A study, published in the September 2009 issue of the journal Psychological Science, “addresses the age-old question: ‘Do we see reality as it is, or is what we see influenced by our preconceptions?’” said study coauthor Piotr Winkielman, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. “Our findings indicate that what we think has a noticeable effect on our perceptions.”

This should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog. We’re talking about the relationship between what we believe and what we experience. Our thinking goes: “I perceive an event and the way I perceive it is THE way it happened. Further, the way I feel about the event has nothing to do with how the event went down.” Thinking error!!

“We imagine our emotional expressions as unambiguous ways of communicating how we’re feeling,” said coauthor Jamin Halberstadt, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, “but in real social interactions, facial expressions are blends of multiple emotions – they are open to interpretation. This means that two people can have different recollections about the same emotional episode, yet both be correct about what they ‘saw.’ So when my wife remembers my smirk as cynicism, she is right: her explanation of the expression at the time biased her perception of it. But it is also true that, had she explained my expression as empathy, I wouldn’t be sleeping on the couch.”

You mean, if I change my mind about my interpretation of the data, the event changes for me? Whoa! That’s radical!

“It’s a paradox,” Halberstadt added. “The more we seek meaning in others’ emotions, the less accurate we are in remembering them.”

Oh, and, by the way – the less accurate we are at interpreting them, too!

“The novel finding here,” said Winkielman, of UC San Diego, “is that our body is the interface: The place where thoughts and perceptions meet. It supports a growing area of research on ‘embodied cognition’ and ‘embodied emotion.’ Our corporeal self is intimately intertwined with how – and what – we think and feel.”

Well, I guess we really do see (and hear, smell, taste, feel) what we believe! And at the root of it all is our body. We give lots of kudos to our magnificent minds, but when you really get down to brass tacks, our body plays a much bigger role than we give it credit – it has the starring role!

This adds significant credibility to my own theory about emotional healing – it’s in the body! Sensation is the language of the body. We ignore our body’s language at our peril – getting fatter, more stressed, and less resilient. I wonder what would happen if we were to focus emotional healing processes on the physical aspects of those emotions – the physical sensations that arise during the expression of our emotions. We might find the key to healing our emotions and our mental constructs that hold those emotions in place. Maybe my theory is worthy of study, too.

Study source: University of California, San Diego. Coauthors on the study are Paula Niedenthal and Nathalie Dalle, both at the Universite Blaise Pascall, Clermont-Ferrand, France.