Reading between the lines

Dr Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology who has become the world’s most famous face reader, is much in demand these days.

The Dalai Lama was so impressed that he gave Dr Ekman $50,000 to learn how to improve emotional balance in schoolteachers and other people in high-pressure jobs.

The FBI, CIA and state and local police forces have turned to Dr Ekman for help in learning to read subtle emotional cues from the faces, voices and body language of potential assassins, terrorists and questionable visa applicants. Around the world, more than 500 people - including neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists - have learned Dr Ekman’s research tool called FACS, or Facial Action Coding System, for deciphering which of the 43 muscles in the face are working at any moment, even when an emotion is so fleeting, the person experiencing it may not be aware of it.

That detailed knowledge of facial expression has earned Dr Ekman, 69, a supporting role in the film industry, where he has consulted with animators from Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic to give lifelike expressions to cartoon characters.

Speaking from his office at the University of California Medical School at San Francisco, Dr Ekman explained his philosophy. He said his decision to go into psychology evolved out of a family tragedy in his youth.

"My mother, who I now believe had bipolar disorder, committed suicide when I was 14. I decided the way to deal with that was to try to help people like her, by trying to understand emotional disorders," he said.

He decided to focus on the face, despite accepting the voice was just as revealing. "I had been a photographer since I was 12. I knew how to use that tool to understand the face," he explained.

The basic human emotions which, according to Dr Ekman, have very clear facial signals, are "anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt and happiness".

He doesn’t list love as a basic human emotion: "Romantic and parental love are more enduring than emotions, though they are highly emotionally laden.

"I don’t just feel happy with my daughter. Sometimes I’m worried, sometimes I’m surprised and sometimes I might feel anger. It’s an attachment, not a fleeting emotional state. A mood, by the way, is different still. It doesn’t last as long as an attachment, though it can last for hours or even longer.

Charles Darwin, more than 100 years ago, proposed that human facial expressions are universal. Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead thought the opposite.

Initially, Dr Ekman was sceptical and veered towards the Mead position, but then sought evidence to settle the argument.

"I showed pictures of facial expressions to people in the United States, Japan, Argentina, Chile and Brazil - and found that they judged the expressions in the same way."

He goes on: "This was not conclusive because all these people could have learned the meaning of expressions by watching Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne. I needed visually isolated people unexposed to the modern world and the media.

"I found them in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They not only judged the expressions in the same way, but their posed expressions, which I recorded with a movie camera, were readily understandable to people in the west."

One of Dr Ekman’s key findings is that if a person merely arranges his face into a certain expression, he will actually feel the corresponding emotion - in other words, emotions work from the outside in as well as the inside out.

But is it so simple - happy expression, happy mood? "The trick with happiness is that while everybody can smile, most people can’t move one crucial muscle around the eyes that must be moved to generate the physiology of happiness.

"With anger or disgust, though, everybody can make the right facial movements and turn on the physical sensations of those emotions."

So what if someone received Botox injections all over their face and could not make normal expressions - would their emotions be similarly curtailed as a result? "Probably not. I did a study with Robert Levenson, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, on people who had been born with facial paralysis. We found no impairment in their ability to recognise or experience emotions. There is a problem with Botox, though. Limiting facial animation may make people less appealing."

Dr Ekman accepts certain people lie with their faces all the time, but says there is a way of identifying this, although only a minority can do it. "They are highly motivated, close observers who, without training, are able to spot subtle cues about concealed emotions that we call microexpressions.

"These are very fast intense expressions of concealed emotions that most people miss because they typically last less than a quarter of a second."

Dr Ekman says studies show secret-service agents are experts at distinguishing lying from truthfulness, but psychiatrists are no better than anyone else.

So how do you tell a fake smile from a real one? "In a fake smile, only the zygomatic major muscle, which runs from the cheekbone to the corner of the lips, moves.

"In a real smile, the eyebrows and the skin between the upper eyelid and the eyebrow come down very slightly. The muscle involved is the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis."

And can ‘regular’ people learn to get better at telling real expressions from fake ones? "Much to my surprise, people can learn to do this in under an hour. I have developed a CD which teaches people to do this quickly. I thought it would take a lot longer."

Dr Ekman describes his meeting with the Dalai Lama, in the Tibetan government-in-exile’s base in Dharmsala, India, as "extraordinary". "My daughter led me to him. When she was 16, she went to Nepal and lived in a Tibetan refugee camp. She came back all fired up and started a Free Tibet club. When I heard there was going to be a meeting between the Dalai Lama and western scientists about emotions, I volunteered so that I could bring my daughter.

"Until then, I had had no interest in Buddhism. Afterwards, I began studying Buddhist monks in my lab. In addition, I was halfway through writing Emotions Revealed when I met him.

"It caused me to rewrite it. It sharpened my ideas to contrast them with Buddhist beliefs. Crucial to how we feel is being aware of how we are feeling in the moment.

"The sine qua non of that is to realise that you are being emotional in the first place. The earlier you recognise an emotion, the more choice you will have in dealing with it.

"In Buddhist terms, it’s recognising the spark before the flame. In western terms, it’s trying to increase the gap between impulse and saying or doing something you might regret later."