Speaker 1: Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: it's Saturday. Let's head into the vault this week. It
Speaker 1: is part two of our series on the Coolest Jov Effect.
Speaker 1: This episode originally aired January. I hope you enjoy Welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
Speaker 1: part two of our series on the Coolest Jov Effect. Now,
Speaker 1: as I explained last time, this is one that originally
Speaker 1: was going to be one episode. We ended up splitting
Speaker 1: it into so we're doing a little time traveling right now.
Speaker 1: This is an out of sequence introduction, but I guess
Speaker 1: from here we'll just jump right back into the middle
Speaker 1: of our conversation from last time. Let's do it well. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So I wanted to talk about a very interesting paper
Speaker 1: that analyzed the the history and meaning of the cool
Speaker 1: Shov effect and then also tried to recreate the Mojukan experiment.
Speaker 1: So this paper was published in the Cinema Journal by
Speaker 1: Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley called the Coolershov Effect
Speaker 1: Recreating the classic experiment your nineteen. I think both of
Speaker 1: the authors on this paper were at the time professors
Speaker 1: at Virginia Tech. Stephen Prince is a is a film
Speaker 1: scholar who I know has done a lot of work
Speaker 1: on a Kirakurasawa. And I'm not going to cover the
Speaker 1: entire paper, but i just want to note some parts
Speaker 1: of it that struck me as as relevant and interesting.
Speaker 1: So they start off by telling the story of the
Speaker 1: Kolashov effect experiment, the experiment with that actor mojuk In
Speaker 1: making the neutral face and then either being intercut with
Speaker 1: with soup or with the woman in the coffin, and
Speaker 1: the audience is raving about how how expressive and powerful
Speaker 1: the emotions in the performance were. Now, one thing they
Speaker 1: do at the beginning is they note some differences in
Speaker 1: the details of the story that arise from different recountings
Speaker 1: of it, and so they end up casting doubt on
Speaker 1: whether the accounts of this experiment are first of all,
Speaker 1: historically accurate and second analytically valid, and so the author's
Speaker 1: right quote. The goal here is to provide a clearer
Speaker 1: contextualization of Kolashev's work distinguishing between its incontrovertible importance for
Speaker 1: an understanding of how cinema communicates and certain of its limitations,
Speaker 1: especially it's incautious merging of theoretical claim and observational assertion.
Speaker 1: As we will see, Kulashev may have been right, but
Speaker 1: perhaps for the wrong reasons. So the top line of
Speaker 1: this paper is that they try to recreate the Majukan
Speaker 1: experiment as it is usually described, and they do not
Speaker 1: produce the same result. But this doesn't necessarily mean that
Speaker 1: the broader implications of the Kolashov effect are wrong theoretically, uh,
Speaker 1: but it might mean something about the specific claims about
Speaker 1: a neutral face. Um. So they start off talking Aboutkulashev's
Speaker 1: belief in the power of montage and his arguments that
Speaker 1: editing is far more important the meaning generated by a
Speaker 1: film than the contents of the shots. So they talked
Speaker 1: about the masou Can experiment and then the other things
Speaker 1: we mentioned, creative geography and creative anatomy, and they described
Speaker 1: the general takeaway from the masuk And experiment as follows. Quote.
Speaker 1: Naturalistic emotive performances by actors were not considered by Kulashev
Speaker 1: to be essential to cinema because of the demands of montage,
Speaker 1: actors were to provide minimal restraint and fairly unambiguous gestural
Speaker 1: and facial expressions. As kola Chev puts it, quote, the
Speaker 1: presence of montage necessitated that the shots should be constructed simply, clearly, distinctly.
Speaker 1: Otherwise the flickering of a rapid montage would not be
Speaker 1: sufficient for a full scrutin any of its contents. And
Speaker 1: then the authors go on reacting, partly against the over
Speaker 1: emoting found in some silent films. Kulashov noted that quote,
Speaker 1: a preoccupation with psychologism rooted in the actor's performance was
Speaker 1: quite useless for the cinema. So in a in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, it sounds like Kolashov kind of wanted
Speaker 1: to take the acting out of acting. He was like,
Speaker 1: there's too much psychology and acting. What we need instead
Speaker 1: is just sort of like shots of actors doing kind
Speaker 1: of like plain, unambiguous moments that can then be selected
Speaker 1: by the editor to insert in a sequence to make
Speaker 1: meaning of m Yeah, that's I mean, it reminds me
Speaker 1: of so many other discussions we've had about performance and direction. Uh.
Speaker 1: I'm always reminded of that that final sequence from A
Speaker 1: Geary The Wrath of God, where you have you have
Speaker 1: what ends up being a rather balanced and and and
Speaker 1: interesting performance by klaus Kinsky. But apparently it's because Vernon
Speaker 1: Herzag just wore him out, made him do take after
Speaker 1: take until he wasn't doing like a frenzied um uh
Speaker 1: you know, over almost you know, overacting overly intense performance.
Speaker 1: He's not raging, he's just actually you know, you know,
Speaker 1: emoting it at the level that the director wants and
Speaker 1: then can therefore be uh be used effectively in the edit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and though if that story is true, it may have
Speaker 1: worked in this case. So I want to say I
Speaker 1: do not necessarily endorse directing by exhaustion. No. Now that
Speaker 1: was a special relationship obviously, But you often see this
Speaker 1: brought up, and you know, there's this idea of like,
Speaker 1: is this is it the is is this about the
Speaker 1: actor and the acting performance? Is it about uh editing?
Speaker 1: Is it about the director's vision? And you do often
Speaker 1: see that sort of push and pull be a you know,
Speaker 1: Klauskinski in vern Or Herzog or Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the the actor has a certain vision about
Speaker 1: how things want need to be, and then the director
Speaker 1: had maybe has another eye dea not not only about
Speaker 1: like this particular character in this particular performance, but how
Speaker 1: it fits into the the overall film, how it fits
Speaker 1: into the final edit. And so you could you can
Speaker 1: imagine somebody going into it with this this sort of
Speaker 1: very kulashav idea of just shoot, all we needed as
Speaker 1: neutral actors, we don't really need any of this emotion
Speaker 1: one way or another. And um, I don't know, there's
Speaker 1: probably some examples of filmmakers who tend to lean in
Speaker 1: that direction with very neutral performances. Yeah, you could almost
Speaker 1: look at that approach as uh, something that might be
Speaker 1: more common saying like music videos and stuff than in
Speaker 1: narrative films. Being probably find at some in narrative films
Speaker 1: as well, where the filming part of the filmmaking process
Speaker 1: is just sort of like creating a bunch of building
Speaker 1: blocks that can later be used in various arrangements to
Speaker 1: do whatever the director editor later decides to do with them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it also reminds me how, you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: the films we're watching weird how cinema will sometimes feature
Speaker 1: non actors or you know, very very green actors, But
Speaker 1: the right sort of non actor can really excel in
Speaker 1: a scene if utilized correctly, you know, like not the
Speaker 1: kind of non actor where they're just really outrageous with
Speaker 1: you know, but but where they're just sort of very
Speaker 1: they're very neutral, they're they're almost barely there at all,
Speaker 1: and if enough of the other stuff is in the
Speaker 1: right place, it can really work. Now. I gotta say, though,
Speaker 1: as this paper ends up describing kola Chev's theory of
Speaker 1: film and montage, I think I can't agree with with
Speaker 1: what it sounds like Coolshov's vision actually was, because cool
Speaker 1: a Show apparently said things like the film shot is
Speaker 1: not a still photograph. The shot is a sign a
Speaker 1: letter for montage. So I think he's saying like a
Speaker 1: still photograph can have meaning on its own, but a
Speaker 1: shot in a movie is more like a letter in
Speaker 1: a sentence. Something which does not have meaning on its own,
Speaker 1: but is combined in sequence to make meaning clearly has
Speaker 1: some truth to it, because, as we've said, editing does
Speaker 1: constitute a major part of the the sense making or
Speaker 1: meaning making of a film. But I think that's also
Speaker 1: pretty overstated. You know, a lot of meaning lies in
Speaker 1: the editing, but the contents of the shots also stand
Speaker 1: alone to a greater extent and and matter a lot
Speaker 1: more than Kolashaw was giving credit here. Um. Though, again,
Speaker 1: to be fair, I think it's important for us not
Speaker 1: to forget that in the nineteen teens and early nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: you know, film was still fairly young, Editing was still
Speaker 1: fairly new in cinema, and its powers were still being discovered. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like, like we talked about the very
Speaker 1: earliest films from the eighteen nineties and such, we're usually
Speaker 1: not edited at all. They'd just be one continuous shot.
