World-wide welcome?

A couple of decades ago, I reviewed the argument between Paul Ekman and Margaret Meade about whether facial expressions are universal or socially constructed:

"Political correctness, biology and culture", 10/31/2006 "The Cabinet of Dr. Birdwhistell", 11/2/2006

Ekman won that argument, at least as judged by most of subsequent intellectual history — though not everyone is convinced, and his own methods have been criticized.

But I recently saw a facial image suggesting that postural context also matters, with perhaps some effects of social associations as well.

We associate the Statue of Liberty with a positive, welcoming attitude — "From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome", as Emma Lazarus wrote.

But this photo, showing her face being unpacked in 1886, seems to project a dour and rather unwelcoming attitude:

This picture, showing the statue's head on exhibit at the 1878 Paris World's Fair, make her seem a bit milder:

The version on this 1971 stamp looks almost friendly:

And this one, showing Nancy Reagan re-opening the statue to the public in 1986, makes Lady Liberty look blandly thoughtful, at least to me:

1960s-era Paul Ekman would have wanted evidence about what the Fore people in in the highlands of Papua New Guinea thought of those facial images — except that his 1960s-era methods would have excluded them,

Ekman showed photographs selected from over 3000 pictures of individuals asked to simulate emotions, from which he edited to contain "those which showed only the pure display of a single affect," using no control and subject only to Ekman's intuition. If Ekman felt a photograph did not show the correct "pure" emotion, he excluded it.

In any case, his focus in recent decades has been on deception detection.