Sexy Sundays: Sluggish Sex

David Attenborough and the BBC have some nice footage of strange slug sex, though the kiss-off at the end is awfully harsh.  (Sure, just kick him/her/it out of  bed and go to sleep.)

The prize for making slug sex romantic still goes to Microcosmos, with the beautiful aria playing in the background.

N.B.  Despite the creditline prominently slapped on the video, this footage of leopard slugs actually comes from the BBC series Planet Earth

The Science of Smiling

 

Smiling Lindbergh before transatlantic flight. The sign says: "KEEP OUT of the water" Credit: H. A. Erickson (Smithsonian Institution)

Human facial expressions are one of my recurring interests, and the other day I ran across an interview I did with the NPR show “Here and Now” about what we mean when we smile.  Click here to take a listen.

And here’s an excerpt from an article on smiling I wrote for Smithsonian Magazine:

Smiles can communicate feelings as different as love or contempt, pride or submission, flirtatiousness or polite tolerance.  A smile can be deeply comforting and reassuring.  (Babies smile a few weeks after birth, and it helps keep new parents from going completely out of their minds.)  Or it can induce a chill of fear.  (Hannibal Lector smiled when he thought about fava beans and a nice little Chianti—with liver.)  A smile can keep customers happy, as businesses often remind their employees.  But it can also send a customer–or the adamantly smiling employee–into a spit-flinging rage.    In truth, despite the common phrase, there is no such thing as a simple smile.

 

 

Read That Face: Conclusion (Can it Change Your Life?)

So has FACS changed my life?  Yes and no.  Watching a video at home, I found myself hitting the pause button so I could check out Claire Danes’s corrugator muscles, a first for me in that anatomical region.  And in the supermarket one day, I looked up across the produce aisle to watch a dad yelling at his young son, and I wanted to say, “Oooo, hey, wait, do you really want your kid seeing that much hatred on your face?”  Then the dad looked up as if he were about to shift his aggression onto me (4d+5d+7c = time to run), and I grabbed three avocadoes and bolted for the checkout.  (Guacamole, anyone?) 

In the interest of science, I even stopped in at the casino up the road to study the gamblers.  But it turned out that I hadn’t gotten any better at spotting a bluff.  Instead, I got distracted by the grim, tight-lipped expression on the face of a woman playing blackjack, and the way her husband was flirting with a woman off to their left. I came away broke and not much wiser for it, much as on previous casino visits.

So I can hear the women out there practically yelling, “Yes, you stupid turnip, but did it make you more empathetic?” And in fact thinking about facial expressions had reminded me in particular of one critical factor in the male-female dynamic.  Studies have suggested that men specialize in expressions of

Read That Face–Part V (Being Aware of “Meaningless” Expressions)

As Rosenberg had promised, we were becoming more aware of facial expressions.  One manipulative jerk in class (me) promptly set out to turn his new knowledge to profit. When the local coffee shop was out of iced tea one morning, I put on a disappointed face without actually thinking about it.  But when I went back that afternoon, I decided that if they were still out, I was going to blast the barista with a withering AU7.  That would be a fierce tightening of the lower eyelids, the sort of expression David could have used to slay Goliath, if he hadn’t had a rock.  And in fact they were still out. But my seven seemed to have no effect.  I went for a bottle of fruit drink, and I think it was my AU1, a hapless lifting of the inner eyebrows, that caused the barista to give it to me for free.  And that just made me feel pathetic.

My classmates had weightier problems in mind.  One of them griped about the way a colleague back home never smiles when he passes in the hallway.  Instead, the corners of his mouth jerk briefly out to the sides, as if yanked by puppet strings.   “It’s like he’s saying, ‘I acknowledge that you’re there.  But I wish you weren’t.’”   Another was trying to figure out how to work with a subordinate whose face reveals flashes of hostility and resentment.

“You can’t just blurt it out,” said Rosenberg.

Read That Face–Part IV (Knowing the Caveats)

“I want you to become detectives of facial movement,” Rosenberg was saying, and the first step is to look in the bathroom mirror.  “Your face is your model that you have with you at all times,” she said.  So use it as a tool for understanding other people’s facial expressions. “What did her face do?  You think it’s a four.  You try it on your face and see if it matches.”  Did she pull her eyebrows together a little, which might indicate puzzlement or concentration?  (That’s the corrugator muscle at work.)  Or did she drop them sharply, while tightening her lower eyelids, suggesting that you have seriously pissed her off?  Putting on the expression, you start to feel what she felt.

Let’s say you met a woman the other night at a party.  How do you interpret that look she gave you?  Try it now for practice:  Pull your lips out to the sides a bit and tuck in the corners, an expression known as “the dimpler.”  Then lift just one side of your mouth. Does that feel familiar?  Too bad:  It’s contempt.  On the other hand, if you got her to smile and then look away, only to turn back and smile again (cheeks lifting, corners of the eyes crinkling), that’s what FACS coders call the “the coy smile.” Check the back of your hand:  You should have her phone number scribbled there.

But if you are going to become a detective of facial movements, you also need to know

Read That Face–Part III (Seeing Stuff You Didn’t See Before)

Psychologists studying nonverbal communication first developed the Facial Action Coding System in the 1970s, by cataloguing every possible movement in their own faces.  It’s still primarily a research tool, for coders who watch video in slow motion and spend an hour to analyze a minute’s worth of facial expressions.  It takes that long because a single expression lasting a fraction of a second can end up looking like an algebra equation.  I coded one that came out as 4b+5d+17b+23b+ 25c+26a +29c+38d, with the number indicating which muscled moved and the letter how intensely.  It’s more information than the average guy needs to figure out if his girlfriend likes her birthday present, or if the boss is only pretending to think he did a terrific job on the latest project.  (For that, you can skip the FACS course and instead, for a fee, take a 75-minute training program created by Paul Ekman, Phd, co-founder of FACS, at www.mettonline.com.)

But picking apart the individual muscle movements has turned out to be useful in surprising ways.  Hollywood animators, for instance, now use FACS to make characters from Buzz Lightyear to Wall-E emote more realistically.  It “made us aware of things,” says Pete Docter, who directed Monsters, Inc. and wrote the script for Wall-E.  It “helped pinpoint the little things that might turn out to be the essence of an expression.”

Law enforcement and intelligence types now also use FACS-based methods in airport security and in interrogations of suspected terrorists.

Read That Face–Part II (“Can’t You See That I’m Upset?”)

 Next morning, 15 fellow face-watchers and I assembled around a horseshoe of tables, with our laptop computers open in front of us. Rosenberg soon had us scrunching up our noses in pig-snout disgust (that’s an a AU 9), or puckering up like kids making kissyface for the camera (that’s an 18).  We used hand mirrors to see if we’d gotten it right, and it was a little unsettling to look up now and then and see the people around me randomly expressing what looked like anger, or contempt, or delight at their own reflections. A student with an uncanny resemblance to Jesus Christ lifted his brow and simultaneously rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and for a moment it looked as if Leonardo DaVinci  had painted his “Last Supper” in a psych ward.

Over the course of the week, we were going to have to memorize about 70 muscle and head movements.  But the real trick was that each movement seemed to tug and twist and fold against the others in mysterious and challenging new ways—altogether producing upwards of 3000 meaningful combinations.   It seemed at first like trying to read sense into the clouds passing by on a windy day.

Rosenberg was an attractive woman, fortyish, with curly hair down over her brow, hoop earrings, and an unintimidating manner (except maybe for the teacherly way she lifted the outside of one eyebrow, which made me reach for my homework).  I’d mentioned to her my concern that men might not be as good as women at judging emotions from the face.  She admitted that when she gets home at the end of a bad day, she sometimes has to stop and ask her husband, “Can’t you see that I’m upset?”  Her husband is also a psychologist.  “He’s sensitive.  He’s not a ‘guy’s guy.’  He’s just not that into it.  But when I remind him …”

