Published: May 13, 2022, 1:16 p.m.
Does communicating over a screen impair our ability to interpret non-verbal behavior? And if so what impact will it have?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01747/full
Transcript:
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welcome into the psych with mike library as mr brett newcomb prepares his headphones he's back uh it's not that we
really need the headphones but it does it does actually keep my head from exploding when i talk to you yeah
keeps my ears warm you have this capacity to just generate distress that becomes
i do yeah yeah and and uh if your head exploded that would probably be a mess
that i would not want to clean up if you could see what was in my head yeah i've said that to my wife many
times she says hey what are you thinking about i'm like man you don't want to be in my head that's a scary place to be
yeah yeah so uh i saw a thing on facebook that a cartoon
and a meme man and woman laying in bed at night both way facing away from each other
yeah and she's thinking i wonder if he's thinking about other women and he's thinking how will gonzaga win
the tournament yeah yeah yeah yeah well and she's wondering and and i don't want to this to be a social
commentary but she's wondering if he's thinking about other women yeah but she's not offering
will we to be with him we don't know any more than that we don't know any more than that they're together alone yeah which is not
an uncommon circumstance it is not an uncommon circumstance no it is not that is true
so uh i have struggled mightily
uh in my career i don't know if you feel this
much connection to this specific subject because you spent more time
before the internets than i do i'm older yeah you're here a little bit it didn't have the option
so while i grew up without the internets the internets were around by the time i started practicing by the time i had
books still have books yeah well uh and so
in another version of our lives we worked at a group practice and in that
group practice we did a lot of collaboration with the parochial schools
and a lot of what i did there in that group practice was presentations on
how the schools could bring technology into the schools safely and effectively
and how parents could manage the their children's technological lives
in a way that would be beneficial and healthy for them you know back in the early days
we were talking about you know things like keystroke loggers where you could actually see the kinds of websites that
your children visited and things like that and i mean that's like now out the window i mean the technology now has
advanced to the point where i guess you could still have keystroke loggers but i'm not sure how effective that they are
anymore but one of the things that was profoundly
memorable for me was i walked into my son's room one night and he was hiding a screen so he had aol
if you don't know what that is he had aim which was aol instant messenger
and so aol was a service at the time the biggest internet service on the planet
and they had started an internet messaging service an instant messaging service even before that was a thing on
texting for phones right and i walked in and he was doing he was he was doing his homework but he was
also going back and forth between doing his homework and looking at this so he
can figure it out and set up a hotkey so that somebody came in exactly hit the key and yeah but i saw it
and so i had introduced this idea but i had never really had an extensive conversation so i said
okay we're going to have an extensive conversation and i said you know i need to know
that all of the people that you are interacting with are actually legitimate
people and that you know them and he said well i know everybody on my
aim and i so we pulled it up and i mean at the time i think he had 104
connections right which compared to today is minuscule right i mean you'd be embarrassed to say you had 104
connections today but i said okay i need you to justify to me that all 104 of
these people are real people where do they live where what classes do you share with them and he could only do
that with a handful this girl's name is candy does it in dallas yeah who is she yeah yeah
how do you know her she's in my fifth hour calculus class yeah right um and so i had a rule
when my kids were growing up that they couldn't communicate with anybody that they couldn't verify the identity of
i don't even know if you could do that today but what i do know is that
as the internet becomes more ubiquitous as communication goes more online
i'm very very concerned with what we are doing to ourselves
specifically for me the concern is in the area of the
lack of skills for reading nonverbal human behavior
so there's a term called mediated communications
mediated communications use some type of technology as a go-between or an
interface so it can be your phone it can be your computer it can be a tele it can be a
teletype or a typewriter or something so that you are not face to face reading
non-verbals as you exchange communications
cooper and arabian two social scientists who studied all this early in the early years
used to talk about nonverbal communications that were not mediated so person to
person looking at you reading all the different messages that are coming from you you say something orally
and i hear it and those words that i hear compose about seven percent of the
message the rest of the message comes from your nonverbals your tone your facial expression your volume your
rhythm uh your body language of various kinds are you stiff are you relaxed are
you hyperagitated and all of that factors into the communication and
children learned this growing up i remember learning how to say
yes ma'am to my mother and it meant a hundred different things depending on how i said it i said the
same two words yes ma'am but many times it meant oh enthusiastically yes you know yeah i'd like to have a piece of
cake yes ma'am but sometimes it meant no way in hell get out of here or sometimes it meant
just try and make me yeah exactly yeah uh and she always knew which way i meant it because but i would hide behind
saying but i said yes ma'am you know how can you punish me for that and um
so when you use a mediated communication device you lose
that capacity and you develop a certain level of anonymity so if i am communicating with
you over an ipad screen on the internet and you're a thousand miles away or your
next door or in the next room it doesn't matter uh i can say something that i might not
say if we were face to face right because i don't have to deal with your
