Part 5 (1/2)

If you can come up with some reasonable answers that satisfy you, consider this one last phenomenon. Patient X, who has suffered a stroke, has this condition. His eyes can still take in visual stimuli, but the primary part of his visual cortex has been destroyed. He is blind. He cannot even distinguish light from dark. You can show him pictures of circles or squares, or ask him to distinguish between photos of men or women, and he has no idea what is in front of him. You can show him snarling animal faces or calm animal faces, and he has nothing to say, but if you show him pictures of angry or happy human faces, he, like some other patients with this kind of brain lesion, can guess what the emotions are.1 He has what has come to be called blindsight.

How do we recognize the emotional states of others? Is it a conscious appraisal, or is it automatic? There are a few schools of thought about this. One school holds that an individual uses her own version of psychology, which is either innate or learned, and infers the mental state of others from how they are acting and what they are doing, where they are and whom they are with, and how they have been in the past. This is called theory theory. The other school holds that one infers another's emotional state by deliberately and voluntarily attempting to simulate or replicate it in one's own mind-first pretending to be in the other's situation and seeing how that feels, then feeding that information to the decision-making process, and ending up with what one thinks the other is feeling. This is called simulation theory.2 Both of these theories are volitional. You actually decide to evaluate the other's emotional state. Neither of them can explain patient X's ability to determine emotions.

In another form of the simulation theory, the simulation is not deliberate and voluntary but automatic and involuntary.3 In other words, it just happens without your control or rational input. You perceive an emotional stimulus through your senses, and your body automatically responds to it by simulating the emotion, which your conscious mind can either recognize or not. This could help us explain patient X. And of course there is the combo theory, which is part theory theory and part simulation theory, part automatic and part volitional. A lot of the controversy, as usual, seems to be about how much is automatic, or voluntary, or a learned response. Because our social interactions are vastly important to being human, and because recognizing the states of mind, emotions, and intentions of others is necessary to interact, how this all comes about is extremely intriguing as well as controversial.

There is also the question of empathy, and understanding why some individuals use it selectively or lack it altogether. Other social animals share at least some of our capabilities, but is there something unique going on in our brains that allows us to have more complex interactions? Much evidence is acc.u.mulating that we automatically simulate the internal experiences of others, and that this simulation contributes to empathy and theory of mind. Is it all automatic, or does the conscious brain contribute to such evaluations? Let's see what has been discovered so far.

VOLUNTARY SIMULATION: PHYSICAL IMITATION.

