The living lie detector
"Nice to meet you." A banal sentence. Accompanied by a smile, my smile. At the same time, I think there are tens of kinds of smiles. Joyful. Polite. Smug. Tense. Pinched. Paul Ekman knows them all. And anyway he sorted my smile anyway. So, Mr. Ekman, what do you see when you see me? "You are attentive, very alert, even if you argued with your husband this morning, your face shows no signs of it." OK then. Incidentally, I did not argue. Nothing to hide. But who knows?
How does he recognize, I ask Paul Ekman, if my smile is real or put on? "With a real smile, not only do the corners of the mouth go up, but the circular muscles that surround the eye are activated, and the eyes look smaller, and those who only smile with their mouths do not smile from their hearts." And what about my smile? "Really."
Who smiles only with the mouth, does not smile from the heart.
Paul Ekman, the living lie detector. He has been studying human facial expressions for decades, writing books about them. He taught psychology as a professor at the University of San Francisco and was ranked among the 100 most influential people in the world this year by "Time Magazine". Who with his knowledge even the American government has supported in the terrorist search. In the sixties, he set off to the jungles of Papua New Guinea to study the faces of the natives. He found that emotions such as fear or anger are universal and not culturally shaped. Facial expressions - Ekman has found more than 10,000 - are archetypes, so to speak.
He has knowledge that I do not have.
If you meet the researcher from San Francisco, you are ready for a game with double bottom. There is the cultivated conversation on the one hand. And then there's always this second level: I see something you do not know. He has knowledge that I do not have. The amazing thing, though, is that my discomfort quickly vanishes. Mr. Ekman, born in 1934, is as relaxed as if he had just completed a yoga session. No scientist-arrogance, no know-it-alls. We sit in the courtyard of a Berlin hotel, drink cappuccino, and he makes me feel that we have already drunk many cappuccinos in various places around the world. He wears a sweatshirt jacket, gray T-shirt, shiny white-silver sneakers. Out of the corner of my eye, I look at his opulent silver bracelet, think "pretty ugly" and hope that my face at the moment shows no emotion. Ekman watches as I watch him and laughs aloud: "My wife does not like my bracelet very much, she finds it very unusual for a man." I also have to laugh and wonder if Ekman knows why.
The man with the shrill sneakers is one of those meticulous scientists who are obsessed with detail. He examined the interplay of the 43 facial muscles, made countless photos and videos, recorded every subtle muscle movement. If the face is a map, it has found hills, valleys, and paths that others have never seen. Together with a colleague, he developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which classifies facial expressions. For the annoyance alone Ekman has made more than 100 expressions.
Sometimes it's just "micro-expressions" when feelings flicker across a face for a fraction of a second: desperate, damaging impulses, for example. A "micro-anger expression" is shorter than a blink of an eye. Ekman can see him. Why someone is angry, whether he is angry with his counterpart or someone else remains hidden from him.
Ekman is not God. He can read feelings on a face but not thoughts. "I had to train for 20, 30 years to learn this kind of human knowledge," he says. I ask him about the lie. How he manages to detect lies. There is no simple answer. Microexpression that does not fit the word can betray someone. Also the overall picture is important: Maybe the voice does not fit the content, or gestures and content are not compatible. "If you were to lie to me about your birthplace now, I probably would not notice it, because it does not matter, but it's about something that matters to you, where your relationship, your reputation, your money is at stake , I would recognize the lie. " Polite lying, dizziness out of consideration is allowed, finds Ekman. Of course he tells his wife that her new dress is great, even if he finds it wrong. Ekman is beaming. Oh no, lying does not have to be a sin automatically.
The hatred of his father has accompanied him for a long time.
That Ekman has plunged into the world of emotions so obsessively is connected with his childhood, he says.His father was violent, the mother committed suicide when Paul was 14 years old. Hatred of his father has accompanied the scientist for many years. "Hate poisoned my entire personality," he writes in his new book "Feeling and Compassion," which he co-authored with the Dalai Lama: extensive dialogues on feelings, mindfulness, and peace of mind based on two completely different spiritual traditions. For almost ten years, the scientist has been friends with the Buddhist monk. They also talked about hatred. Talking to the Dalai Lama helped him overcome hatred for his father, says Ekman. "My wife said to me: You are no longer the man I married, you have become more tolerable."
I tell him that I am surprised at the two pages of Mr. Ekman, those of the industrious scientist and those of the spiritual philosopher. Ekman answers, he too wonders about it. The encounter with the Dalai Lama was for him a "mystery".
Does he find the Dalai Lama as charismatic as it is claimed again and again? Ekman grins. "I like him a lot, but I do not think he's charismatic!" That is the truth? Or does Ekman want to test my ability as a face reader? Surely I have just escaped a crucial micro-expression. Mr. Ekman, please take over!
Recommended reading: Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman: "Feeling and Compassion", 354 p., 24.95 Euro, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag
