Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  When a ten-month-old is approached by his or her mother: Davidson and N. A. Fox, “Frontal Brain Asymmetry Predicts Infants’ Response to Maternal Separation,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 98 (1989): 127–31.

  we interviewed middle-aged adults six months after their deceased spouse had passed away: D. Keltner and G. A. Bonanno, “A Study of Laughter and Dissociation: The Distinct Correlates of Laughter and Smiling During Bereavement,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1997): 687–702.

  In Emotions Revealed: Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed (New York: Owl, 2004).

  In the 1980s developmental psychologists: E. Z. Tronick, “Emotions and Emotional Communications in Infants,” American Psychologist 44 (1989): 112–19; Tronick, J. Cohn, and E. Shea, “The Transfer of Affect between Mothers and Infants,” Affective Development in Infancy, ed. T. B. Brazelton and M. W. Yogman (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986); T. Field et al., “Behavior State Matching and Synchrony in Mother-Infant Interactions of Nondepressed Versus Depressed Dyads,” Developmental Psychology 26 (1990): 7–14; Field et al., “Infants of Depressed Mothers Show ‘Depressed’ Behavior Even with Nondepressed Adults,” Child Development 59 (1988): 1569–79.

  Friends of depressives: Connie Hammen and Ian Gotlib have done superb work documenting the social costs of depression, how it transmits to others and turns relationships into more complex, and at times less rewarding, endeavors. One likely reason is that depressives give off fewer positive emotional cues, in such behaviors as the smile, laugh, and playful touch. Ian H. Gotlib and Constance L. Hammen, Psychological Aspects of Depression: Toward a Cognitive-Interpersonal Integration (Chichester: Wiley, 1992).

  In conversations with individuals who show little positive emotion in the face or voice: For a review of these findings, see Keltner and Kring, “Emotion, Social Function, and Psychopathology.”

  will eagerly cross the surface, risking potential harm, to be in the warm, reassuring midst of their mother’s smile: J. F. Sorce, R. N. Emde, Joseph Campos, and M. D. Klinnert, “Maternal Emotional Signaling: Its Effect on the Visual Cliff Behavior of One-Year-Olds,” Developmental Psychiatry 21 (1985): 195–200; M. D. Klinnert, R. N. Emde, P. Butterfield, J. Campos, “Social Referencing: The Infant’s Use of Emotional Signals from a Friendly Adult with Mother Present,” Developmental Psychology 22 (1986): 427–32.

  when people emit D smiles when experiencing stress: B. L. Fredrickson and R. W. Levenson, “Positive Emotions Speed Recovery from the Cardiovascular Sequelae of Negative Emotions,” Cognition and Emotion 12 (1998): 191–220.

  The definitive work on this topic: For a review of this superb work, see U. Dimberg and A. Öhman, “Behold the Wrath: Psychophysiological Responses to Facial Stimuli,” Motivation and Emotion 20 (1996): 149–82.

  suggest that perceiving smiles in others, most likely of the Duchenne variety, triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine: R. Depue and J. Morrone-Strupinsky, “A Neurobehavioral Model of Affiliative Bonding: Implications for Conceptualizing a Human Trait of Affiliation,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 313–95.

  As one illustration: C. Senior, “Beauty in the Brain of the Beholder,” Neuron 38 (2004): 525–28.

  Undaunted, LeeAnne Harker and I took a week to code the yearbook photos: L. A. Harker and D. Keltner, “Expressions of Positive Emotion in Women’s College Yearbook Pictures and their Relationship to Personality and Life Outcomes across Adulthood,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (2001): 112–24.

  Dozens of scientific studies have found that people who are led to experience brief positive emotions are more creative: Research by Alice Isen and Barbara Fredrickson dispels many myths about the thoughtlessness of positive emotion. Instead, the consistent theme to emerge is that positive emotions make our thought processes more creative and sophisticated. Fredrickson, “What Good Are Positive Emotions?” Review of General Psychology 2 (1998): 300–19, and “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,” American Psychologist 56 (2001): 218–26; A. M. Isen, K. A. Daubman, and G. P. Nowicki, “Positive Affect Facilitates Creative Problem Solving,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1987): 1122–31; A. M. Isen, “Positive Affect, Cognitive Processes, and Social Behavior,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1987), 203–53.

  Much has been made of the toxic effects on marriages of negative emotions: For a summary of Gottman and Levenson’s research, see Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

  Here Gottman and colleagues are starting to show: Gottman and R. W. Levenson, “Rebound from Marital Conflict and Divorce Prediction,” Family Processes 38 (1999): 287–92, and “The Timing of Divorce: Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce over a Fourteen-Year Period,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2001): 737–45; Gottman et al., “Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60, no. 1 (1998): 5–22.

  Physical attractiveness has been shown to have a host of benefits: K. K. Dion, E. Berscheid, and E. Walster, “What Is a Beautiful Good,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 285–90.

  For example, Silvan Tomkins: Tomkins, “Affect Theory.”

  For Freud, many pleasurable experiences: Sigmund. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 5, trans. J. Strachey et al., (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975); Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (London: Hogarth Press, 1937).

