The Art of Deception

truth. They look and sound sincere. So here is the question: is there any way you can be sure they are telling the truth? Ekman did not know the answer then, but wanted to find out. As part of his research, he had already filmed a series of 12-minute interviews with psychiatric patients. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients told him that she had lied to him. So, Ekman sat and looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. And suddenly, there, across just two frames of the film, he saw it: an intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second, but once he had spotted the first expression, he soon found three more examples in that same interview. He termed his discovery “micro-expression”: very rapid intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to be concealed.