Speaker 1: And even after editing was introduced, films of the Silent
Speaker 1: era typically did not have as many cuts as movies
Speaker 1: were used to today. Furthermore, the authors of of this
Speaker 1: paper argue that a theory comparing film to language is
Speaker 1: actually not super useful because there's just a lot of
Speaker 1: ways in which that doesn't work. Like film does things
Speaker 1: language cannot do. So you don't have to learn a
Speaker 1: language to appreciate the meanings of films. You you learn
Speaker 1: some conventions, but you know, you can just watch a
Speaker 1: movie and make some sense of it, even if you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with conventions. You to understand the language, you
Speaker 1: have to learn the language. Um. Meanwhile, language does things
Speaker 1: that film can't do, like photographic images used in a
Speaker 1: film cannot be recombined freely to make endless meaning the
Speaker 1: way a language can. There's also an interesting digression in
Speaker 1: this paper about Kolashaw being influenced by the ideology of
Speaker 1: industrial efficiency on the model of the American engineer Frederick Taylor,
Speaker 1: who was a big proponent of finding ways to make
Speaker 1: you know, production processes and factories more efficient, finding all
Speaker 1: the places where waste and and and problems creep in
Speaker 1: and eliminating those, And that Taylor's ideas of industrial efficiency
Speaker 1: were apparently very popular in the Soviet Union at the time,
Speaker 1: and that in a way, the authors say that you
Speaker 1: could view Kolashaw's emphasis on economy and acting as a
Speaker 1: type of industrial efficiency technique applied to film theory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And based on what I was reading it, it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It does seem like a lot of his work was
Speaker 1: based in let's figure out what's working, and then how
Speaker 1: we can we can do that? How how do we
Speaker 1: make how do what is the most economic means of
Speaker 1: making effective film now? Ultimately, Prince and Hensley make the
Speaker 1: case that Koulishev really was trying to dress up his
Speaker 1: theoretical convictions about how film works with the imper mater
Speaker 1: of empirical science with this alleged experiment them as you
Speaker 1: can experiment, uh, And I think I'm pretty convinced by
Speaker 1: their description of it that way. I think this is
Speaker 1: something you've always got to be cautious of because obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't object in principle to exploring or
Speaker 1: building upon artistic theories with empirical methods. But I would
Speaker 1: also say, my personal opinion is that a lot of
Speaker 1: these efforts to inject scientific methods into esthetics and and
Speaker 1: art and stuff can be confusing and unnecessary. Like I
Speaker 1: don't think you have to have an empirical scientific justification
Speaker 1: for an opinion about where meaning comes from in art
Speaker 1: or in film. Obviously, I'm a huge believer in empirical science.
Speaker 1: I just don't think it has to pervade every domain,
Speaker 1: Like aesthetics and art don't necessarily need scientific evidence and
Speaker 1: theories behind them that those fields just you know, work
Speaker 1: by different standards. And I think also a lot of
Speaker 1: times if you try to generate empirical scientific justifications for
Speaker 1: your beliefs about art or aesthetics or whatever, you're often
Speaker 1: just gonna end up doing sloppy experiments or drawing unjustified conclusions,
Speaker 1: even if you do a good one. Yeah. Um, like
Speaker 1: I'm reminded, you know of the fact that obviously you
Speaker 1: have a such thing. There's such a thing as outsider
Speaker 1: art and oursider cinema. Um, and and examples of outsider
Speaker 1: art and outsider cinema can be amazing, uh, you know.
Speaker 1: And on the other side of things, you don't hear
Speaker 1: as much about maybe outsider architecture, outsider structural engineering, things
Speaker 1: of this nature. Outsider medicine is probably you know, best
Speaker 1: avoided if you can, no matter how it's being dressed up. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think empirical methods are good for fields
Speaker 1: in which you are trying to achieve very clearly specified goals,
Speaker 1: certain kinds of outcomes and get them as reliably as possible.
Speaker 1: And empirical methods are are less important in fields where
Speaker 1: you're you're just trying to be expressive or be creative
Speaker 1: and see what kind of emergent results come out. But
Speaker 1: if it's like like this turns my mind to like
Speaker 1: a b testing and focus groups used in film and television. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, not not necessarily a bad idea at all,
Speaker 1: especially when you're dealing again with a very mainstream product
Speaker 1: you want to appeal to a you know, a wide
Speaker 1: population of individuals. Um. But you know, there are plenty
Speaker 1: of arguments to be made about it as a potential,
Speaker 1: you know, sloppy experiment. As you say, perhaps one of
Speaker 1: the best critiques of all of this is that that
Speaker 1: episode of The Simpsons, the Itchy and Scratchy and Pucci Show,
Speaker 1: one of my favorites. It's just an old, creaky mirror.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it sounds like it's coughing or talking softly. Yes,
Speaker 1: But anyway, to come back to uh, Prince and Henley's
Speaker 1: description of methodological problems with the common descriptions of Kolashov's
Speaker 1: alleged experiment the Masukan experiment with the neutral face and
Speaker 1: the soup and the and the coffin and stuff. And
Speaker 1: they list a bunch of questions, they say, quote for
Speaker 1: such a seminal and basically uncontested study, there is virtually
Speaker 1: no information available about Kolashov's actual method and procedure. Did he,
Speaker 1: for example, will interview the subjects individually or in a group.
Speaker 1: What did he tell them beforehand about the purpose of
Speaker 1: the presentation, What, if anything, did he tell them about
Speaker 1: the nature of film editing or montage. What was the
Speaker 1: frequency of outlier opinions e g. People who did not
Speaker 1: think Masukan was saddened by the dead woman. Published accounts
Speaker 1: suggest the responses were uniform. Was this so? Unfortunately we
Speaker 1: do not know the answers to any of these questions. So,
Speaker 1: given these limitations, they attempt to recreate and try to
Speaker 1: replicate as best they can the conditions of the original
Speaker 1: experiment to see if they get the same result. So
Speaker 1: what they did was they put together a videotape that
Speaker 1: had some auditions for actors to produce a close up
Speaker 1: shot of a face that was just totally neutral and
Speaker 1: expression list And they had to go through a couple
Speaker 1: of rounds because in the first round the actor's neutral
Speaker 1: face was not perceived as neutral enough by the control group. Um.
Speaker 1: But so so they got a neutral face on a
Speaker 1: video and they did the same thing. They intercut it
Speaker 1: with a woman lying in a coffin, a girl playing
Speaker 1: with a teddy bear and a bowl of soup on
Speaker 1: a table, and they tried as best they could to
Speaker 1: follow Kolashov's cues about what what the cinematography techniques for
Speaker 1: making this work the best would be, so it would
Speaker 1: be UH people visible on a darkened black velvet background.
Speaker 1: Apparently the actors were told that they just needed someone
Speaker 1: to uh to model for an instructional video in which
Speaker 1: they would be required to do an expressionless or neutral face.
Speaker 1: So one difference is that instead of one long sequence
Speaker 1: intercutting with all of them, they did separate sequences for
Speaker 1: each reaction. So for example, it might go face soup,
Speaker 1: face fade out or face coffin, face fade out, and
Speaker 1: each shot was seven seconds long. And the separate sequences
Speaker 1: make sense to me because you might get a different
Speaker 1: reaction with some pairings than you would with others. So
Speaker 1: viewers each saw one sequence selected at random, and they
Speaker 1: were told that the experimenters needed help evaluating an acting performance.
