Table of Contents
Cover
Figures
Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART I: Perspectives on Emotions
1 Approaches to Understanding Emotions
Introduction
What Is an Emotion? First Ideas
Nineteenth-Century Founders
Philosophical and Literary Approaches
Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology
Empirical Inspirations for a New Science of Emotion
What Is an Emotion? A Framework
The Emotional Realm: Emotions—Moods—Dispositions
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
2 Evolution of Emotions
Elements of an Evolutionary Approach
An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions
Evolution of Symbolic Representation and Language
Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
3 Cultural Understandings of Emotions
An Island Society
Cross-cultural Approaches to Emotion
The Construction of Emotions in the West
Sexual Love in the West
Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
PART II: Elements of Emotions
4 Communication of Emotions
Five Kinds of Nonverbal Behavior
Facial Expressions of Emotion
Vocal Communication of Emotion
Tactile Communication of Emotion
Emotional Expression and the Coordination of Social
Interaction
Cultural Variation in Emotional Expression
Communication of Emotion in Art
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
5 Bodily Changes and Emotions
Early Theorizing About Emotion and Bodily Changes
Emotion and the Autonomic Nervous System
Emotion and the Neuroendocrine System
Emotion and the Immune System
Bodily Changes and Emotional Experience
Embodiment, Cognition, and Social Interaction
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
6 Appraisal, Experience, Regulation
Appraisal and Emotion
Primary Appraisals, Good and Bad
Secondary Appraisals
A Third Phase of Appraisal: Verbal Sharing
Words and concepts
Emotional Experience
Regulation of Emotions
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
7 Brain Mechanisms and Emotion
Historical Approaches to the Neuroscience of Emotion
Emotion‐Related Appraisals and Subcortical Processes in
the Brain
Bodily Awareness and Subjective Feeling: The Anterior
Insular Cortex
From Conceptualization to Empathic Understanding:
Cortical Processes in the Brain
The Search for Emotion‐Specific Patterns of Brain
Activation
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
PART III: Emotions and Social Life
8 Development of Emotions in Childhood
Theories of Emotional Development
Emotional Expression
Recognition of Emotions
Regulation of Emotions
Biological Contributions to Temperament
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
9 Emotions in Social Relationships
Emotions Within Intimate Relationships
Emotions in Friendships
Emotions in Hierarchical Relationships
Emotion and Group Dynamics
Emotional Intelligence
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
10 Emotions and Thinking
Passion and Reason
Emotions Prioritize Thoughts, Goals, and Actions
Emotion and Mood in Economic Behavior
Affect Infusion, and Affect as Information
Styles of Processing
Effects of Moods and Emotions on Cognitive Functioning
Morality
Emotions and the Law
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
PART IV: Emotions and the Individual
11 Individual Differences in Emotionality
Emotionality Over the Life Span
Attachment and Emotionality
Parental Behaviors Beyond Attachment
Beyond Parenting: Influences of Siblings, Peers, and the
Broader Social Context
Programs That Optimize Emotional Development
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
12 Psychopathology of Emotions in Childhood
Emotions and Psychopathology
Prevalence of Psychopathology in Childhood
The Relationship Between Risk Factors and
Psychopathology
Risk Factors
Trajectories of Disorders
Interventions for Child and Adolescent Psychopathology
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
13 Emotional Disorders in Adulthood
Depression and Anxiety
Psychiatric Disorders: Symptoms and Prevalence
How Disorders Are Caused
Gene–Environment Interactions
Emotional Predispositions and Emotional Disorders
Vulnerability Factors
Recurrence, Recovery, and Prolongation of Disorders
Neurophysiology of Depression and Anxiety
Beyond Depression and Anxiety
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
14 A Meaningful Life
A Significant Event
Meaning in Life
Psychological Therapy with Others and by Oneself
Mindfulness, Ancient and Modern
Consciously Making Sense of Emotions
Emotions in Literature
Emotion and Free Will
Emotion and Meaning in the Social World
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
References
Author Index
Subject Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1 Emotional expressions discussed by Darwin (1872),
the bodily systems used, and the type of emotion which was
expressed
Chapter 2
Table 2.1 Examples of adaptations
Table 2.2 Ainsworth’s (1967) list of attachment behaviors
Table 2.3 Relations, recurring situations, and emotions
Chapter 3
Table 3.1 Two different self-construals. This table outlines
contrasting elements of the independent self, prominent in
Northern Europe and North America, with the
interdependent self, prominent in Asia, Africa, and South
America
Table 3.2 Comparison of evolutionary and cultural
approaches
Chapter 4
Table 4.1 Drawings and “stickers” of 16 emotions
Table 4.2 Darwin's descriptions of emotional expression from
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Table 4.3 Accuracy rates for participants from New Guinea
and the United States in judging expressions of six emotions
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 Emotion‐related changes in autonomic physiology
observed in the directed facial action task
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 Modes of action readiness
Table 6.2 Dimensions of appraisal
Table 6.3 Prototype of sadness
Chapter 7
Table 7.1 Jaak Panksepp's ideas of social–emotional systems
of the brain.
Chapter 8
Table 8.1 Numbers of children who showed embarrassment
as a function of whether they recognized themselves from
the rouge‐on‐the‐nose test (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, &
Weiss, 1989).
Table 8.2 Mapping of dimensions of temperament onto
aspects of emotions, for two well‐known schemes of
temperament: Buss and Plomin's (1975) and Rothbart's
(1981).
Chapter 9
Table 9.1 Measure of social support
Table 9.2 In groups of four, high‐power (HP) and low‐power
(LP) fraternity members teased one another. During these
interactions, high‐power individuals were more likely to
smile with delight and to show facial displays of anger and
contempt, especially when being challenged by a low‐power
member. Low‐power fraternity members, in contrast, were
more likely to show displays of fear and pain.
Chapter 10
Table 10.1 Moral principles and characteristics
Chapter 11
Table 11.1 Positive emotionality, as assessed in the magnitude
of the smile shown in a photograph at age 20, predicts adult
personality, relationship satisfaction, and personal well‐being
over the next 30 years
Table 11.2 Number of individuals in three different categories
for caregiver's adult attachment status and their children's
attachment status, in 2,774 dyads
Chapter 12
Table 12.1 Three‐month prevalence rates of psychopathology
among a representative sample of children and adolescents of
different age groups
Table 12.2 Proportion of variance in childhood disorders
attributable to additive genetic factors
Chapter 13
Table 13.1 Lifetime prevalence (in percentages) of psychiatric
conditions in people aged 18 and over in the 48 contiguous
United States, using the World Health Organization World
Mental Health Survey version of the Composite International
Diagnostic Interview
Table 13.2 Adversities that cause depressive and anxiety
disorders
Table 13.3 Plomin et al.’s (2016) top ten replicated findings in
behavioral genetics
Table 13.4 Disorders as excesses, deficits, and dysfunctions of
emotions
Chapter 14
Table 14.1 Modes and characteristics of meaning in life
Table 14.2 Pretreatment and posttreatment means on two
symptom measures for clients receiving client-centered
therapy or emotion-focused therapy
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
FIGURE 1.0 Young girl in a hat, from Darwin (1872)
FIGURE 1.1 Characters from Inside Out.
FIGURE 1.2 Drawing of Charles Darwin.
FIGURE 1.3 Two of Charles Darwin’s photographs, sneering
and crying: (a) Plate IV No. 1; (b) Plate 1 No. 1.
FIGURE 1.4 Group photograph of the conference to mark
Freud’s honorary degree at Clark University in 1909. In the
front row Freud is fourth from the right, Jung third from the
right, and William James is third from the left.
FIGURE 1.5 The theater in classical times was an important
institution, constructed to portray action in the context of
fellow citizens who sat there in full view.
FIGURE 1.6 A stoa that runs alongside the agora
(marketplace) in Athens. It was in such a place that the Stoics
taught the management of emotions. (The stoa in this
picture is not the original but one constructed a century after
the founding of Stoicism, and rebuilt in the 1930s).
FIGURE 1.7 Model of Phineas Gage’s head and his skull
showing the exit hole made by the tamping rod.
FIGURE 1.8 Empathy (darker color labels) and compassion
(lighter color labels) in networks in the brain.
FIGURE 1.9 Arlie Hochschild is a pioneering scientist in the
study of emotion.
FIGURE 1.10 A model of the unfolding processes of emotion.
FIGURE 1.11 A spectrum of emotional phenomena in terms
of the time course of each.
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2.0 About 10 minutes before this photograph was
taken these two male chimpanzees had a fight that ended in
the trees. Now one extends a hand toward the other in
reconciliation. Immediately after this, they embraced and
climbed down to the ground together.
FIGURE 2.1 These two male elephant seals are in the midst
of a struggle to determine their relative strength and standing
within a social hierarchy, which will impact their mating
opportunities.
FIGURE 2.2a AND 2.2b. Given their hypervulnerability, new
babies rely on a variety of cues, evolutionary reasoning holds,
such as smiles, coos, soft skin, and cute faces to draw parents
into the provision of care, and this intensive caregiving
continues for several years.
FIGURE 2.3 Greeting gestures around the world often
involve smiles, eye contact, touch, and the raising of the
eyebrows.
FIGURE 2.4 A DNA molecule.
FIGURE 2.5 A group of San people.
FIGURE 2.6 Human relatedness to the apes.
FIGURE 2.7 An Orangutan mother and offspring in Borneo.
FIGURE 2.8 In chimpanzees, threat displays and chasing are
part of the negotiation of rank within hierarchies.
FIGURE 2.9 Two chimpanzees grooming. Dunbar’s
hypothesis is that in humans this emotionally intimate
activity has been replaced by conversation.
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3.0 A bronze figurine from the Han dynasty in
China, made more than 2,000 years ago, probably
representing a person from an foreign northern tribe.
FIGURE 3.1 An Ifaluk woman smiles as she makes an
impromptu head-dress for her small son. This kind of socially
responsive smiling is of a lower intensity and signals
something different from ker, meaning “excited happiness”
(from Lutz, 1988, p. 49).
FIGURE 3.2 Image used in research by Masuda and
colleagues (2008b), in which the central figure is smiling and
surrounding individuals are frowning.
FIGURE 3.3 European Americans experience and express
greater anger in response to a frustrating experimenter
(adapted from Mauss, Butler, Roberts, & Chu, 2010).
FIGURE 3.4 Calmness and serenity are at the heart of
Buddhism, which has shaped the emotional lives of vast parts
of East Asian cultures.
FIGURE 3.5 European Americans reveal a greater preference
for exciting recreational activities (left-hand panel adapted
from Tsai, Louie et al., 2007). Christian texts place a greater
value on high-arousal, positive emotions (HAP), whereas
Buddhist texts place a greater value on low-arousal, calm,
positive emotions (LAP) (right-hand panel adapted from Tsai,
Miao, & Seppala, 2007).
FIGURE 3.6 Homicide rates in England and in Europe as a
whole from Eisner (2003). (The data point for England in the
fifteenth century is an interpolation; Eisner did not have
enough data for an estimate for this century.)
FIGURE 3.7 Title page of volume 1 of Frankenstein, written
by Mary Shelley but published anonymously in 1818.
FIGURE 3.8 The origin of the culturally distinctive version of
romantic love that occurs in the West is traced from courtly
love in medieval Europe. The most famous book depicting
this was Roman de la Rose, for which this was an illuminated
illustration from about 1500 depicting the garden of courtly
love.
Chapter 4
FIGURE 4.0 Most important social rituals, as at this wedding
when the groom embraces a groomsman, involve emotional
expression involving the face, the voice, touch, and different
movements of the body. In fact, most social interactions, you
shall learn, are rich with emotional expression.
FIGURE 4.1 “Flirtation,” by the Hungarian painter Miklós
Barabás, showing characteristic elements: the man shows
direct interest with body and head oriented toward the
woman; the woman shows classic coyness, with head and
gaze cast away.
FIGURE 4.2 A coarse gesture of contempt: seen in Britain,
but not in southern Europe. Such gestures are based on
learned conventions like words (from Morris et al., 1979).
FIGURE 4.3 Dr. Martin Luther King using the clenched fist,
an inspiring illustrator, to add strength to his words in a
speech in Philadelphia.
FIGURE 4.4 Six different emotions: (a) anger, (b) disgust, (c)
fear, (d) happiness, (e) sadness, and (f) surprise. The
expressions in these photos are similar to those described by
Darwin, to those used by Ekman and Friesen in their
universality studies, and to those used in many other studies
of facial expression.
FIGURE 4.5 Paul Ekman in New Guinea.
FIGURE 4.6 Affiliation‐related displays in chimpanzees
captured by Frans de Waal.
FIGURE 4.7 Static photos of expressions of love, desire, and
sympathy.
FIGURE 4.8 Static photos of expressions of embarrassment,
shame, and pride.
FIGURE 4.9 Sighted (top panel) and blind (bottom panel)
Olympic Athletes' nonverbal displays to winning and losing a
competition (from Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008).
FIGURE 4.10 Static photos of expressions of amusement,
interest, and contentment.
FIGURE 4.11 Accuracy rates across 10 cultures in judging
emotions from static photos of facial/bodily expressions.
Chance guessing is represented in the dotted line (adapted
from Keltner & Cordaro, 2016).
FIGURE 4.12 Anatomy of the vocal apparatus (from
babelsdawn.com).
FIGURE 4.13 Observers in 10 cultures are able to identify
several emotions from vocal bursts (from Cordaro et al.,
2016).
FIGURE 4.14 A Himba woman listening to vocal bursts, and
Disa Sauter working with the Himba.
FIGURE 4.15 Three different kinds of fearful response by
vervet monkeys to three kinds of predator.
