I Can Sense What You Feel But I Don't Know What You Are Thinking

By Steven Stosny

Attunement

Attunement is a special kind of emotional contagion that operates on a deeper, more intimate level. It automatically matches the intensity and tone of your emotions with those of someone else. In other words, you feel that person.

Social convention establishes norms for the range and intensity of emotional display. For example, you might feel like screaming on the subway when you read in the paper that your team blew the game on the last play, after you thought it was already won and went to bed. But you won't scream on the subway, just as you probably won't tell jokes at a funeral, even if you feel the dreary atmosphere could use some levity.

As long as we stay within the boundaries of social convention, our bodies literally tune our emotions to one another. On those few occasions when you are consciously aware of it, it feels like your emotions are on the same "frequency" and "hit the same notes" as those of another person.

They actually do synchronize. If you stop to think about it (and you usually don't) you know what the other person is feeling, because, in a very real way, you're feeling it, too.

Although our unconscious sensitivity to others is almost always active when we're not alone, it is not always accurate, i.e., we sometimes misconstrue what other people are feeling.

However, we are far more accurate in sensing what others feel than in knowing what they think.

This disproportionate accuracy between sensing another's feelings and judging their thinking leads to most of our misunderstandings of one another.

Because we can pretty reliably tell when someone is, say, uncomfortable, we feel justified in guessing, albeit with far less accuracy, why they are uncomfortable or what their discomfort means.

You might assume that your partner is aloof because he is irritated with you (or because you are irritated with him), when in reality he was still reacting to a harsh word his boss said to him before he left work.

Attunement makes it pretty safe to assume what another is feeling but perilous to guess at what they are thinking or what their feelings mean to them.

Attunement begins with the first stirrings of life, as newborns naturally tune their emotions to those of their caregivers and vice versa - just try reading the paper when your baby is crying or calming her down when you're upset. When parents are anxious, infants are anxious, and when parents feel loving, their babies feel loving, too, as long as they're not experiencing physical discomfort.

Throughout the lifespan, sensitivity to the internal experience of loved ones is the cornerstone of empathy, compassion, support, romance, and intimacy.