The general claim that Schelling offered: Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. As Ekman parsed the intricate realm of facial expression, he arrived at a discovery that would provide anatomical support for Schelling’s commitment thesis, and that would lead to a rethinking of the centrality of emotion to our most important bonds. Of the forty-three sets of facial muscles, most are easy to move voluntarily. For example, the pictures that follow represent common facial actions, pregnant with signal value, that most anyone can produce at the drop of a hat, at the behest of a friend, to pass the time in the hotel bathroom, or to win a drunken bet.
A subset of facial muscles, however, are wired differently; they are controlled by different neural pathways originating in the brain. For about 85 to 90 percent of people—actors, sociopaths, politicians, late-night televangelists, and people who take the hundred hours to learn FACS excluded—these muscles are impossible to move voluntarily. If you’re feeling bold, want to put some braggart to the test, or are lacking a bit in levity, try yourself or test whether some other poor soul can produce the following muscle actions:
I’ve asked dozens of children in summer camps, hundreds of undergraduates in lecture courses, dozens of executives in seminars, most of my indulgent friends, and even, I must confess, my two daughters, to try to produce these muscle actions. After many misfires, contorted faces, shakes of disbelief, and the occasional blush, individuals inevitably fail. What these muscles are, Ekman deduced, are the reliable indicators of emotion. These fleeting movements of muscles in the face are the trustworthy signs of specific emotions, such as anger, fear, desire and love, and, by implication, our social commitments.
Consider sympathy, an emotion central to the stability of the social contract, as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Charles Darwin long ago surmised. Social theorists have homed in on sympathy for some time because it backgrounds the individual’s self-interest, and leads to actions that enhance the welfare of others, even at expense to the self. The question is: How do we discern sincere sympathy, or true commitment to others’ welfare, from the false promises of demagogues, sociopaths, and hucksters? Robert Frank reasoned, in a synthesis of Schelling’s insights and Ekman’s methodological labors, that the clues to another’s sympathy and commitment to cooperation are found in two simple facial muscle movements (AU1 + AU4, in FACS terminology). Feelings of sympathy, and the commitment to cooperative exchange, are registered in an involuntary facial display that is more trustworthy than its cheap, and readily feigned, copies.
To get a sense of this, compare your reactions to the photos of the two facial displays below. The expression on the left is hard to produce voluntarily. It involves the pulling in and upward of the inner eyebrows, and has been shown in several empirical studies to accompany sympathetic feelings and activation of a region of the nervous system that is associated with caretaking behavior. The facial expression on the right, although quite similar morphologically to the sympathetic display on the left, does not involve activation of these involuntary, reliable facial muscles. It is not a reliable signal of an individual’s interest in your welfare (in fact, the eyebrow raise is a signal with many meanings, including interest, skepticism, weakness, and dramatic emphasis when speaking).
Darwin had claimed that our emotional expressions are distilled tokens of more complex social actions—striking out, soothing, eating, embrace, yelling to escape, vomiting, self-protection. Ekman had taken this analysis one step further, showing that of the thousands of possible configurations of facial muscles, a select few are reliable clues to the individual’s emotions. This subset of facial expressions, by implication, signals an individual’s social commitments, be it likely attack, the inclination to soothe, to be sexually faithful in romantic bonds, or to show concern over social norms and morals.
Emotions feel irrational from the individual’s point of view. Emotions can subvert our best attempts at self-control, composure, autonomy, and a narrow self-interested rationality. I’m not at my best at considering the recommendations of a financial advisor, solving crossword puzzles, or sorting out the costs and benefits of my actions when feeling strong emotion.
Long-term relationships, however, require us to put aside utilitarian, cost-benefit analyses of self-interest. Emotions enable us to enact the costly commitments to another’s welfare, to respect, to maintaining fair and just relations. Emotions are statements to others that we care, and without these statements long-term relations wither and die. Emotions, Martha Nussbaum argues in Upheavals of Thought, are the idiom in which we negotiate our engagements with others. We would live in a lonely, disengaged world were it not for the emotions.
THE SUBLIME BODY
Like many members of his illustrious family, William James was a hypochondriac. It may have been his somatic oversensitivities that led James to publish his radical thesis about emotion in 1884. His thesis turned long-standing intuitions about emotion on their head, and in fact, the role of the head in emotion on its head. Most writers had proposed that our experience of emotion follows from the perception of emotionally evocative events. These experiences, in turn, generate bodily responses rooted in our nervous system. Your experience of embarrassment, for example, follows from your recognition that you’ve been conducting an important business meeting with toilet paper stuck to your briefcase, and it is this recognition and experience that generate the physiological response—the rush of blood to your cheeks, neck, and forehead that results in the blush.
James’s thesis reversed this sequence of bodily response and experience: “My thesis,” James proposed, “…is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.” Whereas for Darwin, our repertoire of emotions is wired into our forty-three facial muscles, for James the topography of emotion maps onto our viscera. Every subjective state, from political rage to spiritual rapture to contentment one feels at the sounds of children playing, is registered in its own distinct “bodily reverberation.”
Lacking experimental evidence, James turned to thought experiments. One of the most illustrative was the following: What would be left of fear or love or embarrassment, or any emotion, if you took away the physiological sensations such as the heart palpitations, trembling, muscle tensions, warmth or coldness in the skin, sweaty palms, and churning of the stomach? James argued that you would be left with a purely intellectual state. Emotional experience is formed in visceral response.
The bodily system most relevant to James’s analysis is the autonomic nervous system, or ANS. The most general function of the ANS is to maintain the internal condition of the body to enable adaptive response to ever-changing environmental events. The autonomic nervous system is like the old furnace in a home: It generates energy and distributes it through the body to support our most basic physical activities—digestion, sexual contact, fight or flight behaviors, and just moving the body through space.
The parasympathetic autonomic nervous system incorporates nerves that originate at the top and near the bottom of the spinal cord. The parasympathetic system decreases heart rate and blood pressure, it facilitates blood flow by dilating certain arteries, it increases blood flow to erectile tissue in the penis and clitoris, and it moves digested food through the gastrointestinal tract. The parasympathetic system also constricts the pupil (for feelings of love, look for smaller rather than larger pupils), and it stimulates the secretion of various fluids in the digestive, salivary, and lachrymal glands (for tears). Scientists believe that the parasympathetic branch of the ANS helps the individual relax and restore resources and bodily function. One branch of the parasympathetic ANS originating near the top of the spinal cord—the vagus nerve—is thought to enable caretaking behavior.