Why is it that you can feel compassion for a homeless person you see in the morning, yet when you spot him again at the end of the day, you're nagged by the thought that he won't even try to get his act together and look for a job?

What makes a disappointed child feel like giving up on everything when alone, but inspired to find something of interest as soon as she's with her friends?

How do we even know what they mean on the news when they use terms like the "mood of the nation" or the "feel of the community?"

These are not idle questions. Unless we understand how emotions happen in a social context and how they give meaning to events and behavior, there is no hope of knowing the self, let alone understanding another person or other cultures. There is a simple answer to the most resonant question about September 11, 2001: "Why do they hate us?" They hate us because we do not "see them." Couples divorce, children become alienated, and communities deteriorate for the same reason. We don't see each other because we react to a virtually invisible emotional tone that all people - indeed, all social animals - project.

Compelling evidence from a variety of scientific disciplines shows that we automatically and continuously synchronize with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements, and emotional displays of others. This automatic emotional reactivity occurs in milliseconds, i.e., thousands of a second and is thus well outside conscious awareness. The milliseconds our brains take to process emotional tone is much faster than the formulation of thoughts, beliefs, and values. That is to say, we react to emotional tones emitted by others that have little to do with who they really are as people, and so we do not see them.

Because we fail to see our interactions with others in realistic, multi-perspective social contexts, we tend to regard our emotions in terms of whatever spouses, kids, bosses, underlings, clients, or some jerk on the road did or did not do:

"He really makes me mad."

"How can I relax when she's so uptight?"

"You're getting on my last good nerve."

These kinds of statements reflect a familiar and convenient way of thinking. They also underscore our inability to see the people we interact with apart from our reactions to them. Worse, they reinforce the self-alienation that comes from viewing our emotions as mere reflections of other people's behavior, which is like looking in the mirror and seeing someone else's face.

Social alienation interacts with self-alienation to make a potent fertilizer for emotional pollution.