2: When We Become Emotional
In most instances, our emotions serve us well by motivating us to address what is most important at the moment, to sustain or alter our course of action to improve our condition. But in some instances, our emotions can misguide us, in one of three ways:
- We may have the correct emotion, but at the wrong intensity - creating too much or too little motivation to address the issue to which the emotion is in response
- We may have the correct emotion but the wrong reaction - we rightly feel anger in a given situation, but direct it at the wrong person
- We may be feeling the wrong emotion altogether and take action before evaluating it to recognize it is inappropriate
The first two will be addressed in later material - but in this chapter and the next, the author will consider the arousal of the wrong emotions.
The Nature of Emotion
To begin, all emotions are reactions to stimuli, somatic or external. We do not randomly experience emotions, but experience them in response to something. Second, these emotional "triggers" tend to be idiosyncratic. Within a culture, certain emotional responses are encouraged or discouraged, but the individual first feels whatever he happens to feel and considers whether it is culturally appropriate afterward.
Emotional triggers depend on a person's existing mindset. When a politician is assassinated, some react with shock and sadness while others feel a sense of liberation and happiness. It is because some considered that politician to be their protector and others felt him to be their oppressor that his elimination evokes entirely different reactions.
Those emotions that are practically universal tend to deal with a threat to personal safety. Everyone feels fear and then relief when they experience a "near miss" accident - the moment that they expected to suffer pain and injury followed by relief when their expectation was not fulfilled. But some people fear dogs or flying in airplanes when others are excited or pleased by the prospect of greeting a dog or taking a flight. And again, it is because they have different individual perceptions of whether these events are enjoyable or unpleasant.
In chemistry, in is possible to accurately predict the reaction of solutions because there are means by which the chemist can know exactly what they contain, and because there is historical knowledge that suggests exactly what will occur when two chemicals are mixed with one another and heated. But in psychology, it is not possible to know what is in the mind of a person - there are no means of detection.
Even the science of neurology is very primitive: the most advanced tools such as the electroencephalograph (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can track movement of electricity through the brain in a broad and general manner - and even when they become granular and specific, there is still a distinct difference between the functioning of the brain as an organ and the functioning of the mind itself. It may be decades or centuries before the two can be connected.
Psychology relies on a similarly vague level of perception of human behavior. We can observe what behaviors occur in the wake of a given stimulus and, after observing the reactions of many people to the same stimuli, form a general principal of their correlation - but even in the act of observation we recognize that correlation is weak. In chemistry, one chemical reacts to another in a given way 100% of the time. In the social sciences, we remark that there is a strong correlation if people respond in a similar manner less than 40% of the time.
The Occurrence of Emotion
Per the previous section, emotion is a reaction to stimulus - so we can first conclude that emotion occurs in response to a stimulus, external and external.
But the converse is not true: just because every emotion is a response to a stimulus doesn't mean that every stimulus evokes an emotional response. We are not always emotionally engaged, and different people are not engaged by the same things, in the same ways, or to the same degrees. Even the most emotionally sensitive and expressive person is not constantly experiencing emotion.
Next question: what are the qualities of a stimulus that causes it to elicit an emotional reaction?
The first quality is unusualness - as we do not become emotionally aroused when something expected and routine occurs. Flipping on a light switch and seeing that a light comes on is routine an unremarkable, and we are not filled with wonder and delight when this occurs. We are far more likely to be perplexed when it does not occur.
A second quality is relevance. In order for a person to become emotionally aroused, the event in question must have some relevance to himself. We are not aggrieved when we hear that a stranger in a distant country died in an accident. But we are deeply upset if it was a friend or a loved one, or if the accident happened right in front of us.
The Function of Emotion
Charles Darwin suggested that emotions serve a survival purpose in that they poise us to take action (EN: and that whether that action is then undertaken is usually a rational decision). In this sense, an emotion is a functional shortcut - we do not choose t o cringe when we hear a loud noise, it happens because our emotions, within milliseconds, poise us to react to a perceived threat.
It is the immediate physical reaction that take place within milliseconds that posies us to take action - we are pre-programmed to run when there is danger, and while a person can choose not to run, it is a logical choice that follows the emotional reaction that poises him to take flight. And this is biologically necessary for our survival - if we were to pause, collect more information, analyze it, and make a decision, it would already be too late to flee. So instead, the muscles tense and adrenaline rushes so that we are already prepared to what is the most likely response.
All of this happens unconsciously: our conscious and deliberate mind largely ignores the constant barrage input, but on some level we are always monitoring and analyzing the environment for potential threats. This is why we can easily be distracted when trying to concentrate on something.
Because we are able to rely on our autonomous brain to scan the environment and alert us to signs of danger, we are then able to focus our mind on other things. It is possible for a person's autonomous mind to by hypersensitive, so frequently distracting them from what they are doing to deal with false alarms that they can get nothing done. This is considered a psychological dysfunction.
He also notes that while the body is poised in a fraction of a second, it can take some time for the emotions to wear off. Consider the instance of a near-miss accident: though we recognize immediately that the danger has passed, the adrenaline and hormones have already been released and it may take several seconds to regain our composure.
Emotions also tend to be difficult to explain because they are not the result of a conscious process of thought. A person who was startled and jumped onto a table cannot rationally explain why he jumped onto it instead of diving under it - it was an emotional response that took place faster than the conscious brain could rationalize it.
When the emotion and corresponding action were beneficial, it seems to have made perfect sense - it was "smart" of that person to leap onto the table. But it was not an act of intelligence at all. And this can act against us when the emotion is an inappropriate one. But even if we could switch off our automatic reactions, it would be unwise to do so - as they are usually right.
The Control of Emotion
So we are driven by instinct to have an immediate emotional instinct, lasting for milliseconds, that poises us to take a certain action - but we are then in control of the action that we take. Our feeling of anger poises us to lash out and our feeling of fear poses us to flee - but we do not lash out or flee until the conscious mind confirms this choice.
He speaks of formal training, such as airline pilots receive. It is a natural reaction to feel a sense of fear when encountering air turbulence, but by being exposed to turbulence in training simulations, the pilot learns not to panic. But more accurately, he learns not to give in to the panic he feels and to act upon the fear that he will inevitably feel - as even experienced pilots will admit to feeling a momentary sensation of fear when they encounter turbulence.
There is a brief mention of microexpressions in social encounters, where a person feels an emotion that is socially inappropriate and quickly masks it with an appropriate reaction. This is the same thing, the conscious mind kicking in to countermand the initial emotional response.
There's also a mention of post-rationalization: when a person acts on their emotions and later asserts that it was an intentional decision for them to have reacted the way that they did. In a way, this is correct: their reflex was not rational, but their decision to follow their emotions was. (EN: what's a bit more interesting in the instances in which a person claims that it was not an intentional decision, that they "acted without thinking" when in reality they decided to follow their emotional lead instead of negate it.)
When people report their emotional reactions, they often misrepresent themselves as having felt the culturally-appropriate emotion rather than the one they actually did. This is the reason for the mistaken belief that emotions are purely cultural phenomena - everyone feels fear in certain situations, but not everyone is able to admit it.
The Idiosyncrasy of Emotion
But on the other hand, emotions are not truly universal because the "triggers" are different from one person to another, even in the same culture. Some people feel genuine fear at the sight of a mouse whereas others do not. It is because their triggers are set differently. So while emotional reactions can be called instinctive, they are not innate instincts because different people react in different ways. My instincts are not the same as yours.
Emotions are very often based on experience. A person who has been burned in a fire develops a fear of fire that is not present in others who have not had that experience. Everyone's life experience is unique, hence everyone's emotional triggers are unique - at least to the degree that their experience is not shared with others.
This relates to Pavlov and the theory of operant conditioning: by artificially creating a negative consequence in conjunction to a stimulus, we can create in any person or intelligent creature an emotional trigger. And in desensitization therapy, a trigger is disconnected by subjecting an individual to something that triggers negative reactions in a safe setting for which there are no consequences - and in time their instinctive reaction changes.
Ekman then returns to the cultural versus universal argument, and considers that our emotional reactions are derived from our life experience. The reasons certain cultures have peculiar emotional triggers is because people of that culture have similar life experience: the members of a primitive tribe fear wild pigs, whereas the members of an urban society who grew up in the suburbs have no experience with wild pigs to teach them the fear.
