Foundational Research in Facial Expressions: Tomkins and Ekman

Key Insight

Much of the understanding of mind reading stems from the work of Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman. Tomkins, a psychologist, held a belief that faces, even those of animals, provided valuable clues to inner emotions and motivations. He possessed an extraordinary ability to discern people's states, reportedly identifying crimes from mug shots and infallibly detecting liars on a television show.

Tomkins's insight was further demonstrated when he accurately characterized the emotional nature of two New Guinea tribes—the peaceful South Fore and the hostile Kukukuku—solely by observing their facial expressions in a film, without any contextual information. This profound skill involved recognizing specific 'bulges and wrinkles' in faces that others overlooked, suggesting faces were a 'gold mine of information.'

Paul Ekman, a young psychologist, was initially interested in whether universal rules governed facial expressions, contradicting the conventional wisdom that expressions were culturally determined. Through cross-cultural research in places like Japan, Brazil, Argentina, and remote tribes in the Far East, Ekman confirmed that people worldwide agreed on the meaning of various facial expressions, validating Tomkins's pioneering views on the universality of human emotions.