Speaker 1: And then the viewers were supposed to select from a
Speaker 1: list of emotions that they thought were being portrayed by
Speaker 1: the actor. Options included happiness, sadness, anger, fear, Surprise, discussed hunger,
Speaker 1: no emotion, and other Apparently the participants were undergrads at
Speaker 1: a mid Atlantic university. I'm going to assume based on
Speaker 1: the author's affiliations, this was probably Virginia Tech. They said
Speaker 1: that interestingly, film students were excluded from the experiments since
Speaker 1: they might detect the connection to Kolashov and understand what
Speaker 1: the experiment was getting at, which could bias results. And
Speaker 1: in support of this decision, I mean, it seems like
Speaker 1: a good choice either way. But to justify this decision,
Speaker 1: they wrote about another recent attempt to replicate the Monsieur
Speaker 1: can experiment in France among film students who allegedly gave
Speaker 1: answers like the following quote. We know that the man
Speaker 1: does not change his expression, but because of the montage,
Speaker 1: we think we see him change or quote. We know
Speaker 1: the Cooleshov effect and it works. And then Princeton Hensley
Speaker 1: also had a control condition where they showed the face
Speaker 1: to twenty four film students, this time but without any
Speaker 1: inner cutting. They were just showing them the face by
Speaker 1: itself and asking them what emotion it was showing for
Speaker 1: the face that they actually used in the experiment. Percent
Speaker 1: said there was no emotion on the face. So this
Speaker 1: is a very good neutral face. You know that. That
Speaker 1: reminds me though of of use of neutral face uh
Speaker 1: sort of not still pictures, but just seen sequences where um,
Speaker 1: a character and individual is staring directly into the camera. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking it's certainly about Ron fricksm Baraka, which features
Speaker 1: a number of these uh sequences where you'll you'll just
Speaker 1: have an individual from from one culture or another just
Speaker 1: staring into the camera. Or Another example that comes to
Speaker 1: mind is the film The Mission, where at the very
Speaker 1: end of the film there's you who just have several
Speaker 1: beats of one of the primary characters, uh staring into
Speaker 1: the camera and very neutral expression. And of course you
Speaker 1: have the entire film you've just watched to help uh
Speaker 1: inform your idea of what's going through that that character's head. Um.
Speaker 1: But but but still, it's it's a it's a great
Speaker 1: use of neutral expression, Like he doesn't it doesn't look
Speaker 1: particularly sad in that case, but you in you can
Speaker 1: see sadness in the character. You know. Well, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a good example, but I think it also does raise
Speaker 1: questions about something that's supposed to be sort of outside
Speaker 1: the the standard interpretation of this of this experiment, which
Speaker 1: is like, well, wait, what are the actual contents of
Speaker 1: the face? Maybe that does matter. That's going to come
Speaker 1: up in the author's interpretation of the results they get.
Speaker 1: But so in the actual experiment they did, they had
Speaker 1: a hundred and thirty seven participants, including the control group.
Speaker 1: In the experimental group. In every condition, whether it was soup, coffin,
Speaker 1: or child, the majority of people said there was no emotion.
Speaker 1: So they saw the face that was supposedly neutral, they
Speaker 1: saw it intercut with whatever it was, the soup or
Speaker 1: the coffin, and they said, nope, there is no emotion
Speaker 1: on this face. In the soup condition, sixty eight percent
Speaker 1: selected no emotion. In both the child and the coffin condition,
Speaker 1: sixty one percent said no emotion, and so comparing that
Speaker 1: to the control group, in the control eight percent said
Speaker 1: there was no emotion, and that dropped down to sixty
Speaker 1: eight in the soup and sixty one in the child
Speaker 1: and the coffin. So you could say this is a
Speaker 1: small increase in perceived emotion, though the authors note that
Speaker 1: for the size of the group they tested, it actually
Speaker 1: doesn't reach statistical significance, so it might just be a
Speaker 1: random fluke. Furthermore, in the cases where the viewers picked
Speaker 1: in emotion, it was usually not the expected emotion, so
Speaker 1: it was not happiness for the child and so forth.
Speaker 1: So either way, this experiment find something somewhere between no
Speaker 1: effect and small effect on perceived emotion, which is a
Speaker 1: very far cry either way from Kolashev's reports about the
Speaker 1: audience is unanimous raving about the actor's subtle emotional performances,
Speaker 1: And so the authors say here that you know, in
Speaker 1: less contrary evidence emerges, it seems true to say that
Speaker 1: quote the Kolashov effect as reported no longer exists, even
Speaker 1: if the effect did play a role at one time,
Speaker 1: though emphasis there should be on as reported, because some
Speaker 1: of the broader implications of it probably do still hold true. Now,
Speaker 1: this raises an interesting question. If we assume, for the
Speaker 1: sake of argument, that Kolashev was basically reporting the results
Speaker 1: of his experiment accurately or with only slight exaggeration, what
Speaker 1: could account between the difference. Why did Kolashov get people
Speaker 1: raving about the subtle emotion in the neutral face, but
Speaker 1: that that didn't really happen in a modern experiment? The
Speaker 1: authors offer some ideas here, and I think they're all
Speaker 1: pretty possible via and certainly interesting. So one would be
Speaker 1: changes in audience expectation. You know, audiences today are accustomed
Speaker 1: to highly effective editing techniques that have been perfected over time,
Speaker 1: such as, like I mentioned earlier, the preservation of eyelines
Speaker 1: to enforce continuity of of perspective and reverse shots. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this is this is a big one. And
Speaker 1: I mean it comes down to like some of the
Speaker 1: basics of what we said earlier about how at least
Speaker 1: for many of us and certainly for me, like trying
Speaker 1: to watch an actual cooler show film is very difficult.
Speaker 1: Like it's just film has come has evolved so much
Speaker 1: since then, um, and and the effects are subtle in
Speaker 1: a way that you really the film only has to
Speaker 1: be even halfway competent to really just draw you in
Speaker 1: and create the illusion. Right, So uh so the author's
Speaker 1: right quote. It may be that a modern audience, by
Speaker 1: virtue of increased media exposure relative to cool A. Shov's day,
Speaker 1: has become accustomed to a more systematic and complex set
Speaker 1: of associate creational cues, such as those supplied by the
Speaker 1: continuity system of editing. And is correspondingly less likely to
Speaker 1: respond to a montage sequence that employs a blank face
Speaker 1: and minimal, if any associated cues within shots. So maybe
Speaker 1: the bar for perceiving emotion in films has has gone up,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just harder to do now. And at
Speaker 1: the time the Kolashov did his experiment, allegedly maybe the
Speaker 1: audiences were just we're just more it was easier for
Speaker 1: them to project that emotion now that There could be
Speaker 1: a number of ways to read that. One way is
Speaker 1: is thinking about how much exposure modern audiences have to
Speaker 1: modern editing techniques. Um the other way, I guess, and
Speaker 1: the authors don't really favor this explanation, but they say
Speaker 1: another way of looking at it is naivete on the
Speaker 1: part of the early audiences. There's some kind of projection
Speaker 1: going on, because maybe early film audiences were just so
Speaker 1: bewildered by moving pictures that they almost like hallucinated projections
Speaker 1: of emotion. And uh, the authors don't think this is
Speaker 1: a very good explanation for one thing, because they argue
Speaker 1: that a lot of the stories that are used to
Speaker 1: to illustrate the sort of bewilderment of early film audiences,
Speaker 1: like that, you know, the semi mythological things about the
Speaker 1: audiences running away from the Loomi air train and stuff
Speaker 1: that they say that I mean, there were sort of
Speaker 1: events of this kind, but they have been mythologized in
Speaker 1: a way that over emphasizes how naive early audiences were,
Speaker 1: and that a lot of these kinds of reactions may
Speaker 1: have just been audiences playing along there at the theater
Speaker 1: having a good time, and they're playing along with what
Speaker 1: the suggested reaction was supposed to be. That's true once
Speaker 1: you especially when you're dealing with a group of people,
Speaker 1: you know, watching watching anything with a group, even even
Speaker 1: today with our our modern exposure to cinema, you know,
Speaker 1: if one person jumps, everybody can jump. That sort of thing,
Speaker 1: you know, you're more maybe you're more likely to to
Speaker 1: laugh or scream if you're watching it with with other people.
Speaker 1: That sort of thing makes me think about William Castle
Speaker 1: and the Tingle are trying to get people screaming in
Speaker 1: the movie theaters. Yea, yeah, which which is uh is infectious.
Speaker 1: As I think I mentioned in that Tingler episode, I
Speaker 1: got to see the Tingler UH in a theater and
Speaker 1: people were totally playing into it, like it's still worked today,
Speaker 1: so good. Okay. A couple of other possible explanations for
Speaker 1: the difference between Kolashov's report and then and then they
Speaker 1: failed attempt to replicate those findings. Another one is response bias.
