Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life

Professor Ekman is attempting several things with one book: an introduction to the evolutionary basis for emotions and emotional expression; a definition for "emotion"; identification of the indivisible, fundemental emotions and a primer in how to read the emotions of others. Somehow, despite this book's short length (especially given that it is liberally peppered with photographs), he achieves all of these things. Emotions Revealed is fascinating and useful.

Drawing on Darwinism, Paul Ekman (inspiration for the TV series "Lie To Me", for those who remember it) argues that humans possess a limited number of emotions, each of which has a fixed corresponding facial expression. In this book, Ekman identifies six states - anger, fear, happiness, disgust, contempt, sadness - though I believe he expands this in later books.

The most fascinating aspect of his work is his contention that these states are revealed through facial micro-expressions, the identification of which can help us to trace the often unexpressed responses that pass fleetingly across the face. This is all fascinating, but it is something that is also of use to artists, as his exploration of the characteristic forms that emotions show more take provide useful building blocks for the depiction of facial expression.

Gareth Southwell is a philosopher, writer and illustrator. show less

Paul Ekman, who is also author of the landmark book Unmasking The Face – A Guide To Recognizing Emotions From Facial Expression, has been at the tip of the spear in regards to the topic of emotions and behavioral psychology.

In Emotions Revealed – Recognizing Faces & Feelings To Improve Communications & Emotional Life, Ekman speaks at length throughout the book about the extensive research he has conducted throughout his life in respect to the emotional behaviour individuals display, and also offers ways of ascertaining whether those individuals are carrying deceit or not.

The book Emotions Revealed couples extremely well with Unmasking The Face because the former provides ample emotional data for reading/understanding individual show more behavior, while the latter offers dozens of visual examples of these emotions – happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and sadness.

Ekman in Emotions Revealed helps individual glean information in a manner that is reasonable and easy to follow with the photographs used, and the exercises to carry out, which helps individuals seep within the mind of another potential person. This aids individuals in the comprehension of how others would behave in many emotional-charged situations.

The author states in the preface to the second edition that his goal is to ‘help people improve four essential skills’, which are:

First, becoming more consciously aware of when you are becoming emotional, even before you speak or act.
Second, choosing how you behave when you are emotional, so you achieve your goals without damaging other people.
Third, becoming more sensitive to how others are feeling.
Fourth, carefully using the information you acquire about how others are feeling.

Knowing the goals the author had in the beginning of the book, it can be said without equivocation that the author did a trenchant job at fulfilling his goal.

Not only did Ekman provide individuals throughout the book with extensive data that merges with his central goals, but he also carries it out in a clear and direct manner.

This book is indispensable in the field of emotions and behavior and it is an essential tool to understanding how people behave. show less

This is an excellent book that was both at times slow to read, and enormously fascinating. For me the challenge came as I was very interested in the topic, but would get slowed down by the details (of which there are many). But really, why would you want a general book about emotions. If you're like me, you nt to be able to better understand the emotions in those around us--and that is going to take effort.

It's worth it...

As a general review of emotions this book was average. The recognition of minute facial expressions aspect was poorly organized, wordy and really quite tedious. Perhaps I will be more aware of true smiles in the future. Apparently the eye muscles cannot be tricked when there is no true happy emotion behind the smile.

Interessant, was man aus Gesichtern alles ablesen kann. Seehr trocken geschrieben, deswegen wird es wohl noch ein wenig dauern, bis ich damit durch bin...

Übrigens die zwei Bücher von Ekman sind spitze!!!!!!!! ~ 2012