Paul Ekman

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Lore & Background

Paul Ekman was born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in a Jewish family in New Jersey, with a brief spell in California during World War II. His father was a pediatrician and his mother an attorney. He originally wanted to be a psychotherapist, but after being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958, he found that research could change army routines to be more humane, converting him to a researcher. At age 15, without graduating high school, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, then earned his BA from New York University in 1954. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Adelphi University in 1958 after an internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute. After military service, Ekman worked as a research associate at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital and met anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who later gave him motion picture films taken in Bali in the mid-1930s for cross-cultural studies. He received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1963 to study nonverbal behavior, which was continuously renewed for the next 40 years. Encouraged by Silvan S. Tomkins, he shifted focus from body movement to facial expressions. He wrote his most famous book, Telling Lies, publishing it in 1985, and retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF. After retiring, he founded the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International. Ekman collaborated with John Cleese for the BBC documentary series The Human Face in 2001. His work is frequently referred to in the TV series Lie to Me, where the character Dr. Lightman is based on him, and he served as a scientific adviser for the series. He also collaborated with Pixar's film director and animator Pete Docter as a scientific consultant for the 2015 film Inside Out, and wrote a parent's guide to using the film to talk with children about emotion. He was named one of the top Time 100 most influential people in the May 11, 2009, edition of Time magazine, and ranked 15th among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century in 2014 by the journal Archives of Scientific Psychology.

Reader's Guide

Paul Ekman's significance lies in his foundational work on emotions and facial expressions, which revived a field that had been dominated by the belief that expressions were culturally learned. Through cross-cultural studies, including with preliterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, he demonstrated that certain emotions—such as wrath, grossness, fear, joy, loneliness, and shock—are universally recognized. This supported Charles Darwin's earlier theory that emotions are evolved traits. Ekman also developed the Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) stimulus set in 1976, consisting of 110 black and white images of Caucasian actors portraying the six universal emotions plus neutral expressions, a widely used tool for studying emotion recognition. His research introduced display rules, culture-specific prescriptions about who can show which emotions to whom and when, explaining how cultural differences may conceal universal effects. In the 1990s, he expanded the list of basic emotions to include amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride in achievement, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, and shame. He also developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) in 1978, an anatomically-based system for describing all observable facial movement, and later the MicroExpressions Training Tool (METT) to help identify subtle emotional expressions. His work has had lasting impact on psychology, nonverbal communication research, and popular culture, influencing television, film, and public understanding of emotion.

Did You Know?

• Ekman was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958 and served as first lieutenant-chief psychologist at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
• He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century in 2002.
• Ekman's master's thesis, focused on facial expression and body movement, began in 1954.
• He collaborated with John Cleese for the BBC documentary series The Human Face in 2001.
• Ekman died at his home in San Francisco, California, on November 17, 2025, at the age of 91.