This reflexive imitation opens us to subtle emotional influences from those around us, adding one lane in what amounts to a brain-to-brain bridge between people. Particularly sensitive people pick up this contagion more readily than most, though the impervious may sail through even the most toxic encounter. In either case, this transaction usually goes on undetected.
We mimic the happiness of a smiling face, pulling our own facial muscles into a subtle grin, even though we may be unaware that we have seen the smile. That mimicked slight smile might not be obvious to the naked eye, but scientists monitoring facial muscles track such emotional mirroring clearly.15 It’s as though our face were being preset, getting ready to display the full emotion.
This mimicry has a bit of biological consequence, since our facial expressions trigger within us the feelings we display. We can stir any emotion by intentionally setting our facial muscles for that feeling: just clench a pencil in your teeth, and you will force your face into a smile, which subtly evokes a positive feeling.
Edgar Allan Poe had an intuitive grasp of this principle. He wrote: “When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.”16
CATCHING EMOTIONS
The scene: Paris, 1895. A handful of adventurous souls have ventured into an exhibition by the Lumière brothers, pioneers in photography. For the first time in history, the brothers are presenting to the public a “moving picture,” a short film depicting—in utter silence—a train chugging into a station, spewing steam and charging toward the camera.
The audience’s reaction: they scream in terror and duck under their seats.
People had never before seen pictures move. This utterly naïve audience could not help but register as “real” the eerie specter on the screen. The most magical, powerful event in film history may well have been these very first moments in Paris, because the realization that what the eye saw was merely an illusion had not registered with any of the viewers. So far as they—and their brain’s perceptual system—were concerned, the images on the screen were reality.
As one movie critic points out, “The dominating impression that this is real is a large part of the primitive power of the art form,” even today.17 That sense of reality continues to ensnare filmgoers because the brain responds to the illusion created by the film with the same circuitry as it does to life itself. Even onscreen emotions are contagious.
Some of the neural mechanisms involved in this screen-to-viewer contagion were identified by an Israeli research team, who showed clips from the 1970s spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly to volunteers in an fMRI. In what may be the only article in the annals of neuroscience to acknowledge the help of Clint Eastwood, the researchers came to the conclusion that the movie played the viewers’ brains like a neural puppeteer.18
Just as with those panicked filmgoers in 1895 Paris, the brains of the viewers in this study were acting as though the imaginary story on the screen were happening to them. When the camera swooped in for a close-up of a face, the face-recognition areas in the viewers’ brains lit up. When the screen showed a building or a vista, a different visual area that takes in our physical surroundings activated.
When the scene depicted some delicate hand movements, the brain region governing touch and movement engaged. And at scenes with maximal excitement—gunshots, explosions, surprising plot twists—the emotional centers roared into action. In short, the movies we watch commandeer our brain.
Members of an audience share this neural puppetry. Whatever happened in one viewer’s brain occurred in lockstep in the others, moment by moment throughout the film. The action onscreen choreographed the identical inner dance in everyone watching.
As a maxim in social science holds, “A thing is real if it is real in its consequences.” When the brain reacts to imagined scenarios the same way it reacts to real ones, the imaginary has biological consequences. The low road takes us along for the emotional ride.
The one major exception to this puppetry is the high-road prefrontal areas, which house the brain’s executive centers and facilitate critical thinking (including the thought This is just a movie) and which did not join in this coordination. And so today we do not run in panic as an onscreen train roars toward us, despite the fear we feel welling up inside.
The more salient or striking an event, the more attention the brain deploys.19 Two factors that amplify the brain’s response to any virtual reality, such as a movie, are perceptual “loudness” and emotionally strong moments, like screaming or crying. Small wonder so many movies feature scenes of mayhem—they dazzle the brain. And the very immensity of the screen—creating monstrously huge people to watch—in itself registers as sensory loudness.20
Yet moods are so contagious that we can catch a whiff of emotion from something as fleeting as a glimpse of a smile or frown, or as dry as the reading of a passage of philosophy.
RADAR FOR INSINCERITY
Two women, complete strangers, had just watched a harrowing documentary, a film of the poignant human aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Both women felt deeply disturbed by what they had seen, a mix of disgust, anger, and sadness welling up inside.
But when they started talking about how they felt, something strange happened. One of the women was utterly frank about her feelings of upset, while the other suppressed her emotions, feigning indifference. Indeed, it seemed to the first woman that the second woman, strangely, had no emotional reaction at all; if anything, she seemed somewhat distracted and removed.
That was exactly how the conversation was meant to go: both women were volunteers in an experiment at Stanford University on the social consequences of emotional suppression; one woman had been instructed to hide her true feelings.21 Understandably, the emotionally open one felt “off” with her partner as they talked—indeed, she had the sense that this was someone she would not want as a friend.
