The action of crying consists of muscular tension accompanied by a reddening of the head, watering of the eyes, opening of the mouth, pulling back of the lips, exaggerated breathing with intense expirations and, of course, the high-pitched rasping vocalizations. With older infants it also includes running to the parent and clinging.
I have described this pattern in some detail, despite its familiarity, because it is from this that our specialized signals of laughing and smiling have evolved. When someone says ‘they laughed until they cried’, he is commenting on this relationship, but in evolutionary terms it is the other way round – we cried until we laughed. How did this come about? To start with, it is important to realize how similar crying and laughing are, as response patterns. Their moods are so different that we tend to overlook this. Like crying, laughing involves muscular tension, opening of the mouth, pulling back of the lips, and exaggerated breathing with intense expirations. At high intensities it also includes reddening of the face and watering of the eyes. But the vocalizations are less rasping and not so high-pitched. Above all, they are shorter and follow one another more rapidly. It is as though the long wail of the crying infant has become segmented, chopped up into little pieces, and at the same time has grown smoother and lower.
It appears that the laughing reaction evolved out of the crying one, as a secondary signal, in the following way. I said earlier that crying is present at birth, but laughing does not appear until the third or fourth month. Its arrival coincides with the development of parental recognition. It may be a wise child that knows its own father, but it is a laughing child that knows its own mother. Before it has learnt to identify its mother’s face and to distinguish her from other adults, a baby may gurgle and burble, but it does not laugh. What happens when it starts to single out its own mother is that it also begins to grow afraid of other, strange adults. At two months any old face will do, all friendly adults are welcome. But now its fears of the world around it are beginning to mature and anyone unfamiliar is liable to upset it and start it crying. (Later on it will soon learn that certain other adults can also be rewarding and will lose its fear of them, but this is then done selectively on the basis of personal recognition.) As a result of this process of becoming imprinted on the mother, the infant may find itself placed in a strange conflict. If the mother does something that startles it, she gives it two sets of opposing signals. One set says, ‘I am your mother – your personal protector; there is nothing to fear,’ and the other set says, ‘Look out, there’s something frightening here.’ This conflict could not arise before the mother was known as an individual, because if she had then done something startling, she would simply be the source of a frightening stimulus at that moment and nothing more. But now she can give the double signal: ‘There’s danger but there’s no danger.’ Or, to put it another way: ‘There may appear to be danger, but because it is coming from me, you do not need to take it seriously.’ The outcome of this is that the child gives a response that is half a crying reaction and half a parental-recognition gurgle. The magic combination produces a laugh. (Or, rather, it did, way back in evolution. It has since become fixed and fully developed as a separate, distinct response in its own right.)
So the laugh says, ‘I recognize that a danger is not real,’ and it conveys this message to the mother. The mother can now play with the baby quite vigorously without making it cry. The earliest causes of laughter in infants are parental games of ‘peek-a-boo’, hand-clapping, rhythmical knee-dropping, and lifting high. Later, tickling plays a major role, but not until after the sixth month. These are all shock stimuli, but performed by the ‘safe’ protector. Children soon learn to provoke them – by play-hiding, for example, so that they will experience the ‘shock’ of discovery, or play-fleeing so that they will be caught.
Laughter therefore becomes a play signal, a sign that the increasingly dramatic inter-actions between the child and the parent can continue and develop. If they become too frightening or painful, then, of course, the reaction can switch over into crying and immediately re-stimulate the protective response. This system enables the child to expand its exploration of its bodily capacities and the physical properties of the world around it.
Other animals also have special play signals, but compared with ours they are unimpressive. The chimpanzee, for instance, has a characteristic play-face, and a soft play-grunt which is the equivalent of our laughter. In origin these signals have the same kind of ambivalence. When greeting, a young chimpanzee protrudes its lips far forward, stretching them to the limit. When frightened, it retracts them, opening its mouth and exposing the teeth. The play-face, being motivated by both feelings of friendly greeting and fear, is a mixture of the two. The jaws open wide, as in fear, but the lips are pulled forward and keep the teeth covered. The soft grunt is halfway between the ‘oo-oo-oo’ greeting sound and the scream of fear. If play becomes too rough, the lips pull back and the grunt becomes a short, sharp scream. If it becomes too calm, the jaws close and the lips pull forward into the friendly chimpanzee pout. Basically the situation is the same, then, but the soft play-grunt is a puny signal when compared with our own vigorous, full-blooded laughter. As chimpanzees grow, the significance of the play signal dwindles even more, whereas ours expands and acquires still greater importance in everyday life. The naked ape, even as an adult, is a playful ape. It is all part of his exploratory nature. He is constantly pushing things to their limit, trying to startle himself, to shock himself without getting hurt, and then signalling his relief with peals of infectious laughter.
Laughing at someone can also, of course, become a potent social weapon among older children and adults. It is doubly insulting because it indicates that he is both frighteningly odd and at the same time not worth taking seriously. The professional comedian deliberately adopts this social role and is paid large sums of money by audiences who enjoy the reassurance of checking their group normality against his assumed abnormality.
