Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934)[1] 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.

[3] 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.

[7] 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.

Notably, his classmates at Chicago included writer Susan Sontag, film director Mike Nichols, and actress Elaine May.

[4] The subject of his first research project, under the direction of his NYU professor, Margaret Tresselt, was an attempt to develop a test of how people would respond to group therapy.

[9] While working for his master's degree, Ekman was awarded a predoctoral research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1955.

[9] Ekman eventually went on to receive his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University in 1958, after a one-year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute.

[9] 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.

[9][11][12][13] 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.

This award would be continuously renewed for the next 40 years and would pay 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.

[21] 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).

A prominent advocate of the latter perspective was the 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.

[26] 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.

[29] The newly included emotions are: Amusement, Contempt, Contentment, Embarrassment, Excitement, Guilt, Pride in achievement, Relief, Satisfaction, Sensory pleasure, and Shame.

[29] Ekman's famous test of emotion recognition was the Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) stimulus set published in 1976.

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).

Application of this tool includes helping people with Asperger's or autism to recognize emotional expressions in their everyday interactions.

[37] In his 1993 paper in the psychology journal American Psychologist, Ekman describes nine direct contributions that his research on facial expression has made to the understanding of emotion.

[43] Methodological criticisms of 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.

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