Clynes: Sentic Forms

Sentic Cycles — The Passions At Your Fingertips

by

Manfred Clynes

Specific emotions — anger, hate, grief, love, sex, joy and reverence — produce distinct muscle movement. They’re the same in Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, and upstate New York. When you run through a cycle, expressing each of the seven with your fingertip, you feel better for it.

In 1967 I took part, as pianist, in Pablo Casals’ master classes in San Juan, Puerto Rico. One day when Casals was teaching Haydn’s “Cello Concerto”, he asked a participant, a young master in his own right, to play the theme from the third movement. His playing was expert, sure and graceful. But for Casals something was missing.

The master stopped the performance. “No, no!”, he said, waving his hands. “That must be graceful!”.

He took up his own cello and played the same passage. And it was graceful, a hundred ties more graceful than we had just heard. Yes — it seemed as though we had never heard grace before. We had experienced one of the least understood forms of human communication — a powerful and clear transmittal f feeling without words, a feeling that penetrated our defenses and transformed our states of mind.

Casals played the same notes, and at similar speed. But the muscles of his hands and arms acted precisely together with his cello according to his very clear idea of grace.

How was his possible? How, precisely, was Casals’ expression different from the student’s? And how did the sound of his cello carry the idea and feeling of grace from his mind to ours?

Action — These and similar questions that I thought about for many years led me to record and measure the precise motions of expressive action. My experiments on impulses from the pressure of a single finger, precisely expressing various fantasized emotional states have shown that there is a specific dynamic form of action underlying the expression of each emotion, and that the dynamic character of this action-form probably is universal, unlearned, and genetically programmed.

Emotions may be experienced in various aspects: (1) in a real situation, or (2) through fantasy — as when one imagines being with a loved person. Also one may experience emotion trough empathy with another person who is (1) either really experiencing the emotion, or (2) experiencing it as fantasy — as when one is watching a play or movie.

It is hard to study the quantitative effects of emotion in a real situation. In most experiments it is difficult to specify situation that reliably produce a given emotion. Repeated experiments are difficult to carry out under the same conditions. Emotions, in real situations, may today be less amenable to scientific study than fantasized emotions are. I have found a way of generating and expressing fantasy emotions that allows precise, repeated measurement.

Signs — How can one know what another person is feeling? Psychologists and other scientists have tried to identify outward, physical signs that correspond to each emotion. Perspiration, pupil-diameter, skin conductance, heart rate — all have been used as objective, observable indications of internal states. But these are not uniformly related to experience — anger turns some persons’ faces red, others, pale.

And yet, artists, musicians, dancers and actors are aware of the precision of emotions that may be communicated. They may communicate through movement of hands, legs, mouths, eyes, the whole body, and through tone of voice. The precise way that one uses his body to express an emotion is more important than the part of the body one sues [see “Body Talk — A Game” by Layne Longfellow, Psychology Today, October 1970].

Anger — We may consider that there is a common brain program for specific emotion that determines the character of the movement and its precise time course, regardless of the particular body movement that expresses it. Or, example, in expressing anger no matter what part of the body one uses, the brain program that determines the character of its time course is revealed. And this is in turn what we notice when we watch the movement and perceive anger.

In this method of generating and expressing fantasy emotions by a succession of single, expressive, appropriately timed acts, the fantasy emotion increases with each expression, until it reaches a peak that may be maintained for a time and then gradually dissipates. This dissipation takes place even though one continues to perform the expressive acts.

Finger — In view of this, I decided to use the expressive pressure movement of one finger as a standardized basic measure of expressed fantasized emotion. In my experiments, the subject sits in a straight-back chair and rests the middle finger of his right hand on a finger rest. I ask him to fantasize a given emotion (say, anger or love) for the next few minutes. Whenever he hears a signal — a soft click — he is to express that emotion as precisely as possible through the single, transient pressure of the finger. The clicks come at unpredictable intervals that vary by several seconds. The finger-rest is mounted with two pressure transducers that produce two graphic tracings of finger pressure during the two seconds immediately following the click. One tracing measures the finger’s vertical pressure; the other measures its horizontal pressure, toward the body and away from it.

