An Interview with Paul Ekman, Ph.D.

on
Emotional Expression
David Van Nuys, Ph.D., edited by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Updated: Oct 19th 2009

In this edition of the Wise Counsel Podcast, Dr. Van Nuys interviews Paul ekman, Ph.D. on
Emotional Expression.

David Van Nuys: Welcome to Wise Counsel, a podcast interview series sponsored by
Mentalhelp.net, covering topics in mental health, wellness, and psychotherapy. My name is Dr.
David Van Nuys. I'm a clinical psychologist and your host.

On today's show we'll be talking with internationally renowned psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman,
who's been a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He's
considered one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century and is the author of
many books and papers and the recipient of numerous awards. Background of Dr. Ekman's
research analyzes the development of human traits and states over time. Interestingly, the
character Cal Lightman of the television series Lie to Me is loosely based on Dr. Ekman and his
work.

Now, here's the interview.

Dr. Paul Ekman, welcome to Wise Counsel.

Paul Ekman: Thank you very much.

David: You're one of the most prominent psychologists on the planet and have been widely
interviewed, so I'm especially pleased to have this opportunity, and I'm hoping we can break
some new ground. So please feel free to take this interview into any areas that are on the edge of
your own excitement, because you've probably been interviewed so much that you're probably
sick of it.

Paul Ekman: Well, almost. It really depends on the questions that are asked.

David: Okay, well, I hope I do a good job. And that having been said, we should probably begin
with at least something of a recap of your work on emotion and how emotions are expressed in
the human face. What got you interested in emotion in the first place?

Paul Ekman: There are so many different answers to that, I don't know which one is the correct
one. One answer is that originally I started out interested in becoming a psychotherapist, and it
seems that most of the psychotherapies of that time, and the research on psychotherapy, only
dealt with words. They didn't really directly deal with emotion, and even psychoanalytic
approaches had a very simple view of what the emotions are. And another answer is it was
something that was being totally ignored in academic research, especially facial expression. But
there wasn't a chapter on emotion in any introductory textbook 50 years ago. Now there is. So it
was uncharted, it was ignored, and it seemed to me, both as being a patient in psychoanalysis and
being a novice psychotherapist, that it was very important to deal with.

David: Well, those are both very interesting answers, and since my own training was as a
psychotherapist and also in a very psychoanalytic program, those are both really of interest. Now,
how did that interest in emotion transition into your later interest in facial expressions?

Paul Ekman: Well, the face is a primary signal system for emotion; the voice is a secondary
system. The face is always active but the voice only when you talk. But these are the ways in
which we signal emotions to others and that show involuntary changes, so if you want to do
research on emotion, the face is the key. The problem was that when I started out in this research
there was no tool for measuring facial movement. There was no way to know how many different
expressions a human being can make, how many of them are relevant to emotion. There wasn't a
way to establish for certain that two people were showing exactly the same emotional expression.
So everything remained to be done, but it took me eight years to develop a tool for measuring the
face - I never thought it would take that long.

David: I'll bet.

Paul Ekman: But that tool now is not only used by me, but it's used by hundreds of scientists
around the world and by animators and advertisers and portrait painters. Anyone who wants to be
able… it's like the equivalent of musical notation for music. This is the notation for facial
movement.

David: And it's one of those things that in retrospect seems so obvious, but as you say, at the
time it just didn't exist before you brought it into being. And we have this expression "it's as plain
as the nose on your face," the idea that emotion is expressed through the face, and yet there was
nothing done about it until you came along.

Paul Ekman: Well, I can't say nothing, because really, the pioneer, the founder in my view not
only of research on emotion and expression but the first book in psychology, in Western
psychology, is Darwin's The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, published in 1872.
And it was a bestseller in its time, but it became completely neglected for multiple reasons. And I
knew of Darwin's work, but I hadn't bothered to read it until I started my cross-cultural work and
found, much to my surprise, evidence for universality, which is what Darwin had predicted - not
for cultural differences, which is what Margaret Mead and the cultural anthropologists had - I
wouldn't say they predicted - they asserted. And it was widely accepted, by me as well.

So I stand on the shoulders of, probably, three men would be the most accurate way to say it.
Darwin is one of them; the 70% of what we know about certainly the face is in Darwin's book.
He just didn't have the evidence for it. And 30% was bit off. In the Journal of the Association of
Psychological Science, I think next month, there will be an article I wrote on Darwin's
contributions to the study of emotion in this 200th anniversary of his birth.
The second man whose shoulders I stand on is Duchenne du Boulogne, a French neurologist that
published in 1862 the first use of photography in science to study facial movement. And
Duchenne's interests in the face were much more narrow but extremely useful in terms of doing a
functional anatomy of the face. That is, up until Duchenne - and after him, because he was also
widely ignored - we only knew what the muscles were by taking the skin off a cadaver's face. But
we didn't know which ones are capable of independent action because they have separate neural
supplies. That's a functional analysis. Duchenne started it. He got about 20% of the way there and
Friesen, my co-worker, and I did the other 80% and developed this facial action coding system,
this tool.

And the third person whose shoulders I stand on - I'm now thinking about whether these guys are
getting tired of having me stand on their shoulders. But, actually, they're all dead and I think
metaphorically they'd all be pleased that their work didn't die with them on this topic, that
someone continued it. Silvan Tompkins, who was a well-known psychologist in the 1950s and
1960s - I met him in early '60s - and it was Silvan who convinced me, by showing me what he
could get by looking at someone's face, that I should tackle this terrible problem that had defeated
so many people. Because there are at least a half dozen famous psychologists who became
famous for something else and failed in their attempts to get anywhere studying the face. So I
knew it was a risky move, but at that point in my life - my wife would say it's still the case - I like
risks. They appeal to me, and so I embarked on it.

David: Yeah, boy, what a fascinating history. Now, I believe that you found that there are about
17 or so basic positive and negative emotions that are expressed facially and that hold up cross-
culturally. Do I have that right?

Paul Ekman: It's almost right. I'm not sure the exact number; it's close to that. And there are
seven emotions for which we have the evidence of universality, and that is for anger, fear,
disgust, contempt, sadness, surprise and overall happiness. Now, those have a universal
expression in the face. That's pretty well established now, as established as anything ever is in
science. And I should offer a reward for anyone who could find an eighth universal facial
expression of emotion, but I don't think anybody would want to look; it's very unlikely there is
one.

But then, we have a number of enjoyable emotions that have not a facial signal, but a vocal
signal. So just to take one example: it feels good - you're happy when you're relieved, and you're
happy when you're amused, but everyone can recall those sound entirely different. They look the
same on the face. The timing's a little different, but the muscles that move are the same. It's the
voice that carries the signal and distinguishes I've claimed as many as 12 emotions. But the
evidence for universality of those vocal signals so far is for only two or three of them:
amusement, relief, and sensory tactile pleasure. Those three have a universal vocal signal. We
don't yet know whether the others that I've proposed have a universal vocal signal.

David: Okay. Now, how did you become interested in the detection of lying and deception?

Paul Ekman: It wasn't my idea, any more than the idea to study the face was mine, and that was
Silvan who said - because I was focused on gesture and posture - he said, "You're missing the
richest source. It's the face." And the idea to study it cross-culturally was not mine either. It was a
program manager at one of the federal agencies, who was married to a woman from another
culture. They were having trouble, and he thought it was because of miscommunication, and he
wanted me to go and try and settle the matter.

And then the issue of deception: I was teaching a group of young psychiatrists about how to
better diagnose different forms of mental illness by considering expression and gesture, and they
said, "Yeah, but the problem we really need help with is how to tell when a patient who's been
admitted because of a serious suicidal attempt is lying or being truthful when they say, 'I'm
feeling much better, doctor. Give me a pass for the weekend to be with my family.' And we know
that some of those patients are deliberately lying to get free of the hospital supervision and take
their life." It took me about 25 years to come up with an answer that's practically useful. So it was
their idea, not mine, to study deception.

David: And how did you get into microexpressions? That's pretty closely related, right?

Paul Ekman: It is. Well, the very first thing I did after I got that request was to start going
through a film I had - notice I say film, not video. This was, maybe, 1966, over 40 years ago. I
have been filming every patient that came into the hospital for a 12-minute sound interview, and I
got told by somebody on one of the wards that a patient had admitted that, during the interview,
she had been deliberately lying when she said she felt much better. So I went through that film in
real time a couple of times, saw no sign of it; she looked very cheerful. And I decided I would go
through in slow motion. And in slow motion, I saw the first microexpression I ever saw, and it
was of anguish. And then I saw a couple more. So that's how that discovery happened.

David: That's really interesting. So as a result of all of this research that you've done over the
years, what have you learned about lying and deception? I'm sure that's a big question.

