Paul Ekman

It is hard to overestimate the importance of emotions in our lives - we organise our lives to maximise the experience of positive emotions and minimise the experience of negative emotions.

Summary

Paul Ekman (1934 - ) is a psychologist and has been a pioneer in the study of Emotions and their relation to Facial Expressions.

Contrary to the belief of some anthropologists at the time including Margaret Mead, Ekman found that at least some facial expressions and their corresponding emotions are not culturally determined, but appear to be universal to human culture and thus presumably biological in origin, as Charles Darwin had once theorized.

His work with facial photographs was influential in developing the Psychology of Emotions (see Psychological Aspects of Biodanza).

Ideas

• Emotion Classification - Ekman devised a list of basic emotions from cross-cultural research on the Fore tribesmen of Papua New Guinea,
• He observed that members of an isolated, stone age culture could reliably identify the expressions of emotion in photographs of people from cultures with which the Fore were not yet familiar,
• From this evidence, he concluded that some emotions were basic or biologically universal to all humans:
  • Sadness,
  • Happiness,
  • Anger,
  • Fear,
  • Disgust,
  • Surprise.
• He discovered that a Duchenne Smile (true smile) is accompanied by increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex (the seat of positive emotions).
• If you put on a Duchenne smile, you can activate your pleasure centers - literally making yourself happy by smiling.
• A spontaneous smile activates even more reactions than you can access with a voluntary smile.