EMOTIONS ARE A RUNAWAY TRAIN

Emotions, and more especially emotional disorders, played a large part in psychotherapy from its beginnings, but they were seen more as symptoms to be treated than as something to be examined in their own right. One of the first to realize that emotions deserved as much attention as thought processes, drives, and behaviour was Paul Ekman, who came to the subject through his research into nonverbal behaviour and facial expressions.

When Ekman began his research in the 1970s, it was assumed that we learn to physically express emotions according to a set of social conventions, which differ from culture to culture. Ekman travelled widely to all corners of the world, first photographing people in the “developed countries”, such as Japan and Brazil, and then people in far-flung, cut-off places without access to radio or television, such as the jungles of Papua New Guinea.

He found tribespeople(部落成员) could interpret facial expressions as well as anyone in more globally-aware countries, which suggests that facial expressions are universal products of human evolution.

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Basic emotions

Ekman came up with six basic emotions – anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise – and because of their ubiquity, concluded they must be important to our psychological make-up. He noted that facial expressions linked to these emotions are involuntary – we react automatically to things that trigger these emotional responses – and that this reaction often happens before our conscious mind has time to register the causes of that emotion.

Ekman inferred not only that our faces can reveal our inner emotional state, but that the emotions responsible for these involuntary expressions are more powerful than psychologists had previously thought. In Emotions Revealed, Ekman states that emotions can be more powerful than the Freudian drives of sex, hunger, and even the will to live. For example, embarassment or fear can override libido, preventing a satisfactory sex life.

Extreme unhappiness can override the will to live. The power of the “runaway train” of emotions convinced Ekman that a better understanding of emotions would help to overcome some mental disorders. We may be unable to control our emotions, but we may be able to make changes to the things that trigger them and the behaviour they lead to.

Running parallel to his work on emotions, Ekman pioneered research into deception and the ways we try to hide our feelings. He identified small tell-tale signs, which he called “micro-expressions”, detectable when someone is either consciously or unconsciously concealing something. This has proved useful in devising security measures to counter terrorism.

MORE TO KNOW…

APPROACH

Psychology of emotions

BEFORE

1960s The study of isolated tribal communities by American anthropologist Margaret Mead suggests that facial expressions are culture-specific.
1960s American psychologist Silvan Tomkins (Ekman’s mentor） proposes his Affect Theory of Emotions, distinct from the basic Freudian drives of sex, fear, and the will to live.
1970s Gordon H. Bower uncovers and defines the links between emotional states and memory.

AFTER

2000s The findings of Ekman’s work on facial expressions and deception are incorporated into security procedures used by public transport systems.

PAUL EKMAN

Paul Ekman was born and spent his early childhood in Newark, New Jersey. At the outbreak of World War II, his family moved west to Washington state, then Oregon, and eventually Southern California. Aged just 15, Ekman took up a place at the University of Chicago, where he became interested in Freud and psychotherapy, and went on to study for his doctorate in clinical psychology at Adelphi University, New York.

After a brief spell working for the US Army, he moved to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he began his research into nonverbal behaviour and facial expressions. This work led to his studies of the concealment of emotions in facial expressions, which in turn took Ekman deep into the then-unexplored field of the psychology of emotions. He was appointed Professor of Psychology at UCSF in 1972, and remained there until his retirement in 2004.