Paul Ekman: It's a very big question. I have two books about it. One is called Telling Lies.
That's never gone out of print since first published in 1985. The fourth edition, which has some
new material in it, just came out this year. And I have a book that's been out of print forever
called Why Kids Lie. Maybe we don't care as much about kids as we do about adults.

My focus first was to try to distinguish lies from other forms of deceit, and there are two criteria.
One is it has to be a deliberate choice to mislead. I can give you a lot of false information, but it
isn't a lie unless I know I'm giving you false information and I deliberately want to mislead you.
So if the stockbroker - which I don't have, but if I had one - gave me bad advice and I lost money,
he's not lying unless he knew he was giving me bad advice, in which case he could be prosecuted.

So that's the first criteria: deliberate choice. And the second is there's no notification; this week's
New Yorker has a joke in which one man says to another, "I'm not going to lie to you, and that's a
lie."

David: Yes, I saw that one.

Paul Ekman: And in some spheres of life, like selling your house, there is notification: nobody
has to believe that the selling price is the asking price. So you can't lie. You try to mislead the
person, so it's deceptive, but there's no notification. In a witness's testimony, they are told they
are to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and if they don't and they can be proven,
that's perjury. In poker, you can't win if you don't bluff, but nobody says to the bluffer, "Oh, you
lied," because you're notified ahead of time. It is deceptive.

There are some creatures on this earth that can never tell the truth: a praying mantis has no choice
but to look like a leaf, so it is continuously lying. But we humans have a choice as to whether to
be truthful or to lie, and we can make that choice deliberately, and we can do it in contexts where
there's no expectation that we will do so. And if we get caught in those circumstances, there's
often a considerable loss of reputation.

A second cut is whether it's a serious lie. By serious I mean that, if caught, you would lose your
freedom, your life, your income, your job, your relationship, your reputation. These are the lies
that society cares about; those are the lies like the suicidal patient; and those are the lies that I've
spent my life studying. And what I have discovered is that it's possible, by close examination of
face, body, voice and speech, to be able to identify such serious lies with about 95% accuracy.
And it's possible to teach people, to teach others, how to recognize those lies if they really want
to find out.

Now, of course, most lies succeed because the target of the lie doesn't want to know the truth. Do
you want to know that your children are using hard drugs? Do you want to know that your spouse
is unfaithful with your best friend? Do you want to find out that the employee you hired is
embezzling from the company? Those are all very unpleasant truths, and it's a cliché that the last
person to know they're being cuckolded is the person being cuckolded, and that's only because
they didn't want to know the truth - the truth can be painful. But there are circumstances where to
be misled has a much higher cost, and there are people who society gives the job of the judge, the
jury, the law enforcement officer, the counter-terrorist, of finding the truth.

David: Okay, this stimulates a couple of questions. One is what about the psychopath? Do they
show the microexpressions that would betray a lie, or are they, in fact, so lacking in conscience
that they don't do that?

Paul Ekman: Well, of course, what betrays most lies is the arousal of emotion, and unless there
is a serious threat of punishment - as there is in all the lies I study - you don't get emotions
aroused. And the three most common emotions are the fear of being caught - of course, the
psychopath can be afraid of being caught because that will harm him. The delight - what I call
"duping delight" - in being able to control and manipulate someone - psychopaths are extremely
vulnerable to that emotion and that often betrays them. And the third, which they don't have, is
guilt about engaging in deception. So it's only one of three emotions that doesn't occur in the
psychopath. The others are there so there's no lack of microexpression.
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David: Okay, and then you mentioned that you can train people to recognize these
microexpressions. What about the other way around? Can you or have you trained people to
suppress the microexpressions in order to become more effective liars?
Paul Ekman: Well, I run a school for lie catchers, but not a school for liars, so I've never worked
that side of the street, although I've been asked by a number of people from various walks of life,
including presidential candidates, to teach them how to "be more credible" is the way they put it.
But I've never tried. I have, however, proposed to our government that they ought to give me the
financial support to find out whether that training would succeed because if it would, it would
mean that when dealing with terrorists or spies from a country that could invest in preparation -
as the Soviet Union once did, and as I suspect China now does - whether it can work. Can you
beat this system? We don't know the answer to that.

