Stony silence as a defense

This non-reaction reaction can be handy, averting ugly confrontations about race, religion or, in recent days, war -- topics that rarely lead to agreement. It can also serve as an effective roadblock to any dreaded conversation, whether in a marriage, at work or with friends.

No matter how well practiced, however, the impassive mask is hardly a neutral expression. New research suggests that suppressing a strong emotion can significantly alter almost any social interaction, even damage relationships. The findings help explain why this form of nonverbal communication can be astute in some cases, disastrous in others.

Learning how the tactic subtly shapes our behavior and others' can help people use it more consciously and effectively, psychologists say. "The important thing to know is that there are costs to suppressing, both for you and for your conversation partner," said Emily Butler, a psychologist at Stanford University who studies emotion and social interaction, "and those costs ought to be weighed against the risks of expressing what you actually feel and think."

Psychologists have long said that masking strong emotion is one of many social deceptions that allow people to navigate everyday life. At a recent dinner out, Christopher Osborne and his wife, Sandra Fulmer, both lawyers in San Francisco, were talking to another couple, friends of friends, who suddenly began making racist jokes.

"We both just shut down completely, didn't say anything, didn't react, even avoided eye contact," he said of himself and his wife. After a couple of long moments playing to a silent audience, the other couple dropped the subject. "It was clear they felt something, and they wanted the dinner to go well too, so they just stopped talking about that stuff," Osborne said.

But in about a dozen experiments over the last several years, researchers have documented both physical and emotional distress when people hide their emotions, whether they're alone or in company, embarrassed or angry. In the latest of these, Butler and a team of investigators at Stanford and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, analyzed interactions among 84 college-aged women. The women sat through a short, bloody film about warfare and then paired off to discuss the movie.