[tt] CHE: How Darwin Inspired a Career

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How Darwin Inspired a Career
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i28/28b01301.htm
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9.3.20

By DAVID GLENN

Paul Ekman isn't spending all of his professional hours on Lie to Me, the
television series for which he serves as chief consultant. He has also
been writing and lecturing on the occasion of Charles Darwin's
bicentennial. It was Darwin's work that, through a slightly winding path,
led Ekman to become an expert on deception.

In an 1872 book, Darwin argued that certain facial expressions are innate
and universal--and that they offer evidence of human descent from other
animals. As he prepared to write that book, Darwin sent letters to
explorers and anthropologists, asking them to describe expressions they
had seen in isolated cultures. Among his 16 questions: "When in good
spirits, do the eyes sparkle, with the skin a little wrinkled around and
under them, and with the mouth a little drawn back around the corners?"

Nearly a century later, the universality of facial expressions was still
an unsettled question. (Margaret Mead, among others, argued that facial
expressions were highly culturally specific.) In the mid-1960s, Ekman set
out to definitively prove or disprove Darwin's idea. Armed with a grant
from the National Science Foundation, he traveled to New Guinea to study
the South Fore people, who had had almost no contact with outsiders. He
found that, in general, they expressed happiness, rage, fear, shame,
sadness, and contempt with the same facial expressions that are observed
in cultures around the world.

Ekman's work--summarized in a 1972 book, Emotion in the Human Face, which
he wrote with two colleagues--is regarded as a landmark in the study of
emotion and physiology. Scholars continue to debate how emotion, cultural
norms, and communicative strategies shape our facial expressions, but
since Ekman's early work, there has been no doubt that some of the
mechanisms are innate. (A 2008 paper looked at how Special Olympics
athletes expressed pride or shame after a competition. Athletes who had
been blind since birth used basic expressions similar to those of the
sighted, supporting the idea of universality; but sighted athletes,
especially those from Europe and North America, seemed to suppress their
expressions of shame, which suggests that culture plays a role.)

Darwin said little about deception in his work. But for Ekman, it was
natural to extend the study of facial expressions by looking at the willed
expression of emotions that a person does not actually feel. By the end of
the 1980s, Ekman was working almost exclusively on lying.

Forty years after his work in New Guinea, he is still grateful for the
federal grant that took him there. "The government had confidence that
this was really an important question to get an answer to, and they gave
me the money to do this," he says. "Senator Proxmire gave me a Golden
Fleece for wasting the taxpayers' money, but everything that I've done has
been based on that study. ... We never know when we do basic research what
it's going to lead to in terms of its applications. If we were to follow
Proxmire--and there are people like him today--who only want things that
have an immediate payoff, that would cripple our country."