[Billboard]

LN: Welcome to The Really Big Questions. I'm Lynn Neary. Look across the room at any gathering of people, and you'll see a range of emotions. A young woman blushes as a boy leans in to kiss her. A mother, her face red with anger, scolds her young son. A group of men smile and laugh at a shared joke. We may think we know what's going on inside of each of these people, but emotions are often complex and tangled.

00:00:50.06    Philosophers have been discussing their nature and meaning since the time of Plato. Thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin, Margaret Mead, and Baruch Spinoza developed theories of emotion that informed the work of researchers today. Is it our biology that determines our emotions? What is the role of culture in the experience and expression of anger, sadness, or happiness? How does emotion affect the way we think, inform our values, even our politics? Are pity, shame, guilt, fear, empathy merely personal feelings or do these emotions play out on a global scale in the waging of war and a search for peace?

00:01:27.24    Over the next hour, we'll ask: What are emotions and how do they shape our world view?

[Segment A]

00:02:13.12    LN: The face, so some say, is the window to the soul or at the very least, it provides a clue to our emotions, but few people are as adept at reading faces as Dr. Paul Ekman. He spent a life researching and devising a system for understanding what even the most fleeting of facial expressions reveal about our emotions. The FBI, the military, animation studios, even the Dalai Lama have been intrigued by his work.

00:02:38.16    And now there's a TV show based on it. It's called "Lie to Me." Tim Roth plays a character very similar to Dr. Ekman. In this scene, he explains the emotions he sees flicker across a man's face who is suspected of planting a bomb.

00:02:52.12    TR: Now what we just saw there was a brief expression of happiness on his face, which he was trying his best to conceal. It lasted for less than a fifth of a second. It's what we call a micro expression. Now look at his mouth. The suspect is secretly happy about the locations we are searching, which tells me we have the wrong locations.

    Now I tell him of our new plan, and—

    [inaudible] what you're talking about.

00:03:16.29    TR: A plastic [?] one-sided shrug, translation, I have absolutely no confidence in what I just said. The body contradicts the words. He's lying.

    LN: And the real Paul Ekman is sitting across from me now. And of course, I can't help wondering what he sees in my own face, although I won't ask. [laughs]

    PE: Thank you very much.

    LN: Now you started studying emotions in the 1960's. What was the prevailing sort of scientific thought about the nature of emotion back then when you began?

00:03:44.21    PE: Well, that it was totally socially constructed. Margaret Mead said it's a cultural product like any other piece of social behavior and I believed her. Actually I'm one of the few people whose research changed their mind. It wasn't until after I got my initial evidence that I bothered to read Charles Darwin,an d in fact—I mean, this is Darwin's 200th anniversary of his birth. Clearly he was on the right track. He got almost all of it correct. He didn't have the evidence, but he had the right idea and insight.

00:04:23.05    LN: Well, you set out to get the evidence. I mean, you said you needed to apply sort of scientific tools to what people thought of, I guess, as a kind of soft subject, when they were talking about emotions. Why? Why did you feel that had to be done?

00:04:38.00    PE: Well, one thing was I thought the opportunities to settle the argument between Darwin and Margaret Mead were quickly vanishing. The definitive study would require examining people who had no contact with the outside world. So they couldn't have been influenced by the media or strangers, and there weren't many of them left.

00:05:00.14    But, you know, I believed then and I believe in more strongly now emotions are what drive our life. They're at the basis for all of the critical decisions we make from mating to how we deal with our children to which candidate we vote for. It's what life is about, and we didn't understand much at all forty years ago.

00:05:23.17    LN: What was it that Darwin had said that you wanted to put to the test? What was it that he—

    PE: Well, that our emotions are universal to the species and also can be observed in other animals, sometimes in different form, but the same emotions. They're not unique to humans. If they're universal, that would not prove his theory of human origins, because if we all descended from Adam and Eve, we'd have the same emotions, and it did—and he saw it as a direct challenge to the racists of his time who said that the Europeans had descended from a much more advanced progenitor, and so they had more refined and different expressions in the primitive Africans. He set out to challenge that, and indeed he did.

