اکمن، ابراز هیجان و هنر تجلی تجربی

In the mid and late 1960s, Paul Ekman offered a variety of bold assertions, some seemingly more radical today than others (Ekman, 1984, Ekman, 1992 and Ekman, 1993). Emotions are expressed in a limited number of particular facial expressions. These expressions are universal and evolved. Facial expressions of emotion are remarkably brief, typically lasting 1 to 5 s. And germane to the interests of the present article, these brief facial expressions of emotion reveal a great deal about people’s lives. In the present article I will present evidence that supports this last notion advanced by Ekman, that brief expressions of emotion reveal important things about the individual’s life course. To do so I first theorize about how individual differences in emotion shape the life context. With this reasoning as backdrop, I then review four kinds of evidence that indicate that facial expression is revealing of the life that the individual has led and is likely to continue leading.

Conclusions It is fair to say that Paul Ekman inspired many recent developments in the field of psychology, including the study of expression, emotion, culture, and evolution. In this essay I hope to have conveyed that with his theorizing about expression and his rigorous approach to capturing brief expressions, he has opened up many opportunities for the study of individual differences. This line of inquiry, which I have briefly reported upon here, is guided by Ekman’s notion that emotions at their very core are social, they motivate thoughts and actions that are crucial to humans most important relationships within the context of spontaneous interactions (e.g., Ekman, 1992; Keltner & Haidt, 2001). Brief observations of expression, as a result, once thought to convey little information at all, instead tell us about the life events, relationships, disorders, and life courses that make up individual identity.