Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [79]
Paul Ekman is now in his sixties. He is clean-shaven, with closely set eyes and thick, prominent eyebrows, and although he is of medium build, he seems much larger: there is something stubborn and substantial in his demeanor. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a pediatrician, and entered the University of Chicago at fifteen. He speaks deliberately. Before he laughs, he pauses slightly, as if waiting for permission. He is the sort who makes lists and numbers his arguments. His academic writing has an orderly logic to it; by the end of an Ekman essay, each stray objection and problem has been gathered up and catalogued. Since the mid-1960s, he has been working out of a ramshackle Victorian townhouse at the University of California at San Francisco, where he holds a professorship. When I met Ekman, he sat in his office and began running through the action-unit configurations he had learned so long ago. He leaned forward slightly, placing his hands on his knees. On the wall behind him were photographs of his two heroes, Tomkins and Charles Darwin. “Everybody can do action unit four,” he began. He lowered his brow, using his depressor glabellae, depressor supercilii, and corrugator. “Almost everyone can do A.U. nine.” He wrinkled his nose, using his levator labii superioris alaeque nasi. “Everybody can do five.” He contracted his levator palpebrae superioris, raising his upper eyelid.
I was trying to follow along with him, and he looked up at me. “You’ve got a very good five,” he said generously. “The more deeply set your eyes are, the harder it is to see the five. Then there’s seven.” He squinted. “Twelve.” He flashed a smile, activating the zygomatic major. The inner parts of his eyebrows shot up. “That’s A.U. one — distress, anguish.” Then he used his frontalis, pars lateralis, to raise the outer half of his eyebrows. “That’s A.U. two. It’s also very hard, but it’s worthless. It’s not part of anything except Kabuki theater. Twenty-three is one of my favorites. It’s the narrowing of the red margin of the lips. Very reliable anger sign. It’s very hard to do voluntarily.” He narrowed his lips. “Moving one ear at a time is still one of the hardest things to do. I have to really concentrate. It takes everything I’ve got.” He laughed. “This is something my daughter always wanted me to do for her friends. Here we go.” He wiggled his left ear, then his right ear. Ekman does not appear to have a particularly expressive face. He has the demeanor of a psychoanalyst, watchful and impassive, and his ability to transform his face so easily and quickly was astonishing. “There is one I can’t do,” he went on. “It’s A.U. thirty-nine. Fortunately, one of my postdocs can do it. A.U. thirty-eight is dilating the nostrils. Thirty-nine is the opposite. It’s the muscle that pulls them down.” He shook his head and looked at me again. “Ooh! You’ve got a fantastic thirty-nine. That’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s genetic. There should be other members of your family who have this heretofore unknown talent. You’ve got it, you’ve got it.” He laughed again. “You’re in a position to flash it at people. See, you should try that in a singles bar!”
Ekman then began to layer one action unit on top of another, in order to compose the more complicated facial expressions that we generally recognize as emotions. Happiness, for instance, is essentially A.U. six and twelve — contracting the muscles that raise the cheek (orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis) in combination with the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners of the lips. Fear is A.U. one, two, and four, or, more fully, one, two, four, five, and twenty, with or without action units twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven. That