A review by lem119
Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life by Paul Ekman

4.0

This book combines several topics I am very interested in. The first is universal cultural traits, which I learned a little bit about and became interested in when we were discussing evolutionary psychology in my science and philosophy of sex and love class; the second is reading people's emotions, particularly regarding negative emotions. This book combines those two elements to look at the physical signifiers of various emotions, and how to recognize and respond to them (if you've seen Lie to Me it was based on Dr. Ekman's work, although obviously dramatised). The book is very interesting; Ekman uses his research studies in Papua New Guinea as well as anecdotes, historical and news media, and other research data to find commonalities in the expressions people show when feeling emotions including disgust, sadness, relief, and surprise. While the book obviously does not go into such in-depth minutia to make anyone reading it an expert on microexpressions, it does show some basic ways to recognize various emotions based on a person's lips, eyes, jaw, nose, and other aspects of facial expression, and shows how they are universal across cultures, as well as explaining some reasons for this universality.