It has been my experience that witnessing an emotion in another person can have one of two effects: it can induce that same emotion in the watcher, or it can diminish that feeling in a spectator. Examples of the emotion carrying to a witness include deep sorrow, humor, joy—seeing someone else grieving makes me sad. I find myself smiling when someone appears terribly happy. And I can’t help but laugh when others do. I own several seasons of Seinfeld on DVD, and I enjoy the bonus features with cut takes, because the actors themselves are so obviously amused. They often blow take after take because that can’t keep a straight face. It’s just fun to watch.
But I’m not going to focus on that effect. I’m more interested, right now, in the opposite effect, that effect which causes someone experiencing an emotion to feel it less when seeing someone else who is obviously feeling the same thing. While this is probably rarer than the other effect, you will likely see my point upon elaboration.
For example:
Today I waited at the train stop for twenty minutes. Usually, arriving trains are announced by their number, the rail they arrive on, and the time of their impending departure. The voice that typically makes these announcements is a recording of all the necessary words spliced together to fit the exact train. It is a deep, gravelly male voice, which I have described to Janae as the voice of the devil. Today, this voice was interrupted by a live announcer. When each train arrived, the deep demon voice would begin, then cut out as a female voice took over the loudspeaker. The woman’s voice was high, nasal, piercingly loud, and followed a strange, sing-songy lilt. “R5 local to Lansdale next to arrive on track 1, section B, track one section B is the 6:22 R5 local to Lansdale.”
It was intensely annoying. I looked up the first time I heard it, as if I would see the woman speaking in the speaker above me. I wondered why the familiar, soothing Satan voice was being overridden by someone so obnoxious. But the next time the nasal woman spoke, I happened to be looking to my left, in the direction my train would come from. In my field of vision sat an old woman reading a book on a neighboring bench. I noticed, in my peripheral vision, that she made some kind of facial movement that corresponded to the announcement. For the next announcement, I looked directly at her to observe her reaction. She was clearly as annoyed as I, perhaps more so. She made a face, the face of a person who has just sucked on a lemon, which slid into a tight-lipped grimace-grin, then collapsed back into the sour-pucker. The transformation startled me. She did not look up from her reading, but made these faces during each announcement, sometimes settling on one face or the other, but more often switching back and forth between the two while high-nasal spoke.
In the middle of my obvious observation, I realized that I was no longer annoyed at the high voice. Watching the extreme reaction of the older woman drove annoyance from me. I was amused that she felt strongly enough about something so trivial as to put on a dramatic show for the pages of the book looking up at her. It was ludicrously melodramatic. And pointless—no one would see her discomfort and make the voice stop. The action had no purpose. Perhaps she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. But my annoyance wasn’t stilled wholly by the amusement that her demonstration produced. Rather, it was as if my own emotion, held inside, was expressed in the face of this old woman, amplified for me to see. And once seen, the emotion appeared silly, for it would affect no change and allowing it to continue served only as a kind of perverse cycle of negative feeling. My annoyance draining away was not conscious, but still it followed this logic.
A similar case took place around the time I was thirteen. Horror movies and thrillers had typically given me nightmares before that time. Movies captured my attention so completely that I had no foot left in reality. My disbelief was suspended, alright. Until I noticed the fright of the other people watching the movie. It suddenly seemed laughable to me that someone sitting in a movie theater would be clutching an armrest, or a boyfriend. There they were, their hearts racing, their nerves quivering like violin strings, and for what? Their situation was no different than if they had been watching a musical or a romantic comedy, or any other film. The world had not changed at all, so why did they allow themselves to revel so long in false emotions? I was suddenly unafraid, and scary movies no longer bother me. Again, this was not a conscious thought process. I don’t think I have ever articulated this experience before, nor noticed the phenomenon. Even so, I am changed by it, and I would bet that others have felt something along these lines.
Which brings us to the inevitable question: what do we name this effect? Does it have a name? Schadenfreude describes one person’s joy at another’s harm, an effect not totally dissimilar from the one I have detailed, but that term connotes malice, which is not what I mean. Perhaps the best we can do, as is often the case, is looking at the opposite of a term already in existence. Sympathy describes the situation in which a person feels for another person’s emotion, even if they cannot really understand it; empathy indicates an even closer connection, as the witness has experienced the same thing. What I have recognized is anti-empathy, a decrease in emotion upon witnessing the same in another. Rather than feeling with them, the watcher is distanced from the watched. I guess you could say that I did not empathize with the old woman reading the book, though I could have. Instead, I anti-empathized.
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