Speaker 1: So this seems quite possible to me. Maybe it was
Speaker 1: originally a sloppy experiment. Maybe Kolashov primed his test subjects
Speaker 1: to react the way they did and they complied. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know that This is why double blind tests are
Speaker 1: very useful. If the person administering the test doesn't know
Speaker 1: what hypothesis is being tested, it's harder for them to
Speaker 1: behave in a way that would bias, that would bias
Speaker 1: the subject response in favor of it. And there is
Speaker 1: of course extensive evidence that Kolashov was already committed to
Speaker 1: his theory about the power of montage, but for he
Speaker 1: allegedly conducted this experiment like he he already had the
Speaker 1: result he was looking for in mind. Yeah, like the
Speaker 1: neutral face. I keep thinking of examples now of neutral
Speaker 1: face or very neutral or or just you know, low
Speaker 1: key acting performances, And one that instantly comes to mind
Speaker 1: is the sequence in The Godfather where al Pacino's character
Speaker 1: is in the restaurant with uh, what is the the
Speaker 1: corrupt police officer and Sterling Hayden and yeah, and the turk,
Speaker 1: right is that the other character his name also it's
Speaker 1: also um And of course what's gonna happen is he's
Speaker 1: gonna go to the toilet, he's gonna come back with
Speaker 1: a gun, and then he's going to shoot them both.
Speaker 1: That's the plan. And there's that great sequence where you
Speaker 1: see al Pacino's face and he's he had a very again,
Speaker 1: very neutral expression, and I previously just always thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's just he's just he was such a great actor
Speaker 1: at that point in his career, Like like you can
Speaker 1: just see the wheels turning, you can see all the
Speaker 1: tension going on behind the scenes. But maybe not, maybe
Speaker 1: he's just thinking about, you know what, what what he
Speaker 1: needs to pick up at the grocery store later on
Speaker 1: in the day, and it's just all about everything else
Speaker 1: going on in the scene and how it's been put
Speaker 1: together that could be there. They're actually a number of
Speaker 1: shots in The Godfather in particular where they're memorable because
Speaker 1: of al Pacino's expressionless face, like when when Carlo Ritzie
Speaker 1: confesses at the end to having killed Sonny, and Michael
Speaker 1: just looks at him with the blank expression. But you
Speaker 1: read a lot into that blank expression. It is a
Speaker 1: murderous blank expression. But there's another way of reading the
Speaker 1: al Pacino example here, and also of possibly interpreting the
Speaker 1: original Mojoukan experiment. I really like this explanation. What if
Speaker 1: Kulashov's montage was loaded with more conventional emotional content than
Speaker 1: he claimed. There could be a million ways this could
Speaker 1: be true. But for example, what if there was something
Speaker 1: special about the face of Majukin. What if there was
Speaker 1: something special about the face that Kulashov used in this
Speaker 1: supposedly neutral test film, there was less neutral than we
Speaker 1: would be led to believe. The authors of this ninety
Speaker 1: two paper note quote there is a difference between an
Speaker 1: expressionless face and an ambiguous expression. And they started an
Speaker 1: experience from their own experiment. They talked about how the
Speaker 1: very first tape they created, if somebody trying to do
Speaker 1: a neutral face had to be rejected and replaced with
Speaker 1: a different actor because it failed to be rated as
Speaker 1: neutral in the control condition. So that was the control
Speaker 1: when there were no shots juxtaposed, the control group thought
Speaker 1: they perceived a range of emotions in the first neutral
Speaker 1: face they looked at, and then the author's got a
Speaker 1: different tape, different actor, and it succeeded at being perceived
Speaker 1: as more neutral in the original control. This is great
Speaker 1: to point out, Yeah, the difference between a neutral face
Speaker 1: and an ambiguous face, because obviously this is one of
Speaker 1: the arguments for why the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da
Speaker 1: vinci Is is such a an admired piece of art.
Speaker 1: Is because you can easily read what the Mona Lisa
Speaker 1: is um is thinking or feeling, but that she has
Speaker 1: this ambiguous countenance, right, And the difference would be that
Speaker 1: there there is a difference between ambiguous and neutral. Neutral
Speaker 1: is something we look at and we see I I
Speaker 1: don't see any emotion on that face. Ambiguous is you
Speaker 1: see emotion, but it's not clear what it is. It
Speaker 1: maybe suggests something that could go in different directions. Oh,
Speaker 1: but then the author's come back to talking about this
Speaker 1: more ambiguous, more emotional face that they got the first
Speaker 1: time they tried to record a tape, they said quote.
Speaker 1: When other viewers were shown this face and sequence, many
Speaker 1: attributed a wide range of emotions to the actor, some
Speaker 1: consistent with the coolishev effect others not. The sequence with
Speaker 1: the soup, for example, elicited interpretations of apathy, disgust, contemplation, detachment, dislike, indifference,
Speaker 1: lack of interest, as well as an occasional attribution of hunger.
Speaker 1: The ambiguous expression see him to offer a stronger interpretive
Speaker 1: cue for the viewer than did the expressionless face. If
Speaker 1: cool a Chauvian montage may not be capable of making
Speaker 1: an expressionless face emotive, it may very well do with
Speaker 1: an ambiguous expression, since the objects like soup, coffin, or
Speaker 1: child provide a context for resolving the ambiguity. And I
Speaker 1: think this interpretation seems very likely to me because again,
Speaker 1: the allegation is that Mozukin was a famed actor, and
Speaker 1: so there's naturally you can imagine a famed actor's face
Speaker 1: has something special about it's kind of brimming with with
Speaker 1: the the implication of emotion, even when they're being relatively
Speaker 1: subtle or not, you know, offering a big smile or
Speaker 1: frown or whatever, right right that this may well have
Speaker 1: been the sort of performer that was highly aware of
Speaker 1: what their face is doing. That is, you know, that
Speaker 1: is practiced in front of the mirror that knows what
Speaker 1: they're projecting, and therefore to you know, to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: might be incapable of a neutral face at least when
Speaker 1: when when told to pull some sort of face. Right,
Speaker 1: So if there's something to this interpretation, I would say
Speaker 1: that that the coolest off effect, even in the specific
Speaker 1: case of interpreting neutral faces, as you know, based on
Speaker 1: the the editing context, it's absolutely tapping into something real,
Speaker 1: but there might be like thresholds or limits, like there
Speaker 1: is some truth to it, but it can't overcome some
Speaker 1: truly deeply blandly neutral faces, you know, like some ambiguous
Speaker 1: faces just offer more hooks on which to hang emotional
Speaker 1: values created by the context. Yeah. Yeah, I also wonder
Speaker 1: what would what would happen if you you took exceptional
Speaker 1: faces and you threw them in, you know, and not
Speaker 1: necessarily even exceptionally dashing faces, but like just exceptionally evocative faces,
Speaker 1: like like I don't know, like a Peter Laurie. You know,
Speaker 1: if you put Peter Laurie in there, just even you know,
Speaker 1: even though he's gonna do you know, a new traw
Speaker 1: ambiguous face. Uh, you know, what would happen to the
Speaker 1: experiment of course, in that case, you'd also have to
Speaker 1: not know it was Peter Lori, because then you're gonna
Speaker 1: you're gonna start typecasting, like, oh, we know what kind
Speaker 1: of guys this this this actor plays. Yeah, you'd be suspicious,
Speaker 1: you'd be reading negative emotional or suspicious mind content. What
Speaker 1: is the planning for that soup? He's going to poison
Speaker 1: that soup? Isn't he right? Anyway? I think the authors
Speaker 1: make the point in the end that the the broader
Speaker 1: implications of the cool A show of myth that that
Speaker 1: individual shots, which may be low on meaning or emotion
Speaker 1: by themselves, can become highly charged with meaning by the
Speaker 1: power of the surrounding editing. This is obviously true, and
Speaker 1: it is largely the basis for the magic of cinema,
Speaker 1: But the specific claim about supposedly neutral faces appears to
Speaker 1: be not true, at least for some audiences or some faces.
Speaker 1: But this raises really interesting questions like, what are the
Speaker 1: properties of the maximally cool A show ambiguous face? You know, what,
Speaker 1: what kind of skills would you want an actor to
Speaker 1: have to be able to have these you know, subtle
Speaker 1: ambiguous expressions that can be sort of driven any which way.
