John Gottman, whose research on marriage I wrote about in chapter 1, has collaborated with Ekman for years and uses the principles of FACS in analyzing the emotional states of couples. Other researchers have employed Ekman’s system to study everything from schizophrenia to heart disease; it has even been put to use by computer animators at Pixar (Toy Story) and DreamWorks (Shrek). FACS takes weeks to master in its entirety, and only five hundred people around the world have been certified to use it in research. But those who have mastered it gain an extraordinary level of insight into the
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