by Sian Beilock
One of the last scenes of the movie is set at the hospital during Jenny’s final hours, with Oliver by her side. His father discovers why his son really needed to borrow money and immediately heads to the hospital to make amends. Jenny has passed away by the time he arrives. When Oliver’s father apologizes to his son for his behavior, Oliver responds with an epic line, based on something that Jenny said: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Even though audiences know that the movie is just a movie, many people come close to tears just thinking about Love Story. Movie producers bank on this reaction, the fact that our neural circuitry doesn’t always make a clear distinction between what is real and what is not. Directors work hard to draw audiences into the story so that they experience the emotions of the characters as if they were their own. Movies like Love Story are called “tearjerkers” for a reason.
We cry while watching tearjerkers even when we know the actors are only portraying emotions because our mind largely sees the emotions as real. This is also true when we read a sad love story; we empathize with the characters as if their trials and tribulations were our own. We make sense of what we are reading or watching by bringing to the surface the thoughts, feelings, emotions—even the sights, sounds, and smells—that we encountered when we were in a similar situation. That’s one reason why Love Story is so popular. We all can relate.
Many scientists believe that empathy, the ability to appreciate the emotions and feelings of others, is largely explained by the phrase “Monkey see, monkey do.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the discovery of mirror neurons—those brain cells that respond not only when a monkey performs an action but when the monkey sees someone else perform the same action—are important for thinking about this resonance. Mirror neurons are most often talked about in terms of understanding action, but mirror neurons and the idea of mirroring more generally are also important for understanding others’ emotions and feelings. Our ability to comprehend the feelings of those around us works, at least in part, by mirroring the actions and related emotions we observe. We recognize another person’s emotions by mapping his behavior onto something similar in our own repertoire of actions whose emotional state we already know. By doing this, we can get a pretty good idea of what he is feeling, even if we can’t see all of his emotions directly and he isn’t telling us what he feels. The idea of mirroring helps explain how a direct link between seeing and feeling could come about.1
Consider a study conducted by a colleague of mine, the neuroscientist Jean Decety, at the University of Chicago. Decety began by asking volunteers to read short descriptions of events that were likely to elicit intense emotions; for instance, “Someone opens the bathroom door that you have forgotten to lock.” He asked one group of volunteers to read these scenarios and think specifically about being in the situation themselves. He asked another group to think about their mother being in the same situation. It’s hard not to cringe when you think about your mother sitting on the toilet.2
Decety used fMRI to peer inside the volunteers’ heads while they imagined these scenarios. He saw that areas of the cortex important for the processing of emotional information, such as the amygdala, became excited when people thought about themselves in these embarrassing situations and when they thought about their mother going through the same ordeal. Some of the same bits of brain tissue we use to experience emotions in ourselves are reused when we think about other people experiencing the same things. Decety’s work provides a clue as to why we want to cry (and some of us actually do) when we find out that Jenny is going to die in Love Story. The emotion centers of our brain register the turmoil as if it were our own. Just as experienced athletes are able to understand others’ play and predict an opponent’s next move by re-creating the movements in their own head, we resonate with the emotions portrayed by characters in movies like Love Story because we experience the anguish ourselves.
This merging of the self and others happens routinely. When people watch videos of others showing facial expressions of disgust, some of the same areas of the cortex come alive as when a person inhales noxious odors, say, the smell of rotten eggs. We recognize facial expressions of disgust and even words that depict disgust because we ourselves have felt disgust.3
Interestingly, these empathetic reactions start very early in life. One-day-old babies cry more when they are exposed to other infants crying than when silence surrounds them. And here is where the findings get really interesting: the infants cry more when they hear another baby cry compared to when they hear synthetic or artificially generated cries of the same intensity. The newborns are most affected by infant cries that are similar to theirs. Scientists believe this suggests that we may be endowed from birth with an innate capacity for empathetic reactions. We glom on to the emotional reactions of people who are most like us and experience their emotions as if they were our own. This linking of ourselves and others is really powerful; it gives meaning to the idea that “others are like I am” and forms the building blocks for empathy in later years.4
Given that we activate some of the same emotion centers of the brain when we are in distress and when we see or hear the distress of others—especially those who are most like us—how do we ever separate ourselves from others? It turns out that, at least early on, we don’t do a good job of differentiating. Children don’t usually make a distinction between their own thinking and that of other people. Early in life, we don’t yet have an intact “theory of mind,” the understanding that our thoughts and feelings may differ from another’s. A simple but clever assessment, the Sally-Anne Test (one of the many different versions of what psychologists call a false-belief task), exemplifies this phenomenon quite clearly.
