Have you seen the viral video below?
It’s already gotten over 21 million views and is rapidly spreading through the internet. The baby is 10 month-old Mary Lynne Leroux, who cries as her mother Amanda sings ‘My Heart Can’t Tell You No’, a song most recently popularized by Sara Evans.
A recent Psychology Today article by Dr. Siu-Lan Tan suggests that the video may be illustrating emotional contagion and emotional synchrony. She defines emotional contagion as “the tendency for humans to absorb and reflect the intense emotions of those around them” and defines emotional synchrony as “the moment-to-moment mimicry and matching of emotional expressions in time”.
Dr David Matsumoto, thank you for featuring my post on the emotional baby viral video, from the viewpoint of developmental psychology, and psychology of music. I have great admiration for your work and Ekman’s, and have sent several of my students through your training program for micro expressions to rave reviews. If you’re interested, my next two posts for this week and next will be “3 reasons why we’re drawn to faces in film” and “How film music shapes face perception” – though taking much broader approaches than micro expressions, and not real world but film applications, they may be of general interest at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-shapes-film.
Sincerely – Dr. Siu-Lan Tan, Associate Professor of Psychology, author of two books, and blogger for Psychology Today and the Oxford University Press Blog.
Dr. Siu-Lan- Thank you very much for your professional comments and supplemental information regarding developmental psychology and facial expressions.
Dr. Matsumoto, thanks for your response. Here’s the post that I referred to – it just went up yesterday. Discusses why human faces are so compelling in real life and in film, and also the role of music in interpretation of emotion. The post is for a general audience but those trained by Humintell may find these face close-ups interesting from the viewpoint of micro expressions in acting. All the best in your work and I won’t bother you again; this post just seemed relevant. http://www.psychologytoday.com/…/3-reasons-why-were-drawn-faces-in-film
Sincerely, Dr. Siu-Lan Tan, Associate Professor of Psychology
PS to my last message. Sorry, it seems your site truncates the URL when it’s long, so the link I gave you might not work. If it does not, you can find this post by typing “3 reasons why we’re drawn to faces in film” and it will come up in a Google search. Sorry about that. Sincerely, Dr. Siu-Lan Tan, Associate Professor of Psychology.