5 Clues To Lie To Me: Gladwell Interviews Cal Lightman .. er, Paul Ekman

Malcolm Gladwell’s article on Paul Ekman, The Naked Face, is a great read, lost a little in the passage of time. Written in 2002, it foreshadows Cal Lightman's character and plot developments on the TV-series Lie To Me. Viewers of the first season would recognize this story:

Early in his career, Paul Ekman filmed forty psychiatric patients, including a woman named Mary, a forty-two-year-old housewife. She had attempted suicide three times.. she was depressed. After three weeks, she told her doctor that she was feeling much better and wanted a weekend pass..

The article give great background to the study of facial expression, emotions and micro-expressions. Gladwell cites a classic piece of neuropsychology:

But our faces are also governed by a separate, involuntary system. We know this because stroke victims who suffer damage to what is know as the pyramidal neural system will laugh at a joke, but they cannot smile if you ask them to. At the same time, patients with damage to another part of the brain have the opposite problem. They can smile on demand, but if you tell them a joke they can’t laugh.

Gladwell provides clear discussion of the fascinating link between the experience of an emotion and the expression in the face.

What happens in the face also happens in the body. Object confront the body, the body acts out an emotion, it changes (a sequence I call the primal first sentence). Emotions in a primal sense are how a body confronts threats and pursues bounty. Emotions are the body’s expression of survival strategies. On Ekman’s words:

Ekman said, and then did all three. “What we discovered is that that expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system. When this first occurred, we were stunned. We weren’t expecting this at all. And it happened to both of us [Ekman and his research partner]. We felt terrible. What we were generating was sadness, anguish. And when I lower my brows, which is four, and raise the upper eyelid, which is five, and narrow the eyelids, which is seven, and press the lips together, which is twenty-four, I’m generating anger. My heartbeat will go up ten to twelve beats. My hands will get hot. As I do it, I can’t disconnect from the system. It’s very unpleasant, very unpleasant.”

I wrote on this topic, an essay appropriately titled Lie To Me.

What becomes even more interesting is when one body has the capacity to predict the behavior of another body based on the presented emotions. This evolutionary development might well be essential to the develop of the mind.

To finish with two other quotes. The first was used in the first season of Lie To Me:

Ekman slipped a tape taken from the O. J. Simpson trial into the VCR. It was of Kato Kaelin, [sitting] in the witness box, with his trademark vacant look. Clark asks a hostile question. Kaelin leans forward and answers softly. “Did you see that?” Ekman asked me. I saw nothing.. Ekman [played the tape back in slow motion and showed] in that fraction of a second his face was utterly transformed. His nose wrinkled, as he flexed his levator labii superioris, alaeque nasi. His teeth were bared, his brows lowered. “It was almost totally A.U. nine,” Ekman said. “It’s disgust, with anger there as well, and the clue to that is that when your eyebrows go down, typically your eyes are not as open as they are here. The raised upper eyelid is a component of anger, not disgust. It’s very quick.” Ekman stopped the tape and played it again, peering at the screen. “You know, he looks like a snarling dog.”

The second explain a major quality of Cal Lightman:

Face-reading, for those who have mastered it, becomes a kind of compulsion; it becomes hard to be satisfied with the level and quality of information that most of us glean from normal social encounters.

UPDATE: Typos and other embarrassmentata corrected.

Comments

[Cole Bitting]

Appologies for the typos in this post.