Ekman, Paul 1934-

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EKMAN, Paul 1934-

PERSONAL: Born February 15, 1934, in Washington, DC; married Mary Ann Mason (dean of graduate studies at University of California—Berkeley); children: Eve, Tom. Education: Attended University of Chicago, 1949-52; New York University, B.A., 1954; Adelphi University, M.A., 1955, Ph.D., 1958.

ADDRESSES: Home—3811 16th St., San Francisco, CA 94114. Office—P.O. Box 5211, Berkeley, CA 94705.

CAREER: University of California, School of Medicine, San Francisco, research psychologist at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, 1960-72, professor of psychology, 1972-2004. Chairman of the board, Institute of Analytic Interviewing. Military service: U.S. Army, Medical Corps, 1958-60; became first lieutenant.

MEMBER: American Psychological Association (fellow), American Association for the Advancement of Science (fellow), Federation of American Sciences.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Institute of Mental Health research scientist awards, 1966, 1970, 1977; Gold Medal, New York International Film Festival, 1976; Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association, 1991; Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Chicago, 1994; American Psychological Society, William James Fellow Award, 1998; Jack Block Award for distinguished contributions in personality psychology, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2002.

WRITINGS:

(With Wallace V. Friesen and Phoebe Ellsworth) Emotion in the Human Face: Guide-Lines for Research and an Integration of Findings, Pergamon (New York, NY), 1972, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

(Editor) Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review, Academic Press (New York, NY), 1973.

Unmasking the Face, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1975.

(With Wallace V. Friesen) Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement, Consulting Psychologists Press, 1978.

Face of Man: Universal Expression in a New Guinea Village, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1980.

(Editor and contributor, with K. Scherer) Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

(Editor, with K. Scherer) Approaches to Emotion, Lawrence Erlbaum (Hillsdale, NJ), 1984.

Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage, and Politics, Norton (New York, NY), 1985, revised edition, 2001.

Discover the Secrets of Facial Language (sound recording), American Psychological Association (Washington, DC), 1988.

Why Kids Lie: How Parents Can Encourage Truthfulness, Scribner (New York, NY), 1991.

(Coeditor) The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

(Editor, with Erika L. Rosenberg) What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1997, 2nd edition, 2005.

(Author of introduction, afterword, and commentaries) Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor, with others) Emotions inside out: 130 Years after Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, New York Academy of Sciences Proceedings (New York, NY), 2003.

Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life, Times Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins, edited by E. Virginia Demos, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1995. Contributor to periodicals, including Psychological Review, Psychology Today, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. General editor (with others), "Series in Affective Science," Oxford University Press (New York, NY).

SIDELIGHTS: Paul Ekman has been called one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, primarily due to his extensive studies on the display of emotions in human facial expressions. His work in that field began during the 1960s, when he realized that, although Darwin had written almost one hundred years earlier about the consistency of expressions in animals, no one had ever undertaken a similar study on humans. Ekman set out to see if expressions were similar even in very different cultures. At the time he undertook this investigation, it was generally believed that within human society, expressions for emotion were culturally determined rather than instinctive. Over the course of many years, Ekman and his colleagues gathered evidence of the universality of seven facial expressions of emotion: anger, happiness, fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, and contempt. Common facial arrangements to signify these feelings were recognizable across multiple cultures, including those of Japan, Europe, the United States, and a remote New Guinea population. Cultures did have widely varying rules for the appropriateness of revealing or expressing emotion. According to Jeanne McDermott in Smithsonian, Ekman's investigations made "the face a respectable thing to study."

While working at the University of California—San Francisco, Ekman moved into a different but related field. His mentor, Sylvan Tompkins, had trained himself to be aware of the most minute changes in emotional expression; he was able to accurately read character and predict actions by looking at faces. Using their assumption of a set of facial expressions universally attached to certain human emotions, Ekman and a colleague decided to create a sort of glossary of human facial expressions, with which they could train themselves and others to be as sensitive to reading emotions as Tompkins. The research partners spent long days sitting across from each other, making every face they could think of. They soon realized that they must study anatomy as well, so that they could accurately record all possible muscle movements in the face. Use of a slow-motion camera helped them to define tiny facial movements they called "microexpressions." Over the course of seven years, they cataloged over ten thousand possible facial configurations, identifying some three thousand that really seemed to have concrete meaning. They had, according to Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, "catalogued the essential repertoire of human emotion."

