The Age of Empathy (14 page)

We show rapid reactions to angry (left) and fearful (right) body postures. In this drawing, the faces convey the same emotions as the bodies, but with the faces blacked out, we still show an emotional reaction purely based on posture.

How exactly the emotions of others affect our own is not entirely understood. One idea, which I’ll call the “Body First Theory,” holds that it starts with the body and that emotions follow. Someone else’s body language affects our own body, which then creates an emotional echo that makes us feel accordingly. As Louis Armstrong sang, “When you’re smiling, the whole world
smiles with you.” If copying another’s smile makes us feel happy, the emotion of the smiler has been transmitted via our body. Strange as it may sound, this theory states that emotions arise from our bodies. For example, our mood can be improved by simply lifting up the corners of our mouth. If people are asked to bite down on a pencil lengthwise, taking care not to let the pencil touch their lips (thus forcing the mouth into a smile-like shape), they judge cartoons funnier than if they have been asked to frown. The primacy of the body is sometimes summarized in the phrase “I must be afraid, because I’m running.”

This surely seems an odd way of putting things: Emotions are supposed to move us, not the other way around. Shouldn’t it rather be “I run, because I’m afraid”? After all, “emotion” means to “stir” or “move.” This is, in fact, the second idea, which I’ll call the “Emotion First Theory.” From seeing someone’s body language or hearing their tone of voice, we deduce their emotional state, which then affects our own. In fact, we don’t need to see their face to adopt the same facial expression, as has been demonstrated by letting humans watch pictures of fearful body postures with the faces blacked out. While this ruled out facial mimicry, the subjects’ faces still registered fear. Emotional contagion thus relies on a direct channel between the other’s and our own emotions.

There are times when matching the other’s emotions is
not
a good idea. When we’re facing a furious boss, for example, we’d get into deep trouble if we were to mimic his attitude. What we need is a quick grasp of his emotional state so as to respond with the appropriate submission, appeasement, or remorse. This applies almost equally to situations where the boss is right as where he is wrong. It’s just a matter of social rank—a dynamic intuitively understood by every primate. The Emotion First Theory explains such encounters much better than the Body First Theory.

Despite the importance of body postures and movements, the face remains the emotion highway: It offers the quickest connection to the other. Our dependence on this highway may explain why
people with immobile or paralyzed faces feel deeply alone, and tend to become depressive, sometimes to the point of suicide. Working with Parkinson’s patients, a speech therapist noted that if in a group of, say, forty patients, five showed facial rigidity, all others would stay away from them. If they talked with them at all, it was to get simple “yes” or “no” answers. And if they wanted to know how they felt, they would rather speak with the companions of these patients. If empathy were a voluntary, conscious process of one mind trying to understand another, there would of course be no reason for this. People would simply need to put in a little more effort to hear the thoughts and feelings of these patients, who are perfectly capable of expressing themselves.

But empathy needs a face. With impoverished facial expression comes impoverished empathic understanding, and a bland interaction devoid of the bodily echoing that humans constantly engage in. As French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, “I live in the facial expression of the other, as I feel him living in mine.” When we try to talk to a stone-faced person, we fall into an emotional black hole.

This is precisely the term used by a Frenchwoman who lost her face to a dog attack (her face had become nothing but
a grand trou,
she said, a “big hole”). In 2007, doctors gave her a new face, and her relief says it all: “I have returned to the planet of human beings. Those who have a face, a smile, facial expressions that permit them to communicate.”

Someone Else’s Shoes

W
alking into Moscow’s State Darwin Museum, the very first display will surprise anyone familiar with the history of evolutionary thought. It’s a life-size statue of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French evolutionist whose ideas are often contrasted with those of Darwin himself.

Lamarck is depicted leaning back in an armchair with two teenage daughters standing by his side. The daughters look remarkably alike, and also resemble the bust, seen a little farther on, of Nadia Kohts, the Russian pioneer of animal studies, whose background I had come to investigate. The resemblance is no coincidence: Kohts posed for the sculptor of the statue. Photographs of her intelligent, dark-eyed face are featured in display after display in the museum: She was famous in Russia, and remains so today.

Even though we’re used to primatological heroes of the female gender, the best-known among them have caught our attention by living close to dangerous creatures in the forest, defying the stereotype that only men would be brave enough to do so. Kohts was brave, too, but instead of lurking in the forest, the danger of her place and time resided in the Kremlin. Stalin, under the dark influence of his protégé, the amateur geneticist Trofim Lysenko, had many a brilliant biologist publicly recant their ideas, sent to the gulags, or quietly disappear. Names of the persecuted became unmentionable. Entire research institutes were closed down.

