Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

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.