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9 - Functions and Effects of Emotions in Cognition and Persuasion

(EN: No chapter introduction.)

Functions of Emotions

None of the nineteenth century founders considered emotions to be purposeful at all - they were regarded as vestiges of a more primitive existence at best, and inherently dysfunctional to at least some degree. It was not until several decades later that psychologists speculated that they might have a purpose, and exploring that potential has been instrumental in freeing the study of emotion from negative biases.

From an evolutionary perspective, it has been considered that emotions have evolved as well - they are not vestiges of instinct that are expected to vanish, but components of a rational mind whose significance is prescient to the modern social world. In some instances it is apparent that mankind is growing his emotions rather than outgrowing them, and they are now recognized as having positive functions as well as negative.

Cognitive Functions

The cognitive approach to psychology seeks to understand the way in which the mind works - as if to consider the way it is designed to operate. From this perspective, emotions are not merely a biological quirk, but a supporting function of the rational mind.

One proposal (Tomkins 1995) is that our emotions prioritize goals. Man's situation is not so simple as being in a contrived situation with a singular objective, but instead is faced with many problems and opportunities all at once, and he lacks the capacity to address them all. Emotions decide what gets attention.

The notion of being in a situation where we are prevented from taking a desired action, whether by lack of resources or by conflicting desires, is apparent in literature, all the way back to Greek drama and even to the present day. It's also considered that emotion fills the void of reason: where there is insufficient information or no clear logical path, "gut feel" guides us to make a choice: in drama, generally the wrong one, but in life, generally the right.

Another cognitive approach (Oatley 1987) considers emotions as shortcuts or stored procedures that are accessed rapidly in situations where we have no time to meditate. Consider that the basic emotions of fear and anger are also basic to survival, enabling us respond to threats and challenges immediately does not mean we respond "without thinking" but instead we respond based on superficial thinking.

Emotions are generally responses to stimuli - which means that they not only suggest how to react, but when to react: to be startled by a sudden noise is a response to a stimuli that may represent danger. This is where emotions are similar to instincts, but for the brevity of their duration - soon after being startled we recognize the cause of the emotion and make a more informed decision of how to act next.

It is further suggested (Duncan 1992) that emotions without causes are rare - such that only 6% of emotions can be called "free-floating" - though it is more common to experience the emotion first and recognize its trigger afterward. There's a brief mention of temporal lobe epileptics as individuals who experience emotions without being able to identify the reason.

It is also suggested that the trigger and reaction mechanisms are separate, which his the reason that the mind can become cross-wired: the trigger is associated to a different emotional response, which is most evident when it is triggered to an inappropriate response.

(EN: The author makes no mention here of operant conditioning, but the connection should be self-evident. The question is whether the way in which humans respond is similar to the way in which lesser orders of animals respond. My sense is that it's likely to be a similar mechanism, but not an identical one.)

It's again reiterated that emotions do not cause actions, but cause us to be poised to take action. The decision to act on emotion is separate.

It's also considered that emotions are not merely triggered by a need to change, but a need to continue. That is to say emotion may begin at a sudden change, but in order to sustain momentum there must be sustained emotion - and it may not necessarily be the same emotion that caused action to be initiated.

Specifically, we become contented with doing whatever it is we happen to be doing because we seem to be making progress toward the goal - but in order to take action we had to be something other than contented. By contrast, if we feel sad or frustrated it is a prompt to reconsider whether the action being taken is likely to accomplish the goal, and causes us to reconsider.

(EN: The concept of "sustaining emotions" seems very interesting, but the authors do not explore it further.)

Rationality and Emotions

(EN: This section is a bit of a philosophical ramble ...)

In very simple animals, such as insects, their behavior is controlled by reflexes. The example is given of the way in which ticks clinging to branches release their grip at the detection of butyric acid, then move toward warmth in order to attach itself to a host. This is entirely successful, but it is not rational" the tick's world is very simple and there is no sign of reason or emotionality.

