The first time I heard the phrase "Hell is Other" was when I was 12-13 years old. Somehow it seemed to me then that we are talking about the physical manifestations of others: noise, scurrying, pushing, etc. Then came the understanding that the author looked deeper into the root of the problem of people's relationships. Still, by "others" we meant those around us with their own opinions, lifestyle, views on life and other content of the psyche that is different from us.
But the farther away, the more life has shown that this hell can be quite diverse for an individual person. For example, the position of others, their property, opportunities and experience. A part of people have it, but a part of people don't have it. And often it will never happen. Of course, a lot of people tolerate this fact quite calmly, but a lot of people for whom it is a stumbling block in the sense of completeness and meaning of their lives.
But this is not all! "Others" still have a lot of longed-for feelings and states, which a person is deprived of for some reason. They are happy, happy, happy, happy, loving work, enjoying nature, etc. This is true, there are many of them. But from the lips of complaining usually come the words: "Everybody is happy. Everyone feels pleasure. Everyone loves their work. Except for me. And if you ask them how they knew about it, they would say, "That's clear. That I don't see it?
There is a similar and related process in people called "mind reading. This is a cognitive distortion. In this case, the person justifies his or her feelings or decisions by saying that he or she knows what others think of him or her. "I know that he looks at me and thinks I'm an idiot. What a scoundrel! And for that reason, I'll put a button on his chair. Then we'll see who laughs last. The distortion in this case is that people are not able to read minds. They attribute them to other people according to their world map.
But emotions and feelings can really be read to a certain extent. This is the same empathy. The process of reading emotions is carried out by the system of "mirror neurons". This system is aimed at reading the behavior of another person and his expression of the face, to correlate them with their own experience. We know that if we behave in one way or another and have such an expression on our faces, it means that we feel these or those emotions. And then we decide that the person with whom we communicate has the same emotions that we have.
The system of "mirror neurons" begins to develop from early childhood, but the dynamics is not so fast. The child does not have such a rich and sophisticated experience of relationships with others to create a database on the fly. But already in 5 months, he clearly begins to get more excited in the event that he is not looking at other people. He feels that he is interested in the way he is interested in the outside world and others. At the age of 3, children can definitely define the simple emotions of others by mimicry and say who is happy, who is sad. At the age of 4 it becomes much more clear to children that people have a certain inner world and they define more complex emotional states. Children of this age understand that a sad face can be caused by the fact that a person is offended or upset, or he has something painful. At age 5, children understand that people think differently and treat the same things or phenomena differently.
Where does all this come from? Of course, from parents and others around us. Children observe the interaction, emotions and reactions associated with it, and compare their feelings with the behavior of adults.
The vast majority of people consider themselves almost experts in reading the emotions of others. But to what extent do they really succeed? It has been found that strangers recognize the emotions of others only in 20% of cases. Relatives and friends understand each other emotionally in more than 35% of cases. But nobody has been accurate in defining emotions by more than 60%. We all have a lot of individual traits that may be missing from others.
Yeah, there's a lot of mistakes in terms of reading emotions. Why is this happening?
- The structure of human life and relations has changed very quickly during the development of civilization. The brain with its "mirror neurons" was not so much a jerk. We can catch the general tendencies of emotions, but we make big mistakes in estimation of their sense.
- Experience of each individual person can be very different from other people. Someone had a happy and cloudless childhood and loving parents, but someone had the opposite. Culture, social and economic class and many other things are also different.
- People are creative beings and immediately to the read emotions can attach a whole tail of interpretations, which can completely change the original meaning.
- Empathy is not a single action, but a series of repeated readings of emotions during communication. However, due to the increased creativity of these interactions can go into a zone of fantasy, and already there a person will compare the emotions of his imaginary opponent, to draw conclusions on this basis.
But despite everything, we continue to apply our emotional ruler to other people and judge their emotions.
It is quite possible to develop empathy, and thus the ability to determine the emotions of others. But it goes through the development of their emotional intelligence. When people have a better understanding of their emotions and are less inclined to interpret and philosophize about the reactions of their own and others', everything turns out much better. Women recognize emotions better. Than men. But this is not an innate quality, but an acquired one. A lady has been training more since childhood. It is difficult to say for sure why they do it, but the important factor here is the social requirements. A woman should be soft and understanding.
Motivation plays a big role in the development and maintenance of empathy. If a person does not want to empathize, he will not do it. Interestingly, newlyweds in the first year of family life are very sensitive to each other's emotions and willingly support this trend. After a year, when the joy of living together begins to fall, there are fewer and fewer empathic connections between them. It seems that there is no point in trying anymore, and so we live together. Often empathy goes to the area of "blind spot of marriage", when the emotions of the partner are thought out. But even then the wife continues to quickly and accurately capture the negative emotions of her husband.
And in matters related to sex and love people make huge mistakes in terms of reading thoughts. So one of the experiments showed that 80% of men evaluated the behavior of women as sexual interest, when the lady is just being nice and friendly.
People who are in an unstable psychological state, anxiety, depression, etc. make very serious mistakes in reading the emotions of others. Basically, there is a distortion in the direction in which the map of the reading world is laid out. If a person thinks he is an outcast, he will "read" the world around him as if he were rejecting it. And the further people go into sickness and the more pronounced their symptoms, the more inaccuracies in their assessment.
So, before you say that "everybody is happy / everybody is sure of themselves, and I am not", estimate how many chances do you have to read exactly, what is the subjective level of confidence and happiness in others? Yes, you can legitimately see that I cannot read emotions, but not the fact that others are not happy. Refer to the statistics. Russia is 167th in the world on the index of happiness. The fact is very sad, but a good reason not to think that you are completely uniquely unhappy.