About thirty years ago, the field of child development got a shock. Up until that time, it had been thought that when babies imitate a motor movement, it was learned. The theory was that the visual perception of a movement and the execution of the imitative movement by the motor system were independent of each other and controlled by different parts of the brain. Then a study of imitative behavior of young infants done by University of Was.h.i.+ngton psychologists Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore suggested perhaps the visual perception of a motor movement (such as tongue protrusion or lip smacking) and the production of the movement (actually copying the movement) were not separately acquired abilities but were linked somehow.4 Since then, many independent studies5 have shown that newborns from the age of forty-two minutes to seventy-two hours can imitate facial expressions accurately.6, 7 Think about it. One can only be amazed what the brain is doing when it is less than one hour old. It sees there is a face with a tongue sticking out, somehow knows it too has a face with a tongue under its command, decides it will imitate the action, finds the tongue in its long list of body parts, gives it a little test run, commands it to be stuck out-and out it goes. How does she know a tongue is a tongue? How does she know what neural system is in charge of the tongue, and how does she know how to move it? Why does she even bother doing it? Obviously, it was not learned by looking in a mirror, nor had anyone taught it to her. The ability to imitate must be innate.8 Imitation is the beginning of a baby's social interaction. Babies will imitate human actions, but not those of objects; they understand they are like other people.9 The brain has specific neural circuits for identifying biological motion and inanimate object motion, along with specific circuits to identify faces and facial movement.10 What can a baby do to enter the social world before it can sit up or control its head or talk? How can she engage another person and form a social link? When you first hold a baby, what links her to you and you to her are her imitative actions. You stick out your tongue, she sticks out her tongue; you purse your lips, she purses her lips. She doesn't lie there like an object but responds in a way that you can relate to. In fact it has been shown that infants use imitation games to check the ident.i.ty of persons, and do not use only their facial features.11, 12 After about three months of age, this type of imitation can no longer be elicited. Imitative abilities then develop that show that the infant understands the meaning of what is being copied: The imitative movements don't have to be exact but are directed toward a goal. The infant puts the sand in the bucket, but the fingers on the shovel don't have to be held in exactly the same way as the fingers of the person showing her how to use the shovel; the goal is getting the sand in the bucket. We have all seen how young children play when they are together, so it comes as no surprise that children aged eighteen to thirty months use imitation in their social exchanges, take turns between being the imitator and the imitatee, share topics, and in short, use imitation as communication.13 Imitating others is a potent mechanism in learning and acculturation.14 Voluntary behavior imitation appears to be rare in the animal kingdom. No evidence of voluntary imitation by monkeys, regardless of how many years they have been trained,15, 16 has been reported, except in one study in which imitative behavior was elicited in two j.a.panese monkeys who were so highly trained that they had learned to follow the eye gaze of a human.17 So much for ”monkey see, monkey do.” To what extent voluntary imitation exists in other animals is controversial. It depends on the definition of imitation and how many other factors are involved, a few of which are whether the imitation is goal directed, exact, motivated, social, or learned.18 It appears to exist to some degree in the great apes and some birds, and there is some evidence that it is present in cetaceans.19 The fact that many people are watching for and testing for imitation in the animal world but have found little evidence of it, and the fact that when it has been found, it has been of limited scope, indicate that the ubiquitious and extensive imitation in the human world is very different.

INVOLUNTARY PHYSICAL IMITATION: MIMICRY.

There is a difference between active imitation and what is known as mimicry, which is nonconscious imitation. In the last chapter, we learned a bit about nonconscious mimicry from the research done by John Bargh at New York University. People will unconsciously copy mannerisms of others, and not only will they not know they are doing it, but they will not consciously realize the other person even has a mannerism they could be mimicking. That is not all. We are virtual mimicking machines! People will not only mimic mannerisms but also unconsciously mimic the facial expressions, postures, vocal intonations, accents,20 and even speech patterns and words of others.21 How often have you noticed when you telephone a friend that their relative or their roommate who answers the phone sounds like your friend? Or how about all those married couples who start looking alike?

Our faces are our most prominent social feature, and they reflect our emotional states, but they also react to the emotional states of others. This can happen so fast that you are not aware of either the other person's expression or that you have had a reaction. In one experiment, subjects were shown thirty-millisecond exposures of happy, neutral, and angry faces. This is too fast for them to consciously realize that a face was seen. This image was immediately followed by pictures of neutral faces. Even though the exposure to happy and angry faces was unconscious, the subjects reacted with distinct facial muscle reactions that corresponded to the happy and angry faces. Their facial muscular activity was measured by electromyography. Both positive and negative emotional reactions were unconsciously evoked; this demonstrates that some emotional face-to-face communication occurs on an unconscious level.22 People will also mimic body movements during conversation. One researcher videotaped a series of sessions in which she told a group of subjects about how she had to duck to avoid being run into at a party and demonstrated by ducking to the right. The video revealed that as they were listening, the listeners mimicked her movements and had strongly tended to duck to the left-the mirror image of her movement.23 Have you ever noticed that your own speech pattern may change when you are visiting different parts of the country or other countries? Partners in conversations will tend to match each other in rhythm of speech, length of pauses, and likelihood of breaking silences.24 All this is going on without your consciously willing it to happen. What's the point?

