Simple Keys To Reading Anyone’s Hidden Emotions with Psychology Legend Dr. Paul Ekman

In this episode we explore emotions and facial expression in depth with one of the world’s top experts - the psychologist who pioneered much of the work in this field - Dr. Paul Ekman. We discuss the 6-7 major universal emotions, how emotional reactions are unchanged across cultures, ages, and even species, we discuss micro expressions, reading people’s faces, how to manage and control your emotions, and much much more.
Dr. Paul Ekman is best known for his work as a pioneer researching the field of emotions and how they relate to our facial expressions and as founder of the Paul Ekman Group. These studies along with many others led to Paul being named one of the top 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine and One of the Most Influential Psychologist of the 20th Century by the American Psychological Association. Paul has written over 14 books and 170 published articles having his work appear in Psychology Today, The New Yorker, Oprah, Larry King, and more.
Reading facial expressions with definitive evidence
There is some universality to our expressions across cultures, ages, and even species
Expressions are a product of evolution
There are 6-7 major universal emotions
Fear
1. Anger
2. Sadness
3. Disgust
4. Surprise
5. Enjoyment
6. Contempt (maybe not as robust evidence)
You have to avoid “Othello’s error” - you can read an emotion, but that doesn’t tell you what TRIGGERS it
The face, as a universal signal system, conveys a tremendous amount of information
There are 16 different types of enjoyment
How poker tells can teach us about emotional expressions and how we often read them wrong
We can know HOW people feel, but we cannot know what triggered how they feel
In one hour you can learn to read anyone's face
How making voluntary facial expressions can turn on and create any emotional statement
The hardest emotion to turn on is enjoyment
Emotions are memories, expectations, changes in what we think, and changes in how we can remember
When we are in the grip of an emotion - we most readily perceive things that fit the emotion we are experiencing and ignore things that don't
It’s not easy to manage your emotions, but it is possible
Fast onset vs slow onset emotional reactiveness
Fast vs slow emotional offset
The specific steps you can take to manage your emotions and create a gap between emotional triggers and emotional reactions
Diary/journal is a powerful tool for understanding and managing your emotional states
Record negative emotional experiences
1. See what they have in common
2. See if you can anticipate and prepare for negative emotions
Lessons from 50 hours with the Dalai Llama
Emotion is useful, powerful, but also can become cumbersome
Thank you so much for listening!
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SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[APA Journal] Emotion
[Sage Journal] Emotion Review (EMR)
[Book] Emotions Revealed, Second Edition: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life by Paul Ekman Ph.D
[Book] Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion by Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman Ph.D.
[Wiki Article] Charles Darwin
[Training Tools] Micro Expressions Training Tools
[Personal Site] Eve Ekman
[Personal Site] Paul Ekman
[Website] Atlas of Emotions
[Article] What Scientists Who Study Emotion Agree About by Paul Ekman
Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.
[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries.
In this episode we explore emotions and facial expressions in-depth with one of the world's top experts, the psychologist pioneered much of the work in this field, Dr. Paul Ekman. We discussed the 6 to 7 universal emotions. How emotional reactions are unchanged across cultures, ages, and even species. We examine micro-expressions, reading people's faces, talk about how to manage and control your own emotions and much, much more. 
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In our previous episode we discussed everything you ever wanted to know about sleep. We examined the findings from hundreds of studies across millions of people and pulled out the major findings about how vitally important sleep is. The global sleep loss epidemic, the stunning data about sleep and productivity, the simplest and most effective evidence-based strategies for getting better sleep, and much more, with Dr. Matthew Walker. If you want to sleep better at night, listen to that episode.
[0:02:36.7] MB: Today, we have another titan of psychology on the show, Dr. Paul Ekman. Dr. Ekman is known for his work as a pioneer in researching the field of emotions and how they relate to our facial expressions and is the founder of the Paul Ekman Group. These studies along with many others led Paul to be named one of the top 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine and one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century by the American Psychology Association. He’s written over 14 books and has 170+ published articles. His work appeared in the New York Times, Psychology Today, and much much more. 
Paul, welcome to the Science of Success. 
[0:03:12.8] PE: Thank you. 
