by DK
When Ekman began his research in the 1970s, it was assumed that we learn to physically express emotions according to a set of social conventions, which differ from culture to culture. Ekman traveled widely to all corners of the world, first photographing people in the “developed countries,” such as Japan and Brazil, and then people in far-flung, cut-off places without access to radio or television, such as the jungles of Papua New Guinea. He found tribespeople could interpret facial expressions as well as anyone in more globally-aware countries, which suggests that facial expressions are universal products of human evolution.
Basic emotions
Ekman came up with six basic emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—and because of their ubiquity, concluded they must be important to our psychological make-up. He noted that facial expressions linked to these emotions are involuntary—we react automatically to things that trigger these emotional responses—and that this reaction often happens before our conscious mind has time to register the causes of that emotion. Ekman inferred not only that our faces can reveal our inner emotional state, but that the emotions responsible for these involuntary expressions are more powerful than psychologists had previously thought.
In Emotions Revealed, Ekman states that emotions can be more powerful than the Freudian drives of sex, hunger, and even the will to live. For example, embarassment or fear can override libido, preventing a satisfactory sex life. Extreme unhappiness can override the will to live. The power of the “runaway train” of emotions convinced Ekman that a better understanding of emotions would help to overcome some mental disorders. We may be unable to control our emotions, but we may be able to make changes to the things that trigger them and the behavior they lead to.
Running parallel to his work on emotions, Ekman pioneered research into deception and the ways we try to hide our feelings. He identified small tell-tale signs, which he called “microexpressions,” detectable when someone is either consciously or unconsciously concealing something. This has proved useful in devising security measures to counter terrorism.
PAUL EKMAN
Paul Ekman was born and spent his early childhood in Newark, New Jersey. At the outbreak of World War II, his family moved west to Washington, then Oregon, and eventually Southern California. Aged just 15, Ekman took up a place at the University of Chicago, where he became interested in Freud and psychotherapy, and went on to study for his doctorate in clinical psychology at Adelphi University, New York. After a brief spell working for the US Army, he moved to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he began his research into nonverbal behavior and facial expressions. This work led to his studies of the concealment of emotions in facial expressions, which in turn took Ekman deep into the then-unexplored field of the psychology of emotions. He was appointed Professor of Psychology at UCSF in 1972, and remained there until his retirement in 2004.
Key works
1985 Telling Lies
2003 Emotions Revealed
2008 Emotional Awareness
See also: William James • Sigmund Freud • Gordon H. Bower • Nico Frijda • Charlotte Bühler • René Diatkine • Stanley Schachter
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Positive psychology
BEFORE
1943 Abraham Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation lays the foundations for a humanistic psychology.
1951 Carl Rogers publishes Client-Centered Therapy, a humanistic approach to psychotherapy.
1960s Aaron Beck introduces cognitive therapy as an alternative to psychoanalysis.
1990s Martin Seligman switches from “learned helplessness” and depression to “positive psychology.”
AFTER
1997 Csíkszentmihályi works on The GoodWork Project with William Damon and Howard Gardner, publishing Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet and Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning in 2002.
During the “cognitive revolution,” there was a growing movement in clinical psychology away from seeing patients solely in terms of their disorders, toward a more holistic, humanistic approach. Psychologists such as Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers were beginning to think about what constituted a good and happy life, rather than merely alleviating the misery of depression and anxiety. From this grew a movement of “positive psychology,” which concentrated on finding ways to achieve this good and happy life.
Central to the new psychology was the concept of “flow,” devised by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the 1970s, and fully explained in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience in 1990. The idea came to him from interviewing people who appeared to get a lot out of life, either in their work or their leisure activities—not only creative professionals such as artists and musicians, but people from all walks of life, including surgeons and business leaders, and those who found satisfaction in pursuits such as sports and games. Csíkszentmihályi found that all these people described a similar sensation when they were totally engaged in an activity they enjoyed and could do well. They all reported achieving a state of mind with no sense of self, in which things came to them automatically—a feeling of “flow.” It starts, he said, with “a narrowing of attention on a clearly defined goal. We feel involved, concentrated, absorbed. We know what must be done, and we get immediate feedback as to how well we are doing.” A musician knows instantly if the notes he plays sound as they should; a tennis player knows the ball he hits will reach its destination.