On the other hand, there are elements of human experience that are nearly universal, and which create triggers that are likewise common among all peoples. Almost every person, in every culture, has likely had a negative experience, connected with some degree of physical pain, while fumbling around in the darkness - hence the fear of darkness is a universal theme.
Likewise, almost everyone experiences frustration when they are prevented from doing something they wish to do - and it is very often caused by the interference of another person. Hence becoming angry and frustrated by other people meddling in one's personal business is another universal theme.
Btu while we call certain themes "cultural" or "universal," they really are not. We can say that almost everyone experiences something, but must always include the "almost" because there are some who lack that experience.
He pauses to consider the theory of natural selection, which would suggest that those who do not have the appropriate emotional responses are weeded out of the species: the deer (or man) who has no fear of wolves is eaten and does not breed. But for human begins at least this is quite tenuous - a person who had a negative childhood experience with a dog does not necessarily have children who have the same fear (though they may model behavior that is imitated by their offspring, passing on the tendency through behavior rather than genetics).
He does cede some validity to the evolutionary theory - as experiments have shown that people who live in environments where there is no exposure to snakes do not have a "natural" aversion - but in aversion-therapy experiments where electric shock was used to create an emotional trigger, it took far fewer shocks to get a subject to have a physical anxiety response to a picture of a snake than it did to get them to react in the same way to a picture of a mushroom or a plant. He also Mention's Dawrin's experiment, putting his face to the glass of a terrarium holding a snake, and being unable to control his physical reaction, even knowing he was safe behind the glass.
Other Sources of Emotion
While emotions are often caused by unconscious triggers, this is not the only way in which emotional responses can be elicited. The author proposes there are eight other sources of emotion,
- Considering what emotion we ought to be feeling at the moment
- Considering what emotion we experienced in the past
- Considering what we ought to have felt in the past
- Imagining how we should feel if something were to happen
- Talking about a past emotional experience
- Imagining how someone else is feeling (or would feel)
- Witnessing the emotions that others express
- Considering what emotions are appropriate in the context of culture
- Pretending to be experiencing an emotion
There's a great deal of overlap between them. For example, he speaks about emotions we experience when remembering past events and when discussing past events with someone else - but both of these are based on memory. HE speaks about emotions that arise when we consider something that might happen to us, or the emotions that arise when we consider something that happens to someone else - but in both instances, these are imagining ourselves in different situations (either fabricated situations we imagine might happen to us, or imagining how we would feel in someone else's place).
In each of these instances, emotions arise from the reasoning mind reacting to something internal rather than external, and an imagining that may be altered or entirely fictional. For this reason, the internal sources of emotion tend to he highly variable among individuals and highly inconstant within the same person.
(EN: And perhaps more importantly, most studies of emotions are based on internal rather than external. A subject is not exposed to real danger, but shown a picture or told a story to evoke an emotional response. So the fear of "fire" is not of fire itself, but to whatever the person imagined when presented with stimuli meant to evoke the idea of fire. This may explain a great deal of variance in such studies.)
There's also a loose bit about the reversal of cause and effect. The author notes that when preparing pictures for an experiment, those who were told to make certain expressions often experienced the emotions associated with those expressions. Smile, and you will feel happy. Glower, and you will feel angry. This is also backed by EEG/MRI studies in which electrical patterns in the brain were similar when faking and experiencing an emotion.
Emotional Normalcy
The concept of "normal" is also a significant factor in the study of emotions - as the study itself seeks to find out what normal emotions actually are. A researcher's concept of "normal" is poisoned by his expectations of the emotions he expects to evoke, and society's definition of "normal" is skewed by what is considered to be culturally appropriate.
Normalcy itself is a highly emotional concept, as each person wishes himself to be normal, or assumes that he is normal and that others should be the same as he. The accusation, or even the thought, of being abnormal evokes an emotional response.
Hence in some cultures people are afraid to show fear, because fear is not accepted by their cultural norms, or by their desire to have a self-image that is aligned to their culture's definition of normal.