Masks and other anti-social behaviors from the perspective of Embodiment
Portions of this is cross-posted from my recent PhD dissertation on Embodied Peacemaking, which is not yet online.
This is a reply to a post by Carson Babich on Old Normal that is too long for a comment.
Terrific insights abound in that post. Too long a comment of mine is below, that stems from a perspective on this experiment from embodiment.
This post touches on the reading of emotions that few others have looked into. It's unclear why, as our human embodiment is the most central part of life on the planet. I have some ideas about why this disembodiment is happening, but I want to instead follow up first, with where you touch on the implications from a proprioception-communicative perspective that interacts with one's exteroception and interoception. The results you refer to of anxiety stem from this lack due to masks and social distancing. These sense-abilities (exteroception, proprioception, and interoception) regulate our embodiment and facilitate social connection. The lack of which results in anti-social behavior, even social-disembodiment.
You source (Carbon 2020)-- The study asserted that facemasks complicate nonverbal social interaction as they limit the ability to decipher emotions from the entirety of facial expression. This is the obvious observation which is enough in itself, but it goes deeper. There is some evidence that “facial expressions are not only a means of expressing emotion but also are involved in the processing of emotional information” (Osypiuk et al. 2014). This reciprocity should not be surprising given what we have learned about embodiment. Smiling has been shown to impact the ability to express pleasantness and humor ( Strack et al. 1988). Not only for expression but impression too, as another significant impact will be how “the inhibition of facial expressions may also inhibit the subjective emotional experience” (Osypiuk et al. 2014). The study suggests an effect on the person who wears the mask from not having these in-person interactions. Another study shows wearing masks has been shown to significantly decrease smell sensitivity and inhibit odor identification thresholds (Chen et al. 2020). One other study found that smell-detected pheromones were emitted by frightened people and subconsciously detected by others through smell, which carries information about their emotional state (Gomes et al. 2020).
We can't even begin to imagine the trauma that this will have on younger children for years to come.
Your conclusion is right on, and we need to understand that masks are not about working or not. It is the result, as you note, of the amygdala shock these individuals have experienced, such trauma that results in empathy or thought for others to significantly be impaired. Psychologically, masking is a big cope. Maskers have lost their trust in others and the earth at large, and it is a signal to others of a shared trauma (some other issues are going on related to tech and its symbiotic relationship to the mind and apparent disassociation with the body and I will come back to this point). Psychologically, wearing a mask was found to represent security among subjects and a belief it signals less risk of being infected (Goh et al. 2020).
You mention the niqab and burka studies. These studies resulted in some terrific insights. Just a few years ago, “the assumption that emotional recognition is impaired” by putting on a veil or mask was “put forward as an argument for advocating a general prohibition of wearing niqabs (or burkas)” (Fischer et al. 2012). The veil which covered the lower part of the face was the “symbol of the oppression of women, and the rejection of gender equality” (Moors & Salih 2009). Now, masks have become ubiquitous, at least in social settings, and some seem inclined to wear them indefinitely.
It's also fascinating to look at how communication is being developed to partially overcome the impaired embodiment. For the nonverbal communication which masks inhibit, there is the question of whether or not these nonverbal cues can be picked up by other forms of facial nonverbal communication, such as movement with eyes (Weisfeld, & Stack 2002), or other nonverbal bodily cues, such as body posture, eye movement, and head orientation adjust, hand-gesturing.1 A previous study done of Muslim women who wear the niqab or burka suggests that subtlety of emotional states can become more predominantly signaled by the eyes to those wearing the facial covering (Fischer et al. 2012; Kret & de Gelder 2012).
I won't get into the ails of social distancing, via touch starvation, lack of healthy germ sharing, etc., and will just go to the point of the way we got into this, where we have to address the trauma of the amygdala, and then I'll share some larger concepts and questions of how tech facilitated and feeds this ongoing shared disembodiment.