Speaker 1: By the surrounding context, by a bowl of soup or
Speaker 1: by a coffin. I guess, you know, I'm just guessing here,
Speaker 1: but at the bare minimum, you need to have some
Speaker 1: sort of like spark of attention, Like they're saying, it's
Speaker 1: not not enough perhaps to just rely solely on the
Speaker 1: editing to imply that there's a connection between this shot
Speaker 1: and the other. But the person's face appears to be
Speaker 1: looking with interest at something. You know, Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: a good point. I mean, I think sometimes with these studies,
Speaker 1: like the face doesn't just look neutral. It looks like
Speaker 1: it's not seeing anything, right, Like if it's just like
Speaker 1: mug shot and then and then pick a plate of spaghetti,
Speaker 1: Like okay, you show me a mug shot, and you
Speaker 1: show me some spaghetti. Maybe something that's crucial is that
Speaker 1: the even if they're not showing a very clear emotion,
Speaker 1: that it looks like they're looking at what ever is
Speaker 1: being shown. So Princeton Henley is very interesting, but it
Speaker 1: was by no means the last study on the cooler
Speaker 1: shop effect, the last attempt to look at it empirically,
Speaker 1: And actually since then some other studies have kind of
Speaker 1: come back on the other side have found a little
Speaker 1: more support for the original alleged finding. So one example
Speaker 1: is the is the study by Dean mobs at All
Speaker 1: from two thousand six called the Cooler Shop Effect the
Speaker 1: influence of contextual framing on emotional attributions. This was in
Speaker 1: social cognitive and effective neuroscience, and the test here was
Speaker 1: a little bit different, but they did basically look for
Speaker 1: the same type of effect and did succeed in producing
Speaker 1: it experimentally. So in this case, they didn't use just
Speaker 1: a single supposedly neutral face as the stimulus. They used
Speaker 1: neutral faces and then what they call faces displaying subtly
Speaker 1: fearful or happy facial expressions, which if you want to
Speaker 1: look up the study you can see the stimuli they
Speaker 1: use the yeah, they're they're play their faces that are
Speaker 1: almost neutral. They've just got the barest little hint of
Speaker 1: a smile or kind of an apprehensive frown. And then
Speaker 1: they put together a task where they would actually they
Speaker 1: paired it with neuroimaging in the study, so they'd have
Speaker 1: people doing neuroimaging while they gave them the task to
Speaker 1: look at this face and then imagine that the person
Speaker 1: is watching a movie of various kinds. It could be
Speaker 1: a happy movie scene or a scary movie scene. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they did find that people were, on average more
Speaker 1: likely to interpret neutral or only very subtle expressive faces
Speaker 1: more in alignment with the emotion that you would expect
Speaker 1: if they believed the person was watching either a scary
Speaker 1: or a happy movie. And so it's worth noting that
Speaker 1: there is an effect here, but it's not as shockingly
Speaker 1: powerful and unanimous as like those original tellings of the
Speaker 1: Cooler Show experiment would suggest. Mm hmm, yeah, this is interesting.
Speaker 1: This is something we'll continue to look at. I also
Speaker 1: like that they were looking at scary and happy movie
Speaker 1: scenes because it also brings to mind episodes we've done
Speaker 1: in the past on audience reactions too scary movies and
Speaker 1: how oftentimes, like like the the reaction you have to
Speaker 1: a pleasant movie or certainly a funny movie compared to
Speaker 1: that of a scary movie. Uh, that they may be
Speaker 1: more like than one might think. Oh yeah, because a
Speaker 1: lot of times people laugh when something is scary. Yeah, laughing, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, reacting to the way that people around them
Speaker 1: are reacting. And if you are acting frightened during a
Speaker 1: frightening movie, it's I feel like, it's very often a
Speaker 1: kind of excited frightening you know, that's safe kind of
Speaker 1: like I am. I am afraid for the characters, but
Speaker 1: I'm not necessarily afraid for myself. You know, I've actually
Speaker 1: wondered before if so. A lot of my movie going
Speaker 1: entertainment pleasure comes from watching be horror movie is essentially
Speaker 1: as unintentional comedies and having a good time laughing laughing
Speaker 1: along with them. But I wonder if part of that
Speaker 1: grows out of a kind of defense mechanism learned in childhood,
Speaker 1: that that I could protect myself from something scary if
Speaker 1: I sort of forced myself to see it instead as
Speaker 1: something funny. Yeah, I don't know. I I certainly catch
Speaker 1: myself going like ah, more like that exact um sound
Speaker 1: if it is say a slightly goofy or goofy monster
Speaker 1: that is suddenly jumping out as opposed to a more
Speaker 1: I don't know, effective looking special effect. Uh there's something
Speaker 1: about I don't know, it's probably you know, all this
Speaker 1: is highly subjective, but for me at least, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm just leaning into the imagination more in those cases. Now,
Speaker 1: just very briefly, I wanted to point out a couple
Speaker 1: more studies I dug up that looked into the cooler
Speaker 1: Shov effect more recently than this one. So there was
Speaker 1: a study in the journal Perception in in two thousand
Speaker 1: and sixteen by Daniel Barrett at All called does the
Speaker 1: cool a Shov effect really exist? Revisiting a classic film
Speaker 1: experiment on facial expressions and emotional context. So they note
Speaker 1: some of the stuff we already did, doubts about the
Speaker 1: original experiment, and then the fact that recent attempts to
Speaker 1: reproduce the effect have had conflicting results. So they tried
Speaker 1: it out with a group of thirty six participants who
Speaker 1: were presented with twenty four film sequences of neutral faces
Speaker 1: across six different emotional conditions, so trying to reproduce the
Speaker 1: same effect, and they actually did find a correlation. It
Speaker 1: may it may not have been huge, but they said
Speaker 1: quote for each emotional condition, the participants tended to choose
Speaker 1: the appropriate the appropriate category more frequently than alternative options,
Speaker 1: while the answers to the valence and arousal questions also
Speaker 1: went in the expected direction. So they did find a
Speaker 1: mild existence of the cool A Shov effect in their
Speaker 1: research here and then there was Another one by Baranowski
Speaker 1: and Hate in UH Perception in two thousand seventeen, called
Speaker 1: the auditory cool Ashov Effect multisensory integration and movie editing.
Speaker 1: The study tried to see if there were any cool
Speaker 1: a Show of type effects, not for cross cutting with
Speaker 1: visual images, but for music. So the question is does
Speaker 1: music affect what emotions people detect on other people's supposedly
Speaker 1: neutral faces, And according to the authors of this study,
Speaker 1: their results were yes. They found that sad music did
Speaker 1: in fact make people more likely to rate a supposedly
Speaker 1: neutral face as sad and vice versa. Well that that
Speaker 1: that doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, music, especially
Speaker 1: music and film, is highly manipulative at times. And uh
Speaker 1: and I think we've all seen experiments with this sort
Speaker 1: of amateur experiments with this online where you take, um,
Speaker 1: Johnny cash Is cover of nine inch Nails Hurt, and
Speaker 1: you play it in the background of virtual virtually any uh,
Speaker 1: neutral or ambiguous footage, and you're going to get a
Speaker 1: sense of like deep personal anguish and and hurt. I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm just putting it all together in my mind
Speaker 1: right now. I'm seeing I'm seeing clips from like happy
Speaker 1: Gilmore or something, but with with the Johnny Cash Yeah,
Speaker 1: to see if I still feel. And then finally one
Speaker 1: last one there was a paper by mullinicks at All
Speaker 1: from twenty nineteen in pl Os one that also looked
Speaker 1: at the cool a Shov effect, trying to see if
Speaker 1: it existed for still photographs instead of dynamic film sequences.
Speaker 1: And the authors say, yes, they did the cool Ashov
Speaker 1: type experiment, but just with still photos, and they found
Speaker 1: there was in fact a cool Ashov type effect for
Speaker 1: just for still images. Okay, also not surprising to me anyway.
