| The Hollywood Issue | Spring 2009 |
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FaceBook What can science tell us about acting? More each year. Psychologist Paul Ekman, for instance, has demonstrated that there are six basic facial expressions that people from every culture understand innately. Although we can’t rely on expressions like winking, the meaning of which varies across cultures, when we’re in China, we can be sure that native Chinese will understand our frowns, smiles, pouts, raised eyebrows, sneers, and wrinkled noses to mean anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, contempt, and disgust. Maude Mitchell, a stage and film actress, once asked me why, when she was starring as Nora in an adaptation of A Doll’s House, her mascara ran down the left side of her face long before it did on the right. I told her this response reflects the fact that the right side of the brain controls negative emotions more than the left one does. Because the right brain controls the left body, the left side of the face tends to express sadness more than the right side does. Maude seemed amused by my explanation and said that from then on she would play her most tragic scenes with her left profile toward the audience. To learn more about expressions of sadness, I turned to colleagues in psychiatry. Although there has been recent debate over whether tears are cathartic, or only make you feel worse, most psychotherapists are strong believers in the purgative effect of tears. One psychotherapist told me with a faint pride that, on average, patients cry in nearly a third of their sessions with her. “Some don’t feel they get their money’s worth if they don’t cry each time,” she told me. The hall leading to her office seemed graphic testimony to her effectiveness; its walls were lined with towers of boxes of facial tissues. When I mentioned that, she burst out laughing.“Those aren’t my tissues,” she said. “Those are the realtors’ in the next suite. You know what housing prices are like in Boston.” Alice Flaherty ’94, PhD, is an HMS assistant professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Photo: Luis Sandoval Mandujano/iStockPhoto.com |
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