The amygdala is a part of the brain located in the temporal lobe and responds to the nerve connections within the adrenaline signal (via the thalamus then adrenal glands located above the kidneys) to react. We can notice that our breathing and heart rate increase, as we unconsciously prepare the body to run away or fight. A manifestation of feeling this is fear. One study found the amygdala the “fear central” for the brain’s activity (Lazar et al. 2000).
The amygdala activates when we are experiencing fearful stimuli, such as when we encounter a person from a different culture in an unfamiliar, or a setting such as when walking along a dark sidewalk in a foreign city. Or when mass media traumatizes with graphics of death. And this is triggered when we think someone else might be infected, ie a 'virus vector' and other names for the other... A person who undergoes a traumatic experience (the residue of a past event left in the body's sensory experience) has that trauma lodged within the amygdala, either making it hypersensitive or completely numb. “When we believe we are threatened, we blame others because we fear a differing opinion or can’t bear to feel responsible for our issues. If we can cast fault on another, there is some temporary relief from fear. Blaming is the fight response. We project the cause of our suffering and demonize the other” (Spindler 2018, 19).
The “collective memory of conflict” within a group’s socio-psychological infrastructure often results in intractable generational conflict (Bar-Tal 2011, 11). That is, within situations of conflict or trauma, especially early traumatic experiences, thought-emotion pathways are laid down in the physiological stream, “which can also alter communication patterns'' (Herbert 2013, 220). Because of the centrality of the body for the trauma location, a “somatic movement” in the treatment of trauma has become a way to facilitate healing (Emerson 2015, 12).
This gets to the core of the problem, the lack of awareness of embodiment, as one's brain becomes more and more interfaced with anti-social networking information. I agree that data and science can be a way out for some, at least enough for us to turn the tide on this experiment, but for many others, the science will be ignored as their cognitive dissonance just can't handle the truth without a bodily crisis. Unless they turn around and face their own embodied trauma, these individuals will continue inside internet enclaves, with group support and corporate overlord affirmation, for a long long time. These internet corporations are not controlling this experiment. Instead, these online readers and repeaters are those most deeply traumatized.
If we look at the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of the fear our society holds of an unexpected death, what stands out is how this fear manifests through embodiment. I refer to the “other” in cases of conflict described above and this experience takes a central role. For those who participated in the global pandemic, the “other” first became an invisible virus in the environment in general and potentially anyone’s body. People became afraid of death for themselves and their friends. I would argue the sense of proprioception, of assuming an embodied connection of being in the world, a feeling that they belonged on earth, and of an implied trust of another being alongside another body, was partially lost. And it is bizarre that this is being celebrated as a mark by those with the mask, and that it does makes it not so surprising as to what came next.
This morphed into another aspect of projecting the other. Not only did the sense of inherent trust in one’s own embodied life disappear, but facets of a disembodied life also ensued through moral (wear your mask and don’t meet with others) and legal (if you don’t wear your mask you will be ostracized and if you meet with others you will be fined or arrested) dystopian authority. From my perspective, I acknowledged my own participation in the mania of fear was not through the virus or a fear of others, but through the loss of freedom, mobility, and the potential loss of social embodiment. My “other” became the possible loss of freedom and mobility, and a perspective of social dystopia emerged. I dealt with this in my own way, which I'll describe later.
A massive ramification of this anti-social experiment was an adaptation that replaced a life online with digital life. This change was already widely in process around the globe, and it can also be viewed as an extension or something entirely different, new, and digital. The digital-social connection between people became a necessity. Most everyone’s use of technology became essential to interact and communicate. With limited travel options and stuck indoors, people’s bodily lives have been partly, or close to entirely, replaced by life online through laptops, tablets, and phone screens. Or is it a replacement? One way to view life online is an extension of life offline. Another is to view it as an entirely different life.
