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Biomedical subjects

Paul Ekman

Publications and source records attributed to Paul Ekman.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Appearing truthful generalizes across different deception situations.

The authors investigated whether the ability to appear truthful is specific to deception situations. Male participants were interrogated after they took part in 2 high-stake deception situations, one involving a mock crime and another involving a false opinion. The videotaped interrogations from each situation were shown to independent groups of undergraduate observers. The proportion of observers who judged each participant as truthful in one situation correlated highly with the proportion of observers who judged the same participant as truthful in the other situation. This was not correlated with physiognomy judgments. Follow-up studies revealed that although the participants showed consistency in their facial, body, and paralinguistic behaviors across situations, observers' judgments seemed to be driven only by the consistency of the dynamic facial behaviors. These results are discussed in terms of the evolutionary importance of the face in communication.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

The relationship among expressions, labels, and descriptions of contempt.

This article reports 4 studies that demonstrate that the contempt expression is reliably associated with situations that elicit contempt and that the inability to label the contempt expression reflects a problem with its label or concept and not with the relationship between its expression and emotion. In Study I, the labeling of contempt in fixed-choice judgment tasks did not occur because of a process of elimination. In Studies 2 and 3, the contempt expression was associated with situations that elicit contempt, but participants did not label the situations in an open-ended response. In Study 3, participants also more reliably labeled the contempt expression with situations rather than with labels and did not generate contempt situations from labels. In Study 4, participants reported using, hearing, and reading about contempt the least among 7 emotions tested.

Affect↗
PubMed2003

Darwin, deception, and facial expression.

Darwin did not focus on deception. Only a few sentences in his book mentioned the issue. One of them raised the very interesting question of whether it is difficult to voluntarily inhibit the emotional expressions that are most difficult to voluntarily fabricate. Another suggestion was that it would be possible to unmask a fabricated expression by the absence of the difficult-to-voluntarily-generate facial actions. Still another was that during emotion body movements could be more easily suppressed than facial expression. Research relevant to each of Darwin's suggestions is reviewed, as is other research on deception that Darwin did not foresee.

Affect↗
PubMed2002

Difficulty does not account for emotion-specific heart rate changes in the directed facial action task.

Boiten (1996) used the Directed Facial Action task (a task we developed in which participants follow instructions, based on theory about how emotion is expressed in the face, to move facial muscles deliberately to produce different facial configurations) to investigate heart rate differences among six emotional configurations. Boiten's findings closely replicated ours (Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990) in terms of heart rate change, self-reported emotion, and rated difficulty during the configurations. Boiten concluded that differences in difficulty were responsible for found differences in heart rate; in contrast, we had concluded that heart rate findings could not be explained in this manner. In this paper, we argue that neither Boiten nor we did the critical analyses needed to determine whether heart rate changes were mediated in this way. Performing these analyses, we conclude that neither reported difficulty nor two other potential mediators (time required to make the facial configurations; activity of nonfacial muscles) mediated the heart rate differences that we found between emotional configurations in the Directed Facial Action task.

Adult↗