FIGURE 4.16 Accuracy with which individuals can
communicate emotion by touching a stranger on the forearm
(left bars in light gray) or anywhere on the body (dark gray to
right).
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5.0 Bernini: St. Teresa. Of this sculpture Gombrich
(1972, p. 345) says that Bernini has “carried us to a pitch of
emotion which artists had so far shunned.”
FIGURE 5.1 Anatomical diagram of the human autonomic
nervous system.
FIGURE 5.2 In this setup in Robert Levenson's laboratory,
two participants' autonomic physiology is recorded as they
talk with each other. Receptors help gather measures of
participants' activity, heart rate, pulse in the finger and ear,
galvanic sweat response in the finger, skin temperature, and
respiration.
FIGURE 5.3 Participants who begin the study with elevated
vagal tone (solid line) show greater increases over time in
social connectedness and positive emotion, which in turn
track increases in vagal tone (from Kok & Fredrickson,
2008).
FIGURE 5.4 The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis that
releases cortisol into the blood stream.
FIGURE 5.5 Teenagers navigating white‐water rapids on a
river in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (photo by Craig
Anderson).
FIGURE 5.6 In situations of increased social evaluative
threat, or SET (dotted line), one measure of cytokine release
(TNF‐alpha) increases when participants must give a speech
about why they would be a good candidate for a job (from
Dickerson et al., 2009).
FIGURE 5.7 Body maps of emotion‐specific sensations
Brighter areas indicate where participants report increased
physical sensation for the emotion.
FIGURE 5.8 Processing concepts related to specific emotions
activates emotion‐specific facial muscles for happiness,
anger, and disgust (adapted from Niedenthal et al., 2009).
Corrugator muscle movement furrows the eyebrows; Levator
muscle movement raises the upper lip; Orbicularis muscle
movement raises the cheek; and Zygomaticus muscle action
pulls the lip corners up.
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6.0 Diagram from Descartes's book, Traite de
l'homme, showing how the soul—which can be moved by
emotions—can open valves to let vital fluids from the
reservoir in the brain (labeled F) into the tubes to work the
muscles and produce actions.
FIGURE 6.1 People liked Chinese ideographs more after they
had first been subliminally presented with a smile,
suggesting that the smile had activated positive feeling at an
unconscious level. When presented with a smiling face long
enough to be consciously aware of it, the smile did not lead
participants to evaluate Chinese ideographs more positively.
FIGURE 6.2 Decision tree of appraisals based on three
features (goal relevance, goal congruence, and ego
involvement), plus the emotions that can occur with these
appraisals (Lazarus, 1991). Further differentiation among
emotions occurs in secondary appraisals.
FIGURE 6.3 A spatial arrangement of different emotional
experiences triggered by 2185 different video clips.
FIGURE 6.4 Increases in blood pressure by partners of those
instructed to reappraise or to suppress their emotions, and
control participants, in the study by Butler et al. (2003).
Chapter 7
FIGURE 7.0 Images from a study by Saarimäki and
colleagues showing different patterns of brain activation for
anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and surprise elicited by
movies, imagery, and both (Adapted from Saarimäki et al.,
2016).
FIGURE 7.1 Early thinking some 100 years ago about the
brain assumed that distinct functions were located in very
specific regions of the brain, as portrayed in this drawing.
Today, it is more widely believed that processes such as
emotion are distributed across different regions of the brain.
FIGURE 7.2 An image of a neuron. Neurotransmitters are
released from vesicles near the synapse, and then they travel
to nearby neurons, stimulating an electrical impulse up the
axon of the neuron.
FIGURE 7.3 Exploded view of the human brain. This slice of
the brain brings into focus the areas involved in emotion.
Subcortical regions of this kind include the amygdala (part of
the limbic system) and hypothalamus, as well as the ventral
striatum and periaqueductal gray (not pictured). Cortical
regions clearly involved in emotion include the orbitofrontal,
dorsolateral, midline, and anterior cingulate, all located in
the frontal region of the cerebral cortex.
FIGURE 7.4 Subcortical regions involved in emotion,
including the reward circuit (the nucleus accumbens, ventral
tegmental area (VTA) and prefrontal cortex) and the
amygdala.
FIGURE 7.5 The orbitofrontal cortex is highlighted in a
monkey brain (left) and brain of a human (right).
FIGURE 7.6 Emotion labeling activates the right
ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, pictured here, which is
associated with reduced activation in the amygdala.
FIGURE 7.7 The Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (the
darker, shaded area in the two images of the brain) is
activated by different forms of social pain and separation.
FIGURE 7.8 Networks of activation associated with six
different emotions and a neutral state (from Kragel & LaBar,
2016).
Chapter 8
FIGURE 8.0 This picture of a four‐year‐old girl was taken
after her father had photographed her sister in her
confirmation dress: finally, this little girl jumped forward and
shouted: “I want to have my picture taken too.” The picture
shows a characteristic angry expression (eyebrows raised,
square mouth) and posture.
FIGURE 8.1 Babies showing emotional expressions: (a) a
positive or happy expression, (b) a negative expression.
FIGURE 8.2 Effects of crawling status on frequency of anger
expressed during the Arm Restraint procedure in Roben et
al.’s (2012) study.
FIGURE 8.3 The development of children's distress
responses when separated from their mothers in four
different cultures. Copied from Kagan, Kearsley & Zelazo,
1978.
FIGURE 8.4 Observed trajectory groupings of children's
stranger fear from 6 to 36 months in the Brooker et al., 2013
study.
FIGURE 8.5 Proportion of children showing specific
emotions as a function of elicitors in the Bennett, Bendersky,
& Lewis, 2002 study.
FIGURE 8.6 Mean percentage of 18‐month‐olds in Warneken
and Tomasello's (2006) study who tried to help the adult
experimenter in experimental and control conditions.
FIGURE 8.7 Summary timelines for the developmental
progression of emotional expression. The top line shows the
age at which certain emotions are expressed, and the bottom
line shows the cognitive milestones associated with the
emergence of various expressions across time.
FIGURE 8.8 The visual cliff: visually the baby sees a steep
drop—notice the finer grain of the checker‐board pattern to
the right of the baby's right knee—but actually a plate of thick
glass supports the infant safely.
FIGURE 8.9 Example still photos of (a) full light expression
and (b) matching point‐light expression of anger (from
Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004).
FIGURE 8.10 Example of the stimuli and the design of the
priming paradigm used in the Rakhans, Jessen, Missana, &
Grossmann (2016) study.
FIGURE 8.11 ERP processing elicited in response to the
angry and happy face conditions in a sample of maltreated
and nonmaltreated 15‐month‐old infants (from Curtis &
Cicchetti, 2013).
FIGURE 8.12 Summary timelines for the development of
emotion regulation from infancy through mid‐childhood. The
top line represents approximate temporal onset of particular
regulatory processes, and the lower line represents associated
neurobiological underpinnings of those processes. Dashed
arrows at age 3 to 5 indicate that these processes occur
within this time frame, at roughly the same time.
FIGURE 8.13 The brain circuitry includes the amygdala,
several regions of the prefrontal cortex, and several regions
of the basal ganglia.
FIGURE 8.14 A sample of neutral and positive images from
the Raila, Scholl, and Gruber, 2015 study.
FIGURE 8.15 Correlations between monozygotic and
dizygotic twins on temperament from the Polderman et al.,
2015 meta‐analysis. The correlation is given for the whole
sample, as well as males and females separately.
FIGURE 8.16 Percentage of correct answers of the Reading
the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) for participants under
oxytocin or placebo. Oxytocin improved performance in the
RMET in comparison with placebo (from Guastella et al.,
2010).
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9.0 Auguste Renoir, “Dance at Bougival,” 1882–83.
This painting was used to illustrate a story, by Lhote, about
an artist seeking to persuade a young woman to model for
him. In the painting, we see the man thrusting his face
eagerly toward the young woman, and grasping her
possessively. We also notice from her ring that she is
married. Keeping her polite social smile, she turns away.
FIGURE 9.1 Colin Firth in his role as Mr Darcy in the 1995
television series of Pride and Prejudice.
FIGURE 9.2 This balcony in Verona Italy is where the
courtship between Romeo and Juliet is alleged to have taken
place. Today when people visit, they write the name of their
loved one on “Juliet's Wall” nearby, and they leave love
letters as well.
FIGURE 9.3 Anger may be an important part of intimate
relationships. It is typically less destructive in relationships
than is contempt.
FIGURE 9.4 Although Adam Smith is known for his enduring
analysis of self‐interest, trade, and capital, in his book “The
Theory of Moral Sentiments” he lays out how emotions are
the source of moral judgment, a thesis we take up in next
chapter. For Smith, gratitude may be the most important
moral emotion and binder of social relations.
FIGURE 9.5 When feeling gratitude, people will give more of
their time both to someone who's helped them (benefactor)
and to a stranger (from Condon & DeSteno, 2006).
FIGURE 9.6 Ceremonies and celebrations, as in this one in
Taiwan, often evoke emotions such as awe and joy that
solidify group identity.
Chapter 10
FIGURE 10.0 Reason, advised by Divine Grace, holds the
Passions, Feare, Despaire, Choler, and others in chains. The
caption starts: “Passions araing'd by Reason here you see/As
she's Advis'd by Grace Divine… .” From Senault (1671).
FIGURE 10.1 Modules of the brain and different kinds of
messages that pass among them (to illustrate Oatley &
Johnson‐Laird's, 1987, theory). In (a) the signals are
informational and travel along particular pathways. In (b) an
emotion‐control signal spreads diffusely from one module
(2.3), turning some other modules on and some off, thereby
setting the system into a distinctive mode. Normally, in (c),
these two kinds of signals occur together.
FIGURE 10.2 People say they are more satisfied with their
life on sunny than on overcast days, except when they are
explicitly asked to think about the weather (adapted from
Schwarz & Clore, 1983).
FIGURE 10.3 Capilano Suspension Bridge. Photo Markus
Säynevirta; acknowledgment by e‐mail would be greatly
appreciated. Wikipedia, Creative Commons License.
FIGURE 10.4 The trolley problem for testing moral intuitions
by means of vignettes, invented by Philippa Foot.
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11.0 A mother picks up her child after an absence.
Notice the child clasping the mother and pushing away the
babysitter.
FIGURE 11.1 Outcome (means) of degree of inhibition, time
until first relationship, and time until first full‐time job of
23‐year‐olds who were inhibited or not inhibited at age four
to six (Asendorpf et al., 2008).
FIGURE 11.2 Survival function over 13 years for participants
who recorded a high number as compared with a low number
of positive emotions when paged five times a day for a week
(from Carstensen et al., 2011, Figure 2, p. 28).
FIGURE 11.3 Photos of a female and a male with,
respectively, happy, angry, and neutral faces as used by
Knyazev et al. (2008).
FIGURE 11.4 The relationship between father power
assertion (harshness) and children's oppositional behavior as
a function of orchids and dandelions (Adapted from
Kochanska, Aksan & Joy, 2007).
FIGURE 11.5 The effect sizes for cumulative risk and
maltreatment in explaining insecure and disorganized
attachment (based on Cyr et al., 2010).
FIGURE 11.6 The relationship between parental supportive
emotion socialization and children's regulatory balance varies
as a function of children's age.
FIGURE 11.7 Following the emotion intervention parents
showed improved skills in being less dismissive of children's
emotions, being more empathic, and showing less negative
expressiveness. ** = difference in change from baseline to
follow up between groups is significant at < .001; * =
difference in change from baseline to follow up between
groups shows a tendency.
FIGURE 11.8 The role of genes (A), shared environment (C),
and nonshared environment (E) in mothers' and fathers'
warmth and negativity to children (Klahr & Burt, 2014).
FIGURE 11.9 The effect of parenting education (classes on
different aspects of raising children) to improve parenting
and child outcomes. Figure derived from Pinquart and
Teubert et al., 2010.
FIGURE 11.10 Taking the third‐party perspective during an
argument (labeled reappraisal intervention) improves marital
satisfaction.
Chapter 12
FIGURE 12.0 These boys are in a fight. Boys are more prone
to these disruptive behavior disorders than girls.
FIGURE 12.1 The multilevel structure of children's
developmental contexts, based on Bronfenbrenner's (1979)
Bioecological Model.
FIGURE 12.2 Development of psychopathology over time,
influenced both by the context and by the factors inherent in
the child.
FIGURE 12.3 Effects of cumulative risk on likelihood of
developing psychopathology in children (Rutter, 1979).
Children with one risk factor are no more likely to develop a
disorder than those with none, but with each added risk
factor the prevalence of psychopathology multiplies.
FIGURE 12.4 Children's oppositional behavior as a function
of differential parenting: Whether the children have been
treated favorably or unfavorably (from Meunier et al., 2012).
FIGURE 12.5 Positive versus threat attention bias in early‐
institutionalized children randomly assigned to a foster‐care
group (FCG) or who remained institutionalized (CAUG) at
age 12 (Troller‐Renfree et al., 2017).
FIGURE 12.6 Conduct problems across childhood and early
adulthood. Approximately 10% of individuals have life‐course
persistent (LCP) conduct problems (taken from Odgers et al.,
2008).
FIGURE 12.7 Trajectories of depression from age 12 to 16 as
identified by Brière, Janosz, Fallu, and Morizot (2015).
Trajectories of depressive symptoms closely mirrored the
course of externalizing problems (delinquency, substance
use) and academic adjustment (school liking, academic
achievement).
FIGURE 12.8 Effect sizes for youth psychotherapy across
disorder categories (from Weisz et al., 2017). The strongest
effects are for anxiety disorders and the weakest for
depression. Behavioral and caregiver/family treatments yield
the most robust cross‐informant effects.
Chapter 13
FIGURE 13.0 A striking result in psychiatric epidemiology is
that the prevalence of depression is 50% higher in women
than in men.
