Ekman, however, was fascinated by the mystery of nonverbal communication. He wanted to understand why some people had little trouble decoding the feelings of others, almost as if they were reading an open book, whereas others fell for one con artist after another. His motto was: trust your eyes, not conventional wisdom. The widespread belief then was that facial expressions arose simply from cultural learning: a child in a given culture learned the faces that accompanied particular emotions by observing people, and over time different cultures developed different expressions. Even renowned researchers such as anthropologist Margaret Mead were unconvinced of the existence of a universal repertoire of expressions, as Charles Darwin had proposed in his book The expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872 but subsequently ignored.
Description of Paul Ekman's work on universal human expressions and microexpressions.