Speaker 1: So it looks like more of the recent studies into
Speaker 1: this have found some kind of effect, though I think
Speaker 1: sometimes the effects are, you know, the kinds of things
Speaker 1: you're more likely to normally see in psychology experiments, kind
Speaker 1: of modest effects rather other than the overwhelming unanimous effect
Speaker 1: described in the the original Masoukan experiment. Now, I'd like
Speaker 1: to take um all these points we've been hitting and
Speaker 1: come back around to something that I briefly discussed, and
Speaker 1: that was Leonardo da Vinci's famous sixteenth century painting The
Speaker 1: Mona Lisa. One of the most intriguing aspects of this
Speaker 1: painting is the the ultimate ambiguity of the expression. You know,
Speaker 1: the Mona Lisa smile especially, Uh, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: it's a it's a slight smile. It's a kind of
Speaker 1: an ambiguous smile. What is she smiling about or beginning
Speaker 1: to smile about? Um? You know there there there have
Speaker 1: been a number of papers written about this, and I'm
Speaker 1: certainly not going to do them all justice here, but
Speaker 1: I wanted to touch on some findings that I think
Speaker 1: can potentially contribute to this conversation. Now, wait, did this
Speaker 1: originally come up in our making a distinction between neutrality
Speaker 1: and ambiguity and so so that maybe you're suggesting that
Speaker 1: the Mona Lisa's face might be one of those famous
Speaker 1: face is that is ambiguous but not neutral? Right, it
Speaker 1: doesn't look like a death mask. But also you know,
Speaker 1: she's not she's not scowling, she doesn't look like Vigo
Speaker 1: the compathion. She's not smiling ear to ear. It's a
Speaker 1: very interesting expression, to say the least. Um that people
Speaker 1: have been discussing and studying for for for decades and
Speaker 1: for for ages. Uh So I'm not going to cover
Speaker 1: all the studies, but there there've been there's been plenty
Speaker 1: but I was looking at one. This was a theory
Speaker 1: that was put forth by Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard
Speaker 1: University UM. She argues that, UM, a lot of what
Speaker 1: fascinates us about this painting is because the smile appears
Speaker 1: differently depending on where you're standing in position to the painting.
Speaker 1: So if you look at it with your fobial or
Speaker 1: direct vision, uh, then arguably there's not really a smile
Speaker 1: going on there. But if you view it from your
Speaker 1: with your peripheral vision, out of the corner of your eye,
Speaker 1: then it seems like there's a pronounced smile. Now this
Speaker 1: doesn't This this little tidbit doesn't particularly I have a
Speaker 1: lot to reveal about the broader topic we're discussing here,
Speaker 1: but I found it interesting just talking about. And indeed,
Speaker 1: it's one that you can You can pull up an
Speaker 1: image of the Mona Lisa on your computer or your phone,
Speaker 1: or if you have a copy hanging in your your
Speaker 1: your house. You can do it this way as well,
Speaker 1: and you'll find I think that you do get this
Speaker 1: effect if you kind of look at out of the
Speaker 1: corner of your eye, it seems like there's a pronounced smile.
Speaker 1: Look at her directly and uh, it's it's not there.
Speaker 1: I see exactly what you mean. Another interesting thing is
Speaker 1: that my mental image of the Mona Lisa is smiling
Speaker 1: more than the actual image seems to be when I
Speaker 1: look at it. Yeah, something about the lower resolution copy
Speaker 1: in my brain appears to have accentuated the smile. And
Speaker 1: maybe somehow that's picking up on the kind of subtle
Speaker 1: shade ding of the contours of her cheeks which looks
Speaker 1: like they could be continuing the lines of her mouth,
Speaker 1: but it's not her mouth. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that that's that's very much it. And of course
Speaker 1: you can get into deeper discussions of you know, to
Speaker 1: what extent um you know this is intended and you
Speaker 1: know what Leonardo Vinci's trying to do with this, um
Speaker 1: Because another another aspect of the smile that's frequently brought
Speaker 1: up is that it's um uh, it's it's not a
Speaker 1: symmetrical smile. Um. And this is often cited as is
Speaker 1: one of the key interesting aspects of the Mona Lisa's smile,
Speaker 1: of Mona Lisa's face in general, um. Now, the emotional
Speaker 1: impact of her expression has been much debated over the years,
Speaker 1: and he is like like a lot of what we
Speaker 1: discussed in part one and in this episode. It's one
Speaker 1: of those areas where you can you can science it
Speaker 1: all day, but you're still working with subjective art rather
Speaker 1: than objective principles. But there are some papers that I
Speaker 1: think have some revealing information based generally on you know,
Speaker 1: small studies looking at asking people to look at the
Speaker 1: painting or look at portions of the paintings sometimes they've
Speaker 1: been manipulated in a key way, and see what people
Speaker 1: have to say about it. And this is where we're getting, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we're getting into something that's more in line
Speaker 1: with the broader topic here. When you look at the
Speaker 1: Mona Lisa, what kind of emotional um understanding is passing
Speaker 1: between the painting and yourself? Does it depend on what
Speaker 1: painting is across the room from her on the other wall,
Speaker 1: so like what you're perceiving her to be looking at.
Speaker 1: They didn't get into that, uh as much, but I
Speaker 1: couldn't help but think of it. I kept thinking of
Speaker 1: her looking at soup and so forth. But one paper
Speaker 1: I was looking at was a twenty nineteen paper from
Speaker 1: Marsilli at All published in Cortex, the journal Cortex in
Speaker 1: which the researchers asked forty two individuals to rate which
Speaker 1: of the six basic emotions as well as a neutral
Speaker 1: expression of emotion was related in chimerical images, uh, constructed
Speaker 1: from the photos. So chimerical images in this sense are
Speaker 1: formed from opposing halves of a pair of same or
Speaker 1: different faces, usually in like studies in courtroom settings. But
Speaker 1: in this case it would be like you know, um,
Speaker 1: my understanding here is like mirroring different parts of the face,
Speaker 1: stealing with the with the asymmetry. You know, like what
Speaker 1: if you had side A is the and you just
Speaker 1: cloned it onto side B. That sort of thing. Now,
Speaker 1: the results in this case indicated that happiness is expressed
Speaker 1: only on the left side of Mona Lisa's face, not
Speaker 1: on the right. Uh. And this actually leans into the
Speaker 1: interpretation that the Mona Lisa's smile is not a legitimate
Speaker 1: smile at all, but a fake smile uh, something that
Speaker 1: is either you know, a noteworthy subject of of the
Speaker 1: art in and of itself, or has a more specific,
Speaker 1: even cryptic purpose in da Vinci's art here, but and
Speaker 1: I think potentially makes it more interesting. Peace it's not
Speaker 1: of just a painting of a woman smiling. It's a
Speaker 1: painting of a woman pretending to smile, yeah, faintly. This
Speaker 1: is interesting because I know that's something I've read, and
Speaker 1: I don't know how legitimate this is, but I've I've
Speaker 1: at least read um facial expression ambiguity as one of
Speaker 1: the features people use to detect fakeery of emotions in others.
Speaker 1: So when people look at somebody else and they see
Speaker 1: that their smile is asymmetrical, they're more likely to think
Speaker 1: they're faking it, right right, um. And this is a
Speaker 1: topic we've we've covered on the show before because you
Speaker 1: get into that whole topic of of micro expressions and
Speaker 1: reading micro expressions and uh, the the idea that that
Speaker 1: a fake smile looks one way, but there's a more profound,
Speaker 1: pronounced um muscle definition to a legitimate smile. And so that's,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's on it on its own, is something
Speaker 1: we might take into account when considering ambiguous like semi happy,
Speaker 1: semi smiling, ambiguous uh images and ambiguous faces used in
Speaker 1: one of these experiments. Now, another study I looked at
Speaker 1: here was one from seventeen by leacci at All published
Speaker 1: in Scientific Reports. The researchers here manipulated This one's actually
Speaker 1: kind of funny. I think manipulated Mona Lisa's mouth curvature. Uh,
Speaker 1: and studied how a range of happier and sadder face
Speaker 1: variance influenced perceptions of her emotions. So, um, the actual
Speaker 1: paper gets into a lot of like they bust out
Speaker 1: some equations and math on this, but basically they're just
Speaker 1: doing what you're imagining now, like making the smile more
Speaker 1: pronounced or making it less pronounced. And um, they were
Speaker 1: able to manipulate perception along a sadness happiness um uh spectrum,
Speaker 1: but contended ultimately that their data indicates that the natural
Speaker 1: Mona Lisa, at any rate, is always happy. But I
Speaker 1: found this more telling quote observers recognize positive facial expressions
Speaker 1: faster than negative expressions. Uh. This is not a finding,
Speaker 1: but just a reality that they were discussing in in
Speaker 1: the paper. So in other words, faces spiraling down through neutrality,
Speaker 1: ambiguity and into other emotional states require more contemplation. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and I'm making assumptions here, but but more nuance.
