Sally&#39;s Journal

Opinions? What comes first? The emotions or the physical expression thereof?

There is a rapidly expanding body of research that suggests they're both the same thing.

I'd like you to humour me. Can you imagine yourself smiling? You don't have to actually smile, just visualise having a big grin on your face, spreading from ear to ear. You know when something happens to make you smile uncontrolably? That kind of grin; that's what I'd like you to visualise. The kind of grin that pulls at your jawline and makes your cheekbones and the corners of your eyes scrunch up. The kind of grin you just can't stop wearing, and the more you try and force it back, the more it wants to be there.

Now, what effect (if any) does that visualisation have?

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I've just tried doing this. I get the memory of how my face feels, but that's about all. I assume from the context that it's supposed to provoke a similar feeling to one which would cause a smile like that in the first place, but I don't get any emotional response to the physical gesture in isolation.

Similarly, I can only see physical expression as an effect of emotional stimuli and not the other way around. In fact, it took me a while to understand the question, as the idea that a physical signal could create an emotional response makes no sense to me at all. For example, I hug my friends because I care about them, but hugging a stranger won't cause my feeling about them to change.

I should probably point out that I'm autistic >.> .

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I should probably point out that I'm autistic >.>

That does bear a lot of pertinence. I did wonder how it would work with people on the autistic spectrum, since it does tie in a lot with facial expressions and finer social cues.

It doesn't always work via this medium anyway, since it requires a certain amount of pacing and timing that you just can't deliver in an LJ comment, but I figured it was worth a go anyway. The first part of it relies on a well-documented neurological phenomenon called the Idiomotor Reflex, which is how thinking about performing an action actually primes you to physically carry it out. It's responsible for things like moving to reach something you want without being consciously aware you're doing it, or making scissor-using motions when you're looking for a missing pair of scissors.

The idea goes that thinking about smiling, especially thinking about it in a very physical way, will actually encourage someone to smile without consciously choosing to do so, which is reasonable enough, since people generally don't consciously choose to smile anyway. All of this has only tangential relation to the subject at hand, and is mostly just a springboard into the idea that people having control over how they think and feel and act is a convenient fiction we like to tell ourselves, and how in fact we're all the robot slaves of our animal-impulse masters. Or something.

Anyway, what does have more than tangential relation to the subject at hand is that smiling and being happy (in those of a neurologically typical bent) aren't actually distinct. Did you know that the majority of emotive facial expressions are culturally nonspecific? As in people from Japan to Poland to Mexico all express things like happiness, disgust, shock, confusion, etc. with the same facial expressions, and if you found some isolated tribe in the middle of the jungle, they'd probably do the same. What it points to is these facial expressions being hardwired into typical human neurology. Our faces are just another facet of our emotional state.

Conversely, it's been found that exhibiting a facial expression will trigger the appropriate emotion. In studies, people asked to vocalise sounds that forced their mouths into smiling positions responded more positively to happiness-provoking stimulus than the control group who didn't, and the opposite response was seen with people subtly forced into frowning. Your facial expressions are your emotions. I think there are enough roleplayers reading this to recognise how easy it is to get bleed-over when portraying an emotive character.

This is especially interesting regarding the whole Autism angle, since the classical explanation for many people with ASDs not expressing their emotions with facial gestures is that they don't pick them up as social cues, but if facial expressions are culturally nonspecific, that can't be the answer. Instead, it seems to suggest some sort of broader expressive disconnect.

Then it gets more curious, since facial expressions and emotive gestures in general are contagious. If you smile at someone, and they're not in a really foul mood or otherwise disinclined to do so, they'll probably smile back, again without conscious thought, and that will then make them happy. If someone scowls, you'll scowl back. Someone acts panicked and stressed, you'll pick up on it and start stressing yourself. If there's a stopgap in autism that prevents facial expressions being exhibited, this also goes a long way to explaining the classical autistic shortfall in empathising with others. If you can't catch someone else's good or bad mood, how are you supposed to know how they feel?

But yeah, the example I've been using so far is the smile, which is an incredibly basic example, but what's to stop it scaling up to more elaborate social gestures? Can't they be infectious? Isn't that how flirting is actually supposed to work? Physical proximity + charm + suggestiveness. It's like a micro-liaison, and it can and does happen between people who've previously not been attracted to each other and result in hot fleshy shenanigans from whence no hot fleshy shenanigans previously resided.

I've typed enough. I think I'll end it here.

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I'm aware of the Idiomotor Reflex - there's a Peter Kay sketch that illustrates it pretty well (I'll post it in a bit if I can find it). I'm one of those people who couldn't speak if you cut their hands off (even on the phone), although my gestures are often pretty random. I have gestures for "cardboard", "cold owl" and "the way ahead" to name a few.

Also, I have the correct facial responses myself (e.g. I smile at happy things), but find it somewhere between difficult and impossible to recognise them in other people. I generally have to learn them on an individual basis.

As far as I know, the only infectious gesture that works for me is yawning. There's been a few times that I've been flirted with and not known it until afterwards when someone's pointed it out to me. I've even been on a date and not realised that's what it was.

I've learned something today - I always assumed that smiling at someone who smiles at you is just a polite thing to do. I didn't know that people do it instinctively.

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I think yawning comes from a much more basic part of your brain than emotional responses (R-complex rather than limbic system) since it's actually a survival instinct.

If you see one person check their phone, do you check yours?

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No, unless I was expecting a message but I'd forgotten and seeing someone checking their phone reminded me (this has happened a few times; I don't have a great memory).

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OK. Just curious. Try it when you're next amongst a group of people. Check your phone, and see how many other people follow suit without even thinking about it.

I suspected R-Complex roots (because it reminded me of the contagious yawn reflex, and also smacks a bit of OCD-esque habits, which coincide with unusual R-Complex activity) but might be entirely wrong.

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I've seen it happen, mostly on buses or in offices, and the same thing with the time/watch checking too.

Here's a link to that bit of Peter Kay stand up (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG_38UV7qnA) about talking with your hands. The quality's not so great, but it gets the point across.

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raggedhalo.livejournal.com

Like my "mind reading" trick ;-)

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Hmmm...it actually cheered me up a bit. I didn't actually smile, but my mood definitely lightened, which is saying something considering how vexing today is currently being.

Interesting...

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castorlion.livejournal.com

Why not just spend the night using a duvet with no cover?

And yes, I've often found my reaction to someone suddenly becomes a lot stronger when they show interest in me. Which has lead to some awkward situations, actually..

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Coz it gets the duvet mucky and duvets are hard to clean and are prone to making jez sick if they accumulate dust etc.

It also seemed to make sense at 1 am which was maybe not the best time for me to make decisions.

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twicedead.livejournal.com

They're both reinforcing I think. You can start with either, and the other will become stronger from it. So physical closeness can strengthen and create to emotional closeness, and emotional closeness acan strengthen and create physical closeness.

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ksirafai.livejournal.com

Sorry! :( I didn't know anyone in the house actually owned single duvets... Next time, will check. Or possibly hide all the single duvet covers...

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No worries. It wasn't a big deal. Just an odd night.

(I didn't know we had any single duvet covers either. God knows where that came from)

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lapinenoireuk.livejournal.com

IMHO a lot of it is context ... you may work with / associate with someone for years and not think of them sexually then WHAM ... out of nowhere you notice that she has eyes you could swim in and bingo .... HELLO !!

MattMatt makes a very true comment when he mentions someone showing interest. I know it works in my case (prob down to low self image {grin}) but then we get into the whole interpretation of "interest" and what that constitutes but lets NOT even go there {rueful smile}

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raggedhalo.livejournal.com

In brief: both are true. You can change people's behaviour by changing their attitude. But, due to a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance(and our desire to avoid it), you can change someone's attitude by changing someone's behaviour.

Or "I am sleeping with you because I love you" vs. "I must love you, because I am sleeping with you."

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