Then jump to the opposite end of the spectrum, imagining a creature od superhuman intelligence that is omniscient and omnipotent. Such a being would have no need of emotion, having perfect knowledge and perfect ability to foresee the outcome of any action. There is no place for emotions where everything is known and anticipated.

Human beings exist in the middle - we perceive the complexity of the world and have the sense of our power and the outcomes of our actions, but this knowledge is highly imperfect. We must act in situations of uncertainty, hoping but not knowing the outcome of our actions will be positive.

That is to say that we employ reason, in varying degrees, to accommodate our limitations. We "guess" because we do not know, and "try" because we cannot be certain of the outcome. This enables us to succeed in a manner that is between taking random action and becoming lost in meditation. Were it not so the human race would have become extinct for its utter incapacity to deal with uncertainty in the struggle for survival.

Emotions as Heuristics

Emotions can also be considered as heuristics - methods of doing something that is typically useful when there is no guaranteed solution. This is a common problem-solving strategy that leverages knowledge and experience.

Except for certain technical problems in contrived environments, there are few if any algorithms in human life - so we mostly rely on our emotions and our reasoning mind to cope with the problems and seize on opportunities that arise.

Emotions in the Management of Action

The authors propose to "briefly sketch, without many qualifications" the basic emotions and their functions within an individual.

Free-Floating Emotions

There are four basic free-floating or unintentional emotions, which people often feel without recognizing their source and can seldom easily suggest a source in arrears.

• Happiness (Enjoyment)is the mood associated with the achievement of goals, which keeps us engaged in a useful activity. There is some evidence that being in a happy mood makes us better able to succeed, and that a general state of optimism not only causes people to maintain interest in doing something, but to tackle more complex problems with greater confidence.
• Sadness (Depression) is generally described as the opposite of happiness, and arises from losing ground rather than gaining it. It's suggested that sadness also leads a person to focus on himself rather than the environment. It's noted that in many European cultures, sadness is encouraged because it demonstrates the virtues of acceptance and patience.
• Anger (Irritability) is considered to be a reaction to something that is impeding progress toward a goal, or something that is causing us to lose what we have. Anger may attach itself to things or situations, but is often misdirected at other people
• Fear (Anxiety) is an emotion of anticipated danger, prompted largely by the same stimuli as anger (an obstruction to achievement or threat to the status quo) but coupled with the sense that we are not empowered to overcome it.

Emotions that Have an Object

Five other emotions, in the nature of attraction and repulsion, are always felt toward an object of some kind. It is argued that these emotions are based on intent, but the authors don't feel there is enough support for that hypothesis, as there are emotions that do not have a clear intention to act, but still rely on the existence of an object. It's also noted that an "object" need not be a person or a thing, but can merely be an idea

• Attachment Love - An emotion that is generally seen in a dependent relationship: child-to-parent, and generally experienced by the weaker party that seeks attachment to a stronger one.
• Caregiving Love - Is the emotional state of the stronger party in an attachment relationship that makes them inclined to act in the welfare of the weaker.
• Sexual Love - Is attraction to another person, or more aptly "to their idea of the other person" that may not be in line with reality.
• Disgust - Is a reaction to an object that makes us sick, literally or metaphorically. Some trace this emotion to a survival reaction to materials that are toxic or unhealthy, and note that feelings of revulsion are often closely related to scent and taste, though humans can for disgust reactions to audiovisual stimuli as well as to ideas.
• Contempt - Is a form of disgust reserved for other human beings, which takes the form of prejudice against a group or even a single individual, either based on our idea of them or our experience dealing with them.

Considering Emptions as Positive or Negative

It is typical to take a polar view of emotions, to see them as positive-negative, pleasant-unpleasant, desirable-undesirable. This also suits the western method of classifying knowledge in terms of defining is-not relationships and seeing things as being opposed to one another.

However, this binary approach can also be preventative to having an accurate understanding of emotions. Happiness is not the opposite of sadness, nor fear of anger, as much as they may seem that way.

