Emotions are the joker...

Katie Moeller

I’ve been finding that over the past few weeks there’s been a slight shift in our readings which I’ve found quite exciting; it seems that at this later stage in the course, having spent significant time building a base knowledge of emotional processes and the brain systems they involve, we are now in a better place to focus on some of the more “real world” applications of the basic concepts we’ve been piecing together. It’s almost as if many of the “but what about…” questions we’ve been asking as we’ve been looking at the bigger picture of emotions are now being given center stage. I find this to be not only satisfying but also important for my own ability to utilize all of what we’ve learned to help explain the everyday goings-on of our emotions, and what the greater system actually looks like “in action” i.e. when confronted with any of the million situations we might encounter as we move through the world.

This week’s topic of social consciousness provided just such an opportunity to think about how our emotions work in specific circumstances, and since interactions (and relationships) with others occupies a fairly large percentage of most of our daily lives, these seven articles had a lot of ground to cover. One of the concepts that many of the readings touched on, and that seems key to our understanding of social interaction is that of mirroring. In “Social Cognition in Humans,” Frith and Frith (2007) identify the exchange of signals as the essential core of human interaction, and they distinguish between the unconscious, automatic versus the conscious, deliberate processing of these signals. Mirroring illustrates the former; when interacting, both individuals will tend to align their movements and gestures with that of the other person without even noticing this is taking place. Interestingly, in mirroring this not noticing aspect is key, as the feeling of good rapport built by this unconscious alignment can be damaged if one or the other person becomes aware of imitation and ends up feeling mocked.

I find it fascinating to think about all the ways in which we are constantly adjusting ourselves to one another in our social interactions, especially in light of other reading and thinking I’ve done about anxiety. Though I don’t think anxiety came up specifically in any of this week’s materials, I found the ideas about unconscious signal exchange between individuals to be consistent with my own experiences of how anxiety can feel in a social situation. For me, anxiety has at times acted as a kind of (annoying) inner voice that constantly narrates the moments of an interaction with another person, in a sense “calling out” all the signals that perhaps should be taking place unconsciously but in the anxious individual are being deliberated and monitored consciously instead. It’s no wonder that anxiety can be viewed as socially maladaptive – as Frith and Frith (2007) point out, when signal exchanges between two people are brought to awareness, there is the potential to end any feelings of rapport that were in the process of being built.

Though not specifically delineated in any of the articles, it seems likely that a hyper-consciousness of the social interaction on the part of one of the participants would in turn have an inhibitory or negative effect on the other person. In “How We Predict What Other People Are Going to Do,” Frith and Frith (2006) describe facial expressions and body postures as “contagious,” (p. 40), and cite evidence that the simple act of watching someone else be touched on the face activates our brain as if we ourselves are being touched. Although I think it might be difficult to tell in the moment that an interaction we are having with someone is being affected by our own or the other person’s anxiety (because everything is happening so quickly and seemingly automatically), the idea of mirroring indicates that when one person is having difficulty relaxing enough for the unconscious alignment and exchange of signals to take place, the interaction itself will not result in the same type of rapport-building as it could.

Somewhat related to the ways in which mirroring enables us to exchange signals and get on the same social “page” as others, the idea that we acquire information and learn about our world through our social interactions with other was raised this week. I find this idea most interesting when applied to children taking emotional cues from their parents or other adult caregivers, as Frith and Frith (2007) point out in “Social Cognition in Humans.” The authors state that “generally speaking, if the mother shows fear, the infants will tend to avoid touching the toy, but if she shows pleasure, they will explore it,” (p. R725).

I found myself discussing just this phenomenon with a fellow preschool teacher recently, as I was pondering over how to help one of the little boys I work with to have an easier time transitioning into school in the morning. He is two and a half, and has been coming to the group since September, but even now, in our eighth month of school, he has mornings where he cries hysterically when his mother drops him off. While this isn’t entirely developmentally inappropriate, I talked a lot to my friend about how anxious his mother seems to be about the whole situation, and how much her mood in the mornings seems to affect him. Some days when she brings him in, she casually chats with other parents and then slowly eases out of the room, but some mornings – and often the times when he has the most trouble – she is very focused on his transition, and does lots of prompting to try and get him involved in school so he won’t be upset. In a basic way, it seems that the more fearful his mother is of the morning transition, the harder time he has, which is entirely consistent with Frith and Frith’s (2007) assessment that people, and especially children, use other people’s emotional reactions as signals or sources of learning about how they themselves should react to a particular stimulus or situation.

While there are dozens of other points of intrigue I could write about from the articles, and real life examples I can think of to go along with them, there were a few questions that came up for me as I moved through the social consciousness materials that I wanted to raise here for possible discussion. Firstly, I am interested but somewhat confused by the definition of self-esteem and the relationship between self-esteem and social rejection posited by Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004) in “Why Rejections Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social Pain.” While I am clear on the idea the authors present that social pain may overlap with physical pain in order to help us avoid social isolation (particularly early on in life when we are so physically dependent on the care and attention of others for survival), and while I agree that self-esteem is traditionally linked with “positive psychological health,” (p. 295), I am not sure I agree that self-esteem can be entirely defined by one’s perception of oneself as either included or excluded by a social group. Although social rejection clearly does have an impact on our self-concept, doesn’t our own assessment of self, or more specifically of our performance have something to do with it? In the example given, research participants reported lower self-esteem when they told they were being excluded from a game of catch even by a computer program, not just when there were other human participants involved. I guess my question about this example is whether the reports of lower self-esteem might be linked to being denied to opportunity to perform, or achieve, rather than just to the denial of social inclusion.

A second question I had was regarding prejudice and bias, which also came up in many of the articles. The general consensus seems to be that our top-down processes of social cognition do give us the ability to control and modify the more automatic emotional responses we have to “untrustworthy” or feared categories of people, responses which more than one article argues are in fact adaptive (and unavoidable?), even if they are socially undesirable. What I wonder, I guess, is why so many people are still compelled to express these prejudices and biases outright when in general as human beings we have the capacity to understand that it is not particularly socially acceptable or desirable to do so. Although it seems reasonable that our biases would show up in some of our more automatic behaviors and actions, what Frith and Frith (2006) argue is that we do have the capacity, at least in social situations, to control the expression of our responses when we know our original reactions are prejudiced and unfounded. They write, “Increased amygdala activity is a largely automatic response to people of other races. However, this activity too can be modulated by conscious, controlled processes associated with frontal activity,” (p. 43). So why don’t we always do this? Why do people continue to make racist, sexist, etc. remarks and judgments out loud when they have the capacity not to? I am fully aware there may not be an answer to this question, but it’s a particularly important issue to me and I am always interested in understanding more about why we as humans - as societies - are so capable of making radical, positive change in some aspects of our collective existence, and not in others.