Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934 in Washington, DC ) is an American anthropologist and psychologist who was best known for his research on non-verbal communication .

Life

Ekman initially studied at the University of Chicago and New York University . He received his doctorate from Adelphi University in New York (1958). From 1958 to 1960 he served as senior psychologist in the US Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then he developed various research projects, which u. a. were funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation . In 1972 he was appointed professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco , to which he remained connected after his retirement in 2004.

research results

Together with his colleague WV Friesen, Ekman set up the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). It is a physiologically oriented classification of emotional facial expressions . The system plays an important role in expression psychology and psychoanalytic therapy research . At the same time, it represents a method with which temporal emotional expression patterns can be recorded and described. However, the system does not record non-emotional expressions, which make up approximately 70% of all facial expressions, as well as body expressions.

Ekman also found statistical evidence for the hereditary nature of numerous emotional expressions, including the seven basic emotions he distinguished : joy, anger, disgust, fear, contempt, sadness, and surprise. These basic emotions are recognized and expressed in the same way by all people across cultures. The facial expressions described by Ekman as elementary are not culturally learned, but genetically determined. He stands in the tradition of Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne and of Charles Darwin's work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals ( The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , 1872).

Evolutionary advantages of the facial expression typical of Ekman in case of surprise can e.g. For example, wide-open eyes make it easier to take in information and open mouths make breathing easier. A genetically determined uniform expression behavior also facilitates communication, reproduction and socialization.

Paul Ekman is considered to be the founder of the neurocultural theory of emotions , according to which the following components are involved in the creation of an emotional expression:

• the trigger, that is, the events that trigger an affect program, are largely culture-dependent and socially learned;
• the affect program is phylogenetically inherited and contains the basic emotions;
• the evaluation program assesses whether the trigger should lead to the playback of the affect program;
• the display rules govern the manner of socio-cultural expression of emotions;
• the coping rules set out how a person could cope with and control the feeling.

The display rules therefore play an essential role in showing feelings. Ekman differentiates between the following affect control mechanisms:

• Qualifying: Modification of an emotional expression by additional presentation of another (see miserable smile; negative affect (sadness) is enriched by the positive affect of smiling and thus weakened)
• Modulating: Modifying the quality of the muscles
  • Strengthen (through stronger or longer innervation of several muscles)
  • Weaken
• Distort
  • Simulate (an emotion, e.g. joy, is hypocritical (e.g. phony smile ))
  • Masking (see masking smile : a negative emotion - anger - is hidden behind a positive - smile)
  • Neutralize (an emotion, e.g. anger, is neutralized)

According to Ekman, there are 43 muscles that can create more than 10,000 facial expressions. Ekman makes the following claim: “I have seen everyone. I've traveled to Papua New Guinea and every continent. There is no expression that I do not know. ”According to Ekman, however, the emotion“ surprise ”can hardly be photographed.

Ekman is now primarily concerned with the phenomenon of lies and differentiates here between "concealment" (omission of information) and "falsification". Concealment is mainly used for emotion-related lies in order to protect the other person from negative primary emotions (e.g. fear), whereas falsifying v. a. is used for factual lies and is mainly associated with structural emotions (e.g. shame / guilt). The figure of Dr. Cal Lightman in the television series Lie to Me , who as the world's best human lie detector is able to uncover all lies and deceptions through analysis of facial expressions and body language, is based on Ekman, who helped develop the series as a scientific advisor.

Economic recovery

Ekman runs a company that also works for CIA , FBI and security firms. I.a. He offers quick and intensive correspondence courses for the analysis of facial expressions and micro expressions (from 40 minutes course duration), which aim to better understand other people, to identify lies and to better control the expression of one's own emotions. This is possible because Ekman includes the influence of social learning processes on facial expression in his training programs: According to Ekman, secret service agents and other “virtuosos” who “are particularly highly motivated because their survival could depend on such a situation” can use his method the detection of micro-expressions - these are extremely short forms of emotional expression from a 1/5 to a 1/25 second - achieve a hit rate of 96%. Its aim is u. a. to develop a method by which one can recognize imminent murder by the facial expression of a potential perpetrator.

criticism

Ekman has been accused of multiple discrimination by human rights organizations for training airport staff to perceive micro-expressions from passengers so that they can identify suspicious passengers. In a 2010 Nature News article, fellow scientists doubt that the concept will work in practice. In addition, Ekman has not had his studies checked by peer review for decades .

Furthermore, important emotions are missing in the Ekman model (sexual arousal, mother-child love, curiosity). Furthermore, the basic emotions of Ekman are presented in a unipolar manner (e.g. lack of appetite for disgust). On the other hand, many personality theories prefer a bipolar scaling of personality traits. They locate individuals on a continuum e.g. B. between introversion and extraversion. Joy, on the other hand, is a very unspecific emotion - from malicious glee to joy at a sporting victory, it has many facets and different forms of expression.