To assume one is the opposite of another, can be elicited by the opposite of the other, and so on leaves us at a loss when a person is feeling "happy and sad" or "angry and afraid" which are emotional states that occur in the wid.

And so, while it might seem useful to schematize emotions as such, be wary of the limitations that this practice can create in gaining an accurate understanding of emotion.

Emotional Affect on Cognitive Functioning

Emotions and moods have two kinds of effects on people. Emotions, which are by definition reactions that create a state of readiness, predispose subjects to take immediate action. Moods, which are more long-lived, are weaker but more insidious to priming the mind to perceive and think in a given way.

We can see this in common social practices, such as offering food to guests or a small gift to a business partner: by giving happiness to others, they are more positively disposed toward us. In extreme cases, this is regarded negatively (bribery), but it is also critical to relationship building to create and sustain positive emotions in those with whom we interact.

Perceptual Effects

The authors spend some time on a few experiments that have attempted to relate emotion to perception, in both directions. Does the way we feel influence the way we perceive things? Does the way we perceive things (especially things in the background, like music) affect the way we feel?

Ultimately, these experiments were inconclusive - there is still the notion that there is a link between emotion and perception - but "such effects have been difficult to demonstrate." The experiments suggest there may be an effect of emotion on perception, but without correlation to a negative or positive dimension.

(EN: I've skipped the copious detail on the experiments, but they were rigged inasmuch as possible to focus on perception rather than more general cognition. That is significant because the lack of evidence here means only that emotions do not seem to have a connection to perception, but there is more to cognition than mere perception.)

Attentional Qualities

A quote from William James: "My experience is what I agree to attend to." This suggests that it is not merely the perception of an environment that creates an experience, but those elements of the environment to which the subject chooses to give attention. This is significant given that the human mind is incapable of attending to everything we perceive, and filters perception to those factors that are considered, without much deliberation, to be of importance. In this sense, research provides strong evidence for a correlation.

The effects of anxiety, fear, and stress have been widely studied. Where a negative emotion has an object, people are more attuned to that object - e.g., a person who is afraid of something fails to notice anything in the surrounding environment.

One experiment (Matthews 1988) provided word-pairs, with one emotionally charged word and another emotionally neutral word, with a "dot" beside one of the words. Reaction times were faster when the dot was paired with the "threat" word. (EN: I have the sense that this is a bit of a stretch, but other experiments in linguistics have shown that attention and retention is higher when there is emotionally charged language than neutral language.)

There is some mention of the Stroop test (1935) in which participants are shown the name of a color that is printed in a different color of ink (e.g., the word "red" is in blue ink) that demonstrates difficulty in naming either the word or the color when there is a mismatch, with some cueing off the word in spite of the color and others cueing off the color in spite of the word.

The test was modified to be performed on subjects who had experienced trauma - they were asked to name the color of words that were either neutral ("table") or in some way related to their trauma ("pain"). The time to name the color was slower for words that related to the trauma the subject had experienced, though to a lesser degree in people who were assessed to have coped better with it, a suggestion that the emotions evoked by the word distracted from the cognitive process of naming the color.

One theory suggests that this is the effect of a survival mechanism - to focus on a threat is necessary to react to the threat by becoming attuned to specific details that enable us to evade or mitigate it.

While it is entirely rational and functional to be attuned to threats, anxiety disorders arise when this is taken to such degree that it impairs cognitive functioning - to feel worry when there is no threat present, or to overreact to the hint of a threat, to the degree that it interferes with the ability to think and act.

Another related category of disorders results for improper attentioning: a person who has experienced a trauma may relate their fear to an unrelated object (the child bitten by a dog while riding a bicycle develops a fear of bicycles) or even people who have not experienced trauma may be anxious about factors that are unrelated to the object of their concern (a person who fears cancer is obsessed with every freckle, mole, or pimple on their body).

