Stony silence as a defense
The most offensive ethnic slurs, lewd cracks or political comments can burst from people’s mouths with so little warning -- what did she just say? -- that the reflexive response in listeners is no response at all. A blank mask, a poker face, a willful emotional absence that offers zero acknowledgment of the remark or interest in the topic.
This non-reaction reaction can be handy, averting ugly confrontations about race, religion or, in recent days, war -- topics that rarely lead to agreement. It can also serve as an effective roadblock to any dreaded conversation, whether in a marriage, at work or with friends.
No matter how well practiced, however, the impassive mask is hardly a neutral expression. New research suggests that suppressing a strong emotion can significantly alter almost any social interaction, even damage relationships. The findings help explain why this form of nonverbal communication can be astute in some cases, disastrous in others.
Learning how the tactic subtly shapes our behavior and others’ can help people use it more consciously and effectively, psychologists say. “The important thing to know is that there are costs to suppressing, both for you and for your conversation partner,” said Emily Butler, a psychologist at Stanford University who studies emotion and social interaction, “and those costs ought to be weighed against the risks of expressing what you actually feel and think.”
Psychologists have long said that masking strong emotion is one of many social deceptions that allow people to navigate everyday life. At a recent dinner out, Christopher Osborne and his wife, Sandra Fulmer, both lawyers in San Francisco, were talking to another couple, friends of friends, who suddenly began making racist jokes.
“We both just shut down completely, didn’t say anything, didn’t react, even avoided eye contact,” he said of himself and his wife. After a couple of long moments playing to a silent audience, the other couple dropped the subject. “It was clear they felt something, and they wanted the dinner to go well too, so they just stopped talking about that stuff,” Osborne said.
But in about a dozen experiments over the last several years, researchers have documented both physical and emotional distress when people hide their emotions, whether they’re alone or in company, embarrassed or angry. In the latest of these, Butler and a team of investigators at Stanford and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, analyzed interactions among 84 college-aged women. The women sat through a short, bloody film about warfare and then paired off to discuss the movie.
Unknown to their conversation partners, some of the women were instructed not to betray any emotion. By measuring blood pressure during the talks, investigators got a reading of how tense the exchanges were. Compared with the women who conversed naturally, those speaking with a seemingly indifferent partner showed significant increases in blood pressure -- as did women who were wearing the poker face. “It was a very odd experience for the listeners,” said Butler. “They said they noticed that something wasn’t right, but they couldn’t tell us what or why.”
They also reported significantly less desire to talk further with their oddly impassive partners.
This is an ideal effect when you’re trying to dodge someone at a party or defuse a loaded conversation with an annoying acquaintance. The other person senses a vague chill and drops the thread of conversation, or at least changes the subject. When the relationship isn’t important enough to justify a confrontation, a poker face can deliver just the right amount of social coolant.
As a standard evasion, however, emotional suppression is treacherous. “The problem is that, in any conversation we have, I’m going to have a theory about how you should be reacting to what I say,” said Nicholas Christenfeld, a research psychologist at UC San Diego, “and I’m going to have another theory about why you might not be reacting that way.”
When people react with affectionate attention and good humor, the effect is physically soothing. A poker face is upsetting because it defies even minimal expectations. As psychologists have found, people tend to mentally project onto a blank screen their own anxieties: He thinks I’m boring; she thinks I’m stupid.
The result is that the suppression of emotions comes across as mild hostility, even if it’s not meant that way. “We use emotional expression to orient ourselves in conversations, and if you’re not getting any feedback from the other person you begin to wonder whether it’s safe to say what you really think,” said Jeanne Watson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto.
Budding friendships can wither from such perceived hostility; and a blank face can sever any connection before it buds at all. Psychologists have found that, while sometimes superficial, our initial readings of people can predict which relationships develop and which do not. The women in the Stanford study who conversed with emotionless partners had little or no desire to talk further or pursue a friendship, whereas many of the others did connect and said they enjoyed the company of their partners, despite the violent subject they had to discuss.
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Close relationships
In established relationships, of course, the dynamic is different. Partners or friends who know each other well often see through the veil to the underlying emotion. Still, suppression can be corrosive -- on both parties involved.
In a study due out later this year, psychologists at Stanford and the University of Washington present evidence that helps explain why. They recruited 86 college-aged couples in steady relationships and observed each pair discussing an issue that had previously caused them tension, such as money or commitment. In about a third of the couples, one partner was instructed to suppress all emotion during the talk, draining all feeling from their speech, expressions and tone of voice. The other couples either discussed their problems freely or were directed to stay upbeat while talking.
Interviewing the men and women afterward, the psychologists found that suppression had a curious effect on memory. Compared to the others, the suppressors had more distinct recollection of how they felt during the conversation: They vividly recalled emotions such as dread or shame. This is not entirely unexpected; interrupting a thought or an expression is known to enhance the memory of it, according to Christenfeld.
But maintaining the mask also distracted people in the study from what their partner was saying, the psychologists found. When asked a week later to recall what was said during the conversation, the suppressors remembered about 20% less than the others did. In short, sustaining a poker face had turned their attention inward, on their own emotions and away from the shared, spoken conversation.
It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to know that blanking out key portions of important conversations isn’t exactly endearing to a beloved partner. After all, the purpose of such talks is to shape future behavior, said Jane Richards, a psychologist at the University of Washington and the study’s lead author. If you can’t remember which of your habits are most offensive and divisive, you’re not going to change them, she points out.
The blank look also puts a cold shudder into any intimate connection. In several long-term investigations, John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, and Robert Levenson, of UC Berkeley, have shown that one communication habit that’s closely associated with marital dissatisfaction is “stonewalling”: a combination of distraction, deflection and emotional distance many people deploy to avoid difficult discussions.
This is how the poker face can play out in a marriage. If both partners are practiced stonewallers and equally happy to ignore problems, the relationship may endure, Gottman has shown. But very often marriages hit the rocks when one spouse can no longer tolerate the distancing evasions of the other, he reports.
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Introverts vs. extroverts
Many people can quickly recognize a poker face in others and accurately judge its purpose. At the same time, researchers suspect that personalities partly determine what they mentally project onto another person’s blank screen, and how they react to it.
In a rough survey of the 84 women in her suppression and blood pressure study, Butler found that the subjects tended to fall into one of two groups: those who had wanted to strike up a friendly connection with the other person they met in the study and those who hadn’t particularly cared how their conversation went.
Questioning the women after the study, Butler found an odd result. Those who expected a friendly meeting, the extroverts, were put off by poker-faced partners, assumed the other person was unfriendly and showed signs of increased stress. But the more introverted women showed higher spikes in blood pressure.
Butler suspects that the extroverts were simply more confident in attributing the awkwardness to the other person. They were more motivated than the introverts to pay close attention to the conversation and consequently better able to identify the source of their uneasiness, she said.
At some level, they understood that suppression often reflects not indifference but feelings or motives so strong that they override the most basic rules of social intercourse.
