The timing of the gesture interprets its meaning. If your timing is off, a positive statement can have negative impact. Cassell gives this example: "If you say, 'She's a great candidate for the job' and raise your eyebrows, nod, and emphasize the word great all at the same time, you send a very positive emotional message. But if as you'say the same sentence your head nod and eyebrow raise come in the short silence after great, then it shifts the emotional meaning to sarcasm-you're really saying she's not all that great."
Such readings of meta-messages in nonverbal channels occur to us instantly, unconsciously, and automatically. "We cannot not make meaning of what someone tells us," says Cassell, whether in words or just gestures, or both together. Everything we attend to in another person generates meaning at an unconscious level, and our bottom-up circuitry constantly reads it.
In one study, listeners remembered having "heard" informa tion they only saw in gesture. For example, somebody who heard "He comes out the bottom of the pipe" but saw the speaker's hand formed into a fist and bouncing up and down said that he had heard "and then goes down stairs."
Cassefl's work makes visible what typically whizzes by us in microseconds. Our automatic circuitry gets the message, but our top-down awareness misses almost all of it.
These hidden messages have powerful impacts. Marital re searchers have long known, for instance, that if one of the partners repeatedly makes fleeting facial expressions for disgust or contempt during conflicts, the odds are great against that couple staying together.In psychotherapy, if the therapist and client move in synch with one another, there are likely to be better therapeutic outcomes.
While Cassell was a professor at MIT's Media Lab, one way she deployed this extremely precise analysis of how we express our selves was in developing a system that guides professional anima tors in the art of nonverbal behavior. The system-called BEAT allows animators to type in a segment of dialogue and get back an automatically animated cartoon person with the right gestures, head and eye movement, and posture, which they can then tweak for artistic value.
Getting the "feel" just right of a virtual actor's remarks, tone of voice, and gestures seems to demand a top-down grasp of bottom-up processes. These--days-- Gassell- is building similarly - animated cartoons where, she says, images of children "act as virtual peers to elementary school students, using social skills to build rapport, and then using that rapport to facilitate learning."
When we met over coffee while on a break at a conference,
Cassell explained how those hundreds of hours of parsing nonver bal messages have fine-tuned her sensitivity. "Now I automatically track this when I'm with anyone," she told me-which, I confess, made me a bit self-conscious (even more so when I realized she probably noticed that, too).