A good jazz musician will pass into an almost trancelike state when he is playing. Engulfed by the ecstatic feeling of “flow,” he becomes totally absorbed by his music and performance.
State of ecstasy
People experiencing flow also describe feelings of timelessness, clarity, and serenity, which led Csíkszentmihályi to liken it to a state of ecstasy (in its truest sense, from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “being outside oneself”). A major part of the enjoyment of flow is the sense of being outside everyday reality, totally separated from the cares and worries of ordinary life. Flow, Csíkszentmihályi felt, is key to optimal enjoyment of any activity, and consequently to a fulfilling life.
But how can flow be achieved? Csíkszentmihályi studied cases of people who regularly reached this “ecstatic” state, and realized that it always occurred when the challenge of an activity matched a person’s skills; the task was doable, but also extended their capabilities and demanded total concentration. Only a reasonable balance of ability and difficulty could lead to flow. If someone’s skills were not up to the task, this led to anxiety, and if the task was too easily done, it led to boredom or apathy.
Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow was eagerly picked up by other advocates of positive psychology, and became an integral part of this new, optimistic approach. Csíkszentmihályi himself saw flow as a vital element in activity of all kinds, and thought it especially important in making work more rewarding and meaningful.
MIHÁLY CSÍKSZENTMIHÁLYI
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi was born in Fiume, Italy (now Rijeka, Croatia), where his father was posted as a Hungarian diplomat. The family became exiles in Rome when Hungary was taken over by the Communists in 1948.
As a teenager, Csíkszentmihályi attended a talk given by Carl Jung in Switzerland, which inspired him to study psychology. A scholarship brought him to the University of Chicago; he graduated in 1959, and received his PhD in 1965. While still a student, he married the writer Isabella Selenga, and in 1968 became a US citizen. Csíkszentmihályi remained at the University of Chicago, teaching and developing his ideas on “flow,” fro
m 1969 to 2000, when he was appointed Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University, California.
Key works
1975 Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
1990 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
1994 The Evolving Self
1996 Creativity
See also: Erich Fromm • Carl Rogers • Abraham Maslow • Aaron Beck • Martin Seligman • Jon Kabat-Zinn
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Positive psychology
BEFORE
1950s Carl Rogers develops the concept and practice of “client-centerd” therapy.
1954 Abraham Maslow uses the term “positive psychology” for the first time, in his book Motivation and Personality.
1960s Aaron Beck exposes the weaknesses of traditional psychoanalytical therapy, and proposes cognitive therapy.
AFTER
1990 Mihály Csíkszentmihályi publishes Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, based on his research into the links between meaningful, engaging activity and happiness.
1994 Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are introduces the idea of “mindfulness meditation” to cope with stress, anxiety, pain, and illness.
While experimental psychology after World War II became deeply concerned with the cognitive processes of the brain, clinical psychology continued to examine ways to treat disorders such as depression and anxiety. The new cognitive therapies still focused largely on alleviating unhappy conditions rather than on creating and promoting happier ones. Martin Seligman, whose theory of “learned helplessness” (the spiral of acquiring pessimistic attitudes in illnesses such as depression) had led to more successful treatments in the 1980s, believed that what psychology offered was good, but it could offer more. He felt that therapy should be “as concerned with strength as with weakness; as interested in building the best things in life as repairing the worst.” Having studied philosophy, he likened the task of his “positive psychology” to that of Aristotle seeking eudaemonia—“the happy life.” Like his philosophical forebears, Seligman found this was not a matter of relieving or removing things that make us unhappy, but of encouraging those things that might make us happy—and first he had to discover what they were.
"Good social relationships are, like food and thermoregulation, universally important to human mood."
Martin Seligman
“Happy” lives
Seligman noticed that extremely happy, fulfilled people tend to get on with others, and enjoy company. They seemed to lead what he called “the pleasant life,” one of the three distinct types of “happy” life that he identified, the others being “the good life” and “the meaningful life.” The pleasant life, or seeking as much pleasure as possible, appeared to bring happiness, though Seligman found this was often short-lived. Less obviously, the good life, or being successfully engaged in relationships, work, and play, gave a deeper, more lasting happiness. Similarly, the meaningful life, or acting in the service of others or something bigger than oneself, led to great satisfaction and fulfilment.
