Paul Ekman (February 15, 1934 – November 17, 2025) was an American psychologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century in 2002 by the Review of General Psychology. His empirical and theoretical work helped to restart the study of emotion and non-verbal communication in the field of psychology, and introduced new quantitative frameworks which researchers could use to do so. He also carried out important early work on the physiology of emotions.
Early life
Childhood Ekman was born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in a Jewish family in New Jersey, aside from a brief spell in California during World War II. His father was a pediatrician and his mother was an attorney. His sister, Joyce Steingart, was a psychoanalytic psychologist who practiced in New York City. Ekman originally wanted to be a psychotherapist, but when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958 he found that research could change army routines, making them more humane. This experience converted him from wanting to be a psychotherapist to wanting to be a researcher, in order to help as many people as possible.
Education At age 15, without graduating from high school, Ekman enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he completed three years of undergraduate study. During his time in Chicago, he was fascinated by group therapy sessions and understanding group dynamics. His classmates at Chicago included writer Susan Sontag, film director Mike Nichols, and actress Elaine May. He then studied for two years at New York University (NYU), earning his BA in 1954. The subject of his first research project, under the direction of professor Margaret Tresselt, was an attempt to develop a test of how people would respond to group therapy. Ekman was accepted into the Adelphi University graduate program for clinical psychology. While working for his master's degree, Ekman was awarded a predoctoral research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1955. His master's thesis was focused on facial expression and body movement that he had begun to study in 1954. Ekman received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University in 1958, after a one-year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute.
Military service Ekman was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958 to serve two years after his internship at Langley Porter was finished. He served as first lieutenant-chief psychologist, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he did research on army stockades and psychological changes during infantry basic training.
Career Upon completion of military service in 1960, he accepted a position as a research associate with Leonard Krasner at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, working on a grant focused on the operant conditioning of verbal behavior in psychiatric patients. Ekman also met anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1960 who was on the staff of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Five years later, Bateson gave Ekman motion picture films taken in Bali in the mid-1930s to help Ekman with cross-cultural studies of expression and gesture. From 1960 to 1963, Ekman was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from NIMH. He submitted his first research grant through San Francisco State College with himself as the principal investigator (PI) at the age of 29. He received this grant from NIMH in 1963 to study nonverbal behavior. This award was continuously renewed for the next 40 years and paid his salary until he was offered a professorship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1972. Encouraged by his college friend and teacher Silvan S. Tomkins, Ekman shifted his focus from body movement to facial expressions. He wrote his most famous book, Telling Lies, publishing it in 1985. He retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF. From 1960 to 2004, he also worked at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute on a limited basis consulting on clinical cases. After retiring from the University of California, San Francisco, Ekman founded the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International.
Media In 2001, Ekman collaborated with John Cleese for the BBC documentary series The Human Face. His work is frequently referred to in the TV series Lie to Me in which the character Dr. Lightman is based on Paul Ekman. Ekman served as a scientific adviser for the series. He collaborated with Pixar's film director and animator Pete Docter as a scientific consultant for the latter's 2015 film Inside Out. Ekman also wrote a parent's guide to using Inside Out to talk with their children about emotion.
Influence
Ekman was named one of the top Time 100 most influential people in the May 11, 2009, edition of Time magazine. He was also ranked 15th among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century in 2014 by the journal Archives of Scientific Psychology. He was on the editorial board of Greater Good magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. Ekman's contributions included the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.
Death Ekman died at his home in San Francisco, California, on November 17, 2025, at the age of 91.
Research work
Measuring nonverbal communication Ekman's interest in nonverbal communication led to his first publication in 1957, describing how difficult it was to develop ways of empirically measuring nonverbal behaviour. He chose the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, the psychiatry department of the University of California Medical School, for his clinical internship partly because Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees had recently published a book called Nonverbal Communication (1956). Ekman then focused on developing techniques for measuring nonverbal communication. He found that facial muscular movements that created facial expressions could be reliably identified through empirical research. He also found that human beings are capable of making over 10,000 facial expressions; only 3,000 relevant to emotion. Psychologist Silvan Tomkins convinced Ekman to extend his studies of nonverbal communication from body movement to the face, helping him design his classic cross-cultural emotion recognition studies.
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