You're So Emotional

      Emotions are a basic part of every conversation. Emotions help us communicate through simple facial expressions and understand how others are feeling without a single word spoken. We can agree that you can not really tell when a friend is jealous just by their facial expression. The six emotions shown above are known as the basic emotions. These emotions are those in which are easy to spot in an individual. There are also emotions that are not as easily spotted, which are known as complex emotions. Emotions tell a lot about a person. They tell you when or when you should not ask certain questions, they tell you how someone feels about you. 

     Recently, an article was released at Who Should Know How You Are Feeling? which discusses how various companies are using our emotions to determine various things. For example, companies are observing potential customers emotions through facial expression to determine if their advertisement was effective or not. So what is really private? If you are being watched while you watch television? That is just creepy. This article was written by someone who is in the business of creating this technology. It was nice of this guy to warn us about the upcoming privacy invasion but he is the one creating the devices to read our emotions! Luckily, this technology will only be able to read our basic emotions. We will still be able to maintain the secrecy in our complex emotions. 

      On the website, Paul Ekman you can watch several videos with Paul Ekman who is a psychologist specializing in detecting micro emotions. In these videos, Dr. Ekman teaches you how to tell if someone is lying, how to master your emotions and many other emotional techniques. I find this kind of creepy as well that this man can catch a facial expression that only occurs for 1/25th of a second. Many of us believe that we would be able to pick up on emotions but the truth is, we would not be able to pick up on micro emotions. 

     I have never been a huge on showing my emotion, excluding joy. I would rather keep to myself that way no one can question me on how I am feeling. This being said, I am curious to whether Dr. Ekman would be capable of depicting different emotions I have. Since the majority of people I see on a day to day basis can not decipher my emotions, I am curious if I do show micro emotions momentarily and people do not pick up on them or if I have adapted to showing no micro emotions what so ever. 

     There was a television series called "Lie to Me" based on Dr. Ekman's work. Basically in the show, you can see Dr. Ekman's life played out by actor Tim Roth. I would find it very interesting, especially after recently reading these articles, to watch the three seasons that aired. In this show you can watch the life of a deception detection expert in work. You can read about this television show at Paul Ekman Group . I wonder also, how often Dr. Ekman reads emotions. Is it something he can stop doing when he chooses? Or is he constantly reading micro emotions no matter who he is speaking to?