You bounce into work with great news for the organization. The reaction from your manager? Completely deadpan. Another day, you unfortunately have to share some bad news; yet again, you get a deadpan response. Now that you think of it, you’ve seen your manager both hire and fire people with exactly the same level of emotion every time: zero, zip, nada. The lack of emotional response in your manager’s face is making you feel like anything could happen to anyone at work and there would be no obvious signs or clues. This is making you feel worried about your job security. You have no way of predicting what could happen to you, and it’s making you feel anxious and at a disadvantage, and all because your manager is such a cold fish.
DOES YOUR MANAGER’S deadpan expression mean they are emotionless, hard-hearted, cold and unfeeling? Let’s SCAN this situation by suspending judgment and being more descriptive of this key signal that led you to this conclusion. Their deadpan face could be described as neutral, relaxed, seemingly expressionless, a face in repose, the facial muscles neither stretched nor retracted, seemingly emotionless. With no information about how they are feeling visible on their face, their expression provides no visual triggers that can help you get a theory of mind about them, to attribute a mental state to them, to infer what they are thinking or feeling. Here with no theory of mind, no knowledge about what emotion, whether positive or negative, your manager may be feeling at any given time, you assume they are as cold as a fish—and, to go along with the negative connotations that implies, that they are hard-hearted and unfeeling. Because you lack visual information about how they feel about you, you default to extreme negatives about them and their intentions, assuming the worst.
In this situation, the lack of emotional information about your manager is powerful. It makes you nervous, and so you catastrophize that your job could be on the line and you’ll be blindsided because you will have no way of knowing from their body language cues. Without enough data, your primitive brain defaults to negatives. You’re powerless in the face of this seemingly emotionless human. Given your manager’s seeming lack of emotion and therefore incapacity for empathy, how can you have any job security, let alone relate to them?
BODY LANGUAGE MYTHBUSTER
Autistic People Don’t Have Empathy
Many people think that people with autism have trouble with empathy. This misconception often gets tied up with the misconception that those with autism have no feelings. This is an area rife with misunderstanding, based on a lack of knowledge. Making matters more confusing is a lack of accurate insight into the meaning of the word empathy.
Empathy is the ability to step into another person’s shoes, so to speak, to feel what they’re feeling. Research shows that people on the autism spectrum have different degrees of impairment when it comes to picking up on what other people are feeling by means of observing others’ body language and tone of voice. But this does not equate to any lack of feelings that people with this condition experience.1
Modern theories of autism, such as the intense world theory, argue that in some ways, people with autism relate intensely to the feelings of others—so intensely that their experience can be overwhelming or even painful. Like everyone else on the planet, those on the autism spectrum will have varying levels of empathy, but the idea that having autism always means you have no empathy is simply inaccurate.
Research on cross-cultural facial expression, such as the work of Paul Ekman, shows that some people, and this is true regardless of culture and gender, are capable of experiencing emotions without showing any visible facial expression of the emotion; in some cases, only through technology can we detect the subvisible pattern changes in their facial activity indicating their emotional response. Ekman also notes that a lack of facial activity in expressing an emotion in a variety of circumstances could partly be due to the different ways the emotion has been called forth, with what speed and in what context.2
Following from this, other research, like that of Rana el Kaliouby at her organization Affectiva, shows big differences among gender, age and culture in how frequently people express their emotions. Using technology that uses computers to detect and interpret human facial expressions, el Kaliouby and her team analyzed hundreds of thousands of videos of facial expressions and coded them with Facial Action Coding System (FACS) action units in the development of their emotion recognition technology. According to their research in the United States, women are 40 percent more facially expressive than men; in the UK there is no difference in expressiveness between genders; and people who are fifty years and older are 25 percent more emotive with facial expression than the under-fifty crowd.3
How emotions are experienced and expressed can largely depend on the context in which the stimulus for the emotion takes place. In some workplaces, the expression of strong emotions is frowned upon or considered entirely inappropriate. In our scenario, all your interaction with your manager takes place in the context of the working environment. This context for some will just not be emotionally charged, nor may it even have the potential to stir up strong feelings. Additionally, in many societies and cultures, it is taboo to show emotions in the public arena at all, let alone in the workplace, and there is fear of serious condemnation and reprisals for doing so. So just because someone does not show emotion in the context of the workplace or even in public is not a clear sign that they do not show emotion in other contexts, with family or friends, say, or in the privacy of their own company; nor is it a sign that they simply do not feel emotions. It is important to make the distinction between experiencing emotion and expressing it, and to recognize that some people certainly experience emotions but will suppress or conceal them in certain contexts.
