Paul and Eve Ekman
My father, Paul Ekman, was an awesome and loving dad, husband, and friend — with a huge heart, great humor, and an indelible hunger for life. He overcame profound trauma and loss as a child, experiences that shaped his research on human emotion and echoed through his heart for a lifetime. He was committed to becoming the kind of father he never had. He wasn’t perfect, but he poured himself into being present, curious, loving, and supportive. He became not only a parent to me and my brother, but a true friend and collaborator — someone who showed up in every chapter of my life with fierce loyalty and genuine delight, a real co-conspirator. He taught me so many essential things: how to keep a vulnerable and open heart; how to think rigorously and question assumptions; the imperative of dedicating yourself to work that serves others; how to love music deeply; and, of course, how to parallel park on a steep San Francisco hill. He adored and supported my mother in her own remarkable academic career at UC Berkeley through 41 years of marriage, until her death in 2020. He never stopped feeling dumbfounded with delight that she had taken a chance on him after earlier marriages, and they had an absolute blast of a life together.
The last 25 years of his career were notable not only for their scientific impact, but for what they revealed about the human capacity to change. The 2000 meeting in Dharamsala, India — a gathering of my dad, the Dalai Lama, and a circle of scientists and contemplatives exploring “Destructive Emotions” — completely transformed his understanding of the world and of himself. Many colleagues and friends knew that he had struggled with anger earlier in his life. What fewer people know is how profoundly he shifted afterward. Something in that meeting gave him an unmistakable, embodied sense of what it might feel like to live with less reactivity and anger. He talked about that moment often, always admitting he could never fully explain it.
The Dalai Lama never wanted to be treated as someone special, but hoped the tools of Buddhist practice could help reduce suffering by helping people understand their emotions, find a calm mind, and do the only truly sane thing in an interconnected world: be kind. My father took that to heart. The scientist in him followed that experience — and his desire to help others find similar freedom — with the same curiosity and rigor that defined his entire career.
What emerged from that connection and transformation was not simply a deeper scientific exploration of emotion or compassion. It was a meaningful integration of his decades of research with ancient contemplative traditions he came to respect deeply. I was fortunate to work alongside him through this period and to carry forward those ideas in my own way. My background as a clinical social worker in a level-one trauma center grounded my commitment to helping people not just through science, but in daily, practical ways. I’ve supported and taught Cultivating Emotional Balance — an evidence-based training on emotion and compassion created by my dad and Alan Wallace after that historic 2000 meeting — which has been offered around the world. We later collaborated on the creation of the online Atlas of Emotions, a free tool for building a vocabulary to describe our emotional lives, commissioned by the Dalai Lama in 2016 and soon to be relaunched for its ten-year anniversary. Both projects reflect what my father cared about most in his later years: helping people understand their emotions so they could reduce suffering — for themselves and for others.
For these reasons, it was difficult to see the New York Times obituary frame his work through the lens of “controversy,” particularly by centering a single scientist’s opinion rather than the extensive body of peer-reviewed research that has replicated, expanded, and refined the field he helped establish. Disagreement is part of science — he welcomed it. But presenting his life’s work primarily through one selective critique, instead of the hundreds of studies and dozens of labs that built upon his foundational findings, misrepresents both his scientific contributions and the broader field of emotion research. It also overlooks the simple truth that his work significantly advanced global understanding of human emotion — across psychology, neuroscience, medicine, anthropology, national security, animation, and everyday life.
My father dedicated his life to science in the service of reducing human suffering. He did that not only through meticulous research, but through a sincere desire to help people understand themselves better. He did it by sharing his own vulnerabilities, repairing relationships, and softening over the years into a man who was joyful, open-hearted, and generous. He made deep, meaningful connections right up until the last months of his life.
This is the fuller picture: a scientist of enormous influence, yes, but also a father who rebuilt himself from painful beginnings; a man who changed in profound and visible ways; a collaborator who brought together ancient wisdom and modern science; and a human being who spent his final decades studying, practicing, and truly embodying a life with less anger and more compassion.
He was complicated and imperfect, like all of us. But he was also kind, brave, funny, endlessly curious, and deeply committed to making the world better. That is the story of Paul Ekman that I hope can be held alongside the rest — a story of both scientific impact and personal transformation. Above all, it is a story of a human being who dedicated his life to understanding emotion and expanding compassion, and who never stopped learning how to love well.
Thanks for all the well wishes near and far. It is inspiring to know how much my dad and his work has impacted so many people.
