 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Paul Ekman" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(November 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Paul Ekman | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Ekman in 2013 | |
| Born | February 15, 1934 (1934-02-15) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Died | November 17, 2025(2025-11-17) (aged 91) San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Education | University of Chicago New York University (BA) Adelphi University (MA,PhD) |
| Known for | Microexpressions,Lie to Me |
| Spouse | Mary Ann Mason |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology, anthropology |
| Doctoral advisor | John Amsden Starkweather |
| Website | PaulEkman.com |
Paul Ekman (February 15, 1934 – November 17, 2025) was an American psychologist and professor at theUniversity of California, San Francisco who was a pioneer in the study ofemotions and their relation tofacial expressions.[1][2] He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century in 2002 by theReview of General Psychology.[3]
His empirical and theoretical work helped to restart the study of emotion and non-verbal communication in the field of psychology, and introduced new quantitative frameworks which researchers could use to do so. He also carried out important early work on the physiology of emotions.[4][5]
Paul Ekman was born in 1934 inWashington, D.C., and grew up in a Jewish family[6][1] inNew Jersey, aside from a brief spell inCalifornia duringWorld War II. His father was a pediatrician and his mother was an attorney. His sister, Joyce Steingart, was a psychoanalytic psychologist who practiced inNew York City.[4]
Ekman originally wanted to be a psychotherapist, but when he was drafted into the army in 1958 he found that research could change army routines, making them more humane. This experience converted him from wanting to be a psychotherapist to wanting to be a researcher, in order to help as many people as possible.[7]
At the age of 15, without graduating from high school,[8] Paul Ekman enrolled at theUniversity of Chicago, where he completed three years of undergraduate study. During his time in Chicago, he was fascinated bygroup therapy sessions and understanding group dynamics. Notably, his classmates at Chicago included writerSusan Sontag, film directorMike Nichols, and actressElaine May.[9]
He then studied for two years atNew York University (NYU), earning his BA in 1954.[4] The subject of his first research project, under the direction of his NYU professor, Margaret Tresselt, was an attempt to develop a test of how people would respond to group therapy.[10]
Next, Ekman was accepted into theAdelphi University graduate program forclinical psychology.[10] While working for his master's degree, Ekman was awarded a predoctoral research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1955.[10] His Master's thesis was focused on facial expression and body movement he had begun to study in 1954.[10] Ekman eventually went on to receive his Ph.D. inclinical psychology atAdelphi University in 1958, after a one-year internship at theLangley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute.[10][11]
Ekman was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958 to serve two years as soon as his internship at Langley Porter was finished.[10] He served asfirst lieutenant-chief psychologist, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he did research on army stockades and psychological changes during infantry basic training.[10][12][13][14]
Upon completion of military service in 1960, he accepted a position as a research associate with Leonard Krasner at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, working on a grant focused on the operant conditioning of verbal behavior in psychiatric patients. Ekman also met anthropologistGregory Bateson in 1960 who was on the staff of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Five years later, Gregory Bateson gave Paul Ekman motion picture films taken in Bali in the mid-1930s to help Ekman with cross-cultural studies of expression and gesture.[10]
From 1960 to 1963, Ekman was supported by a post doctoral fellowship from NIMH. He submitted his first research grant through San Francisco State College with himself as the principal investigator (PI) at the young age of 29.[15] He received this grant from theNational Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1963 to study nonverbal behaviour. This award would be continuously renewed for the next 40 years and would pay his salary until he was offered a professorship at theUniversity of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1972.
Encouraged by his college friend and teacherSilvan S. Tomkins, Ekman shifted his focus from body movement to facial expressions. He wrote his most famous book,Telling Lies, and published it in 1985. The 4th edition is still in print. He retired in 2004 as professor ofpsychology in the Department ofPsychiatry at theUniversity of California, San Francisco (UCSF). From 1960 to 2004 he also worked at theLangley Porter Psychiatric Institute on a limited basis consulting on various clinical cases.