Ekman began to write up his work in books such as Unmasking the Face and Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement. His work identified various expressions with numbers, and "hundreds of people around the world have learned the system and apply it to people's pathologies, to things such as degrees of depression or trauma to the brain," according to Julian Guthrie of the San Francisco Chronicle. Ekman became particularly interested in the expressions that signify lying and in teaching people to detect when someone else is telling a falsehood. In 1985 he published Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage, and Politics. Ekman and his work were suddenly popular with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency (NSA), and other individuals and organizations with an interest in knowing who is telling the truth and who is not.

In 1999, Ekman wrote the introduction, preface, and afterword for a new edition of Charles Darwin's classic work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. He pointed to reasons for long neglect of Darwin's ideas about emotion, ideas which had propelled Ekman into his own studies. Mary Ann French wrote in the Boston Globe Magazine a "reason why Darwin's ideas were rejected was that he was proclaiming the universality of mankind. 'He was directly attacking the racists who said Europeans were superior because they had evolved from a more advanced progenitor,' Ekman says, 'and his proof was the universality of human expression, which he said shows that we all have a single progenitor'." According to Steven Pinker in Science, Darwin "proved that the human mind, not just the body, is a product of evolution. It showed, during the heyday of scientific racism, that the races of mankind are fundamentally similar." Ekman claimed his to be the "definitive" edition of Darwin's work, noted Pinker: "It includes revisions and material that Darwin had intended for a second edition that he did not live to see because the publisher refused to go back to press until all the copies of the first edition had sold (some things don't change). Ekman has also added commentary before, after, and within the text, and has reproduced original versions of photographs that had been altered or misprinted in the first edition."

In Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life, Ekman sought to help readers understand and improve their own emotional lives. In a New York Times interview, Ekman told Judy Foreman that his mother had committed suicide when he was 14, and he became a psychologist to help himself by helping others like her. His book touches on the intersection of scientific understanding with Buddhist mindfulness and meditation techniques. He suggests that while readers do not want to shut off their emotions, they should develop the habit of mindfulness or attentiveness to avoid destructive emotional interactions. Ekman explains how to do this and also illuminates why it can be difficult to accomplish.

Ekman met the Dalai Lama while working on Emotions Revealed, and he told Foreman that the meeting led him to rewrite his book: "It sharpened my ideas to contrast them with Buddhist beliefs." Ekman continued to pursue an understanding of what it takes to recognize and control emotions. Laboratory findings that Tibetan lamas with years of training in meditation are both very difficult to disturb and very good at recognizing emotions in other people inspired Ekman to work on designing programs that combine Buddhist techniques with modern psychological methods to help people manage their emotions and relationships productively.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

American Journal of Psychology, fall, 1996, Niels Birbaumer and Dominic Massaro, "The Nature of Emotion," p. 496.

Boston Globe Magazine, September 11, 2000; July 5, 2001.

Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 1981, Melvin Maddocks, "Is Your Face an Open Book?," p. 23.

Discover, January, 2005, Mary Duenwald, "Is She Hiding Something?," p. 16.

Esquire, April, 2003, Daniel Torday, "How to Read Your Wife's Face," p. 90.

Financial Times, April 4, 1998.

Fresno Bee (Fresno, CA), August 17, 1997, Beverly Mills, "What to Do with a Child Who Lies," p. E4.

Guardian (Manchester, England), February 12, 1998, Stephen Poole, review of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, p. 14; March 27, 1999, Desmond Christie, review of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, p. 11; July 10, 2003, Ian Sample, interview with Paul Ekman, p. 9.

Independent (London, England), April 4, 1998, Peter Tallack, "The Science of Feelings," p. 16.