    PE: Well, I first went to different literate cultures, Japan, South America, European, but there was that loophole that maybe it was Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne, not our evolutionary heritage that was responsible for similarities. So after searching for some time, I found a Stone Age culture in the highlands of New Guinea where I could still be the first outsider for them to see, where they had not seen—most of them had not seen any outsider. They had never seen a photograph, a magazine, certainly not film. If they had the same expressions as you and I, that would settle it.

00:07:05.06    The hard part was to figure out how to do research with people who had no language and with whom I shared no language, but I came up with using a method that had been used some forty years ago with young children. Young children don't have a written language. So I would show them three photographs. They had never seen a photograph. The had never seen themselves in the mirror. There were no still bodies of water in the villages that these people lived in.

00:07:34.22    I'd show them three photographs. They had no trouble understanding that these were faces, and then going through three languages from English to pidgin to their language, I would say, "Someone's child has died," pointing to the person. Right away, they'd point to the face that you and I would call sad. "Someone's about to fight," point to the person.

00:07:58.15    So in the space of a short period of time—this was in my second trip—by then they knew I was harmless, and  I didn't know what a favor I was doing them. At the end of my first trip, I left a lot of audiotape, reel to reel audiotape I hadn't used. They made it into jewelry, and it was all over the highlands.

00:08:18.18    So the magician had returned who had all of these—had things like matches, flashlights, music coming out of  a box.

    LN: What year are we talking about?

    PE: '67 and '68. So people poured in from outer villages. The first year I had to hike on muddy trails up and down to find people. The second time, I just stayed in one place. They came to see me. They went through the experiment very quickly. It was easy, fun, and I gave them either a bar of soap or a cigarette, whichever they chose.

00:08:55.21    LN: Well, what's the scientific conclusion then?

    PE: That the morphology, the facial configuration or what we call the expression is the same for all people regardless of culture. Culture does have a big impact. It shapes most of the trigger. Oscar Hammerstein is right. You have to be taught who to hate. Okay? But there are certain in-built triggers like restraining locomotion. The current version of that is road rage. But if you take a young infant who can crawl and put a wonderful toy in front of him and then keep it from moving, you'll see anger no matter what the culture.

00:09:39.29    But most of what angers us is related but learned, and also culture teaches us the rules about managing expression. "Wipe that look off your face. Don't you ever look angry at your father." These become such well established habits that they're automatic.

    One more key thing. Language gives us the words for representing emotions. Now we can feel pleasure at the suffering of our enemy, but we don't have a word for it. Schadenfreude, the Germans have a word. In Tahitian, they have no word for sadness. That means that they can't think about it. They can't consider it; they can't plan about it.

00:10:24.04    So the language of emotion is not emotion. It's the representation that allows us to think and consider our emotional experience.

    LN: Wait a minute. If the word doesn't exist in a culture, does that mean that the emotion doesn't exist?

    PE: Not at all. The emotion is still there. I'm sure you may not want to admit it, but I'm sure you occasionally feel schadenfreude when the politician you must despised got defeated. You probably felt good at his defeat. You don't have a word for it; the Germans do.

00:10:55.07    LN: Okay. Now you came up with—what is it? Seven basic emotions?

    PE: Yes.

    LN: All of which can be traced and seen in a moment's second on a face.

    PE: In a moment on a face. I call them snapshot expressions, because it only takes an instant to see them. They're long distance. "you can recognize them at thirty meters. In fact, if you look at how far away can you tell all seven, it's the distance from the center of Shakespeare's Globe theater to the back of the theater. He knew what he was doing when they built those theaters. They didn't have binoculars. You have to see the actor's face. That's how big they built the theatre.

00:11:31.10    LN: And the seven emotions are?

    PE: Anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt—a terrible word, because it sounds like contempt, a feeling of moral superiority. The enjoyable emotions of which I named thirteen, but they all have the same expression. They sound different and surprise That's seven.

