1 - Approaches to Understanding
In this chapter the authors consider some of the historical approaches to understanding emotion, in that many are still influential to and evident in present-day thinking about the topic, and the source of many of the misconceptions and superstitions that remain widely held on the topic of emotion.
In general, even the scientific literature on the topic treats emotions as random and incoherent intrusions on the mental processes of an otherwise rational human beings. The authors, meanwhile, maintain that emotions are neither random nor inexplicable, but well defined and systematic. But for now, that has to be set aside to appreciate and understand the early theories of emotion such as they are.
Founding a Psychology of Emotions
The authors consider Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud as the representatives, if not the inventors of the three approaches to emotions that seem to characterize much of the early theory.
Biological Approach: Charles Darwin
Darwin is a central figure in modern biology and also strayed deeply into the realm of psychology. His 1872 book "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" focused on the way in which emotions are communicated, and considers them to be components of biological functions that have evolved, much as other capabilities, in support of the ability of man to survive as a social creature.
His approach to evolution gave little attention to the human being as an animal, but in drawing similarities among various animal species he suggested that the traits in more primitive species are inherited by more recent ones, and man as descendent of hominids carries with him vestigial traits and behaviors that were once critical to the survival of species, and others that continue to be critical even today.
An aside: the "Expression of Emotions" is one of the first scientific works to make extensive use of photography, as an illustration is more effective in communicating gesture, posture, and expression than a verbal description.
The first component of this book is a simple analysis of expressions: correlating a given expression to a given emotion (such as a wrinkled being an expression of disgust), and forming a taxonomy of emotional states that gave names to principal emotions and considered their interrelation to one another (such as anxiety blending the emotions of fear and desire).
The second component of the book is analysis of the functional value of expressions - determining which emotional expressions are conscious or unconscious, and how the use of expression is functional to the organism (crying as lubrication and protection of the eyes).
Naturally, Darwin sees the emotion of humans as being derived from members of the animal kingdom - the bared teeth of anger in humans as a vestige of the animal behavior of moving the lips away from the teeth in preparation to deliver a bite, even though humans very seldom engage in biting one another.
Ultimately, Darwin's approach leads to the perspective that emotions are primitive and largely unnecessary and undesirable in modern man, and they should as such be controlled and discouraged. This is not so very different from the perspective that many psychologists seem to take to the topic in the present day.
It's also noted that disdain for emotions did not originate from Darwin or in the Victorian era, but can be seen in western culture far earlier, such as in the philosophy of the Stoics of ancient Greece.
Bodily Approach: William James
In William James's 1890 book "The Principles of Psychology," he presented a theory of emotions that argued that emotions were a biological mechanism. Fear, for example, is functional in that it provokes us to avoid (or run away from) something we unconsciously recognize to be dangerous. In essence, that the emotions were shortcuts utilized when there is insufficient time to more soberly assess the situation and formulate a planned reaction.
He also espoused the notion that emotions were evidence of the involuntary bodily functions: that our heartbeat, respiration, and even digestive systems were sending signals to their control centers within the brain that can be sensed but not controlled by the conscious mind, and that emotion was also a reaction to our somatic senses.
Another of his proposals vaguely implies that emotions give "color and warmth" to experiences, creating associations that cause us not only to remember the identity of things, but our general sense of whether they are harmful or beneficial to us when we reencounter them.
Psychoanalytic Approach: Sigmund Freud
Freud did not propose a direct theory of emotions, but the emotional aspect was a significant facto in many of his other theories, most notably the theories of emotional traumas, internal conflicts, and repetition compulsion.
His theory of traumatic events was that certain events could be so damaging that they leave psychological "scars" that influence the personality of the subject for long periods, potentially life. He was particularly interested in the onset of strong emotions without an apparent stimulus (such as a panic attack), and while the stimulus was not related to a traumatic event for which the subject had suppressed in their memory, or did not consciously recollect details.
This is central to Freud's approach to psychoanalysis, as a process of discovery to make these unconscious associations known, and thereby render patients better ability to recognize and control their reactions.
Philosophical and Literary Background
The authors reach back a bit further, to consider some of the philosophers and writers who considered emotions, which have also had a profound effect on the present perception.
