Paul Ekman
American psychologist known for research on facial expressions and basic emotions
American psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who with Wallace Friesen studied facial expressions across cultures and developed the Facial Action Coding System. He is associated with the idea of basic emotions.
Why this person matters
Ekman's cross-cultural studies of facial expression were influential evidence for a small set of universal emotions, and his coding system gave researchers a way to measure facial movement. Wallace Friesen worked with him on both. His claims are now disputed by researchers who find the evidence weaker.
Main contributions
Cross-cultural facial expression studies
In 1967 and 1968 Ekman studied the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. With Friesen he showed photographs to people with little exposure to modern media, who linked the expressions to the same emotions as people elsewhere. His account was that certain expressions are universal.
Facial Action Coding System
With Friesen he developed FACS in 1978 as a method for measuring facial movement. It was revised in 2003 with a third author.
Microexpressions and deception
Ekman and Friesen identified microexpressions in 1967 while reviewing slow-motion films of patients who concealed negative feelings. After his 1985 book Telling Lies he developed workshops for agencies including the TSA, CIA and FBI.
Context and limits
A 2019 review by Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues concluded that the evidence does not support the common view that specific facial configurations reliably signal specific emotions; the review does not name Ekman. It reports that studies in small remote cultures found no configuration specific to a single emotion. According to his obituary, newer researchers questioned his 1960s method of giving subjects a list of emotion words to match with faces, and Barrett found that recognition fell when word lists were removed.
In your introductory course
Motivation and emotion.Ekman appears in chapters on emotion, where students meet the six emotion categories and the universality debate. The critique shows why facial expression research is now taught with caution.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 10.4. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1958
He earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Adelphi University.
- 1967
He began fieldwork with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea.
- 1978
He and Friesen developed the Facial Action Coding System.
- 1985
He published Telling Lies.
- 2004
He retired from his UCSF professorship and formed the Paul Ekman Group.
Sources
- Paul Ekman Group, About Paul EkmanPublisher. Institutional biography inspected.
- Boston Globe, Paul Ekman, who linked facial expressions to universal emotions, dies at 91 (New York Times obituary)Publisher. Reference article inspected.
- Association for Psychological Science, Emotional Expressions Reconsidered (Barrett et al., 2019)Society or association. Abstract inspected.