Paul Ekman

An argument for basic emotions

Abstract Emotions are viewed as having evolved through their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life-tasks. Each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology, and antecedent events. Each...

The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior: Categories, Origins, Usage, and Coding

Ir we arc to understand fully any instance of a persons non-verbal behavior that is, any movement or position of the face and/or the bodywe must discover how that behavior became part of the penons repertoire, the circumstances of its usc, and the rules which explain how the behavior contains or conveys information. We will call these three fundamental considerations ORIGIN, USAGE. and CODING. The interrelationships among and the differences within these three aspects of nonverbal behavior are extremely complex. The task of unraveling nonverbal behavior in these terms is enormously difficult; and it becomes impossible if we fail to consider the possibility of multiple categories of nonverbal behavior. The need to develop such a categorical scheme bas emerged from the results of our empirical studies over the past eight years, and has been crystallized by our two current research projects, the study of crosscultural differences in nonverbal behavior, and the study of nonverbal leakage of information during deceptive situations. We will briefly trace how some of the findings raised questions which led us to attempt to

Approach-Withdrawal and Cerebral Asymmetry: Emotional Expression and Brain Physiology I

In this experiment, we combined the measurement of observable facial behavior with simultaneous measures of brain electrical activity to assess patterns of hemispheric activation in different regions during the experience of happiness and disgust. Disgust was found to be associated with right-sided activation in the frontal and anterior temporal regions compared with the happy condition. Happiness was accompanied by left-sided activation in the anterior temporal region compared with disgust. No differences in asymmetry were found between emotions in the central and parietal regions. When data aggregated across positive films were compared to aggregate negative film data, no reliable differences in brain activity were found. These findings illustrate the utility of using facial behavior to verify the presence of emotion, are consistent with the notion of emotion-specific physiological patterning, and underscore the importance of anterior cerebral asymmetries for emotions associated with approach and withdrawal.

NONVERBAL LEAKAGE AND CLUES TO DECEPTION

Abstract : Research relevant to psychotherapy regarding facial expression and body movement, has shown that the kind of information which can be gleaned from the patients words - information about affects, attitudes, interpersonal styles, psychodynamics - can also be derived from his concomitant nonverbal behavior. The study explores the interaction situation, and considers how within deception interactions differences in neuroanatomy and cultural influences combine to produce specific types of body movements and facial expressions which escape efforts to deceive and emerge as leakage or deception clues.

Are there basic emotions

Ortony and Turners (1990) arguments against those who adopt the view that there are basic emotions are challenged. The evidence on universals in expression and in physiology strongly suggests that there is a biological basis to the emotions that have been studied. Ortony and Turners reviews of this literature are faulted, and their alternative theoretical explanations do not fit the evidence. The utility of the basic emotions approach is also shown in terms of the research it has generated.

Pan-Cultural Elements in Facial Displays of Emotion

Observers in both literate and preliterate cultures chose the predicted emotion for photographs of the face, although agreement was higher in the literate samples. These findings suggest that the pan-cultural element in facial displays of emotion is the association between facial muscular movements and discrete primary emotions, although cultures may still differ in what evokes an emotion, in rules for controlling the display of emotion, and in behavioral consequences.

Classifying facial actions

The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) [23] is an objective method for quantifying facial movement in terms of component actions. This system is widely used in behavioral investigations of emotion, cognitive processes, and social interaction. The coding is presently performed by highly trained human experts. This paper explores and compares techniques for automatically recognizing facial actions in sequences of images. These techniques include analysis of facial motion through estimation of optical flow; holistic spatial analysis, such as principal component analysis, independent component analysis, local feature analysis, and linear discriminant analysis; and methods based on the outputs of local filters, such as Gabor wavelet representations and local principal components. Performance of these systems is compared to naive and expert human subjects. Best performances were obtained using the Gabor wavelet representation and the independent component representation, both of which achieved 96 percent accuracy for classifying 12 facial actions of the upper and lower face. The results provide converging evidence for the importance of using local filters, high spatial frequencies, and statistical independence for classifying facial actions.

Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion.

We present here new evidence of cross-cultural agreement in the judgement of facial expression. Subjects in 10 cultures performed a more complex judgment task than has been used in previous cross-cultural studies. Instead of limiting the subjects to selecting only one emotion term for each expression, this task allowed them to indicate that multiple emotions were evident and the intensity of each emotion. Agreement was very high across cultures about which emotion was the most intense. The 10 cultures also agreed about the second most intense emotion signaled by an expression and about the relative intensity among expressions of the same emotion. However, cultural differences were found in judgments of the absolute level of emotional intensity.

The Duchenne smile : emotional expression and brain physiology. II

Facial expression, EEG, and self-report of subjective emotional experience were recorded while subjects individually watched both pleasant and unpleasant films. Smiling in which the muscle that orbits the eye is active in addition to the muscle that pulls the lip corners up (the Duchenne smile) was compared with other smiling in which the muscle orbiting the eye was not active. As predicted, the Duchenne smile was related to enjoyment in terms of occurring more often during the pleasant than the unpleasant films, in measures of cerebral asymmetry, and in relation to subjective reports of positive emotions, and other smiling was not.

Strong evidence for universals in facial expressions: a reply to Russell's mistaken critique.

J. A. Russell (1994) misrepresents what universality means, misinterprets the evidence from past studies, and fails to consider or report findings that disagree with his position. New data are introduced that decisively answer the central question that Russell raises about the use of a forced-choice format in many of the past studies. This article also shows that his many other qualms about other aspects of the design of the studies of literate cultures have no merit. Russells critique of the preliterate cultures is inaccurate; he does not fully disclose what those who studied preliterate subjects did or what they concluded that they had found. Taking account of all of Russells qualms, my analysis shows that the evidence from both literate and preliterate cultures is overwhelming in support of universals in facial expressions.