Emotions and Memory

Memory is significant to cognition, as the information we have about what we immediately perceived is entered into a mental framework that is composed entirely of memory - and the filters that may prevent information from being considered at all must pass through filters that use memories as a basis for determining whether any new information is worth giving attention.

The way in which we remember things is never exact - our account of an event is accentuated, changed, or even fabricated by our preconceptions that are, again, based on memory. But because emotion functions as a shortcut to thinking, the way we feel about something precedes the way we think about it - such that emotion is not only important to what we perceive, but what we remember from our experiences.

The authors present two statements (from Loftus 1980) about the way in which memory works:

1. Everything we learn is stored in the mind, although details may be difficult to access - noting that hypnosis is believed to help overcome cognitive filters to perception and retrieve "lost" memories
2. This storage is extensive, but not limitless or permanent. Some details are not recorded, and some details that are recorded are lost to the point that not even hypnosis can recover them.

The authors concede that hypnosis is hotly debated, particularly given the media attention of cases in which adults recalled abuse as children and then it was later discovered these memories were fabricated or confabulated. So while few deny that subjects under hypnosis can often retrieve forgotten details, there is much skepticism about whether the details they recall are factual, particularly when the memories are distant.

Moreover, there is no evidence to support the notion that everything we perceive is stored perfectly and permanently in the mind - but that perception and memory are fallible and transient: we do not remember everything and forget what we remember over time. (EN: There has been some evidence that memory is stronger when the information from the past is used on a regular basis or associated to strong emotions.)

There's also a side-note that people piece together their memory from their sensory data and other sources: subjects in an experiment who watched a film and then read the accounts of other people were indiscriminate in reporting details that they had actually seen and those that they had only read about.

As such, memory is regarded as "an imaginative reconstruction" that pieces together bits of information - often using emotion as a guide to determine which bits are important and which are not.

The validity of human memory has been the subject of much study and speculation, largely because of the importance of testimony in the judicial system: an attorney can undermine the credibility of a witness merely by suggesting that their memory is imperfect.

Results of a self-study (Linton 1982) are reported in which a researcher took notes on two events each day that seemed significant and assessed her own ability to remember details later. What she found was that the memory of common events was lost rather quickly - they blended into the "patter on her life" - and even the details of recurring events were lost. In general, she observed that she remembered events that met three criteria:

1. The event was perceived as being strongly emotional at the time
2. Events are remembered in the context of a sequence (episode), either supporting or interrupting the plot
3. The event was relatively unique and did not blend into routine or repetitive sensation

Even events that were unique and emotionally salient that were vivid in her memory, and even those were lost at a rate of about 5% per year. Another observation from the study is that memories are not recorded, but retold - even within the mind of the person who was involved and directly observing the scene, it is just as likely that details are changed as events are recorded into memory.

A second researcher (Wagenaar 1986) attempted a similar study: over a four-year period, he recorded the most significant event of each day, using a form to collect detail about the event and the people involved along with any details he considered to be critical. He also rated events on a 100-point scale for each of three qualities: salience, emotional impact, and pleasantness. He found that 20% of these events were completely forgotten, and his results agreed with Linton that salience and emotion coincided with retention, and that pleasantness was also a factor in his ability to recall events.

(EN: The focus on pleasantness/unpleasantness may be indicative of the individual. Even in everyday experience, its clear to see that some people focus on positive aspects and others focus on negative, so it may be a matter of temperament. I also sense it may also have to do with context - a pleasant element in a traumatic experience or an unpleasant element in an otherwise delightful experience may either stand out in memory or be glossed over. This is merely an observation of a tendency of people telling stories about past events to select details that agree with the overall theme of their recollection.)

Extensive study has been done into eyewitness testimony in the judicial system that has led to a general sense that it is not reliable. Even when people speak with certainty about events that they witnessed, the details are often inconsistent with mechanical recordings (such as videotape) of the actual events.

