Paul Ekman (February 15, 1934 – November 17, 2025) was an American psychologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century in 2002 by the Review of General Psychology.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 three quantitative variables: citations in professional journals, citations in textbooks, and nominations in a survey given to members of the Association for Psychological Science, with three qualitative variables (converted to quantitative scores): National Academy of Sciences (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.
His empirical and theoretical work helped to restart the study of emotion and non-verbal communication in the field of psychology, and introduced new quantitative frameworks which researchers could use to do so. He also carried out important early work on the physiology of emotions.
Early life Childhood Ekman was born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in a Jewish family in New Jersey, aside from a brief spell in California during World War II. His father was a pediatrician and his mother was an attorney. His sister, Joyce Steingart, was a psychoanalytic psychologist who practiced in New York City.
Ekman originally wanted to be a psychotherapist, but when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958 he found that research could change army routines, making them more humane. This experience converted him from wanting to be a psychotherapist to wanting to be a researcher, in order to help as many people as possible.
Education At age 15, without graduating from high school, Ekman enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he completed three years of undergraduate study. During his time in Chicago, he was fascinated by group therapy sessions and understanding group dynamics. His classmates at Chicago included writer Susan Sontag, film director Mike Nichols, and actress Elaine May.
He then studied for two years at New York University (NYU), earning his BA in 1954. The subject of his first research project, under the direction of professor Margaret Tresselt, was an attempt to develop a test of how people would respond to group therapy.Ekman, P. (1987). "A life's pursuit." In The Semiotic Web '86: An International Yearbook, Sebeok, T. A.; Umiker-Seboek, J., Eds. Berlin, Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 3–45.
Ekman was accepted into the Adelphi University graduate program for clinical psychology. While working for his master's degree, Ekman was awarded a predoctoral research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1955. His master's thesis was focused on facial expression and body movement that he had begun to study in 1954. Ekman received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University in 1958, after a one-year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute.Eissner, B. Paul Ekman PH.D. '58, '08: East Meets West. http://profiles.adelphi.edu/profile/paul-ekman/ http://www.adelphi.edu/adelphi-magazine/Adelphi-Magazine-Fall-2008.pdf.
Military service Ekman was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958 to serve two years after his internship at Langley Porter was finished. He served as first lieutenant-chief psychologist, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he did research on army stockades and psychological changes during infantry basic training.
Career Upon completion of military service in 1960, he accepted a position as a research associate with Leonard Krasner at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, working on a grant focused on the operant conditioning of verbal behavior in psychiatric patients. Ekman also met anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1960 who was on the staff of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Five years later, Bateson gave Ekman motion picture films taken in Bali in the mid-1930s to help Ekman with cross-cultural studies of expression and gesture.
From 1960 to 1963, Ekman was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from NIMH. He submitted his first research grant through San Francisco State College with himself as the principal investigator (PI) at the age of 29.Ekman, P. (1987). '"A life's pursuit". In The Semiotic Web '86: An International Yearbook, Sebeok, T. A.; Umiker-Sebeok, J., eds. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 3–45 He received this grant from NIMH in 1963 to study nonverbal behavior. This award was continuously renewed for the next 40 years and paid his salary until he was offered a professorship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1972.
Encouraged by his college friend and teacher Silvan S. Tomkins, Ekman shifted his focus from body movement to facial expressions. He wrote his most famous book, Telling Lies, publishing it in 1985. He retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF. From 1960 to 2004, he also worked at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute on a limited basis consulting on clinical cases.
After retiring from the University of California, San Francisco, Ekman founded the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International.
Media In 2001, Ekman collaborated with John Cleese for the BBC documentary series The Human Face.
His work is frequently referred to in the TV series Lie to Me"The (Real!) Science Behind Fox's Lie to Me". Popular Mechanics [Online], 2009. in which the character Dr. Lightman is based on Paul Ekman. Ekman served as a scientific adviser for the series.
