PAUL EKMAN: BIOGRAPHY, THEORY OF EMOTIONS, COMMUNICATION, WORKS - PSYCHOLOGY - 2024

Paul Ekman (1934 - present) is an American scientist and researcher considered one of the most important figures in psychology of the 21st century. He is famous for being the first person to study the innate nature of emotions with a series of cross-cultural investigations.

Paul Ekman's research was based on the idea that some human characteristics, such as emotions or body language, have a biological origin instead of being purely cultural as previously believed. In this way, Ekman believed that they were universal, and he tried to prove it with his studies.

Paul Ekman, 2016. Source: Momopuppycat / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

In addition to this, Paul Ekman was one of the first people to investigate body language and the information that our movements and expressions can convey. In fact, he rose to fame within the United States due to his interpretation of the scandal between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, determining that the president was lying based on his body language.

Bill Clinton said "I didn't have sex with that woman." Yet he lied

Today Paul Ekman continues to carry out research and outreach work, despite being retired from his teaching duties. In 1985 he published a best seller called How to detect lies, and in 2001 he participated in a documentary on lies, The Human Face.

Biography

Early years

Paul Ekman was born on February 15, 1934 in Washington DC, United States. The son of a Jewish family, he grew up moving through different cities in his country, including New Jersey, Oregon, California and Washington. His father was a pediatrician and his mother was a lawyer, and his only sister, Joyce, was a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City.

At first Ekman wanted to be a psychotherapist. However, in 1958 she had to join the army, and she soon realized that the routines used there were quite detrimental to the morale and emotions of the troops. This experience made him change his objective, and he began to want to become a researcher in order to improve the lives of as many people as possible.

University of Chicago and New York

At the age of 15, without having graduated from high school, Paul Ekman managed to be admitted to the University of Chicago, where he completed three years of studies. During the time he was in this institution, he was especially interested in group therapies and in the information they gave him about group dynamics.

After this period he moved to New York University (NYU), where he obtained his degree in 1954. During his time there he had to do his thesis, in which he tried to create a study to see how people would respond to therapies group.

Later Paul Ekman got accepted to Adelphi College to take a course in clinical psychology. His master's thesis was focused on facial expressions and body movement. Finally, he obtained his Ph.D. from Adelphi University itself in 1958.

Professional life

After his military service ended, in 1960, Paul Ekman decided to start doing research. To do this, he accepted a position as a research associate at Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital along with Leonard Krasner. There he devoted himself to researching the operant conditioning of verbal behaviors in patients with psychiatric problems.

Between 1960 and 1963 Ekman obtained funds for his research thanks to a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). This scholarship was intended for him to study non-verbal language, and was renewed for 40 years, becoming his main source of income until he managed to enter the University of California as a professor in 1972.

Later Ekman shifted his focus from body movements to facial expressions. In 1985 he wrote and published his famous book How to Detect Lies. At the same time, between 1960 and 2004 he worked as a consultant at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute collaborating with different complicated cases.

In 2004 he retired from teaching at the University of California, and founded the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International.

Fame and influence

In addition to his work as a researcher and teacher, Paul Ekman has also collaborated on numerous projects that have had a great influence on the general public. The first of these was his BBC documentary The Human Face, which came out in 2001.

On the other hand, Ekman worked as a consultant for the famous television series Lie to me, which is largely based on his work. This series served to make it known to the general public.

The same could be said for the Pixar film Inside Out, in which he collaborated by giving advice to the director. After it was released, Ekman wrote a parenting guide based on it.

In the May 2009 issue of Time magazine, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People. He is also considered one of the most important psychologists of the entire 21st century.

Theory of emotions

One of the most important contributions of Paul Ekman was his innovative theory of emotions. Until the arrival of this researcher, the most accepted current was the one that defended that emotions were social constructions, and that since they had no biological basis, they depended to a great extent on the society in which each person lived.

Rather, Ekman believed that feelings were primarily biological in origin, and therefore should be universal and present in much the same ways across cultures around the world. To prove this, he carried out one of the most ambitious cross-cultural studies to date.

Together with his team, Paul Ekman designed a study in which he showed photographs of different facial expressions to people from cultures throughout the world. His idea is that if emotions were really innate, all participants should be able to recognize them regardless of their origin.

The results of the study were very conclusive: practically all the participants were able to recognize the facial expressions represented in the photograph and to name them in a similar way. In this way it was shown that there are indeed a series of innate emotions that are independent of the culture or place of origin.

Basic emotions

The basic emotions described by Ekman in his Emotions Revealed (2007) were the following: anger, disgust, joy, sadness and fear. Some evidences related to other secondary feelings were also found, but these were not so strong and therefore they were not included in his original theory.

Non-verbal communication

On the other hand, Paul Ekman was also one of the pioneers in the study of body language and its importance in interpersonal communication processes. In fact, his first publication was an article from 1957 in which he expressed his frustration at the difficulty that existed when it came to measuring body language empirically.

For Paul Ekman, non-verbal communication is a large part of all information exchange that occurs in human interactions. According to him, unconsciously we are able to interpret the gestures, movements, expressions, tones and positions of our interlocutor, in such a way that we can better understand his message.

However, there is great difficulty in measuring all these elements objectively, something that Ekman set out to solve. Much of his research was aimed at better understanding non-verbal communication and identifying and classifying its most important components.

Paul Ekman's studies with body language were also closely related to his research on emotions and their universal character. In fact, one of the basic principles of his theory of feelings is that feelings are expressed physically in very similar ways in all cultures of the world, so non-verbal language would have a strong biological component.

Microexpressions

Another of Paul Ekman's main branches of study was the importance of micro-expressions in detecting human emotions and inconsistencies in communication. According to this researcher, people are capable of using more than 10,000 different facial expressions, although only about 3,000 would be directly related to emotions.

Microexpressions. Source: paulekman.com

One of Ekman's goals with this line of research was to be able to detect a reliable system to detect lies and inconsistencies in communication. His results in this regard were published in his book How to detect lies, in addition to serving as the basis for the famous television series Lie to me.

In addition to this, Ekman developed a system known as the Facial Action Coding System that serves to describe the facial movements related to each of the basic emotions.

From this system he also developed various training methods to recognize basic facial expressions, which for example can be used for the rehabilitation of people with Asperger's.

In this short interview Ekman talks about non-verbal communication and lies, micro-expressions:

Plays

- How to detect lies (1985).

- Emotions in the human face (1972).

- The face of emotions: how to read facial expressions to improve your relationships (2017).

- What does that gesture say? (2004).

- Why children lie (1994).

- Moving towards global compassion (2014).

- Revealed emotions (2003).

- Facial action coding system (1978).

References

1. "Paul Ekman Biography" in: Good Therapy. Retrieved on: April 26, 2020 from Good Therapy: goodtherapy.org.
2. "Paul Ekman" in: Famous Psychologists. Retrieved on: April 26, 2020 from Famous Psychologists: famouspsychologists.org.
3. "About Paul Ekman" in: Paul Ekman Group. Retrieved on: April 26, 2020 from Paul Ekman Group: paulekman.com.
4. "Paul Ekman Ph. D." in: Psychology Today. Retrieved on: April 26, 2020 from Psychology Today: psychologytoday.com.
5. "Paul Ekman" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: April 26, 2020 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.