Emotions Revealed

Psychologist Paul Ekman draws on more than 40 years of research on facial expression and emotion to help readers improve four essential skills: becoming aware of emotions before acting on them, choosing constructive emotional behavior, recognizing how others feel, and using that information carefully. Ekman argues that emotions determine the quality of every important relationship and can override fundamental drives such as hunger, sex, and even the will to survive. He credits his late mentor, psychologist Silvan Tomkins, who claimed emotions motivate all important life choices, and structures the book around the mechanics of emotion (Chapters 1 through 4), individual emotions illustrated with photographs and exercises (Chapters 5 through 9), the role of emotions in detecting lies (Chapter 10), and an appendix offering a facial expression recognition test.

Ekman recounts how his career shifted from studying hand movements in psychiatric patients to studying facial expression, redirected by a grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and a meeting with Tomkins, who argued that expressions were innate and universal. Ekman initially sided with prominent figures such as anthropologist Margaret Mead, who believed expressions were socially learned and culturally variable. His first study showed photographs to people in five cultures, and majorities in every culture agreed on the emotions depicted, a finding independently replicated by psychologist Carrol Izard. To reconcile this universality with observed cultural differences, Ekman proposed "display rules," socially learned conventions governing who can show which emotion to whom and when: A study comparing Japanese and American subjects confirmed that both groups displayed the same expressions when alone, but in public the Japanese masked negative expressions with smiles. To close the loophole that people might have learned Western expressions through media, Ekman traveled to Papua New Guinea to study the Fore, a visually isolated people who had seen no movies, television, or photographs. Over 300 Fore subjects agreed on the emotions shown in photographs for happiness, anger, disgust, and sadness, though they did not distinguish fear from surprise. Anthropologist Karl Heider independently replicated these findings with the Dani people of West Irian, Indonesia. With colleague Wally Friesen, Ekman developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a tool for measuring all facial muscular movements, and subsequent research identified micro expressions, very fast facial movements lasting less than one-fifth of a second that betray concealed emotions.

Ekman explains that the most common pathway to emotion is through "autoappraisers," automatic appraising mechanisms that scan the environment for anything important to a person's welfare. Using a near-miss car accident as an example, he shows how danger is sensed before conscious awareness, triggering a fear expression, physiological changes, and protective actions without deliberate choice. The autoappraisers respond to two kinds of triggers: universal themes stored by evolution, such as threat of harm for fear, and learned variations acquired through individual experience. Ekman argues that evolution is the more likely source of universal themes, citing evidence from congenitally blind children's expressions and psychologist Arne Ohman's studies showing people learn to fear evolutionary threats like snakes far more quickly than modern dangers like guns. He introduces the "emotion alert database," a metaphor for stored triggers that is open to new entries throughout life but resistant to deletion. Beyond automatic appraisal, he describes eight additional pathways for generating emotion, including reflective appraisal, memory, imagination, empathy, and voluntarily assuming the facial appearance of an emotion.

Turning to why changing emotional triggers is difficult, Ekman introduces the "refractory period," a state following the onset of emotion during which thinking is biased to support the current feeling and contradictory information is discounted. He illustrates this through a couple, Helen and Jim: Helen's anger at Jim persists even after a reasonable explanation because she is importing a childhood script in which her older brother bullied her. Ekman cites neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux's research showing that learned fear triggers form permanent cell assemblies in the brain that can be weakened but not fully erased. He also distinguishes emotions from moods: emotions are brief and have identifiable triggers, while moods last hours, lack clear triggers, and predispose a person toward particular emotions.

Ekman identifies three categories of involuntary change when emotion begins: signals (facial expressions, vocal changes, action impulses), autonomic nervous system changes (heart rate, sweating), and cognitive shifts (biased evaluation, selective memory). He warns against "Othello's error," the mistake of assuming one knows the cause of another person's emotion without considering alternatives, named for Shakespeare's Othello, who misread Desdemona's fear as guilt. He introduces "attentiveness," a form of consciousness in which a person observes an emotional episode as it unfolds and considers whether to act on the feeling, and illustrates the concept with a personal example involving his wife Mary Ann's failure to call during a trip, which activated his abandonment trigger rooted in his mother's death when he was 14.

The middle chapters examine specific emotions. Ekman discusses sadness and agony, distinguishing agony (active protest against loss) from sadness (passive resignation), and identifies loss as the central trigger. He connects sadness to the blue mood, the melancholic personality, and clinical depression, distinguishing these by duration, intensity, and impairment. The chapter on anger identifies triggers including interference with goals, insults, and rejection. Ekman argues that nearly everyone can choose not to act violently even when enraged, and cites psychologist Carol Tavris's finding that venting anger usually makes matters worse. He reports that patients with coronary artery disease who showed anger expressions while discussing frustrations were more likely to experience cardiac ischemia, episodes during which the heart receives insufficient oxygen, linking hostility to cardiac risk. He examines surprise and fear together, characterizing surprise as the briefest emotion and identifying threat of harm as fear's universal theme. The chapter on disgust and contempt traces disgust from food rejection to moral judgment, presenting psychologist Paul Rozin's research identifying the core of disgust as a sense of ingesting something offensive, and notes that disgust can dehumanize those deemed disgusting, potentially enabling violence. Ekman distinguishes contempt as involving condescension and moral superiority directed only toward people, and reports psychologist John Gottman's finding that husbands' contempt expressions predicted wives feeling overwhelmed and becoming ill more often. In the chapter on enjoyable emotions, Ekman proposes 16 candidates, including sensory pleasures, amusement, contentment, relief, and culturally named emotions such as fiero (Italian for pride in a difficult achievement) and naches (Yiddish for pride in a child's accomplishment). He explains the Duchenne smile, named for French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne, who discovered that genuine enjoyment smiles involve the outer eye muscle, which most people cannot contract voluntarily.

Chapter 10 applies Ekman's research to detecting lies. Frame-by-frame analysis of a patient's interview revealed micro expressions of anguish covered by smiles. Ekman explains that micro expressions can result from deliberate suppression or unconscious repression, and their meaning depends on contextual factors including the nature of the exchange and congruence with speech and gesture. He identifies fear of being caught, guilt, and "duping delight" (pleasure in deceiving another) as the three emotions liars most commonly feel, and describes practical applications including training for police, military intelligence, and the Transportation Security Administration's Screening Passengers by Observational Techniques (SPOT) program for airport security.

Ekman concludes by describing research on individual emotional profiles, examining differences in speed, strength, duration, and recovery time of emotional responses. He lists defining characteristics of emotions, briefly addresses guilt, shame, embarrassment, and envy as emotions lacking unique facial expressions, and classifies jealousy as an emotional scene rather than a single emotion. In the afterword, he distinguishes three levels of emotional awareness, from the nearly impossible (awareness of automatic appraisal as it occurs) to the achievable (awareness of emotional behavior once it has begun), and explains how mindfulness meditation may improve emotional life by strengthening the capacity to attend to automatic processes.