[0:03:13.7] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today. Your work has informed tons of what we talked about on the show. So it's truly an honor to have you here. 
[0:03:21.2] PE: Oh, ready to be available. 
[0:03:23.6] MB: I’d love to start out and dig in a little bit about kind of the universality and the power of facial expressions. 
[0:03:32.4] PE: Well, when I started out more than 50 years ago, it was believed that expressions were poor source of information. Just a harbor for stereotype and misunderstandings. That has shifted from that to the belief that while there is information in the face, but it's culture specific. And what my work and the work of others has shown, and I think as definitive as evidence ever gets, is that there are some universals of expression, that our expressions are not unique to each culture and that some of our expressions you can see in great apes and chimpanzees, that these are the product of our evolution and culture does influence what triggers the expressions. Culture does influence our attempts to manage our expressions. Culture does influence how we feel about our face. But culture does not write the rules as to what muscles will be activated when fear is felt or anger or distrust. There’re actually six or seven emotions that have a universal expression on the face. 
Those are — I have to count them on my figures as I tell you; fear, anger, sadness, distrust, surprise, enjoyment, and the evidence for contempt I think is almost as good, but it's not as widely replicated. So that's a lot of information from our faces. You don't need a Berlitz book to read the face, but the mistake you have to avoid is what I call Othello’s error. Othello red just about his fear expression accurately. What he misunderstood is what triggers it. Emotions do not tell you their trigger. You could know how someone's feeling, but you don't know what triggered it. 
Often our preconceptions about what should be triggering it may be misleading as it was for Orthello. But the face has a universal signal system. Charles Darwin was not the first to point this out, but perhaps one of the most influential and famous people to point it out, and he learned that because in his five year voyage on the beagle around the world, wherever he went, he was convinced he could understand their facial expressions but not their gestures, and he was right on both counts. Gestures, things like the A-OK are terrible insult in Sicily, for example. Gestures are culture specific, mini-language. I say mini, because they don't really have a grammar. Gesture rarely will you you admit four gestures in a row linked by a particular order. Gestures are pretty much singletons. I think culture specific, unlike the expressions which are universal. 
[0:06:45.0] MB: I find it interesting that out of all of those emotions, they're all skewed towards kind of negative emotions. You have enjoyment as the one positive may be surprised, but that could also most definitely be negative.
[0:06:57.5] PE: Well, I have 16 different types of enjoyment, but they pretty much share the same facial expressions. So there isn't just one way of enjoying yourself. There are at least the 16 that I've identified, but they don't have different signals. The signal is the same. It may differ in strength or in its timing, but it’s the same signal. Why is that so? You’d have to ask a higher authority than me. I don't answer the why. I just answer the when and how questions. 
[0:07:30.3] MB: That make sense. You know it's funny circling back to the idea you talked about a second ago of Othello’s error. I'm a poker player and it makes me think of poker tells, which obviously are very kind of wound up in this. If you can see a tell that might be a strong emotional or reaction, but you don't know if it's a reaction, because they're bluffing and they're scared or they have a great hand and they're scared that it still might lose. It’s so very dangerous to read into certain reactions, because you can sort of commit that error of not understanding what's actually triggering that emotional response. 
[0:08:01.2] PE: Right. We often think it's what fits our preconception of what should be triggering it. That may not be right at all. So it's a danger. We can know how people feel, but we cannot know from their expressions what triggered it. Now, sometimes we can tell by what we just said that it led to an immediate response. Even that can sometimes be misleading. So facial expressions tell us the emotion. They don't tell us the trigger. 
[0:08:32.1] MB: I want to dig in a little bit more and hear about how kind of scientifically validated and universal the work you've done around facial expressions is. 
[0:08:43.3] PE: You would have a hard time getting any respectable scientific journal to publish new evidence on the universality of facial expressions, because it's been established in the judgment of most of the scientific community. There are a few holdouts who do not agree, but I published a paper a year or two ago called what emotion scientists agree about. I first identified how many scientists in the world consider their special area of interest to be emotion. Well, 248 as of two years ago. 
Then I surveyed them. What do you think has been established beyond reasonable doubt? Well, certainly the universality of facial expression was the opinion over 90% of emotion scientists had been established beyond reasonable doubt.