Judicature, October-November, 1985, Steven Lefelt, review of Telling Lies, p. 159.

Library Journal, February 1, 1985, William Abrams, review of Telling Lies, p. 103; May 1, 2003, Mary Ann Hughes, review of Emotions Revealed, p. 140.

Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1991, Thomas Maugh, II, "The Truth about Lies," p. A3.

Men's Health, May, 1996, "Read between the Lines," p. 52.

National Geographic, March, 2005, "Playing with Emotions: A Photographer's Lesson in Reading (and Making) Faces."

New Scientist, March 7, 1998, Laurence Hurst, review of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, p. 46; June 6, 1998, p. 50.

Newsweek International, June 9, 2003, Temma Ehrenfeld, "What's in Your Face," p. 53.

New Yorker, August 5, 2002, Malcolm Gladwell, "The Naked Face."

New York Times, May 6, 1980, Dava Sobel, "The Face of a Man," p. C3; September 9, 1983, Harold Schmeck, Jr., "Study Says Smile May Indeed be an Umbrella," pp. 1, A1; December 23, 1986, "Universal Look of Contempt," pp. 20, C3; September 17, 1991, Daniel Goleman, "Non-verbal Cues Are Easy to Misinterpret," pp. B5, C1; May 11, 1999, Erica Goode, "To Tell the Truth," pp. D1, F1; September 8, 2002, Michael T. Kaufman, "Face It: Your Looks Are Revealing," p. 3; February 4, 2003, Daniel Goleman, "Finding Happiness," pp. D5, F5; August 5, 2003, Judy Foreman, interview with Paul Ekman, p. F5.

New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1985, Carol Malatesta, review of Telling Lies, p. 9; October 19, 1986, Patricia O'Conner, review of Telling Lies, p. 50; Cynthia Samuels, November 26, 1989, "Why Kids Lie," p. 27.

People, November 25, 1985, interview with Paul Ekman, p. 159.

Psychology Today, February, 1981, Daniel Goleman, "The 7,000 Faces of Dr. Ekman," p. 42; May, 1985, M. S. Kaplan, "Telling Lies," p. 74; January, 1986, Nick Jordan, "The Face of Feeling," p. 8; July-August, 1988, Valeria Adler, "Lying Smiles," p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, December 21, 1984, review of Telling Lies, p. 77.

San Francisco Chronicle, October 13, 1996, Leah Garchick, "A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Votes," p. 2/Z1; September 16, 2002, Julian Guthrie, "The Lie Detective," p. A6.

San Jose Mercury News, April 29, 2003.

Science, July 24, 1998, Steven Pinker, review of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, p. 522.

Scientific American, June, 2003.

Scotland on Sunday (Edinburgh, Scotland), February 8, 1998, Carl MacDougall, review of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, p. S26.

Smithsonian, March, 1986, Jeanne McDermott, "Face to Face," p. 112.

Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), July 26, 1998, Tony Johnston, "Facial 'Language' Our Survival Key," p. 6.

Sunday Times (London, England), August 31, 2003, Dominic Rushe, "The Little Fish that Hooked Disney," p. 8.

Time, April 22, 1985, John Leo, "The Fine Art of Catching Liars," p. 59.

Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 1998, Ian Hacking, review of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, p. 11.

Washingtonian, February, 1990, Diana McLellan, "Who's Smiling Now?," p. 108.

Washington Post, May 30, 1985, Boyce Rensberger, "Study Finds Fake Emotion Becomes Real," p. A7; December 10, 1987, "Truth in Smiling," p. A26; September 3, 1991, Sally Squires, "Secret Service Agents Appear Gifted," p. WH3; November 8, 1993, John Schwartz, "Putting a Certain Face on Emotions," p. A3; July 12, 1999, Guy Gugliotta, "True or False?," p. A07.

Weekend Australian (Sydney, Australia), June 28, 2003, review of Emotions Revealed, p. T13; September 27, 2003, Damien Broderick, "Mind Reading the Body," p. B31.