Thanks to its secular worldview, evolutionary theory was in favor with the Bolsheviks. Except, that is, for the idea of genetic change. Since this is a bit like accepting gravity without its pull, scientists had trouble with the tortuous way communism looked at evolution. Staying out of trouble became a major preoccupation for Kohts and her husband, Aleksandr, director of the museum. They hid their most sensitive documents and data among the stuffed animals in the basement, and made sure Lamarck received a prominent place in the museum. His theory, formulated before Darwin’s, posited that acquired characteristics (such as the stretching of legs by wading birds or the lengthening of the giraffe’s neck) can be passed on to the next generation. No genetic mutations are needed. The Lamarckian façade helped make the museum palatable to the powerful.

Kohts’s isolation in Moscow had its advantages, though. She was oblivious to the doctrinal battles in the West, where scientists were busy closing the book on the animal mind. Acting as a surrogate mother for Yoni, a young chimpanzee, Kohts opened her heart and eyes to his every expression of sensitivity and intelligence. Rather than regarding him as a robot, devoid of thoughts and feelings, she saw him as a living being, not all that different from her own little son, Roody, She documented the development of her two charges in loving detail, being one of the first modern scientists to fully appreciate the emotional life of animals.

Kohts investigated Yoni’s reactions to pictures of chimpanzees
and other animals, to furs, and to his own reflection in a mirror. Even though Yoni was still too young to recognize what the mirror showed him, Kohts describes how, once he had gotten used to it, he would entertain himself by moving his tongue back and forth, and writhe and rotate it, closely studying its movements in the mirror. Kohts reports every aspect of Yoni’s emotional development, from joy, jealousy, and guilt to sympathy and protection of loved ones. The following passage relates the extreme concern and compassion Yoni felt for Kohts:

What better evidence for the power of simian sympathy than the fact that an ape who’d refuse to descend from the roof of the house for food that was waved at him would do so instantly upon seeing his mistress in distress? Kohts describes how Yoni would look into her eyes when she pretended to cry: “the more sorrowful and disconsolate my crying, the warmer his sympathy.” When she slapped her hands over her eyes, he tried to pull them away, extending his lips toward her face, looking attentively, slightly groaning and whimpering. She describes similar reactions from Roody, adding that her son went further than the ape in that he’d actually cry along with her. Roody cried even when he’d notice a bandage over the eye of his favorite uncle or when he’d see the maid grimace while swallowing bitter medicine.

The one limitation of Kohts’s work was that she studied a single chimpanzee, and that he was so young. She never got to see the
species’ mature psychology and knew nothing about the way chimpanzees live in the wild. A psychologist who studied a single boy of a few years old would similarly be unable to generalize about the human species as a whole. On the other hand, because she was in contact with Yoni every day, and collected all possible information about him, Kohts was able to see a chimp up close in a way very few people have. She looked into the ape’s heart and was impressed by what she saw.

Kohts included perceptive remarks about human behavior. For instance, when she sought a comparison for the temper tantrums that Yoni threw if he didn’t get his way or was temporarily left alone, Kohts saw parallels gazing out the window of her study, which overlooked a morgue. Responding to the loss of a family member, especially in a case of accidental death, people utter heartbreaking cries while bending to the ground, almost under the wheels of the funeral carriage, making fitful, desperate gripping movements with their hands. She went on to comment on the human habit to gesticulate as a way of expressing and alleviating grief, comparing this to Yoni’s hand gestures, which she found strikingly similar.

Having walked by Kohts’s original writing desk in the museum, a photograph of her sitting next to her husband, another one in which the American expert of ape psychology Robert Yerkes talks with her via an interpreter, and a somber gallery of portraits honoring the many scientists executed under Lysenko and Stalin, I ran into a most unexpected display. Amid photos of Yoni laughing while being tickled and crying when frustrated, and an arrangement of his wooden toys and climbing ropes, stood Yoni himself. He has been preserved in a typical hooting posture—the way chimpanzees look when they are excited about something, such as food or company. The taxidermy is superb, as one would expect given that it was Aleksandr Kohts’s specialty.

At first, I found it macabre to see the object of so much of Nadia Kohts’s love and affection standing there as if still alive. But upon reflection, I concluded that preserving Yoni made sense for a couple as
devoted to the traditional ways of natural history museums as the Kohtses were. After all, each had given the other a preserved animal as a wedding gift. For them, the best way to honor and commemorate Yoni must have been to make him part of their collection.

One of the greatest but least-known pioneers of primatology had left us her subject in an active pose, so that his obvious emotionality would catch our eye, as it did hers.

A monkey or rat reacting to another’s pain by stopping the behavior that caused it may simply be “turning off” unpleasant signals. But self-protective altruism can’t explain Yoni’s reaction to his surrogate mother. First, because he hadn’t caused her distress himself, and second, because he could easily have moved away when he saw her crying from the roof of the house. If self-protection had been his goal, he also should have left her hands where they were when she cried behind them. Clearly, Yoni wasn’t just focusing on his own situation: He felt an urge to understand what the matter was with Kohts.

If Yoni were human, we’d speak of sympathy. Sympathy differs from empathy in that it is proactive. Empathy is the process by which we gather information about someone else. Sympathy, in contrast, reflects concern about the other and a desire to improve the other’s situation. American psychologist Lauren Wispé offers the following definition: