Introversion as sensitivity (1 March 2007)

WSJ's new digest feature, "The Informed Reader", has an item today from Psychology Today about introverts: "Loners don't necessarily fear the company of others. They appear to require solitude to process thoughts and events because those stimuli register more strongly with them than in outgoing people." This definitely corresponds with my experience of introversion, which always has felt like oversensitivity to me, putting too much stock in momentary cues that probably don't signify that much to the person giving them off. Relative to the oversensitivity, it seems like no one else is really paying any attention to you at all, which can feel like a slight. Thus introversion's a kind of paranoia where minute things -- a look, a gesture, a verbal slip-up -- become subject to intense interpretation and I end up with a constant awareness of how precarious my integration is into what's going on socially, along with a building narcissism stemming from the enduring feeling that everyone's being indifferent toward me. It's pretty exhausting and makes me want to withdraw pre-emptively. So this sounds right too: "Situations rife with emotional triggers, such as parties, can be wearying for such people, while solitude serves as a refreshing balm." I tend to leave parties without telling anyone and go walking around aimlessly, or I'll try to find an empty room and hole up with a book. I've even taken naps at parties before. All of this, I'm afraid, makes me seem a little weird, and I usually end up wondering why I go to parties at all.

A few years ago (and I probably blogged about this before), Jonathan Rauch published a sort of introvert manifesto in The Atlantic that develop some of these same ideas, and pleaded with people to understand that introversion can be a preference rather than a pathology.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

In a follow-up interview with Rauch about his article's surprising popularity, the interview connects it to Reisman's analysis in The Lonely Crowd that the consumer economy requires extroversion, and its form of public identity building, as the norm. If we're continually being encouraged to advertise our personality to secure status, then introversion would simultaneously come to be seen as a kind of threat to the whole social order founded on that status as well as a form of self-sabotage. Thus the inner plenitude that lets introverts enjoy a quiet room alone becomes translated into a lack, a sadness, a disease: social anxiety.

Connoisseurs of emotion (27 October 2006)

Via BPS Digest (and Marginal Revolution) comes this report that claims reading novels will make a person more empathetic. In the test the researchers conducted, "The more authors of fiction that a participant recognised, the higher they tended to score on measures of social awareness and tests of empathy – for example being able to recognise a person’s emotions from a picture showing their eyes only, or being able to take another person’s perspective. Recognising more non-fiction authors showed the opposite association."

The BPS Digest also notes of the study: "However, a weakness of the study is that the direction of causation has not been established – it might simply be that more-empathic people prefer reading novels." Having recently turned away from fiction to read nonfiction almost exclusively, I wonder if this means I've become more callous, and my disgruntlement with fiction is indicative of empathy fatigue or something -- novels are a means to try to experience empathy on an artificial, preplanned basis. Or perhaps my turn to nonfiction, if I really thought about it, is a potentially pathological means to blunt emotional connection I'm subconsciously trying to ward off. Maybe I'm using the arid world of facts -- the dry, detached prose of The Economist, for instance -- as a buffer from the warmth of human contact, which, frankly, can often seem like a hassle and a threat and a call to action when I'm much more comfortable planted on my couch reading.

That's not a good thing. So as a therapeutic measure, I've stayed planted on the couch, and started to read The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells. Something Walter Benn Michaels wrote about it in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism stuck with me -- something about how Howells is trying to figure a return to a precapitalist mode of relationships and how the novel delineates zero-sum social status games. (Even when I'm picking novels, I need some hyperpragmatic reason to read them.) I'm about halfway through it, and I can't say I feel any more empathic, but I'm trying to pay special attention to how the novelist wants to keep my attention focused on minute shiftings of his characters' attitude, and the means he uses to describe them. What novels do obviously -- the raison d'etre, probably for the study -- is teach readers ways to think the emotion of others, put it into words that can serve as a comprehensible substitute for something we can never access directly. Our own emotion is often inarticulate, too immediate, and we often don't bother to analyze it and think it rather than experience it. One of the reasons novels of past centuries continue to be read is that they provide tools for verbalizing emotion and for modeling its recognition.

This line of thinking would seem to run counter to the evolutionary psychologists' beliefs that apprehension of emotion is inborn and immediate (a la Darwin's study of facial expressions, for instance). From this point of view emotional comprehension is hard-wired and verges on instinct -- one psychologist even argues that changing your expression can change your mood to suit it. But what novels want to do is slow down the instantaneous instinctual process of reaction to others' emotional expressions and make it a subject for gratifying intellectual mastery. We derive a grammar of emotion and learn to experience tracing its fine movements as a species of pleasure. We are encouraged to become connoisseurs in emotion -- the way Sterne's narrator is in A Sentimental Journey.

Does this then objectify emotion, trivialize it, or commodify it? Is it wrong to perceive the feelings of others as a kind of delicacy, like a rare cheese or bottle of port? Is being overly concerned with the emotions others are experiencing simply a way of consuming other people? Novels serve to commercialize otherwise intangible emotional experiences; in the process they likely make empathy into something more akin to a shopper's discernment.

The question of whether altruism exists comes into play in this as well -- what motives are ultimately served in our efforts to feel another's pain? It seems a pertinent question to ask, because perhaps a deeper empathy can be achieved once the more self-serving level is interrogated a bit. Ultimately, I guess I would need to know more about how the study measure empathy to know whether there might be differences between that kind of empathy and some other preferable kind that isn't instrumentalized through entertainment product. Until then I'll keep reading Howells and hope things work out for "sly" Penelope.