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Moreover, apart from a handful of excellent ethograms that describe the communication repertoires for a variety of species, including chimpanzees, bonobos, rhesus monkeys, capuchin monkeys and canids (Hinde and Rowell, 1962 van Hooff, 1962, 1967, 1973 Andrew, 1963 Goodall, 1968 Fox, 1969 Bolwig, 1978 Weigel, 1979 de Waal, 1988 Preuschoft and van Hooff, 1997 Redican, 1982 Parr, et al., 2005), there has been little attempt to standardize the description of their facial and vocal displays in a manner that facilitates comparative and evolutionary studies.įridlund ( 1994) has proposed that facial expressions are best understood as communicative signals and as such, researchers should focus on their functional consequences during social interaction, or how they impact the listener. Despite the importance of facial expressions in the evolution of complex societies, there is little work comparing either the form or function of facial expression across distinct phylogenetic groups. As such, facial expressions are critically important for coordinating social interaction, facilitating group cohesion and maintaining individual social relationships (Parr et al., 2002). There is, for example, a general assumption that facial expressions convey a variety of information about an individual's motivation, intentions and emotions (van Hooff, 1967 Ekman, 1997 Parr, et al., 2002). Among primates, the visual and auditory domains have become the two most prominently involved in social communications. Many animal species communicate using a variety of highly conspicuous signals, including acoustic, tactile, olfactory and visual displays that have been tuned by natural selection to impact the listener in a reliable way (Smith, 1977 Dawkins and Krebs, 1978). NATURAL ETHOLOGY OF FACIAL EXPRESSION: FORM AND FUNCTION Future directions for understanding the evolution of emotional communication will include studies on the social function of facial expressions in ongoing social interactions, the development of facial expression communication and more studies that examine the perception of these important social signals.

Finally, it reviews previous studies on the categorization of facial expressions by chimpanzees using computerized tasks, and discusses the importance of configural processing for this skill in both humans and chimpanzees. This paper reviews what is known about these facial expression repertoires, discusses the importance of social organization in understanding the meaning of different expressions, and introduces a new coding system, the ChimpFACS, and describes how it can be used to determine homologies between human and chimpanzee facial expressions. Chimpanzees display a complex, flexible facial expression repertoire with many physical and functional similarities to humans. To understand the evolution of emotional communication, comparative research on facial expression similarities between humans and related species is essential.

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