FIGURE 13.1 Prevalence of mental illness in American adults
as a function of gender, age, and ethnic background.
FIGURE 13.2 Rates of mental illness as percentages of the
populations of four different nations as a function of income
inequality (data from Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009, graph
drawn by Keith Oatley).
FIGURE 13.3 Poverty is a fundamental cause of depression,
which has hopeless despair at its core.
FIGURE 13.4 Differentiation of normal emotions from
depressive breakdowns (Oatley, 1988).
FIGURE 13.5 Social support, the feeling of having people to
turn to in difficult times, comes in many forms, including
family, friends, and close colleagues at work.
FIGURE 13.6 Standardized coefficients of factors that
predicted relapse of depression in the study of BacksDermott et al. (2010).
FIGURE 13.7 A vicious circle: depression caused by a life
event may elicit memories of previous losses and failures,
which, in turn, tend to make the person more depressed, and
so on.
FIGURE 13.8 Activation of the left amygdala of adolescents
in a control group (CTL) and in those with a disorder at the
major depressive level (MDL) who were shown fearful,
angry, and happy faces (from Yang et al., 2010).
FIGURE 13.9 Percentages of schizophrenic patients who
relapsed within nine months of leaving hospital as a function
of high and low expressed emotion, the amount of time they
spent with their family, and whether they took their
medication (Vaughn & Leff, 1976).
Chapter 14
FIGURE 14.0
FIGURE 14.1 Determinants of happiness and well-being
(Lyubomirsky et al., 2005).
FIGURE 14.2 Often people in traditional cultures with fewer
possessions and material wealth, as in these Massai men
participating in a ritual, scored on well-being measures as
high as or higher than people in cultures of greater wealth.
FIGURE 14.3 Almost all forms of psychological therapy
involve a therapist listening and coming to understand a
client, or in this picture a woman and a man who talk about
their emotional life together.
FIGURE 14.4 Symptom levels, measured by the General
Symptom Index (GSI), over different phases of
psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the study by Blomberg
et al. (2001), as compared with norm for the case level (upper
horizontal dotted line, labeled Normgroup 1 28 SD) and a
normgroup who were without significant symptoms, lower
horizontal dotted line (labeled Normgroup M).
FIGURE 14.5 Mindfulness is being taught and practiced in
just about every setting, from schools to prisons to
workplaces of different kinds, including in the military.
FIGURE 14.6 Stanley Milgram behind the apparatus by
means of which participants in his experiments on obedience
thought they were delivering painful electrical shocks to
others.
Understanding Emotions
FOURTH EDITION
Dacher Keltner
Keith Oatley
Jennifer M. Jenkins
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Veronica Visentin
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Ethan Lipson
EDITORIAL MANAGER
Judy Howarth
CONTENT MANAGEMENT DIRECTOR Lisa Wojcik
CONTENT MANAGER
Nichole Urban
SENIOR CONTENT SPECIALIST
Nicole Repasky
PRODUCTION EDITOR
Meghana Antony
PERMISSIONS SPECIALIST
Preethi Devaraj
COVER PHOTO CREDIT
© Sergey Novikov/Shutterstock
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data:
Names: Keltner, Dacher, author. | Oatley, Keith, author. | Jenkins, Jennifer M., author.
Title: Understanding emotions / Dacher Keltner, Keith Oatley, Jennifer M. Jenkins.
Description: Fourth edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2019] | Includes
index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032831 (print) | LCCN 2018034946 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119492535
(Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119492542 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119492566 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Emotions.
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To
Natalie, Serafina
Simon, Grant, and Hannah
Figures
1.0
Young girl in a hat, from Darwin (1872)
1.1
Characters from Inside Out.
1.2
Drawing of Charles Darwin.
1.3
Two of Charles Darwin’s photographs, sneering and crying:
(a) Plate IV No. 1; (b) Plate 1 No. 1.
1.4
Group photograph of the conference to mark Freud’s
honorary degree at Clark University in 1909. In the front row
Freud is fourth from the right, Jung third from the right, and
William James is third from the left.
1.5
The theater in classical times was an important institution,
constructed to portray action in the context of fellow citizens
who sat there in full view.
1.6
A stoa that runs alongside the agora (marketplace) in
Athens. It was in such a place that the Stoics taught the
management of emotions. (The stoa in this picture is not the
original but one constructed a century after the founding of
Stoicism, and rebuilt in the 1930s).
1.7
Model of Phineas Gage’s head and his skull showing the exit
hole made by the tamping rod.
1.8
Empathy (darker color labels) and compassion (lighter color
labels) in networks in the brain.
1.9
Arlie Hochschild a pioneering scientist in the study of
emotion.
1.10 A model of the unfolding processes of emotion.
1.11
A spectrum of emotional phenomena in terms of the time
course of each.
2.0
About 10 minutes before this photograph was taken these
two male chimpanzees had a fight that ended in the trees.
Now one extends a hand toward the other in reconciliation.
Immediately after this, they embraced and climbed down to
the ground together.
2.1
These two male elephant seals are in the midst of a struggle
to determine their relative strength and standing within a
social hierarchy, which will impact their mating
opportunities.
2.2
Given their hypervulnerability, new babies rely on a variety
of cues, evolutionary reasoning holds, such as smiles, coos,
soft skin, and cute faces to draw parents into the provision of
care, and this intensive caregiving continues for several
years.
2.3
Greeting gestures around the world often involve smiles, eye
contact, touch, and the raising of the eyebrows.
2.4
A DNA molecule.
2.5
A group of San people
2.6
Human relatedness to the apes.
2.7
An Orangutan mother and offspring in Borneo.
2.8
In chimpanzees, threat displays and chasing are part of the
negotiation of rank within hierarchies.
2.9
Two chimpanzees grooming. Dunbar’s hypothesis is that in
humans this emotionally intimate activity has been replaced
by conversation.
3.0
A bronze figurine from the Han dynasty in China, made
more than 2,000 years ago, probably representing a person
from an foreign northern tribe.
3.1
An Ifaluk woman smiles as she makes an impromptu head‐
dress for her small son. This kind of socially responsive
smiling is of a lower intensity and signals something
different from ker, meaning “excited happiness” (from Lutz,
1988, p. 49).
3.2
Image used in research by Masuda and colleagues (2008b),
in which the central figure is smiling and surrounding
individuals are frowning.
3.3
European Americans experience and express greater anger in
response to a frustrating experimenter (adapted from
Mauss, Butler, Roberts, & Chu, 2010).
3.4
Calmness and serenity are at the heart of Buddhism, which
has shaped the emotional lives of vast parts of East Asian
cultures.
3.5
European Americans reveal a greater preference for exciting
recreational activities (left‐hand panel adapted from Tsai,
Louie et al., 2007). Christian texts place a greater value on
high‐arousal, positive emotions (HAP), whereas Buddhist
texts place a greater value on low‐arousal, calm, positive
emotions (LAP) (right‐hand panel adapted from Tsai, Miao,
& Seppala, 2007).
3.6
Homicide rates in England and in Europe as a whole from
Eisner (2003). (The data point for England in the fifteenth
century is an interpolation; Eisner did not have enough data
for an estimate for this century.)
3.7
Title page of volume 1 of Frankenstein, written by Mary
Shelley but published anonymously in 1818.
3.8
The origin of the culturally distinctive version of romantic
love that occurs in the West is traced from courtly love in
medieval Europe. The most famous book depicting this was
Roman de la Rose, for which this was an illuminated
illustration from about 1500 depicting the garden of courtly
love.
4.0
Most important social rituals, as at this wedding when the
groom embraces a groomsman, involve emotional
expression involving the face, the voice, touch, and different
movements of the body. In fact, most social interactions, you
shall learn, are rich with emotional expression.
4.1
“Flirtation,” by the Hungarian painter Miklós Barabás,
showing characteristic elements: the man shows direct
interest with body and head oriented toward the woman; the
woman shows classic coyness, with head and gaze cast away.
4.2
A coarse gesture of contempt: seen in Britain, but not in
southern Europe. Such gestures are based on learned
conventions like words (from Morris et al., 1979).
4.3
Dr. Martin Luther King using the clenched fist, an inspiring
illustrator, to add strength to his words in a speech in
Philadelphia.
4.4
Six different emotions: (a) anger, (b) disgust, (c) fear, (d)
happiness, (e) sadness, and (f) surprise. The expressions in
these photos are similar to those described by Darwin, to
those used by Ekman and Friesen in their universality
studies, and to those used in many other studies of facial
expression.
4.5
Paul Ekman in New Guinea.
4.6
Affiliation‐related displays in chimpanzees captured by
Frans de Waal.
4.7
Static photos of expressions of love, desire, and sympathy.
4.8
Static photos of expressions of embarrassment, shame, and
pride.
4.9
Sighted (top panel) and blind (bottom panel) Olympic
Athletes’ nonverbal displays to winning and losing a
competition (from Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008).
4.10 Static photos of expressions of amusement, interest, and
contentment.
4.11 Accuracy rates across 10 cultures in judging emotions from
static photos of facial/bodily expressions. Chance guessing is
represented in the dotted line (adapted from Keltner &
Cordaro, 2016).
4.12 Anatomy of the vocal apparatus (from babelsdawn.com).
4.13 Observers in 10 cultures are able to identify several
emotions from vocal bursts (from Cordaro et al., 2016).
4.14 A Himba woman listening to vocal bursts, and Disa Sauter
working with the Himba.
4.15 Three different kinds of fearful response by vervet monkeys
to three kinds of predator.
4.16 Accuracy with which individuals can communicate emotion
by touching a stranger on the forearm (left bars in light gray)
or anywhere on the body (dark gray to right).
5.0
Bernini: St. Teresa. Of this sculpture Gombrich (1972, p.
345) says that Bernini has “carried us to a pitch of emotion
which artists had so far shunned.”
5.1
Anatomical diagram of the human autonomic nervous
system.
5.2
In this setup in Robert Levenson’s laboratory, two
participants’ autonomic physiology is recorded as they talk
with each other. Receptors help gather measures of
participants’ activity, heart rate, pulse in the finger and ear,
galvanic sweat response in the finger, skin temperature, and
respiration
5.3
Participants who begin the study with elevated vagal tone
(solid line) show greater increases over time in social
connectedness and positive emotion, which in turn track
increases in vagal tone (from Kok & Fredrickson, 2008).
5.4
The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis that releases
cortisol into the blood stream.
5.5
Teenagers navigating white‐water rapids on a river in the
Sierra Nevada Mountains (photo by Craig Anderson).
5.6
In situations of increased social evaluative threat, or SET
(dotted line), one measure of cytokine release (TNF‐alpha)
increases when participants must give a speech about why
they would be a good candidate for a job (from Dickerson et
al., 2009).
5.7
Body maps of emotion‐specific sensations. Brighter areas
indicate where participants report increased physical
sensation for the emotion.
5.8
Processing concepts related to specific emotions activates
emotion‐specific facial muscles for happiness, anger, and
disgust (adapted from Niedenthal et al., 2009). Corrugator
muscle movement furrows the eyebrows; Levator muscle
movement raises the upper lip; Orbicularis muscle
movement raises the cheek; and Zygomaticus muscle action
pulls the lip corners up.
6.0
Diagram from Descartes’s book, Traite de l’homme, showing
how the soul—which can be moved by emotions—can open
valves to let vital fluids from the reservoir in the brain
(labeled F) into the tubes to work the muscles and produce
actions.
6.1
People liked Chinese ideographs more after they had first
been subliminally presented with a smile, suggesting that
the smile had activated positive feeling at an unconscious
level. When presented with a smiling face long enough to be
consciously aware of it, the smile did not lead participants to
evaluate Chinese ideographs more positively (Source:
Murphy & Zajonc, 1993).
6.2
Decision tree of appraisals based on three features (goal
relevance, goal congruence, and ego involvement), plus the
emotions that can occur with these appraisals (Lazarus,
1991). Further differentiation among emotions occurs in
secondary appraisals.
6.3
A spatial arrangement of different emotional experiences
triggered by 2185 different video clips.
6.4
Increases in blood pressure by partners of those instructed
to reappraise or to suppress their emotions, and control
participants, in the study by Butler et al. (2003).
7.0
Images from a study by Saarimäki and colleagues showing
different patterns of brain activation for anger, disgust, fear,
happiness, and surprise elicited by movies, imagery, and
both (Adapted from Saarimäki et al., 2016).
7.1
Early thinking some 100 years ago about the brain assumed
that distinct functions were located in very specific regions
of the brain, as portrayed in this drawing. Today, it is more
widely believed that processes such as emotion are
distributed across different regions of the brain.
7.2
An image of a neuron. Neurotransmitters are released from
vesicles near the synapse, and then travel to nearby neurons,
stimulating an electrical impulse up the axon of the neuron.
7.3
Exploded view of the human brain. This slice of the brain
brings into focus the areas involved in emotion. Subcortical
regions of this kind include the amygdala (part of the limbic
system) and hypothalamus, as well as the ventral striatum
and periaqueductal gray (not pictured). Cortical regions
clearly involved in emotion include the orbitofrontal,
dorsolateral, midline, and anterior cingulate, all located in
the frontal region of the cerebral cortex.
7.4
Subcortical regions involved in emotion, including the
reward circuit (the nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental
area (VTA) and prefrontal cortex) and the amygdala.
7.5
The orbitofrontal cortex is highlighted in a monkey brain
(left) and brain of a human (right).
7.6
Emotion labeling activates the right ventrolateral prefrontal
cortex, pictured here, which is associated with reduced
activation in the amygdala.
7.7
The Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (the darker, shaded
area in the two images of the brain) is activated by different
forms of social pain and separation.