misunderstanding or your non-verbal reaction if you roll your eyes you know how many times do you remember being told don't
roll your eyes at me yeah if they can see them they can say wow you just did that bam if they can't see
them then they can't see them right right so that affects the communication right and
the way in which this has been most impactful for me in my professional
career is the extent to which a client will come into the office and will say to me
i want to read you some texts yeah and they'll read me a text chain and they will have the they will have
concluded that this other person is angry with them or hates them or whatever and i will say
there's nothing in that communication that suggests that and so people are
projecting onto these written communications and
an assumption of emotional context that they just can't get which is what you
just said just in different words and i'm worried that a we do that first off
so we're projecting so let me just say very clearly
i cannot assign emotional context
to a printed communication and i'm really good at nonverbal
behavior and empathy nobody can do that if you think you can
do that you are mistaken no one can do that and then they'll say to me but look
at the emojis and i'm like an emoji is not a substitute for
non-verbal behavior and people just don't seem to be able to understand that there's so much of this
message that is missing but the internet offers opportunities for
even more egregious abuse of that reality oh absolutely
i may live in your neighborhood i may see you at the grocery store i may see you at church on sunday i am not going
to have a conversation with you ever under any of those circumstances to talk about how much i obsess about sexually
abusing a child but i can find a chat room on the internet with everybody else who's found that
room that does want to talk about that in brutal specifics and i can find a group that i can be in touch with and we
can share all of this stuff back and forth that we get off on
that i could not ever share with anybody in my community that knows me as a real
person that sees me it's secretive it's destructive it's poisonous uh you do the same thing with
political agendas i mean there's so much out there right now about how divided america is politically
in part because of the news media are you extreme left are you extreme right
yeah uh are you on these different websites the q and on whatever that
promote specific uh political agendas to an extreme level right
or religion we're about to have an election here in in missouri
and the elections locally various elections locally for school board members are
being impacted by nationwide movement that's coming from the far right
saying uh we've got to worry about critical race theory we have to take certain books out of the curriculum
we've got to take them out of the library we can't let them you know these teachers are going to corrupt and ruin our children
if we don't limit them so we need to put cameras in the classrooms and if you elect me for the school board locally
then i can watch that on your behalf and that's what i'll do right so candidates
are running like that and they want to take books out of the library and burn books and say we can't expose our
children to these thoughts we don't want to teach accurate american history we don't want to teach
racial disparity or disharmony we want to
we'll teach reading and write we're going to teach arithmetic there's no other thing that should be taught we don't need these cultural biases and
propaganda happening from these school teachers but what you pointed out and i think is very apt
is that the internet can be a way
of exacerbating the pathology of an individual i like
what you said my wife calls that confirmation bias yeah yeah you look for the things that confirm the way you
already but i think i think those are actually two different things i think confirmation bias is a thing and the internet is really good at confirmation
bias but i think it also can exacerbate your own pathology because when you talk about going to you know
some kind of sub reddit and and finding a pornography or
a an abuse kind of forum i think that exactly killer chat right yeah where they all get off on
this this is what i do and how i do it and how i don't get caught and you know that's that's just really scary
to think of but in a less in a less extreme kind of way because people say
oh well you're just being hyperbolic brett newcomb but in a less hyperbolic way i had a client
and he was just obsessed with feedback from people on the
internet and he would post pictures of himself on these reddit sub forums and
he would just obsess about the responses and i would say to him all the time but ninety percent of
these responses are positive and he's like yeah but look at those those negative ones those are the real ones
those are the people who are telling it like it is i say how do you know that those aren't people who feel horrible about themselves and they get off on
just making other people feel bad i mean you don't know where this information is coming from why
would you assume well because that the minority is the only real part it has to do with our
personalities it's something to do with human nature i remember
back in the day giving speeches to four or five thousand uh in an audience
and then they would pass around or ask for speaker evaluation right so i get 5 000
speaker evaluation forms and 4 800 of them would just be raving oh
great speaker great speech wonderful job 150 200 of them would be like right
well 50 of them would be like the room is cold yeah cherries exactly i'm hungry and the other hundred would
be like this guy's a drip i don't know how do you let him even out those hundred would be the one
i would hear and feel and obsess about well i'm not saying that i'm not that i'm immune to that because i did the
same thing and the the most uh
the way that that that that affected me the most was when we would go out and do protecting god's children when we would do workshops on
you know child abuse for the archdiocese and you know that exact same thing would
happen where you'd get just one percent and they would just just rip you up and
most of the time it was probably because those were the people that didn't want to go there and hear the message right
and i'm i'm a coach don't kill the messenger coach yeah i love coaching right how can you tell me not to pat
these kids on the bus right or you know i'm telling you if you do you're get undressed and take a shower with them
yeah absolutely which is you know that's i i heard that more than one because so
people in the audience if you're saying oh my god no one ever said that i guarantee you
i heard exactly that statement more than once but what are you saying
immediately shower with these kids written documents yeah and then come and stand in front of your face and say it right yeah which
what we're talking about and it can stir you up i mean it's working you up right now yeah and and
there's not an individual in front of you whose nonverbals you can read a check messaging interact with and maybe
reach an accommodation where both of you can go oh that makes sense to me right okay so that's a good time to take a
break and i will cool down and we'll pick this up on the other side all right
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if it's friday it's psych with mike okay we're back and
in the uh the frontiers in psychology article that i sent you they are actually now on the verge of
creating an entire diagnosis around what we're talking about called internet communication disorder and i don't know
so specific sub domains yeah so it might be like for pornography you know abuse
level uh so yeah the internet communication disorder we just saw an example of it
in the the the brown jackson hearings yeah yeah so so
we're doing this and and they haven't voted yet we assume that she's going to be confirmed but katanji uh brown
jackson is has been nominated for the supreme court and in her hearings
um they were talking about you know that that even one uh download
or so the the the sensing protocols for pornography child pornography were
dependent on the number of digital images that could be retrieved off your computer
and so what the article that i read was saying is when
they were talking about the time frame they were talking about 100 you could only download 5 000. yeah yeah but now you can press a
button and get 500 000 in a single download they're just cascading into
your computer and so is it fair to judge someone off of what was going on
you know a hundred years ago or not a hundred years ago but so you're looking at technology from the technology or you're looking at the content of the
message right but the technology has evolved to a point now where it's
impossible to not have these kinds of communications we're all talking about you know we're
all walking around with you know essentially super computers in our
pockets we all engage in some form of digital communication and if i text you
and you don't answer me back in 10 minutes i'm wondering did something happen to
you yeah and is that something is that healthy i don't think that's healthy no
and i mean there's so many different sidebars to that you know corporations are now focusing on telling their
employees turn turn the thing off and go home we can tell if you check back in we can tell if you check your emails we
don't want you doing that we want you to have an evening with your family but that's new messaging 20 15 years ago
10 years ago they were saying we want you ready 24 7. if i call you you better answer the damn phone
so people are addicted to checking their cell phones at night they take them to bed
there are sleep problems that are diagnosed because you have blue light in your bedroom you have
the tv on you have your computer on you have your phone on and it impacts your sleeping uh so so
there are so many elements of this that could be focused on and say well let's
make an intervention here let's make an intervention here what they're doing with the jackson hearings
is trying to build an argument in support of a social
agenda that they have yeah about pornography or about uh race training
education crt i mean i saw a meme where they'd taken her three initials and
scratched them out and put crt next to him for critical race theory uh
they claim well she's on the board of a private elementary school in washington d.c
and so she represents critical every single teaching that the school does this elementary school level
well and the science is critical race is not taught as a theory
in elementary schools in junior high schools or in high schools it is taught at the university level for higher level
university training uh when and where it's sought but that doesn't pop in the media of course so if
we're gonna do it on the internet we gotta find something that makes it pop or we gotta make it pop right but you know i just am amazed at
the growth i said i was going to say proliferation but i think it's more the growth of this phenomenon
you know one of the things that they talk about in this article is that the more
electronic communications that you have oftentimes the more lonely you feel so
you get driven to engage in a large
number of electronic communications because you're lonely but that doesn't actually satisfy that
loneliness we have done podcasts in the last two years uh different ones that focus on
research that shows that people are getting pregnant less often they're having sex less often
why would that be well the research supports that many of them are laying in bed next to their
partner each individually looking at a communication device showing some level
of pornography but not interacting with each other not having sex with each other so the research
shows that they lay there and masturbate looking at something on a video screen instead of having sex with their partner
and that the more that you do that the more that it desensitizes you but
the more that it desensitizes you to the stimulus input of the porn so the more that's how people get into crazy animal
porn and stuff yeah it's because they have to increase the level of stimulation to get that you build up a
tolerance how do you find a crazy animal i don't know you you just give them give them an mmpi
and rate their results and diagnosis yeah which is a previous conversation but the
point is that the more that you expose yourself to these digital formats the
less satisfying that they are and then the solution is to expose yourself to
more of the digital formats and at the same time you're losing your ability to really be connected to
real human beings and so this is a tangential thing but something that i wanted to bring up in
all of this i worked as a clinical director for an eap and employee assistance program for
about a decade and one of the things and this was a couple of years ago so i've been
i haven't been there for a couple of years but while i was there they were working with a company to
develop a mental health bot that would be essentially you would text
in and say i'm feeling lonely and the bot would talk to you rather than a therapist and the more so the pandemic
now has exacerbated this because there's a lot of research that's trying to lay the foundation for teletherapy as the