Much less about what areas of the brain are involved? Much less about the triggers. Certainly, the universality of facial expression, pretty well-established. It’s well-established as any scientific fact could be established. 
[0:09:55.5] MB: I think it's fascinating. I read somewhere that you, through the course of your work, studied more than 15,000 people and you found these conclusions across everything from — In some instances, kind of apes and nonhumans, to infants, to many different cultures as well. 
[0:10:11.2] PE: True enough. 
[0:10:12.3] MB: Tell me a little bit about specifically your trip to New Guinea. I know that was one of the most influential moments or kind of inflection points in your work and your research. 
[0:10:22.1] PE: Well, I started out by doing studies in some 16 literate cultures. Some in Asia, some in South America where I would show the photographs of a facial expression and asked them to choose of six or seven words what was the emotion being signaled, and I found a very strong evidence for similarity for universality regardless of the language or culture. But it wasn't conclusive, because all the people I was studying, whether it was in Thailand, or in Argentina, had all been subject to the same mass media influences and perhaps they had all learned expressions, the meaning of expressions from the media. Not from their evolution. 
So deal with that loophole, I had to find a culture that was visually isolated. That it had no exposure to media, no books, no magazines, no photographs, no films, no video, and if possible, no outsiders. In 1966 when I searched for such a group, there weren't many left. I knew time was running out. I had to go to the highlands of New Guinea, Papua New Guinea and hike for four days to get into a visually isolated culture where I was the first outsider that ever seen. I showed them the first photograph that I ever had seen. 
That research was the most difficult to perform, but the most important in ruling out the possibility that similarities and expression were due to learning from common media instead of being a result of our evolution as a species. 
[0:12:21.4] MB: So I think we've established that these universal expressions are evidence-based, that they’re universal, that they're detectable. You can see on people's faces whether they’re experiencing anger or fear, sadness, etc. How do we practically integrate that information into our day-to-day lives? For somebody who's listening, how can they take that science and use it in some form or fashion, practice — 
[0:12:49.2] PE: Well you’re already doing it. You don't need me. Everybody responds to people's faces. It’s a very powerful stimulus, commands attention. You don't need to go to school to learn how to interpret it. From about six months of age and on, you can get good evidence of differential response to different facial expressions of emotion, but you didn't is before my work and the work of others, is whether it was the same across cultures. Yes, it is. You don’t need the Berlitz book of facial expressions when you travel around the world. You know what triggered it and that may well be different. You know how the person feels about the emotion that they're showing that they will be different. But regardless of culture, if the person is not succeeding and interfering with their expressions, you'll see the same configuration on their face. The same expression for the same emotion regardless of culture, and that’s for six or seven emotions. 
[0:13:56.7] MB: I know one of the ways that you’ve practically kind of grounded this, and you've done a tremendous amount of work on this as well, is in detecting liars and detecting lies. Tell me a little bit more about that. 
[0:14:07.4] PE: Well, that's a specific application. We could all lie with words very easily. I was really impressed with what President Trump told me this morning about what his next plans are, and he listened to my questions. I think I said that in a very effective and meaningful way. It's a total lie. So we can with words. That’s what words are made for. They’re made for communication, but it's very easy to lie with words. Much harder to lie convincingly with your face.
I found only about 10% of thousands of people I studied who could effectively lie with their face in a way that I could detect. Now, most of us are suckers for facial expression even rather poor, faked expressions are believed. That’s because most of us don't want to know the truth. We want to know what the person wants us to know rather than how they actually feel. Do you really want to find out that your spouse is unfaithful, that your adolescent is using hard drugs? No, of course you don't. In a sense you do, but you do and you don’t. 
We are all unwittingly collaborating and being misled by rather poor facial expressions. They don't mislead me and they don't mislead the people I train on how to detect lies from facial expression. Takes about an hour to two hours to learn how to do it effectively from the face. I even have a program on the Internet the people can buy that teaches them how to spot lies from facial expression. Learning how to spot it from the sound of the voice and from the words is more complicated and there is no currently available training tool, like the one I developed for the face that's available on the internet. 
[0:16:11.0] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that. So this is a trainable skillset that somebody who has — Who’s listened to episode wants to go out and in a few hours be able to read somebody's facial expressions. How do they do that?
