Can a husband fake a loving smile to his wife? Can a liar maintain a seamless mask of sincerity?

When does the face reveal what words do not?

Such questions are the stuff of everyday detective work, bedeviling a parent trying to figure out
who broke a window or a police officer grilling a suspect. To many, the human face can often be
unreadable.
But for Paul Ekman, the face is like a window on the mind, revealing secret, sometimes
unconscious emotions. The University of California-San Francisco psychologist has made a 40-
year career of deciphering facial expressions and training others to do the same -- and he has
helped create a burgeoning field of research.
His scientific career has spanned the worlds of academia, law enforcement and, lately, the
ancient art of Buddhist meditation. He has helped police figure out better ways to question
suspects and U.S. visa officers discern which would-be visitors might be lying about the nature
of their travel plans. He has proved that human facial expressions cut across race and culture.
Most recently, at the behest of the world's top Tibetan Buddhist, he developed a program to help
Bay Area schoolteachers cultivate emotional balance.
``I think I am the only person in the world who is supported both by the Dalai Lama and the
Defense Department,'' Ekman quipped.
Ekman's main scientific contribution has been to show how the face is the mind's involuntary
messenger. Even when suppressed or subconscious, emotions make fleeting appearances. These
micro-expressions are as brief as one-one-hundred-twenty-fifth of a second. They are too fast for
most people to recognize, but they lay bare our true feelings.
To the untrained eye, such micro-expressions may only be visible if slowed down on film. But
after an hour of training, Ekman says, even a novice can begin to detect them in real time.
Recognizing an emotion, however, doesn't explain everything. A suspect could be experiencing
fear because he is lying -- or because he has been framed.
Cuts across race, culture
When Ekman began studying human facial expressions 40 years ago, psychologists still believed
that everything we did was learned, rather than instinctual.
A glare, a downcast look or a smile made by an American would be unreadable to someone from
New Guinea, according to the behaviorist reasoning of the day.
At 30, Ekman journeyed to the highlands of Papua New Guinea in search of a Stone Age culture
whose inhabitants had never been exposed to Western media, and he proved otherwise.
Although they had never seen a Westerner before, New Guineans could easily interpret their
expressions. The only confusion arose around fear and surprise -- New Guineans mixed up the
two in the Western face, and American college students likewise could not distinguish between
the New Guinean's expressions of those two emotions.
Still, Ekman's overall findings confirmed the insights of 19th-century evolutionary biologist
Charles Darwin -- that emotional expressions are universal.
In the 1980s, Ekman began studying deception. He wrote a book, ``Telling Lies,'' and before long
he was training police officers in the science of reading faces. Ekman, with partners in academia
and law enforcement, now teaches at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco,
Ga.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, he has trained people working in counterterrorism, as well as the people
who train the Foreign Service officers in granting visa applications. His training program teaches
people how to look for ``hot spots,'' which are indications that a person is conflicted about what
he is saying.
J.J. Newberry, a former Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms investigator who is Ekman's principal
law enforcement training partner, said police officers enjoy Ekman as much as he enjoys them.
``He knows how to tell them what they're seeing,'' Newberry said. ``I have seen hard cops, cops
who have been around 20, 30 years, say, `Why didn't I have this when I was a rookie?' ''
Feel what we show
Ekman's work has also found that not only do we show what we feel, we also feel what we show.
In the 1970s, Ekman and his colleague, Wally Friesen, spent hours making faces while
developing what they called the Facial Action Coding System, a compendium of facial
expressions that can be used in research on everything from brain disease to love.
After making sad and angry faces, the two men discovered they felt awful. Later research
confirmed that certain facial expressions induce emotional states.
A true smile -- one that raises the corners of the mouth and contracts the muscle around the eyes,
known as orbicularis oculi -- activates the left temporal and anterior regions of the brain, the
same areas that respond when people are happy. But smiling with just the lips, what Ekman calls
a false smile, does not.
Researchers found that babies give true smiles to their mothers and false ones to strangers.
Likewise, happily married couples greet one another with smiles that reach their eyes, while
unhappily married couples use just the lips.
Ekman's work is not without its critics. Some sociologists still have doubts about whether facial
expressions cut across all cultures.
But his research had enough cross-cultural appeal to intrigue the Dalai Lama. In 2000, Ekman
went to Dharamsala, India, to participate in a scientific meeting with the Dalai Lama on Eastern
and Western approaches to destructive emotion.
It wasn't an easy fit at first. Initially, Ekman told friends, his only interest in attending the
conference was so his daughter, Eve, could meet the Dalai Lama.
B. Alan Wallace, who attended as a translator, found Ekman rather intimidating.
``I thought, `How do you crack this nut?' '' Wallace recalled. ``He's got a pretty tough shell.''
But Ekman soon warmed to the Tibetan holy man, and he left India with a glow that friends say
lasted for months.
``The experience with the Dalai Lama was very mellowing,'' said Maureen O'Sullivan, a
professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco who has felt the sting of Ekman's
anger many times throughout their long collaboration.
The Dalai Lama wanted the scientific meeting to have a practical benefit. When it ended, he gave
Ekman $50,000 to develop a program combining Western psychological and Buddhist
techniques for countering negative emotions and promoting positive ones.
That program, called Cultivating Emotional Balance, has been turned into a training program for
Bay Area schoolteachers, taught by Wallace, a former Buddhist monk, and a psychologist. A
pilot program with 15 teachers was held in January and February. Next year, the program will be
expanded, and Ekman will oversee a scientific study to see if it is effective.
Researchers will study the participants' brains to see if they are experiencing more positive
emotions, as well as their immune systems to see if those improved as people's stress levels
decreased.