To put it another way, is it the same body? Does the life one begins, feeds, and sustains online, need embodiment? The body within the technological screen is in contrast to the physiological body’s world, but it is a lived life and does have shared physiological ramifications, but they do not share the same source. One is physiological and material, and the other is technological and digital. We do share communication, to a limited degree, online. We can still use sight and hearing among our five exteroceptive senses. But where is the full array of tacit knowledge, much of which is informally acquired through social connection and unconscious awareness and not easily articulated? Where are the tactile skills which allow a young person to succeed in offline environments and pursuits? This socially embedded know-how is a fundamental aspect of embodied knowledge (Polanyi 1966).
Once again, we have to consider children. Now going on 14 months, consider how much this time is as a percentile makeup of a young child's life, especially when we consider their memory features which have already been upheaved by relying on the internet for factual memory storage. The generational impact is massive for many children.
There are more downsides. Looking at this tech-bio experiment through the way we understand embedded social embodiment, there is no proprioceptive awareness through virtual communication. We can have and be aware of our own interoceptive feelings, but of another, shared? Through an exteroceptive awareness, we have sight and hearing, two out of the five senses happen, but with no socially embodied knowledge transferred through tactile, proprioceptive, interoceptive, and limited tacit knowledge, I would formulate that 20-30% of the embodied life is replicable online socially. Where did the other 70-80% of our socially embodied life go?
This begs a serious question. Is the reality, or the body, created online inherently a disembodied life? Edifices of society rest atop a belief in the institutional and educational practices that facilitate coping with modern life challenges (Eisner 2001). In that case, one could argue that the current edifice is a technological life. One can sit inside your house, view a screen, and go anywhere in the world. One can visit an island beach through online photos and videos and tour its roads with street maps and pictures. It is a simulation of reality, a digital copy of the real thing, but is it real, or something else? What would entail an answer to that question? In one way, it is a tool. In other ways, it is a crutch, a prop, for lifting or propping feelings of isolation, depression, and physical disembodiment.
As for myself, I moved my family to Tanzania, where it is still 2019. A larger reason was to escape the box in order to look at it from an outsider's perspective, and I have a book in development.... (though the above is from a separate writing project). Once I understood the creative aspect of embodiment and how important our thoughts and actions are active in creating our reality, there became an impetus to change, to stay that way amidst the world’s open creativity (Gebser 1985). Like the rhizome of change in Deleuze and Guitarri (1980), I took a flight to a place where embodiment still lived in a manner I deemed essential. It took about three months for my trauma to recede entirely, and I expect others to be traumatized for longer.
Longer-term, people have to unplug themselves from being used by the tech medium to perform anti-social behavior. Will they? Not everyone. However, I do believe enough of us can and will ally and overwhelm these proselytizers with factual information. We have to force people who think of themselves as being serious to confront a plurality who expose their lack of logic and are willing to embody the truth to their faces. I thought the situation looked dire over the winter, but right now it seems as if this ‘liminal stage of social life’ (Qiaoan 2020), as a permanent feature of our physical interaction, is at least being challenged by more people. And some places, like Florida, are even opening up entirely, exposing the cognitive dissonance for all to see. How many and how soon, those are to unmask this created reality remains to be seen.
For those who maintain social embodiment during this dystopia, it has been a very strange time, and we may be only halfway through this mass experiment of its anti-social behavior. Keep your personal embodiment as a means to stay connected, even though it has been somewhat awkward. To be in the % that did not dive headlong into this mania of disembodiment, one maintains embeddedness along a path that keeps a perspective on life and living that is essential for humanity.
In 1971, Albert Mehrabian (Silent Messages) discussed his research on non-verbal communication for salespersons. He concluded that prospects based their assessments of credibility on factors other than words. The study concluded that 55% of the communicative weight body language, 38% to the tone and music of their voice, and 7% to actual words.
Masks and other anti-social behaviors from the perspective of Embodiment
Wow, thank you for this fascinating analysis. I feel that it is CRUCIAL for these ideas to become a part of the great "unpacking" of what happened & what is still happening. I look forward to reading more.