wave of the future and i'm telling you right now if you're a therapist and you think teletherapy is a good idea you are
putting yourself out of a job because the insurance companies don't want to pay you to do that therapy they want to
produce a bot that will do that therapy and they want you to be out of the equation i've seen
uh some of those programs and they're things like i call up and say i'm feeling depressed
and the robot says say more about that uh can you tell me more about that and
you go well yeah i'm depressed because you know my but listen to the way that you said that the way that you said that
was very warm and very engendering it made me want to say more to you but this
is what the robot said can you say no more no no it doesn't work that way well i'm
talking about if it's text now yes okay yes if if they're putting voice synthesized yeah overlays on the text i
have people read it but the point is this is that's not real therapy that's
not a real human connection right we are losing our ability to be genuinely
connected and to be able to understand the empathic responsiveness of ourselves
so if if if empathy is mapped on the left temporal lobe where your language centers are as it is
and you are never in the presence of another human being you don't learn how to be an empathic
person can you say more about that i can say a lot more about it because i am i'm
really worried that we are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy so
people are very interested in expanding telehealth and i'm not you know
if you live in you know some place outside of bozeman montana and it's 350
miles to a grocery store and you don't have access to a mental health professional do i believe that
telehealth is better than no health at all absolutely i absolutely do but in that's that's less than one
percent of the total population of the country most of us live in an area where we
could drive and get actual professional health help and i think that if we start
to convince ourselves that we don't need to be in the presence of other human beings that we're just going to be
exacerbating this slide down this spiral and where does that end
up if we if we actually educate out of ourselves the ability to
read nonverbal human behavior and we lose our capacity to be empathically
responsive to other human beings where are we going to be that's a scary place to be
yeah and i think that people are creating that reality i know that the
the insurance companies want that reality because i've been in rooms where insurance companies have
said exactly that and they're going to deny they're going to say oh no we just want to deliver good mental health
services to the most amount of people the company wants to make a profit they don't deliver services at all exactly
they want to deny services you don't need that you're not sick and that's not a real sickness because if i say it is
then i gotta pay for it the same school districts have been taught around the country tell the teachers not to
diagnose tell the school counselor oh yeah not to diagnose because if they diagnose if the counselor says to the
parent we think little johnny is adhd right then the school district becomes
responsible for paying for the treatment right but if the counselor says wonder if you had him assessed what they
would discover then they tell you take him out somewhere
or they say well i think he needs some help he's struggling and he said some
scary things so you need to get him some help and the parent says no we don't believe
in that stuff we'll we'll pray we'll we'll sit over the dinner table now we'll pray and that'll be better and then that afternoon because they didn't
take the kid out of the school and they didn't take him to the hospital after he'd already said i want to kill people he goes out and kills people then the
parents get arrested and charged and tried for not doing what
they need to do and you're talking about the guy who shot up it yeah in michigan yeah and and
uh i i as far as i know the trial of the parents is still ongoing is that correct
they haven't concluded that right that's right but you know the parents were apoplexic when they got arrested it's
not our fault and everybody said but the school told you not once not twice but three times that they had concerns they
not only asked at one point demanded that you take him home and that was the day that he had a gun
in his backpack and i just am i'm amazed
when i was young you as a parent you expected that it was
your responsibility to raise your children and i'm not sure that that is the expectation today
it's such a loaded statement it is it is okay i'm a little fired up right now yeah
because this is a topic that really uh is something that i am concerned
about i'm concerned about it from a professional perspective i'm also concerned about it from a social
psychology perspective and the the reason why i'm so concerned
about it is it wasn't like we couldn't see this coming
and yet we don't do anything until we're in crisis and it's just a shame why can't we
recognize something might be a problem before it becomes a problem
so carried to extremes they are developing these
artificial reality games where you wear equipment and you feel like you're in a room with other people yeah you can have
a conversation you can see them you can move you can read the non-verbals you can sword fight you can interact
you can have sex all you need is this pair of glasses and earphones and you go away from where you
are there's a disney cartoon movie out several years ago i'm blanking on the name of it but uh
these this robot the earth has been destroyed and this robot's looking around and it has a personality and the
survivors of earth are floating around in space somewhere for another place to go eva evo yeah yeah yeah and
it's uh like cartoons used to be when we were growing up a lot of social messages in
there under the disguise of an entertainment about the internet about
the way we use our time about the interface with mechanics mechanical systems
so this kind of stuff is potentially deadly for our culture as
well as for individuals but it's also potentially rewarding and expansive and we can grow and
be places we've never been and be places we'll never go and that's fair and it's not yeah
so you're right i shouldn't make it all about doom and gloom because there has been a lot of benefit and a lot of
positivity that's come out of the our access to electronic media but
it just you know i i see the writing on the wall touch the nerve yeah
yeah so hopefully that was beneficial for people as always the music that appears inside with mike is written and
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