Paul Ekman

Emotions Revealed

Without consciously choosing to do it, you automatically turned the steering wheel to avoid the other motorist, hitting the brake with your foot. At the same time an expression of fear flashed across your face—brows raised and drawn together, eyes opened very wide, and lips stretched back toward your ears. Your heart began to pump more rapidly, you began to sweat, and the blood rushed to the large muscles of your lees. Note that you would have made that facial expression even if there were no one sitting in the car, just as your heart would begin to pump more rapidly even if you did not engage in a sudden physical exertion requiring increased blood circulation. These responses occur because over the course of our evolution it has been useful for others to know when we sense danger, and it has similarly been useful to be prepared to run when afraid.

Emotions prepare us to deal with important events without our having to think about what to do. You would not have survived that near-miss car accident if part of you weren't continually monitoring the world for signs of danger. Nor would you have survived if you had had to think consciously about what you should do to cope with the danger once it was apparent. Emotions do this without your knowing it is happening, and much of the time that's good for you, as it would be in a near-miss car accident.

Once the danger passed, you would still feel the fear churning away inside. It would take ten to fifteen seconds for those sensations to subside, and there would not be much you could do to cut that short. Emotions produce changes in parts of our brain that mobilize us to deal with what has set off the emotion, as well as changes in our autonomic nervous system, which regulates our heart rate, breathing, sweating, and many other bodily changes, preparing us for different actions. Emotions also send out signals, changes in our expressions, face, voice, and bodily posture. We don't choose these changes; they simply happen.

When the emotion is strong and it starts abruptly, as in the car example, our memory of the emotion episode after it is over won't be very accurate. You can't know what your brain did, what processes were involved in recognizing the danger posed by the other car. You would know that you turned the wheel and hit the brake, but you probably would not realize that an expression flashed across your face. You would have felt some of the sensations in your body, but it would be hard for you to find words to describe those sensations. If we wanted to know how it was that you were even able to sense the danger when you had been focused on your conversation or the music on the car radio, you would not be able to tell us. You are unable to witness or direct the processes that saved your life. This wonderful feature of our emotions—that they can and usually do begin without our awareness of the processes involved—can also work against us, causing inappropriate emotional reactions. More about that later.

If the process were slower, we might be aware of what was happening inside our brain; indeed, we might all know the answers to the questions posed in this chapter. But we wouldn't survive near-miss car accidents; we wouldn't be able to act quickly enough. In that first instant, the decision or evaluation that brings forth the emotion is extraordinarily fast and outside of awareness. We must have automatic appraising mechanisms that are continually scanning the world around us, detecting when something important to our welfare, to our survival, is happening.

When we get to the point where we can actually observe the operation of automatic appraising in the brain, I expect we will find many mechanisms, not one; so from now on I will use the plural form when referring to automatic-appraising mechanisms, which I will abbreviate as autoappraisers.

Nearly everyone who does research on emotion today agrees with what I have described so far: first, that emotions are reactions to matters that seem to be very important to our welfare, and second, that emotions often begin so quickly that we are not aware of the processes in our mind that set them off Research on the brain is consistent with what I have so far suggested. We can make very complex evaluations very quickly, in milliseconds, without being aware of the evaluative process.

We can now rephrase the first set of questions about how there can be both universal and individual-specific emotion triggers. What are the autoappraisers sensitive to, and how did they become sensitive to those triggers? How do emotion triggers become established? The answers will tell us why we have an emotion when we do. It will also help us answer the question of why we sometimes have emotions that don't seem at all appropriate to us while at other moments our emotions are perfectly tuned to what is happening, and may even save our lives.

The answers will also tell us whether it is possible to change what produces an emotion. For example, is there something we could do so we would no longer experience fear when an airplane hits an air pocket? (Airline pilots tell me they have achieved that, because they are almost always warned ahead of time by their equipment when rough weather is about to be encountered. But what if there were no warning; would they then feel fear? I couldn't get any of the pilots to tell me, but the flight attendants say yes, they do feel momentary fear.) What would we need to do so that we no longer felt the impulse to return anger with anger, for example? Is that an impossible goal? Perhaps all we can do is change the sensitivity of the autoappraisers to certain triggers. Maybe even that is more than we can achieve. We will get to that.

We can infer something about what events our autoappraisers are sensitive to by examining when emotions happen. Most of what we know has not come from actually observing when people experience one or another emotion. Instead, it comes from their answers to questionnaires about when they remember feeling one or another emotion. Philosopher Peter Goldie in his insightful book calls this kind of information post-rationalizing. This is not to dismiss such information. The answers people give on such questionnaires, like the explanations we give ourselves after an emotional episode to account for why we did what we did, may be incomplete and perhaps stereotyped because they go through the filters of what people are aware of and remember. On questionnaires there is the additional issue of what people are willing to tell others. But the answers can still teach us quite a bit.

My former student, psychologist Jerry Boucher, asked such questions of people in Malaysia and in the United States in the 1970s. Some years later my colleague psychologist Klaus Scherer, and his collaborators, did similar research on students in eight Western cultures. They both found evidence of universals—the same kinds of
triggers were reported to evoke the same emotions across very different cultures. They both also found evidence of cultural differences in the specific events that call forth an emotion. For example, in every culture loss of something important was the trigger for sadness, but exactly what that loss was reported to be varied from one culture to another.