[0:16:22.9] PE: They go on the internet and they put in the letters M, like micro, E like a motion, T like training, and T like tea, METT, and up will come the training tool and they will pay a fee. I think it's around $50. It will take them about an hour interacting with the training tool and they’ll become very accurate in being able to spot micro-expressions. The very quick expressions that leak attempts to conceal feelings. It won't change somehow to spot false expressions. I know how to do that. I can teach people how to do that, but that's not the tool I developed. A tool I developed was just for training people to spot the micro-expressions that occur that leak concealed emotions. 
[0:17:20.9] MB: Is this something that takes continuous practice to be able to wield or is it like riding a bike, where once you’d learn this, you can continue to recognize every day and see people when maybe the twinge of sadness or anger or something kind of flashes across their face?
[0:17:35.7] PE: We did some research to find that out, and we found out that it does not decay over time. I believe the reason is that once you learn it, you use it. So you're practicing it and honing it all the time. I would like to do an experiment where I train people and then blindfolded them for the next week so they couldn’t practice and see whether they still retained it, but nobody's willing to be a subject in that research that and I'm not going to do it.
[0:18:07.9] MB: What about defending against someone you can read your kind of facial expressions? Whether that's planting false expressions or covering up your own micro-expressions. Is that something that's possible and can it be trained?
[0:18:19.6] PE: I run a training in lie catching. I don't run a school for liars. So I have not tried to train people to be better facial liars. So I don't have any evidence whether or not it's trainable. My suspicion is most people cannot learn it well enough to fool someone who's received my training in how to spot such deceptions. 
[0:18:47.4] MB: So in my poker game, I’m out of luck in terms of my ability to conceal my emotional reactions on my face?
[0:18:53.9] PE: From someone who’s been trained using my METT, my micro-expression training tool, yes. Your best bet is to wear a mask. 
[0:19:02.1] MB: Fair enough. Fair enough. So I want to now talk a little bit about how our facial expressions can actually impact our emotional state. I know you've done a lot of work about that. Tell me a little bit more. 
[0:19:14.4] PE: Well, it was a surprising finding. I didn't expect it. Those of the nicest findings. Those are discoveries. A lot of research you do is simply proof of something that you suspect or know already, but you need the evidence for. Then there is discovery research, where you didn’t know what you’re going to find, and you find something you didn't expect. Td that so about the fact, which I think it's pretty well-established at this point, scientifically. That by voluntarily making one of the universal facial expressions, you generate the changes in the body and in the brain which occur without emotion is evoked more naturally. 
You can turn on any emotion if you could make the face. The hardest one to turn on paradoxically is enjoyment, and the reason is that one of the two muscles you have to move, the muscle that orbits the eye. Only about 10% of people could do voluntarily. The muscles movements for anger, fear, sadness, discussed and surprised, everybody, nearly everybody can do, and so they could turn those emotions on if they want to. The muscles for enjoyment, everybody can do one of them, the one the pulls your lip corners up, but only about 10% of people can, at the same time, contract the muscle that orbits the outer part of their eye muscle. 
[0:20:50.2] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that muscular movement. Is that kind of widening your eyes or what exactly is it? 
[0:20:56.1] PE: There are two muscles that orbit your eye. The inner one is a fairly close circle. If you drew a circle right over your — Or above your upper eyelid, down about a half inch below your lower eyelid, that's the inner or virtual orbital muscle, which we call muscle six — I’m sorry. Muscle 7. There is a larger one, and everybody can do that. You squint, you do that. There is a larger one around that that goes above your eyebrow, around the top part of your cheek, and only about 10% of us can voluntarily contract that muscle. Unless you contract that muscle at the same time you contract the muscle that pulls your lip corners, you won't be able to turn on enjoying them. We’ll have to do something enjoyable to turn it on, not by contracting the muscles. 
[0:21:57.9] MB: I'm sitting here right now trying to contort my face to see whether or not I'm capable of doing that. Is it possible through muscular training or other activities to learn to turn enjoyment on like that?
[0:22:08.0] PE: Yeah, we could train people to do it, but I haven't spent much time doing it. It's tedious to do and it would be a much more difficult task to develop an online training tool to do that. So I run a set of techniques for lie catchers, not for liars. 
