Dr paul ekman emotions revealed recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and em 0

replay the emotions we felt in the original scene, or we may now feel a different emotion. For example, a person might be disgusted with herself for having been afraid in the original scene, feeling now only the disgust and none of the fear that was originally experienced. It can also happen that initially we remember the emotional events, but do not again experience those or other emotions. Or the emotions may begin as the scene unfolds in our mind.

Robert Levenson and I have used a memory task to produce emotions in the laboratory in order to study the expressions and physiological reactions that mark each emotion. We thought it would be hard for people to reexperience past emotional scenes when they knew they were being videotaped and had wires attached to different parts of their body to measure their heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, sweating, and skin temperature. It was just the opposite.

Most people seem eager for an opportunity to replay and reexperience a past emotional scene. Give them the chance to do so, and it happens almost immediately, for some, if not all, emotions.

We asked people to remember their own personal version of one of the events that has been found to be universal for each emotion.

For example, to call forth sadness we asked people to remember a time in their life when someone to whom they were attached had died. We asked them to visualize a moment when they had felt the most intense sadness and then to try to experience again the emotion they had felt when the death first happened.

Almost before these short instructions were over, their physiology, their subjective feelings, and, in some people, even the facial expressions of emotions changed. This should be no surprise, as everyone has had the experience of remembering an important event and feeling an emotion. What was not known before our research is whether the changes that occur when emotions are remembered actually resemble the changes that occur when emotions begin by other means, and indeed they do. Memories about emotional events, those that we choose to call to mind, which do not immediately cause us to reexperience the originally felt emotions, provide an opportunity to learn how to reconstrue what is happening in our life so that we have a chance to change what is making us emotional.

Imagination is still another way in which we can bring about an