David: Yeah, that was precisely the concern that was behind my question. I was wondering if, in
fact, this science could be used against us, as other things that we've invented and created
sometimes are used in ways that were not intended or anticipated. Not long ago I discovered a
TV show called Lie to Me, and I immediately realized it had to be based on you and your work.
Are you a technical consultant on that show?

Paul Ekman: It's referred to as scientific advisor, and I have a contract with Twentieth Century
Fox that obligates to review critically every draft of each script and tell them where they've gone
off base or suggest other possibilities. They take my advice about 80% of the time. I also,
occasionally, will make video examples of some of the more difficult things and send that to
them for the actors to study. And I also write a commentary called "The Truth About Lie to Me,"
separating the science from the fiction, and that appears on Fox's website, foxtv.com, a day after
each program. And some of the entertainment columnists have pointed out that this the first time
that a television network has ever published on its own website criticisms of what it's doing. But I
feel that's very important, and the producers of the show feel it's important as well. And if they
start doing something that's too outrageous - I only did this once in the last season - I say to them,
"If someday some innocent person gets convicted because a juror saw this on your show and
believed that that innocent person is guilty, that's on your conscience because I've warned you it's
wrong. Don't put it in." Now, that's what now in Congress is referred to as the "nuclear option."

David: Did they listen to you?

Paul Ekman: They do. If I did that every week, I couldn't get away with it, but they want… I
mean, they're a dramatic television program, and if they don't get good ratings, they go out of
business, and they don't want to go out of business. But they want it to be as close to the science
as possible. However, my contract also reads that the character Dr. Lightman, played by Tim
Roth, cannot resemble me personally in any way - in age, shape, nationality, marital status,
personality. He has to be different.

David: Interesting.

Paul Ekman: And he is. And I've also ruled off limits my work for the last 10 years with the
Dalai Lama. They can't use that at all in any program.

David: Oh, that's good. Well, it's a testimony to you and to them that, without knowing it, I was
immediately able to recognize your work in the show. So it's really succeeded.
Paul Ekman: Yes. And the DVD - this is to give them a little promo - the DVD of the first
season just went on sale this week, and the new season begins September 28.

David: Hey, how does it feel to you to be a star, in a sense, to have your work highlighted in this
way?

Paul Ekman: Well, I try to keep my personal privacy, as I described. And to get the work into
the knowledge of the public, I'm glad about that. The NIMH supported me for 43 years - that's the
taxpayer. And I'm giving it back in terms of entertainment, but I'm also giving it back in terms of
most of what I've done for the last five years is to train law enforcement - federal, state and
municipal. So I believe I have learned some things that are relevant to law enforcement and
counter-terror and to just improving emotional life in general. And I feel an obligation at this
point in my life to… I've stopped doing the basic research, and I'm doing the translational work to
make it available to others.

And if anybody wants to learn how to read microexpressions, I have a tool on the Internet that, in
the cost of a DVD rental - not much more - anybody can learn how to spot concealed emotions.
However, you may not always like what you see, and once you learn it, you can't turn it off.
You're now going to see what other people don't want you to know about how they feel. That can
be very useful; we have evidence it's very useful for the salesperson, for the doctor, for the nurse,
for the law enforcement person. I'm not so sure it's so useful in family life - your in-laws.

I was just talking to a lawyer today; you know, the Miranda says you have the right to silence. If
you're a criminal suspect, you don't have to say a word. Well, do you have the right to turn your
back on the person who's questioning you? Because otherwise they're going to get information
out of you that you don't want to give them from your involuntary expressions.

David: Yes, and of course then there's the whole issue of DNA and so-on. It's really getting
harder and harder to withhold information about ourselves. Now, you mentioned law
enforcement, and certainly I was aware of - as I think many people are from magazine articles
and so on - of your work with law enforcement. You started off talking about your own training
to be a therapist and your experience in therapy. What about psychotherapists? Have there been
applications of your work in psychotherapy? Have psychotherapists taken to it?

Paul Ekman: As far as I know, very few know about it or care about it, and I get much more in
the requests from law enforcement. I now teach medical students at Mayo Clinic every year, but I
think only once or twice - twice at most - have I been asked to help in the training of
psychotherapists. Not that I don't think it's extremely relevant to them - I think it is - but putting
things into an academic curriculum is a real problem.

