Q & A with Dacher Keltner, UC-Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (W. W. Norton; January 2009)
1. What does science say is the key to happiness?
Connect, and be kind to others. Dozens of years of research on literally millions of people around the world from all walks of life tell us that it is not money or career achievement or material gain that makes us happy, but instead the strength of our connection to others. Strong families make for happier children. Strong intimate relations make for greater contentment and more robust immune systems. Caring adults give children strength in adverse circumstances. Pictures of our children and friends light up reward centers in the brain. What Born to Be Good explores is that we evolved as a species to connect to others, to care for the vulnerable, to reconcile and forgive, and to appreciate and revere; and it is emotions like compassion, gratitude, and awe that are the keys to our strong connection to others.
2. In your first chapter you introduce the “jen ratio” as a way to think about happiness. What is the “jen ratio”?
For several thousand years, people have been trying to arrive at the clearest way to think about the meaning of happiness. Is it the amount of pleasure you experience? Virtue? The fulfillment of duties? An illusion? My attempt to answer this age-old question is to have the reader look at life through the jen[NKP1] ratio. Jen is a concept from the Chinese philosopher Confucius. It refers to a rich mixture of kindness, humanity, and reverence. A person of jen brings the good in others to completion and not the bad in others to completion. So the jen ratio is this: in the top part of the ratio, in the numerator, put all the actions in which you or other people have brought the good in others to completion; in the bottom part of the ratio, list the occasions in which you or others have done the opposite, bringing the bad in others to completion. Higher scores mean happier, more satisfying marriages, work lives, relationships with a friend or relative—that your life is more filled with kindness and appreciation. Lower scores mean more cynical, adversarial marriages, work lives, and so on. When you review different scientific studies, you find that marriages with high jen ratios fare better; that children with high jen ratios, who bring the good in others to completion, are healthier; and even that communities and cultures with higher jen ratios are faring better. The key to high jen, in my opinion, is emotions I’ve studied in my lab, like compassion, gratitude, awe, love, or laughter.
3. You write about homo economicus. Who is that?
In much of western thought, we assume that our basic nature is that of homo economicus. Homo economicus is selfish and competitive at the core and wired to give priority to the bad in the world over the good. Given this view of human nature, several things readily follow. Altruism is an illusion. Aggression and adversarial relations are natural states. Happiness derives from the pursuit of self-interest. What the new science that I summarize in Born to Be Good is revealing is, instead, that we are also wired for good. In a recent study, people derived greater happiness spending $20 on someone else than on themselves. New neuroscience suggests that when we give to others, or act cooperatively, the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain known to have many dopamine receptors and to process rewards, lights up. New discoveries are finding that oxytocin, a neuropeptide that floats through the bloodstream, promotes trust and devotion. Modest expressions of gratitude, the simple “thank you,” smile, or warm gaze, prompts the recipient of such kindness to be kind in ensuing interactions. Even in economic games between strangers, cooperators and those who forgive their partner’s more selfish behaviors fare better than competitors in terms of economic outcome.
Survival of the kindest may be a more apt description of human nature than survival of the most selfish.
4. You did a well-known study showing that the warmth of a woman’s smile in her 1960 college yearbook photo predicted how happy she and her marriage were thirty years later. Tell us about that study.
Ravenna Helson has been studying the lives of women who graduated from Mills College in 1960 for 45 years. It’s the longest study ever conducted on women’s lives. One day she asked whether I’d be interested in coding their smiles from their yearbook photos to see if it would predict what their lives were like. So we took a week to code the smiles of 110 women, focusing on two muscles: the zygomatic major which pulls the lip corners up, and the orbicularis oculi, which surrounds the eyes, and when contracted, raises your cheeks, leads to a bulge in the lower eyelid, and gives you those crows’ feet that you dread but that your loved ones cherish. When people feel happiness, warmth, and love, this second muscle contracts. It could be called the happiness muscle. Sure enough, we found that women with warmer smiles in their yearbook photos—that is, stronger contractions in these two muscles—reported being more content with their lives thirty years later, they were more likely to have accomplished their goals, they reported less anxiety on a daily basis, and they were happier in their marriages.
