44 Facts About Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman was born on February 15,1934 and is an American psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco who is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions.

Paul Ekman was ranked 59th out of the 100 most cited psychologists of the twentieth century.

Paul Ekman was born in 1934 in Washington, DC, and grew up in a Jewish family in New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, and California.

Paul Ekman's father was a pediatrician and his mother was an attorney.

Paul Ekman's sister, Joyce Steinhart, is a psychoanalytic psychologist who, before her retirement, practiced in New York City.

Paul Ekman originally wanted to be a psychotherapist, but when he was drafted into the army in 1958 he found that research could change army routines, making them more humane.

At the age of 15, without graduating from high school, Paul Ekman enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he completed three years of undergraduate study.

Paul Ekman then studied two years at New York University, earning his BA in 1954.

Paul Ekman was drafted into the US Army in 1958 to serve two years as soon as his internship at Langley Porter was finished.

Paul Ekman 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.

Paul Ekman met anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1960 who was on the staff of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital.

From 1960 to 1963, Paul Ekman was supported by a post doctoral fellowship from NIMH.

Paul Ekman submitted his first research grant through San Francisco State College with himself as the principal investigator at the young age of 29.

Paul Ekman received this grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1963 to study nonverbal behaviour.

Paul Ekman wrote his most famous book, Telling Lies, and published it in 1985.

Paul Ekman retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.

In 2001, Paul Ekman collaborated with John Cleese for the BBC documentary series The Human Face.

Paul Ekman's work is frequently referred to in the TV series Lie to Me.

Paul Ekman has collaborated with Pixar's film director and animator Pete Docter in preparation of his 2015 film Inside Out.

Paul Ekman wrote a parent's guide to using Inside Out to help parents talk with their children about emotion, which can be found on his personal website.

Paul Ekman was named one of the top Time 100 most influential people in the May 11,2009 edition of Time magazine.

Paul Ekman was ranked fifteenth among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century in 2014 by the journal Archives of Scientific Psychology.

Paul Ekman is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley.

Paul Ekman's contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.

Paul Ekman 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.

Paul Ekman then focused on developing techniques for measuring nonverbal communication.

Paul Ekman found that facial muscular movements that created facial expressions could be reliably identified through empirical research.

Paul Ekman found that human beings are capable of making over 10,000 facial expressions; only 3,000 relevant to emotion.

Psychologist Silvan Tomkins convinced Paul Ekman to extend his studies of nonverbal communication from body movement to the face, helping him design his classic cross-cultural emotion recognition studies.

Paul Ekman International was established in 2010 by the EIA Group based on a partnership between Cliff Lansley and Paul Ekman to deliver emotional skills and deception detection workshops around the world.

Paul Ekman has contributed to the study of social aspects of lying, why people lie, and why people are often unconcerned with detecting lies.

Paul Ekman first became interested in detecting lies while completing his clinical work.

Paul Ekman began to review videotaped interviews to study people's facial expressions while lying.

Since controlled scientific tests typically involve people playing the part of terrorists, Paul Ekman says those people are unlikely to have the same emotions as actual terrorists.

Methodological criticisms of Paul Ekman's work focus on the essentially circular and tautological nature of his experiments, in which test subjects were shown selected photographs of "basic emotions," and then asked to match them with the same set of concepts used in their production.

Paul Ekman showed photographs selected from over 3000 pictures of individuals asked to simulate emotions, from which he edited to contain "those which showed only the pure display of a single affect," using no control and subject only to Paul Ekman's intuition.

Paul Ekman received hostility from some anthropologists at meetings of the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association from 1967 to 1969.

Paul Ekman recounted that, as he was reporting his findings on universality of expression, one anthropologist tried to stop him from finishing by shouting that his ideas were fascist.

Paul Ekman compares this to another incident when he was accused of being racist by an activist for claiming that Black expressions are not different from White expressions.

In 1975, Margaret Mead, an anthropologist, wrote against Paul Ekman for doing "improper anthropology", and for disagreeing with Ray Birdwhistell's claim opposing universality.

Paul Ekman wrote that, while many people agreed with Birdwhistell then, most came to accept his own findings over the next decade.

Paul Ekman argued that there has been no quantitative data to support the claim that emotions are culture specific.

Paul Ekman criticized the tendency of psychologists to base their conclusions on surveys of college students.

Paul Ekman has refused to submit his more recent work to peer-review, claiming that revealing the details of his work might reveal state secrets and endanger security.