Those who have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking would already have been introduced to psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman. Dr. Ekman developed the Facial Action Coding System which catalogued every possible human facial expression. He was such an expert on facial expressions that he could easily tell just by looking at faces if a person was lying, if a marriage was going to last, if someone’s joy was sincere. Blink readers fascinated by this uncanny skill will be glad to know that we have two of Dr. Ekman’s books at the store.

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

Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage
by Paul Ekman

Here is a link to an interesting interview/conversation with Dr. Ekman.

Below is an excerpt from the preface of Emotions Revealed.

My goal in writing Emotions Revealed was to help people improve four essential skills, and thus I have included suggestions and exercises in the book that I hope you will find both helpful and provocative.

Those four skills are:

First, becoming more consciously aware of when you are becoming emotional, even before you speak or act. This is the hardest skill to acquire. Developing this skill allows you to have some choice about when you are emotional.

Second, choosing how you behave when you are emotional, so you achieve your goals without damaging other people. The purpose of emotional episodes is to help us quickly achieve our objectives, whether to draw people to comfort us, scare off a perpetrator, or some other of thousands of goals. The best emotional episodes do no harm to and cause no problems for those with whom we are engaged. This is not an easy skill to develop, but with practice it can become part of your life.

Third, becoming more sensitive to how others are feeling. Since emotions are at the core of every important relationship we have, we must be sensitive to how others are feeling.

Fourth, carefully using the information you acquire about how others are feeling. Sometimes that means asking the person about the emotion you have spotted, acknowledging how he or she is feeling, or re-calibrating your own reactions in light of what you have recognized. Your response will depend on who the other person is and the history of your relationship with that person. How this varies within a family, in the workplace, and in friendship is explained in the book.