He collaborated with Pixar's film director and animator Pete Docter as a scientific consultant for the latter's 2015 film Inside Out. Ekman also wrote a parent's guide to using Inside Out to talk with their children about emotion.
Influence
Ekman was named one of the top Time 100 most influential people in the May 11, 2009, edition of Time magazine.The 2009 TIME 100: Paul Ekman, Scientists & Thinkers. Time. April 30, 2009. He was also ranked 15th among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century in 2014 by the journal Archives of Scientific Psychology. He was on the editorial board of Greater Good magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. Ekman's contributions included the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.
Death Ekman died at his home in San Francisco, California, on November 17, 2025, at the age of 91.
Research work
Measuring nonverbal communication Ekman's interest in nonverbal communication led to his first publication in 1957, describing how difficult it was to develop ways of empirically measuring nonverbal behaviour. He chose the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, the psychiatry department of the University of California Medical School, for his clinical internship partly because Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees had recently published a book called Nonverbal Communication (1956).Ruesch, J.; Kees, W. (1956). Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations. University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 205.
Ekman then focused on developing techniques for measuring nonverbal communication. He found that facial muscular movements that created facial expressions could be reliably identified through empirical research. He also found that human beings are capable of making over 10,000 facial expressions; only 3,000 relevant to emotion. Psychologist Silvan Tomkins convinced Ekman to extend his studies of nonverbal communication from body movement to the face, helping him design his classic cross-cultural emotion recognition studies.
Emotions as universal categories In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872, Charles Darwin theorized that emotions were evolved traits universal to the human species. However, the prevalent belief during the 1950s, particularly among anthropologists, was that facial expressions and their meanings were determined through behavioral learning processes. A prominent advocate of the latter perspective was anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had traveled to different countries examining how cultures communicated using nonverbal behavior.
Through a series of studies, Ekman found a high agreement across members of diverse Western and Eastern literate cultures on selecting emotional labels that fit facial expressions. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating wrath, grossness, fear, joy, loneliness, and shock. Findings on contempt were less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.Matsumoto, David (1992) "More evidence for the universality of a contempt expression". Motivation and Emotion. Springer Netherlands. vol. 16, no. 4 / December 1992. Working with Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman demonstrated that the findings extended to preliterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, whose members could not have learned the meaning of expressions from exposure to media depictions of emotion. Ekman and Friesen then demonstrated that certain emotions were exhibited with very specific display rules, culture-specific prescriptions about who can show which emotions to whom and when. These display rules could explain how cultural differences may conceal the universal effect of expression.
In the 1990s, Ekman proposed an expanded list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions that are not all encoded in facial muscles. The newly included emotions are: amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride in achievement, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, and shame.
Visual depictions of facial actions for studying emotion Ekman's well-known test of emotion recognition was the Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) stimulus set published in 1976. Consisting of 110 black and white images of Caucasian actors portraying the six universal emotions plus neutral expressions, the POFA has been used to study emotion recognition rates in normal and psychiatric populations around the world. Ekman used these stimuli in his original cross-cultural research. Many researchers favor the POFA because these photographs have been rated by large normative groups in different cultures. In response to critics, however, Ekman eventually released a more culturally diverse set of stimuli called the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE).
By 1978, Ekman and Friesen had finalized and developed the Facial Action Coding System. FACS is an anatomically-based system for describing all observable facial movement for every emotion. Each observable component of facial movement is called an action unit or AU and all facial expressions can be decomposed into their constituent core AUs. The tool was updated in the early 2000s.
Other tools have been developed, including the MicroExpressions Training Tool (METT), which can help individuals identify more subtle emotional expressions that occur when people try to suppress their emotions. Application of this tool includes helping people with Asperger's or autism to recognize emotional expressions in their everyday interactions. The Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT) teaches recognition of very small, micro signs of emotion. These are very tiny expressions, sometimes registering in only part of the face, or when the expression is shown across the entire face, but is very small. Subtle expressions occur for many reasons, for example, the emotion experienced may be very slight or the emotion may be just beginning.