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Decoding Emotions

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There are two distinct perspectives on the nature of emotions. One view is that they are universal—and universally recognizable—responses that are automatically triggered by events and circumstances. The other view is that they are constructed by each of us moment-to-moment, based on our particular combination of physiology, temperament, and experience.

Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, wasn’t the first book to attempt to codify facial expressions, but it still serves as inspiration for what has been referred to by Lisa Feldman Barrett as the classical view of emotion.

[H]e claimed that emotions and their expressions were an ancient part of universal human nature. All people, everywhere in the world are said to exhibit and recognize facial expressions of emotions without any training whatsoever.

This idea was further advanced in the 1960s and 70s, by psychologist Paul Ekman and others, and remains a widely held view. It’s why many people believe there are six basic emotions—fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and surprise—that are recognized by people across the globe. And it’s why the use of psychological tests for recognizing emotions from facial photographs is still quite common.

Furthermore the ability to identify emotions from facial expressions is a standard test of empathy, with implications in diagnosing various mental health conditions. So it’s relatively safe to say that a belief in empathy is based in the classical view of emotions.

But as Feldman Barrett points out:

Hundreds of experiments have shown that people worldwide can match emotion words to so-called expressions of emotion, posed by actors who aren’t actually feeling those emotions. However, those expressions can’t be consistently and specifically detected by objective measures of facial muscle movements when people are actually feeling emotion.

So if most (if not all) of the people who have been photographed for emotion detection tests are…emoting (i.e., acting), what do these tests actually reveal? At best, they appear to reveal some consensus agreement as to what those facial expressions are supposed to represent—stereotypes of emotions, if you will.

A Little Context, Please

Even if the photographs were not posed, focusing exclusively on faces excludes all the relevant contextual detail that the brain uses to form impressions and make interpretations.

Other things, including body movement, personality, tone of voice and changes in skin tone have important roles in how we perceive and display emotion. —Douglas Heaven, Nature, 2/26/20

Surrounding environmental context is even more critical. In a PNAS paper published on 3/21/19, Aleix Martinez offers the following images to support the importance of contextual information.

When asked to identify the emotions shown in these images, most people agree that the left image expresses sadness, while the right image is a clear display of anger. If asked whether these expressions communicate positive or negative valence, most people agree that both correspond to a negative expression. The problem with these assessments is that context is not observable, which may lead to incorrect interpretations. Images courtesy of (Left) Imgflip and (Right) Getty Images/Michael Steele.

Adding context to the facial expressions previously seen in [the previous figure] radically changes our interpretation of the emotion being experienced by a person. (A and B) In these two images, most observers agree that the people shown are experiencing a joyful event (i.e., positive valence). (C and D) When the face and body are blurred out, inference of valence and arousal is still possible. Images courtesy of (Upper Left, Lower Left, and Lower Right) Imgflip and (Upper Right) Getty Images/Michael Steele.

Martinez concludes that:

[w]e still do not know which brain regions of interest (ROIs) are involved in the recognition of affective context and how these communicate with already known areas. ROIs for the recognition of facial muscle articulations and biological motion as well as affective variables have been identified. It is logical to assume that ROIs involved in visual analysis of scenes, objects, and bodies are part of the visual interpretation of context. But does the brain employ other mechanisms to perform this inference? And, how do all these ROIs interact with one another to create the conscious affective percept we all experience?

How Many Words Is a Picture Worth?

Contextual information can not only lead to more accurate interpretations, it can also turn the tables on emotion recognition altogether. In writing about rethinking emotional intelligence a few years ago, I included this excerpt from The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall:

In the early twentieth century, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov produced a film of unnarrated images: a corpse in a coffin, a lovely young woman, and a bowl of soup. In between these images, Kuleshov squeezed shots of an actor’s face. The audience noted that when the soup was shown, the actor emoted hunger. When the corpse was shown, he looked sad. When the lovely young woman appeared, the actor’s face was transformed by lust.

In fact the actor wasn’t emoting at all. After every shot, Kuleshov had inserted exactly the same footage of an actor staring impassively into the camera.

We often see what we expect to see rather than what’s actually there. Expectations play an enormous role in the interpretations made by the brain. So does our experience, as well as the language we speak and the range of our emotional vocabulary.

