May 24, 2004
Notes on Ekman's 'Emotions Revealed'
(to be revised)
Paul Ekman, "Emotions Revealed", Owl Books ISBN: 080507516X
Ekman is an authority on the display of emotion on the human face. This mass market paperback summarizes his research findings as well as his personal theories on emotion for a general public. While the topic is engaging, the writing is somehwat repetitive and often wordy in a colloquial way. The book could have been condensed significantly.
The first part, chapters 1-4, outlines Ekman's trajectory as a researcher and introduces his understanding of emotions. A visit to New Guinea in the 1960s was a formative period for Ekman's research focus. According to him, there are a few basic categories of emotion that have universal corresponding expressions in the human face. Emotions are short term events that are triggered and take control over our thought process until the end of their refractory period. Individual differences may be large, but emotions in general cannot be completely controlled. Ekman's suggests to develop an emotional consciousness he calls _mindfulness_, in which we cannot stop our emotions but we do make the choice of acting on the emotions or merely observing them.
In the second part, starting with chapter 5, Ekman describes his basic categories of emotion: sadness and agony, anger, surprise and fear, disgust and contempt, enjoyable emotions. For each emotion (or pair thereof), Ekman introduces situations in which the emotion may arise and exhaustively lists variants of the emotion. He then asks the reader to induce the emotion in herself and to take note of physiological changes cuased by the arousal. Next, facial expressions linked to the emotion are presented in a lego-like system of independent components. Ekman describes how presence of various components can be caused by different shades/variations in the underlying emotional state. The last subsection of each chapter, entitled "using information from expressions" repeatedly stresses the point that while we may be able to recognize an emotion from its signal, we cannot infer the cause of the emotion. for this step, context has to be taken into account. The author also discusses how to react to perceived emotional signals, often suggesting not a direct acknowledgment that the emotion was perceived, but an invitation to elaborate on the topic potentially having caused the emotion. For anger, this elaboration should not be immediate to avoid escalation.
The conclusion (not yet read) offers guidelines on "living with emotion" and tests the reader's sensitivity to facial signals of emotion.