7.8
Networks of activation associated with six different
emotions and a neutral state (from Kragel & LaBar, 2016).
8.0
This picture of a four‐year‐old girl was taken after her father
had photographed her sister in her confirmation dress:
finally, this little girl jumped forward and shouted: “I want
to have my picture taken too.” The picture shows a
characteristic angry expression (eyebrows raised, square
mouth) and posture.
8.1
Babies showing emotional expressions: (a) a positive or
happy expression, (b) a negative expression.
8.2
Effects of crawling status on frequency of anger expressed
during the Arm Restraint procedure in Roben et al.’s (2012)
study.
8.3
The development of children’s distress responses when
separated from their mothers in four different cultures.
Copied from Kagan, Kearsley & Zelazo, 1978.
8.4
Observed trajectory groupings of children’s stranger fear
from 6 to 36 months in the Brooker et al., 2013 study.
8.5
Proportion of children showing specific emotions as a
function of elicitors in the Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis,
2002 study.
8.6
Mean percentage of 18‐month‐olds in Warneken and
Tomasello’s (2006) study who tried to help the adult
experimenter in experimental and control conditions.
8.7
Summary timelines for the developmental progression of
emotional expression. The top line shows the age at which
certain emotions are expressed, and the bottom line shows
the cognitive milestones associated with the emergence of
various expressions across time.
8.8
The visual cliff: visually the baby sees a steep drop—notice
the finer grain of the checker‐board pattern to the right of
the baby’s right knee—but actually a plate of thick glass
supports the infant safely.
8.9
Example still photos of (a) full light expression and (b)
matching point‐light expression of anger (from Atkinson,
Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004).
8.10 Example of the stimuli and the design of the priming
paradigm used in the Rakhans, Jessen, Missana, &
Grossmann (2016) study.
8.11 ERP processing elicited in response to the angry and happy
face conditions in a sample of maltreated and nonmaltreated
15‐month‐old infants (from Curtis & Cicchetti, 2013).
8.12 Summary timelines for the development of emotion
regulation from infancy through mid‐childhood. The top line
represents approximate temporal onset of particular
regulatory processes, and the lower line represents
associated neurobiological underpinnings of those
processes. Dashed arrows at age 3 to 5 indicate that these
processes occur within this time frame, at roughly the same
time.
8.13 The brain circuitry includes the amygdala, several regions of
the prefrontal cortex, and several regions of the basal
ganglia. (Source: Copied from Clauss, Avery & Blackford,
2015.)
8.14 A sample of neutral and positive images from the Raila,
Scholl, and Gruber 2015 study.
8.15 Correlations between monozygotic and dizygotic twins on
temperament from the Polderman et al., 2015 meta‐analysis.
The correlation is given for the whole sample, as well as
males and females separately.
8.16 Percentage of correct answers of the Reading the Mind in
the Eyes Test (RMET) for participants under oxytocin or
placebo. Oxytocin improved performance in the RMET in
comparison with placebo (from Guastella et al., 2010)
9.0
Auguste Renoir, "Dance at Bougival," 1882–83. This painting
was used to illustrate a story, by Lhote, about an artist
seeking to persuade a young woman to model for him. In the
painting, we see the man thrusting his face eagerly toward
the young woman, and grasping her possessively. We also
notice from her ring that she is married. Keeping her polite
social smile, she turns away.
9.1
Colin Firth in his role as Mr Darcy in the 1995 television
series of Pride and Prejudice.
9.2
This balcony in Verona Italy is where the courtship between
Romeo and Juliet is alleged to have taken place. Today when
people visit, they write the name of their loved one on
“Juliet’s Wall” nearby, and they leave love letters as well.
9.3
Anger may be an important part of intimate relationships. It
is typically less destructive in relationships than is contempt.
9.4
Although Adam Smith is known for his enduring analysis of
self‐interest, trade, and capital, in his book “The Theory of
Moral Sentiments” he lays out how emotions are the source
of moral judgment, a thesis we take up in next chapter. For
Smith, gratitude may be the most important moral emotion
and binder of social relations.
9.5
When feeling gratitude, people will give more of their time
both to someone who’s helped them (benefactor) and to a
stranger (from Condon & DeSteno, 2006).
9.6
Ceremonies and celebrations, as in this one in Taiwan, often
evoke emotions such as awe and joy that solidify group
identity.
10.0 Reason, advised by Divine Grace, holds the Passions, Feare,
Despaire, Choler, and others in chains. The caption starts:
“Passions araing’d by Reason here you see/As she’s Advis’d
by Grace Divine… .” From Senault (1671).
10.1 Modules of the brain and different kinds of messages that
pass among them (to illustrate Oatley & Johnson‐Laird’s,
1987, theory). In (a) the signals are informational and travel
along particular pathways. In (b) an emotion‐control signal
spreads diffusely from one module (2.3), turning some other
modules on and some off, thereby setting the system into a
distinctive mode. Normally, in (c) these two kinds of signals
occur together.
10.2 People say they are more satisfied with their life on sunny
than on overcast days, except when they are explicitly asked
to think about the weather (adapted from Schwarz & Clore,
1983).
10.3 Capilano Suspension Bridge. Photo Markus Säynevirta;
acknowledgment by e‐mail would be greatly appreciated.
Wikipedia, Creative Commons License.
10.4 The trolley problem for testing moral intuitions by means of
vignettes, invented by Philippa Foot.
11.0 A mother picks up her child after an absence. Notice the
child clasping the mother and pushing away the babysitter.
11.1
Outcome (means) of degree of inhibition, time until first
relationship, and time until first full‐time job of 23‐year‐olds
who were inhibited or not inhibited at age four to six
(Asendorpf et al., 2008).
11.2 Survival function over 13 years for participants who recorded
a high number as compared with a low number of positive
emotions when paged five times a day for a week (from
Carstensen et al., 2011, Figure 2, p. 28).
11.3 Photos of a female and a male with, respectively, happy,
angry, and neutral faces as used by Knyazev et al. (2008).
11.4 The relationship between father power assertion
(harshness) and children’s oppositional behavior as a
function of orchids and dandelions (Adapted from
Kochanska, Aksan & Joy, 2007).
11.5 The effect sizes for cumulative risk and maltreatment in
explaining insecure and disorganized attachment (based on
Cyr et al., 2010).
11.6 The relationship between parental supportive emotion
socialization and children’s regulatory balance varies as a
function of children’s age (Source: Mirabile, Oertwig, and
Halberstadt, 2016).
11.7 Following the emotion intervention parents showed
improved skills in being less dismissive of children’s
emotions, being more empathic, and showing less negative
expressiveness. ** = difference in change from baseline to
follow up between groups is significant at < .001; * =
difference in change from baseline to follow up between
groups shows a tendency.
11.8 The role of genes (A), shared environment (C), and
nonshared environment (E) in mothers’ and fathers’ warmth
and negativity to children (Klahr & Burt, 2014).
11.9 The effect of parenting education (classes on different
aspects of raising children) to improve parenting and child
outcomes. Figure derived from Pinquart and Teubert et al.,
2010.
11.10 Taking the third‐party perspective during an argument
(labeled reappraisal intervention) improves marital
satisfaction.
12.0 These boys are in a fight. Boys are more prone to these
disruptive behavior disorders than girls.
12.1 The multilevel structure of children’s developmental
contexts, based on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Bioecological
Model.
12.2 Development of psychopathology over time, influenced both
by the context and by factors inherent in the child.
12.3 Effects of cumulative risk on likelihood of developing
psychopathology in children (Rutter, 1979). Children with
one risk factor are no more likely to develop a disorder than
those with none, but with each added risk factor the
prevalence of psychopathology multiplies.
12.4 Children’s oppositional behavior as a function of differential
parenting: whether the children have been treated favorably
or unfavorably (from Meunier et al., 2012).
12.5 Positive versus threat attention bias in early‐
institutionalized children randomly assigned to a foster‐care
group (FCG) or who remained institutionalized (CAUG) at
age 12 (Troller‐Renfree et al., 2017).
12.6 Conduct problems across childhood and early adulthood.
Approximately 10% of individuals have life‐course persistent
(LCP) conduct problems (taken from Odgers et al., 2008).
12.7 Trajectories of depression from age 12 to 16 as identified by
Brière, Janosz, Fallu, and Morizot (2015). Trajectories of
depressive symptoms closely mirrored the course of
externalizing problems (delinquency, substance use) and
academic adjustment (school liking, academic achievement).
12.8 Effect sizes for youth psychotherapy across disorder
categories (from Weisz et al., 2017). The strongest effects are
for anxiety disorders and the weakest for depression.
Behavioral and caregiver/family treatments yield the most
robust cross‐informant effects.
13.0 A striking result in psychiatric epidemiology is that the
prevalence of depression is 50% higher in women than in
men.
13.1 Prevalence of mental illness in American adults as a
function of gender, age, and ethnic background.
13.2 Rates of mental illness as percentages of the populations of
four different nations as a function of income inequality
(data from Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009, graph drawn by Keith
Oatley).
13.3 Poverty is a fundamental cause of depression, which has
hopeless despair at its core.
13.4 Differentiation of normal emotions from depressive
breakdowns (Oatley, 1988).
13.5 Social support, the feeling of having people to turn to in
difficult times, comes in many forms, including family,
friends, and close colleagues at work.
13.6 Standardized coefficients of factors that predicted relapse of
depression in the study of Backs‐Dermott et al. (2010).
13.7 A vicious circle: depression caused by a life event may elicit
memories of previous losses and failures, which, in turn,
tend to make the person more depressed, and so on.
13.8 Activation of the left amygdala of adolescents in a control
group (CTL) and in those with a disorder at the major
depressive level (MDL) who were shown fearful, angry, and
happy faces (from Yang et al., 2010).
13.9 Percentages of schizophrenic patients who relapsed within
nine months of leaving hospital as a function of high and
low expressed emotion, the amount of time they spent with
their family, and whether they took their medication
(Vaughn & Leff, 1976).
14.1 Determinants of happiness and well‐being (Lyubomirsky et
al., 2005).
14.2 Often people in traditional cultures with fewer possessions
and material wealth, as in these Massai men participating in
a ritual, scored on well‐being measures as high as or higher
than people in cultures of greater wealth.
14.3 Almost all forms of psychological therapy involve a therapist
listening and coming to understand a client, or in this
picture a woman and a man who talk about their emotional
life together.
14.4 Symptom levels, measured by the General Symptom Index
(GSI), over different phases of psychotherapy and
psychoanalysis in the study by Blomberg et al. (2001), as
compared with norm for the case level (upper horizontal
dotted line, labeled Normgroup 1 28 SD) and a normgroup
who were without significant symptoms, lower horizontal
dotted line (labeled Normgroup M). (Source: Blomberg et al.,
2001).
14.5 Mindfulness is being taught and practiced in just about
every setting, from schools to prisons to workplaces of
different kinds, including in the military.
14.6 Stanley Milgram leaning on the apparatus by means of
which participants in his experiments on obedience thought
they were delivering painful electrical shocks to others.
Tables
1.1
Emotional expressions discussed by Darwin (1872), the
bodily systems used, and the type of emotion which was
expressed.
2.1
Examples of adaptations.
2.2 Ainsworth’s (1967) list of attachment behaviors.
2.3 Relations, recurring situations, and emotions.
3.1
Two different self‐construals. This table outlines contrasting
elements of the independent self, prominent in Northern
Europe and North America, with the interdependent self,
prominent in Asia, Africa, and South America.
3.2 Comparison of evolutionary and cultural approaches.
4.1
Drawings and “stickers” of 16 emotions.
4.2 Darwin’s descriptions of emotional expression from The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
4.3 Accuracy rates for participants from New Guinea and the
United States in judging expressions of six emotions.
4.4 Emotions as performed by actors, rasas, and English
translations of them as aesthetic emotions that spectators
may experience.
5.1
Emotion‐related changes in autonomic physiology observed
in the directed facial action task.
6.1
Modes of action readiness.
6.2 Dimensions of appraisal.
6.3 Prototype of sadness.
7.1
Jaak Panksepp’s ideas of systems of social–emotional
systems of the brain.
8.1 Numbers of children who showed embarrassment as a
function of whether they recognized themselves from the
rouge‐on‐the‐nose test (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, &
Weiss,1989).
8.2 Mapping of dimensions of temperament onto aspects of
emotions, for two well‐known schemes of temperament:
Buss and Plomin’s (1975) and Rothbart’s (1981).
9.1
Measure of social support.
9.2 In groups of four, high‐power (HP) and low‐power (LP)
fraternity members teased one another. During these
interactions, high‐power individuals were more likely to
smile with delight and to show facial displays of anger and
contempt, especially when being challenged by a low‐power
member. Low‐power fraternity members, in contrast, were
more likely to show displays of fear and pain.
10.1 Moral principles and characteristics.
11.1 Positive emotionality, as assessed in the magnitude of the
smile shown in a photograph at age 20, predicts adult
personality, relationship satisfaction, and personal well‐being
over the next 30 years.
11.2 Number of individuals in three different categories for
caregiver’s adult attachment status and their children’s
attachment status, in 2,774 dyads.
12.1 Three‐month prevalence rates of psychopathology among a
representative sample of children and adolescents of different
age groups.
12.2 Proportion of variance in childhood disorders attributable to
additive genetic factors.
13.1 Lifetime prevalence (in percentages) of psychiatric conditions
in people aged 18 and over in the 48 contiguous United
States, using the World Health Organization World Mental
Health Survey version of the Composite International
Diagnostic Interview.
13.2 Adversities that cause depressive and anxiety disorders.
13.3 Plomin et al.’s (2016) top ten replicated findings in behavioral
genetics.