Seligman also observed that good and meaningful lifestyles both involve activities that his colleague Mihály Csíkszentmihályi had described as generating “flow,” or deep mental engagement. The pleasant life clearly does not involve “flow,” but Seligman did find that all the “extremely happy people” he studied were also very sociable, and in a relationship. He concluded that “social relationships do not guarantee high happiness, but it does not appear to occur without them.” A good and meaningful life may bring eudaemonia, but having a pleasant life as well will intensify whatever happiness you achieve.
Enjoying social events and the company of others may not offer deep intellectual or emotional satisfaction, but Seligman observed that it was an essential part of being truly happy.
MARTIN SELIGMAN
Born in Albany, New York, Martin Seligman took his first degree in philosophy at Princeton University in 1964. He then turned his attention to psychology, gaining a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. He taught at Cornell University, New York, for three years, before returning in 1970 to Pennsylvania, where he has been Professor of Psychology since 1976.
Seligman’s research into depression during the 1970s led to a theory of “learned helplessness,” and a method of countering the pervasive pessimism associated with it. But after an incident with his daughter that highlighted his own innate negativity, he was persuaded that focusing on positive strengths, rather than negative weaknesses, was key to happiness. Regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern positive psychology, Seligman instigated the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Key works
1975 Helplessness
1991 Learned Optimism
2002 Authentic Happiness
See also: Erich Fromm • Carl Rogers • Abraham Maslow • Aaron Beck • Mihály Csíkszentmihályi • Jon Kabat-Zinn
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Memory
BEFORE
1896 Sigmund Freud proposes the notion of repressed memory.
1932 Frederic Bartlett claims that memory is subject to elaboration, omission, and distortion in Remembering.
1947 Gordon Allport and Leo Postman conduct experiments that demonstrate various types of nondeliberate misreporting.
AFTER
1988 The self-help book for sexual abuse survivors, The Courage to Heal, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, is influential in popularizing recovered memory therapy in the 1990s.
2001 In The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel Schacter describes the seven different ways in which our memories can malfunction.
Toward the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud claimed that the mind has a way of defending itself against unacceptable or painful thoughts and impulses, by using an unconscious mechanism that he called “repression” to keep them hidden from awareness. Freud later modified his thinking to a more general theory of repressed desires and emotions. However, the idea that the memory of a traumatic event could be repressed and stored beyond conscious recall became accepted by many psychologists.
The rise of various forms of psychotherapy in the 20th century focused attention on repression, and the possibility of retrieving repressed memories became associated with psychoanalysis so strongly that even Hollywood dramas began to explore the link. Memory in general was a popular subject among experimental psychologists too, particularly as behaviorism began to wane after World War II, and the “cognitive revolution” was suggesting new models for how the brain processed information into memory. By the time Elizabeth Loftus began her studies, long-term memory in particular was an attractive area for research, and repressed and recovered memory was about to become a hot topic, as a number of high-profile child abuse cases reached the courts in the 1980s.
"Human remembering does not work like a videotape recorder or a movie camera."
Elizabeth Loftus
Suggestible memory
During the course of her research, Loftus grew skeptical about the idea of recovering repressed memories. Previous research by Frederic Bartlett, Gordon Allport, and Leo Postman had already shown that even in the normal working of the human brain, our ability to retrieve information from memory can be unreliable; Loftus believed that this must also be true of the recollection of events that are so traumatic that they are repressed—perhaps even more so, given the emotive nature of the events.
Loftus began her research into the fallibility of recollection in the early 1970s, with a series of simple experiments designed to test the veracity
of eyewitness testimony. Participants were shown film clips of traffic accidents and then asked questions about what they had seen. Loftus found that the phrasing of questions had a significant influence on how people reported events. For example, when asked to estimate the speed of the cars involved, the answers varied widely, depending on whether the questioner had used the words “bumped”, “collided,” or “smashed” to describe the collision. They were also asked if there was any broken glass after the accident, and the answers again correlated to the wording of the question of speed. In later versions of the experiment, participants were verbally given false information about some details of the accident (such as road signs around the scene), and these appeared as recollections in many of the participants’ reports.
In a 1974 experiment, Loftus showed a group of people a film of cars colliding, then asked them how fast the cars “bumped,” “collided,” or “smashed” into each other. Her choice of verb determined their estimate of car speeds.