Your Boss May Be a Psychopath If . . .
Antisocial disconnections with others can often show up in the psychopath’s inability to take part in contagious yawning, according to findings from tests at Baylor University’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.4 So if you are presenting to a room full of yawning workmates but the boss is not joining in, then maybe they are dangerous, maybe they have had more coffee than the rest, or maybe they are the only one interested in what you are saying—the truth could be any or all three.
But ask what else could be going on. Neural differences can cause some people to not experience emotions quite the same as do others. Underlying conditions such as post-traumatic stress can cause people to filter out emotions because their experience of them is too extreme. Some people grow up in conditions whereby feeling or expressing emotions is too dangerous, and so to survive they have suppressed them. For many people who are forced to learn over time that if they show their feelings, they will be at a disadvantage, we can conclude that they may be careful to ensure that nobody will see them.
You can form a new judgment that just because your manager is not showing you their emotions, it does not necessarily mean that they are not experiencing any. The deadpan face may cause feelings of unease or mistrust in others, and that often holds true even if the person is verbalizing their emotions but still not showing the outward signs of experiencing them. People who do not show emotion may have difficulties getting promoted to leadership positions, where people skills are essential, or indeed making transitions within their organizations or onward to other work environments, because they can appear to others as untrustworthy and so a risk. Once again we see here that the popular notion that the body does not lie or that the truth will come out in our body language is just not true. Although technology can detect movements in muscles and in some circumstances changes in hormones, to the naked eye, which means for the majority of us, there are plenty of circumstances where the body can and will lie, as in this scenario where your manager is not showing you what is really going on for them.
The problem is that it is easy and tempting to assume that if we can’t see a person’s emotion, then they have no empathy. We have a tendency as humans to ascribe meaning based on our expectations. Devoid of information, we can easily assume insensitivity and bad intentions toward us. However, if you consider what the baseline activity is for your manager—they hire people and they fire people—it may be that they have the exact right skill set for these responsibilities.
How can you test your new judgment that your manager in fact does have feelings and empathy for others? This is more of a social test: Think about behaviors or events you have seen your manager engage in or instigate that are social. Have they ever arranged a great holiday party for employees, or even brought in doughnuts and coffee? It may be that you remember occasions where they behave with sensitivity to the emotional experiences of others in the workplace, even if they do not show that they are feeling emotional themselves. They may remark positively on others’ enjoyment, which is a sign they do understand emotion and have empathy for others. Look out for emotional words, caring actions, social actions—there are more indicators of emotional attachment and social ability than just someone wearing a happy face or a sad face.
TOUCHY FEELY
ANDERSON CARVALHO is our go-to specialist in body language for communication and influence in Brazil. He has created the largest online body language congress and is a coach to political and corporate leaders, CEOs, communicators and athletes in South America. Here’s what he has to tell us about the most important specifics of body language when it come to South American versus North American social behavior.
When we analyze body language variations, the biggest difference between North and South America is the physical contact. In South America, the interpersonal relationship has physical contact as a strong characteristic: shaking hands, touching the shoulders, and hugs and kisses on the cheeks between close friends and family. Whereas in North America, hugs and kisses, even between those with very close social and family bonds, can be disconcerting and feel like boundaries are being crossed.
When greeting a person from South America, male or female, start by shaking their hand and maintaining eye contact. Generally, if the person you are greeting is of the opposite sex, wait to see how they act toward you. The person may give you a hug, expressing sympathy for you. If this occurs, reciprocate in the same way. If the person you are greeting realizes you have rejected a hug, they may feel rejected and have some antipathy toward you.
For South Americans, there isn’t much difference between professional and personal boundaries. However, during a business conversation, avoid any physical contact but keep good eye contact.
At the end of a meeting, when leading another to the exit, you may put a hand on the other’s shoulder, as this is considered a sign of conducting the other. For the person being conducted, this act represents protection rather than the suppression and dominance that this style of physical contact may feel like to a North American.
QUICK SCAN
S: When there is insufficient emotional data, it is very easy for your instinct to default to negative assumptions and even catastrophization. Suspending judgment when it feels like there are catastrophic implications can be very hard to do indeed.
C: Context can be a barrier to someone feeling comfortable or even appropriately displaying emotion to you or to the group. This may be the context of the current work environment or the context in which they grew up.
A: What else do you know about the area of neural differences in people that could affect the way you need to look at body language? Who can you ask for more detail or experience of this?
N: New discoveries around emotion and displays of emotion are ongoing. Just because you don’t see that someone has a feeling does not mean it is not there.