13.4 Disorders as excesses, deficits, and dysfunctions of emotions.
14.1 Modes and characteristics of meaning in life.
14.2 Pretreatment and posttreatment means on two symptom
measures for clients receiving client‐centered therapy or
emotion‐focused therapy.
Preface
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must
have been apparent to everyone for hundreds of years, no one
has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have
their map; but our passions are uncharted.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
As we present the fourth edition of Understanding Emotions, we
are struck by how much has been learned about emotion in the past
six years since we published the third edition. We are also struck by
how topical emotions are today. They are the inspiration for films,
for alarming trends in politics in different countries, for lesson
plans in the classroom, for new emotional intelligence programs at
work, and for the time‐honored contemplation of what it means to
live a meaningful life. It is an honor to be part of the scientific effort
at understanding emotions as we try, with our varying methods and
notions, to chart the human passions.
According to written and oral traditions, people have been
interested in emotions for thousands of years; in most societies,
they are at the center of people's understandings of themselves and
others in their relationships, rituals, and public life. Great ethical,
philosophical, and spiritual traditions, from Aristotle to Lao Tzu,
concern themselves with the emotions, as has been observed by the
historian Karen Armstrong. So too do the great artists and writers of
all eras, from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison. In
the era of scientific research in psychology, we present here an
approach to understanding that can enter ordinary conversation and
that is based in the growing streams of scientific evidence.
In psychology, emotions have now moved into their proper place, at
the center of our understandings of the human mind and of
relationships in the social world. Research on emotions is not just
psychology. It extends into neuroscience, cognitive science,
psychiatry, biology, genetics, anthropology, sociology, economics,
literature, history, and philosophy. As has been true since the first
edition of this book, and our own leanings, we do our best to offer
insights about emotions from many disciplines, alongside those of
psychology.
In this edition, we continue to build upon the growing realization
that although emotions occur in individuals' brains and bodies, they
also mediate our relationships with each other, in both intimate and
public ways. They support a grammar of social life. We focus on this
idea even more explicitly in this edition: on the role of emotions in
attachments, friendships, parent–child interactions, and intimate
relationships, as well as in hierarchical and collective social
structures.
Surveying the field as we have done for this edition, we note some
other new trends in the field that have shaped the revision of this
book. It is now quite clear that the field has moved well beyond a
narrow focus on what might be called the “Basic Six”—anger,
disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness—which were so
central to the study of emotions 40 years ago (for summary of that
science, see Lench et al., 2011). In part, this is due to the study of
emotions in relationships, which led researchers to emotions like
compassion, love, and desire, as well as envy and jealousy. This
includes the emergence of moral psychology, and the notion that
emotions are involved in moral judgments, which leads to an
interest in emotions such as gratitude, guilt, and shame. There is
also an increasing interest in emotion and the arts, fiction, and our
narrative and scientific understanding of the world, and emotions
like awe, interest, and appreciation of beauty. We believe this
interest in a broadening array of emotions, seen in studies of
expression, the nervous system, development, relationships, and
well‐being shifts our understanding of who we are as a species, and
we've done our best in this new edition to represent these changes.
In surveying the field for this edition, it is clear that the current
generation of scholars has pushed the longstanding debate about
how emotions might be discrete, and how they are constructed with
language, in new directions. Findings are emerging that suggest how
emotions may be both discrete and constructed, a theme we take up
in fresh ways in different chapters in the book.
We also note the greater interest in the meaningful life through the
lens of the science of emotion. Happiness, after all, is in many ways
at its heart about emotion. So too are the struggles of living—
depression, anxiety, loneliness, illness, sleep disruption, drug
addiction, and antisocial behavior. Well‐being and health often
involve practices that cultivate different emotions. And so
throughout this book, culminating in our last chapter, we explore
the new science of a meaningful life and focus on such themes as
mindfulness, empathy, gratitude, compassion, kindness, immersion
in nature, and even mystical states.
We hope you will like this fourth edition, which continues the
traditions of the earlier editions, but with new features that we hope
will make it easier and more pleasurable for both instructors and
students to use. In this edition, we have collaborated with people
who are students or former students in particular chapters:
Michelle Rodriguez and Sahar Borairi in Chapter 8, Heather Prime
and Alessandra Schneider in Chapter 11, Mark Wade and Noam
Binoon‐Erez in Chapter 12. We are very grateful to these people;
they have improved on what we would have been able to do on our
own. We are also very grateful to colleagues who sent thoughts
about advances in the field or read and sent us feedback and
suggestions on chapters: Belinda Campos, Hugo Critchley, David
DeSteno, Neha John‐Anderson, Brian Knutson, Matthew
Lieberman, Terry Maroney, Batja Mesquita, Randolph Nesse, Lauri
Nummenmaa, Kevin Ochsner, Ira Roseman, Ryan Smith, Emiliana
Simon‐Thomas, Jessica Tracy, and Jeanne Tsai.
Exciting advances continue to be made in the field of emotions, and
we have done our best to reflect the new currents, and we have also
responded to colleagues' suggestions for updating this book.
Changes in the fourth edition include the following:
Updated references throughout, including recent research and
evidence in psychology, psychiatry, the social sciences, and the
humanities, as well as in neuroscience
Deepened attention to interpersonal and social functions of
emotions, with discussions of how emotions work between
people in different relationships
More treatment of positive emotions such as love, compassion,
awe, interest, and gratitude and how they help shape our
relationships and well‐being
A greater focus on mind–body relations in emotion through the
lens of new studies of embodiment and interoception
A more coherent focus on studies of how emotion‐related
language influences emotional experience, neurophysiology, and
well‐being
New discussions of contemporary research on evolution, and on
genes in interaction with the environment
A deepened focus on emotion and moral judgment
New sections on collective emotions, meaning and well‐being,
mindfulness, and a sharpened focus on personal and societal
costs of poverty and economic inequality
Science and the humanities both depend on entering the tradition of
earlier writers. Bernard of Chartres, a scholar of the twelfth century,
seems to have been the first to remark that if we can see further,
now, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants: those who
have come before us. Our job as writers is to present some of what
can be seen from this position, and to evaluate theories and
evidence. You as a reader can then evaluate what we say in relation
to what else you know. You can take part in the debate that is the
social process of science and discussion, means by which
understanding is increased.
This book is intended for anyone with an interest in emotions to
show how far conceptualization and research have progressed
toward understanding. Although some have argued that emotions
are too heterogeneous for systematic study, the fact that we can
write a textbook shows—we believe—that from a complex field,
order, insight, and intellectual progress can emerge.
Any discussion of human emotions without a point of view would
be dull and largely incomprehensible. The quantity of publications—
numbering now in tens of tens of thousands—in the field makes it
impossible to be exhaustive. We have therefore chosen studies that
we believe are representative, hoping to convey material for you to
think productively and critically about this field. As well as an
overall narrative arc in the book, there is a story line for each
chapter, including pivotal characters, foundational ideas, and
intellectual controversies and tensions. Where there are debates we
discuss them, so that you can look at the field from different points
of view. But we have also worked to produce a coherent book.
Although ours is not the only point of view, we think that by seeing
that there is a coherent perspective in this area, you the reader will
be able to agree, or to disagree, or to modify it. Knowing that any
piece of evidence is not conclusive on its own but that each is a step
in exploring an idea, we hope that an integrated picture will take
shape for you the reader, with concepts and ideas you can modify
and apply to your own interests.
We have done our best to be fair‐minded in our treatment of
evidence, but our knowledge is necessarily incomplete and our
views are necessarily biased toward our own interests and
conceptualizations. Our interests are in thinking of emotions in
cognitive, evolutionary, social, and developmental terms, in
understanding their role in mediating everyday social interaction,
and in comprehending what goes wrong in emotional disorders. We
see emotions as based on biological processes, elaborated in our
close relationships, and shaped by culture. Like the skilled action
when you write your signature, an emotion has a biological basis of
components and constraints. It also has a history of individual
development. It is only fully understandable within an interpersonal
and cultural context.
We write about emotions largely in the Western tradition. This does
not imply universality of Euro‐American assumptions; we present a
lot of cross‐cultural comparisons. At the same time, we imagine that
most of our readers will be members of, or will be conversant with,
the Western tradition. We believe that, by characterizing and
identifying with this tradition, the ideas and findings about
emotions that have substance within it can be seen clearly. We, and
others, can then both form understandings based in that tradition
and also understand better other culturally distinctive ways of
thinking.
As well as a general introduction to the area, the book is designed
for use as a textbook for a course on emotions for second‐ to fourth‐
year undergraduates, or for students at the MA/MSc or PhD level,
and we hope, for interested readers more generally.
Most textbooks in psychology nowadays are compendia of many
things to be remembered and a few to be conceptualized. By
contrast, Richards (1925) said that a book is “a machine to think
with” (p. 1). We have written our book to invite your thinking. Our
conclusions make up a narrative thread. But by offering you
sufficient evidence, from which we make suggestions, we hope to
make it possible for you to draw your own conclusions.
The 14 chapters of this book can be covered in semester‐long
courses at the rate of one a week, perhaps with one or two chapters
left out according to the judgment of the instructor. For full‐year
courses, each chapter can be divided. Throughout, we keep in mind
both the issue of prompting understandings of emotions and
practical applications in clinical psychology, psychiatry, health care,
education, and issues of organizations. We envisage that many
instructors who use the book will supplement it with readings that
they provide. At the end of each chapter, we offer some suggestions
for further reading, typically reviews and books.
We have tested our ideas and coverage by going to conferences, and
attending to the currents of publications in the field, which has its
own journals, its international societies for research, its review
volumes, its handbooks. One of us (DK) continues to keep the
material of this book in register with students in his undergraduate
course of emotions at the University of California, Berkeley. All
three of us use the material presented here in our courses and
lectures.
An Instructor's Manual with lecture notes and teaching tips is
available upon request.
Acknowledgments
As with any book, we the authors are not the only ones who brought
this object into being. This text is a reflection of the work of many
people: researchers and thinkers, our teachers, our students, and
our colleagues. We would like to thank once more those who
assisted with the first, second, and third editions of this text.
In addition, the following have contributed to the fourth edition:
We thank Veronica Viscentin, the Wiley Executive Editor, and Judy
Howarth, the substantive editor and Meghana Antony of Wiley.
The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission
granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:
R. L. Atkinson, R. C. Atkinson, E. E. Smith, & D. M. Bem, “Figs
2.6–7 Exploded view of human brain & human brain as if sliced
in the midline,” pp. 42–3 from Introduction to Psychology, 10th
edn. Wadsworth, 1989. Copyright © 1989. Reprinted with
permission of Wadsworth, a division of Thomson Learning:
www.thomsonrights.com. Fax 800 730 2215.
N. Carlson, “Fig 3.21: The autonomic nervous system and the
target organs and functions served by the sympathetic and
parasympathetic branches,” p. 90 from Foundations of
Physiological Psychology, 6th edn. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon,
2004. Copyright © 2004 by Pearson Education. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher.
D. Morris, P. Collett, P. Marsh, & M. O'Shaughnessy, “Two coarse
gestures of contempt,” p. 107 in 1st edn of Understanding
Emotions from Gestures: Their origin and distribution. London:
Cape, 1979 Copyright © 1979 by D. Morris, P. Collett, P. Marsh &
M. O'Shaughnessy. Reprinted by permission of The Random
House Group Ltd.
K. Oatley, “Fig 30.1 The differentiation of normal emotions from
depressive breakdowns” in “Life events, social cognition and
depression,” p. 552 from S. Fisher & J. Reason, Handbook of Life
Stress, Cognition and Health, John Wiley & Sons, 1988.
Copyright © 1988 by John Wiley & Sons Limited. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher.
S. Scarr & P. Salapatek, “Fig 3.5 Fear of visual cliff, dogs, noises,
and jack‐in‐the‐box” in “Patterns of fear development during
infancy,” pp. 64–5 from Merrill Palmer Quarterly 16. Wayne
State University Press, 1970. Copyright © 1970 by Merrill Palmer
Quarterly. Reprinted by permission of Wayne State University
Press.
R. M. Seyfarth & D. L. Cheney, “Three different kinds of fearful
response by vervet monkeys” in “Meaning and mind in
monkeys,” p. 124 from Scientific American 267 (Dec.). Scientific
American, Inc., 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Patricia J. Wynne.
Reprinted by permission of the illustrator.
C. E. Vaughn & J. P. Leff, “Fig 1 Schizophrenic patients relapsing,
as a function of High and Low Expressed Emotion of families” in
“The influence of family and social factors on the course of
psychiatric illness: A comparison of schizophrenic and depressed
patients,” p. 132 from British Journal of Psychiatry 129. Royal
College of Psychiatrists, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by The British
Journal of Psychiatry. Reprinted by permission of the journal.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain
their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher
apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would
be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated
in future reprints or editions of this book.
PART I
Perspectives on Emotions
1
Approaches to Understanding Emotions
CONTENTS
Introduction
What Is an Emotion? First Ideas
Nineteenth-Century Founders
Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Approach
William James: The Bodily Approach
Sigmund Freud: The Psychoanalytic Approach
Philosophical and Literary Approaches
Aristotle and the Ethics of Emotions
René Descartes: Philosophically Speaking
George Eliot: The World of the Arts
Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology
John Harlow, Tania Singer: Toward a Brain Science of
Emotion
Magda Arnold, Sylvan Tomkins: New Psychological Theories
Erving Goffman, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Lila AbuLughod: Emotions as Moral Dramas Involving Selves and
Others
Empirical Inspirations for a New Science of Emotion
What Is an Emotion? A Framework
The Emotional Realm: Emotions—Moods—Dispositions
Episodes of Emotion
Moods and Sentiments
Emotional Disorders
Personality and Temperament
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 1.0 Young girl in a hat, from Darwin (1872)
Why is every critical moment in the fate of the adult or child so
clearly colored by emotion?
(Vygotsky, 1987, p. 335)
Introduction
After winning an Academy Award for his movie Up, Pixar director
Pete Docter was searching for a fresh subject for his next film. What
captured his imagination was something close to home: the
emotional fluctuations that he saw in his 11-year-old daughter Elie,
who was experiencing her transition to adolescence. Adolescence is
a notoriously emotional time. The delights and joys of childhood
come to be replaced by doubts, anxieties, and self-consciousness. It
is not uncommon for preadolescent girls to experience such
feelings. As Pete Docter watched his daughter go through emotional
changes of this kind, he arrived at the subject of his next film—the
emotions.
To understand his new subject more deeply, Docter immersed
himself in the science of emotion you are about to study (and
reached out to one of the authors of this book (D.K.), to serve as a
scientific consultant for the film). He read the previous edition of
the book you are just beginning to read. He pored over scientific
articles. He asked questions such as: How many emotions are
there? Why do we feel emotions such as sadness or anger? What are
the subtle ways in which we express emotions? How do emotions
shape how we perceive the world? When we remember an
emotional event in the past, how much of that recollection is
faithful to what happened? The scientific answers to the
aforementioned questions became a foundation of his film, Inside
Out.
Inside Out is about the emotional turmoil that Riley, an 11-year-old
girl, experiences as she and her family move from Minnesota to San
Francisco. It is a traumatic move, as so many are. Riley must leave
behind her best friend, joyful times of ice-skating with her parents,
and the passion of her childhood—her hockey team. She moves into
a spooky Victorian house in San Francisco, that, without the
family’s furniture, fills her dreams with ghosts. Alone, she must
make her way at a new school and the navigate judgments of
middle-school girls, who can be contemptuous critics of character.
What is unique, though, about Inside Out is that alongside Riley
and her parents, the central characters in the film are five emotions
in Riley’s mind—Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, and Sadness (see Figure
1.1).
FIGURE 1.1 Characters from Inside Out.
Inside Out dramatizes two central insights about the emotions that
are contained within its title. The “Inside” of Inside Out refers to
how emotions shape the inner workings of our minds and identities.
If you watch Inside Out you’ll notice how the five emotions vie for
control over a console in Riley’s mind, and once in charge, if only
for a second or two, they arrange how Riley perceives her present
circumstances. For example, in one scene, when Riley’s dad offers
to walk with her on her first day of school, Disgust, played by Mindy
Kaling, rejects this mortifying possibility, prompting Riley to
politely decline her dad’s offer. Emotions also guide how Riley
thinks about the past. In one of the more poignant scenes in the
film, Sadness, played by Phyllis Smith, adds a blue tint to Riley’s
joyous, yellow-hued memories of her idyllic childhood in
Minnesota. Emotions shape the workings of our minds.
The “Out” of Inside Out refers to how emotions guide our behavior
in the social environment. For example, Anger, played by Lewis
Black, drives Riley to compete fiercely when playing hockey and to
storm upstairs after a temper tantrum directed at her parents.
Sadness prompts thoughtful, wise action, guiding Riley to comfort
her imaginary friend Bing Bong when he has lost the wagon in
which they had played during Riley’s childhood. At the end of the
film, Riley reunites with her parents after a brief attempt at running
away. If you watch this scene closely enough, you will see how
emotional embraces and sighs are at the heart of their shared
affection. Emotions shape our social lives.
Inside Out went on to win an Academy Award in 2016 and made it
into most lists of best-films-of-the-year. But in important ways its
influence is more enduring; it would offer a new view of what
emotions are to a worldwide audience and one in keeping with the
science of emotion that you will explore in this book. For over 2,000
years, some thinkers have argued that our emotions are irrational
and destructive. The more noble reaches of human nature are
attained, this reasoning continues, when we control our passions
with our reason. In this book, as in Inside Out, we arrive at a
different view. Emotions are vital to adapting to the social
environment. They shape how we perceive the world and guide
important courses of action, such as committing to a romantic
partner, fighting for justice, or consoling a friend. Emotions are the
very foundation of our sense of identity, our moral judgment, and
our relationships. They are vital to our pursuit of the meaningful
life. To lay a foundation for these ideas, let’s first look at how the
study of emotion emerged. As we do, we will take on a particularly
vexing question: what is an emotion?
What Is an Emotion? First Ideas
We have all experienced emotions, and in this sense we know what
they are. But emotions are difficult to define in precise terms. In
fact, such difficulties are rather usual. We all know what a tree is,
even though we don’t know its proper definition. We all have a
sense of beauty or justice, but when pressed to define such concepts
often fail to find the exact language. It’s one of the wonderful
properties of language to be able to refer to things even when we
don’t know exactly what we mean (Putnam, 1975). To arrive at a
useful definition of something as complex as emotion, you need a
good theory. With the help of this book, we hope you will formulate
your own good theory of emotion.
Let’s begin to characterize emotion, so that we can agree upon
roughly what we are talking about. An emotion is a psychological
state that relates an event, usually out there in the world, but
sometimes in the mind, to what Nico Frijda (e.g., 2007) called a
concern. It prepares the person for action. What this makes clear
is that one central component of an emotion is an internal
experience, a state that reflects a present context relevant to the
person’s goals (Lazarus, 1991). A result is that, as Sylvan Tomkins
(whose work we discuss later in this chapter) has said: the emotion
gives priority to one goal over others. It gives that goal, or concern,
urgency. If you are crossing the road, and nearly get run over, your
concern for self-preservation takes priority: you are motivated by
fear. The urge is to jump back onto the curb. If you fare well on a
test you’ve studied hard for, your concern for being esteemed by
others is made salient: you feel pride, and may be inclined to tell
your parents, or, in worse moments, show off to your friends in
hubris (Tracy, Weidman, Cheng, & Martens, 2014). As these
examples illustrate, emotions relate events to our personal
concerns, and prepare us, as Nico Frijda has argued, to act in
response to events in the environment (Frijda, 1988, 2007;
Scarantino, 2017a). Emotions, then, are states triggered by events
related to our concerns and that motivate action. So, rather than
thinking that emotions are irrational, psychologists now tend to
think of emotions as being locally rational: they help us deal
adaptively with concerns specific to our current social context,
concerns, for example, over safety, fairness, agency, being esteemed
and respected, moral virtue, and feeling connected to trustworthy
others, that define our identities (Brosch & Sander, 2014; Solomon,
2007). An emotion gives urgency to a specific concern, and orients
us to specific kinds of action.
Our characterization of emotion also highlights how social these
states are; they mediate, or connect, the individual’s pressing
concerns with potential courses of action within the social
environment (Frijda, 2007; Keltner & Haidt, 1999; Scarantino,
2017a; van Kleef, 2016; van Kleef, Cheshin, Fischer, & Schneider,
2016). When we feel angered by a friend’s sarcastic comment, our
concern over being valued is given urgency, and points to courses of
action to undo the friend’s critique. Emotions are relational in many
ways. Expressions of emotion guide specific interactions that make
up your day (Keltner & Kring, 1998; Scarantino, 2017b). Think of the
last time you flirted or soothed a struggling friend. What might
come to mind as you do this are emotional expressions—a coy
glance, laughter, a comforting embrace, or compassionate word
accompanied by tender prosody. Emotions help us form and engage
in our relationships. Who do we choose to spend our lives with?
How do we feel about members of our family? Who are our friends?
Why do we worry when separated from someone to whom we’re
very close? Emotions connect our context-specific concerns with
possible courses of action in the social environment.
What’s the interpersonal equivalent of an emotion giving priority to
a concern? It’s that an emotion is a kind of commitment to another
(Aubé, 2009; Frank, 1988). When we love someone, even if the love
is brief, and even if it is not spoken about as love, we commit
ourselves to that other, at least for a while. We make the other’s
concerns our own, be it in sex, or in childrearing, or in cooperating
as soldiers or nurses do in situations when life is in peril. When we
are angry with someone, we commit ourselves to seeing the matter
through, to a resolution, or to a parting.
Emotions, then, are subjective and intrapersonal, but also
powerfully social and interpersonal. Let’s now examine how these
ideas have precursors in thinkers of the past.
Nineteenth-Century Founders
Modern ideas about emotions can be thought of as derived from
Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud; here’s how
their ideas have been influential.
Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Approach
Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! –
The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!
Charles Darwin, notebook (Gruber & Barrett, 1974, p. 289)
In 1872, Charles Darwin (see Figure 1.2), the central figure in
modern biology, published the most important book on emotions
yet written—The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872). Earlier, in On The Origin of Species (1859), he had described
how all living things have evolved to be adapted to their
environments. Knowing this you might imagine that Darwin would
have proposed that emotions served functions in our survival.
Indeed many psychologists and biologists assume that this is what
he said. But he didn’t. His argument was both closer to common
sense and more subtle than anything that we might
commonsensically believe.
FIGURE 1.2 Drawing of Charles Darwin.
Darwin began writing notes on his observations of emotions in
1838. At that time, the accepted theory was that God had given
humans special facial muscles that allowed them to express
uniquely human sentiments. A central tenet of Darwin’s theory,
however, was that humans are descended from other species: we are
not only closer to animals than had been thought, but we ourselves
are animals of a certain kind. Darwin gathered many observations,
which would have enduring effects on the contemporary study of
emotion (Darwin 1872/1998).
In his book on emotions, Darwin asked two broad questions that
still guide emotion researchers (Hess & Thibault, 2009; Shariff &
Tracy, 2011). First, how are emotions expressed in humans and
other animals? Table 1.1 is a taxonomy of some of the expressions
Darwin described.
TABLE 1.1
Emotional expressions discussed by Darwin (1872), the
bodily systems used, and the type of emotion which was
expressed
Source: Oatley (1992).
Expression
Bodily system
Emotion example
Blushing
Blood vessels
Shame, modesty
Body contact
Somatic muscles
Affection
Clenching fists
Somatic muscles
Anger
Crying
Tear ducts
Sadness
Frowning
Facial muscles
Anger, frustration
Laughing
Breathing apparatus Pleasure
Perspiration
Sweat glands
Pain
Hair standing on end Dermal apparatus
Fear, anger
Screaming
Vocal apparatus
Pain
Shrugging
Somatic muscles
Resignation
Sneering
Facial muscles
Contempt
Trembling
Somatic muscles
Fear, anxiety
The second question Darwin asked is where do our emotions come
from? He argued that emotional expressions derive largely from
habits that in our evolutionary or individual past had once been
useful (for criticism, see Fugate et al., 2014). Darwin proposed that
emotional expressions are based on reflex-like mechanisms, and
some of them occur whether they are useful or not. They can be
triggered involuntarily in circumstances analogous to those that had
triggered the original habits. His book brims with examples of such
actions: of tears that do not function to lubricate the eyes, of hair
standing on end in fear and anger to no apparent purpose, and so on
(see Figure 1.3).
FIGURE 1.3 Two of Charles Darwin’s photographs,
sneering and crying: (a) Plate IV No. 1; (b) Plate 1 No. 1.
For Darwin, expressions showed the continuity of adult human
emotions with those of lower animals and with those of infancy.
Because these expressions occur in adults “though they may not …
be of the least use,” they had for Darwin a significance for
evolutionary thinking rather like that of fossils that allow us to trace
the evolutionary ancestry of species. He thought emotional
expressions were like the appendix, which is a small organ that is
part of the gut but seemingly has no function. Darwin proposed that
this is evidence that we are descended from prehuman ancestors in
whom this organ had a use. He argued that many emotional
expressions have the same quality: for instance that sneering, in
which we partially uncover the teeth on one side, is a behavioral
vestige of snarling, and of preparing to bite. This preparation was
functional in some distant ancestor, but is so no longer. Though we
sometimes make mordant and cutting remarks, adult human beings
do not now generally use the teeth to attack (although in the United
States about a third to a half of preschool children have been bitten
by fellow preschoolers!).
Darwin traced other expressions to infancy: crying, he argued, is the
vestige of screaming in infancy, though in adulthood it is partly
inhibited. He described screaming in young babies and gave an
argument for the function of closing the eyes and the secretion of
tears to help protect them when this occurred. When adults cry they
still secrete tears, but adult tears no longer have a protective
function. One of Darwin’s most interesting suggestions is that
patterns of adult affection, of taking those whom we love in our
arms, are based on patterns of parents hugging young infants.
For Darwin, our emotions link us to our past: to the past of our
species and to our own infancy. He provided descriptions of facial
expressions, and he argued for the universality of such expressions,
a claim we shall take up in Chapter 4. He gave a perspective on the
question of how beneficial emotions are that is reflected in the
quotation at the head of this section. Might we be better off if we
could rise above bestial passions, which emerged in a prehuman
phase of in our evolution? Only toward the end of his book does
Darwin write:
The movements of expression in the face and body, whatever
their origin might have been, are in themselves of much
importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means of
communication between the mother and her infant; she smiles
approval, and thus encourages her child on the right path, or
frowns disapproval. We readily perceive sympathy in others by
their expression … The movements of expression give vividness
and energy to our spoken words.
(Darwin, 1872/1998, p. 359)
So, despite his reservations and the pressing nature of his
evolutionary argument, Darwin thought that emotions have useful
functions, they help us navigate our social interactions. And that is a
hypothesis we pursue in this book.
