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