5. So why is the warm smile such an indicator of well-being?
What this study illustrates are all the immense benefits of emotions like love, kindness, gratitude, and mirth that are registered in the warm smile, in particular those smiles that involve the contraction of the muscle surrounding the eyes. Scientific studies find that emotions soothe our stress-related cardiovascular responses, they build trust in others, they benefit your immune systems and those of your partners, and they make for stronger families and marriages.
6. One theme that emerges in the research reported in different chapters is how meaningful brief emotional expressions are, as in your yearbook study. Why is that?
You’re right. It really is the case that fleeting expressions tell us about the course of life. In our research we find that people who laugh only a fraction more when talking about their deceased spouse fare better during bereavement, that little half-second flashes of love in the smile and eyes reveal that a young couple has talked about marriage, that brief soothing touches calm the nervous systems of infants going through a medical procedure, and that the playfulness of a 30-second tease reveals a person’s position in a social hierarchy. I think the reason we get these findings is that our emotions are the building blocks of healthy or destructive relations, and thanks to the back-breaking work of people like Paul Ekman, who figured out how to code the millisecond movements of facial muscles, we can now study these brief expressions scientifically.
7. You talk about the interesting effects of doing this kind of science on yourself. What was that like?
After my PhD I was a post-doc with Paul Ekman, the pioneer in the study of emotion and facial expression. Upon arrival in the lab, you have the honor of learning the Facial Action Coding System, which took him five years to develop. It provides muscle-by-muscle guidelines that allow people to learn how to identify movements of the 40 facial muscles from changes in facial appearance – wrinkles, bulges in different parts of the face, and so on. It takes about 100 hours to learn, and once you pass the test showing that you know it, it takes about one hour to code every minute of behavior. I think I’ve coded more facial expressions than any human being alive, and it’s changed how I look at people and our social worlds. What you begin to see in this work are the millisecond clues to our emotions and how people are doing, even before they know how they feel—the tension in a marriage revealed in a contemptuous tightening of the lip corner, the flirtatious desire of someone revealed in the slight swelling of the lips, a child’s sense of remorse in the embarrassed smile.
8. In your chapter on embarrassment, you make what many might perceive as a counterintuitive point, that embarrassment is a good thing, even something to be encouraged. How so?
You know, in the West embarrassment is not one of the most sought after emotions. In fact, studies find that people will pay good money to avoid embarrassing themselves in front of others. I think I spent the first twenty years of my life remaining in my room cowering from the experience of embarrassment. But my research would lead to the conclusion that embarrassment is a powerful trigger of forgiveness and reconciliation, and, in reality, a glue of social life. I began this work accidentally. I was coding people’s startle responses to a loud pistol shot, because the startle response is an exquisitely precise measure of the person’s tension and anxiety. As I coded how people startled I noticed that about half the people got embarrassed after being unexpectedly startled, probably because they had fallen out of their chairs, lost composure, and were convinced they had wet their pants. The embarrassment response I then coded—gaze aversion; a coy, compressed smile; face touching; and head movements down and away—looks exactly like the appeasement displays that other mammals resort to in order to make peace during conflict. Then in my own research I’ve found that when people display embarrassment, they are quickly forgiven, they are trusted, they are liked by their peers, and they are even given status. In contrast, people who, due to particular kinds of brain damage, experience little or inappropriate embarrassment have greater difficulty avoiding transgressions and folding into cooperative relationships. We are a peace-making species that resolves conflicts through reconciliation rather than territorial separation and that values modesty as a virtue. (New data show that more modest people actually rise more quickly in social hierarchies than Machiavellian types.)
9. You also take a surprisingly upbeat view on teasing. How do you reconcile that with all the terrible things that are produced by bullying?
I believe that when teasing is done right, it is an artful way in which people create a realm of play and pretense to negotiate conflicts and tensions of daily living. For example, studies find that happier romantic couples have a richer language of teasing nicknames for each other than less happy couples. We have found that when fourteen-year-olds at a basketball camp were given the chance to tease each other, they were more likely to become friends. Romantic couples who teased each other while dealing with a conflict were happier than those who spoke directly and sincerely.
