Michelle: That polite smile from your colleague? It might not mean they're happy. It could be a mask for contempt. Today, we're learning to read the face's hidden language, and it will change how you see every single interaction. Mark: Whoa, okay. So you're telling me my entire social life has been built on a lie? I thought a smile was, you know, a smile. That feels like a pretty foundational belief to shatter on a Tuesday morning. Michelle: It's a little more complex than that, but the core idea is that our faces are constantly broadcasting information, whether we want them to or not. And this all comes from the groundbreaking work in Emotions Revealed by Paul Ekman. Mark: Ekman, right. He's the guy who basically inspired that TV show Lie to Me, the human lie detector. The one who can spot a lie from a twitch of an eyebrow across a crowded room. Michelle: Exactly. And what's wild is that he spent decades as a clinical psychologist and a professor at UCSF, and his work completely flipped psychology on its head. At a time when the dominant view, behaviorism, suggested everything was learned, he went to the ends of the earth to prove that our core emotions are biologically hardwired. Mark: To the ends of the earth, literally, right? I heard his research involved some pretty remote places. Michelle: It did. And his journey to that discovery is a story in itself, starting with a trip that was supposed to prove the exact opposite of what he found.

Michelle: In the late 1960s, Ekman was convinced, like most academics of his time, that emotional expressions were culturally specific. You know, that a gesture of anger in America might mean something totally different somewhere else. To prove it, he needed to find a culture that was completely isolated from the outside world, especially from movies and magazines. Mark: So no chance they could have just learned Western expressions from watching John Wayne movies. Michelle: Precisely. He found that in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea, with a pre-literate tribe called the Fore. These were people who had lived in, essentially, a Stone Age culture. He went there with his colleague Wally Friesen, armed with photographs of American faces showing clear emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Mark: And how do you even run that experiment? You can't just hand them a multiple-choice quiz. Michelle: That was the challenge. His first attempt, asking them to make up stories about the faces, was a disaster. The task was too foreign. So he adapted. He would tell them a simple story, like "This person's child has died," and then show them three photos, asking them to point to the face that matched the story. Mark: That’s clever. And what happened? Michelle: The results were stunning. The Fore people, who had never seen a Western face before, picked the "correct" emotion with an accuracy rate between 80 and 90 percent. They looked at a smiling face and connected it to a story of happiness. They saw a scowling face and linked it to anger. It was undeniable. He had gone there to prove emotions were relative and instead found powerful evidence that they were universal. As he put it, "I found just the opposite of what I thought I would discover. That's ideal." Mark: Wow. So a scowl in a New Guinea village and a scowl in a New York boardroom are speaking the same basic language. That’s a huge idea. Michelle: It is. It suggests that these expressions are part of our evolutionary inheritance, a kind of pre-verbal language that connects all of humanity. Mark: Okay, but hold on. I'm thinking of that story from the book, "The Case of the Misunderstood Smile." An American businesswoman in Japan smiles during a tense negotiation to show goodwill, but the Japanese CEO reads it as insincere and disrespectful. If happiness is universal, how does that happen? Michelle: Ah, that is the perfect question. And it leads to Ekman's other brilliant discovery, which resolves this apparent contradiction. He calls them "display rules." Mark: Display rules. Sounds like emotional etiquette. Michelle: That's a great way to put it. The underlying feeling and the facial program for it—like a smile for joy—are universal. But from a very young age, our culture teaches us a set of rules about when, where, and to whom it's appropriate to show that emotion. In many Asian cultures, for example, it's considered inappropriate to show strong negative emotions in public, or even to smile broadly during a serious business meeting. Mark: So the hardware is the same everywhere, but the software—the cultural programming—is different. Michelle: Exactly. The American businesswoman’s smile was a genuine attempt to ease tension, but the Japanese CEO’s cultural software interpreted it as a violation of the "serious situation" display rule. It’s not that he didn't understand what a smile was; it's that he understood it was being used at the wrong time. This is why emotional intelligence isn't just about reading faces; it's about understanding the cultural context they're in. Mark: That makes so much sense. It’s not a contradiction at all; it’s two layers of communication happening at once. The universal and the cultural. Michelle: And that's where things get really tricky. Because even when we try to follow our display rules and hide what we're feeling, the truth has a way of leaking out.

