Emotions Revealed - KQED QUEST

Is your face giving you away? Meet renowned psychologist Paul Ekman, who has spent his life studying how our facial muscles involuntarily reveal emotions like sadness and anger. His comprehensive catalog of human facial expressions has become an important tool for everyone from law enforcement agents to animators.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• science
• pbs
• kqed
• quest
• emotions
• psychology
• exploratorium
• california
• faces
• paul
• ekman

[severnjeff]

did anyone else see the face that popped up while the video was loading?

[Costic]

facecrime! This is so bloody interesting, I wish I could find out where to get hold of sofware or anything that could help me train to recognize microexpressions

[carlo88moe]

@severnjeff the super Greenwich Village-y, "i wanna be on brooooaadwaaaaay*sung*" guy featured later in the vid?...yes we did

[animals0feel1pain2]

Lol. I just made a rudimentary microexpression training program using Matlab. I'm thinking about reprogramming it in Python (which is a free language to download online). If anyone's interested, contact me.

The code is pretty simple.

It'll flash a face for .015 seconds and you have to tell what microexpression was shown.

[drpool2424]

I can't wait for TSA to start using the facial expression software. We'll be detained for frowning! Just a skip from being arrested for aggressive expressions.

Then, the emotion police can be formed. Very cool.

[g12momo]

@Costic This is an old video and you may have already found out a software that can train you to read microexpressions or not. But now Dr. Paul Ekman has the software available from his website. Paulekman[dot]com

[golsno147]

@bluecali I am not discrediting Ekman or his work. only objecting, as I do to the majority of contemporary emotion researchers including Ekman, that they fail to make the distinctions set out in my previous comment. Experiencing emotion and how we then feel and re-act , including expression and body language ,as a consequence are, in my view, discrete phenomena.

[bluecali]

I disagree with "golsno147". Sorry but I believe in Ekmans work n I'm sure there is solid good reason why he dosent reveal certain information to the public. Imagine the wrong hands in could get into...I like your observation. But you dont work 40 years n 20,000 people later to say your findings are false.

[golsno147]

There is nothing unique about Eckman's observation that some facial expressions tend to reflect how we feel as does our body language( e.g. someone experiencing "guilt" tends to avoid looking you straight in the eye.) But, everything we claim to "feel" is not emotion and, like most "emotion" researchers, Eckman fails to distinguish between emotion, moods, thoughts, attitudes and the  variety of individual responses to our interactions with the environment.

[KeepingModern]

I see it when people are full of shit nearly always without this training class aid to do so. It's not a pleasant thing to know how to do, just be aware of that before you think about being able to see what people really feel about things. More people are salesmen than you think.

[ShamrocksGetYouHigh]

no wonder people act bit freaked out sometimes when they find out im studying psychology! we can really learn to mind read

[ShamrocksGetYouHigh]

its not nature vs nurture anymore, 'its how much of each contributes to such and such'