At Muybridge’s highly publicized trial, which produced an acquittal, several witnesses spoke of the changes the stagecoach accident had produced in his character. After the accident, he seemed like a different man—eccentric, remote, aloof, and cold. His speech and manner of dress were odd. He did not clean himself regularly. He cared little for social outings. He had difficulties keeping track of the contracts that financed his photography. And he demonstrated little or no modesty, no embarrassment at his eccentricities.
What does embarrassment have to do with incivility, remoteness, and murder? To find answers to these questions, I trained my eye in the frame-by-frame view of human social life inspired by Darwin and pioneered by Muybridge himself in his still photography. I slowed down the blur of two-second snippets of embarrassment and studied its fleeting elements—gaze shifts, head movements down, coy, compressed smiles, neck exposures, and glancing touches of the face. At the time I began my research, the display of embarrassment was thought to be a sign of confusion and thwarted intention. My research told a different story, about how these elements of embarrassment are the visible signals of an evolved force that brings people together during conflict and after breeches of the social contract, when relations are adrift, and aggressive inclinations perilously on the rise. This subtle display is a sign of our respect for others, our appreciation of their view of things, and our commitment to the moral and social order. I found that facial displays of embarrassment are evolved signals whose rudiments are observed in other species, and that the study of this seemingly inconsequential emotion offers a porthole onto the ethical brain, which in Muybridge’s case had been destroyed in northeastern Texas over 140 years ago.
SLOW WORLD, FRAME BY FRAME
When Muybridge returned to California in 1866, brain damaged and a different man, he was swept up in a period of radical change. Space and time and the ordinary rhythms of human exchange were being annihilated by the new technologies, the steam engine, the railroad, the factory, and photography. Muybridge became a photographer of this modernization, this deconstruction of human social life.
Muybridge is best-known for his studies of animals in motion, an obsession that began with his photos of Leland Stanford’s horses on his farm in Palo Alto. In a frenzied eighteen months at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge shot over 100,000 photos, capturing the frame-by-frame elements of people, often nude, walking, running, doing flips, jumping, throwing discs, descending stairs, and pouring water. He shot nude women throwing balls and feeding dogs, a legless boy getting into and out of a chair, cripples walking, and near-nude men doing rifle drills, laying bricks, and throwing seventy-five-pound rocks. The subjects’ faces are typically turned away. They are lonely forms removed from the warm surround of other people.
In this frame-by-frame world, Muybridge revealed truths previously inaccessible to the human eye, truths about whether horses’ hooves are all aloft when galloping, about the coordination of arms and legs during a simple stroll, about how the arms thrust backward after throwing a heavy object. Slow-motion scenes in film are similarly revelatory. In one scene in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Robert De Niro, as the 1940s middleweight Jake LaMotta, first realizes his desire for a young teen while staring at her feet, splashing in a pool, foot by immersing foot, in hypnotic slow motion. On the ropes in a bloody championship fight, LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson dwell in intimate eye contact in a few slow-moving frames, realizing respect amid violence, through their swollen eyes, misshapen heads, and the stroboscopic blur of their punches.
For Darwin, the frame-by-frame world revealed how human facial expression traces back to the expressions of our primate relatives, and the selection pressures that have produced the human emotional repertoire. It is this frame-by-frame world to which Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen devoted seven years, developing the Facial Action Coding System.
It was this frame-by-frame world that I entered into in 1990 as a post-doc in Paul Ekman’s Human Interaction Laboratory. The lab is tucked away in a fog-bound, beige, two-story Victorian amid the Mies van der Rohe-style steel-and-glass UC San Francisco campus. My first task, of Talmudic proportions, was to master the Facial Action Coding System, which, as mentioned earlier, takes 100 hours of monastic, vision-blurring study. There is the manual itself, seventy dense pages, in which all visible facial actions are translated to specific action units, or AUs, and combinations of AUs. There is the instructional videotape, in which you watch Ekman move each individual facial muscle and then see important combinations, demonstrating the grammar of facial expression, the periodic chart—the skeptical, bemused, outer eyebrow raise (AU2), the delicate drawing together of the lips (AU8), the tragic raising of the inner eyebrow (AU1), the sulky lip curl (AU22), the hackle-raising tightening of the lower eyelid (AU7).
As I walked the streets from my apartment in San Francisco to the Human Interaction Laboratory, a frame-by-frame world exploded with AU12s (smiles), AU4s (frowns), AU5s (glares), AU9s (nose wrinkles), and AU29s (tongue protrusions). I began to see still, frozen vestiges of our evolutionary past in the crowded, unfolding world: flirtations between two teens waiting for a tram; festering anger between husband and wife stewing at a table in a café radiant warmth in the shared gaze of a nine-month-old and her mother, lying on a picnic blanket. In these instances I began to see the products of millions of years of evolution, the traces of positive emotions that bind humans to one another.
Once, I was lacing up my hightops for a game of pickup basketball near some creaky, rusty swings. A tense mother was pushing her eight-year-old daughter on a swing. As the young girl swung by, her face was frozen in the tightened, lifted eyebrows, the remote eyes, and taut, elongated mouth that telegraphed chronic anxiety. As she returned to my field of vision with each backward swing, her face remained frozen in this expression, one faintly mirrored on her mother’s face. In this thin slice of time, the lifetime of anxiety she faced was evident. Inspired by my in-lab and out-of-lab observations, I began to see the origins of the evolution of our ethical sense in brief displays of embarrassment.
THIN SLICES OF MORTIFICATION
My first project with Ekman, a rite of passage, really, was to code the facial actions of people being startled. The startle is a lightning-fast response that short-circuits whatever the individual is immersed in—reading a newspaper, snacking on a bagel, daydreaming of warm sand and a novel. That is the orienting function of the startle: it resets the individual’s mind and physiology to attend to the source of the loud noise that has suddenly entered the individual’s phenomenal field.
The startle response involves seven actions: a blink, cheek tighten, furrowed brow, lip stretch, neck tighten, and shoulder and head flinch, which blaze by in a 250-millisecond blur. Coding them is a form of torture, like watching a sky for shooting stars, knowing they’re going to appear, and being asked to pinpoint the exact instant and place where they appeared and when and where they gracefully dissipated. Why was I devoting precious publish-or-perish time to coding the startle response? Wasn’t there bigger game for me to set my sights on?
As it turns out, the magnitude of the 250-millisecond startle response is a telling indicator of a person’s temperament, and in particular of the extent to which the person is anxious, reactive, and vigilant to threat and danger. People with intense startle responses, typically measured in terms of the intensity of their eye blink, experience more anxiety and dread. They are more tense and neurotic. They are more pessimistic about their prospects. The startle response is a good bet to capture a veteran’s degree of posttraumatic stress disorder. If you’re worried about moving in with someone who might be a bit too neurotic for your tastes (and this could be justified; neurotic individuals make for more difficult marriages), consider startling him and gathering a bit of data. Sneak up on your beloved as he is settling into a glass of wine, and drop a heavy book on the counter next to him. If he shrieks, with arms flailing and wine glass flying, you have just witnessed a few telling seconds of his behavior that speak volumes to how he will handle the daily stresses and tribulations of life.