Professional Erika
Erika Rosenberg, Ph.D. is a world-renowned expert in facial expression, who trains and consults on facial measurement using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) with academic, corporate, digital arts, and entertainment industry clients worldwide. She is the protégé of Paul Ekman, senior author of FACS, and has published widely on this measurement system, including educational materials and original scientific research, and currently is revising the official FACS manual. Dr. Rosenberg is Chief Scientific Officer at Humain, Ltd., a company that create digital humans, fantasy creatures and digital doubles for many of the top entertainment and technology companies around the world.
Dr. Rosenberg is also Founding Faculty at the Compassion Institute, a non-profit devoted to promoting compassion education worldwide. She co-authored the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) program with Thupten Jinpa and others in 2009 at Stanford University. In 2010 she presented the CCT program to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Dr. Rosenberg is Faculty at The Nyingma Institute in Berkeley and has offered meditation trainings in such diverse international venues such as: Lerab Ling Monastery, Upaya Zen Center, The Telluride Institute, and Burning Man.
Erika is co-author of the McGraw-Hill textbook, Psychology: Perspectives and Connections (5e is in press), Fundamentals of Psychology: Perspectives and Connections (1e), and What the Face Reveals (with Paul Ekman), now in press in it’s 3rd edition, and numerous scientific articles and chapters on FACS, facial expression, emotion, and meditation.
My journey
I started manipulating my facial expressions regularly at the age of two, though I did not pursue specialized skills in facial measurement for another 20 years or so.
Following a brief, misguided sojourn into journalism, I succumbed to my natural attraction toward psychology by my second semester in college. I did not want to be a therapist (I was busy enough as a favorite counselor for family and friends!), but instead wanted to understand how behavior worked and, more importantly, how states of mind and body interacted.
So I made a commitment to studying the relationship between behavior and physiology, first in Neuroscience and then finally in Health Psychology. My own experiences of getting sick during times of high stress (I will spare you the details) led me to pursue a Ph.D. in Health Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. There I met Paul Ekman, who drew me into the vortex of high-end affective science and detailed study of facial expression. My dissertation work on anger and heart disease brought the equation full circle — right back to the question of emotions and physical health.
To cope with stress of graduate school, I took up meditation. This led to a lifelong path of studying, practicing and teaching meditation, which later intersected with my research. I now occupy a unique niche at the interface of science and meditation, as a world-renowned expert in facial expressions of emotion, a scientist who studies emotions and meditation, and a meditation teacher who regularly includes science in my teachings.