Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Facial expressions 'hereditary' (BBC/PNAS)
BBC Health News: The faces we pull when we are happy, sad or angry may be passed from generation to generation, according to researchers.
An Israeli team discovered facial expressions among family members bore striking similarities.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they said their findings suggested expressions may be hereditary.
This confirms an idea posed by Charles Darwin in 1872.
In his famous work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Amazon UK | US), he suggested facial expressions were innate.
To test this, University of Haifa researchers analysed the facial expressions of 21 volunteers who had been blind from birth along with those of their relatives.
Continued at "Facial expressions 'hereditary'"
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Based on "Hereditary family signature of facial expression" (Abstract)
[Science, Evolution, Genetics, Israel]
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