Emotional distraction

The origins of word can be revealing and usually instructive. The word “heal” for instance comes from the Saxon word “helian” and the Norse word “helia” which both meant to “make whole”. Therein in lies what should be the true aim of medicine and the healing arts, to return a person or creature to wholeness although modern medicine has somehow contrived to see humans as a series of separate body systems that can be patched in isolation. “Happy” has its root in the old English word “hap” which meant to be fortunate or lucky pointing to the fact that “happiness” is a whole of life state of being rather than a momentary “feeling”. The origins of the word “distract” are equally revealing coming from the Latin “distrahere” which means “drawn apart” and that is exactly what distraction is, a drawing apart of your consciousness from what is before you. Of course, these days a lot of time (and sometimes money) is spent on learning to focus but what if you wanted to deliberately distract someone? According to a new study your best option might be to pull an emotional face.

For the study researchers had people trace a path on a tablet computer from a starting using a stylus pen. As they did this a face with either an emotional or a neutral expression would appear on the screen suddenly and in a fixed position. You might expect that any such sudden appearance would distract a person from their task. However, it was only when the face was emotionally charged that people deviated from their assigned path toward the distracting face.

It appears that we are so geared to recognising emotions in others that our brains just cannot ignore them even when another task is at hand.

In the real world that might mean someone’s emotional outburst might distract you from your work no matter how hard you try to focus. Or it might mean that an emotional face on a roadside billboard could distract you while you are driving. It could also mean that when you are locked in a gruelling game of chess you might be able to mentally derail your opponent by having a silent emotional facial tantrum (tennis players have appreciated this principle for decades).

It is not all to do with negativity either; happy faces were actually the most distracting faces in this study. We just can’t ignore emotions, and that is probably a good thing.