Ekman overlooks, according to critics, that social communication is just a function of emotions. For many emotions it would be more appropriate from an evolutionary point of view to hide them.

From the point of view of brain research, too, criticism comes from Ekman. Hennenlotter and Schröder were only able to demonstrate clear neural correlates for disgust and fear.

Ekman himself explains the high variance and comparatively weak significance of his own findings with the cultural shaping of the expression by social norms and culturally shaped decoding rules. Sociological critics counter this with a concept of the gradual decoding of expressions: With an assumed limited, possibly only minimal universality of facial expression, a much more precise “decoding” of the dialects is possible within culturally and socially homogeneous or closely related groups than between different groups. The basic emotions are also not discreet, but rather mixed in the complex facial expression. Ekman also ignores the phenomenon of “socially contagious” emotions known since Gustave Le Bon and Émile Durkheim .

In recent years there has been an increasing number of empirical findings that speak against the universality of the Ekman model, at least with regard to the ability to decode the affects of people from other cultures. Many of these socio- or cultural-science-oriented authors do not take a direct position on Ekman's biological model, but rather investigate whether certain emotions such as anger can be reliably perceived based on the facial expression in different cultural or situational contexts. This can be seen both as an expression of the intensive work on the reliability of as well as the criticism of systems of artificial intelligence , which are supposed to recognize the expression of emotions in every situation (so to speak, an "artificial emotional intelligence").

Awards

• American Psychological Association : 100 Most Important Psychologists of the 20th Century
• 2009: Time magazine 100 most influential people

Publications

• Universals and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion. In: J. Cole (Ed.): Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1971. Vol. 19, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1975.
• with WV Friesen: Unmasking the Face. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River 1975.
• Maria von Salisch (ed.): Facial expression and feeling: 20 years of research by Paul Ekman , translated by Maria von Salisch, Junfermann, Paderborn 1988, ISBN 3-87387-280-3 .
• Reading feelings - How to recognize and correctly interpret emotions. (Original title: Emotions Revealed , translated by Susanne Kuhlmann-Krieg and Matthias Reiss), 2nd edition, Spektrum, Heidelberg 2010 (German first edition 2004), ISBN 978-3-8274-2568-3 .
• I know you lie: what faces reveal. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-499-62718-7 .
• with Tendzin Gyatsho alias Dalai Lama : feeling and compassion. Emotional mindfulness and the path to emotional balance. Spektrum, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8274-2810-3 (original title: Emotional Awareness , a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman, translated by Matthias Reiss, with a foreword by Daniel Goleman).
• What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) (Series in Affective Science). Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-19-517964-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Ekman in the catalog of the German National Library
• Paul Ekman's homepage

Individual evidence

1. ^ A. Freitas-Magalhães: The Ekman Code or in Praise of the Science of the Human Face. In: A. Freitas-Magalhães (Ed.): Emotional Expression: The Brain and The Face. Vol. 1, University Fernando Pessoa Press, Porto 2010, ISBN 978-989-643-034-4 , pp. Ix-xvii.
2. ↑ E.g. through examination of children who are blind from birth and who cannot have learned a certain expressive behavior.
3. ↑ I don't miss a single expression. Interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010.
4. ^ Website of the Paul Ekman Group
5. ↑ https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/ein-luegenexperte-im-interview-mir-entgangs-kein-gesichtsausdruck-1.471158
6. ↑ Ekman in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung on May 17, 2010.
7. ↑ The understanding of face. dasgehirn.info, accessed October 30, 2013.
8. ↑ Hans-Georg Häusel: The scientific foundation of the Limbic approach. Nymphenburg Consult AG, Paper, Munich 2010. (PDF; 1.3 MB) ( Memento from July 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ A. Henn Lotter, U. Schroeder: Partly dissociable neutral substrate for Recognizing basic emotions: a critical review. In: S. Anders u. a. (Ed.): Understanding Emotions. In: Progress in Brain Research. 156, Elsevier 2006.
10. ↑ Christian von Schewe: The emotional structure of social interaction: emotion expression and social order formation. In: Journal of Sociology. Vol. 39, H. 5 (2010), pp. 346-362.
11. ↑ Rather critical, because emphasizing the situation-dependent facial expression: Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ralph Adolphs, Stacy Marsella and others. a .: Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements. In: Psychological Science in the Public Interest. July 17, 2019, [1]
12. ^ APA: Eminent psychologists of the 20th century
13. ^ The 2009 TIME 100: Paul Ekman , Scientists & Thinkers. Time . (accessed April 30, 2009)