The one who suppressed her true feelings felt tense and ill at ease in the conversation, distracted and preoccupied. Tellingly, her blood pressure rose steadily as the conversation went on. Suppressing such disturbing feelings takes a physiological toll; her heightened blood pressure reflected this emotional effort.
But here’s the big surprise: the woman who was open and honest exhibited the same steady rise in blood pressure as the one suppressing her feelings. The tension was not just palpable but contagious.
Forthrightness is the brain’s default response: our neural wiring transmits our every minor mood onto the muscles of our face, making our feelings instantly visible. The display of emotion is automatic and unconscious, and so its suppression demands conscious effort. Being devious about what we feel—trying to hide our fear or anger—demands active effort and rarely succeeds perfectly.22
A friend told me, for instance, that she “just knew” the first time they talked that she should not have trusted a man who sublet her condominium. And sure enough, the week she was to move back in, he told her he refused to move out. Meanwhile, she had no place to go herself. She faced a thicket of regulations protecting renters’ rights that meant she would be homeless while her lawyer fought to get her back into her own condo.
She had met the man just once, when he came to look at her condo. “There was just something about him that told me he was going to be a problem,” she later lamented.
The “something about him” reflects the workings of specific high-and-low-road circuitry that serves as our early warning system for insincerity. This circuitry, specialized for suspicion, differs from that for empathy and rapport. Its existence suggests the importance of detecting duplicity in human affairs. Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for hum
an survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation.
The specific neural radar involved was revealed in a study where volunteers’ brain images were taken as they watched any of several actors tell a tragic story. A strong difference emerged in the particular neural regions activated, depending on the facial expression of the actor doing the telling. If the face of the actor showed an appropriate sadness, the listener’s amygdala and related circuits for sadness activated.
But if the actor’s face was smiling during the sad tale—an emotional mismatch—the listener’s brain activated a site specializing in vigilance for social threats or conflicting information. In that case the listeners actively disliked the person telling the story.23
The amygdala automatically and compulsively scans everyone we encounter for whether they are to be trusted: Is it safe to approach this guy? Is he dangerous? Can I count on him or not? Neurological patients who have extensive amygdala damage are unable to make judgments of how trustworthy someone might be. When shown a photo of a man who ordinary people find highly suspicious, these patients rate him on a par with the man others rated most deserving of their trust.24
Our warning system for whether we can trust someone has two branches, high and low.25 The high road operates when we intentionally make a judgment of whether someone might be trustworthy. But a continual amygdala-driven appraisal goes on outside our awareness, regardless of whether we consciously think about the issue. The low road labors to keep us safe.
A CASANOVA’S DOWNFALL
Giovanni Vigliotto was remarkably successful as a Don Juan; his charm brought him romantic conquests one after another. Well, not exactly one after another: actually, he was married to several women at the same time.
No one knows with certainty how many times Vigliotto wed. But he may have married one hundred women over the course of his romantic career—and it did seem to be a career. Vigliotto made a living by marrying wealthy women.
That career crash-landed when Patricia Gardner, one of his would-be conquests, took him to court for bigamy.
Just what made so many women swoon for Vigliotto was hinted at during his trial. Gardner admitted that one of the things that attracted her to the charming bigamist was what she called “that honest trait”: he looked her directly in the eyes, smiling, even as he lied through his teeth.26
Like Gardner, experts on emotion read much into a person’s gaze. Ordinarily, they tell us, we avert our eyes downward with sadness, away with disgust, and down or away while feeling guilt or shame. Most people sense this intuitively, and so folk wisdom advises us to check if someone “looks us in the eye” as a gauge of whether he might be lying.
Vigliotto, like many a con artist, apparently knew this all too well and was skillful enough to offer a seemingly sincere locking of eyes with his romantic victims.
He was on to something—but perhaps it was more about rapport-building than lying. That believe-what-I’m-saying eyelock actually reveals little about whether someone is telling us the truth, according to Paul Ekman, a world-class expert on detecting lies from a person’s demeanor.
In his years of studying how we express emotions in our facial muscles, Ekman became fascinated by the ways we can detect lies. His keen eye for facial subtleties detected discrepancies between the mask of a person’s faked emotions and leakage of what they actually felt.27
The act of lying demands conscious, intentional activity in the high road, which handles the executive control systems that keep our words and deeds smoothly on track. As Ekman points out, liars pay most attention to their choice of words, censoring what they say, and less to their choice of facial expression.
