Seven Sides of a Sixth Sense
If everyday mind reading is a sixth sense, it's a very complicated one that relies on all the other senses and fully exploits our cognitive and perceptual abilities. For starters: When we're trying to get inside someone's head, we comprehend the meaning of the words being spoken, we monitor facial expressions and body language, and we register the tone of voice and the cadence of speech.
Not all mind reading moments are created equal, however. There are break points, times where the interaction changes color and tone. A break point could follow an awkward pause or the entrance of someone else into the discussion, explains Sara Hodges, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. We don't have to pinpoint our partner's every fleeting thought and emotion, but we'd better gauge these moments right, because they carry more weight. "If you're reading someone pretty accurately but then miss the point where they go from laughing along with you to feeling teased in a hurtful way, or if you miss the point where a light conversation turns serious, then all your other points of accuracy may be blown, and it's going to reveal that you're not very empathically accurate."
Reading body language is a core component of mind reading. It can reveal a person's most basic emotions. Researchers have shown that when watching a body's movements reduced to points of light on a screen, observers can still read sadness, anger, joy, disgust, fear, and romantic love. We're primed to read emotion into movement—even when there's very little to go on.
Facial expressions are also cues we use to know what others are thinking. Despite the 3,000 different expressions we may deploy each day, it's the fleeting microexpressions that betray many feelings. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us are terrible at detecting them. Still, we tend to focus on others' eyes, and that helps us. The many surrounding muscles make eyes a richer source of clues than other parts of the face: downcast in sadness, wide open in fright, dreamily unfocused, staring hard with jealousy, or glancing around with bored impatience.
We know even more about someone's mind from the way the components of conversation fit together—someone's words, gestures, and pitch of voice may seem either aligned or incongruous. But despite all we glean from body language and voice tone, Ickes finds, it's the content of speech that contributes most to our success at mind reading. Words matter.
All Together Now
There's yet another, deeper level on which mind reading happens. Emotions are in a sense contagious, and we may sense what's on others' minds by "catching" what our conversation partners are feeling. Psychologists have long known that we tend to converge emotionally with others as we talk to them; without being aware of it, we copy them, altering our physiology from the outside in. Like the method actor who "becomes" her character, we start to "feel" what the other person is feeling. When we mimic other people's behavior, speech, rhythms, gestures, expressions, and physical attitudes, studies show, we gain a direct sense of their feelings and psychological attitudes as well.
Though smiles spread easily, negative emotions are more contagious than positive ones overall, probably because our brains are especially sensitive to negative information. And picking up someone's anxiety or fear triggers our own fight-or-flight response, which gets our heart racing and blood pumping. Research has shown that those who are most susceptible to emotional contagion do better at reading a person's negative thoughts and feelings than they do her sunnier ones.
Mind reading, however, is not a one-way process; it's a dynamic interaction, and this adds an additional layer of complexity. Siegel conceives of mindsight as starting with interoception—a sense of our own bodies and inner state. The more self-aware you are, the more easily you will recognize, for example, that you are suddenly tense. You might attribute that to your conversation partner: "Jane must be on edge about her job." And you may be right. If you begin to comfort her even before she's said she's worried about her career, you will come off as a caring, perceptive friend.
But you might be wrong. Jane could be fine while the tension you sensed was a figment of your own imagination. Say you grew up in a family where anger was not managed well, observes Siegel; you may tend to pick up on false threats. "Your internal mechanisms color your mindsight," he says. All our particular prejudices, biases, and memory distortions also affect our mindsight. We may read ulterior motives into straightforward statements if we have a suspicious worldview. Or we may see good intentions in evil ones if our take on others is more optimistic.
Because there's a direct correlation between having a good map of your own mental state and drawing accurate maps of other people, Siegel believes that attentiveness or mindfulness—which can be increased through practices like meditation—can "stabilize the lens of mindsight. It helps you see your interior world with more clarity. As you further develop mindfulness, you can look to your increased self-knowing as the material from which you draw empathic inferences."
Skill at sensing your own feelings and interpreting all the clues your conversation partner is giving off qualifies you for truly advanced feats of mind reading: identifying those thoughts of which even the person having them is not aware. "The ability that separates the sheep from the goats, so to speak, is the ability to discern a thought or feeling the other person hasn't yet fully recognized," says Hodges. "They're not lying or concealing their emotions, they're just still sorting them out. And you can help them with that."
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