Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman (Washington, D.C., 1934 – San Francisco, 2025) was an American psychologist and a pioneer in the study of emotions and their expression on the face. Working from an evolutionary perspective that owed much to Charles Darwin, he helped restart the scientific study of emotion and nonverbal communication.

He grew up in a Jewish family, moving between New Jersey, Washington State, Oregon and California. He first wanted to become a psychotherapist, but his military service in the late 1950s showed him that research could improve the routines of an institution, and this pushed him toward research. He earned his doctorate in clinical psychology at Adelphi University in 1958. In 1972 he joined the University of California, San Francisco as a professor, retiring in 2004, after decades of funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.

His central contribution was the claim that certain facial expressions are universal. Against the view, common among anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, that gestures are learned culturally, he found that members of literate Western and Eastern cultures agreed when assigning emotion labels to faces, and that the same held for a people of Papua New Guinea. To describe facial movement he developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and in the 1990s he expanded his list of basic emotions.

His work has also drawn criticism. Many researchers doubt that people can reliably spot lies just by looking at faces, and others found little experimental support for his taxonomy of discrete emotions. Still, his influence is wide: he inspired the television series Lie to Me and served as a scientific adviser to Pixar's film Inside Out (2015).