She theorized, on the other hand, that men might actually do better than women with FACS, because it’s analytical, even technical, breaking emotions down into component parts.  And I could see what she meant as I started to get the hang of the facial bulges and furrows. If we are indeed stupid and insensitive, as the women in our lives often tell us, then maybe we can at least take a kind of car mechanic’s approach to fixing the problem:  “Looks like that corrugator muscle’s acting up again. I better find out what’s bugging her.”  Or maybe:  “Chin boss tremble.  Weeping alert.  Pull over, apply hug.  Wait 60 seconds.  Re-start.”   [Continues tomorrow]

Read That Face–Part 1 (In Which I Face the FACS)

This is a story I wrote for the April issue of Men’s Health magazine, about the the art and science of reading human facial expressions.  It’s about 4000 words long, so I’ll put the story up in several parts over the next few days.

 

One weekend not long ago, on Telegraph Avenue, near the University of California at Berkeley, I threaded my way past white people in dreadlocks selling macramé, and a man who was doing crunches on the sidewalk. And I made a point of not looking anybody in the face. Call it self-preservation.

Or maybe it was hypocrisy, because looking at faces was the reason I had come to California in the first place. A few years back, I wrote a chapter in my book The Ape in the Corner Office arguing that facial expressions are the universal language of the human soul. Understanding what they say can determine whether you get the job, close the deal, make friends, win fights, talk her into dinner at your place, charm her pants off, charm her parents, live surrounded by people you love—or die alone listening to an $8-an-hour orderly make rude jokes outside the door.

But it had lately dawned on me that, in my own life, looking at faces was something I generally avoided. So now I was going to swallow my own medicine. I’d signed up for a week-long course in the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, which breaks down the expressions on the human face into a series of muscle movements, called action units, or AUs. The teacher, psychologist Erika Rosenberg, PhD, warned me that she wouldn’t be teaching us how to read emotions. Instead, we would be going back to basics, charting bulges, knots, furrows, wrinkles, stretching, bagging, and pouching of facial flesh—the moving parts of human emotion. It would be like learning how to diagram sentences as a tool for speaking better English. Oh, and there would be homework and quizzes, a terrifying thought since I hadn’t been a student in a classroom in decades. But then Rosenberg added, “Your life is going to change as a result of learning FACS. You will never look at people the same way again.”

The Origins of Cooperation: Male and Female Points of View

Did the intensely cooperative behavior of human beings emerge as a byproduct of group rivalries?  H. Kern Reed and Bert Hölldobler put forward one variant of that idea, called “nested tug of war” theory, in 2007.  (I wrote about it in a column for The New York Times.)  Or is cooperation a necessary result of the way we raise our babies, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argues in her new book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding?   Natalie Angier takes a look at Hrdy’s theory  in today’s New York Times:

Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became adorable and keen to make connections with every passing adult gaze. Mothers became willing to play pass the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously hold on to their infants for the first six months or more of life. Other females may express real interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you never know when one of those females will turn

Strange Baby, with Dr. Seuss as the midwife

Elephant shrew baby (Photo by National Zoo/Mehgan Murphy)

 

 

A few years ago, I wrote about elephant shrews for Smithsonian magazine.  Now a happy couple have produced the National Zoo’s first elephant shrew baby, though it took everybody a while to notice it in its leaf litter nest.  The newborn is five weeks old.  You can see a video of the baby here.  And here’s my original article from Smithsonian:

  “Hey, come over here,” says the child, wandering through the Small Mammal House at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

  “No, Chad.  Mommy doesn’t like rats.”

 “Mommy!”

 “What did Mommy say, Chad?  Mommy …doesn’t … like … rats.”

But, Mommy, you are confused.  The animals in question are not rats, though they are roughly the right size, have glossy black eyes, and long, leathery tails.  What they are is a conundrum, a Dr. Seuss sort of animal seemingly put together by a committee from spare parts at the end of a rough day, while God and Darwin were off playing pinochle.   

The sign calls them elephant-shrews, suggesting for one brief moment the appalling possibility of a cross between the largest land mammal on Earth and the smallest.  (That would be a rough day, now, wouldn’t it?)