A case study is presented (Yuille 1986) in which witnesses to a deadly shoot-out between a store owner and a robber were examined. All were certain and accurate of the basic scenario (a shootout between two men) but lost details as to the number of shots that were fired, the description of he pistols, and the blanket used to cover the body. During police interviews on the scene witness accounts were 93.4% accurate, but five months later (the average time between an event and a trial) the accounts were only 88.2% correct, and only 75% correct in the memories of witnesses that reported feeling less stressed at the incident.

This suggests that emotional intensity improves, rather than detracts from, the accuracy of memory. These findings are corroborated by other stories that compare witness accounts to videotape. (EN: I'm skipping the details of similar studies, as there are variations in the percentages but the general conclusion regarding emotion is supported.)

A separate study (Christianson 191) showed subjects a sequence of slides to test their recollection of details - with focus on the eighth slide (the middle one in a series of fifteen, for which recall is shown to be lowest) that featured a traumatic event (an injured person). What was found that details such as the color of the person's coat or a car in the background were recalled with greater accuracy than details of the other slides, which showed humdrum events (a person walking or riding a bicycle). Moreover, the study observed that it did not seem to matter whether the detail was foreground (the person's coat) or background (a car behind them) in the accuracy of recall.

Another study was conducted on the recall of peripheral details - a psychology professor asked students to recall details of where they were on the day that the space shuttle Challenger exploded the very next day, then caught up with the same students two years later and asked them to do the same. There was only 37.8% agreement between the two accounts - even among major details such as "where were you at the time?"

Additional studies have been done on the effect of mood on memory, using various tactics to encourage a positive or negative mood (e.g. a series of problems that were easy or difficult to solve, in which a proctor praised or criticized the subject).

• Control subjects in a "neutral" mood performed best overall in recalling the most details, as well as a balance of both positive and negative details
• Subjects in a positive mood had the second highest score in recalling the number of details, but were heavily skewed to forget negative details and focus only on positive
• Subjects in a negative mood had the lowest overall score but showed a balance of recalling positive and negative details

This supports the assertion form an earlier chapter that people in a neutral to slightly negative mood have more effective and balanced recollection of past events, as well as the present assertion that memory is skewed to favor details that support the overall emotional state of the subject and are more biased in positive moods.

The author does concede that the theory of mood-dependent memory is not as "robust and wide-=ranging" as early studies seemed to indicate. Moreover the conclusions supported by laboratory research are often contradicted by field research, which shows that the relationship between mood and memory does follow the pattern lab research describes, but not as consistently nor in as pronounced a manner.

There has also been evidence (Bowers 1981) that there is correlation between the mood at the time of experience, mood at the time of recollection, and the accuracy and detail of memory. That is, when a person in a negative mood recalls a negative event, their memory of it is more accurate and detailed than if there was a mismatch in mood and emotion (a negative mood recalling a positive event or vice-versa).

A few other stray notes include the value of mental imagery (when a memory is tied to a visual stimulus, it is stronger) and egocentricity (better memory when an event is related to self, rather than related to another person).

Effects of Mood on Judgment

Life is ambiguous, and decisions are made based on mood. When we judge something as good or bad, decide whether to do something or refrain from doing it, or to debate for or against something in a discussion, the judgment we make is based on a combination of reason and emotion.

While the desire is to set emotions aside and make a purely rational decision, emotional influence cannot be denied. Some even take the extreme position that facts do nothing but give us details to which we react in an emotional manner.

Ethos, Logos, Pathos

There's a brief mention of Aristotle, whose rhetoric described three methods of convincing someone of an argument: logos (rational facts), ethos (their trust in the speaker), and pathos (their emotions). To this day, his three approaches are still regarded and practiced, in more or less the way Aristotle suggested (a logical argument, leveraging emotion to gain credibility for the case the speaker is making).

Emotion and reason have also been long regarded as opponents in an internal struggle - to be emotional is to be irrational - but closer examination shows that the two must be in agreement before a commitment is made.

A bit of detail is given about an experiment (Worth 1987) in which subjects were shown the same recorded speech and asked to indicate, during the course of the speech, whether they agreed with the speaker's thesis.