A three-year-old child is told a story about two girls, Sally and Anne. As a way to set the stage, the child is usually shown dolls that represent the girls. In the story, Sally has a basket beside her, and Anne has a wooden box. The child is told that Sally has a toy that she decides to place in her basket before leaving for a while. (When the toy is in the basket, no one can see it.) Sally leaves, and Anne goes over to Sally’s basket, takes out the toy, and puts it in her box (again hiding it from view). Sally then comes back, and the child is asked, “Where will Sally look for her toy?” The correct answer of course is that Sally should look in her basket for the toy, where she left it. But, depending on the child’s age, she may not differentiate between what she knows (her own mental state) and what others, in this case Sally, should believe. The child knows the toy is now in Anne’s box, but theory of mind entails that she understand that her knowledge may be different from that of other people, that Sally doesn’t know the toy was moved.
Most normally developing children pass some version of the Sally-Anne Test by around four years of age. Before this time, however, not being able to make a clear distinction between ourselves and others is a normal part of the developmental process. The merging of me and you early in life serves as a basis for shared feeling and understanding—a crucial component of empathy. For instance, by automatically matching his mother’s behavior and his own emotional state, and not being able to tell the two apart, a child becomes highly attuned to what his mother is feeling. Because of this, he is able to form a close connection with her. Infants of depressed mothers tend to display negative facial expressions more frequently than do infants of nondepressed mothers. Because depressed mothers show more negative affect on a daily basis, their babies are more in tune with these responses and synchronize to them.5 In the short term, this bodily mirroring helps the baby relate to his closest caretaker. In the long term, of course, having a depressed mother can have dire consequences. When children constantly mirror the negative affective behaviors of their parents, the children’s own expression of negative bodily emotions sends signals to their brain about how the children feel. In this way, depression can be handed down from parent to child, with the body serving as a vehicle of transfer. A genetic predisposition for depression may certainly help expl
ain the linking of depression in mother and child, but how a child holds his body (which is often learned from what the parents are doing) matters a lot too.
At some point during development we do learn to separate our own feelings from the feelings of those around us. Yet even as adults, we call upon our body to help us make sense of potentially emotional information that others display, and this bodily involvement has some striking consequences. Paula Niedenthal, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, has spent the past several decades investigating the link between the body and emotion. Although people tend to think that affective reactions are rooted in the mind, Niedenthal has repeatedly demonstrated the important role the body plays in our emotional experiences. In one of her most compelling studies, Niedenthal asked students participating in her research to decide if a particular object, such as a baby, a slug, or a water bottle, was associated with an emotion. Unbeknownst to the students, Niedenthal had picked the objects to be either highly emotional—igniting strong feelings of joy, disgust, or anger—or not emotionally laden at all. In addition to rating the objects, the students also rated more abstract concepts, such as joyful and enraged, as emotional or not.
While wearing small electrodes placed below the mouth and above the eye, the students judged the emotionality of the objects and ideas, and Niedenthal took recordings from their facial muscles. The tiny movements, which are invisible to the naked eye, can be used to assess whether facial muscles produce frowns or smiles. The results were clear: while making their judgments about both the objects and the abstract ideas, the students reflected the corresponding emotion on their face. It took them only a few seconds to decide if a slug, for instance, was strongly associated with an emotion, but in that time their face also expressed signs of that emotion.
The emotional centers of the brain send signals to the body about how we should behave, but that pathway is not a one-way street. The muscles involved in the body postures we assume and the facial expressions we make also send signals back up to the brain, reinforcing our feelings. In a provocative demonstration of this point, Niedenthal ran another experiment in which she asked volunteers to watch videos of people whose face was morphing from one expression to another—happy to sad or angry to amused—and to indicate when the facial expression had changed by pressing a button on a keyboard.
Not surprisingly, as the volunteers monitored the faces for changing emotions, they were morphing their own facial expressions along with the videos. Niedenthal allowed some volunteers to freely mimic the facial expressions they were watching, but she asked another group of volunteers to hold a pencil between their lips and teeth, which prevented them from frowning or smiling along with the faces they were viewing, even though they didn’t realize it. Subjects who were free to mimic detected the emotional change in the video faces much quicker than those who were prevented from mimicking. Our facial expressions send feedback to our brain about what emotion we should be feeling, which in turn affects our ability to understand emotions in others. As Niedenthal notes, these findings lend credence to the saying “When you’re smiling, the whole word smiles with you.”6
But what if your facial muscles aren’t sending those signals? In the first chapter of this book I described how Botox prevented frowning and the negative emotional signals that go along with it. Freezing the face can just as easily prevent positive emotional information from being sent to the brain. Niedenthal has been examining the social and emotional consequences of the pacifier, an object that is a very important part of my life as the parent of a toddler. She had been wondering if the pacifier serves the same sort of function as putting a pencil between your teeth, freezing the facial muscles so that babies are less likely to form emotions on their face. Could a pacifier stunt emotional development by preventing a child from mimicking others’ facial expressions, perhaps having some effect on that child’s eventual empathetic reactions as an adult? Although she doesn’t have a definitive answer yet, Niedenthal thinks parents need to be cautious about how often they let their child have a pacifier. Even though we often think of the pacifier as a life saver, soothing an infant in times of stress, if it prevents a child from fully displaying the emotions he is feeling or mirroring those observed in others, there may be some risks. Yes, a pacifier may help stop the wailing and forming of unhappy expressions that could turn into a depressive cycle: the child is unhappy, Mom is unhappy, and the child is unhappy in return. But it’s also important to remember that, whether positive or negative, the ability to freely display emotions on our face is an important part of learning to successfully empathize with others and to fully experience emotions ourselves.
