Raul Jimenez - Code Red: The Manager's Perspective

Mexican footballer Raúl Jiménez suffered a serious head injury during a match against Arsenal in November 2020. The injury left him with a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain.

In November 2021, a year following the injury, the BBC produced a documentary 'Raul Jimenez: Code Red' that outlined the player's injury and conducted interviews with fellow players, medical professionals and family members.

There were also several scenes which focused on the manager at the time, Nuno Espírito Santo.

During one clip, Nuno describes the incident.

Nuno says 'There are some things that you are able to put away from your memories, but this moment will stay forever... And then the noise. That will stay.'

From a nonverbal behaviour perspective, several interesting elements occur...

In the lead up to this moment, Nuno described Jimenez's role when it came to defending corners, highlighting the importance of the player during defensive set-pieces. During this dialogue Nuno is sitting relatively upright, his body posture is upright, arms resting on the the chair, head and eyes in a relatively neutral position, while he makes a cutting gesture with his right hand to indicate Jimenez's function when defending the front post from corners.

The next scene cuts to Nuno as he describes the incident, yet this time his head and eyes are tilted down, as he explains how the moment will stay with him forever.

As his head position returns close to neutral, you can immediately observe the uprising of emotion that has flooded through his face and a glassy appearance/quality added to his eyes.

(Word of the day here - 'lacrimation' - this is the term used to describe the beginning of tear production. Who knew?!)

Why is it that we tend to tilt our head down and avert our gaze during the process of recalling certain painful memories?

The answer for this lies in Emotional Memory Images (Hudson and Johnson, 2022).

Emotional Memory Images are the specific elements of sensory information (visual, auditory, feelings, smells, tastes etc) that the mind stores during moments of intense emotion.

These Emotional Memory Images or EMI's are nonconscious, meaning they often sit outside of our daily awareness.

But these EMI's are positioned in a specific location, stored on our visuospatial sketchpad.

The visuospatial sketchpad is a component of memory, proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974, and updated multiple times since, adding further nuance to the theory.

The visuospatial sketchpad directly relates to spatial information, handling tasks that involve the mental representation, storage, and manipulation of spatial relationships and objects.

This means, that EMI's have a specific SPATIAL location on the sketchpad. Aka they are stored in a certain place and stay there until resolved.

In many cases, painful or emotional memories (potentially due to their relevance to survival), are often positioned front and centre on the upper portion of the visuospatial sketchpad.

This means, when recalling a painful memory, as Nuno is actively doing in this moment, one way to distance himself - or minimise the emotional pain from the EMI - is to avert his gaze and look down or away from the EMI when accessing the information.

This is not a conscious process, but is a relatively universal one.

Nor is it the only reason this movement may occur, but it is a relatively common one.

You'll easily notice the next time someone is describing a significant or painful event, that one of the most common compensation strategies is gaze aversion and tilted head positioning.

In the next moment Nuno refers to the sound, using a gesture to mimic the sounds that was generated at the moment of the incident.

As he moves on to the utterance relating to the noise, you can observe his eyebrows moving upwards (middle portion only) and toward each other in a symmetrical movement.

This simultaneous elevation and drawing together of the medial (inside) aspect of the eyebrows is a reliable indicator of sadness.

It is a reliable indicator because the action is hard to produce voluntarily.

(Give it a go - stand in front of the mirror and attempt to raise your eyebrows while also bringing your inside part of your eyebrows together. The movement of the brow must be symmetrical on both sides. But remembering the raising of the eyebrows occurs in the inside aspect of the brow only. This means you must avoid raising the outer brows, as well as avoiding wrinkling the nose and lowering the brows. Here's an image below to help. A note of caution however, the Facial Feedback Hypothesis states when we make a sad facial expression, it triggers physiological changes that generate the genuine emotion, so be mindful!).

These subtle but clearly evident nonverbal cues indicate that Nuno still has an active EMI relating to the incident. Positioned front and centre on his sketchpad.

While this EMI remains active, when circumstances arise that are similar to, or symbolic of the original event, Nuno's stress response will be triggered and a similar emotion of sadness will likely flood his system. It also means his stress response will be triggered when he encounters sounds that resemble the injury event.

This documentary, while of course focusing on the terribly traumatic injury the player experienced, gives us a fascinating insight into how observers of painful incidents can also store sensory information following a painful event. For example, when children observe parents fighting or shouting aggressively, the same process can occur.

Fortunately for both parties, Jimenez is rediscovering his best form and Nuno Espírito Santo is masterminding Nottingham Forrest's incredible run in the league this season. But the documentary serves as an important reminder of the impact that traumatic injuries or experiences can have.