To test logos, different presentations by the same speaker were used, one of which included weak arguments (opinion with few facts and little structure), the other of which presented strong arguments (presentation of facts, demonstration of the logic by which the facts supported the conclusion). Early in the program, the weak argument was considered slightly more convincing than the strong - but by the end there was a dramatic difference in favor of the logical argument (a 3:1 ratio).

To test ethos, background information was provided on the speaker. Those who were told the speaker was an expert showed a high level of agreement in the beginning of the speech that waned during its course. Those who were told the speaker was a non-expert showed a lower level of agreement that increased during its course. By the end of the speech, the scores of the two groups were nearly equal.

To test pathos, some participants were paid their fee at the beginning of the presentation and others at the end, on the presumption that those who were paid before the presentation would be in a better mood. This also demonstrated the pattern that happy people are more easily persuaded, but that their enthusiasm wanes during the course of the presentation.

A separate researcher (Clore 1988) offers the hypothesis is that mood functions like an additional piece of information. An unemotional person takes the facts into consideration in making a decision. An emotional person considers the same facts, but also his mood. This is the reason that opinions converge over the course of the presentation: at the onset, there was only emotion to consider, but after getting additional information, the emotion may remain but represents a smaller ratio of the amount of data being assessed.

Misattribution

The authors find it "disturbing" that mood can be manipulated independently of anything else. It's quite common to observe that a decision was influenced by the residual mood of a prior event that had nothing to do with the present evaluation. An interviewer who had an argument with his spouse will take a dimmer view of a candidate as a result, or a politician who had an unsatisfactory lunch will be more likely to reject a bill.

There is reference to a study (Schachter 1962) in which subjects were injected with adrenaline (and told that it was a drug that would improve eyesight) were put into a social context that was designed to evoke feelings of pleasure, but who instead behaved anxiously, and when put in a frustrating situation were more prone to outbursts of anger.

Another experiment (same researcher) showed that people were more "amorous" after having walked across a "rather scary suspension bridge" as opposed to a lower and more stable bridge. (The study used a female proctor to interview male subjects and gave them a number to call if they had questions, then measured the number who called asking for a date.)

These and other such experiments demonstrate how mood can influence judgment, even if subjects are unaware of the cause of their mood. It is suggested that rhetorical devices such as ethos and pathos function the same way - generating a mood that is unconnected to the logic of the argument.

Persuasion

The classical approach to persuasion suggests that the best way to present a convincing case is through pure logic that presents facts and shows their relationship to a conclusion, and to leverage emotion only in instances where the facts alone would not lead to a firm conclusion.

However, the authors argument that outside the field of mathematics and science, there are no certainties in life and we are always in a position where we cannot be absolutely certain of anything.

(EN: Even math and science have come into doubt because "proof" exists only in a contrived situation - mathematic accounts for quantities, but quantification is arbitrary, and science always entails a carefully arranged situation such that the outcome is prejudiced by the design of the experiment.)

The difference between the classical and contemporary approach is that Aristotle considered the use of ethos and pathos to bolster and support logic, whereas in the present day it is recognized that they can also serve to subvert it, and many in professions that attempt to use persuasion to achieve a goal (marketing, politics, law, and the like) set out with the very intention of subverting logic.

The classical view is also criticized for its binary nature: Aristotle's approach to argumentation was a competition between two speakers with different perspectives. But the internal mechanisms are now known to be involve many factors to differing degrees - such that the process by which a person makes a decision is highly complex.

The authors the present some of the ideas of Quintillian, a Roman rhetor, who more carefully considered the emotional impact of an argument - to present more than just the facts, but the circumstances that cause us to interpret facts differently (e.g., whether a physical attack was provoked or not determines whether we consider the matter to be criminal or to mitigate the degree of the punishment).

We could make purely rational decisions if we were omniscient, but being as this is not the case we rely heavily on emotions in the decision-making process - and the art of persuasion is as much about manipulating feelings as presenting facts.