Mark: Okay, so the expressions are universal, but we learn to hide them. That brings up the whole idea of reading people. But Ekman's book makes it clear it's not that simple. You can see the emotion, but you can still get it totally, catastrophically wrong. Michelle: You absolutely can. And this brings us to one of the most important, and I think most dangerous, psychological traps that Ekman identifies. He calls it "Othello's Error." Mark: From Shakespeare, right? Othello kills his wife Desdemona because he thinks she's cheating on him. Michelle: Yes, but the psychological error is incredibly specific. Othello confronts Desdemona, accusing her of infidelity. She's terrified and anguished, pleading for her life. But Othello looks at her terror and thinks, "Aha! That's the fear of a guilty woman who has been caught!" He completely misreads the source of her emotion. Mark: Oh, I see. He was right that she was afraid, but he was dead wrong about why she was afraid. She wasn't afraid of being caught; she was afraid because her husband was threatening to murder her! Michelle: Precisely. Othello's Error is the mistake of believing that because you've correctly identified an emotion on someone's face, you automatically know what caused it. And we do this all the time. The book gives some great modern examples. Your spouse comes home and you see a flash of anger on their face as they walk in the door. You immediately think, "What did I do?" Mark: When in reality, they could have just gotten cut off in traffic or had a terrible meeting with their boss. Michelle: Exactly. And this error is amplified by another concept Ekman introduces: the "refractory period." When we're in the grip of a strong emotion, our brain enters a state where it actively filters out any information that contradicts that emotion. Mark: It's like having emotional tunnel vision. If I'm angry because I think you're ignoring me, I'm only going to notice the times you look at your phone. I'll completely miss the fact that you just asked me a question. Michelle: That's the perfect analogy. During that refractory period, which can last seconds or even minutes, your thinking is hijacked. You're not looking for the truth; you're looking for confirmation of the emotion you're already feeling. This is how arguments spiral out of control. You make Othello's Error, the refractory period kicks in, and suddenly you're in a fight based on a complete misinterpretation. Mark: So this is where microexpressions come in, right? Those little flashes of truth that leak out. I'm thinking of the story of the nervous job applicant, the guy named Mark. The hiring manager, Sarah, sees these fleeting looks of fear and anxiety on his face, even though he's talking a big game about his sales record. Michelle: Yes, that's a perfect example of microexpressions in action. They are incredibly brief—we're talking a fraction of a second—involuntary expressions that reveal a concealed emotion. Sarah correctly identified that Mark was feeling fear, not confidence. But here’s the crucial part, and it connects back to Othello's Error and the controversy around Ekman's work. Mark: What's that? Michelle: The microexpression told her that he was hiding something. It revealed the presence of fear. But it didn't tell her why. Was he afraid because he was lying about his sales numbers? Or was he afraid because he desperately needed the job and was terrified of failing the interview? Mark: Right. It's a clue, not a confession. Michelle: It's a hot spot. It tells you where to dig, but it doesn't tell you what you'll find. This is the nuance that often gets lost. Ekman himself is very clear that there is no single sign of lying, no Pinocchio's nose. Microexpressions just reveal an emotion that is at odds with what the person is saying or projecting. The real work is figuring out why that conflict exists. Mark: This is all fascinating, but it also feels a bit overwhelming. Our faces are broadcasting universal signals, our brains are wired to misinterpret them, and our true feelings are leaking out in these tiny flashes. Can we actually do anything about it? Can we stop ourselves from flying off the handle or getting stuck in a bad mood? The book asks, 'Can we really ever control our emotions?' Michelle: That is the million-dollar question, and Ekman's answer is a very careful, and I think very honest, "yes, but not in the way you think."

Michelle: Ekman argues that we have very little control over what triggers an emotion in the first place. That near-miss car accident story in the book is a perfect illustration. You don't choose to feel fear; your brain's automatic appraiser senses danger and floods your system with fear before you're even consciously aware of what's happening. Mark: The "wisdom of the ages," as he calls it. Our evolutionary programming kicking in to save our lives. Michelle: Right. And you can't just turn that off. But what you can work on are two things: changing the triggers over the long term, and managing your behavior in the moment. And to illustrate this, he tells a wonderfully vulnerable story about himself. Mark: I love when the experts admit they're human. What happened? Michelle: He and his wife, Mary Ann, had an agreement to talk on the phone every day when she was away at a conference. One Sunday morning, she was supposed to call, and she didn't. As the hours ticked by, Ekman found himself getting more and more agitated. First it was worry, but then it morphed into full-blown anger. Mark: Othello's Error in the wild! He's assuming the reason for the missed call. Michelle: Completely. His mind started racing. He thought, "She's forgotten. She doesn't care. Maybe she's embarrassed about something." He even recognized that this was tapping into one of his own "hot triggers"—a deep-seated fear of abandonment. He was in the grip of the emotion, in that refractory period, and his mind was just feeding him justifications for his anger. Mark: So what did he do? Did the world's foremost emotion expert yell at his wife when she finally called? Michelle: This is the beautiful part. He didn't. When she finally called, he was still furious, but he had developed enough self-awareness to know he was in an irrational state. He kept the call short and polite. And then, after hanging up, he did the hard work. He forced himself to reappraise the situation. He thought about who his wife is—a considerate person. He thought about the practicalities—maybe the pay phones were broken, maybe the conference ran late. He actively fought against the narrative his anger was feeding him. Mark: He created a little space between the feeling and the reaction. Michelle: He created space. And after a few minutes of this conscious reappraisal, he was able to call her back and have a pleasant, normal conversation. He didn't suppress the anger; he acknowledged it, understood its irrational root in his own history, and chose not to act on it destructively. Mark: Wow, it's so powerful that the world's leading expert on emotions admits he gets hijacked by them too. It makes the advice feel so much more real. So the key isn't to not feel the anger, but to develop that 'attentiveness' he talks about—that little space where you can choose your response. Michelle: That's the entire game. He calls it developing a more advanced form of consciousness, one where you can observe yourself being emotional. It’s about being able to say, "Okay, I am feeling intense anger right now. My heart is pounding. I want to lash out. Is this response justified by the situation, or is it being fueled by something else?" Mark: And that's a skill you have to build. It's not a switch you can just flip. Michelle: It's a lifelong practice. He suggests keeping an emotion diary to identify your hot triggers. The more you understand what sets you off, the more you can anticipate it and prepare yourself to be attentive when it happens.

Michelle: So we've gone on this incredible journey, from the universal language on our faces in New Guinea, to the internal hijacking of our minds in Othello's castle, and finally to this idea of 'attentive consciousness' in our own daily lives. Mark: It really feels like the book gives you a kind of user's manual for the human emotional system. It’s not about a quick fix or a life hack. It's a deep, scientific, and yet profoundly human look at the forces that shape our lives. Michelle: I think that's right. The book's ultimate message isn't that we can become emotionless robots, or that we should want to. Ekman quotes his mentor, Silvan Tomkins, saying "Emotions are what motivate our lives." They are, as the book's title says, revealed. They are essential. The goal is not to eliminate them. Mark: The goal is to have more choice. To understand the machinery so we can stop being puppets pulled by its strings. It’s about gaining that fraction of a second of choice between the trigger and the response. Michelle: And maybe the first step for anyone listening is just to notice. The next time you feel a strong emotion—anger, sadness, even intense joy—just try to name it. Take a second and ask, "What does this actually feel like in my body? Where is the heat? Where is the tension?" That's the start of attentiveness. Mark: That feels like something anyone can do. It's not about being an expert, it's just about being a little more curious about your own inner world. Michelle: Exactly. And we'd love to hear what you discover. Share your own 'Othello's Error' moments or times you successfully managed a hot trigger with our community. Let's talk about it. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.