Speaker 1: So like the like the face that's smiling ear to
Speaker 1: ear or is in a you know, the vego of
Speaker 1: the coppathion scowl. We don't have to think long and
Speaker 1: hard about that, like what kind of emotion is this
Speaker 1: person having about the soup. We know that they they're
Speaker 1: either ecstatic over the soup or they just hate the
Speaker 1: soup or something involved with the soup. We don't have
Speaker 1: to uh to think about it much. But when you
Speaker 1: have that that that ambiguous smile or even a slight
Speaker 1: uh frown, you know, that's that's when that's when that
Speaker 1: really makes you think, like what is this person thinking?
Speaker 1: My my theory of mind has to maybe engage more
Speaker 1: to try and figure it out, and then ultimately we
Speaker 1: have to remember, I mean, one of the key things
Speaker 1: about people's faces is that the face itself is a
Speaker 1: communication array. So like we're trying to get information potentially
Speaker 1: about that soup, right, like like that this individual might
Speaker 1: know of that soup is good. I want to know
Speaker 1: like what the inside track is on the soup um
Speaker 1: or on other human beings before I myself decide how
Speaker 1: I feel about it. I know this is sort of
Speaker 1: besides your main point, but it also makes me think
Speaker 1: about the strange biological contingency that one of the main
Speaker 1: features of that communication arrays also the whole that soup
Speaker 1: goes in. It's true. Do you ever think about how
Speaker 1: weird that is? You know, didn't have to be that way,
Speaker 1: but we just we we cram in, we cram in
Speaker 1: nutrition and speak through the same orifice. It's weird. It's true,
Speaker 1: it's weird, But you know, it's always a reminder that
Speaker 1: we shouldn't try and do both at the same time.
Speaker 1: But to bring it back to Koloshov, I do think
Speaker 1: this drives home a little bit of the susceptibility of
Speaker 1: ambiguous faces. You know that we can if the face
Speaker 1: is ambiguous, we have to think more about it, We
Speaker 1: have to think more about the context. But you know,
Speaker 1: what is the relationship between um shot A and shot B, right?
Speaker 1: I mean that would go along with what mobs that
Speaker 1: all said in their background again, which is that, you know,
Speaker 1: the broad finding of behavioral researches that people rely most
Speaker 1: on context to interpret the faces of others when the
Speaker 1: clarity of the facial expression is low, so that could
Speaker 1: be ambiguity or other things maybe or maybe just like
Speaker 1: it's hard to see, and when the clarity of the
Speaker 1: context is high, so when there's information in the context
Speaker 1: and less information in the face you reach for the context.
Speaker 1: Thank you well anyway. I guess this all brings us
Speaker 1: back to one of the questions posed by the Prince
Speaker 1: in Hensley paper, which is, you know, I wonder if
Speaker 1: certain actors are just more likely to um more likely
Speaker 1: to give rise to this effect than others are. And
Speaker 1: that again drawing on that observation that there's actually a
Speaker 1: different ins between a neutral face and an ambiguous face.
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of examples of actors who's
Speaker 1: what you might call blank or neutral faces might tend
Speaker 1: more toward expressive ambiguity rather than true neutrality. So even
Speaker 1: when their face is supposedly at rest, you could look
Speaker 1: at it and and it would seem valid to interpret
Speaker 1: a wide range of intense emotions to them. The best
Speaker 1: example I could think of, and I didn't pick him
Speaker 1: just because I love him as an actor, though I do.
Speaker 1: The best example I could think of was Toshiro Mufune,
Speaker 1: who you might know from a cure Kua Sawa movies.
Speaker 1: You know, he's the star of your Jimbo and movies
Speaker 1: like that. I would say he is somebody who, even
Speaker 1: when he's doing something very stoic with his face even
Speaker 1: when his face appears to be at rest, you could
Speaker 1: easily imagine that it is expressing a range of diametrically
Speaker 1: opposing emotions. And Rob I I pasted in a picture
Speaker 1: for you to look at here. That's just a portrait
Speaker 1: of him. I don't think this is even from a film.
Speaker 1: I think this might just be like a studio portrait still,
Speaker 1: because this is one where I've seen, you know, like
Speaker 1: that he's done autographs on and stuff. To my eye,
Speaker 1: in this portrait, he could be happy, he could be sad,
Speaker 1: he could be affectionate, he could be hungry, he could
Speaker 1: be angry. All seemed totally plausible with the expression on
Speaker 1: his face. And I guess this seems to correspond with
Speaker 1: the fact that I'd say he's an actor known simultaneously
Speaker 1: for having a highly emotionally expressive face and for often
Speaker 1: playing kind of stoic characters. Yeah. Yeah, you think about
Speaker 1: the especially some of the samurai type characters that he played,
Speaker 1: it attends to be an intense stoicism to those characters.
Speaker 1: Though at the same time, I mean, you think of
Speaker 1: his the McBeth character or the equivalent of McBeth pretty
Speaker 1: wise and Throne of Blood, you know, certainly he's you know,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of wide eyed crazy shots in that film,
Speaker 1: especially towards the end. But yeah, a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of the characters he plays, how have a certain sternness,
Speaker 1: a certain stoic quality. Uh that that has ultimately has
Speaker 1: an intense ambiguity to it, And it makes me think
Speaker 1: about a difference that. You know, sometimes you read psychological
Speaker 1: studies that are measuring emotions in some context, and they
Speaker 1: measure emotions in terms of both valence and intensity, where
Speaker 1: valence means what the emotion is, so it could be
Speaker 1: like positive emotion or negative emotion, and intensity is how
Speaker 1: strongly it is felt. Thinking about this makes me wonder
Speaker 1: if maybe there are some people whose emotional expression naturally
Speaker 1: tends to be high in intensity, even when the valence
Speaker 1: is unknown or unclear, If that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I wonder if that's especially the kind of person
Speaker 1: that you use a picture of, that kind of actor
Speaker 1: trying to do a neutral face. But then you do
Speaker 1: a Coolishov type experiment and people would be like, yes,
Speaker 1: you know, you show them looking at the coffin, they're
Speaker 1: very sad. You show them looking at the soup, they
Speaker 1: are ravenous, whereas there are other actors who whose face
Speaker 1: is just more successfully convey a blank neutrality where people
Speaker 1: see it and they say, I don't think this person
Speaker 1: is feeling anything. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a good
Speaker 1: point and to try and sort of prove it out
Speaker 1: for our own purposes. You posted this picture of a
Speaker 1: man in our notes, and I posted a picture of
Speaker 1: soup next to him. And indeed, if I look at
Speaker 1: the two and I sort of go back and forth,
Speaker 1: if yeah, I can read, I can lean into different
Speaker 1: interpretations like is he he is angry that the soup
Speaker 1: has been served, maybe it was served too early, or
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's clearly cold, or he just had
Speaker 1: the soup yesterday and therefore he has uh he is
Speaker 1: I rate? But he also could be like, yes, now
Speaker 1: it's time to to really get into this soup. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: or or various other interpretations. You know. Weirdly, some of
Speaker 1: the other actors I know who fit into this mold
Speaker 1: are not just film actors. I mean a lot them
Speaker 1: are film actors, but especially people who have done like modeling,
Speaker 1: like fashion modeling or art modeling like Grace Jones comes
Speaker 1: to mind as somebody who could have have a facial
Speaker 1: expression that is ambiguous in valence but high in intensity. No, yeah,
Speaker 1: I definitely, yeah, I definitely can see that with Grace Jones.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, I was trying to think of good
Speaker 1: examples of this, and uh, like my mind turned to
Speaker 1: some actors who certainly, you know, have kind of like
Speaker 1: a smoldering uh stare or have you know, good at
Speaker 1: the stoic type characters are especially the sort of Joe
Speaker 1: cool characters, you know, as I think of them, where
Speaker 1: you know, it's like it's playing some cool, cool dude
Speaker 1: is like a detective or something, and he's you know,
Speaker 1: he's acting pretty much unfazed by everything around him. But
Speaker 1: I think the better example I ended up turning to
Speaker 1: is Harry Dean Stanton, who often played very you know,
Speaker 1: very sort of emotionally muted characters. I would say, though
Speaker 1: not Joe cool characters, you know, not not a character
Speaker 1: or that's so far above it all that he feels
Speaker 1: completely at ease. Oh, I think Harry Dean's potentially another
Speaker 1: great example. Yeah. Yeah. And another like actually kind of
Speaker 1: like a suite of answers that came to mind were
Speaker 1: from the uh, the the Alien film franchise. The various
Speaker 1: actors that you had playing androids. UM, specifically thinking of
Speaker 1: Ian Holme, Um, Lance Hendrickson, and Michael Fassbender, all three
Speaker 1: very talented actors, um but um, But in all cases
Speaker 1: they're supposed to be playing this artificial human type of
Speaker 1: being that has no emotions but but has an intent
Speaker 1: and in depending on which film you're landing on, in
Speaker 1: which particular incarnation of of the android, that intent maybe
Speaker 1: um benevolent or or might lean more neutral or might
Speaker 1: be malicious. UM. And Yeah, I don't know if i'd
Speaker 1: go there with Ian Holme actually, because Ian Holmes seems
Speaker 1: unusually capable of projecting absolute blank neutrality where you don't
Speaker 1: get that that ambiguity that spins off in all the directions.