After retiring from the University of California, San Francisco, Paul Ekman founded the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International.[16]
In 2001, Ekman collaborated withJohn Cleese for theBBCdocumentary seriesThe Human Face.[17]
His work is frequently referred to in the TV seriesLie to Me.[18] Dr. Lightman is based on Paul Ekman, and Ekman served as a scientific adviser for the series; he read and edited the scripts and sent video clip-notes of facial expressions for the actors to imitate. While Ekman has written 15 books, the seriesLie to Me has more effectively brought Ekman's research into people's homes.[18]
He also collaborated withPixar's film director and animatorPete Docter in preparation of his 2015 filmInside Out.[19] Ekman also wrote a parent's guide to usingInside Out to help parents talk with their children about emotion, which can be found on his personal website.
He was named one of the topTime 100 most influential people in the May 11, 2009 edition ofTime magazine.[20] He was also ranked fifteenth among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century in 2014 by the journal Archives of Scientific Psychology.[21] He is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good magazine, published by theGreater Good Science Center of theUniversity of California, Berkeley. His contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.
Ekman died at his home inSan Francisco,California, on November 17, 2025, at the age of 91.[22][23][24]
Ekman's interest innonverbal communication led to his first publication in 1957, describing how difficult it was to develop ways of empirically measuring nonverbal behaviour.[25] He chose theLangley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, the psychiatry department of the University of California Medical School, for his clinical internship partly becauseJurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees had recently published a book calledNonverbal Communication (1956).[10][26][27]
Ekman then focused on developing techniques for measuring nonverbal communication. He found that facial muscular movements that created facial expressions could be reliably identified through empirical research. He also found that human beings are capable of making over 10,000 facial expressions; only 3,000 relevant to emotion.[28] PsychologistSilvan Tomkins convinced Ekman to extend his studies of nonverbal communication from body movement to the face, helping him design his classic cross-cultural emotion recognition studies.[29]
InThe Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872,Charles Darwin theorized that emotions were evolved traits universal to the human species. However, the prevalent belief during the 1950s, particularly amonganthropologists, was thatfacial expressions and their meanings were determined through behavioral learning processes. A prominent advocate of the latter perspective was the anthropologistMargaret Mead, who had traveled to different countries examining how cultures communicated using nonverbal behavior.
Through a series of studies, Ekman found a high agreement across members of diverse Western and Eastern literate cultures on selecting emotional labels that fit facial expressions. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicatingwrath,grossness,fear,joy,loneliness, andshock. Findings oncontempt were less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.[30] Working with Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman demonstrated that the findings extended to preliterateFore tribesmen inPapua New Guinea, whose members could not have learned the meaning of expressions from exposure to media depictions of emotion.[31] Ekman and Friesen then demonstrated that certain emotions were exhibited with very specific display rules, culture-specific prescriptions about who can show which emotions to whom and when. These display rules could explain how cultural differences may conceal the universal effect of expression.[32]
In the 1990s, Ekman proposed an expanded list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions that are not all encoded in facial muscles.[33] The newly included emotions are:Amusement,Contempt,Contentment,Embarrassment,Excitement,Guilt,Pride in achievement,Relief,Satisfaction,Sensory pleasure, andShame.[33]
Ekman's famous test of emotion recognition was the Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) stimulus set published in 1976. Consisting of 110 black and white images of Caucasian actors portraying the six universal emotions plus neutral expressions, the POFA has been used to study emotion recognition rates in normal and psychiatric populations around the world. Ekman used these stimuli in his original cross-cultural research. Many researchers favor the POFA because these photographs have been rated by large normative groups in different cultures. In response to critics, however, Ekman eventually released a more culturally diverse set of stimuli called the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE).[34]
By 1978, Ekman and Friesen had finalized and developed theFacial Action Coding System. FACS is an anatomically based system for describing all observable facial movement for every emotion. Each observable component of facial movement is called an action unit or AU and all facial expressions can be decomposed into their constituent core AUs.[35] An update of this tool came in the early 2000s.
Other tools have been developed, including the MicroExpressions Training Tool (METT), which can help individuals identify more subtle emotional expressions that occur when people try to suppress their emotions. Application of this tool includes helping people withAsperger's orautism to recognize emotional expressions in their everyday interactions. The Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT) teaches recognition of very small, micro signs of emotion. These are very tiny expressions, sometimes registering in only part of the face, or when the expression is shown across the entire face, but is very small. Subtle expressions occur for many reasons, for example, the emotion experienced may be very slight or the emotion may be just beginning.