All this mimicking behavior greases the machinery of social interactions. Unconsciously, deep down in that automatic part of your brain, you form connections with, and you like, other people who are similar to you. Think how often you have said, ”I liked her the second I met her!” or, ”Just looking at him gave me the creeps!” Mimicry increases positive social behavior. Rick Van Baaren and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam have shown that individuals who have been mimicked are more helpful and generous not only toward their mimicker but also toward other people present than are nonmimicked individuals.25 Thus, when you mimic someone, it becomes more likely that this person will behave positively not only toward you but also toward other people around you, by fostering empathy, liking, and smooth interactions.26 This binding of people together through enhancing prosocial behavior may have adaptive value by acting as social glue that holds the group together25 and fosters safety in numbers. These behavioral consequences provide suggestive support for an evolutionary explanation of mimicry.

However, it is difficult to consciously mimic someone. Once we resort to conscious voluntary imitative behavior, we are just too slow. The whole conscious pathway takes too long. Muhammad Ali, whose motto was ”Float like a b.u.t.terfly, sting like a bee,” and who moved about as fast as anyone, took a minimum of 190 milliseconds to detect a light flash and another 40 milliseconds to begin his punch. In contrast, one study found that it took college students only 21 milliseconds to synchronize their movements unconsciously.27 Consciously trying to mimic someone usually backfires, looks phony, and throws the communication out of sync.

A few years back, Charlotte Smylie and I were able to work out which hemispheres of the brain are involved in voluntary and involuntary commands.28 Testing split-brain patients, we showed that while both hemispheres can respond to involuntary responses, only the left hemisphere can carry out voluntary responses. In addition, the left hemisphere uses two different neurological systems to carry out the voluntary, as opposed to the involuntary, responses. This is abundantly apparent when studying Parkinson's disease. This disease strikes the neurological system that controls the involuntary spontaneous facial responses. As a result, people suffering from Parkinson's disease don't show the normal facial reactions when engaged in social interactions. They might actually be having a good time, but because of their ”mask,” no one knows it. Parkinson's patients talk about this with great despair.

This tells us that physical action, such as mimicking facial expressions, is closely linked to the visual perception of the face, and happens so quickly and automatically that it seems there must be some closely linked neuronal pathways. But what is behind the action? There is a smile or a sneer, but what does that imply? Does the other person actually feel the emotion of the mimicked facial expression? Does this mimicry help us figure that out?

EMOTIONAL MIMICRY?.

If nonconscious automatic mimicry occurs with physical actions, does the same thing happen when observing emotional states? When I cut my finger, do you automatically copy how I am feeling and wince, or do you consciously reason it out? How about that s.h.i.+ver that you get up your spine? Do you consciously produce that, or is it an automatic response? If we automatically mimic a sad face (merely the physical action), do we actually feel sad, too? If we do feel the emotion, which comes first, the facial expression or the emotion? If we sense the emotion of the other, such as feeling sad, is it automatic? Or once we have the automatic sad face, do we consciously say to ourselves, ”Gee, I seem to have this expression on my face that I remember I've had when I felt sad, and Sam has the same dang expression on his face, so I guess he must feel sad. I remember the last time I felt sad, and I didn't like that feeling and I bet he doesn't, either. Poor guy.”

Do we consciously or unconsciously simulate the emotional states of others? If so, how do we do it, and how do we recognize which emotion it is? We need to be a bit careful here. I just casually threw in a word in the last paragraph that I wonder if you even noticed: feeling. Antonio Damasio has made a point of separating the definitions of emotion and feeling. He defines a feeling as ”the perception of a certain state of the body (the emotion) along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes.” Your body can respond to a stimulus with an automatic emotion, but not until your conscious brain recognizes it can you say you have a feeling. He emphasizes the point that the emotion is what causes the feeling, not the other way around. This is contrary to the way most people think the brain works.29 EMOTIONAL CONTAGION.