Such suppression of the truth takes both mental effort and time. When a person tells a lie in answering a question, he begins his response about two-tenths of a second later than does a person telling the truth. That gap signifies an effort to compose the lie well and to manage the emotional and physical channels through which truth might inadvertently leak.28
Successful lying takes concentration. The high road is the site for this mental effort, but attention is a limited capacity, and telling a lie demands an extra dose. This extra allocation of neural resources leaves the prefrontal area less wherewithal to perform another task: inhibiting involuntary displays of emotion that might betray that lie.
Words alone may betray a lie. But more often than not the clue that someone may be misleading us will be a discrepancy between their words and their facial expression, as when someone assures us they “feel great” yet a quaver in their voice reveals angst.
“There is no surefire lie detector,” Ekman told me. “But you can detect hot spots”—points where a person’s emotions don’t fit the words. These signs of extra mental effort call out for examination: the reasons for the glitch can range from simple nervousness to bald-faced lying.
The facial muscles are controlled by the low road, the choice to lie by the high road; in an emotional lie, the face belies what’s said. The high road conceals, the low road reveals.
Low-road circuits offer multiple lanes in the silent bridge that connects us, brain to brain. These circuits help us navigate the shoals of our relationships, detecting who to trust or avoid—or spreading good feeling infectiously.
LOVE, POWER, AND EMPATHY
In the interpersonal flow of emotion, power matters. It happens in couples. One partner will make a larger emotional shift to converge with the other: the partner who has less power.29 Gauging relative power within a couple raises complex issues. But in a romantic relationship “power” can be roughly assessed in practical terms like which partner has more influence on how the other feels about him- or herself, or which has more say in making joint decisions on matters like finances, or in making choices about the details of everyday life, like whether to go to a party.
To be sure, couples tacitly negotiate which partner will have more power in what domain; one may be dominant in finances, and the other in social scheduling. In the realm of emotions, however, the less powerful partner all in all makes the greater internal adjustments in their emotional convergence.
Such adjustments can be better sensed if one partner in a duo intentionally takes a neutral emotional stance, as is the case in psychotherapy. Since Freud’s time psychotherapists have noticed that their own body mirrors emotions their clients are feeling. If a client cries over a painful recollection, the therapist will feel tears well up; if she is terrified by a traumatic memory, feelings of fear will stir in the pit of the therapist’s stomach.
Freud pointed out that attuning themselves to their own body gives psychoanalysts a window into their clients’ emotional world. While most anyone can detect emotions that are openly expressed, great psychotherapists go a step further, picking up emotional undertones from patients who have not even allowed these feelings into their own consciousness.30
Not until almost a century after Freud first noted these subtle shared sensations did researchers develop a sound method for tracking such simultaneous changes in two people’s physiology during an ordinary conversation.31 The breakthrough came with new statistical methods and computing power that allowed scientists to analyze an immense number of data points, from heart rate and the like, during a live interaction.
These studies revealed, for instance, that when a married couple argues, each partner’s body tends to mimic the disturbances in the other. As the conflict progresses, they drive each other into escalating states of anger, hurt, and sadness (a scientific finding that will surprise no one).
More interesting was what the marital researchers did next: they videotaped couples having arguments, then invited total strangers to watch these tapes and guess which emotions one of the partners was feeling as the argument went on.32 As these volunteers made their guesses, their own physiology tracked those they were watching.
The more strongly a stranger’s body mimicked that of the person she watched, the more accurate was her sense of what that person felt—an effect most marked fo
r negative emotions like anger. Empathy—sensing another’s emotions—seems to be as physiological as it is mental, built on sharing the inner state of the other person. This biological dance occurs when anyone empathizes with someone else—the empathizer subtly shares the physiological state of the person with whom she attunes.
People whose own faces showed the strongest expressions were the most accurate at judging the feelings of others. The general principle: the more similar the physiological state of two people at a given moment, the more easily they can sense each other’s feelings.
When we attune ourselves to someone, we can’t help but feel along with them, if only subtly. We resonate so similarly that their emotions enter us—even when we don’t want them to.
In short, the emotions we catch have consequences. And that gives us a good reason to understand how to shift them for the better.
2
A Recipe for Rapport
A psychotherapy session is well under way. The psychiatrist sits in a wooden armchair, stiffly formal in manner. His patient slumps on a leather couch, her very air one of defeat. They are not on the same wavelength.
The psychiatrist has made a therapeutic gaffe, an off-kilter interpretation of what the patient has just said. He offers an apology: “I was concerned I was doing something disruptive to the treatment.”
“No—” the patient begins.
The therapist cuts her off and makes another interpretation.
The patient starts to reply, and the therapist just talks over her.
Finally able to get a word in, the patient starts complaining about all she had to put up with over the years from her mother—a backhanded comment on what the therapist has just been doing.
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 3
