Paul Ekman facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Paul Ekman

Born	February 15, 1934 (1934-02-15) (age 91) Washington, D.C., United States
Alma mater	University of Chicago New York University Adelphi University
Known for	Microexpressions, Lie to Me
Spouse(s)	Mary Ann Mason
Awards	Named by the American Psychological Association as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century based on publications, citations and awards (2001) Honorary Degree, University of Fernando Pessoa, Portugal (2008) Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Adelphi University (2008) Honorary Degree, University of Geneva, Switzerland (2008) Named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine (2009) Honorary Degree, Lund University, Sweden (2011)
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology Anthropology
Doctoral advisor	John Amsden Starkweather

Paul Ekman, born on February 15, 1934, is an American psychologist. He used to be a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He is famous for his groundbreaking work on emotions and how they show up on our facial expressions. Many people consider him one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century.

His research helped restart the study of emotions and how people communicate without words. He created new ways for scientists to study these topics. He also did important early work on how emotions affect our bodies.

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About Paul Ekman

Early Life and Education

Paul Ekman was born in 1934 in Washington, D.C.. He grew up in several states, including New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, and California. His father was a children's doctor, and his mother was a lawyer.

When he was 15, Paul Ekman started college at the University of Chicago. He was very interested in how groups of people interact. Later, he studied at New York University (NYU) and earned his bachelor's degree in 1954. His first research project looked at how people reacted in group therapy.

He then went to Adelphi University to study clinical psychology. He earned his Ph.D. in 1958. His master's thesis focused on facial expressions and body movements, which he had started studying in 1954.

Military Service

After finishing his studies, Ekman joined the U.S. Army in 1958. He served for two years as a chief psychologist at Fort Dix, New Jersey. There, he studied army routines and how basic training affected soldiers' minds. This experience made him want to be a researcher to help many people.

His Career in Psychology

After the army, Ekman became a research associate in 1960. He met an anthropologist named Gregory Bateson, who later gave him old films from Bali. These films helped Ekman study how people express themselves in different cultures.

In 1963, Ekman received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study nonverbal behavior. This grant helped pay his salary for 40 years! In 1972, he became a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

A friend and teacher, Silvan Tomkins, encouraged Ekman to focus on facial expressions. In 1985, Ekman published his famous book, Telling Lies, which is still popular today. He retired from UCSF in 2004. After retiring, he started his own groups, Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International.

Paul Ekman in Media

Paul Ekman's work has appeared in many popular media projects.

In 2001, he worked with John Cleese on a BBC documentary series called The Human Face.
His research is a big part of the TV show Lie to Me. The main character, Dr. Lightman, is based on Paul Ekman. Ekman was a scientific adviser for the show. He read scripts and sent videos of facial expressions for the actors to copy.
He also worked with Pixar director Pete Docter for the 2015 movie Inside Out. Ekman even wrote a guide for parents on how to use Inside Out to talk about emotions with their children.

His Influence

Paul Ekman is a very influential psychologist.

Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009.
He was also ranked among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century in 2014.
He helps the Greater Good magazine, which shares scientific research about kindness, helping others, and peaceful relationships.

What Paul Ekman Researched

Studying Nonverbal Communication

Ekman became interested in nonverbal communication early in his career. He wanted to find ways to measure how people communicate without words. He learned that facial muscle movements create facial expressions. He found that humans can make over 10,000 different facial expressions! About 3,000 of these are related to emotions.

His friend, psychologist Silvan Tomkins, helped him focus on facial expressions. This led to Ekman's famous studies on how emotions are recognized across different cultures.

Emotions Around the World

In the 1800s, Charles Darwin suggested that emotions and their expressions are universal, meaning they are the same for all humans. However, in the 1950s, many anthropologists believed that facial expressions were learned differently in each culture.

Through his studies, Ekman found that people from many different cultures, both Western and Eastern, agreed on what certain facial expressions meant. He found that expressions for anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise are universal. This means people everywhere tend to show and understand these emotions in the same way.

Ekman and his colleague Wallace V. Friesen even studied a tribe in Papua New Guinea who had not been exposed to media. They found that these tribesmen also recognized the same universal emotions.

However, Ekman and Friesen also found that cultures have "display rules." These are rules about when and to whom people can show certain emotions. These rules can make it seem like emotions are different across cultures, even though the basic expressions are universal.

In the 1990s, Ekman added more emotions to his list of basic emotions. These included:

Tools for Studying Facial Expressions

Ekman created tools to help people study and understand facial expressions.

Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA): In 1976, he released a set of 110 black and white photos of people showing the six universal emotions. Researchers around the world use these photos to study emotion recognition.
Facial Action Coding System (FACS): By 1978, Ekman and Friesen developed FACS. This system describes every observable facial movement. Each movement is called an "action unit" (AU). All facial expressions can be broken down into these basic action units.
MicroExpressions Training Tool (METT): This tool helps people spot very quick, tiny facial expressions called "microexpressions." These microexpressions often appear when someone tries to hide their true feelings. This tool can help people with conditions like Asperger's or autism understand emotions better.
Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT): This tool teaches how to recognize very small signs of emotion. These can be tiny expressions on just part of the face, or very faint expressions across the whole face.

Detecting Deception

Ekman also studied how to tell when people are lying. He looked at why people lie and why it's often hard to spot a lie. He started by watching videotaped interviews to study people's facial expressions when they were not telling the truth.

In a project called the Wizards Project, Ekman found that certain facial "microexpressions" can help detect lies. After testing 20,000 people, he found only 50 who could spot lies without any special training. He called these people "Truth Wizards."

Ekman also looks for verbal signs of lying. For example, he noticed that former President Bill Clinton used "distancing language" when talking about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which suggested he might not be telling the full truth.

Paul Ekman's Contributions

In a 1993 paper, Ekman described nine ways his research on facial expressions helped us understand emotion better. Here are some key ideas:

Nature and Nurture: Emotions are now seen as both natural (physiological) and influenced by our culture and learning.
Emotion-Specific Physiology: Ekman looked for specific body changes that happen with different emotions. This helped create the field of affective neuroscience, which studies how emotions relate to brain activity.
What Comes Before Emotions: Ekman found that simply making a universal facial expression can actually make you feel that emotion and cause your body to react.
Emotions as Families: Ekman and Friesen found that each emotion doesn't have just one expression. Instead, there are many related expressions for each emotion. For example, they found 60 different ways to show anger. These variations might show how strong the emotion is or how it's being controlled.