This applies to the interpretation of our own emotions as well as the emotions of others. When it comes to interpreting our own emotions, we don’t usually go about it by looking at ourselves in a mirror. We’re more likely to focus on internal cues first. But no matter how strong those cues are, they do require interpretation. For example, excitement and anxiety are what are called high-arousal states that have similar neurological and physiological symptoms, such as increased heart-rate, restlessness, rapid breathing, difficulty concentrating, and nervousness or tension. So context (the circumstances surrounding a particular high-arousal state) plays a role in our process of interpretation. Nevertheless, some of us are more inclined in general to interpret this set of sensations as anxiety and some of us are more inclined to interpret it as excitement.

Our personal interpretive tendencies are very likely to influence our interpretations of the emotions others are experiencing. Given what we understand about how the brain works, it’s hard to imagine how they wouldn’t.

Take Away

The idea that emotions are constitutive (constructed) has gained more and more ground as neuroscience research expands our understanding of how we function. There are so many things we take for granted, or at face value, without questioning them. The idea that there are six basic emotions that are universally recognized is an intuitive get. But there was actually substantial disagreement with the classical view of emotion prior to the 1960s; it just got swept under the rug. It wasn’t the first scientific concept that got swept aside and won’t be the last.

Emotions are real just as a sense of self is real, but neither an emotion nor a sense of self is a thing. Instead both are processes, continually in flux, a result of our interpretation—and open to our interpretation.

Empathy: What Is It Good For?

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I wish I could have a discussion about empathy with a particular friend who, unfortunately, is no longer here. She was a caring person, generous with time, money, and attention. She was a good friend to me. She likely considered herself to be empathetic, although I don’t recall her making such a claim.

But there were some attitudes she espoused and actions she took that I was perplexed and a little bit horrified by. For example, I remember her telling me she’d gone out of her way to congratulate a woman paying for groceries in a supermarket with the equivalent of food stamps on her good (nutritious?) food choices. My reaction was along the lines of You did what? I could write an entire article on the assumptions underlying that interaction.

And when there was much talk about airport security following the events of 911, she and I discussed the problems posed for people with metal implants going through scanners. Her opinion at the time was that this group of people ought to give up air travel for the sake of making it easier on the rest of us. I (let us say) disagreed. We also strongly disagreed on the subject of undocumented immigrants. However, she later changed her stance on that one.

We were of the same political persuasion, so that wasn’t the basis for our sometimes strong differences of opinion. Those differences never really got in our way, anyway. I enjoy a good argument, and once she figured that out, she was willing to engage.

On the other end of the spectrum, this friend (most definitely a cat person) dropped everything to come to the aid of a neighbor who needed daily assistance with her dog for at least a month after surgery relegated her to a wheelchair. And she seriously considered moving to another state to help out a niece who hadn’t even made a request.

Empathy vs. Compassion

In my ongoing research into the subject of empathy, I’ve encountered numerous takes on what it’s supposed to be, as well as what it’s supposed to be good for. Consistent with my previous research on what it’s supposed to be, there’s no consensus on what it’s supposed to be good for. While many people still claim that empathy is necessary and useful all around, others report that it actually only comes into play in regard to the closest members of our in-group—people we already know and care about and presumably understand to some extent.

Psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled Against Empathy, in which he cites research supporting the idea that empathy doesn’t lead to prosocial action—that people substitute feeling (or thinking they’re feeling) someone else’s pain or distress for doing something to alleviate it. Compassion, on the other hand, which doesn’t necessarily involve relating to other people empathically—which in fact involves having some emotional distance—does lead to prosocial action.

By empathy I mean feeling the feelings of other people. So if you’re in pain and I feel your pain—I am feeling empathy toward you. If you’re being anxious, I pick up your anxiety. If you’re sad and I pick up your sadness, I’m being empathetic. And that’s different from compassion. Compassion means I give your concern weight, I value it. I care about you, but I don’t necessarily pick up your feelings.

A lot of people think this is merely a verbal distinction, that it doesn’t matter that much. But actually there’s a lot of evidence in my book that empathy and compassion activate different parts of the brain. But more importantly, they have different consequences. If I have empathy toward you, it will be painful if you’re suffering. It will be exhausting. It will lead me to avoid you and avoid helping. But if I feel compassion for you, I’ll be invigorated. I’ll be happy and I’ll try to make your life better. —Paul Bloom

Can You Relate?