But, on the other hand, I have no way to know how many people who are teaching
psychotherapists are currently using the stuff I've published or the tools I've put on the Internet.
Maybe quite a few are. If they are, they're doing so silently and not telling me. I give a public talk
to some public group - lawyers, mediators, etc. - at least three times a month, but in this next
year, there will be one time I'm talking to psychiatrists and none to psychologists, none to
psychotherapists in general. And that's not because I'm resistant; it's because nobody asked me.
David: Do you think that psychotherapists ought to pick up on it more than they have?

Paul Ekman: Well, if they care about how the patient is feeling. And then I think my book
Emotions Revealed as well as my microexpression training tool would be useful to them. I
remember having many feelings that I found it very hard to verbalize because of fear of
disapproval when I was a patient in psychotherapy, so I figure it would be a useful tool and a
useful asset.

I think emotions - and disorders in emotion and dissatisfactions with emotion - do drive people to
psychotherapy, and one of the most frequent issues that people have is how can I stop becoming
emotional about what's getting me so upset? And another is how can I change how I behave when
I am emotional? I think I have three chapters on that in the book Emotions Revealed that suggest
some ideas that haven't been suggested before in the literature I know of. It's out there; it's out
there for people to try if they want to do it.

David: What about John Gottman's work on marital issues? Are you familiar with his research?
Because I believe he's done a lot of very close study of microexpressions between husbands and
wives.

Paul Ekman: John has used my work and my research tools. He's one of the few people who has.
I've known John for almost 30 years and I admire his work, and I'm glad that he's using it, and he
is one of the few who is.

David: Okay, yes, he seems to have used it to good effect. You know, I wear another hat as a
market researcher, and they're always looking for tools to probe what people are really thinking
about products and services and so on. People in the field tend to shamelessly adapt insights from
the social sciences and so on. Are you aware of any market research applications of your work?

Paul Ekman: I am aware of… There is a psychologist who's written a book about it, and he talks
about my work a lot. I'm not going to mention his name because I think he gets at least half of it
wrong. But it's a very popular book, so I think most market researchers will know it. It's been
published in the last year and a half. Some people who formerly worked with me are doing
market research. I'm not opposed to market research, but it's not a high priority, and I have not
myself gotten involved in any.

David: Right. Now, I was at last year's Happiness Conference in San Francisco that was
sponsored by a Tibetan Buddhist organization, and I think you were the very first speaker. And I
later learned that you'd co-written a book with the Dalai Lama, based on some marathon
conversations about human emotions, and I refer people to your book Emotional Awareness. As
you think back about those conversations, what stands out for you?

Paul Ekman: I had such a good time. We became, over the course of 40 hours in one-on-one
intense conversation, we really became friends, and I came to feel like he was the brother I never
had, and of course he believes that that's literally true in a previous incarnation. We don't have all
of the same interests but enough overlap in the areas of emotion and compassion and forgiveness,
that we get involved in very intense discussion - I would even say argument without anger,
passionate argument without anger. He's a great debater and I'm not too bad myself, and we've
really changed our views and come up with new ideas; they're all in that book.

And I think the book Emotional Awareness, which really is the dialogue - it's not like a
conventional book - it gives you more of an idea of what he's like as a person, because it's not
been converted and edited into prose. It's a discussion; it's a conversation. A lot of his personality
and humor comes through. But there are a lot of useful ideas in there, and I'm meeting with him
again next month, because my ideas about the nature of compassion have changed quite
considerably since that book, and I want to see what he thinks about it.

So it's been a great gift to get to know him at this point of my life and to be able to have these
dialogues. And because he represents a tradition that is as elaborate as any Western philosophy or
religion but has been out of contact with the rest of the world for so long, he looks at things
freshly and takes nothing for granted that we all take for granted. And that's of great benefit
because he challenges every assumption that you're making without knowing that you've made
that assumption. And, of course, I challenged some of his assumptions that he doesn't know that
he's making. So we've just had the most fun. I've never spent 40 hours talking about issues that
matter to me with anyone before.

David: Yeah, that's a rare experience for sure. And you two are just about age mates, which is
fascinating.

Paul Ekman: I'm a year older than he is, so I view him as my younger brother. And I have to
look out for him.

David: And you're both at the top of your game. Often when people debate, they just become
more hardened in their own positions, but it sounds like you both approached this in a way that
while you were passionate about your positions you were also open to one another. Is there,
maybe, one thing that you could share with us that either you changed your mind about or that
you learned in the process?