Let's start with babies. How about when you go to the newborn nursery and all the babies are crying at once? Can it be that all of them are hungry and wet at the exact same time? No, not with all those nurses running around. Studies with newborns have shown that when they are exposed to the crying of another infant, a distress response is induced, and they will join in. However, when they hear their own cry that has been tape-recorded and played to them, or the cries of a baby several months older than they, or other random loud noises, a distress response is not induced, and they don't cry. The fact that babies are able to discriminate between their own cry and other infants' cries suggests that they have some innate understanding of the difference between themselves and others.30, 31 Is this a rudimentary expression of emotional contagion? That is the tendency to automatically mimic facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements of another person and consequently to converge emotionally with them.27 It certainly seems to be, because if it were just a response to crying or loud noises in general, the newborn should cry even when he hears his own recorded cries, not just the cries of others. It also does not support theory theory, because then we would have to suppose the baby is thinking like this: ”Aidan, Liam, and Seamus are crying in the ba.s.sinets all around me, and I know when I cry it is because I am hungry, wet, or thirsty, which, of course, is uncomfortable. Well, I feel fine, though. My diapers are dry, I just ate, and I am ready for a snooze.

But those guys must be miserable, just listen to them. I think I'll show a little baby solidarity and make a stink too.” Perhaps a bit too sophisticated for a three-hour-old, who has not yet developed the ability to consciously recognize that others have separate beliefs and emotions.

Now consider this situation: You are laughing with a friend when the phone rings and she answers it. You are feeling great, you're sitting in the warm spring sun enjoying a steamy cappuccino, but now you look over at your friend's face, and you know something is dreadfully wrong. In a second, you no longer feel great, but anxious. You have caught her mood in a single glance.

An interesting experiment done by Roland Neumann and Fritz Strack, psychologists at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, demonstrates mood contagion. They were interested in finding out if a person who had no social motivation to interact with another person would still take on his mood. They also wanted to know if this was automatic or a result of taking the perspective of another. In order to figure this out, they had subjects listen to a tape recording of a rather dry philosophical text being read by an unknown person in a happy, sad, or neutral voice. Meanwhile, they also gave their research subjects a small physical task to do while they were listening. This was to divert their attention from the actual meaning of what was being read and the emotionality of the voice, so that wouldn't influence them. Then they were asked to read the same text out loud while they themselves were taped. The subjects not only automatically mimicked the tone of voice of the other person-happy, sad, or neutral-but what was even more interesting, they also took on the mood of the mimicked voice. They were also completely unable to recognize why they felt the way they did, and they hadn't realized that the voice they were mimicking had been happy or sad.32 So although there never was nor would be an actual social interaction, and the text that they were reading was not emotionally charged, and their attention to its content had been diverted, they still automatically mimicked the vocal tone and felt the same mood as the voice had indicated the reader was feeling.

These researchers define an emotion as having two components-a mood, and knowledge of why the mood is being felt. Mood is defined as the experience component itself, without the knowledge.

Neumann and Strack then did one further experiment. Up until this point, they had diverted the attention of the subject so that she had not noticed that the person whose voice she had been listening to had expressed an emotion. In this last experiment, they asked half of the subjects to adopt the perspective of the reader, with the idea that the subject would then consciously recognize the emotional component of the voice. Afterward, the subjects who had been directed to take the reader's perspective were able to identify that they had felt the emotion of sadness or happiness.

Infants Take On the Mood of Their Mothers.

Babies are affected by their depressed mothers. Studies of infant-mother pairs reveal that depressed mothers typically show flat affect, provide less stimulation, and respond less appropriately to their infant's actions. Their infants are less attentive, have fewer contented expressions, and are more fussy and less active33, 34 than babies with mothers who are not depressed. These infants are physiologically aroused by interactions with their depressed mothers: They have stress reactions, which are revealed by elevated heart rate and cortisol levels.35 They also appear to have a depressed mood, despite differences in the way their depressed mothers treated them.36 Unfortunately, these interactions can have long-term effects on these children.

Of course, the phenomenon of mood contagion should not come as a complete surprise to us. We come out of the grocery store laughing and feeling good after listening to the banter of a funny cas.h.i.+er, or when a smiling stranger nods at us. Living with a depressed roommate or family member puts a cloud on the whole household. One depressed, angry, or negative dinner guest can ruin a party, whereas a group of simpatico guests will spell its success. Moods are subtle and can be affected by a word or a painting or music. With knowledge about mood contagion, we can increase the frequency of good moods by putting ourselves in places ”infected” with good moods so we can catch them! Such places include comedy clubs, bustling restaurants, funny movies, parks with kids having fun and laughing, colorful rooms, and outdoor locales with beautiful scenery. So moods and emotions appear to be automatically contagious. What is going on in the brain to make this happen?

