could teach him how not to do that in two to three hours.’ And
he said, ‘Well, we can’t take the risk that he’s known to be
seeing an expert on lying.’ ” Ekman’s voice trailed off. It was
clear that he rather liked Clinton and that he wanted Clinton’s
expression to have been no more than a meaningless facial tic.
Ekman shrugged. “Unfortunately, I guess, he needed to get
caught — and he got caught.”
3. The Naked Face
What Ekman is saying is that the face is an enormously rich
source of information about emotion. In fact, he makes an even
bolder claim — one central to understanding how mind reading
works — and that is that the information on our face is not just
a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense,
it is what is going on inside our mind.
The beginnings of this insight came when Ekman and Friesen
were first sitting across from each other, working on
expressions of anger and distress. “It was weeks before one of
us finally admitted feeling terrible after a session where we’d
been making one of those faces all day,” Friesen says. “Then the
other realized that he’d been feeling poorly, too, so we began to