Paul Ekman: It's interesting, I was just writing earlier today about something that we continue to
disagree about. I got invited by someone who's celebrating the 150th anniversary of some
publication and has invited a bunch of psychologists to write 150 words - no less - about
something they still don't understand about themselves. And the Dalai Lama believes that
everybody is afraid of dying, and I don't have any fear of death, so I was writing about that. But
one of the issues I changed my mind about in the course of these discussions with him was about
the function of hatred.

In my book Emotions Revealed, I argue that hatred could in some circumstances motivate
positive acts that were of benefit to the person and to society. And I've come to believe that,
although that's true in the short run, in the long run hatred is corrosive and maybe it actually has a
long-term harmful impact on the person.

And the other thing I think I've become most sensitive to is the dangers of humor that involve any
form of ridicule - which can be very funny, but I think has a very negative impact on the person
who's enjoying that type of humor. And without wanting to seem self-righteous about it, I think
the movie Borat is an example of a very funny humor built largely around ridicule of the people
who are acting in very foolish ways. I think that's a bad part of one's own personality to indulge
or strengthen.

David: Okay, I can go along with that. In your introduction to that book, you make reference to
some research you carried out with advanced meditators. What is that research?

Paul Ekman: The only thing that we carried to completion was a study of a single Buddhist
monk, who's been a monk for 32 years. And what we were able to do is to identify the differences
between different forms of meditation and its impact on his mental state, and we were also able to
show the calming effect that his presence had in discussion with people who are normally or
typically very aggressive. I'm delinquent in not getting it published; it's been in a draft form for
about three years.

David: Oh, boy.

Paul Ekman: I'll get it out one of these days. It's just there are too many things to do.

David: Yeah, well, it does sound fascinating. We'll look forward to that. Now, another story that
you tell in the book is - well, you don't really go into detail, and I don't know if you will now or
not - but you, in passing, mention having a transformative experience that you underwent as your
daughter Eve was asking the Dalai Lama about love and anger. Is that something that you would
be willing to talk about here?

Paul Ekman: Oh, yes. Actually, the whole last chapter of the book is about it, and I couldn't get
the Dalai Lama to talk about it at all. I know he knows what's going on, and all the people who
are typically around him as translators and scholars all have seen exactly what I experienced
happening with other people, and in fact, they gave me leads to some of those other people and I
interviewed them. So what I've learned is a lot about what makes you open to, or available to,
have such an experience when encountering such an unusual person as the Dalai Lama who
seems to exude goodness, if I can use a non-21st century term. One thing is that they are at a
transition point in their life - I was about to retire. Others had recovered from a life-threatening
illness or had just gone through a divorce or changing occupations, so they are transitions. And
otherwise they all had a severe emotional trauma in childhood.

David: What was the experience that you had?

Paul Ekman: Well, I can't really characterize it other than it changed the role of anger in my life
from having been a daily concern to not overreact, which I often did, to being a minor concern
since I rarely overreact. And for months, I never felt any anger at all.

David: I notice that you're on the board of Dacher Keltner's Greater Good magazine. I just
interviewed Dacher just a few days ago, by coincidence, and understand that he was one of your
students. What's your take on the positive psychology movement?
Paul Ekman: Well, I have some hesitation about it because I do not believe that - this is one of
the things I got the Dalai Lama to change on - that any emotion is either positive or negative. I
think that's an over-simplification. The humor that's used to ridicule is negative; there is forms of
anger that can be very constructive. The issue is how to constructively enact any emotion, so I
would be in favor of a constructive emotion movement. I think the positive psychology
movement is an over-simplification of a more complex set of matters.

David: Okay, as we begin to wind down here, is there anything about human emotions and their
expression that still puzzles you?

Paul Ekman: Oh, there's a lot of things. I don't really understand why, for example, some people
when they lie about strong emotions don't show microexpressions. Not everyone does. I don't
know why some people don't; there's other reasons to believe they're having the same emotion.

I don't really know the extent to which the emotional triggers are fixed, either through experience
in early life, or are totally modifiable. Now, there's a lot of work these days on neuroplasticity,
but very little of it has to do with emotion. I have tended to believe - but it's a belief because I
don't really know the answer - that there's much less plasticity for only some people with what
triggers their emotions. And yet I've written again and again in the Emotions Revealed book
about things one can try to do to change or weaken. But can you just weaken a trigger, or can you
completely erase it so it no longer gets to you? I don't know the answer to that.