The response of teenagers to their idols is relevant here. As an audience, they enjoy themselves, not by screaming with laughter, but screaming with screams. They not only scream, they also grip their own and one another’s bodies, they writhe, they moan, they cover their faces and they pull at their hair. These are all the classic signs of intense pain or fear, but they have become deliberately stylized. Their thresholds have been artificially lowered. They are no longer cries for help, but signals to one another in the audience that they are capable of feeling an emotional response to the sexual idols which is so powerful that, like all stimuli of unbearably high intensity, they pass into the realm of pure pain. If a teenage girl found herself suddenly alone in the presence of one of her idols, it would never occur to her to scream at him. The screams were not meant for him, they were meant for the other girls in the audience. In this way young girls can reassure one another of their developing emotional responsiveness.
Before leaving the subject of tears and laughter there is one further mystery to be cleared up. Some mothers suffer agony from incessantly crying babies during the first three months of life. Nothing the parents do seems to stem the flood. They usually conclude that there is something radically, physically wrong with the infants and try to treat them accordingly. They are right, of course, there is something physically wrong; but it is probably effect rather than cause. The vital clue comes with the fact that this so-called ‘colic’ crying ceases, as if by magic, around the third or fourth month of life. It vanishes at just the point where the baby is beginning to be able to identify its mother as a known individual. A comparison of the parental behaviour of mothers with cry-babies and those with quieter infants gives the answer. The former are tentative, nervous and anxious in their dealings with their offspring. The latter are deliberate, calm and serene. The point is that even at this tender age, the baby is acutely aware of differences in tactile ‘security’ and ‘safety’, on the one hand, and tactile ‘insecurity’ and ‘alarm’ on the other. An agitated mother cannot avoid signall
ing her agitation to her newborn infant. It signals back to her in the appropriate manner, demanding protection from the cause of the agitation. This only serves to increase the mother’s distress, which in turn increases the baby’s crying. Eventually the wretched infant cries itself sick and its physical pains are then added to the sum total of its already considerable misery. All that is necessary to break the vicious circle is for the mother to accept the situation and become calm herself. Even if she cannot manage this (and it is almost impossible to fool a baby on this score) the problem corrects itself, as I said, in the third or fourth month of life, because at that stage the baby becomes imprinted on the mother and instinctively begins to respond to her as the ‘protector’. She is no longer a disembodied series of agitating stimuli, but a familiar face. If she continues to give agitating stimuli, they are no longer so alarming because they are coming from a known source with a friendly identity. The baby’s growing bond with its parent then calms the mother and automatically reduces her anxiety. The ‘colic’ disappears.
Up to this point I have omitted the question of smiling because it is an even more specialized response than laughing Just as laughing is a secondary form of crying, so smiling is a secondary form of laughing. At first sight it may indeed appear to be no more than a low-intensity version of laughing, but it is not as simple as that. It is true that in its mildest form a laugh is indistinguishable from a smile, and this is no doubt how smiling originated, but it is quite clear that during the course of evolution smiling has become emancipated and must now be considered as a separate entity. High-intensity smiling – the giving of a broad grin, a beaming smile – is completely different in function from high-intensity laughing. It has become specialized as a species greeting signal. If we greet someone by smiling at them, they know we are friendly, but if we greet them by laughing at them, they may have reason to doubt it.
Any social contact is at best mildly fear-provoking. The behaviour of the other individual at the moment of meeting is an unknown quantity. Both the smile and the laugh indicate the existence of this fear and its combination with feelings of attraction and acceptance. But when the laugh develops into high intensity, it signals the readiness for further ‘startlement’ for further exploitation of the danger-with-safety situation. If, on the other hand, the smiling expression of the low-level laugh grows instead into something else – into a broad grin – it signals that the situation is not to be extended in that way. It indicates simply that the initial mood is an end in itself, without any vigorous elaborations. Mutual smiling reassures the smilers that they are both in a slightly apprehensive, but reciprocally attracted, state of mind. Being slightly fearful means being non-aggressive and being non-aggressive means being friendly, and in this way the smile evolves as a friendly attraction device.
Why, if we have needed this signal, have other primates managed without it? They do, it is true, have friendly gestures of various kinds, but the smile for us is an additional one, and one of tremendous importance in our daily lives, both as infants and as adults. What is it about our own pattern of existence that has brought it so much to the forefront? The answer, it would seem, lies in our famous naked skins. When a young monkey is born it clings tightly to its mother’s fur. There it stays, hour in and hour out, day after day. For weeks, or even months, it never leaves the snug protection of its mother’s body. Later, when it is venturing away from her for the first time, it can run back to her at a moment’s notice and cling on again in an instant. It has its own positive way of ensuring close physical contact. Even if the mother does not welcome this contact (as the infant grows older and heavier), she will have a hard time rejecting it. Anyone who has ever had to act as a foster-mother for a young chimpanzee can testify to this.
When we are born we are in a much more hazardous position. Not only are we too weak to cling, but there is nothing to cling to. Robbed of any mechanical means of ensuring close proximity with our mothers, we must rely entirely on maternally stimulating signals. We can scream our heads off to summon parental attention, but having got it we must do something more to maintain it. A young chimpanzee screams for attention just as we do. The mother rushes over and grabs it up. Instantly the baby is clinging again. This is the moment at which we need a clinging-substitute, some kind of signal that will reward the mother and make her want to stay on with us. The signal we use is the smile.
Smiling begins during the first few weeks of life, but to start with it is not directed at anything in particular. By about the fifth week it is being given as a definite reaction to certain stimuli. The baby’s eyes can now fixate objects. At first it is most responsive to a pair of eyes staring at it. Even two black spots on a piece of card will do. As the weeks pass, a mouth also becomes necessary. Two black spots with a mouth-line below them are now more efficient at inciting the response. Soon a widening of the mouth becomes vital, and then the eyes begin to lose their significance as key stimuli. At this stage, around three to four months, the response starts to become more specific. It is narrowed down from any old face to the particular face of the mother. Parental imprinting is taking place.
The astonishing thing about the growth of this reaction is that, at the time when it is developing, the infant is hopeless at discriminating between such things as squares and triangles, or other sharp geometrical shapes. It seems as if there is a special advance in the maturing of the ability to recognize certain rather limited kinds of shapes – those related to human features – while other visual abilities lag behind. This ensures that the infant’s vision is going to dwell on the right kind of object. It will avoid becoming imprinted on some near-by inanimate shape.
By the age of seven months the infant is completely imprinted on its mother. Whatever she does now, she will retain her mother-image for her offspring for the rest of its life. Young ducklings achieve this by the act of following the mother, young apes by clinging to her. We develop the vital bond of attachment via the smiling response.
As a visual stimulus the smile has attained its unique configuration principally by the simple act of turning up the mouth-corners. The mouth is opened to some extent and the lips pulled back, as in the face of fear, but by the addition of the curling up of the corners the character of the expression is radically changed. This development has in turn led to the possibility of another and contrasting facial posture – that of the down-turned mouth. By adopting a mouth-line that is the complete opposite of the smile shape, it is possible to signal an anti-smile. Just as laughing evolved out of crying and smiling out of laughing, so the unfriendly face has evolved, by a pendulum swing, from the friendly face.
But there is more to smiling than a mouth-line. As adults we may be able to convey our mood by a mere twist of the lips, but the infant throws much more into the battle. When smiling at full intensity, it also kicks and waves its arms about, stretches its hands out towards the stimulus and moves them about, produces babbling vocalizations, tilts back its head and protrudes its chin, leans its trunk forward or rolls it to one side, and exaggerates its respiration. Its eyes become brighter and may close slightly; wrinkles appear underneath or alongside the eyes and sometimes also on the bridge of the nose; the skin-fold between the sides of the nose and the sides of the mouth becomes more accentuated, and the tongue may be slightly protruded. Of these various elements the body movements seem to indicate a struggle on the infant’s part to make contact with the mother. With its clumsy physique, the baby is probably showing us all that remains of the ancestral primate clinging response.
I have been dwelling on the baby’s smile, but smiling is, of course, a two-way signal. When the infant smiles at its mother she responds with a similar signal. Each rewards the other and the bond between them tightens in both directions. You may feel that this is an obvious statement, but there can be a catch in it. Some mothers, when feeling agitated, anxious, or cross with the child, try to conceal their mood by forcing a smile. They hope that the counterfeit face will avoid upsetting the infant
, but in reality this trick may do more harm than good. I mentioned earlier that it is almost impossible to fool a baby over questions of maternal mood. In the early years of life we seem to be acutely responsive to subtle signs of parental agitation and parental calm. At the pre-verbal stages, before the massive machinery of symbolic, cultural communication has bogged us down, we rely much more on tiny movements, postural changes and tones of voice than we need to in later life. Other species are particularly good at this, too. The astonishing ability of ‘Clever Hans’, the famous counting horse, was in fact based on its acuteness in responding to minute postural changes in his trainer. When asked to do a sum, Hans would tap his foot the appropriate number of times and then stop. Even if the trainer left the room and someone else took over, it still worked, because as the vital number of taps was reached, the stranger could not help tensing his body slightly. We all have this ability ourselves, even as adults (it is used a great deal by fortune-tellers to judge when they are on the right lines), but in pre-verbal infants it appears to be especially active. If the mother is making tense and agitated movements, no matter how concealed, she will communicate these to her child. If at the same time she gives a strong smile, it does not fool the infant, it only confuses it. Two conflicting messages are being transmitted. If this is done a great deal it may be permanently damaging and cause the child serious difficulties when making social contacts and adjustments later in life.
The Naked Ape Page 12