[0:22:29.7] MB: That make sense. That makes sense. So I know that that discovery led your work into looking more broadly at how we interact with and deal with our own emotions. Tell me a little bit about that journey and how you became so fascinated with our own emotional worlds. 
[0:22:46.8] PE: Well, once you open up your question of emotion, an expression is a signal of an emotion. Expressions aren't the emotion themselves. The emotions are directed by number a of circuits in our brain, which nearly all of us have if we’re not brain damaged, that are innate. But their expression is influenced by our development and what we learn in the course of growing up. It’s a duel influence, and emotions are not simply our only expressions. That's the signal of the emotion. They are memories, expectations, changes in how we think and what we could remember. Emotions act as filters. When we are in the grip of an emotion, we can most readily perceive things that fit the emotion we’re experiencing and will by enlarge March ignore things that don't. 
In a similar fashion, we can remember from our memory things consistent with the motion we’re feeling and we’ll have a hard time remembering things that are inconsistent with it. So our emotions act as filters on what we see in the world and what we can access in ourselves. 
[0:24:12.7] MB: And what led you to begin digging into the rabbit hole of emotions? 
[0:24:17.9] PE: It was there. Who could ask for more? A ripe, important problem that had not been well explored, who is waiting for me. So I took it on. It took me between 5 and 10 years to make real progress of steady work on it, and I was pleased to find something so important that had not yet been well explored, and I was glad to have the time and the funding to be able to do so.
[0:24:48.5] MB: What were some of the first of the findings that you discovered when you began your work on emotion?
[0:24:55.1] PE: Well, the universality of facial expression was the very first finding. It was the first issue I took up, and other scientists have said that the publication of universality of facial expression, my publication of that, resurrected the field of emotion, which had been left dormant for 30 or 40 years. There was probably a bit of research on it in the 20s and 30s, and then it was dropped completely in the 40s and 50s and got rejuvenated after the publication of my findings on universality. Now, it’s a hot field. There are two scientific journals dedicated just to the field of emotion, publishing research just on emotion. 
[0:25:42.8] MB: If you don't mind me asking, which journals as those? We’ll make sure to include those in our show notes for the listeners.
[0:25:47.2] PE: Well, one of them is called emotions. That's a really easy. It’s published by the American Psychological Association, and I don't remember the name of the other journal. It’s probably something like the Journal of Emotion, but I don't remember. I don't read those journals of this point in my life. I'm retired. 
[0:26:06.5] MB: What did you find in terms of emotional reactions across different cultures? Do we have similar reactions or they sort of culturally shaped? 
[0:26:15.0] PE: They’re both in part because we have emotions about our motions, and cultures differ and how —What they teach their members to feel about feelings. When you get angry, do you get afraid of your anger? Do you get excited about your anger? Do you enjoy being angry? How much does it depend on who you're angry at? These are all things that different cultures and within a culture you’ll will find differences on. 
[0:26:43.3] MB: I want to dig a little bit deeper into emotions. When we find ourselves behaving in an emotional way, how can we start to step back and not only understand that better, but kind of deal with situations like that more productively or more effectively going forward?
[0:27:01.7] PE: It won't be easy. Now, individuals different in what they call their emotional profile. For some of us we go from no motion to a moderate or a strong emotion in less than a second. We have what I’d call a fast onset. While others go from no emotion to a strong emotion. It takes quite a few seconds. Most people have a better chance of being able to control their emotions or even sidestep and not engage. Our former President Obama was a good exemplar of someone who had a very slow emotional onset. Our current president, I think, but I haven't been able to study him as much, has fast emotional onset. 
I wrote an article which was published somewhere about what are the personality characteristics we should want in our leaders and the people who can initiate a war, or at least the first steps of the war. One of them, those characteristics, is a slow, not a fast emotional onset. It's safer. They have more time to consider. Do they really want to engage? That's the major difference that I've studied. 
Now I propose that we also differ, and once we’re in a grip of an emotion, how long it endures, and that we also differ in what I call the offset. Once it begins to decay, does it take us a long time to get over the emotion or do we go back through a neutral state very quickly? I know that people differ in their emotional profile, their onset duration and offset. I don't know. Someone could do research to find out how early in life is this apparent and how consistent is it across the lifecycle. I don’t know. If I was 10 years younger, I would take that question on, but it's a 10-year question, probably take 10 years to resolve, and I don't have 10 years to live. 
[0:29:14.2] MB: You know, that's interesting. In my own personal experience, I can definitely see that I feel like I'm someone who has both a slow onset of emotions and also a slow, I guess, offset of emotion. So it takes a long time for an emotion to kind of hit me, but once it does, it really sticks with me for a while and it's hard for me to kind of move beyond it. 
[0:29:32.0] PE: You have a long-duration, long onset, long-duration. Then once it begins to add, does go back quickly or does it take a while for you to get over it as it ebbs?
[0:29:46.5] MB: I think it varies. I mean, it's not a huge amount of time, but I think it definitely — If I get put into, let’s just say a negative emotional state, it takes me a little while to kind of come out of it. I've done a lot of work on — And we’ll get into this more, but journaling and mindfulness and other strategies that have helped me understand and manage my own emotions more effectively. 
[0:30:06.5] PE: Well, having a long onset means you’ve got a better chance of being able to manage your emotions than people who have a short onset. There isn’t enough time for them to become aware of the fact that they’re in a grip of an emotion, because it’s got them in a fracture of a second, and there are people like that. We should not want such people to be our leaders. 
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Now back to the show. 
[0:31:48.8] MB: For somebody who's listening that maybe has a short onset, is there anything that they can do to help widen that gap between kind of reaction, sort of trigger and reaction?
[0:32:00.8] PE: Yes, here are the steps to take. Keep a diary of regrettable emotional episodes. Those times you’ve got an emotion which afterwards you think, “I wish I have either — I wish that I hadn’t felt any emotion or I wish I hadn’t of acted the way I did act.” Just write a sentence or two about each entry in the diary. 
If you’ve got 30, take a look at them and see what's in common. What’s the common trigger? It’s setting off regrettable emotional episodes. Can you by that means to learn how to anticipate such episodes and either avoid them or prepare yourself. 
I sometimes, if I know I’m getting into what will be for me a difficult emotional episode, I’ll rehearse in my mind. I’ll play out a whole movie script in my mind of a different way of handling that. I also find that it helps to notify the other person. If I’ll say to my wife, “Is this a good time for us to discuss a difficult emotional matter?” She may say, “No. Not right now. I’m not ready,” or she may say, “Well, let's talk about that Saturday morning?” So we’re both set and prepared. 
Step one, make a diary of regrettable episodes. Step two, see what they have in common. Step three, see if you can anticipate and prepare yourself for your next encounter what will trigger a difficult emotional episode so you don't have to act in a way that you will subsequently regret. 
[0:33:41.6] MB: Tell me about has there been research or have you done research specifically around the kind of diary or the journal and why that's such an effective tool for managing negative emotions or emotions in general?
[0:33:53.6] PE: I haven't done any research on it. I thought of it too late in my career beyond the point where I had the funding for research, nor has anyone to my knowledge. Take it for what it's worth. I think it's right. I think it'll work. It makes sense from what we know about emotion, but it has not been tested in research. 
[0:34:16.8] MB: I asked mostly, because I’m really curious. I'd love to dig in and kind of understand. I found that strategy be very effective for myself personally as well, that I really would love to get into some of the science and figure out more effectively kind of what it says about that question specifically. 
[0:34:31.2] PE: Maybe someone who listens to this program will take this on for their doctoral dissertation. 
[0:34:37.1] MB: Great idea. Listeners out there,  you heard Dr. Ekman. Get on it. Another tool that you’ve talk a lot about is mindfulness. Tell me about how you came to mindfulness as a strategy for managing your emotions or managing emotions more broadly. 
[0:34:51.1] PE: It was an accident. My daughter, Eve Ekman, got interested in it and in the Dalai Lama and we threw her. I got to meet and spend actually — The Dalai Lama and I spent about 50 hours in one-on-one conversations, which in our conversations about emotion are published in a book, paperback book called Emotional Awareness, and we called it that, because the key is to develop awareness of what you're in an emotion. 
