Would Baltimore Be Burning If Police Wore Anger Detectors? | Big Think.

Would Baltimore Be Burning If Police Wore Anger Detectors?

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Most American police officers are just like everyone else, says psychologist Paul Ekman. One of the only real differences is that when an officer's emotions get the best of him or her, the consequences of those actions tend to be much greater — and sometimes even deadly. Ekman, who is one of the world's foremost experts on emotion, suggests that police departments would benefit from keeping risky officers off the streets, and that identifying these officers would be easy with the adoption of a simple daily diagnostic test.

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PAUL EKMAN:

Paul Ekman is the Manager of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC (PEG), a small company that produces training devices relevant to emotional skills, and is initiating new research relevant to national security and law enforcement.

His research on facial expression and body movement began in 1954, as the subject of his Master’s thesis in 1955 and his first publication in 1957. In his early work, his approach to nonverbal behavior showed his training in personality. Over the next decade, a social psychological and cross-cultural emphasis characterized his work, with a growing interest in an evolutionary and semiotic frame of reference. In addition to his basic research on emotion and its expression, he has, for the last thirty years, also been studying deceit.

In 1971, he received a Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health; that Award has been renewed in 1976, 1981, 1987, 1991, and 1997. His research was supported by fellowships, grants and awards from the National Institute of Mental Health for over forty years.

Articles reporting on Dr. Ekman’s work have appeared in Time Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Psychology Today, The New Yorker and others, both American and foreign. Numerous articles about his work have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and other national newspapers.

He has appeared on 48 Hours, Dateline, Good Morning America, 20/20, Larry King, Oprah, Johnny Carson and many other TV programs. He has also been featured on various public television programs such as News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Bill Moyers’ The Truth About Lying.

Ekman is co-author of Emotion in the Human Face (1971), Unmasking the Face (1975), Facial Action Coding System (1978), editor of Darwin and Facial Expression (1973), co-editor of Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research (1982), Approaches to Emotion (1984), The Nature of Emotion (1994), What the Face Reveals (1997), and author of Face of Man (1980), Telling Lies (1985, paperback, 1986, second edition, 1992, third edition, 2001, 4th edition 2008), Why Kids Lie (1989, paperback 1991), Emotions Revealed, (2003), New Edition (2009) Telling Lies, Dalai Lama-Emotional Awareness (2008) and New Edition Emotions Revealed (2007) . He is the editor of the third edition (1998) and the fourth edition (2009) of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1998). He has published more than 100 articles.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Ekman: Police are there to protect us. They’re there for our safety. Now occasionally, there will be a bad apple, but my work with police has suggested that that’s really exceptional. The problem is they have a gun, so they can do a lot of harm quickly. But that’s overwhelmingly not the problem. The problem is the pressure that police are under to make instant decisions for safety, for their safety and the safety of others.

We all have bad days. We all have days, or most of us, where we say, "I wish I hadn’t said that. I wish I hadn’t been so impatient. I was off today." Well if a policeman is in that state, and they’re not any different than the rest of us in that regard, it’s a lot more dangerous. So it’s a dangerous job that requires that you’re in a calm state of mind when you go out to perform it. And we have the means to both assess that and further that. We’re just not deploying it.....

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