Significant Figure: Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin’s mother died when he was eight. At the age of
16, Charles was sent by his father to Edinburgh University to
study medicine, but he would skip classes to collect specimens
along the shores of the Firth of Forth, developing his strong
interest in natural history. In despair about the failure of his
son’s medical studies, his father next sent him to Cambridge to
study theology. Again, young Darwin was not fully engaged with
his courses: he was more interested in collecting beetles and in
hunting. He obtained an ordinary BA in 1831, and seemed
headed for a life as a country parson with the hobby of natural
history. He had not been idle at Cambridge, however. He had
won the esteem of a number of scientists, and, at the age of 22,
through a fortuitous turn of events, he was appointed naturalist
on the Beagle, a British Navy ship with a mission to chart
coastlines in South America. Two years after his return from his
five-year voyage, Darwin proposed to a cousin, Emma
Wedgewood and, a few months later, they started a long and
generally happy marriage. Darwin was a bit of hypochondriac,
and after he and his wife had settled in a house in a village
outside London, he seldom went out, except to health spas to
take cures.
The couple had 10 children, two of whom died in infancy.
Charles and Emma were devoted parents, and the death of their
daughter Annie at age 10 was devastating for both of them (and
deepened Darwin’s thinking about the evolution of sympathy).
Although evolution is often seen as in conflict with religion,
Charles did not see his discoveries and theory as incompatible
with his Christian beliefs. But the death of Annie did make him
doubt the existence of God.
From 1837, Charles’s notebooks show him struggling to
understand the change of one species into another. He
proceeded slowly, and it wasn’t until 1859 that his book On the
Origin of Species appeared.
From 1838 onward, Charles’s notebooks reflect a growing
interest in emotional expressions in humans, as well as in
nonhuman species, with many visits to the zoo. He enlisted
others to make observations for him. He realized the importance
of cross-cultural study. He was one of the first researchers to use
questionnaires: he sent a set of printed questions to
missionaries and others who could observe people all round the
world, asking them to observe particular expressions. He
received 36 replies. He was one of the first to use photographs
for research. He used both naturalistic and posed expressions of
emotion (such as the one at the head of this chapter) to make
scientific arguments. Darwin’s 1872 book on expression is the
foundation of the study of emotions. His 1877 paper in the
journal Mind, in which he describes observations of his infant
son William’s emotional and cognitive development, is one of
the first contributions to developmental psychology.
(Biographical information from Bowlby, 1991; Gruber & Barrett,
1974).
William James: The Bodily Approach
… bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting
fact … and feeling of the same changes as they occur, IS the
emotion.
James, 1890, p. 449
In this well-known quotation from The Principles of Psychology
(1890), William James argued against the common-sense idea that
when we feel an emotion it impels us to act in a certain way, that if
we were to meet a bear in the woods we would feel frightened and
run. Instead, James proposed that when we see the bear, “the
exciting fact” as he put it, the emotion, IS the perception of changes
of our body as we react to that fact. When we feel frightened, James
thought, what we feel is our heart beating, our skin cold, our
posture frozen, or our legs carrying us away as fast as possible. (In
1855 Carl Lange independently published the same idea, which thus
is sometimes known as the James-Lange theory.)
James’s theorizing focuses on the nature of emotional experience.
He stressed the way in which emotions move us in bodily ways.
We may tremble or perspire, our heart may thump in our chest, our
breathing may be taken over as we weep or laugh helplessly, we may
blush and feel the heat rise in our face in mortification, or feel
tingles in our spine when moved by music or a piece of art. The core
of an emotion, James contended, is the pattern of such bodily
responses. This vital point about the embodied nature of emotion is
captured in this observation of James: “If we fancy some strong
emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all
the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left
behind” (James, 1890, p. 451). This proposal has guided the study of
emotion in two important ways.
First, James concentrated on experience, and proposed that our
experience of many emotions, from fear to joy to reverence,
involves changes of the autonomic nervous system, that part of the
nervous system that affects systems in the body such as the heart,
blood vessels, lungs, stomach, and sweat glands. He also argued that
changes of muscles and joints and the sensory signals coming from
them were involved. Physiological reactions in the body associated
with the different emotions are our focus in Chapter 5.
Second, James proposed that emotions give “color and warmth” to
experience. Without these effects, he said, everything would be pale.
Colloquially we speak of “rose colored glasses” or a “jaundiced view
of life” to indicate how our emotions affect our perceptions. In
different parts of this book we will consider how deeply emotions
shape our patterns of thought (Lerner, Li, Valdesolo, & Kassam,
2015). In Chapter 10 we will examine how emotions guide our
judgments, from what is right and wrong to what is fair and just to
what we remember about the past.
Sigmund Freud: The Psychoanalytic Approach
I came away from the window at once, and leant up against the
wall and couldn’t get my breath … (description given by
Katharina, subject of one of Freud’s early case histories).
Freud & Breuer, 1895
One of Sigmund Freud’s most enduring ideas is that certain events
can be so damaging that they leave emotional scars that can affect
the rest of our lives (See Figure 1.4). His principal exposition was in
a series of case studies.
FIGURE 1.4 Group photograph of the conference to mark
Freud’s honorary degree at Clark University in 1909. In
the front row Freud is fourth from the right, Jung third
from the right, and William James is third from the left.
Freud was one of the first to argue that emotions are at the core of
many mental illnesses. An early patient, Katharina—a quotation
from whom is at the head of this section—described how she
suffered from attacks in which she thought she would suffocate.
Asked by Freud to give more details, she said: “I always see an awful
face that looks at me in a dreadful way, so that I am frightened” (p.
192). She could not say whose face it was. Freud was clear that the
attacks were of anxiety. Katharina would now be diagnosed as
suffering from panic attacks, defined in the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, Fifth Edition, DSM-5 (2013).
Like Darwin, Freud thought that an emotion in the present could
derive from one in the past, in the patient’s early life. His aim in
therapy for Katharina was to discover how her attacks had started
and who the feared person was. The method Freud developed was
called psychoanalysis, and in Katharina’s case we see elements of
how this kind of therapy developed: the telling by a patient of her or
his life story, which is found to have gaps (in this case the gap of
having no idea of whose the awful face was that appeared to her in
her attacks), the filling of such gaps by interpretations of the
therapist, and the insights of the person receiving the therapy who
realizes something that had been unconscious. Although in his case
history of 1895, Freud was able to elicit from Katharina parts of her
story, which involved sexual molestation, he disguised his account.
In a footnote to his case, which he added in 1924, he wrote: “I
venture after the lapse of so many years to lift the veil of discretion
and reveal the fact that Katharina … fell ill, therefore, as a result of
sexual attempts on the part of her own father” (p. 210).
Although psychoanalysis has been an influential psychological
therapy, it is often criticized. Very vocal, recently, has been Frederic
Crews (2017), a literary critic, who in the 1960s fell in love with
Freud and his theories, and subsequently (perhaps like other lovers
who have experienced disappointment) devoted himself to
disparagement. Perhaps more cogently, Freud’s methods of therapy
have been criticized by those who developed newer methods such as
behavior therapy and cognitive-behavior therapy (to which we come
in Chapter 14).
Most importantly for our understanding of emotions, in ways that
are generally not given proper consideration by Freud’s debunkers,
the work of Freud suggests that the emotional life of adulthood is
strongly influenced by relationships we had in childhood with
parents or other caregivers. This idea was the foundation of work of
John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst who, from 1951 onward, developed
the theory of attachment—the love between an infant and its
mother or other caregiver—and his idea that all later social
development derives from this emotional base. Arguably, this was
the most important new element in twentieth-century psychological
research on emotions. It was a huge step, an understanding of the
emotional development of children would now be unthinkable
without it. We discuss it in Chapter 11.
Freud’s theories were also critical to the influential theorist Richard
Lazarus (1991) who combined them with the Darwinian
evolutionary idea of adaptation, to propose that emotions derive
from how we appraise events in the environment in relation to our
goals. We discuss this, and related theories, in Chapter 6.
Philosophical and Literary Approaches
Darwin, James, and Freud laid important foundations in the study
of emotion, turning our attention to how expression, bodily
response, and complex narratives are part of emotion. They were,
however, not the first in the Western tradition to think about
emotions. Philosophers have long grappled with the nature of
emotion, as have writers of fiction (Scarantino, 2016). In this
section, we focus on three thinkers who influenced important
currents in the understanding of emotions and whose ideas are still
alive.
Aristotle and the Ethics of Emotions
… there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, 2, 1. 249–250
Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, offered some of the first
systematic analyses of emotions. His most fundamental insight was
that whereas many assume that emotions just happen to us, really
they depend on what we believe; emotions, in this view, are
evaluative judgments of events in the world (Clore & Ortony, 2013;
Ellsworth, 2013). In this way, we are responsible for our emotions
because we are responsible for our beliefs.
In his book Rhetoric, Aristotle discussed how different judgments
give rise to different emotions (see Konstan, 2006). “Anger,” says
Aristotle, “may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a
conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without
justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what
concerns one’s friends” (1378b, 1.32). The emotion occurs because
of our belief that a slight has occurred. To be slighted is to be
treated with contempt, or thwarted, or shamed.
In Aristotle’s discussion of the role of emotion in persuasion, we see
the message, echoed in the quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet at
the head of this section: our emotional experiences are shaped by
our judgments and evaluations. Think of it like this. It’s a warm
summer evening and you are lightly dressed, waiting in line at a
cinema. A light touch on your arm by the person you invited to the
movie might prompt a surge of affection. The very same pattern of
touch from a stranger might make you feel anxious, angry, or even
repelled. Our experience depends on our judgment.
In his book Poetics, which is about narrative writing, mainly about
tragedy, Aristotle concerned himself with the central place of
emotions in artistic expression, a theme we take up in different
places in the book. Drama, said Aristotle, is about human action,
and what can happen when human actions have effects that were
unforeseen. We are humans, not gods. We simply do not know
enough to predict the consequences of everything we do.
Nonetheless, and this is the root of human tragedy, we remain
responsible for our actions.
Aristotle noticed two important effects of tragic drama. First, at the
theater, people are moved emotionally (See Figure 1.5). As the
principal character grapples with consequences that were
unforeseen and uninvited, we see the somber spectacle of a person
who is good being tortured by circumstances to which he or she has
contributed but cannot control. We are moved to feel sympathy (or
pity) for this person—and to fear for ourselves, because in the
universal appeal of these plays we know that the principal character
is also ourself.
FIGURE 1.5 The theater in classical times was an
important institution, constructed to portray action in
the context of fellow citizens who sat there in full view.
Second, we can experience what Aristotle called katharsis of our
emotions. This term is widely mistranslated as purgation or
purification, as if one goes to the theater to rid oneself of toxic
emotions or to elevate them. But as Martha Nussbaum (1986)
argues, for Aristotle katharsis meant neither purgation nor
purification. It meant clarification—the clearing away of obstacles to
understanding. By seeing predicaments of human action at the
theater we may come to experience emotions of sympathy and fear,
and understand consciously for ourselves their relation to the
consequences of human action in a world that can be known only
imperfectly.
Not long after Aristotle’s death, two important schools of
philosophy developed out of his argument that emotions are
evaluations and depend upon beliefs. The first was Epicureanism,
based on the teachings of Epicurus who lived near Athens, around
300 BCE, in a community of like-minded friends. The second was
Stoicism. It got its name from the stoa, where the philosophers of
this school taught; the stoa was a colonnade, a bit like a cloister,
that ran alongside the marketplace in Athens (see Figure 1.6).
FIGURE 1.6 A stoa that runs alongside the agora
(marketplace) in Athens. It was in such a place that the
Stoics taught the management of emotions. (The stoa in
this picture is not the original but one constructed a
century after the founding of Stoicism, and rebuilt in the
1930s).
Though dictionaries tell us that epicurean now means “devoted to
the pursuit of pleasure” and stoic means “indifferent to pleasure or
pain,” these meanings are distant from their origins, but the fact
that these words are in modern languages testifies to a continuing
influence.
The Epicurean and Stoic philosophers can be thought of as the first
thoroughgoing Western emotion researchers. The Epicureans
developed ideas of natural human sociality that influenced both the
American and French Revolutions. The idea that human beings
have a right to the pursuit of happiness is distinctively Epicurean, as
is the idea of living naturally, in harmony with an environment of
which we are stewards. The Epicureans taught that one should live
in a simple way, and enjoy simple pleasures, like wholesome food
and the enjoyment of friendship, rather than chasing after things
that make one anxious like wealth or are unnatural like luxuries, or
are ephemeral like fame. Being guided by such desires can only lead
to painful emotions: anger when someone frustrates one’s will,
greed at wanting more and more, envy at someone having
something we do not. The Epicureans recommended shifts in
attention, from such irrational desires to more worthwhile ones, a
possibility that today is studied in the literatures on emotion
regulation and mindfulness, which we consider later (Gross, 2015).
As to Stoicism, one of the most interesting Stoic philosophers was
Chrysippus. He distinguished between first movements of
emotions, which are automatic, and second movements, which
are mental and involve judgment and decision (Nussbaum, 2001).
Chrysippus thought that one cannot avoid the first movements;
they occur in the body and we can’t do anything about them. But
since second movements involve thought, they are “up to us.” We
get a glimpse of this in the movie Inside out, when Riley’s emotions
Joy and Sadness, feeling lost, alight upon the train of thought.
For the most part, Stoics thought that emotions derive from desires.
To free oneself from crippling and destructive emotions, therefore,
one should extirpate most desires, such as those to be superior to
others or yearning for fame or wealth. They advised that humans
should pursue rationality and good character as the only values that
are outside the vagaries of chance or the control of others and,
therefore, are subject to one’s own will. The Stoic understanding
was that most emotions, especially anger, anxiety, pride, and lust,
are damaging to the self and to society, and so the desires that lead
to them should be disciplined out of our daily lives.
