In May, The Complete Combatant hosted a weekend event called “The Mingle: Openness to Experience.” This was the 9th year of bringing professional women in the firearms industry together for training. It is truly amazing to see 65 shooters working for a common goal: To better themselves.
When I was giving the closing statements each day, I would look out in the sea of faces and I would see smiles, eyes on me, positive interactions with people sitting close together, and I could feel overall joy from the guests.
Through all this wonderful synergy, my eyes kept moving towards one person that seemed sad, distracted and not like the others. I wanted to know why I was drawn to her, so I did some research.
You see, your brain can quickly decipher sadness and happiness in other people through a mix of several cues.
- Visual cues
- Auditory signals
- Emotional contagion
Your awesome brain mainly uses two parts to process facial expressions, body language, tone of voice and even emotional state. These two areas are called the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
Sending Out Signals
There was a recent spot on the news on how it has been found that your brain detects emotional signals of happiness quicker than sadness. I will not bore you with the details but in a nutshell, the right hemisphere processes emotions faster than the left and perceives positive expressions like delight, amazement and surprise more precisely.
Emotional contagion is a phenomenon where emotions spread unconsciously from one person to another, leading to shared emotional experiences. It involves mimicking facial expressions, body language and vocalizations, triggering a similar emotional state in the observer. This can be positive (e.g., catching a smile) or negative (e.g., feeling anxious). This process, called the Mirror Neuron System (MNS). provides the ability to mirror the happy or sad emotions of others, and truly “feel what they feel.” You don’t control it; it just jumps up to interpret cues and signals. The MNS allows you to connect with others on a deeper level. I felt joy from the group, but I now know I also felt melancholy from the one person because my MNS kicked in.
This got me thinking about the speed at which we recognize negative body language, and a criminal actor associated with it. Unfortunately, this is not a simple answer because there are many factors that influence your reaction time like training history, different types and intensity of stimulus, the complexity of the response, are you really focused, are you tired and last but not least, what does your surrounding look like?
It looks like the average person’s simple reaction time to a single stimulus is .25 second (250 milliseconds) and their complex (also known as choice) reaction time, when reacting to multiple decision steps, could take seconds.
Life Is Complex
Complex Reaction Scenario: You are hiking in the woods, your peripheral vision picks up movement, you turn and see a bear about 25 feet from you.
On a quick and efficient decision day, it takes approximately .25 second to see the bear, .25 second to understand that the bear’s body language is not friendly, about .25 second to move your brain into decision time, .25 second to pick a decision, .25 second to decide to act on that decision, and then about .25 second to move into action. On your best decision day ever, we are looking at 1.5 seconds, and you have not even accomplished the task that you decided to do, such as run, move to cover, get out pepper spray, draw your gun, etc. If took you a handful of seconds to process and react, you may end up bear scat.
Complex Reaction Scenario: Now let’s run this same scenario but with bear spray pre-deployed. You already know that bear spray can cover 20 to 40 feet depending on the brand, size and weather. You are hiking in the woods with bear spray in your hand and paying attention to changes in your environment, your peripheral vision picks up movement, you turn and see a bear about 25 feet from you.
It takes approximately .25 second to understand that the bear’s body language is not friendly, .25 second to move into action and then spray. When you make decisions in advance, like carrying pepper spray in your hand, you cut time off the process and can move into action much quicker.
I now know why I was drawn to that one guest; I could “feel” her. I now know how fast I recognized her body language; .25 second.
I think this is valuable information for self-preservation. If we work on critical thinking and pre-need decisions, we can potentially cut our “in the moment” decisions in half. What a wonderful gift knowledge is.
You may be wondering about the lady that seemed unhappy and scattered at the end at my event. It turns out that she forgot her three door-prize raffle tickets (for a chance to a pistol in her hotel room and was mentally “kicking herself”. I picked up on the negative body language but in the end, all was well. Mistakes happen.
Read the full article here