Blurring the lines between life forms

Composite creatures, such as the mythical centaur, have long lived in the human imagination. Our growing power to directly design life forms should give us pause, says bio-ethicist Paul Root Wolpe. Once we perfect the technologies in animals and start using them in humans, what will be the ethical guidelines?

You may have already heard of the liger, the lion-tiger hybrid that is the largest cat in the world. Now meet the beefalo (buffalo-cattle), the geep (goat-sheep) and the camma (camel-llama).

A growing number of such hybrid animals exist due to selective breeding combined with genetic manipulation. “For the first time in our history, we’re able to directly design organisms,” says Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics in a TED conversation (see video below). “We’re able to manipulate life with unprecedented power.”

Bioengineers have removed the bio-luminescent gene from jellyfish and used it to make kittens, pigs and puppies that glow in the dark. Some states already allow sales of genetically altered Zebra fish, a black-and-white aquarium favorite that now comes in glowing yellow, red and green.

Wolpe wonders, “Do we get to go to ‘Pets-R-Us’ someday and say, ‘I’d like to have a dog. I’d like it to have the head of a dachshund, the body of a retriever, maybe some pink fur, and let’s make it glow in the dark.’”

It’s past time for us to confront tough questions about bio-engineering, Wolpe says. How are we going to define animal species in this new era of directed evolution?

He points out that most of the food we buy in the supermarket today already has a genetically modified component to it. “So even as we have worried about it, we’ve allowed it to go on in this country without regulation, or even any identification on the package.”

Cloning and computers are further pushing the envelope of transgenic animals. Labs have created organic robots, including Goliath beetles implanted with computer chips that allow engineers to use a joystick to control their flight. This technology is not limited to insects. One lab has created a robo-rat with electrodes wired into its brain and a tiny camera mounted on its head.

“This is not science fiction, it’s happening now,” Wolpe says. “Once we perfect these technologies in animals and start using them in human beings, what are the ethical guidelines we’ll use? Is it okay to manipulate and create whatever creatures we want?”

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Misreading faces tied to child social anxiety

"If you misread facial expressions, you're in social trouble, no matter what other social skills you have," says Emory psychologist Steve Nowicki. 

By Carol Clark

Children suffering from extreme social anxiety are trapped in a nightmare of misinterpreted facial expressions: They confuse angry faces with sad ones, a new study shows.

“If you misread facial expressions, you’re in social trouble, no matter what other social skills you have,” says Emory psychologist Steve Nowicki, a clinical researcher who developed the tests used in the study. “It can make life very difficult, because other people’s faces are like a prism through which we look at the world.”

It’s easy to assume that a socially anxious child would be especially sensitive to anger. “It turns out that they never learn to pick up on anger and often make the error of seeing it as sadness,” Nowicki says. “It sets up a very problematic interaction.”

Some socially anxious children long to interact with others, he says, and may try to comfort someone they think is sad, but who is actually angry. “They want to help, because they’re good kids,” Nowicki says. “I’ve seen these kids trying to make a friend, and keep trying, but they keep getting rebuffed and are never aware of the reason why.”

The study was co-authored by Amy Walker, a former undergraduate student at Emory, now at Yeshiva University, and will be published in the Journal of Genetic Psychology.

It is unclear whether misreading the facial expression is linked to the cause of the anxiety, or merely contributing to it.

By identifying the patterns of errors in nonverbal communication, Nowicki hopes to create better diagnostic tools and interventions for children with behavioral disorders.

For more than two decades, in association with Emory psychologist Marshall Duke, Nowicki has produced a groundbreaking body of work on how non-verbal communication impacts a child’s development. They have found that in a range of children with behavioral disorders, including high-functioning autism, direct teaching can improve their non-verbal communication.

“When I first started this work, people asked me, why are you doing this? Everybody can recognize emotions in faces,” Nowicki recalls. Nonverbal communication was not taken that seriously, and relegated to popular magazine articles like, “Seven ways to improve your body language.”