Trials — Most subjects find it easy to express a fantasy emotion with a single finger pressure. About 70 percent can do it on the first set of trials.

To get a stable overall measurement, I usually have a subject express each emotion 50 times, then I feed the data into a computer of average transients (CAT) that averages the vertical tracings for a given emotion into one common vertical form and, likewise, extracts a common form from the horizontal tracings. I have found that the more a subject practices a clearly separate fantasy emotion, the more his individual expression tends to approach the common form for that emotion.

Usually I have a subject express anger, hate, grief, love, sex, joy, reverence, and a state of no emotion.

Expressing no emotion in this method is like the mechanical movement of typewriting: primarily downward, and slightly outward, away from the body. Anger is a similar emotion, but with reversed emphasis: outward movement is more pronounced than downward movement. Anger is a brief expression — the finger returns to its original position in less than a second. Love is slower, and takes two seconds or more. Changes in pressure during love are gradual and smooth, and the horizontal tracings often show an inward, embracing movement. The form for sex is distinct from love.

Measurements of electrical activity in the muscles show that there is a secondary delayed pressure that begins after the expression has started. Such delayed muscular activity also occurs in hate — another passionate emotion. Hate, like anger, involves a push away from the body. Grief is slow, like love, but is flatter and slightly outward. In joy, after an initial downward push, the finger pressure rebounds above its starting position, as if one were jumping for joy. Reverence is similar to love, but lacks the inward pull ad follows a longer tie scale — the full expression of reverence may take three or four seconds. I first included fear among emotions that a subject was to fantasize, but I found that fear implied withdrawal and inhibition of expression and our technique could not measure this.

Oxygen — In many cases I have measured additional physiological variables during an experiment, and these measurements confirm both a specific pattern for the expression of each emotion, and the persistent physiological changes that accompany sustained fantasy emotions. During an expression by this method, the electrical activities in separate muscle groups (the forearm, upper arm, front shoulder and back) show reliable, identifiable patterns). Respiration also tends to follow a specific pattern: a subject tends to exhale as he expresses hate or grief, for example, and to inhale when he expresses joy.

Heart rate and oxygen consumption show definite, characteristic changes while a particular emotion is fantasized. Oxygen consumption appears to be highest in the states of hate and sex, lowest in love and reverence.

Stability — Emotional expressive forms measured in this way are stable and apparently universal. A subject will give essentially the same tracing for a single emotion on different occasions, and different subjects from different cultures produce remarkably similar tracings for a given emotion. We can state the degree of correspondence between any two measurements as a correlation in which zero indicates no relationship between one measure and the other and 1.0 indicates a perfect match. Between two measurements of the same emotion in one person, the vertical tracings usually correlate above 0.90, whereas cross-correlations between different emotions are generally lower than 0.30. The forms are also remarkably consistent between individuals — correlations between two persons’ expressions of an emotion are generally above 0.80. Dramatic differences can occur, and the discrepancy can be instructive. For example, when I compared my expressions to those of another subject, I found that our tracings were similar for most emotions (correlations of 0.80 or higher), but that for anger they differed sharply, with a negative correlation of 0.22. We learned that we interpreted the word anger differently. I had expressed an irritable, ready-to-strike-out anger, whereas my colleague’s anger was of the slow, burning type. The tracings seems to detect the word anger designates two different emotions.

Test — The observation raises an interesting question. Suppose two persons expressing an emotion (joy, for example) produce slightly different waveforms. Does this mean that they express the same emotion in different ways, or does the slight shape discrepancy imply a corresponding difference in the way the two feel joy? We cannot answer, but my research indicates that when there are large differences in form, there are large differences in the emotions experienced.

For example, I have tried to train subjects to express one emotion with the expressive form of another emotion, but they cannot learn to do it. I asked subjects to fantasize anger and try to experience this with the patern associated with love, and vice versa. When a subject’s tracings approached the love form, re received praise; when he reproduced anger-shaped waves, he was warned. But no matter ow hard he tried, no subject could generate and express anger by finger pressure resembling love.

With repeated expression, a subject’s fantasies became more and more intense. He may shed tears while he expresses grief, or become aroused.

Several investigators have shown that human beings can learn to control their bodies to an extent previously considered impossible. Peter Lang finds that, through immediate visual feedback about what some of his organs are doing, a subject can learn to control these as he would learn to drive a car [see “Automatic Control or Learning to Play the Internal Organs”, by Peter Lang, Psychol. Today, October 1970].

We gave our subjects no feedback about the shapes they were producing — and yet their tracings became more accurate and precise as the trials went on. Clearly, something different from instrumental learning is involved here. It is as if one were discovering within himself those precise emotional expression programs that were there all along. This uncovering of the forms, and their resistance to change, suggest that the different basic emotional expressive forms are inborn — not culturally learned — a hypothesis that gains support from my finding that the forms are much the same from one culture to another. (The effect of culture may often be to suppress access to these forms, at some sage of development.)

I tested subjects in Mexico and Japan, and in Bali, Indonesia, and their basic shapes were the same as those of Americans. The few cross-cultural inconsistencies could be traced to language differences. Indonesians have no word for hate, and in Mexico alegria (happiness) was the closest approximation I could find for joy. Disparity between alegria tracings and the typical joy shape sowed just how inaccurate the translation was.

Rubicon — The brain programs the entire course of a single brief movement before it acts. Once the decision to move has been made — a swing of a bat, or an eye movement, for example — it must continue; for 200 milliseconds, one cannot change the movements of a limb or muscle by another decision because of limits in the nervous system. The existence of specific, universal brain programs corresponding to certain basic elements of experience is not a new discovery. In 1965, Michael Kohn and I measured the electrical activity originating from the different parts of subjects’ brains while the subjects looked at various colors. We found that with the help of a computer we could identify more than 100 separate brain responses to specific visual stimuli — and the patterns had consistent physiologic code elements in all the subjects we tested. We could thus tell what color a subject was looking at from the pattern of electrical activity in his brain.

The spectrum of our emotions, like our perception of color, is precisely programmed by the brain. This programming is different for different emotions. We call a single programmed movement having a clear beginning and end, together with the decision giving rise to it, an acton. The emotion-seeking expression modulates actons into different E-actons for each emotion. E-actons are so precisely programmed into the brain that we have been able to find a differential equation that can be used to simulate these human forms of expression on a computer.

To understand how the idea of an emotion directs the body’s movements, consider what happens when a pitcher throws a ball at a target. He must have (1) a clear idea of where he wants to hit the target and (2) a precise execution. The idea of the target modulates his throwing motion, so that eventually one may choose any object within a certain range, think of hitting it, and a spatio-temporal form will direct the exact movements of the arm. As many a major-league pitcher has demonstrated, practice can refine the accuracy with which the idea is executed.

A similar process determines the expression of emotions. Effective emotional communication depends on (1) a clear idea of the emotion one wants to express and (2) a precise execution of the muscular acts involved — finger movements, gestures, tone of voice, etc. The capacity to develop a clear idea of an emotion (which I call an idiolog) is as much a part of human nature as the ability to perceive red or sweet or hot. The idiolog accurately dictates the specific expressive movement (if it is permitted to do so).

Animals — Any number of bodily movements can express a given emotional idiolog. The specific brain program for anger, which can turn an innocuous arm-raising into an angry threat, also can direct angry movements of the foot, or the mouth, or the tone of voice. In successful communication the specific brain program effectively commands a movement — with no inhibitions to block the expression. We generally interpret direct, unhindered expression of emotion as faithful or sincere.

When one perceives an emotional expression, the nervous system recognizes the form, and decodes it into a corresponding emotional idiolog. As the receiver of such messages, the nervous system is programmed to interpret the shape of movements, and there is little we can do to change this program. We even attribute appropriate characteristics to animals whose movements remind us of human qualities we are programmed to recognize (for example, a graceful antelope or an uncouth hippopotamus).

Cycle — In my first exploratory studies, I usually expressed no emotion 50 times in sequence and then expressed each of the seven emotions 50 times. The entire process takes about 30 minutes. I call this a sentic cycle, according to the terms in my formal theory, in which the specific expression of an emotion is an essentic form, and the emotion brain programs that produces the form is a sentic state.

Although at first a subject may like to imagine various scenes to help him fantasize the emotion, he soon finds out that he can express an emotion without directing it at a specific person or imagining a specific scene. He learns to experience the emotion in itself, as in music, without needing specific provokers or recipients for the emotion. This pure emotion does not imply lack of consideration for the individual: when we understand and experience emotion in its most general sense, we are also most able to become genuinely concerned about and close to a particular person, that is, to develop empathy.

Peace — Often I go through several sentic cycles at a sitting. (A straight-backed chair and a correct arm position, I have found, a crucial to performing sentic cycles reliably and without fatigue). When I first began doing sentic cycles for several hours at a stretch, I was surprised to find that I was neither bored nor tired, but refreshed and satisfied, and that I required less sleep than usual the following night.

At first, I attributed these effects to enthusiasm and curiosity about a new discovery and to the satisfaction of completing a good day’s experiment. But I soon found that others reported similar feelings of well-being and satisfaction from repeated sentic cycles.

In further, systematic observation, I had subjects go through one-hour sessions made up of two sentic cycles. Most subjects reported that after the second cycle (which they often experienced more fully than the first), they felt calm, content — some compared the experience to a marijuana high.

Other researchers have confirmed the general observation: performing sentic cycles lessened anxiety for 3 to 24 hours. And, together with calmness, they often showed marked increases in mental energy. It is not necessary to record the expressive movements to reap these benefits. Practicing sentic cycles in the home, in the proper position and with the finger rest, works as well as performing in the laboratory.

Release — Many persons work off anger by punching at a wall or chopping wood. They say that the physical activity makes them feel better — it releases the anger, “lets off steam”. But it may not be the amount of energy expended that is effective, but the quality of anger that is expressed repeatedly. One can work off anger by appropriate and repeated pressing of a finger as effectively as by chopping a pile of wood.

Most of us tend to suppress emotions in our daily lives, but in sentic cycles one can express a spectrum of emotions freely, without embarrassment or fear of social censure. This freedom to discover and to be what is natural contributes to the satisfactory results of a sentic session. In addition, there is the satisfaction of finding that one can summon up various emotions at will. This creates a condition of sentic fluidity — as compared with the rigidity found in emotional disturbances.

Whatever their cause, the beneficial effects of sentic cycles have many applications. In fantasizing emotions one experiences relief from daily emotional tensions. Fearful or anxious persons have reported that sentic cycles help relieve their symptoms.

Psychiatrist Alfred P. French and Joe Tupin have found that sentic cycles provide “immediate and dramatic relief of symptoms of depression”, in some patients. Other researchers have evidence that they may also relieve psychosomatic disorders, perhaps because during sentic cycles one naturally expresses emotions that might otherwise be shunted to various parts of the system causing long-term internal stress.

Touch — After experience with sentic cycles, one comes to appreciate the language of touch: he becomes more sensitive to the emotional signals in another person’s touch, and more aware of the emotions he communicates through his own touch.

Learning to express and control emotions in the way I have described may help drama and music students learn to be better, more convincing communicators. Feedback in the form of tracings can show them when their expressions approach the true sentic form. The measurements might shed light on what we call natural talent.

Training a person to express fantasy emotions in this manner, to be in touch with the spectrum of emotions, may help in the treatment of emotionally disturbed, neurotic, or psychopathic personalities. It also seems to lend itself to rechanneling of anxiety-driven aggressiveness to a creative energy, in which the expressive act itself gives satisfaction. We should be able to learn more about the basic human emotions, and perhaps someday, possibly with help from geneticists, discover new ones better than we have yet experienced. Indeed the experience of the sentic cycle itself is a step in this direction.