Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Evidence of distinct nonverbal displays of sympathy and gratitude would then justify the search for the evolutionary origins of these emotions in other primates and mammals, and in our nervous system as well. So I began my quest for the signs of these emotions by turning to what I knew best—the face. I concentrated on sympathy, confident that I would document a unique facial display of this emotion. This work was based on Nancy Eisenberg’s important finding that when people feel sympathy and are inclined to help others in need, they show a concerned eyebrow and pressed lip. When I presented images of this display to participants, and asked them to judge the emotion shown in the face, my hopes were dashed. Participants had only a faint idea what the person with the “sympathy face” was feeling. A few said compassion and sympathy, elevating my hopes. The majority, however, said things such as: she looked like she was concentrating or confused; still others volunteered answers like “she’s drunk or stoned” or “she’s constipated.” Those states certainly did not offer evolutionary clues about this most virtuous of emotions, sympathy.

So like a good emotion researcher, I turned to the next best studied modality of emotional communication—the voice. Here Emiliana Simon-Thomas and I had twenty-two different individuals utter sounds that they would normally use to communicate a variety of different emotions, including sympathy, love, and gratitude. We achieved modest, but unremarkable, success: When I presented these vocalizations of sympathy, love, and gratitude to a pool of participants and asked them to judge the emotions in each voice, about 50 percent correctly identified the vocalizations of sympathy as communicating that emotion. They had no idea, however, what to make of the vocalizations of love and gratitude. The most pro-social of the emotions did not seem to register in the face and voice.

 

Accuracy rates in judging vocal bursts of emotion.

 

Thankfully, graduate students wander into my lab with interests I’ve never imagined. Matt Hertenstein, now a professor at DePauw University, suggested that we look at touch. Perhaps it is with touch that we convey these most pro-social emotions so critical to jen and the spread of goodness to others. Certainly studies of touch and the orbitofrontal cortex, oxytocin, reduced amygdala response, and reduced cortisol would suggest so. Perhaps William James was right in his observation that “Touch is both the alpha and omega of affection.” So Matt and I designed an experiment motivated by a simple question: Can we communicate sympathy, love, and gratitude through touch?

Clearly, the more general requirements of the study were straightforward—one person, the toucher, would be given the task of communicating sympathy, love, and gratitude and other emotions to another person—the touchee. The touchee would only be able to rely on tactile information in discerning the emotion conveyed in each touch. Our first version of the study was a disaster. In this version, our touchee sat blindfolded with earplugs in a lab room. The toucher was given a list of twelve emotions, including sympathy, gratitude, and love, and asked to touch the blindfolded individual, in any fashion within reason, to communicate these emotions. The touchee, who sat in a state of sensory deprivation, knew of the list of twelve emotions that were soon to descend upon his or her skin, and had the task of picking a term that best matched the touch that was just delivered.

The study more resembled a piece of performance art than science. One set of participants acting as the touchee found it to be a form of torture, sitting silently in a sightless and soundless world, ready to be poked in anger or soothingly stroked in compassion. Another portion of students, usually males, found the study to be exhilarating. I have the strong sense they would have paid good money to sit blindfolded and have female participants touch them to communicate love and gratitude.

So we turned to a primitive technology. We built a large barrier in a lab room, a wall to separate toucher and touchee. Part of this barrier included an opaque black curtain. The curtain prevented any kind of communication between toucher and touchee—visual, auditory, olfactory—other than touch. First, both toucher and touchee reviewed the list of twelve emotions: anger, disgust, embarrassment, envy, fear, happiness, pride, sadness, surprise, and the three of interest—sympathy, love, and gratitude. The touchee bravely put his or her arm through the curtain and awaited twelve different touches, randomly ordered. For each touch, the touchee guessed which emotion was being communicated. The toucher could only make contact with the touchee’s arm from elbow to hand to signal each emotion, using any form of touch. The touchee could not see any part of the touch because his or her arm was positioned on the toucher’s side of the curtain.