00:11:54.05    Now recently, I have acknowledged that there are some emotions that don't have an expression in face or voice. Guilt, shame, envy, embarrassment, and the most recent one I'm writing about is familial compassion. Your willingness to sacrifice your life without thought for your infant. That's built into us, too. There's not a unique expression on the face, but in all respects, it fits the characteristics of emotions.

00:12:25.18    LN: There's not a unique expression on the face for embarrassment? I would think that would be.

    PE: No, only some people blush. Blacks blush and you can't see it. There's no expression of emotion that's race specific, but blushing is, because it's not visible on a dark face, and not everybody blushes. Only some people do. So it's very interesting, but a signal never evolved. you can make up your own story as to why  not, but it's not there.

00:12:54.22    LN: Now I understand that you say you can actually create an emotion by putting your face into—by putting your muscles into a certain arrangement on the face. Can you do that?

    PE: I'll tell your listeners—sure.

    LN: Can you do that with me?

    PE: I can tell your listeners just what to do if they want to feel an emotion. They won't like the one they're going to feel.

    LN: Okay, I'll try it.

    PE: So what I want you to do is relax your face, no smiling. Don't get embarrassed. Now I want you to raise your upper lip as high as you can. Now wrinkle your nose. Hold it. All right. If you let your tongue come forward, it would have helped, but it probably did anyhow, because you were feeling disgust.

00:13:38.23    LN: I knew it was disgust, but I was also giggling a little bit in the back. [laughs]

    PE: I know; I saw that. Now the best subjects for this are actors, because they don't get embarrassed when you pay attention to their faces. It's their profession. But you can generate—this was actually 1983 when we discovered this. Stanislavsky knew it. He said in one of his writings—

00:14:00.07    LN: Stanislavsky, of course, is the great acting teacher from Russia.

    PE: Right, and most people think of him in terms of sense memory, but he also said, "Make the movement and the feeling will follow," and that's so for the seven emotions.

    LN: Stop one sec. I'm being asked to try that again. You didn't think it was effective enough? [laughs] I'm going to try it one more—we're going to try it again.

    PE: What are we going to do?

    LN: Can we try a different emotion? How about sadness? That's a fairly easy one to get to do.

    PE: No, that's a hard one, because the muscle movements are much more difficult. I'll give you an easy one.

    LN: Okay.

00:14:37.20    PE: You've got to not get embarrassed now.

    LN: All right. Let's—all right, we'll try it.

    PE: Are you ready?

    LN: Yeah. All right. I want you to press one lip against the other tight. Push up with your chin muscle. Now I want you to look straight ahead. I want you to raise your upper eyelid and tighten your lower eyelid, bring your eyebrows down and together. Now hold that. All right let it go. What was it?

00:15:03.29    LN: Anger.

    PE: Of course it was.  And your heart rate went up and so did your skin temperature. The blood goes to the large muscles in your arms and hands to prepare you to hit. Not that you will, but from an evolutionary point of view, that was what was most effective, and that's what we're prepared to do.

    LN: Yeah, and you can see that?

00:15:25.00    PE: Oh, I can see that in a twenty-fifth of a second in these micro expressions that Dr. Lichtman [?] on "Lie to Me" is so fond of pointing out to the viewers.

    LN: What's interesting about what you were saying—I mean, the fact that this means that we're so biologically wired for emotions does make it a little hard to understand the cultural connection there.

00:15:48.17    PE: Well, no, no, the culture—most of what triggers—my wife likes oysters. I find them disgusting. She's afraid of mice. I'm not afraid of mice. Most of what triggers our emotions is learned, and it's learned differently from one family to another in one culture. Our attitudes about the propriety of feeling and emotion, what I call display rules about who can show which emotion to whom and when it can be shown—why is it that the only person who cries in a beauty content is the one who won? Because you're supposed to be a good sport. You're not supposed to cry when you're disappointed.

