Subliminal

Why did humans develop nonverbal communication? One of the first to seriously study the issue was an English fellow, spurred by his interest in the theory of evolution. By his own assessment, he was no genius. He had “no great quickness of apprehension or wit” or “power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought.”¹⁴ On the many occasions when I share those feelings, I find it encouraging to review those words because that Englishman did okay for himself—his name was Charles Darwin. Thirteen years after publishing The Origin of Species, Darwin published another radical book, this one called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In it, Darwin argued that emotions—and the ways they are expressed—provide a survival advantage and that they are not unique to humans but occur in many species. Clues to the role of emotions therefore can be found by examining the similarities and differences of nonverbal emotional expression across various species.

If Darwin didn’t consider himself brilliant, he did believe he possessed one great intellectual strength: his powers of careful and detailed observation. And, indeed, though he was not the first to suggest the universality of emotion and its expression,¹⁵ he spent several decades meticulously studying the physical manifestations of mental states. He watched his countrymen, and he observed foreigners, too, looking for cultural similarities and differences. He even studied domestic animals and those in the London Zoo. In his book, Darwin categorized numerous human expressions and gestures of emotion and offered hypotheses about their origin. He noted how lower animals, too, display intent and emotion through facial expression, posture, and gesture. Darwin speculated that much of our nonverbal communication might be an innate and automatic holdover from earlier phases of our evolution. For example, we can bite affectionately, as do other animals. We also sneer like other primates by flaring our nostrils and baring our teeth.

The smile is another expression we share with lower primates. Suppose you’re sitting in some public place and notice someone looking at you. If you return the gaze and the other person smiles, you’ll probably feel good about the exchange. But if the other person continues to stare without any hint of a smile, you’ll probably feel uncomfortable. Where do these instinctual responses come from? In trading the currency of smiles, we are sharing a feeling experienced by many of our primate cousins. In the societies of nonhuman primates, a direct stare is an aggressive signal. It often precedes an attack—and, therefore, can precipitate one. As a result, if, say, a submissive monkey wants to check out a dominant one, it will bare its teeth as a peace signal. In monkey talk, bared teeth means Pardon my stare. True, I’m looking, but I don’t plan to attack, so PLEASE don’t attack me first. In chimpanzees, the smile can also go the other way—a dominant individual may smile at a submissive one, saying, analogously, Don’t worry, I’m not going to attack you. So when you pass a stranger in the corridor and that person flashes a brief smile, you’re experiencing an exchange with roots deep in our primate heritage. There is even evidence that with chimps, as with humans, when a smile is exchanged, it can be a sign of friendship.¹⁶

You might think a smile is a rather shoddy barometer of true feelings because, after all, anyone can fake one. It’s true that we can consciously decide to exhibit a smile, or any other expression, by using the muscles in our faces in ways we are practiced at doing. Think about what you do when trying to make a good impression at a cocktail party, even though you are miserable about being there. But our facial expressions are also governed subliminally, by muscles over which we have no conscious control. So our real expressions cannot be faked. Sure, anyone can create a posed smile by contracting the zygomatic major muscles, which pull the corners of the mouth up toward the cheekbones. But a genuine smile involves contraction of an additional pair of actors, the orbicularis oculi muscles, which pull the skin surrounding the eye toward the eyeball, causing an effect that looks like crow’s- feet but can be very subtle. That was first pointed out by the nineteenth-century French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne, who was an influence on Darwin and collected a large number of photographs of people smiling. There are two distinct neural pathways for these smile muscles: a voluntary one for the zygomatic major, and an involuntary one for the orbicularis oculi.¹⁷ So a smile-seeking photographer might implore us to say “cheese,” which nudges our mouths into the smile position, but unless you’re the kind who actually rejoices when asked to speak the word “cheese,” the smile won’t look genuine.

In viewing photographs of the two types of smiles given to him by Duchenne de Boulogne, Darwin remarked that though people could sense the difference, he found it very difficult to consciously pinpoint what that difference was, remarking, “It has often struck me as a curious fact that so many shades of expression are instantly recognized without any conscious process of analysis on our part.”¹⁸ No one paid much attention to such issues until recently, but modern studies have shown that, as Darwin observed, even people untrained in smile analysis have a good enough gut feeling to distinguish real smiles from phony ones when they can observe the same individual creating both.¹⁹ Smiles we intuitively recognize as fake are one reason used-car salesmen, politicians, and others who smile when they don’t mean it are often described as looking sleazy. Actors in the Method dramatic tradition try to get around this by training themselves to actually feel the emotion they are supposed to manifest, and many successful politicians are said to be talented at conjuring up genuine feelings of friendliness and empathy when talking to a roomful of strangers.

Darwin realized that if our expressions evolved along with our species, then many of the ways we express the basic emotions—happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise—should be shared by humans from different cultures. And so in 1867 he arranged for a questionnaire to be circulated on five continents among indigenous people, some of whom had had little contact with Europeans.²⁰ The survey asked questions like “Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide and by the eyebrows being raised?” On the basis of the answers he received, Darwin concluded that “the same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity.” Darwin’s study was biased in that his questionnaire asked such leading questions, and like so many other early contributions to psychology, his were overridden—in this case, by the idea that facial expressions are learned behavior, acquired during infancy, as a baby mimics its caretakers and others in the immediate environment. However, in recent years a substantial body of cross-cultural research has offered evidence that Darwin was right after all.²¹

In the first of a series of famous studies, the psychologist Paul Ekman showed photos of people’s expressions to subjects in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Japan.²² Within a few years, he and a colleague had shown such pictures to people in twenty-one countries. Their findings were the same as Darwin’s, demonstrating that people across a diversity of cultures had a similar understanding of the emotional meaning of a range of facial expressions. Still, such studies alone don’t necessarily mean that those expressions are innate, or even truly universal. Adherents of the “learned expressions” theory argued that Ekman’s results conveyed no deeper truth than the fact that people in the societies studied had all watched Gilligan’s Island, or other movies and television shows. So Ekman traveled to New Guinea, where an isolated Neolithic culture had recently been discovered.²³ The natives there had no written language and were still using stone implements. Very few had seen a photograph, much less film or television. Ekman recruited hundreds of these subjects, who had never been previously exposed to outside cultures, and, through a translator, presented them with photographs of American faces illustrating the basic emotions.

The primitive foragers proved to be as nimble as those in the twenty-one literate countries at recognizing happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise in the face of an emoting American. The scientists also reversed the research design. They photographed the New Guineans as they acted out how they would respond if they saw that their child had died, or found a dead pig that had been lying there for a long time, and so on. The expressions Ekman recorded were unequivocally recognizable.²⁴

This universal capability to create and recognize facial expressions starts at or near birth. Young infants have been observed making nearly all the same facial muscle movements used by adults to signify emotion. Infants can also discriminate among the facial expressions of others and, like adults, modify their behavior based on what they see.²⁵ It is doubtful that these are learned behaviors. In fact, congenitally blind young children, who have never seen a frown or a smile, express a range of spontaneous facial emotions that are almost identical to those of the sighted.²⁶ Our catalog of facial expressions seems to be standard equipment—it comes with the basic model. And because it is a largely innate, unconscious part of our being, communicating our feelings comes naturally, while hiding them requires great effort.

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IN HUMANS, BODY language and nonverbal communication are not limited to simple gestures and expressions. We have a highly complex system of nonverbal language, and we routinely participate in elaborate nonverbal exchanges, even when we are not consciously aware of doing so. For example, in the case of casual