In his clinical practice, however, Nowicki noticed that some children who had trouble socializing appeared to misinterpret nonverbal clues. He sought ways to measure the deficits and remediate them.

“My heart went out to these kids,” he says. “I had the idea that nonverbal communication could be taught. It’s a skill, not something mysterious.”

Nowicki and Duke termed the coin “dyssemia,” meaning the inability to process signs. They also developed the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) to assess subtle cues to emotional expressions, including visual signals and tone and cadence of voice. DANVA is now widely used by researchers in studies of everything from emotionally disturbed children to the relationships between doctors and their patients.

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Top 10 facts about non-verbal communication

Non-verbal communication has a huge impact on a child's social well-being, yet development of this skill is often overlooked, says Emory psychologist Steve Nowicki. 

By Carol Clark

What you don’t say during a face-to-face encounter can deliver a stronger message than words.

“Non-verbal communication is at least as important, if not more important, than the verbal part of relationships,” says Emory psychologist Steve Nowicki, a leading expert in the nuances of body language. “When you break a non-verbal rule of language, it almost always has a negative emotional impact.”

And yet, the elaborate codes of facial expressions, postures and gestures that form the basis of non-verbal communication are learned informally and indirectly, primarily from our parents, he says.

He cites his own experience of having a reserved, Polish father and a boisterous Italian mother. “At times, the only sign that my father was upset was the way he would raise one eyebrow by a certain degree,” Nowicki recalls. “My mother, on the other hand, never met an emotion that she didn’t express immediately and vividly.”

Between the pair of them, Nowicki learned to interpret and use the gamut of non-verbal signals. “But imagine what a boy who was raised by two parents like my mother would be like when he got to school,” Nowicki says. If a teacher delivered a command in a soft, even tone characteristic of preschool instructors, the child would be likely to miss the teacher’s message entirely and perhaps get labeled as “oppositional.”

For more than two decades, in association with Emory psychologist Marshall Duke, Nowicki has produced a groundbreaking body of work in how non-verbal communication impacts a child’s development. They developed the Diagnostic Analysis of Non-verbal Accuracy (DANVA) a set of tests to access subtle cues to emotional expressions, including visual signals and tone and cadence of voice. The test is in use by researchers around the world.

“Research has shown that most people overestimate their non-verbal communication skills,” Nowicki says.

In the following Q&A, he answers 10 questions based on research by himself and others.

Is non-verbal communication skill associated with personal and social adjustment?

Yes, DANVA errors in children can help predict future personal and social difficulties, including anxiety, ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, lower self-esteem and being the victim of bullies.

Can the ability to read non-verbal emotions be improved?

Yes, direct teaching of children, including those with high-functioning autism, can lead to significant improvement in their DANVA scores.

Are there any drawbacks to being extremely good at reading others?

Yes. You have to be careful if you are especially adept at sensing the non-verbal signals of others, because you may pick up emotional signals that they are unaware of sending and would rather hide. For instance, when you tell someone that they look a little tired and sad, they might take offense, even if it’s true.

Is non-verbal communication skill tied to cognitive ability?

No, except when the IQ is below 70. For those with average IQs and above, there does not appear to be a correlation between non-verbal communication skills and intelligence.

Is the ability to interpret non-verbal cues correlated to the ability to express them?

No, not much. Even if you’re good at reading people’s non-verbal cues, it doesn’t mean that you’re not sending out faulty messages yourself. They appear to be two different skills.

Is non-verbal communication interpreted the same way across cultures?

No, culture has a significant impact. Studies have shown, for instance, that African-Americans can read white faces as well as they can read African-American faces. White people, however, do not read African-American faces as well, and when they misinterpret their facial expressions, they tend to read them as angry. You can imagine the potential kinds of problems this might cause.

Do children acquire the ability to read the emotions of facial expressions in a particular order?

Yes, studies show that children tend to learn to read a happy expression first, followed by sad, angry and then fearful expressions.

Does older age affect non-verbal communication skill?

Yes. As we become elderly, our ability to read emotions can erode, and it seems we lose skill in emotions in the opposite order that we acquired them as children. Happy is the last one to go.