What I tell parents about teasing, bullying, and childhood is a few things. Bullying is a different thing than teasing and we shouldn’t confuse the two. Bullying is much more aggressive than teasing; it involves things like physically pinning someone down, theft, and vandalism. Bullies don’t really tease, they humiliate. And like so many things, teasing gets better with age. At around age eleven children start to understand that you can say one thing and mean another, and as a result they begin to tease more effectively and enjoy it more.
10. So what are the signs of an effective tease?
We actually have conducted several studies to answer that question. What we’ve found is that the art of the tease involves using your face and voice to signal that you are not serious, to avoid taboo topics, and to allow your recipient to respond. The art of being teased involves laughing it off and not taking yourself too seriously.
Creative teasing takes an act of the imagination to appreciate how the other person will take it, and it builds social bonds. Interestingly, we’ve found that Aspergers children, who have typical language abilities but have difficulties in the realm of pretense, irony, and nonverbal behaviors used in teasing, have great difficulties teasing in artful ways and finding the pleasure of teasing. We have found that these difficulties in teasing are part of their more general difficulties in folding into healthy social bonds, and probably a good place for early diagnosis and intervention.
11. You write about some interesting gender differences in emotions like love and compassion. What are they?
First, a caveat. We have deeply entrenched gender stereotypes about emotions I study. Women are the more compassionate or embarrassment- prone half of the species. Men are more prone to desire. And so on. The caveat is that in our dozens of studies we find that there is greater overlap between women and men in their expression and experience of emotions like compassion or embarrassment than dissimilarity. But you cannot help but think about some of the differences we have found. One is in our research on touch. Touch is an amazing modality of communication. The right kind of touch makes people trust, increases body weight in premature babies, reduces depression in adults in nursing homes, builds strong immune systems, and reduces stress-related brain activation. In our research we have found that people in different countries can communicate emotions like anger, fear, compassion, love, and gratitude to a stranger with one- second touches to the forearm. The one catch was a fascinating sex difference. This study had all possible combinations of women touching women, men touching men, etc., and here are the only gender differences we observed: When women tried to communicate anger with touch to a man’s forearm he had no idea what she was doing. Regrettably, it gets worse, for when the man tried to communicate compassion to a woman she was completely unable to detect what he was doing.
12. How do you cultivate compassion in children?
If I were to choose one emotion to cultivate in children, it would be compassion. Darwin long ago said that compassion is the source of our moral capacities, and an instinct shaped by evolution. The contemporary science is revealing a compatible story. Compassion is a wellspring of altruism, the belief in equality, giving, and healthy bonds. Our lab is finding that a bundle of nerves originating in the top of the spinal cord called the vagus nerve, which is loaded up with oxytocin receptors, fires when people feel compassion. The same is true of certain regions of the brain. I take great heart in these findings, that compassion is wired into our nervous systems. At the same time we are learning that the regions of the brain that are involved in compassion in the frontal lobes are quite plastic, and subject to growth through environmental input. There are genes related to altruistic behavior, and we know that certain environments are likely to lead to the expression of those genes. So while we have an instinct for compassion, it is also clear that that instinct can be cultivated or malnourished. Things like the presence of grandparents, prioritizing altruism and compassion around the dinner table, keeping children away from videogames, and teaching children how to reason about emotion have been shown to be good steps.
13. How did you get to the research on smiling, laughter, touch, and the like?
One answer is through my parents. My dad, an artist, taught me to look closely at other people. My mom, a literature professor, taught me about the centrality of emotion. It also began during my research with Paul Ekman, famous for his studies of facial expression, when I was exposed to his insight that, with brief measures of the face or voice or touch, you can discern a person’s emotion, intention, and character. It traces back to Darwin, who saw in our expressive behaviors the signs of how we evolved to be good through our primate evolution. And fortunately for me, the science of emotion long prioritized emotions like anger, fear, and disgust over emotions like compassion, gratitude, awe, and love, so when I entered the field there was, and still is, a lot of uncharted territory.
