Embody your Happiness.
And mimicry leads to empathy
In a past newsletter, I described recent research that supported theories of consciousness from Carl Jung and William James:
“William James proposed that an external event triggers a physiological reaction in us, which we then interpret; emotions are then ‘caused’ by our mind’s interpretations of these physiological reactions. Physical sensations ‘feedback’ from our own bodies and tell our minds what emotions we are ‘feeling.’ This feedback comes into consciousness via the brain’s ‘unconscious’ regions.”
We don’t laugh because we’re happy — we’re happy because we laugh. — William James
In my book, “Be the Rainbow * Bridge Heaven and Earth”, I describe the phenomenon called ‘embodiment’ which captures these physical feelings transferred into the psyche.
“Meanings arise from and are conditioned by the patterns of our own bodily experiences. Philosophies that separate mind from body, cognition from emotion, and logic from wonder, are incomplete because imagination links your cognitive and bodily functions. Images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors are all connected to your physical encounters with the world.
All are fundamentally derived from your senses. This shows up strongly in linguistics, the study of language, where they describe ‘conceptual metaphors.’ These emerge as early as infancy and involve space, time, moving, controlling, and other experiences of the body. Our daily language is chock full of these body-based metaphors, like ‘push the idea through’ or it is going to be a ‘rough day.’ Brain scans show that you actually mentally sense a rough texture when you say or read that metaphor, even though you may be just referring to a difficult work day and not literally, a sandpaper-filled day. And just by clenching your muscles you can activate willpower, facilitating self-control, when facing a challenge. …
Did you know that your facial expressions indicating your emotions are similar to those in other human cultures and therefore are universal? Actually, your face doesn’t just show your emotions, it controls your emotions. Facial expressions have a role in how your own emotions develop inside of you, not only in how you display them for others to see. When we are happy, we smile, yes? Even more true, is that when we smile, we ‘become’ happy. Trying to get rid of your depression? First thing, start smiling. And do not botox your smiling eyes away. People injected with the toxin actually end up with diminished emotional intensity to display on their face, and less intensity to feel.
Women who botox their faces are less able to read emotional expressions on other people’s faces. So maybe related, too, is the fact that physically following and imitating others folks’ facial expressions can help you to experience empathy, i.e. shared emotions. We also respond to expressions and gestures from other folks’ bodies, and these feed back and play into our own emotions — the well-known concept of mirroring. Perhaps this is the basis for that cliché, ‘monkey see, monkey do;’ and maybe after a few back and forth cycles, it turns into, ‘birds of a feather, flock together.’ Yawning is a good example. When a person yawns, those around him start yawning. Well, that yawn transmission happens sooner and more often, between close friends, relatives and mates — those we empathize with — than among strangers….”
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A recent paper investigated the contribution of embodiment to empathy, i.e. the recognition of another’s emotions. By selectively engaging the facial smile muscle using facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation at time of stimulus onset, researchers were able to change the way people perceive facial expressions—making them see emotionally ambiguous faces instead, as happy. And, once seen, the facial expression can be mimicked, and the emotion shared. A phenomenon called ‘mirroring’.
ABSTRACT. The role of facial feedback in facial emotion recognition remains controversial, partly due to limitations of the existing methods to manipulate the activation of facial muscles, such as voluntary posing of facial expressions or holding a pen in the mouth. These procedures are indeed limited in their control over which muscles are (de)activated when and to what degree. To overcome these limitations and investigate in a more controlled way if facial emotion recognition is modulated by one’s facial muscle activity, we used computer-controlled facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES). In a pre-registered EEG experiment, ambiguous facial expressions were categorised as happy or sad by 47 participants. In half of the trials, weak smiling was induced through fNMES delivered to the bilateral Zygomaticus Major muscle for 500 ms. The likelihood of categorising ambiguous facial expressions as happy was significantly increased with fNMES, as shown with frequentist and Bayesian linear mixed models. Further, fNMES resulted in a reduction of P1, N170 and LPP amplitudes. These findings suggest that fNMES-induced facial feedback can bias facial emotion recognition and modulate the neural correlates of face processing. -TN Efthimiou, et al
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You can put this information to work in everyday life. For example, the yawn contagion test is a predictor for psychopathy [i.e. lack of empathy]. A recent study demonstrated a small, but significant negative relationship between yawn contagion and psychopathic traits in a community sample.
Considerable variation exists in the contagiousness of yawning, and numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the proximate mechanisms involved in this response. Yet, findings within the psychological literature are mixed, with many studies conducted on relatively small and homogeneous samples. Here, we aimed to replicate and extend upon research suggesting a negative relationship between psychopathic traits and yawn contagion in community samples. In the largest study of contagious yawning to date (N = 458), which included both university students and community members from across 50 nationalities, participants completed an online study in which they self-reported on their yawn contagion to a video stimulus and completed four measures of psychopathy: the primary and secondary psychopathy scales from the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRPS), the psychopathy construct from the Dirty Dozen, and the Psychopathic Personality Traits Scale (PPTS). Results support previous findings in that participants that yawned contagiously tended to score lower on the combined and primary measures of psychopathy. That said, tiredness was the strongest predictor across all models. These findings align with functional accounts of spontaneous and contagious yawning and a generalized impairment in overall patterns of behavioral contagion and biobehavioral synchrony among people high in psychopathic traits. - AC Gallup, et al.
REFERENCES
Be the Rainbow * Bridge Heaven and Earth ebook. pdf format to download.
Laura Kragie MD. 2012 Be the Rainbow * Bridge Heaven and Earth: How-to Manual for Integrating Alternative and Evidence-Based Medicine https://www.amazon.com/Rainbow-Bridge-Heaven-Earth-ebook/dp/B0081UEYIU/
Vagaries of the Vagus. This nerve is the superhighway to and from your organs
TN Efthimiou, et al. Zygomaticus activation through facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) induces happiness perception in ambiguous facial expressions and affects neural correlates of face processing, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2024). DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsae013
AC Gallup, et al. People that score high on psychopathic traits are less likely to yawn contagiously. Sci Rep 11, 23779 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-03159-1