Now, emotions usually occur without having any awareness of it when we’re in the grip of the emotion. It's usually not until after the emotion that we may realize particularly when someone says, “What was wrong with you just then?” You say, “Oh! Gee, I lost my head.” What you mean is that you were unaware of being emotional. That's in the nature of emotion itself, is to keep awareness out. That's what saved your life. That's why you could drive on the freeway and avoid cars that are veering towards you in a dangerous way without thinking about it. But that very skill that allows you to drive on the freeway is the skill that means that you're not going to be aware of the onset of emotions. 
The benefit of mindfulness, which is only partially substantiated in research, and there's nothing that really contradicts it, but there isn’t as much research as I would like to see to supported it. is that that's a practice that will increase the likelihood of your being aware, of being in the grip of an emotion when you are in the grip of the emotion, not just afterwards. We don't really have a set of psychological tools for generating that kind of awareness. 
Again, if I was still at a research lab and had 10 or 15 years in front of me, I would take on doing that research, but I haven't and I don't know anyone who has. 
[0:37:08.1] MB: Fair enough. I’m just curious about what topics still fascinate you. Once again, I think that could be a challenge to people out there listening. Maybe it's an opportunity to do a little bit more homework and a little bit more digging. I'm curious, I want to know more about your experience with the Dalai Lama. 
[0:37:23.3] PE: Well, I felt once we started spending time with each other, that I've known him all my life. I felt he was a brother. I've never had a brother. I had a sister, but I never had a brother. I really felt like I’ve met a family member. So strange, because you probably couldn't find two more dissimilar people in terms of upbringing.. He's a Buddhist monk and I’m sort of a renegade non-practicing Jew. I’m raised in a Westerners, and he’s raised in an Easter tradition, and yet we really hit it off. 
He believes it's because of the previous incarnation, we were brothers. Of course, I don't believe in reincarnation. I have no explanation. He has an expiration, which I reject. He finds it amusing that I, the scientists, can't explain what he — The Buddhist has an explanation for, but that's where we are. We’ve had a wonderful time conversing and I think our book, jointly authored book, Emotional Awareness, reaches the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman and it’s in paperback. I know it's a book of dialogue and it pretty much captures, pretty well captures where our conversation went and what we learned talking toeach other. 
[0:38:40.7] MB: That's fascinating, and I'm a huge fan of the Dalai Lama and his work and we’ve had several previous guests you've also interacted with him and learned from him. So for someone who's listening to this episode that wants to kind of concretely implement the things we’ve talked about today in some way or another, what would be kind of one piece of homework that you would give to them as an exercise or a practice or a starting point to implement something that we’ve talked about today?
[0:39:09.1] PE: Go online and use the micro-expression training tool, METT. That will certainly open your eyes and make you a more accurate perceive or emotion. Do search for Eve Ekman, my daughter, and see what she's next giving a workshop. But I know that I think this coming weekend, she’s doing a one-day workshop on mindfulness here in San Francisco at a local meditation center in the Mission District, which you can find that by searching on the internet for Eve Ekman Workshops. There's a couple of things you can do. 
[0:39:53.9] MB: We’ll make sure to include that in the show notes for listeners who want to dig in and find both training tool and see if there are any upcoming workshops near them. For listeners who want to find more about you and your work, what’s the best place to find you and your various books and research online?
[0:40:11.2] PE: I have a website, and I think it's called paulekman.com, or just go on the internet and do a search for my name and it'll come up in the first few. Also, take a look at something that my daughter and I developed and put on the internet. Dalai Lama said to me, he really wanted to get to the new world we needed a map. So could you make a map of the emotions? So my daughter and a local cartographer created a map of the emotions, and if you go into any web browser put into it map of emotions, it'll come up and you'll see free of charge and it is a map of how the emotions work and it will help you understand your emotions better. There's some concrete suggestions. 
[0:40:59.6] MB: Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your incredible story journey and wisdom. You're truly one of the most influential psychologists in the field today, and so it's truly been an honor to have you on here and learn more about your groundbreaking work. 
[0:41:17.7] PE: Well, thank you for asking good questions. The worst nightmare is when you're being interviewed by someone who asks really dull questions, but you ask good ones. So thank you for that. 
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