Between the ages of 45 and 55, we begin to lose the ability to pick up emotions in voices, and by ages 55 to 65 loss in the ability to read faces follows. However, what remains the same at any age is that better skill compared to peers is correlated with better personal and social adjustment.

What is the effect of a neutral expression?

There is no such thing as a neutral face, because a neutral face is usually interpreted negatively.

About one-third of people have an off-putting “resting face” and they don’t realize it. Their faces, when they are thinking about nothing in particular and feeling no emotion, are actually communicating something negative. As we age, this tendency grows. It is estimated that more than half of people above the age of 65 have a negative resting face.

Do nonverbal communication skills correlate to attitudes toward robots?

Yes. Believe it or not, a study showed that people who are not good at reading the emotional cues in human body postures tend to dislike robots.

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Africa and the dawn of collective unconscious

View of Africa from space by NASA.

What do ancient African deities and modern psychoanalysis have in common? In a recent talk at the Carlos Museum, Emory psychologist Marshall Duke cited revelations by Jung when he traveled to Africa in 1928. Emory’s ThoughtWork provides this summary of Duke’s comments:

"Freud and Jung were very close to one another. It’s said that when they first met each other they spoke without stopping for twelve or thirteen hours. They respected one another for a period of time, but interestingly, they broke with one another based upon Freud’s rejection of religion and Jung’s belief that religion was inherently important in human behavior. They drifted apart because each one believed the other would never change. And they were right ...

"Jung differed from Freud in terms of his belief in what he called the collective unconscious. Jung felt there was something more than the personal experiences of an individual’s life that were stored in the unconscious mind. Jung in fact believed that there were memories and images and roles that were passed along from generation to generation to all people, that everyone shared certain capacities and beliefs.

Image, left, from the Carlos exhibit "Divine Intervention: African Art and Religion."

"When Jung was very young, he believed, as many kids do, that mysterious things happened in his life. He believed that his mother, after falling asleep, moved through the house as a spirit, and was a bit frightened by this. In order to deal with it, it’s reported that he took a ruler from his pencil case and carved a small mannequin, a small figure, out of the ruler and he put it in his pencil case and kept it under his bed. Over time, he gathered small stones and painted them particular colors in different configurations and put them into his box as a way of protecting himself. He just sort of came up with this.

"In 1928, he traveled to Africa and visited Kenya. He came upon people who had small mannequins and little stones and all sorts of things like this. Reportedly, he said to himself, 'My God, how did I know about this without ever learning about it?' This is where his concept of the collective unconscious supposedly began."

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Sorting truth from false memories

While president, Ronald Reagan famously told a story about how he had been at a German concentration camp shortly after the Nazi defeat in World War II, and had helped to make films of the liberation of that camp. He told this story in depth, and more than once. The truth was, however, that although Reagan made training films for the armed forces, he spent the entire war in the United States.

So was Reagan telling a bold-faced lie? Was it an early sign of dementia? Or was he simply telling the truth as he remembered it?

Author Salman Rushdie recalled his own experience of reinventing his past during a recent public conversation at Emory, where he is a writer-in-residence.

“Ever since I was writing ‘Midnight’s Children,’ I’ve gotten very interested in the divergence between memory and the record,” Rushdie said.

As he was writing the novel, which drew from biographical details of his childhood in Bombay, he thought of the panicked atmosphere created by a border dispute between India and China. Rushdie vividly recalled hearing his parents discuss their fears of a Chinese empire replacing the British one as Chinese troops advanced over the Himalayas.

When Rushdie told his mother about it, she replied, “Don’t be stupid, you weren’t here. You were in boarding school in England.”

He checked the dates and realized that his mother was right. “All of this was a memory that I had constructed out of what people had told me,” Rushdie said. “My memory had just put me into the scene, even though the facts insisted that I was actually in England. Even today, knowing that I wasn’t there, my memory tells me that I was. I became very interested in that, in the way that memory rebuilds our lives for us in such a way that even when we are shown categorically that the memory is false, we actually believe the memory more than we believe the facts.”

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