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Paul Ekman (February 15, 1934 – November 17, 2025) was an American psychologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was a pioneer in the study of and their relation to facial expressions. He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century in 2002 by the Review of General Psychology.Haggbloom, S. J. et al. (2002). "The 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century" . Review of General Psychology. Vol. 6, No. 2, 139–15. . Haggbloom and his team combined three quantitative variables: citations in professional journals, citations in textbooks, and nominations in a survey given to members of the Association for Psychological Science, with three qualitative variables (converted to quantitative scores): National Academy of Sciences (NAS) membership, American Psychological Association (APA) President and/or recipient of the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and surname used as an eponym. Then the list was rank ordered. Ekman was #59.
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. (2026). 9780080961804, Academic Press. ISBN 9780080961804
Ekman originally wanted to be a psychotherapist, but when he was drafted into the U.S. 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.
He then studied for two years at New York University (NYU), earning his BA in 1954. The subject of his first research project, under the direction of professor Margaret Tresselt, was an attempt to develop a test of how people would respond to group therapy.Ekman, P. (1987). "A life's pursuit." In The Semiotic Web '86: An International Yearbook, Sebeok, T. A.; Umiker-Seboek, J., Eds. Berlin, Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 3–45.
Ekman was accepted into the Adelphi University graduate program for clinical psychology. While working for his master's degree, Ekman was awarded a predoctoral research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1955. His master's thesis was focused on facial expression and body movement that he had begun to study in 1954. Ekman received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University in 1958, after a one-year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute.Eissner, B. Paul Ekman PH.D. '58, '08: East Meets West. http://profiles.adelphi.edu/profile/paul-ekman/ http://www.adelphi.edu/adelphi-magazine/Adelphi-Magazine-Fall-2008.pdf.
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 age of 29.Ekman, P. (1987). '"A life's pursuit". In The Semiotic Web '86: An International Yearbook, Sebeok, T. A.; Umiker-Sebeok, J., eds. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 3–45 He received this grant from NIMH in 1963 to study nonverbal behavior. This award was continuously renewed for the next 40 years and paid his salary until he was offered a professorship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1972.
Encouraged by his college friend and teacher Silvan Tomkins, Ekman shifted his focus from body movement to facial expressions. He wrote his most famous book, Telling Lies, publishing it in 1985. He retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF. From 1960 to 2004, he also worked at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute on a limited basis consulting on clinical cases.
After retiring from the University of California, San Francisco, Ekman founded the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International.
His work is frequently referred to in the TV series Lie to Me"The (Real!) Science Behind Fox's Lie to Me". Popular Mechanics Online, 2009. in which the character Dr. Lightman is based on Paul Ekman. Ekman served as a scientific adviser for the series.
He collaborated with Pixar film director and animator Pete Docter as a scientific consultant for the latter's 2015 film Inside Out. Ekman also wrote a parent's guide to using Inside Out to talk with their children about emotion.
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. Psychologist Silvan 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.
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 indicating wrath, disgust, fear, joy, loneliness, and shock. Findings on contempt were less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.Matsumoto, David (1992) "More evidence for the universality of a contempt expression". Motivation and Emotion. Springer Netherlands. vol. 16, no. 4 / December 1992. Working with Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman demonstrated that the findings extended to preliterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, whose members could not have learned the meaning of expressions from exposure to media depictions of emotion. 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.
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. The newly included emotions are: amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride in achievement, relief, Contentment, Pleasure, and shame.
By 1978, Ekman and Friesen had finalized and developed the Facial 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. The tool was updated 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 with Asperger's or autism 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.
In his profession, he also used oral signs of lying. When interviewed about the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, he mentioned that he could detect that President Bill Clinton was lying because he used distancing language.Julian Guthrie. "The lie detective: San Francisco psychologist has made a science of reading facial expressions". San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 2002.
The methodology used by Ekman and O'Sullivan in their recent work on "Wizards Project" has also received criticism on the basis of validation.
Other criticisms of Ekman's work are based on experimental and naturalistic studies by several other psychologists of emotion that did not find evidence in support of Ekman's proposed taxonomy of discrete emotions and discrete facial expression.Russel and Fernandez-Dols (1997). The Psychology of Facial Expression. Cambridge University Press. . p. 400
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. If Ekman felt a photograph did not show the correct "pure" emotion, he excluded it.Jan Plamper. The History of Emotions: An Introduction Oxford, 2012, p. 153.
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 recounted 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, criticized Ekman for doing "improper anthropology", and for disagreeing with Ray Birdwhistell claim opposing universality. Ekman wrote that, while many people agreed with Birdwhistell then, most came to accept his own findings over the next decade. Some anthropologists continued to suggest that emotions are not universal. 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 stated 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.
Ekman criticized the tendency of psychologists to base their conclusions on surveys of college students. Hank Campbell quotes Ekman saying at the Being Human conference, "We basically have a science of undergraduates." Ekman's own studies have used freshman college students as the subject group, comparing their results with those of illiterate subjects from New Guinea.
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. 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.Jan Plamper. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Oxford, 2012, p. 162.
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Other emotion researchers
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Categories: 1934 Births, 2025 Deaths, 20th-century American Psychologists, American Social Psychologists, Emotion Psychologists, Evolutionary Psychologists, 21st-century American Psychologists, New York University Alumni, Adelphi University Alumni, University Of California, San Francisco Faculty, Lie Detection, 20th-century American Jews, Academics From San Francisco, Scientists From San Francisco, 21st-century American Jews
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