Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The experimenter quickly noted, with drill sergeant precision, participants’ deviations from the instructions (“keep your eyebrows raised” “your eyes are fluttering, please just keep one eye closed” “now close your mouth, and don’t press your lips together, pucker them” “remember to puff out your cheeks, and don’t stick out your tongue”). Typically, after a valiant, thirty-second struggle, participants achieved the expression and then were asked to hold it for ten seconds. As participants’ facial muscles quivered and they tried to hold their smiles at bay, they showed visible signs, a furtive glance askance, of imagining what their appearance was, permanently recorded on videotape: They looked like Popeye, drunk on ale, puckering up for a smooch from Olive Oyl, sure to be rebuffed. They were part of some weird joke or an act of absurdist theater. After ten seconds of this pose, participants were asked to rest. It was in the milliseconds after resting that I saw my quarry: the embarrassment display.

With these videos in hand, I spent much of a summer in the coding room of Ekman’s lab, with its cream-colored walls and drawers bursting with electrical plugs, wires, and videotapes. Each fifteen-second snippet of behavior required about half an hour to code, as I charted each twenty-millisecond shift in gaze and discerned the specific muscle actions that define the awkward, embarrassed smile. At the time, most scientists assumed that the display of embarrassment was a jumble of confused actions. In real time my participants did appear rather shaken, uncertain, and disorganized.

Yet with careful frame-by-frame analysis a different picture emerged, and one in line with Darwin-inspired analyses of emotional displays as involuntary, truthful signs of our commitments to particular courses of actions. Our facial expression of anger, for example, signals to others likely aggressive actions, and prompts actions in others that prevent costly aggressive encounters. Within this school of thought, emotional displays are highly coordinated, stereotyped patterns of behavior, honed by thousands of generations of evolution and the beneficial effects displays have on social interactions. Evolved displays unfold briefly, typically between two and three seconds. The brevity of emotional displays is, in part, due to limits on the time that certain facial muscles can fire. Emotional displays are brief, as well, because of the pressing needs facial expressions are attuned to—the approaching predator, the child catapulting toward danger, the flickering signs of interest shown by a potential mate amid many suitors. Involuntary displays of emotion have different temporal dynamics than nonemotional displays: They are gradual in their onset and offset. More voluntary displays, in contrast, like polite smiles, pouts, dramatic glares, or provocative puckers, can come on the face in milliseconds, and remain on the face for minutes, hours, days, or, for some regrettable souls, a lifetime.

What I charted in the elements of the embarrassment display was a fleeting but highly coordinated two-to three-second signal. First the participant’s eyes shot down within .75 seconds after finishing the pose of the awkward face. Then the individual turned his head to the side, typically leftward, and down within the next .5 seconds, exposing the neck. Contained within this head motion down and to the left was a smile, which typically lasted about two seconds. At the onset and offset of this smile, like bookends, were other facial actions in the mouth, smile controls: lip sucks, lip presses, lip puckers. And while the person’s head was down and to the left a few curious actions: the person looked up two to three times with furtive glances, and the person often touched his or her face. This three-second snippet of behavior was not some bedlam of confused actions; it had the timing, patterning, and contour of an evolved signal, coordinated, brief, and smooth in its onset and offset.

BARED-TEETH GRINS AND NODDING GULLS

 

To understand the deeper meaning of facial displays, like smiles, sneers, tongue flicks, or eyebrow flashes, researchers can do what Darwin had pioneered: turn to the displays of other species. By looking to other animals we discern the deeper forces that have produced many of the displays that we observe today. We learn about the contexts in which displays emerged—for example, when sharing food, fighting a rival, engaging in rough-and-tumble play, or protecting vulnerable offspring. We learn how displays are really the tip of the iceberg of more complex behavioral systems, such as eating, breastfeeding, attack, or defense.