Paul Ekman and His Study on Facial Expressions

Science released an article entitled “Facial Expressions—Including Fear—May Not Be as Universal as We Thought”, written by Michael Pierce on October 17, 2016. In this article Pierce discusses how 50 years ago it was assumed that facial expressions were universal. However, it has been found that in the present day, this may not be the case. Expressions such as happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, or hunger, were all assumed to be expressed the same way as well as interpreted the same way. A study was conducted in the Trobriand Islands, were Trobrianders were shown as series of photos with facial expressions. They were asked to describe the emotions they interpreted from the photos, the results were intriguing. Pierce (2016) describes how

In 1924, Carney Landis set up an experiment to determine whether there is a common facial expression for each emotion that we experience. For example, is there a specific facial expression, used by everyone, for when we feel anger, fear etc? This became the aim of his work. At the time, Carney Landis was a graduate at the university of Minnesota thus the subjects of the experiment were mostly students (madsciencemuseum, 2011). There were 25 subjects in total; of that there were 12 women, 12 men and 1 boy aged 13 (Landis, 1924). Each person was taken into an experimental room and their faces were painted with black lines to allow Landis to clearly see the change in their expressions (madsciencemuseum, 2011). He photographed each change in expression as they reacted to each situation and he could refer to the black lines when analysing the photographs (madsciencemuseum, 2011). Apparatus was set up over 2 rooms; the first

Facial Expression: The facial expression such as happiness, sadness, anger and fear helps a lot in conveying a message. These facial expressions are similar all over the world but non- verbal communication and behaviour varies hugely between the cultures in the world.Since the look on a person’s face is noticed , before we hear ,facial expression contributes a lot in a successfully non-verbal communication .

Charles Darwin was the first scientist to ever study animals in a systematic way (Bekoff “The Emotional Lives” 6). In his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin discussed the

Before starting the discussion of emotion-focused therapy, it is very important to have an understanding of what emotion is. Historically, emotions were seen as nonspecific and disruptive; however more recent analyses have emphasized the functions that emotions serve (Hebb, 1949). Although emotions address different adaptive problems, they generally facilitate decision making, prepare the individual for rapid motor responses and provide information regarding the ongoing match between organism and environment (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). In addition to this, emotion also serves as a social function for they inform us about others’ behavioral intentions, give us clues as to whether something is good or bad and control our social behavior (Greenberg & Safran, 1987). From an emotion-focused perspective, according to Greenberg (2004), emotion disorder is seen as a result of more failures in the dyadic regulation of affect, avoidance of affect, traumatic

His findings helped psychologist gain knowledge in how facial expressions play an important part in human interactions. His work helps doctors identify when patients are being deceitful and prevent them from harming themselves in the future. Today, Ekman continues to be an influential leader in the field of psychology. He has developed training programs to help people decipher people’s emotions, help people enhance their relationships with others and help people develop a sense of empathy for others. In addition to his work Ekman is an active consultant on emotional expression to judges, lawyers, government agencies such as the FBI and CIA.

In her book What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture, Liza Zunshine depicts the moments in which individual losses control over his composure as embodied transparency. According to Zunshine, “Instances of embodied transparency offer us something that we hold at a premium in our everyday life and never get much of: the experience of perfect access to other people’s minds in complex social situations” (Zunshine, Pg. 23). People wants to know what in others’ mind, but the inability to properly guess someone’s perspective makes them unpredictable. The ability to actively understand the characters’ emotional state allow us to be intrigued by their involuntary body language and facial expressions.

Ekman studied how what people felt and what they thought could be revealed just by the facial expressions people made. He wanted to see how people can look at faces and figure out what they were thinking. He studied many of the different expressions that people could make and what each of those expressions mean. He also studied the involuntary muscle movements and how they were triggered automatically when people feel certain emotions. He figured out how to read these emotions to figure out what people are thinking basically taking what humans do naturally a step farther. He became very proficient at the art of “mind reading”.

Thesis Statement: Body language expresses emotions and actions unconsciously and differs between men and women depending on their brain type, emotional experience and culture.

Furthermore, I saw a photograph of President Kennedy in the oval at the White House. Furthermore, this photograph displays how his face was positioned in a downward position as he was standing. I looked closely at this photo and it displayed to me that Kennedy is stressed out as a president. In psychology, facial feedback effect enables me to understand how at that moment when the photo was taken, he was going to think about a verdict that he must make and at that point he was stressed and didn’t know what to do. Also, his “behavior feedback effect” in this photo informs one about his emotion because if one’s head is down, it tells one how he is sad or stressed out about something. Finally, I am really pleased I went to Worcester Art Museum

3. What is the evolutionary view of emotion as originally proposed by Darwin? What is the adaptive value of emotion? What evidence suggests

In the article Emotion Expressions: On Signals, Symbols, and Spandrels—A Response to Barrett, Azim F. Shariff and Jessica L. Tracy talk about whether emotional expression can be evolved. They acknowledge the view of an opposing author, Barret, that they are culturally different and that they are byproducts of evolution. They state that although they don’t have sufficient evidence, that this conclusion can be deduced through cognition of other evidence. To support their argument, they use the example of how blind people express their emotion, similar to how non-blind people do, even though they have never seen someone else express emotions, which holds up through cultures. They mention how we use our emotions

Tamar and Ford found conducted their experiments using 162 undergraduate college students, but excluded 10 of the participants for their inability to follow directions. The study consisted of 49 males and 103 females. The median age of the participants was 23 years. The participants were selected from a diverse group of self-reported ethnicities. The participants were shown video clips of sad or happy clients, and were asked to evaluate the emotional state of the people in the video clips. The video clips consisted of extreme cases of “sad and happy” states, such as a person describing the death of their grandmother or a mother describing the birth of her child. The participants were instructed to take three different approaches. First approach, to dissociate with the people from the video clip by imagining they were in a movie theater and they were able to observe the physical surroundings, essentially observing from the third person. Second approach, consisted of “reflection” which consisted of examining the people in the video and attempt to figure out what the person is experiencing. Additionally, the participants were asked to attempt to understand what effect the video clip is having on them, and to take a positive, nonjudgmental approach. Third approach, consisted of “empathy imagery” consisted on the participants attempting to mentally place themselves in the situation. In this approach the

It suggested counselors to look into the affect of the client during sessions. Meier (2012) stated that a therapist must try to hear the feelings of the client during sessions (p. 14). The reading described various terms of affect in detail. The relationship between physical movements of the client such as downcast gaze, and affect was interesting. This body movement would possibly be hypothesized as a sad affect (Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2015). It was helpful to read this section because it helped me to prepare my interventions with my client for the next session. One of my clients is diagnosed with major depressive disorder and has difficulties in expressing his symptoms. This reading provided me with terms of mood state to observe and intervene to explore his affective content.

Chapter 3 explores the concept of universally shared basic emotions, an idea that was first advanced as a theory by Charles Darwin. Paul Ekman and Jakk Panksepp studied the concept of