Speaker 1: Like I think he would be he would be great
Speaker 1: to have people like absolutely fail to reproduce the coolish
Speaker 1: of results have him doing blank face. But other ones
Speaker 1: you're saying, I agree, Yeah, so I don't. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Like I was just thinking back on those films, and
Speaker 1: even though these are the characters that are not supposed
Speaker 1: to have emotional states, in some cases, I feel like
Speaker 1: I have a better handle on their emotional states versus
Speaker 1: other human characters in those pictures. Yeah, but I have
Speaker 1: to admit I did not paste all of their photos
Speaker 1: into our document and put them opposite soup, so I
Speaker 1: haven't tested it myself. Oh you did put fast spender
Speaker 1: next to soup, though, And I gotta say, he looks hungry. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he looks. He does look like he is, um, he's
Speaker 1: about to dine on some soup. Can't you just imagine
Speaker 1: a scene of him sensually teaching his twin how to
Speaker 1: peel above or nut squash. Yeah, that would be good,
Speaker 1: feeding each other's soup with wooden spoons. Yeah. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: all this is just to say, and to be fair,
Speaker 1: maybe some studies have done this and I didn't realize it,
Speaker 1: but it seems like maybe one good move to try
Speaker 1: to avoid the the the the interactor effects of the
Speaker 1: of the stimulus you use in Kolashov type experiments is
Speaker 1: to just like get a whole lot of pictures of
Speaker 1: neutral faces and then serve them up at random, and
Speaker 1: so you can get kind of the neutral face photo
Speaker 1: averaged out over a big population, instead of having it
Speaker 1: fluctuate based on like how truly neutral your supposedly neutral
Speaker 1: face looks. I'd be delighted to hear from listeners out
Speaker 1: there what their thoughts are and their specific examples, uh,
Speaker 1: from cinema and from you know, the faces of various actors.
Speaker 1: You know, I wanted to come back to something that
Speaker 1: which which I thought is kind of interesting about this. Uh.
Speaker 1: Even if you'll accepted that the cool as show of
Speaker 1: effect is rather modest or only applies sometimes, it is
Speaker 1: still pretty interesting that it indicates how flexible the human
Speaker 1: brain is at constructing artificial scenarios and still applying like
Speaker 1: human logic to them. That like, you know, you're not
Speaker 1: observing a real scenario in life where you're trying to
Speaker 1: guess if somebody is hungry. You're looking at a photo
Speaker 1: or you're looking at an image on a on a screen,
Speaker 1: and then it's being intercut with a you know, a
Speaker 1: coffin that they might be sad at, or a just
Speaker 1: a picture of soup or something, and we we start
Speaker 1: applying the same logic we apply to real life to
Speaker 1: these obviously artificial stimuli. Yeah. Yeah, And I think it's
Speaker 1: a great reminder of just how film works and and
Speaker 1: and other mediums of virab but especially film, how you
Speaker 1: know there they still require a viewer. And if there's
Speaker 1: not a viewer, uh, there's not a movie go or
Speaker 1: there's no film experience, since therefore there's no film, and
Speaker 1: so there's no matter how polished the thing on the
Speaker 1: screen is, there's something that takes place not only between
Speaker 1: the film and the viewer, but inside the viewer's mind.
Speaker 1: That's that's critical, and that a lot of times we
Speaker 1: don't notice how many gaps were filling in as film viewers, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't realize how much work you're doing, and it's
Speaker 1: work that is apparently pretty easy to do. It's just
Speaker 1: something we we tend to do pretty much automatically while
Speaker 1: we're watching movies is fill in those gaps of logic,
Speaker 1: make connections between one image and another, make assumptions about
Speaker 1: what's going on in an actor's head when they're portrayed
Speaker 1: on screen based on the context or the music, you know,
Speaker 1: what was shown just before after. But it's one of
Speaker 1: those things where it gets pretty weird when you start
Speaker 1: to notice all of those like assumptions you're having to
Speaker 1: make and mental work you're having to do for a
Speaker 1: movie to make sense, which in reality is a flickering
Speaker 1: succession of moving images, which you know, sometimes if you
Speaker 1: were to be very literal roll about them, are are
Speaker 1: totally unconnected. Like you see like a staircase that's from
Speaker 1: one state and then a house that's from another, and
Speaker 1: then somebody's coming in through a front door, and you
Speaker 1: just connect it all is this is all in the
Speaker 1: same place, persons just moving through their their daily routine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We often think of of viewing films and watching TV
Speaker 1: programs as being kind of a shut your brain off
Speaker 1: kind of a situation, at least with certain types of
Speaker 1: of film and TV. And you know, we think that, Okay,
Speaker 1: if it's a it's a highly crafted product, we're not
Speaker 1: gonna have to mainstream product, we're not gonna have to
Speaker 1: do much thinking. It's gonna hold our hand the whole way.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, even even in the case if you're
Speaker 1: sort of you know, by the numbers summer Blockbuster, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, very much repeating a plot you've seen before,
Speaker 1: with the sort of characters you've seen before, your brain
Speaker 1: is still filling in these little gaps, like you say.
Speaker 1: But on the same hand, I think one one thing
Speaker 1: we can drive home based on what we've been discussing
Speaker 1: here is that that the opposite, uh, in a way
Speaker 1: is true, is that if you're dealing with a film
Speaker 1: that's say, is uh, you know of a of a
Speaker 1: genre you're not that familiar with, or a time period
Speaker 1: of filmmaking and out of familiar with. Um, perhaps it's
Speaker 1: a you know, more more of an art film, or
Speaker 1: it's you know, foreign language, etcetera. A lot of it
Speaker 1: is still going to come down to human or humanoid
Speaker 1: entities interacting with things in each other, and then our
Speaker 1: brain is going to make presumptions about their mental state
Speaker 1: and their emotional state. Oh yeah, yeah, you you infer
Speaker 1: drama even when the thing you're looking at is almost
Speaker 1: actively resisting it, and that that goes beyond movies. In fact,
Speaker 1: I mean what is drama. Drama is somebody wanting something
Speaker 1: or trying to get something and then coming up against
Speaker 1: resistance in some way. Uh. People infer those kinds of
Speaker 1: dramas on like balls rolling around on the table. They're
Speaker 1: literally studies of that. You know, people will say, like
Speaker 1: the ball wanted to go down in this hole, but
Speaker 1: it you know, it couldn't get there because something was
Speaker 1: preventing it. All Right, we're gonna go ahead and close
Speaker 1: it out there, but we would love to hear from
Speaker 1: everybody if you have particular thoughts on the clue Shov effect.
Speaker 1: Various examples and studies we've discussed in these episodes. Uh,
Speaker 1: some of the various examples from film and acting that
Speaker 1: we have alluded to. Perhaps you have some better examples
Speaker 1: that you would like to bring to our attention. Just
Speaker 1: write in and let us know. In the meantime, if
Speaker 1: you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, check it out in this Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind podcast feed. You'll find that wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on Tuesday
Speaker 1: and Thursday. We have a listener mail on Monday, short
Speaker 1: form artifact episode on Wednesday, and on Friday we do
Speaker 1: Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most
Speaker 1: serious matters and just discuss a weird film. Um. If
Speaker 1: you want a quick way to get to our podcast,
Speaker 1: you can just go to Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com. That should still redirect you over to the
Speaker 1: I heart listing for our page. Huge thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producers Seth and Pollis Johnson. If
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