My friend was financially comfortably well off (not on food stamps), did not have any metal implants, and was born and raised in the U.S. The three examples I gave all involved a reaction to others, people who were not members of her, or my, in-group. I would say she didn’t or couldn’t relate to them. And I think the concept of relating is separate from the concept of empathy. For example, I relate to people who share major personality traits with me. I “get” them in a way that’s both easy and deep. No imagination is required. No effort. No attempt to understand.

When another friend whose son I have spent very little time with during his 20 years on the planet (but who is quite a lot like me) tells me of her interactions with him or his responses and reactions, I can sometimes physically feel what he might be feeling: the feelings that make his resulting response entirely logical. That’s not empathy. If empathy were good for something, it would be assisting us in “getting” people we don’t automatically relate to or resonate with—people in our out-groups—and then lead us to take compassionate action in response. But as much as so many people wish it did do that, it doesn’t and ultimately can’t.

Empathy appears to be an outdated folk belief we really ought to retire.

You Feel Me?

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In my previous post on the subject, I sided with a secondary definition of the word empathy, which is:

the projection of one’s own feelings or thoughts onto something else, such as an object in a work of art or a character in a novel or film [or another person].

As it turns out, that’s much closer to the original meaning of the source of the word for empathy, which is a translation of the German Einfühlung. According to a PubMed article:

The term “Einfühlung” literally means “feeling into” and refers to an act of projecting oneself into another body or environment, i.e. …to an imaginary bodily “displacement” (“Versetzung”) of oneself into another body or environment, which is aimed at understanding how it feels to be in that other body or environment.

Kudos for multiple uses of the words “body” and “environment” in a single sentence.

I was surprised to learn that the translation of Einfühlung into empathy didn’t take place until 1908. And even then the word was related to aesthetics rather than to interpersonal relationships (understanding other people). The meaning and application that it has today didn’t begin to develop until the 1930s. That seems really recent until you consider that Theory of Mind didn’t arrive on the scene until the late 70s.

Given this relatively recent—and, in the case of empathy, revisionist—history of these concepts, the extent to which so many people now take them for granted, and at face value, is a little mind-blowing.

Early Days: Telling Stories

Rosalind Dymond, a psychologist at Cornell University, appears to be the first person to have attempted to measure empathy. In 1946, she used a set of cards “depicting images of archetypal personalities and dramatic scenes” and tasked subjects with telling stories about the characters pictured.

The stories were rated good, fair, or poor. Good stories described the thoughts and feelings of the characters. Fair stories only described the characters’ external characteristics. Poor stories simply named the characters. Those individuals whose stories were rated good were found to also have greater insight into their own relationships—the implication being that the better, more in-depth stories people can tell, the more aware they are of themselves and others.

If you’ve read Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal or have seen his Ted Talk, you won’t find this surprising.

According to Susan Lanzoni, author of Empathy: A History:

[Dymond’s] characterization of empathy as the ability to tell in-depth, imaginative stories of another’s feelings and circumstances was closely tied to empathy’s early aesthetic meaning.

We communicate in stories and understand the world in terms of stories. As poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” I think this early take on empathy was probably the most useful. But it didn’t last.

Later Revisions

Dymond went on to redefine empathy as “the ability to accurately predict how another person saw themselves” and ultimately to be “an accurate appraisal of how someone else felt and thought.”

A little later some psychologists at Dartmouth College determined that subjects were pretty terrible at predicting other people’s preferences, meaning they had little “empathic accuracy.” Dartmouth then began offering a course to “increase students’ sensitivity to the attitudes and feelings of others.”

Many psychologists have gone on to lament the lack of empathy and the dearth of studies of empathy, including Dymond (1949), Gordon Allport (1960), and Kenneth B. Clark (1980). Yet there never has been—and still isn’t—a consensus agreement on what this concept or word refers to or means.

Nor is there agreement as to how we, as individuals, become—or fail to become—empathetic. Some researchers seem to believe empathy is straight-up the result of mirror neurons. Others believe we have genetic predispositions to be more or less empathetic. It has been proposed that we have an empathy circuit in the brain, which can “go down.” Individuals may then experience “empathy erosion.”