Conceptual Approach: Aristotle
Aristotle had a surprisingly pragmatic approach to emotions: his fundamental insights were that emotions are connected to behaviors, and emotional reaction derive from more carefully considered beliefs. In essence, emotions made perfect sense to Aristotle.
Aristotle considerer the emotional appeal of an argument in his "Rhetoric," where it was regarded a method of persuasion - people accepted an argument because it was logical, because they had faith in the character of the speaker, or because it spoke to their emotions. He regarded the misuse of emotions to sway logic as a "perversion", but considered that an emotional appeal that supported a logical appeal was acceptable and effective.
But to know how to affect (or effect) emotions of an audience, a speaker had to consider the beliefs of his audience. What moves one person to anger or pity may have no effect on another. A person feels elated or saddened for a reason, which could generally be related to their personal experience of pleasure and pain.
Many of his key ideas are reflected in modern psychology: the basis of emotion in cognition, the binary classification as positive or negative, the influence they have on actions and decisions, etc.
Aristotle's postulate is that our emotional reaction is based on a cognitive evaluation. If we are touched by a person we like, we experience a positive emotional reaction; but if touched in the very same way by a person we dislike, the reaction is strongly negative. (EN: and the reasons we like or dislike a given person are generally cognitive in nature, reflected in the memory of the experiences we have had with that individual.)
Aristotle's book on dramatic writing, the "Poetics," delves deeper into emotion, as to consider a work of fiction to be a comedy or a tragedy depends on the emotional reaction the audience has to the events depicted. Even to gain the attention of the audience requires engaging them on an emotional level, and their appreciation of a work depends on the emotional catharsis they experience as a result.
Aristotle's work on the subject of emotion was highly influential with the Roman philosophers that followed, and has been the subject of much consideration since - much of which has been the basis of scientific inquiry to the present day.
Philosophical Approach: Descartes
Rene Descartes considered emotion in "The Passions of the Soul" (1649) - though it's noted that "the soul" was meant in terms of the mind, or the thinking part of ourselves, rather than in a spiritual sense. Following in Aristotle's tradition, Descartes considered emotions to be a functional component of the human body that were explicable.
However, Descartes departed from Aristotle in that he considered emotions to be something apart from the rational mind: the mind can recognize emotions, and we can attempt to control the physical actions to which we are prompted, but we cannot control emotions themselves.
For example, fear is a visceral reaction. A person can recognize that they are afraid, and they can even refrain from taking the action that fear is urging them to make - i.e., they can stand fast rather than running away - but the rational mind cannot prevent a person from experiencing fear itself. Likewise we can in social situations attempt to control our expression and tone to mask our disgust, but we cannot prevent feeling disgusted.
While emotions are provided by our biology in pursuit of positive outcomes, emotions taken to extremes can become dysfunctional. The urge to eat is necessary to provoke us to undertake actions necessary to our survival, but if we overindulge that urge we experience discomfort of overeating in the short term and the detriments of obesity in the long term.
For that reason the rational part of our thinking selves must filter, mitigate, and restrain emotion when it becomes counterproductive.
Philosophical Approach: Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza, a generation after Descartes, is considered to be a luminary in the school of rationalism, which upheld reason and shunned the concept of mysticism - but to the degree that the philosophy itself became mystical, embracing solipsism.
In "Ethics" (1675) Spinoza descried the universe as an expression of the mind of god and that rational thought was the very basis of all of existence. And given god's perfection, the universe does not contain anything random or irrational - it is all part of a very orderly design, though mankind cannot see the full pattern due to his limited perception.
To Spinoza, the positive emotions reflect an individual who accepts the universe such as it is, and the negative arise from rejection of the divine plan. Moreover, it is only by the control of emotion that man controls his destiny - to surrender to emotion is to engage in irrational and uncontrolled behavior.
In spite of Spinoza's mysticism, he maintained that emotion was a cognitive process, a reaction to environmental stimuli in a controlled or uncontrolled manner, reflecting the degree to which the ideas we have correspond to the things and events we witness, and our acceptance of the divine plan.
For example, Spinoza defined hatred as "pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause" - specifically, it is the idea of the cause of our displeasure, rather than the cause itself, that gives rise to hatred. We assess the causal relationship of our sensation and evaluate it to be unjust. This suggest that were we to interpret and understand the events differently, from a higher perspective of the divine plan, we would not experience hatred.