Neural Mechanisms for Emotional Contagion?

Let's see if we can find out from neuroimaging studies how and why emotional contagion happens. Two emotional states that have been well studied in humans are disgust and pain-”yuck and ouch.” These sound like excellent material for what we are interested in. Good thing there are psychology students! (”Hi, I'd like to volunteer for the disgusting experiment or, if that one is full, how about the pain one?”) One group of volunteers watched a film of someone sniffing different fragrances, either disgusting ones, pleasant ones, or neutral ones, while their brain was being scanned with fMRI. Then they each had their turn at sniffing the same range of fragrances. It turned out that the same areas of the brain, the left anterior insula and the right anterior cingulate cortex, were automatically activated, both during the observation of disgusted facial expressions in the video and while experiencing the emotion of disgust evoked by the unpleasant fragrance. This suggests that the understanding of the facial expressions of disgust in someone else involves the activation of the same part of the brain that normally is activated during the experience of that same emotion.

The insula is busy in other ways, too. It also responds to gustatory stimulation: not just disgusting fragrances but disgusting tastes. Electrically stimulating the anterior insula during neurosurgery results in nausea or the sensation of being about to vomit,37 visceromotor activity (that queasy feeling you get), and unpleasant sensations in the throat and mouth.38 So the anterior insula partic.i.p.ates in transforming unpleasant sensory input, whether it is actual perception of the disgusting odor or flavor or merely observing someone else's facial reaction, into visceromotor reactions and the accompanying physical feeling one gets with the emotion of disgust.

So, at least for disgust, there is a common area in the brain that is activated for visually seeing the facial expression of the emotion in someone else, for one's own visceral response, and for feeling the emotion39-a tidy little brain package. The expression of disgust that you see on your wife's face when she sniffs the sour milk activates your own disgust emotion. Luckily, you don't need to sniff it yourself. Obviously this has an evolutionary advantage. Your companion takes a bite of the rotting gazelle carca.s.s and makes the disgust face. Now you don't have to test it. Interestingly, the same did not hold true for the pleasant fragrance. Pleasant fragrances activate the posterior right insula only, and we know we don't get the same visceromotor response.

Pain also appears to be a shared experience. In the movie Marathon Man, we all cringed at the dental torture scene. In our brains, there is an area that responds to both the observation of pain and the experience of pain. Volunteer couples were scanned with fMRI while one was being given a painful shock to the hand and the other was an observer. There are anatomical connections between regions that make up the pain system in the brain; these do not function independently but are highly interactive. However, there appears to be a separation between the sensory (”that hurts!”) and emotional perceptions of pain, such as its antic.i.p.ation and the anxiety that it produces (”I know it's going to hurt, oh, hurry up and get it over with, ohhh, when is it going to happen?”). What the scans showed was that both the observer and the recipient of pain had activity in the part of the brain that is active with the emotional perception of pain,* but only the recipient had activity in the area that is active with the sensory experience,40 which is a good thing. You wouldn't want the paramedic himself to need to be anesthetized while he was stabilizing your broken femur, but you do want him to be gentle with your painful leg: You want him to realize it hurts but not to feel it himself to the point of inaction.

Clearly, whether you antic.i.p.ate the pain for yourself or another, the same area in the brain is used. Looking at pictures of humans in painful situations also activates brain activity in the area that is active in the emotional appraisal of pain, but not the area that is active with the actual sensation of pain.41 There is evidence the same neurons mediate the emotional appraisal of both personal and vicarious pain. In rare cases, patients who have had portions of their cingulate removed have had testing of neurons under local anesthesia with microelectrodes. This has shown that the same neuron in the anterior cingulate fired upon experiencing a painful stimulus and also while antic.i.p.ating or observing one.42 This indicates that the observation of an emotion in someone else can result in brain activity that matches the experience of the emotion, to a certain degree, automatically.

