My name is Paul Ekman. I have a PhD in psychology. I was a professor at UCSF, University of California, San Francisco, for more than 40 years. I'm also the president of a small startup company that translates my research findings into things that people can use to improve their life. [MUSIC] When I was 14, my mother committed suicide and I knew she was going to do it. And neither I or any professionals knew how to help people with severe depression at that time. And I made a very explicit decision that I would devote my life to developing a kind of knowledge that would be of help to people that. And so some years later when I was 26, I got my first grant to do research on depressed patients. [MUSIC] I have evidence that there are seven emotions that are universal and most scientists who study emotion, agree with me on five of them. I'll give you the five that there's really common agreement about. Anger, fear, disgust, sadness and enjoyment. Now the other two that make up the seven are contempt, in which it's a fearing of moral superiority to another. Contempt is rarely felt towards the self, disgust is often felt towards the self. And the last is surprise. Now surprise, in the words of a colleague of mine, Carl is a way station emotion not an endpoint. You can't be surprised for long [MUSIC] They're two critical things, the easy one and the hard one that can improve your success in dealing with other people and in having some pride in how you behave yourself. The easy one is being able to identify how the other person feels. We've developed some online interactive tools that in less than an hour, really improve people's ability to spot not only the emotions that people want you to know that they feel, but concealed emotions. Sometimes concealed from the self. Now, my old friend Erving Goffman would say that what I'm doing is teaching people how to steal information. When I spot an emotion that you're trying to conceal, I'm taking something from you, so how ideal is it has to be considered. That's skill number two. Skill number one is spotting the emotion. Skill number two, we've also developed an online tool, which we call responding effectively to emotional expressions. In a difficult situation, what's the best way to respond to your emotion? For example, if I tell my adolescent, my daughter is no longer an adolescent, but when she was an adolescent, that since your mother is out of town and I have to have dinner with my boss and the babysitter just called in sick. You can't go bowling with your friends, you've got to babysit your younger sister. Now, many different responses can occur. Whether the offspring shows sadness or anger, for example, how should you respond to that? What we're trying to teach people online, is what to consider in order to have the most constructive response. Those are the easy ones. The hard ones involve self awareness. And you're working against nature to acquire self awareness. It was not something that nature gave to us. It wanted us to solve problems without having to think. But we want to use. We are the only animal we know of that can represent an emotion or not feeling with the word. I can tell you I was afraid yesterday that the elevator wasn't going to work for a few hours. I don't feel afraid now. But I can talk about a fear in the past. I can consider what I'm going to do the next time I get angry. When I get frustrated, so that I don't act unskillfully, so I don't act in a way that blocks further cooperation. So the ability to use words to think about our emotions, to bring our intelligence to bear, enormous capability that is often unused. I know another important feature of emotions and the skills is that if I act in a way that relieves another person's suffering or misery. [MUSIC] It immediately feels good to me. I call that compassionate joy. It's a different emotion. It's one of my 16. It's not just happy, it's a particular type of happy and it's built into us. It feels good. It's an enjoyable feeling. To help others. It's not something we need to learn. [MUSIC]