Seeking Emotional Clues Without Facial Cues

[groovedaddy]

MEDFORD, Mass. — The woman was afraid and alone, a fragile soul in a wheelchair who had managed to stuff a few possessions into a plastic garbage bag before being evacuated. Like many of the Hurricane Katrina refugees who straggled into Baton Rouge, La., in the summer of 2005, she needed more than food and shelter. She needed company, sympathy — someone, anyone, to see and feel her loss — and searched the face of her assigned social worker in vain.

But the social worker, barely out of college, seemed somehow emotionally removed. Something was missing.

“I could see the breakdown in the emotional connection between us, could see it happening and there was nothing I could do,” said Kathleen Bogart, 28, the social worker who is now a psychology researcher at Tufts University here. Ms. Bogart has Moebius syndrome, a rare congenital condition named for a 19th-century neurologist that causes facial paralysis.

When the people she helped made a sad expression, she continued, “I wasn’t able to return it. I tried to do so with words and tone of voice, but it was no use. Stripped of the facial expression, the emotion just dies there, unshared. It just dies.”

Researchers have long known that facial expressions are crucial to social interaction and have categorized them in great detail. They know which expressions are universal; they can distinguish slight differences in expression, for example between a polite smile and a genuine one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/health/06mind.html?th&emc=th

[enlightenment]

1. Good article. Thank you for posting.

I've always been very tied to visual cues when speaking with others - one of the reasons I dislike talking on the telephone (and teaching online, which I do more and more of, unfortunately). The nonverbal cues are half the conversation, as far as I'm concerned.

[Odin2005]

2. To me almost everyone is like this woman, I am blind to subtle non-verbal communication.