Whatever culture we come from, emotions play a huge role in our lives and in every relationship within them. Whether anger, joy, fear or sorrow, they can be incredibly powerful things - but can be equally hard to understand or control. In EMOTIONS REVEALED, Paul Ekman draws on a lifetime's study to take the reader on a complete tour of the emotional self.
Against a background of specially commissioned photographs and forceful news images from around the world, he examines and explains how, when and why we become emotional and how far we can change what we get emotional about; why we sometimes get emotional when others don't; how to recognise and understand the subtlest signs of emotion both in ourselves and other people, and much more. This stunning volume contains a test to find out how good you are at spotting emotions, excercises to improve your awareness of the bodily sensations involved in each emotion and an explanation of how to apply all this information to enhance your daily life.
Psychologist and author of
Emotions Revealed, Paul Ekman has been studying emotion for over 40 years specialising in the expression, and more recently on the physiology, of emotion. It shows.
Emotions Revealed focuses on the universal emotions--the ones experienced by all human beings and for which there are clear universal expressions (sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, contempt and enjoyment). The goal of the book is to help the reader better understand and improve their emotional lives in practical ways.
The fascinating opening chapter describes the history and development of Ekman's research and things just get more and more interesting as we get closer to the emotions themselves. He leads us to the big questions: Why do we become emotional when we do? What triggers each of our emotions and how and when we can change what we become emotional? Will emotion always, somehow (in a "micro-expression" perhaps) reveal itself? Ekman also explains how we can become more attentive to our emotions as we have them and so increase the possibility of behaving in emotionally more constructive ways.
Having prepared the territory Ekman then moves to physiological ground explaining that each emotion has unique signals, most readily identified in the face and voice, that generate a unique pattern of sensations in our body. By becoming better acquainted with those sensations we may become aware early enough in our emotional response that we have some chance to choose, if we like, whether to go along or interfere with the emotion. We are also made aware of the connection this process has to the Buddhist practice and ideal of "mindfulness" through Ekman's discussions with the Dalai Lama. The appendix contains a set of photographs designed to test our skill at spotting the subtlest signs of the various emotions which the reader is advised to take before beginning the book. --Larry Brown
