Book Nerds and People Lovers Unite

This post brought to you by: Research I am not being paid to do

Hopefully someday I will tell you about my current unpaid research. But as I can’t do that right now, I wanted to tell you about some exciting research, which is tangentially relevant to my work, and was just published in Science by Kidd and Castano.

We read social cues all the time, pretty much without being deliberate or being taught to do so. Basically, humans have built in tools to help us get along in a social environment (and I think that is super cool, since we happen to live in a social environment). One of the major skills we have is inferring what people are thinking or feeling from their facial expressions. Now, there are a lot of ways that we do this (I’m not even going to start on how much I enjoy the show Lie To Me, which is loosely based on the life and work of psychologist Paul Eckman[i]) but a main source of information is the eyes.

Practicing reading Lilly from her eyes. In case
 you were curious, I scored a 30, so I'm
average. I think Lilly would have done better
than me, but she had trouble with the
trackpad on my laptop ;) 

“Reading the Mind in the Eyes” is a psychological task designed by Simon Baren-Cohen that is used to determine how well an individual can read other people’s emotions. How good are you at this? You can take a modified version of the test here. Some people really struggle with recognizing facial expressions; a marked inability to read facial expressions is common in disorders such as autism[ii], asperger’s, social anxiety disorder, PWS, etc. But even among people who can read facial expressions, there is a range of ability... in the task adaptation above, people with “average” ability fall between 22-30 correct out of 36.

“Yes, this is all very logical,” you are thinking to yourself. “I know some people who are more sensitive to the emotions of others around them than others. It makes sense that some people are better at this reading the eyes thing than others. But what’s the big deal?” 

Well, other than the fact that I think this is intrinsically cool, Kidd and Castano found out that you can manipulate this by reading. In their study, they had participants read literary fiction (think Jane Austen, Mark Twain, etc), popular fiction (think Hunger Games, Harry Potter, etc), serious nonfiction, or nothing for five minutes and then complete several tasks, including Reading the Mind in the Eyes. They found that people who read literary fiction performed better compared to all other groups. Reading for only 5 minutes improved recognition of facial expressions! The researchers suggested this might be because literary fiction, with its rich descriptions and complexity, leaves more to the imagination and causes the reader to make their own assumptions about characters’ emotional states.

Basically, reading well-written books is a good work out for the part of your brain that interprets people in real life. And it never hurts to be better at that. :) 

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[i] I am going to ramble about Lie to Me a bit, though. It is a very interesting show (which, alas, only ran for three seasons) about a man who is an expert in the science of facial expressions and body language. Not only is the show’s lead charachter, Cal Lightman, based off of the professional and personal life of Dr Eckman, but Eckman actually critiqued each episode on his blog, which I find both fascinating and hilarious.

[ii] There is some interesting speculation about a lack of theory of mind/inability to read other's emotions and an absence of eye contact in people with autism. They haven't established a causal relationship yet, but there are early intervention strategies that involve training kids with autism/aspergers to make eye contact or look at people's faces.