According to a 2018 article by Fabrizio Mafessoni and Michael Lachmann in Nature:

Contagious yawning, emotional contagion, and empathy are characterized by the activation of similar neurophysiological states or responses in an observed individual and an observer.

That raises an interesting line of inquiry. Maybe another time.

What’s the Point?

Many people claim that empathy is essential for the survival of our species and possibly the planet, too. But for purposes of survival—from the Pleistocene to today, whether on a one-to-one or group basis—we need to be able to predict what other people are likely to do in a particular situation. The part of the brain that excels at predicting is System 1, the unconscious. Animals do it, too. The only difference between us and animals is that we’re not satisfied with the predictions unless we believe we understand what’s behind them. So we tell stories about what we think is going on with other people, the same way we tell stories about what is going on with us.

Of course, as I’ve been saying for years, there’s no such thing as a true story.

to be continued…

Is Empathy Even a Thing?

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My post on theory of mind last week elicited several comments and some good discussions about empathy.

What do you think empathy is? How would you define it? Do you consider yourself to be empathetic? Do you think empathy is a personality trait? Can it be developed? Where does it come from to begin with? Can you tell if someone else is—or is being—empathetic? How? How does one express or demonstrate empathy? Are there different kinds of empathy? Is empathy always positive and/or constructive?

If you don’t have clear and immediate answers to these questions, you’re not alone. Neither do the people researching empathy nor the rest of us.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Empathy

Not knowing what we’re talking about is a common trait of humans. So the lack of even a consensus agreement on what empathy is doesn’t stop anyone from studying it or making assertions about it.

What are the many ways researchers define empathy? Sometimes empathy is regarded as a trait of a person, meaning that some people have more or less of it as part of their personality. Sometimes, researchers are interested not in individual people’s characteristics but rather in their behaviors, particularly how they treat other people. A therapist might reflect back a client’s feelings with “I hear you saying you are feeling overwhelmed right now,” or someone might hug a distressed friend, and such behaviors might be considered demonstrations of empathy. Sometimes empathy is viewed as having certain emotional reactions, such as getting sad when someone else is sad. Sometimes it is the skill of being able to read other people’s emotions from their face, voice, or body language. Sometimes it’s taking another’s perspective by trying to imagine why they feel and act as they do. Sometimes empathy is a very broad notion that seems to be not too different from being a very nice, considerate person, while sometimes it is defined very narrowly, for example as the activation of certain brain areas when seeing someone being poked by a needle. —Judith A. Hall and Rachel Schwartz, Society for Personality and Social Psychology

My favorite dictionary’s definition of empathy is:

the ability to identify with or understand the perspective, experiences, or motivations of another individual and to comprehend and share another individual’s emotional state.

That’s a pretty good definition of theory of mind, which I’ve already expressed my opinion of. The secondary definition is more akin to what I think really passes for empathy:

the projection of one’s own feelings or thoughts onto something else, such as an object in a work of art or a character in a novel or film [or another person].

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert talks about a concept called presentism that makes it difficult for us to imagine feeling different from the way we’re feeling right now. In the context of affective forecasting, he’s referring to feeling different in the future. But the same principle applies in regard to empathy. We can’t actually know how someone else is feeling—or how they felt—about something. All we have are our own feelings. Is projecting them onto others—with all the assumptions that go along with that—really helpful?

Can You Relate?

There’s an anecdote I’ve told a number of times over the years of an incident that occurred when I was a child. The story, when I tell it straight, generates emotional responses in listeners: they imagine how they might feel in that situation. That’s all they can do. Almost no one can imagine how I felt, though, unless and until I describe my reactions. And even then they may be able to understand—if they know me, they can make the connection between the adult me and the child me—but most of them can’t relate.

Roger Schank (Tell Me a Story) says that understanding consists of the brain locating a similar personal story to the one being listened to and interpreting the other’s experience based on our own experience. He adds that if we don’t have a similar experience, we literally can’t understand the other person. (Also it’s System 1, the unconscious, that is locating what it considers a relevant story, and System 1 is far more interested in efficiency than accuracy.)

Are we better off assuming we get what’s going on with other people, when it’s more likely than not that we don’t, or might we actually make more headway in communicating, connecting, and solving problems by acknowledging that we really don’t know, but we want to, and then asking how we might be able to find out?

My clients tease me about writing a book titled Is That Even a Thing? I’m just going with the flow now.

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