ZIEL - Details

ZIEL’s scientific research: Under the coordination of Prof. Dr. Willibald Ruch the ZIEL team is dedicated to the use of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Ekman, Friesen & Hager, 2002). FACS enables the objective and reliable measurement of facial action units or events that combined relate to facial expression, which can assess all kinds of facial changes, emotion relevant, as well as actions that are emotionally irrelevant but equally important.

ZIEL is inspired by the work of Paul Ekman, now professor emeritus at the University of California at San Francisco. Paul Ekman is listed among the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century and he is one of the creators of FACS.

ZIEL’s FACS training: The ZIEL team offers training that can be targeted to specific research and applied or commercial needs.

ZIEL’s comprehensive training packages are for those who would like to use FACS in their research projects and who require the knowledge to undertake the FACS final test.

Two-day (16-hour) comprehensive training:

This course is only offered to those with some own reading and prior knowledge of FACS techniques. The course provides a full overview of all action units, practice coding and full feedback with discussion on different action unit combinations and subtle differences. The emphasis of this course is to train the identification of full action events that will assist in the FFT.

Five-day (40-hour) comprehensive training:

This course is offered to those with only the reading of the first two chapters of the FACS manual. Each action unit, as well as the subtle differences required to identify each component of an action event will be reviewed. This is a very intensive training with practice coding homework to be done each night. At the end of the

ZIEL’s selected training packages are designed specifically to the audience, showing how FACS can be used anywhere that understanding the emotional reactions of others is interesting or advantageous. This training can range from many applied areas such as marketing, negotiation, communications, and can be from a one-hour talk given by one of the ZIEL team, to full training days designed around your own area of interes

ZIEL’s internship training packages range from 6-weeks upwards, depending on your needs and time available. In the internship you will be trained in all aspects of FACS from learning each action unit, taking the FFT and applying that knowledge to ongoing studies. Interns learn how to film, edit and store films. Training in the Noldus Observer software will also be given. The outcome of the internship will be that you will have the knowledge of how to conduct your own FACS study, prepare and code data and extract variables for use.

ZIEL’s link to the Human Interaction Lab, San Francisco:

Ekman’s Human Interaction Laboratory (HIL) at Parnassus Ave was the home-place of many important discoveries, from the development of FACS and the existence of global emotion signals found by researching indigenous people of Papua New Guinea, to the re-confirmation of the smile that is connected to felt emotion of joy, the Duchenne Display so named after a French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne who introduced it into the scientific literature in 1863. Ekman’s lab was also responsible for identifying facial signs for lying or micro-expressions and furthering our knowledge of emotions and emotional expression.

Willibald Ruch spent time visiting Paul Ekman in 1998 in the Human Interaction Laboratory during a Heisenberg-Fellowship