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John Buckley
One of the things I do outside the world of education is serve as a mediator for our local court system. I spend most of my time in family court. That is, I’m dealing with couples going through a divorce or fighting over child custody. It is, what we call, the “land of unhappy people.”
As you might imagine, cases are filled with no small amount of emotion. Tension is so much a part of the process, that, when getting my last two guide dogs, I felt it necessary to explain that the only nonnegotiable requirement of a new dog was that he or she be able to lie quietly for three or four hours in a small room likely oozing with hostility and not be affected. While cases usually involve feelings of anger, betrayal, and frustration, they can, on occasion, also elicit forgiveness, compassion, and happiness.
One of the most important skills a mediator can possess is the ability to accurately read emotions. There is, for example, a thin line between relief and disgust. Over the years, a number of the people with whom I have mediated have commented that I am “really good” at reading emotions. I have even had attorneys, not a group known for their sensitive interpersonal natures, say the same thing.
Flattering as this is, I have never once taken it seriously. I suppose I subscribed to that line from Shakespeare to the effect that “the eyes are the window to the soul” and, Lacking the ability to see the face, I felt I might be adequate at reading emotion but, at best, wouldn’t be any better than adequate.
This is not an entirely unreasonable conclusion. Experts in nonverbal communication have, reported for almost fifty years that 70% to 80% of what people know about the world comes from what they can see. There are also numerous studies indicating that, when presented with pictures of the human face, subjects can recognize some emotions with considerable accuracy but struggle to distinguish others. People like to think, for example, that they can detect when someone is lying, but research has found that only three groups – Secret Service agents, CIA employees, and professional poker players – can actually do it with any consistency.
New research from Yale University, however, casts new light on our ability to accurately identify the emotional states of others. I’ll spare you the methodological details, but the researchers report that people who are best at “reading” others emotional states depend exclusively on listening. Subjects who relied on visual cues only or a combination of visual and auditory feedback were significantly less able to accurately identify emotions such as joy, fear, sadness, shame, embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, hostility, and contempt.
In some cases, participants were asked to interact directly with someone else and then evaluate their emotional state. At other times, subjects were asked to observe two people communicating and then make their judgment. Either way, listening exclusively helped people to interpret emotional states more accurately.
The author of the study speculates two possible reasons for the superiority of listening. First, people have more experience using facial expressions to mask their emotions. We are socialized to sit up straight, look interested, stop frowning, etc. Second, more information doesn’t always improve accuracy. In the world of cognitive psychology, engaging in two complex tasks simultaneously (watching and listening) may hurt a person’s performance on both tasks. As the author concludes, “the human voice, including speech content and the linguistic and paralinguistic vocal cues (e.g. pitch, cadence, speed, and volume) that accompany it is a particularly powerful channel for perceiving the emotions of others.”
So, what does all of this have to do with education? While the spotlight is inevitably placed on the intellectual part of the teaching process, a refined sense of emotional intelligence has its place as well. Being able to emotionally read students, parents, colleagues, and administrators effectively is no small asset, and, if the research is to be believed, it’s one that blind and visually-impaired teachers likely do as well, or better, than their sighted peers. This having been said, there will still be those occasions when there is no substitute for being able to see the human face. Regrettably, I will always be fairly clueless when confronting a divorcing mother who is crying silently but will never again buy into the idea that, because I can’t see her face, my ability to evaluate her emotional state is irreparably compromised.
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