Paul Ekman International was established in 2010 by the EIA Group based on a partnership between Cliff Lansley and Paul Ekman to deliver emotional skills and deception detection workshops around the world.[36]
Ekman has contributed to the study of social aspects of lying, why people lie,[37] and why people are often unconcerned with detecting lies.[38] He first became interested in detecting lies while completing his clinical work. As detailed in Ekman'sTelling Lies, a patient he was involved in treating denied that she was suicidal in order to leave the hospital. Ekman began to review videotaped interviews to study people's facial expressions while lying. In a research project along with Maureen O'Sullivan, called theWizards Project (previously named theDiogenes Project), Ekman reported on facial "microexpressions" which could be used to assist inlie detection. After testing a total of 20,000 people[39] from all walks of life, he found only 50 people who had the ability to spot deception without any formal training. Thesenaturals are also known as "Truth Wizards", or wizards of deception detection from demeanor.[40]
In his profession, he also uses oral signs of lying. When interviewed about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he mentioned that he could detect that former PresidentBill Clinton was lying because he useddistancing language.[41]
In his 1993 paper in the psychology journalAmerican Psychologist, Ekman describes nine direct contributions that his research on facial expression has made to the understanding of emotion.[42] Highlights include:
Most credibility-assessment researchers agree that untrained people are unable to visually detect lies.[43] The application of part of Ekman's work toairport security via theTransportation Security Administration's "Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques" (SPOT) program has been criticized for not having been put through controlled scientific tests.[43] A 2007 report on SPOT referring to untrained people stated that "simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin".[44] Since controlled scientific tests typically involve people playing the part of terrorists, Ekman says those people are unlikely to have the same emotions as actual terrorists.[43]
The methodology used by Ekman and O'Sullivan in their recent work on "Truth Wizards" has also received criticism on the basis of validation.[45]
Other criticisms of Ekman's work are based on experimental and naturalistic studies by several other emotion psychologists that did not find evidence in support of Ekman's proposed taxonomy of discrete emotions and discrete facial expression.[46]
Methodological criticisms of Ekman's work focus on the essentially circular and tautological nature of his experiments, in which test subjects were shown selected photographs of "basic emotions," and then asked to match them with the same set of concepts used in their production. Ekman showed photographs selected from over 3000 pictures of individuals asked to simulate emotions, from which he edited to contain "those which showed only the pure display of a single affect," using no control and subject only to Ekman's intuition.[47] If Ekman felt a photograph did not show the correct "pure" emotion, he excluded it.[48]
Ekman received hostility from some anthropologists at meetings of the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association from 1967 to 1969. He recounted that, as he was reporting his findings on universality of expression, one anthropologist tried to stop him from finishing by shouting that his ideas were fascist. He compares this to another incident when he was accused of being racist by an activist for claiming that Black expressions are not different from White expressions. In 1975,Margaret Mead, an anthropologist, wrote against Ekman for doing "improper anthropology", and for disagreeing withRay Birdwhistell's claim opposing universality. Ekman wrote that, while many people agreed with Birdwhistell then, most came to accept his own findings over the next decade.[15]However, some anthropologists continued to suggest that emotions are not universal.[49] Ekman argued that there has been no quantitative data to support the claim that emotions are culture specific. In his 1993 discussion of the topic, Ekman states that there is no instance in which 70% or more of one cultural group select one of the six universal emotions while another culture group labels the same expression as another universal emotion.[42]
Ekman criticized the tendency of psychologists to base their conclusions on surveys of college students. Hank Campbell quotes Ekman saying at theBeing Human conference, "We basically have a science of undergraduates."[50] Ekman's own studies have used freshman college students as the subject group, comparing their results with those of illiterate subjects from New Guinea.[47]
Ekman has refused to submit his more recent work to peer-review, claiming that revealing the details of his work might reveal state secrets and endanger security.[43] Critics assert that this is instead an attempt to shield his work from methodological criticisms within experimental psychology, even as his public and popular visibility has grown.[51]
...as the legendary Paul Ekman said at the Being Human conference, 'We basically have a science of undergraduates'
