Paul Ekman

Five years later, Gregory Bateson gave Paul Ekman motion picture films taken in Bali in the mid-1930s to help Ekman with cross-cultural studies of expression and gesture.

Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934) 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 born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in a Jewish family in New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, and California.

His father was a pediatrician and his mother was an attorney.

His sister, Joyce Steinhart, is a psychoanalytic psychologist who, before her retirement, practiced in New York City.

He then studied for two years at New York University (NYU), earning his BA in 1954.

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.

Next, Ekman was accepted into the Adelphi University graduate program for clinical psychology.

His Master's thesis was focused on facial expression and body movement he had begun to study in 1954.

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

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.

This experience converted him from wanting to be a psychotherapist to wanting to be a researcher, in order to help as many people as possible.

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.

During his time in Chicago, he was fascinated by group therapy sessions and understanding group dynamics.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Ekman conducted seminal research on the specific biological correlations of specific emotions, attempting to demonstrate the universality and discreteness of emotions in a Darwinian approach.

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.

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

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

He submitted his first research grant through San Francisco State College with himself as the principal investigator (PI) at the young age of 29.

From 1960 to 2004 he also worked at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute on a limited basis consulting on various clinical cases.

After retiring from the University of California, San Francisco, Paul Ekman founded the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International.

He received this grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1963 to study nonverbal behaviour.

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.

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

The 4th edition is still in print.

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

His work is frequently referred to in the TV series Lie to Me.

Dr. Lightman is based on Paul Ekman, and Ekman served as a scientific adviser for the series; he read and edited the scripts and sent video clip-notes of facial expressions for the actors to imitate.

While Ekman has written 15 books, the series Lie to Me has more effectively brought Ekman's research into people's homes.

He retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

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

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

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

Ekman also 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.