Paul Ekman

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Paul Ekman bigraphy, stories - Evolutionary and social psychologist

Paul Ekman : biography

February 15, 1934 –

Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934) is an American psychologist who was a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions, has created an ‘atlas of emotions’ with more than ten thousand facial expressions, and has gained a reputation as "the best human lie detector in the world". He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most cited psychologists of the twentieth century.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 3 quantitative variables: citations in professional journals, citations in textbooks, and nominations in a survey given to members of the Association for Psychological Science, with 3 qualitative variables (converted to quantitative scores): National Academy of Science (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. (A list of the first 25 names, in order, can be found under "Historically important writers" at Template:Psychology.) Ekman conducted seminal research on the specific biological correlates of specific emotions, demonstrating the universality and discreteness of emotions in a Darwinian approach. Freitas-Magalhães, A. (2012). Facial expression of emotion. In V. S. Ramachandran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Vol. 2, pp.173-183). Oxford: Elsevier/Academic Press. ISBN 978-008-088-575-9. Ekman’s biggest discovery is the ‘micro-expression’, which shows up on our faces for fractions of a second as an indicator of emotion.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m72bqvf_qDg

Criticisms

Ekman’s work, particularly its applications to airport security via the Transportation Security Administration’s "Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques" (SPOT) program, has been criticized for not having been subjected to controlled scientific tests.http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100526/full/465412a.html A 2007 report on SPOT stated that "simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin".Hontz, C. R., Hartwig, M., Kleinman, S. M. & Meissner, C. A. Credibility Assessment at Portals, Portals Committee Report (2009). However, Ekman’s TSA work was funded by DARPA. As part of their defense department procedures, Ekman’s approach was assessed using the military blue and red teams: the blue team was charged to use Ekman’s techniques; the red team was charged with defeating the blue team. Ironically, Ekman was assigned by DARPA to head the red team, that is to defeat his own measures. The TSA approach was tested in several major airports in the US, but also in South Korea, Israel and several European airports. In fact, the screening procedures have already demonstrated that they can pick out major felons in a crowd.

The methodology used by Ekman and O’Sullivan in their recent work on Truth wizards has also received criticism on the basis of validation.Bond, Charles F & Uysal, Ahmet. (2007). . Law and human behavior, 31. Other criticisms of Ekman’s work are based on experimental and naturalistic studies by several other emotion psychologists who, in the last two decades, did not find evidence in support of discrete emotions and discrete facial expression, thus questioning Ekman’s proposed taxonomy.Russel and Fernandez-Dols (1997). The Psychology of Facial Expression . Cambridge University Press.

Ekman argues that while some anthropologists continue to suggest that emotions are not universal, there has been no quantitative data to support the claim that emotions are culture specific. In his 1993 discussion of the topic, Ekman states 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 selects labels the same expression as another universal emotion.