00:16:27.20    Culture permeates all of this, and most importantly, it gives us the language to try to explain why I did what I did. "Oh, I lost my head. I'm so sorry I did that. I shouldn't have gotten angry." But you have to have a word. How many different words do you have for the different variations that you have of anger and sadness? It varies from language to language.

    LN: How do you define anger now? Do you have a definition? I'm sorry, not anger. I'm thinking—how do you define emotion now? Do you have a definition for emotion?

    PE: Well, I list about eight characteristics. I'll see if I can remember them. One of them is it's unbidden. We don't choose it. It happens to us. A second is that the processing, very complex processing in our brain that triggers the emotion occurs typically in milliseconds without any awareness. You don't usually become aware until you're in the middle of acting emotionally, not that you're asleep, but awareness plays a very small role. There's distinctive changes in your physiology and in many of the emotions in your vocal apparatus, because it's a dual signal system. You can hear it in the voice, and you can see it in the face.

00:17:54.05    That's the primary characteristics that distinguish emotions. Oh, and it can be very momentary. Unlike a mood, emotions can come and go in a matter of seconds.

    LN: And now that you mentioned moods, we won't go into that entirely, but they really are two very different things. Sometimes people think emotions and moods are the same thing, but they're very different.

    PE: No. There's a couple of things that differ. One is time, which I've already mentioned. A second is we usually  know at least afterwards what triggered the emotion. For moods, we just wake up in a mood. We don't know why it occurred. It's baffling to us. It's sustained for a long time and it biases and filters our perception.

00:18:37.25    When I'm in an irritable mood, I'm looking for an opportunity to get angry, and I get angry more quickly, and it lasts longer than it would ordinarily. I believe moods are totally dysfunctional and have no use to us, and if I could get rid of them, I would, because even euphoric moods [inaudible] us not to see the suffering that exists in the world.

    LN: This whole question of the relationship between whether emotions are cultural or biological has kind of vexed scientists for a long time. Why is it important to study that connection?

00:19:17.01    PE: Well, it's both. There isn't really anything about human beings, except our skeleton, even that's been shaped and varies. You know, your bones grow as a result of muscle movement and how you move your muscles depends on what you do. So everything is influenced by both, but to sort out what influences which part and what parts can we ourselves, our self, the part of our self that says, "I don't want to be so impatient. I don't want to ever hut anybody, even their feelings, with my words." We have to understand what is it that's within us that impels us to act without awareness and how can we introduce awareness into the experience of emotion, because only when we're aware of the impulse to become emotional can we choose whether to engage or not. Maybe that really is a coiled rope and not a snake.

    LN: I know—just one last question—that you are working with the Dalai Lama now, and you're looking at the emotion of compassion. Is that right?

    PE: Yes.

    LN: And why? What has gotten you involved in that?

00:20:34.00    PE: Well, I'll have to reveal a little politics, which I don't usually like to do. I think this reaches beyond politics. The individualist framework that guided most of the twentieth, nineteenth, eighteenth century doesn't work for the planet any more. The planet's only going to survive if we develop what I'm calling a global compassion where I care for all people on this earth and how—and for their welfare and to reduce their suffering. Just me and mine, that might have worked in the past. It's caused a lot of problems for the planet. Now if I want my children and grandchildren to be able to live as well as I, then I have to be concerned about the welfare of total strangers with a different skin color and a different language, many of whom are living terribly compared to how we live now. And yet, global compassion unlike familial compassion isn't built into most of us. So how can we cultivate it? That's what the Dalai Lama and I are talking about.

00:21:46.23    LN: Paul Ekman, thanks so much for being with us.

    PE: My pleasure.

    LN: Paul Ekman is the author of Emotions Revealed. His most recent book is Emotional Awareness. I'm going to stop one second.

00:22:01.25    LN: Paul Ekman is the author of Emotions Revealed. His most recent book is Emotional Awareness: A Conversation between Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama that focuses on compassion. Coming up: What are emotions good for? Philosophers have been trying to answer this question since Plato. A really big question for Martha Nussbaum after a short break.