The next time someone is laughing or smiling while talking with you, observe how similarly you react to them. We always tend to laugh or smile as well, often without realising it. Even more subtle is the way our behaviour and social interactions change depending on who we are interacting with. If one tries to conciously control it, it can be very difficult to stop doing without constant self-monitoring. This has recently been tested, by asking people see photos of others faces and to make their own facial expressions while their face muscles were monitored. The subjects were asked to conciously try to make specific faces even if the photo they saw was of an opposite emotion. There was a clear distinction between making ‘same-emotion’ responses (smiling at a smiling man) than ‘reverse-emotion’ (smiling at a frowning man) ones. This suggests we subconciously imitate the ‘other’ in some way. Although it is quite weird to think of, this is a kind of ‘auto-empathy’. What I wonder is if we have the reverse mechanism (I assume we must), to subconciously process when people are not following along with how we are expressing ourselves.
Would that help to explain why people are so un-empathetic with those who are far away and can not see face to face?
Posted by ferrera at November 5, 2002 10:55 PM