Inspired by Work with Dalai Lama, Eve Ekman Creates App to Map Emotions

UCSF - Latest News Feed

In her house on a hill in San Francisco with sweeping views of the city, Eve Ekman, PhD, MSW, has a meditation altar, which highlights her spiritual interests.

In a nearby room, Ekman has the lamp by which her father, Paul Ekman, PhD, UC San Francisco professor emeritus in psychology, studied facial expressions – part of his work about external emotions that have permeated the public through outlets such as the television series “Lie to Me.”

“I joke that my dad is interested in emotions on the outside and I’m interested about emotions on the inside,” says Eve Ekman.

The combination of the Ekmans’ work on external and internal emotions has extended their findings beyond academia and into popular culture, and it has culminated in partnerships that include one with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, to create a digital map of human emotions.

Now, Eve Ekman has moved the work forward through development of an app to help people track and understand their emotions throughout the day.

An Early Interest in Social Justice

Growing up as the daughter of Paul Ekman, Eve Ekman stood a good chance of being overshadowed by her father’s accomplishments. Paul Ekman, who was a professor of psychology at UCSF from 1972 to 2004, is one of the world’s foremost experts on monitoring facial expressions and gestures to make sense of nonverbal behavior.

His interest in “micro facial expressions” began in the late 1960s when he reviewed film of depressed patients and saw in slow motion brief fleeting expressions of strong negative feelings that these patients were trying to hide to avoid suicide watch.

Upon his retirement from UCSF in 2004, to translate his research into resources that would be helpful to the general public about using facial expressions as a window to people’s feelings, he formed the Paul Ekman Group, wrote several lay books ...

Read More