only when he comes to study his features in the looking-glass. This children do as early as the second year, when they may be observed experimenting before the mirror with all sorts of gestures and grimaces.
The interpretation of a smile, or of any sort of facial expression, is apparently learned much as other things are. By constant study of the face from the first month the child comes, in time, to associate the wrinkles that form a smile with pleasant experiences—fondling, coaxing, offering of playthings or of the bottle, and so on. Thus the smile comes to be recognized as a harbinger of pleasure, and so is greeted with a smile. Its absence, on the other hand, is associated with inattention and indifference. Toward the end of the fifth month M., on one occasion, seemed to notice the change from a smile to a frown, and stopped smiling herself. However, a number of observations taken in the tenth month show that even then it was doubtful whether she could be made to smile merely by seeing someone else do it; and, as I say, the first unequivocal case was noticed toward the end of this month.
Such evidence as we have from the direct observation of children does not seem to me to substantiate the opinion that we have a definite instinctive sensibility to facial expression. Whatever hereditary element there is I imagine to be very vague, and incapable of producing definite phenomena without the aid of experience. I experimented upon my own and some other children with frowns, attempts at ferocity, and pictures of faces, as well as with smiles—in order to elicit instinctive apprehension of expression, but during the first year these phenomena seemed to produce no definite effect. At about fifteen months M. appeared to be dismayed by a savage expression assumed while playing with her, and at about the same period became very sensitive to frowns. The impression left upon me was that after a child learns to expect a smiling face as the concomitant of kindness, he is puzzled, troubled, or startled when it is taken away, and moreover learns by experience that frowns and gravity mean disapproval and opposition. I imagine that children fail to understand any facial expression that is quite new to them. An unfamiliar look, an expression of ferocity for example, may excite vague alarm simply because it is strange; or, as is very likely with children used to kind treatment, this or any other contortion of the face may be welcomed with a laugh on the assumption that it is some new kind of play. I feel sure that observation will dissipate the notion of any definite instinctive capacity to interpret the countenance.
I might also mention, as having some bearing upon this question of definite hereditary ideas, that my children did not show that instinctive fear of animals that some believe to be implanted in us. R., the elder, until about three years of age, delighted in animals, and when taken to the menagerie regarded the lions and tigers with the calmest interest; but later, apparently as a result of rude treatment by a puppy, became exceedingly timid. M. has never, so far as I know, shown any fear of any animal.
As regards sounds, there is no doubt of a vague instinctive susceptibility, at least to what is harsh—sharp, or plaintive. Children less than a month old will show pain at such sounds. A harsh cry, or a sharp sound like that of a tin horn, will sometimes make them draw down the mouth and cry even during the first week.
Darwin records that in one of his children sympathy “was clearly shown at six months and eleven days by his melancholy face, with the corners of his mouth well depressed, when his nurse pretended to cry.”[[19]] Such manifestations are probably caused rather by the plaintive voice than by facial expression; at any rate, I have never been able to produce them by the latter alone.
Some believe that young children have an intuition of personal character quicker and more trustworthy than that of grown people. If this were so it would be a strong argument in favor of the existence of a congenital instinct which does not need experience and is impaired by it. My own belief is that close observation of children under two years of age will lead to the conclusion that personal impressions are developed by experience. Yet it is possibly true that children three years old or more are sometimes quicker and more acute judges of some traits, such as sincerity and good will, than grown people. In so far as it is a fact it may perhaps be explained in this way. The faces that children see and study are mostly full of the expression of love and truth. Nothing like it occurs in later life, even to the most fortunate. These images, we may believe, give rise in the child’s mind to a more or less definite ideal of what a true and kindly face should be, and this ideal he uses with great effect in detecting what falls short of it. He sees that there is something wrong with the false smile; it does not fit the image in his mind; some lines are not there, others are exaggerated. He does not understand what coldness and insincerity are, but their expression puzzles and alarms him, merely because it is not what he is used to. The adult loses this clear, simple ideal of love and truth, and the sharp judgment that flows from it. His perception becomes somewhat vulgarized by a flood of miscellaneous experience, and he sacrifices childish spontaneity to wider range and more complex insight, valuing and studying many traits of which the child knows nothing. It will not be seriously maintained that, on the whole, we know people better when we are children than we do later.
I put forward these scanty observations for what little they may be worth, and not as disproving the existence of special instincts in which Darwin and other great observers have believed. I do not maintain that there is no hereditary aptitude to interpret facial expression—there must be some sort of an instinctive basis to start from—but I think that it develops gradually and in indistinguishable conjunction with knowledge gained by experience.
Apparently, then, voice, facial expression, gesture, and the like, which later become the vehicle of personal impressions and the sensible basis of sympathy, are attractive at first chiefly for their sensuous variety and vividness, very much as other bright, moving, sounding things are attractive; and the interpretation of them comes gradually by the interworking of instinct and observation. This interpretation is nothing other than the growth, in connection with these sensuous experiences, of a system of ideas that we associate with them. The interpretation of an angry look, for instance, consists in the expectation of angry words and acts, in feelings of resentment or fear, and so on; in short, it is our whole mental reaction to this sign. It may consist in part of sympathetic states of mind, that is in states of mind that we suppose the other to experience also; but it is not confined to such. These ideas that enrich the meaning of the symbol—the resentment or fear, for instance—have all, no doubt, their roots in instinct; we are born with the crude raw material of such feelings. And it is precisely in the act of communication, in social contact of some sort, that this material grows, that it gets the impulses that give it further definition, refinement, organization. It is by intercourse with others that we expand our inner experience. In other words, and this is the point of the matter, the personal idea consists at first and in all later development, of a sensuous element or symbol with which is connected a more or less complex body of thought and sentiment; the whole social in genesis, formed by a series of communications.