Literary Approach: George Eliot
The author discusses George Eliot, and "Middlemarch" in particular, as an example of the way in which writers develop engaging stories not merely by depicting a sequence of events, but by engaging with the emotions of the reader.
(EN: Unfortunately the discussion here yields little fruit. The authors provide a biographical portrait of the author and provide some interpretations of the book, but not in a way that seems directly connected to the topic of emotion.)
Modern Research
Entering the twentieth century, the consideration of emotions became more systematic and rigorous, and while some of the elements of the preceding theories were carried forward, additional discoveries were made by a handful of different approaches, as described hereafter.
Brain Science
The vague descriptors of "brain science" represents the participation of multiple fields in correlating what we have learned of the brain as a biological organ (its form, structure, and function) with behavior.
There has been particular interest in observing the effects of damage to the organ with changes in personality, contrasting the behavior of a person before the damage occurred with their behavior afterward. (EN: More recent researchers are quick to note that this has not been ideal - because a person was of no interest to scientists before the event, the depiction of their behavior prior to the damage occurring is often a fictional or at least highly confabulated account.)
One example is the case of Phineas Gage, who suffered massive trauma to the left frontal lobe (an iron rod entered his left eye socket and emerged at the top of his head), who survived the injury but underwent a dramatic personality change, from an affable and patient individual to a hostile and flighty.
Ethics have been an impediment in research into this area, as it is not acceptable to damage the brain of a living human being in order to observe its effects. And while it is possible to conduct such experiments on animals, the results are of little value to the understanding of thought and emotion in man. As such it is a slow accumulation of incomplete information on a happenstance basis.
That limitation conceded, what has been found through animal experimentation and happenstance ethnography is that emotional arousal occurs within primitive parts of the brain such as the hypothalamus, which is considered primitive because these structures exist in the brains of animals as well as in man. However, the higher structures of the brain such as the cerebellum, which is far more developed in man than in any species of animal, governs the way in which sensory stimuli reach the lower structures as well as the way in which information from those structures is processed before action is taken.
This theory collocates well with the Victorian view of human emotions as a baser motivation that can be controlled by the higher mind - and the suggestion that man is not a helpless victim of emotion but quite well equipped to exert some level of control over the way in which he reacts to stimuli. Moreover, it is evident that damage or impairment to the brain (e.g., drunkenness) can also be detrimental to our ability to control our emotions - so that they might overwhelm us rather than being competently restrained and directed.
The notion of a higher and lower brain structure took precedent in Darwin's consideration of evolution (which was picked up by a contemporary named Haeckel). Studies of comparative anatomy demonstrate that animal brains are not merely smaller, but also have fewer structures, and the evolution of the human brain can be traced to a primitive reptile brain, to a more developed mammalian brain, and ultimately to the human brain. Studies of fetal brain development also seem to follow the same pattern, with the lower brain structures developing before the higher ones.
There's a passing mention of the practice (now largely abandoned) of intentionally altering the brain in order to effect changes in behavior - whether the removal of some part of the brain (by frontal lobotomy) or the use of electric current to create lesions within the brain, both as a means to influence behavior.
New Psychological Theories
In the latter half of the twentieth century, academic psychologists focused research into two areas of inquiry: the way in which emotions arise from the interpretation of events, and the way in which emotions are expressed.
Attributing emotion to the interpretation or "appraisal" of events is significant in that it acknowledges that the inconsistency of emotion is not evidence of randomness, but evidence that the past experience of a person contributes to the way in which he reacts to future events. Hence, when two people react very differently to some stimulus, the differences can be traced to a very rational cause.
It's also noted that the interpretation is not always a superficial reaction. In some instances it may well be that our reaction is clear and unanimous, but in others we may not know what we feel about something or may experience conflicting emotions. The evaluation and resolution may be unconscious or the result of conscious deliberation.
One theory that arose (Tomkins) considered emotions to mitigate our response to stimuli, which may amplify or counteract the immediate reaction. That is to say that the detection of a threat creates activity in the brain, but further analysis of the stimulus must be done before an appropriate emotional reaction can be formulated.