How we contort our body when we spontaneously imitate others gives us insight into other people’s emotional states—a vital piece of the empathetic puzzle. Interestingly, this interplay between ourselves and those around us helps explain a surprising phenomenon: why married couples often look alike after many years together.
Married couples are highly motivated to empathize with one another; to do this, they mimic each other’s facial expressions, which in turn facilitates similar emotional experiences. People who are on the same page get along better and are more likely to stay happily married. Over time, research confirms, this mimicry leads to permanent changes in how the face is shaped. In one study, more than a hundred volunteers were shown photographs of men and women taken in their first year of marriage and taken twenty-five years later, on the spouses’ silver wedding anniversary. They were also shown photos of randomly matched pairs at the same ages. The volunteers were asked to judge the physical similarity of the couples. Sure enough, there was an increase in similarity among the married couples at the twenty-five-year mark, but not the randomly matched pairs. Most striking, the more similar people looked, the happier they reported they were in their union.7 So next time you are struggling to connect with your spouse, try to subtly mimic his or her facial expression; it is likely to make you feel in synch and strengthen that emotional link that can weaken in times of strife.
My Emotions Are Not Yours
In one of the final scenes in the movie Love Story, Jenny is in the hospital on her death bed with her husband by her side. Doctors and nurses come and go to check on her but seem unaffected by the couple’s ordeal, which never seems to strike viewers as odd. Doctors are supposed to have a level of professionalism that removes them from their patients’ pain and suffering; this allows them to dispassionately make difficult diagnoses and decisions about treatment. Yet physicians also need to have some level of empathy for their patients. Doctor empathy is particularly important for successful communication with patients and is also associated with improved patient satisfaction. It even relates to a patient’s tendency to comply with a recommended treatment. How do doctors emotionally connect with their patients without becoming overinvolved in a way that can preclude effective medical care?
Most doctors don’t exhibit downgraded emotional responses outside of their practice, which suggests that it’s experience rather than a natural inclination for emotional distance that endows medical professionals with the ability to cope with their patients’ suffering. Doctors learn techniques for keeping their emotions in check and for focusing on what they need to accomplish in the situations they face, such as an emergency or a patient who is not responding to treatment as expected. Indeed people just starting a career in medicine show greater overt emotional reactions to other people’s pain than those with a lot of medical experience. What’s more, the place in the brain where differences emerge between how doctors and nonmedical professionals respond to the discomfort of others tells us a lot about how doctors cope with suffering.
There is a striking overlap in the neural circuits that drive the firsthand experience of pain and the perception of pain in other people. The insula, somatosensory cortex, and cingulate cortex are involved in our own experience of pain and the processing of others’ painful experiences.8 Our empathy largely draws upon a resonance between
ourselves and others: we mentally simulate, and hence share, other people’s emotional experiences. When doctors watch video clips of body parts being pricked by a needle, they show less activity in brain regions at the neural epicenter of the pain response than do nondoctors. But it’s not that doctors’ brains are less active overall when witnessing a painful event. Quite the opposite. An area smack dab in the middle of the frontal cortex that houses our ability to regulate our feelings and emotions works harder in doctors when they watch other people in pain. Indeed the more active the doctors’ emotion-regulation brain center is, the less involved the bits of brain tissue that register pain.9 Doctors train their prefrontal cortex to rein in their natural inclination to mirror other people’s painful experiences.
The ability to temper our emotions, which tend to spontaneously ignite when we see others in distress, develops over the course of a lifetime. Seeing someone’s hand getting slammed in a car door is a very different experience (at least for our brain) when we are seven years old than when we are in our thirties. There is a mental and physical shift in how we understand these emotional situations that depends on our age. Young children show a more visceral emotional response that is critical for determining the emotional meaning of what they are seeing. These kids might actually flinch and may even grab their hand at seeing a car door slam on another person’s hand. In contrast, adults show a more reasoned and detached reaction, more similar to that of seasoned medical professionals. As we age, we get better at making sense of the feelings we see in others, including our ability to separate others’ emotions from our own. The development of the prefrontal cortex, which continues well into our mid-twenties, certainly promotes this emotional meaning-making. Before this time, it is easier for the emotional centers of the brain to call the shots.