Inside the Psychologist's Studio.

Robert Levenson: You attended the University of Chicago as a 15-year-old, jumping directly from 10th grade in South Orange, New Jersey, to one of the top colleges in the country. What was that experience like for you, and how much influence did the Chicago years have on the kind of scholar, scientist, and person you became? Paul Ekman: In many ways, it ruined me for academia, because I have never (other than at St. John’s, where I’ve recently lectured) found any other place where books were idolized and where the emphasis really was on scholarship. In most of our great universities, the emphasis, at least in the behavioral, physical, and biological sciences, is on research. But scholarship is different, and cuts across all disciplines. So, I love the University of Chicago, and I feel like I owe my whole life to them, and I donate money to them every year because of that. Levenson: And, recently, you were honored by them . . . . Ekman: Yes, they gave me a Doctor of Humane Letters. Then I wondered, what were the inhumane letters? I started thinking, should I say B sounded very humane? But Z? Anyhow, there was a 3-day celebration. And they gave me a list of all the people who had received such degrees. They prided themselves on never giving an honorary degree to either a politician—the Queen of England was turned down—or a donor. It was only for scholarship. So, actually, it meant an enormous amount. And, as these things usually work, it was a particular person in the psychology department who was really taken with my work, who pushed for them to give me this for some years. Tom Trabasso, whom many of you may know, just died in the past few days. Very regrettable. Levenson: It was actually a very heady time there. There was the Great Books Program, with Mortimer Adler’s influence, and your class was quite a remarkable group of people, all chosen on the basis of a University of Chicago–developed IQ test. Ekman: Yes. Levenson: It didn’t really matter what your grades were in high school? Ekman: No, they didn’t care. My high school principal said, ‘‘When they read the letter that I’m writing, you’ve got no chance.’’ I visited him when I got my Ph.D. I went and gave him a copy of my first book. By that point he said, ‘‘I always knew you had it in you.’’ My classmates at the University of Chicago were incredible: Susan Sontag sat next to me for 3 years. Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Shelly Berman, and two people who became congressmen. It was a make-or-break place, because the milieu was, you couldn’t do anything unless you could do it better than anyone in the world. Well, how many of us can do something better than anybody in the world? So we had a very high suicide rate. I’ve always believed that many of the people I have most respected, turns out, at some point, they were at the University of Chicago. So it was an amazing place—full of misfits. We were all misfits. That’s why we were there. We couldn’t get along with school, and we couldn’t get along with our parents. So it was the reform school. My parents were always showing me the reform schools advertised in the New York Times Magazine—military schools. That’s what they were trying to put me in, but fortunately, I got to Chicago. Levenson: From Chicago, you went to Adelphi University, and you have said that, at the time, nonverbal communication was considered to be a dead end by the psychological establishment. Yet you began to develop what would become a lifelong pursuit of that topic. How did that come about, and what in the world were you thinking? Ekman: Well, I applied to 24 graduate schools, 23 of which turned me down, because I honestly said that I wanted to become a private practitioner of psychotherapy. Nobody told me that you’re supposed to lie and conceal that. And so, everybody turned me down, except Adelphi, which wanted to train practitioners. I’m the black sheep. I’m the only one, I think, with one other exception, they graduated who didn’t go into private practice. But it was wonderful clinical training. And both doing and observing psychotherapy, I became convinced that there was an awful lot in the face and the body apart from the words, and if we were to really understand the process, we needed to be able to measure it. Little did I know how long it would take. And clinicians thought this was wonderful. Adelphi was basically staffed by people who weren’t academics. There was one academic, a Skinnerian. I was originally a Skinnerian researcher on nonverbal behavior, if you can imagine that, because that was the only tradition I learned. At NIMH [the National Institute of Mental Health]—which ended up supporting me for more than 40 years—I was largely This interview was conducted at a public session held on Friday, May 27, 2005, as part of the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society, held in Los Angeles, California. The format approximated that of the television program ‘‘Inside the Actors Studio.’’ Address correspondence to Robert W. Levenson, 3210 Tolman Hall, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, e-mail: [email protected]. PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE