Not a day goes by that I am not reminded several times of the importance of being self-aware, as a mediator, as a party, as a citizen. Much goes on out of our awareness and the more we can expand our awareness, the less we will be influenced by the subliminal. Fewer influences will be subliminal because they will instead be in our conscious awareness.
A mediation with self-aware people in the room operating from their reflective minds will look and sound very different from one with reactive brains in participants' skulls. One reason is emotional contagion (about which I have blogged here before). A new study is a reminder of just how powerful emotional contagion can be.
Two people, because of damage to one side of their brains, were unable to process what they saw with one of their eyes. Nevertheless when their blind side was shown pictures of people looking happy or fearful, they still responded to the emotion. When shown fearful people, a frown muscle twitched and when shown a happy people, a twitch occurred in a smile muscle. Neuroscientist Christian Keysers, quoted in "Not blind to emotion" (Nature News), said, "This is interesting evidence that we can recognize the emotions
of others without needing to be visually aware of them."
Also from the article:
The [researchers], who were led by Marco Tamietto and Beatrice de Gelder at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, say the results show that our spontaneous tendency to synchronize our facial expressions with those of other people in face-to-face situations — known as emotional contagion — occurs even if we cannot consciously see them.
Think of all that goes on in a conflict, much of it subliminal or below consciousness. Self-awareness enlightens you against some degree of the subliminal by pulling it up from below into the light of awareness where you can shine on it your mental flashlight.
Note (added October 14, 2009): From a "Sight Unseen: People Blinded by Brain Damage Can Respond to Emotive Expressions," a Scientific American article on this research:
Seeing is believing when it comes to emotions. We smile, we gasp, we yawn when we see others do the same—a phenomenon called emotional contagion.
...
We're actually infected by the emotions of others. [This study shows] this phenomenon can be carried out in the absence of visual awareness," says Marco Tamietto, a neuroscience researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. "We can say that emotional contagion cannot be reduced to a simple mimicry."
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