Tomkins also suggested that facial expression was an effective method for assessing emotional reactions, and in that way there is observable evidence of the way in which a stimulus evokes an initial emotional reaction that is assessed - a person who appears frightened for a moment may return to a relaxed state quickly, or their initial fear may be amplified by the process of evaluation.
Effects of Emotions
Experiments in reaction to environmental stimuli did not initially consider themselves to be investigations into emotion, but the authors assert that they were necessarily so. While the researchers may have neglected not to observe the influence of emotion, or made the conscious decision to ignore it, their consideration of reactions to stimuli nonetheless document variances that we now recognize are attributable to emotion.
More recently, the emotional component of reaction has been recognized and directly considered in experimentation - such that in simple tests such as perceptual-motor skills, the emotional state of subjects was observed and correlated to their results - and the findings are generally that positive emotional state not only correlates to success, but to the efficiency by which the subject seeks to achieve success.
That is to say that a positive mood leads to greater confidence, which leads a subject to proceed with alacrity on their first notion, whereas a negative mood diminishes confidence, leading a subject to doubt their competence and experiment with different approaches - in essence, to second-guess themselves and take longer, sometimes discovering a better approach and other times abandoning one.
It is likewise observed that a person in a positive mood is more likely to interact with others socially, which may be a matter of confidence in their ability to do so, or merely that they are not occupied in their own internal struggle and can direct their attention outward.
There's a brief mention of marketing research that found giving a gift to shoppers entering a store resulted in both a greater likelihood to purchase at all and a likelihood to purchase in greater amounts. It is reckoned that this may be a matter of reciprocation, but it is also likely that putting someone in a good "baseline" mood makes them more likely to feel confident in their decisions.
Further experimentation also demonstrates the way in which mood affects memory. The effects of mood on memory are a bit peculiar: subjects are better able to retrieve memories that match their present mental state - but a person in a negative mood can recount positive memories as well as negative ones, whereas a person in a positive mood recounts fewer negative memories.
From the information graphic: a person in a "sad" mood recounts 10 unpleasant memories and 8 pleasant ones, whereas a person in a positive mood recounts 25 pleasant memories but only one unpleasant one. The implication is that a pleasant mood makes memory slightly more productive but strongly skewed whereas a negative mood is les productive but more balanced.
In terms of perception, mood influences interpretations. The psychoanalytic technique of asking a subject to describe a scene or a shape finds that people in negative moods take a more balanced and objective approach to analyzing what they see, whereas people in a positive mood are more subjective - as with memory, their interpretation is often superficial and highly positive with little consideration of negative options.
Given that perception and interpretation are critical stages of cognition, it should be clear from this evidence that emotion influences our thoughts and behaviors - it is not merely a response to stimulus.
The Dramaturgical Perspective
Shakespeare's assertion that "all the world's a stage" turns out to be a highly accurate representation of human interaction: people "act" for one another in a very literal way, considering the way in which their actions will be interpreted by others in a social environment. That is to say that our behavior is just as much a performance as it is a functional necessities, and in some situations the performance takes precedence.
Sociologist Erving Goffman considered human interactions to be likened to games that involve achieving two outcomes, "winning" at the objective of the game and enjoying social action with the other participants. (EN: pause to consider that it is often described as a gender difference, that men take pleasure in "winning" and women take pleasure in the interaction and are often indifferent to outcome. My sense is it's not strictly divided along gender lines.)
Hochschild, another sociologist, considers the way in which gestures and expressions are used to interact social. For example, the "false smile" of a person who receives an unwanted gift but appreciates the intent of the presenter and wishes to communicate pleasure. A child of parents who worked in diplomatic services, Hochschild was keenly observant to the ways in which individuals of different cultures behaved differently in social situations, and thereby reckoned that that the use of emotion was contrived and controlled by culture.
She also examined behavior in the workplace - the way in which waiters and stewardesses behaved constitutes a kind of performance to elicit an emotional reaction from the customers - similar to the way in which a "good host" at a party tends to the emotional well-being of his guests.
Drawing Together some Threads
(EN: The author provides a summary of the major points of the chapter. I'll likely drop chapter conclusions as I proceed as they add nothing new.)