  Terror management theory, a widely influential theory in social psychology: J. Greenberg et al., “Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effects of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1990): 308–18.

  It is assumed in the study of parent-child attachment: M. Mikulincer and P. R. Shaver, “The Attachment Behavioral System in Adulthood: Activation, Psychodynamics, and Interpersonal Processes,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 35, ed. Mark P. Zanna (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 53–152.

  The Woody Allen hypothesis has deep roots in Judeo-Christian thought about original sin and the fall from grace: One of the best books I’ve read on happiness is historian Darrin McMahin’s broad survey of how the concept and practice of happiness have changed over 2,500 years of Western culture. McMahin, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006).

  This is a standard evolutionary principle: R. J. Andrew, “The Origin and Evolution of the Calls and Facial Expressions of the Primates,” Behavior 20 (1963): 1–109. P. Rozin, “Towards a Psychology of Food and Eating: From Motivation to Module to Model to Marker, Morality, Meaning, and Metaphor,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 5 (1996): 18–24.

  downplay any sudden abundance in resources through modesty and generosity: Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest.

  LAUGHTER

  Jared Diamond argues: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

  It is a point that evolutionists Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson: Gervais and Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter: A Synthetic Approach,” Review of Quarterly Biology 80 (2006): 395–430.

  What separates mammals from reptiles are the raw materials of laughter: MacLean was one of the first to make this point in explaining how mammals’ brains differ from those of reptiles. Paul D. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution (New York: Plenum, 1990).

  Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns: Robert Provine has written a wonderful book on laughter. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking, 2000).

  Boyle’s descriptions: T. C. Boyle, Drop City (New York: Penguin, 2003), various pages.

  Estimates indicate that: Provine, Laughter.

  Laughter is contagious: Robert Provine, “Contagiou
s Laughter: Laughter Is a Sufficient Stimulus for Laughs and Smiles,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 30 (1992): 1–4. Provine also details some wonderful episodes of contagious laughter in Laughter.

  laughter is intertwined with our breathing: Provine was the first to make this point, in Laughter.

  Measures include speech rate, pitch, loudness: Klaus Scherer is to the voice in emotion what Ekman is to the face. He was the first to chart systematically how the different emotions will be expressed in difficult acoustic qualities like pitch, amplitude, and variation. K. R. Scherer, “Vocal Affect Expression: A Review and a Model for Future Research,” Psychological Bulletin 99 (1986): 143–65.

  Bachorowski was the first to put laughs through this complex form of acoustic analysis: Jo-Anne Bachorowski has done for the laugh what Ekman did for the smile—provide an objective, anatomically based rationale for explaining some of the varieties of the laugh. Bachorowski and M. J. Owren, “Not All Laughs Are Alike: Voiced by Not Voiced Laughter Readily Elicits Positive Affect,” Psychological Science 12 (2001): 252–57.

  In his remarkable meditation on laughter: Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Penguin, 1981).

  The laughs of friends, as opposed to those of strangers: Smoski and Bachorowski, “Antiphonal Laughter between Friends and Strangers,” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003): 327–40.

  Here a remarkable discovery: Bachorowski, Smoski, and Owren, “The Acoustic Features of Human Laughter,” Journal of Acoustic Society of America 110 (2001): 1581–97.

  laughter preceded language in human evolution: For analyses of the evolution of laughter, see Provine, Laughter; Gervais and Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter.”

  Recent neuroscientific data on laughter: B. Wild, F. A. Rodden, W. Grodd, and W. Ruch, “Neural Correlates of Laughter and Humor,” Brain 126, no. 10 (2002): 2121–38.

  tension and ambiguity: for an excellent treatment of humor and laughter, see Michael L. Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

  Provine turned his astute ear to the laughter that occurs in the real world: Robert Provine, “Laughter Punctuates Speech: Linguistic, Social, and Gender Contexts of Laughter,” Ethology 95 (1993): 291–98.

  the answer is cooperation: Owren and Bachorowski, “The Evolution of Emotional Expression: A ‘Selfish-Gene’ Account of Smiling and Laughter in Early Hominids and Humans, in Emotions: Current Issues and Future Directions, ed. Tracy J. Mayne and George A. Bonanno (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 151–91.

  The first is contagion: Robert Provine details one of my favorite examples of contagious laughter. In a grammar school, girls in one class started laughing, and this outbreak spread throughout the school. Girls laughed for days until the school had to be closed. Notwithstanding the difficulties this contagious laughter produced for the conduct of class, these girls, Bachorowski and Owren argue, are bonding through the contagious delights of laughter.

  when we hear others laugh, mirror neurons represent that expressive behavior: N. Osaka et al., “An Emotion-Based Facial Expression Word Activates Laughter Module in the Human Brain: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study,” Neuroscience Letters 340, no. 2 (2003): 127–30.

  In my own research with executives: For the past fifteen years, I have videotaped executives from around the world conducting negotiations with other executives, and then coded those videotapes for different emotional displays. As reliable as the handshake to begin the negotiation and dramatic displays of anger and contempt when the tension mounts is the occurrence of laughter in the initial stages. This laughter paves the way for increased trust and more integrative bargaining, where the two parties more effectively understand and act upon their respective interests. M. W. Morris and D. Keltner “How Emotions Work: An Analysis of the Social Functions of Emotional Expression in Negotiations,” Review of Organizational Behavior 22 (2000): 1–50.

  Workplace studies find that coworkers often laugh when negotiating potential conflicts: R. L. Coser, “Laughter among Colleagues,” Human Relations 12 (1960): 171–82.

  Strangers who laugh while flirting: K. Grammer, “Strangers Meet: Laughter and Nonverbal Signs of Interest in Opposite-Sex Encounters,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 14 (1990): 209–36.

  Friends whose laughs join in antiphonal form: Smoski and Bachorowski, “Antiphonal Laughter.”

  For couples who divorced on average 13.9 years after they were married: While much has been made of the toxic effects of negative emotions such as contempt and criticism in marriage, Gottman and Levenson and others have begun to look at the benefits of positive emotions, such as mirth and laughter. In their writing about laughter, Gottman and Levenson suggest that problematic discussions in intimate life are like negative affect cascades—feelings of anger and resentment rise and build upon one another. Couples who can exit from these cascades fare much better, and one manner of exiting is laughter. Gottman and Levenson, “Timing of Divorce.”

  Hobbes: Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 43.

  It is for these reasons that Steve Pinker called: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

  In his analysis of the development of pretense: A. M. Leslie, “Pretense and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind,’” Psychological Review 94, no. 4 (1987): 412–26.

  Linguist Paul Drew carefully analyzed the unfolding of family teasing: P. Drew, “Po-Faced Receipts of Teases,” Linguistics 25 (1987): 219–53.

  For the past fifteen years: G. A. Bonanno and S. Kaltman, “Toward an Integrative Perspective on Bereavement,” Psychological Bulletin 125 (1999): 760–76.

  To test this thesis, George and I undertook a study: G. A. Bonanno and D. Keltner, “Facial Expressions of Emotion and the Course of Conjugal Bereavement,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 106 (1997): 126–37.

  We coded participants’ references to several existential themes related to bereavement: G. A. Bonanno and D. Keltner, “The Coherence of Emotion Systems: Comparing ‘On-Line’ Measures of Appraisal and Facial Expressions, and Self-Report,” Cognition and Emotion 18 (2004): 431–44.

  TEASE

  Not so, reason: The Zahavis make a wonderful case for the role of provocation in animal world. They suggest that, as with humans, nonhuman species often need to assess each other’s commitments, and they do so through provocation. This analysis is very much in keeping with Robert Frank’s analysis of the importance of emotion in motivating commitments, and was central to how members of my lab thought about the functions of teasing in human social life. A. Zahavi and A. Zahavi, The Handicap Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  Chimpanzees dangle their tails: O. Adang, “Harassment of Mature Female Chimpanzees by Young Males in the Mahale Mountains,” International Journal of Primatology 24 (2003): 503–14.

  Adults will play hide the face: Bambi B. Schieffelin, The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  Teenage girls and boys resort to hostile nicknames and outlandishly gendered imitations: Barrie Thorne, Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); D. Eder, “The Role of Teasing in Adolescent Peer Group Culture,” Sociological Studies of Child Development 4 (1991): 181–97, and “‘Go Get Ya a French!’: Romantic and Sexual Teasing Among Adolescent Girls,” Gender and Conversational Interaction: Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics, ed. Deborah Tannen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 17–31.

  Teasing has long occupied a problematic place in Western culture: For such an analysis, see Keltner et al., “Just Teasing: A Conceptual Analysis and Empirical Review,” Psychological Bulletin 127 (2001): 229–48. The same ambivalence is evident in Western culture’s stances toward two close relatives of teasing, satire and irony. For excellent cultural, historical analyses of satire and irony and their shifting prominence in Western culture, se
e Duncan Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), and Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1995).

  the most sterling of reputations: Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 7.

  issued a clarion call: Jedidiah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (New York: Random House, 2000).

  On January, 19, 1449, the Scots passed: For an outstanding history of the fool, and the surprising power that fools have enjoyed until recently, see Bernice K. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

  The prominence of the jester and fool: For an excellent anthropological history of the fool, see Apte, Humor and Laughter.

  The scientific study of teasing was hampered by poorly specified definitions: Keltner et al., “Just Teasing.”

  In terms more felicitous to scientific inquiry: Ibid.

  philosopher Paul Grice outlined four principles of communication: H. P. Grice, Logic and Conversation (New York: Academic Press, 1975).

  The relevance of Grice’s maxims to teasing, ironically enough: Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  that act is fraught with potential conflict: Brown and Levinson drew heavily upon the brilliant insights of Erving Goffman. Goffman offered a strategic or dramaturgic account of human social life, arguing that many of the rituals and practices of social life are organized to protect our sense of social esteem, or what he called “face.” Goffman is required reading to understand the universal tendencies toward politeness, modesty, and deference. He reveals the profound degree of cooperation in our public life. See The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1966), and Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Doubleday, 1967).