So most of my questions are really about emotion, not about expression. I think we know most of
what we need to know, but I'll give you one about expression. In English we have about 12
different terms for different types of anger. I know there are more than 12 different angry
expressions, but some of them have to do with simply the strength from annoyance to rage. But is
there a difference between the expression of indignation and vengefulness? I don't know, and no
one else knows either. So, though I think of each emotion as a family of related experiences, we
don't know the extent to which each member of that family maps onto a different expression, or
to put it differently, how many of the facial expressions that we can distinguish are literally
synonyms, and how many are actually showing us different variations on the same thing.

David: Okay, well, thank you very much. Are there any final thoughts you'd like to leave our
audience with?

Paul Ekman: No, but it's been a good interview. I enjoyed it.

David: Okay, well, Dr. Paul Ekman, you've been very generous with your time. Thanks so much
for being my guest today on Wise Counsel.

Paul Ekman: My pleasure.

David: I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Paul Ekman. I've wanted to get an
interview with him for years. As you might guess, he's very high profile and in high demand.
Then, quite by chance, I discovered that he's been friends for years with family members who I'd
been out of touch with. It's a small world indeed. You can learn more about Dr. Ekman and his
work at www.paulekman.com.

You've been listening to Wise Counsel, a podcast interview series sponsored by Mentalhelp.net.
If you found today's show interesting, we encourage you to visit Mentalhelp.net, where you can
add a comment or question to this show's web page, view other shows in the series, or simply
page through the site, which is full of interesting mental health and wellness content. Access the
show's page and show archive information via the podcast box on the Mentalhelp.net home page.

If you like Wise Counsel, you might also like ShrinkRapRadio, my other interview podcast
series, which is available online at www.shrinkrapradio.com. Until next time, this is Dr. David
Van Nuys, and you've been listening to Wise Counsel.

Links Relevant To This Podcast:

• In the interview, Dr. Ekman described an online training tool for learning to become
aware of people's microexpressions of emotions that reveal what they really are feeling.
There are several instances of this tool, known as METT; the original METT and the
advanced METT 2 versions of the tools.

• Dr. Ekman's website, featuring his blog Truth about "lie to me" is available at
www.paulekman.com

About Paul ekman, Ph.D.

Paul Ekman was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and New

York University. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi
University (1958), after a one year internship at the Langley Porter
Neuropsychiatric Institute. After two years as a Clinical Psychology
Officer in the U.S. Army, he returned to Langley Porter where he
worked from 1960 to 2004. His research on facial expression and body
movement began in 1954, as the subject of his Master's thesis in 1955
and his first publication in 1957. In his early work, his approach to
nonverbal behavior showed his training in personality. Over the next
decade, a social psychological and cross-cultural emphasis characterized
his work, with a growing interest in an evolutionary and semiotic frame of reference. In addition
to his basic research on emotion and its expression, he has, for the last thirty years, also been
studying deceit.

Currently, he is the Manager of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC (PEG), a small company that
produces training devices relevant to emotional skills, and is initiating new research relevant to
national security and law enforcement. In 1971, he received a Research Scientist Award from the
National Institute of Mental Health; that Award has been renewed in 1976, 1981, 1987, 1991, and
1997. His research was supported by fellowships, grants and awards from the National Institute
of Mental Health for over forty years.
Articles reporting on Dr. Ekman's work have appeared in Time Magazine, Smithsonian
Magazine, Psychology Today, The New Yorker and others, both American and foreign.
Numerous articles about his work have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post
and other national newspapers.

He has appeared on 48 Hours, Dateline, Good Morning America, 20/20, Larry King, Oprah,
Johnny Carson and many other TV programs. He has also been featured on various public
television programs such as News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Bill Moyers' The Truth About
Lying.

Ekman is co-author of Emotion in the Human Face (1971), Unmasking the Face (1975), Facial
Action Coding System (1978), editor of Darwin and Facial Expression (1973), co-editor of
Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research (1982), Approaches to Emotion (1984),
The Nature of Emotion (1994), What the Face Reveals (1997), and author of Face of Man (1980),
Telling Lies (1985, paperback, 1986, second edition, 1992, third edition, 2001, 4th edition 2008),
Why Kids Lie (1989, paperback 1991), Emotions Revealed, (2003), New Edition (2009) Telling
Lies, Dalai Lama-Emotional Awareness (2008) and New Edition Emotions Revealed (2007) . He
is the editor of the third edition (1998) and the fourth edition (2009) of Charles Darwin's The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1998). He has published more than 100
articles.