These findings have very interesting implications for the emotion of empathy. Without going into a long discussion of the definition of empathy, we can at least agree that it implies being able to detect accurately the emotional information being transmitted by another person, being conscious of it, and caring about it. To care about another's state is an altruistic behavior, but it cannot occur without good information. If I cannot accurately detect your emotion, if I think that you are disgusted when in fact you are in pain, I will react to you inappropriately, perhaps handing you a Compazine suppository instead of Advil.

Tania Singer and colleagues at the University College London, who did the pain research with the couples, wondered, as you may too, if observers who had higher pain-related brain activity were more empathetic. So they gave the couples a standardized test that rates emotional empathy and empathetic concern. Indeed, the individuals who scored higher on general empathy scales did show stronger brain activity in the portions of the brain that were active when they perceived their partner as being in pain. There was also a correlation between how empathetic one rated oneself and how much activity there was in the anterior rostral zone of the cingulate, an area near the center of the brain. Also in the second study, when people looked at pictures of painful situations, the activity in the anterior cingulate was strongly correlated with their ratings of the others' pain. The more activity, the higher they rated the pain, suggesting that the activity of this brain region varies according to subjects' reactivity to the pain of others.

The work on disgust and pain suggests that the simulation of these emotions is automatic. The question remains whether the simulation of the emotion comes first and then the automatic physical mimicry follows, or the automatic mimicry is followed by the emotion. When you see your wife's face after she sniffs the sour milk, do you automatically copy her expression, and then feel the disgust, or do you see her facial expression of disgust, feel disgust yourself, and then automatically make the disgust face? The chicken-and-egg problem continues to be unresolved in this particular case.

PHYSIOLOGICAL SIMULATION.

When you feel a negative emotion, such as fear, anger, or pain, you also get a physiological response, just as babies have a stress response to hearing other newborns crying or when interacting with a depressed mother. Your heart races and you may sweat or get the s.h.i.+ver up your back, and so forth. In fact, you get a different set of physiological responses with each different emotion.43, 44 They are emotion-specific. Would your physiological response to an observed situation be able to predict how accurately you interpreted the emotion of the other person? If your physiological response were more similar to the other person's, would you be better at judging her emotion?

That is what Robert Levenson and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated happens for negative emotions. They measured five physiological variables* in subjects as they watched four separate videotaped conversations between married couples. These same measurements had been taken of the couples as they were having the conversations. Throughout the conversations, the subjects a.s.sessed what they thought the husband or the wife was feeling. The subjects whose autonomic physiological responses more closely simulated those of the person they were observing did indeed interpret his or her negative emotions more accurately. This did not hold true for positive emotions. These results suggest a relation between physiological linkage (how closely one simulates the physiological response) and rating accuracy for negative emotions. The researchers suggest that empathetic subjects (i.e., those who are most accurate in rating the negative emotions of targets) would be most likely to experience the same negative emotions. These negative emotions would produce similar patterns of autonomic activation in both subject and target, thus resulting in high levels of physiological linkage.45 The other question this presents is, ”Do people who are more sensitive to their physiological responses have more intense emotional feelings? If I am acutely aware (conscious) that my heart is beating faster and I am sweating, am I more anxious or scared than someone who doesn't notice? If I pay more attention to my physiological responses, am I more empathetic to others?”

Hugo Critchley and colleagues at Brighton and Suss.e.x Medical School, England, provided the answer to this question and also found out a little bonus information.46 They gave a group of people a questionnaire that rated symptoms of anxiety, depression, and positive and negative emotional experience. None of the subjects scored in the range necessary for a diagnosis of either depression or anxiety. Then they were scanned with fMRI while judging whether an auditory feedback signal, a repeated musical note, was synchronous with their heartbeat or not. This measured their attention to a physiological process-their heartbeat. They were also asked to listen to a series of notes and distinguish which one was a different tone. This was to test their perception, how well they could distinguish differences in sensory input. This separates how intensely one feels a pain (perception) from how intensely one focuses on it (attention).