Stoic ideas are thought to have influenced the acceptance of
Christianity by the Romans following the conversion of the
Emperor Constantine. As Christianity began to spread, the bad
desires and bad thoughts, which the Stoics sought to extirpate,
became the seven deadly sins of greed, gluttony, hubris, lust, vanity,
laziness, and despondency. All of the sins have an emotional quality,
which raises the intriguing question of when emotions benefit us
and those around us and of when they disrupt our social lives
(Sorabji, 2000; Oatley, 2011). One answer is found in this idea: Sin
implies temptation, which, in turn, implies that we have choice. In
the Stoics’ second stage of emotion, this possibility of choice is
foremost. In Chapter 6, we come to it with the theories of appraisal
and emotion regulation, which suggest that what we do with our
emotions is as important to our well-being as whether or not we feel
them. In Chapter 14, we come to the relation between emotions and
free will.
Epicurean and Stoic philosophies have come to be parts of ethics,
because the members of these schools pursued the goal of
understanding how one could shape one’s emotions in pursuing the
good life in what Martha Nussbaum calls, in the title of her book of
1994 Therapy of Desire. Ethics are not about knowing what others
should do, or even what one should do oneself. They are about
considerations we might have on how best to structure our own
lives in relation to others. It’s been said that, when one gets down to
it, there are only two real choices in life: Epicureanism, living in a
way that is pleasurable though moderate, and Stoicism, living so
that rationality and the building of character are the highest virtues.
Just as medicine sought a cure for bodily ills, so the Epicureans and
Stoics thought of philosophy as a cure for the soul; they focused on
emotions as the chief sources of the soul’s diseases. One may
achieve lovely insights into Stoic thinking from the Roman writers
Marcus Aurelius (c. 170) and Epictetus (c. 100), one an emperor and
the other a former slave.
Two thousand years after the Epicureans and Stoics, people who
think about emotions and their contribution to our ethical behavior
and pursuit of happiness tend to seek answers in psychology. Think
of the earlier sections of this chapter: we’ve introduced emotions as
being biological, as arising in the body, as driven by the
unconscious. How—in the face of such forces—can we influence our
emotions? How can we live a life that is satisfying and meaningful,
and tip the balance toward enjoyable engagement in what we are
doing, rather than toward resentment or alienation? Despite the fact
that our emotions are strongly affected by our genes and
upbringing, how might it be possible to use whatever free will we
have to live in a way that is right for us and for those we love? How
can we escape from disabling depression, anxiety, or addiction or
destructive anger and disgust?
Should we make resolutions to use self-control to improve
ourselves? The science of emotions has shown this often isn’t the
best way forward. As David DeSteno (2018) has found, it’s too selfinvolved, and for the most part resolutions to use self-control don’t
carry through. But if we cultivate our emotions toward others, such
as gratitude and compassion—those that orient us toward
benefitting others and folding into strong collaborative relations—
we are more likely to become better in ways that we would like.
Issues of this kind are a focus of our last chapter, Chapter 14.
René Descartes: Philosophically Speaking
The Passions of the Soul
Book title of Descartes
René Descartes is generally regarded as the founder of modern
philosophy and of the scientific view of the world. Descartes wrote
in the seventeenth century in Holland, which had just emerged
from being a Spanish colony to become a center of commercial and
intellectual life, perhaps at that time one of the few places in Europe
where bold thinkers could work and publish without persecution. It
is on the emotions that Descartes directs his focus in The Passions
of the Soul (1649), which offered a detailed discussion of how mind
and body work, which included sensory and motor nerves, reflexes,
and memory.
As for the emotions (which in those days were called the passions)
Descartes opens his book as follows: “There is nothing in which the
defective nature of the sciences which we have received from the
ancients appears more clearly than in what they have written on the
passions” (p. 331).
What new insights does Descartes offer? He claimed that the six
fundamental emotions—wonder, desire, joy, love, hatred, and
sadness—occur in the thinking aspect of ourselves that he called the
soul. Today we might call this the conscious sense of self or our
sense of who we are. At the same time, emotions are closely
connected to our bodies, for example, to our heart beating rapidly,
to blushing, or to tears. Descartes differentiated emotions from
perceptions of events that happen in the outside world and
perceptions of events that happen within the body, such as hunger
and pain. Whereas outer perceptions tell us about the world, and
bodily states like hunger and pain tell us about the body, emotions
tell us what is important in our souls—as we might now say, in our
real selves—in relation to our concerns and our identities.
Having identified the origins of the emotions in our souls, Descartes
then describes how emotions cannot be entirely controlled by
thinking, but they can be regulated by thoughts, especially thoughts
which are true. So, he says:
… in order to excite courage in oneself and remove fear, it is not
sufficient to have the will to do so, but we must also apply
ourselves to consider the reasons, the objects or examples which
persuade us that the peril is not great; that there is always more
security in defense than flight; that … we could expect nothing
but regret and shame for having fled, and so on.
(Descartes, 1649, p. 352)
Like Aristotle, Descartes suggests that the emotions depend on how
we evaluate events.
Descartes was also one of the first to argue that emotions serve
important functions, a central theme of this book:
… the utility of all the passions consists alone in their fortifying
and perpetuating in the soul thoughts which it is good it should
preserve, and which without that might easily be effaced from it.
And again, all the harm which they can cause consists in the fact
that they fortify and conserve those thoughts more than
necessary, or that they fortify and conserve others on which it is
not good to dwell.
(ibid, p. 364)
We might reflect on how, when we love someone our love
perpetuates and extends our thoughts of this person, and when we
are overanxious or depressed we dwell on issues we cannot affect.
Descartes’s idea—a perceptive one—is that our emotions are usually
functional, but can sometimes be dysfunctional (Keltner & Gross,
1999; Oatley & Jenkins, 1992).
Descartes wrote at the end of the Renaissance. He was a
contemporary of William Harvey who discovered the circulation of
the blood, which formerly had been thought to be one of the four
humors. Ideas of these humors derived from Greek doctors such as
Hippocrates and Galen, who thought that disease was caused by
imbalance among the humors, with an increase of each humor
giving rise to a distinct emotional state. Blood gives rise to hope and
vigor, from it comes the term “sanguine;” phlegm gives rise to
placidity, from it comes the term “phlegmatic;” yellow bile gives rise
to anger, from it comes the world “choleric,” black bile gives rise to
despair, from it comes the word “melancholy.” Before the midseventeenth century, it was thought that the very emanations of
these humors were the experience of each kind of emotion, that we
become melancholy (for instance) from an excess of black bile that
gives off the experience of sadness as a stagnant pool gives off a
stench (Paster, Rowe, & Floyd-Wilson, 2004). Among those making
new efforts of imagination was Descartes. In the new physiology to
which he contributed, emotions arise in the mind. Not only do they
often affect our bodies, but functionally they enable our plans and
actions (Scarantino, 2017a).
George Eliot: The World of the Arts
No life would have been possible to Dorothea which was not
filled with emotion …
George Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 894
Many of the greatest insights into emotions come from novelists
and poets—Virginia Woolf on the stream of consciousness, D.H.
Lawrence on emotional dynamics between women and men, Emma
Cline on the self-consciousness of adolescence. The writing of
George Eliot (pen-name of Mary Ann Evans) offers impressive ideas
regarding emotional experience and its place in intimate
relationships (Davis, 2017; Haight, 1968; Oatley, 1992).
In 1856 George Eliot wrote an essay for the Westminster Review,
entitled “The natural history of German life” (Pinney, 1963). In it
she reviewed two books by von Riehl, a pioneer anthropologist, who
described the life of German peasants. Her essay was a kind of
manifesto for her own novels. It includes the following:
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or
novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on
generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a
moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life
such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the
selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves,
which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment … Art is
the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience
and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the
bounds of our personal lot.
(George Eliot, 1856, reprinted in Pinney, 1963, p. 270)
Although the word “emotion” isn’t used here, this passage is about
the importance of literary art for the emotions and has influenced
our approach in this book: emotions are not just in individuals but
between people as well. So, Eliot says, sympathies—emotions that
connect us to each other—can be extended by novelists and other
kinds of artists, to people outside our usual circle of friends and
acquaintances.
In the years 1871 to 1872, Eliot published Middlemarch, a novel
about emotions, which portrays experience from inside the person’s
own consciousness. Each character has aspirations and plans, but
each is affected by the unforeseeable accidents of life. Eliot’s
question is this: if we are unable to foresee the outcomes of all our
actions, if there is no fate or divine force guiding us toward an
inevitable destiny, how should we find our way in life? Her answer
is that our emotion can act as a sort of compass. You might think of
emotions as narratives, or stories, that move us forward in life in
the pursuit of what we care about, our concerns as we said earlier.
In the book, Eliot contrasts Dorothea who longs to do some good in
the world, with Edward Casaubon, an elderly scholar whom
Dorothea admired and married in the hope of gaining entrance to
the world of learning. Dorothea is responsive to the emotional
currents of her own and others’ lives, whereas for all his erudition
Casaubon barely recognizes his emotions at all. About a third of the
way through the book, Casaubon has a heart attack in suppressed
anger following an argument with Dorothea. Lydgate, the town
doctor, attends and counsels Dorothea to avoid all occasions that
might agitate her husband.
Some days later Lydgate makes another call and Casaubon asks him
to be candid about his condition. Lydgate says that although
prediction is difficult, he is at risk. Casaubon perceives that he
might die, and sinks into bitterness. When Lydgate leaves, Dorothea
goes into the garden with a sympathetic impulse to go at once to her
husband.
But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for
her ardour, continually repulsed, served with her intense
memory to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into
a shudder, and she wandered slowly round the nearer clumps of
trees until she saw him advancing. Then she went towards him,
and might have represented a heaven-sent angel coming with a
promise that the short hours remaining should yet be filled with
that faithful love which clings the closer to a comprehended grief.
His glance in reply to hers was so chill that she felt her timidity
increased; yet turned and passed her hand through his arm.
Mr Casaubon kept his hands behind him, and allowed her pliant
arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.
There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation
which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a
strong word, but not too strong; it is in these acts called
trivialities that the seeds of joy are for ever wasted.
(George Eliot, 1871–1872, p. 462)
In this passage we see many of Eliot’s ideas about how emotions
arise and are communicated. They are what relationships are made
of. They have powerful effects upon how we perceive other people
and situations in which we find ourselves. We come to understand
that we experience our own emotions differently from how people
see them. We readers are moved emotionally in ways that succeed
in “extending our sympathies.” Later George Eliot wrote in a letter:
… my writing is simply a set of experiments in life – an
endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable
of – what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give
promise of a better after which we can strive.
(Haight, 1985, p. 466)
Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and
Anthropology
Founding figures from Charles Darwin to George Eliot have
grappled with the nature of emotion, relying on the tools of keen
observation, thought experiments, and literary narrative. How
would the scientific study of emotion emerge? During the first half
of the twentieth century, there was resistance to the study of the
emotions, most pronounced in behaviorism, a school of thought
that saw only overt behavior as worthy of psychological inquiry.
Within this tradition, the mind was a black box, inscrutable to the
lens of science, and emotions disruptive forces within the human
psyche. On this, one of the best-known behaviorists, B.F. Skinner,
has a character in his 1948 novel, Walden Two, say: “We all know
that emotions are useless and bad for our peace of mind and our
blood pressure” (p. 92). In the last 50 years, however, at first
gradually, and then with gathering momentum, the scientific study
of emotions has come into its own in the brain sciences, in
psychology, and in other social sciences, most notably sociology and
anthropology.
John Harlow, Tania Singer: Toward a Brain Science of
Emotion
Even though empathy has been extensively discussed and
investigated by philosophers and social scientists, only recently
has it become a focus for neuroscience.
Tania Singer et al. (2004), p. 1157
One of the earliest and most striking pieces of evidence about how
the brain is involved in emotions came from a horrific accident,
written up by a country doctor, John Harlow.
The case about which Harlow wrote was that of Phineas Gage a
likeable foreman of a group of men working to construct a railroad
in Vermont. On September 13, 1848, they were about to blast a rock,
which had been drilled and the hole filled with gunpowder. Gage
rammed the powder down with an iron rod, three- and- a- half feet
long, an inch and a quarter in diameter. It weighed 13 pounds. This
tamping rod must have struck up a spark, for there was an
explosion. The rod entered Gage’s skull just beneath the left
eyebrow, exited via a hole in the top of his head, and landed 50 feet
away (See Figure 1.7). Gage bled terribly, suffered an infection of his
wound, but recovered, in body though not in mind.
FIGURE 1.7 Model of Phineas Gage’s head and his skull
showing the exit hole made by the tamping rod.
John Harlow, who attended Gage, wrote that the “balance, so to
speak, between his intellectual faculties and his animal propensities
seems to have been destroyed” (1868, p. 277). The effects were
emotional. Although previously he was amiable, Gage was now
impatient, irreverent, and easily moved to anger. His employers who
had regarded him as their “most efficient and capable foreman”
could not give him back his job.
In the science of emotion dozens of people—“modern Phineas
Gages”—have been studied. These are people who suffered damage
to the frontal lobes (Damasio, 1994; Szczepanski & Knight, 2014).
What is most striking and consistent in these studies is how
disrupted are the emotions of such people and how detrimental are
the effects on their judgment and relationships. They often show
inappropriate judgments when it comes to risk, morality, money,
pleasure, or the trustworthiness of other people (Bechara, 2004). As
a result, they may find it hard to choose to make this appointment
or make rash investments with fraudulent financial advisers. They
struggle in friendships, and their marriages often end in divorce
because of their outbursts, sexual improprieties, and unreliability.
These observations speak to our definition of emotion earlier, that
emotions link a person’s current concerns to suitable courses of
action in the present situation. When emotions are disrupted
through such brain damage, people can’t gauge which concerns
matter, and their actions often can be inappropriate. We elaborate
upon this and other insights that emerge in studies of patients like
Gage in Chapter 7.
Before the age of electronics, and the finding that the brain works
by sending electrical and chemical signals, the main evidence about
emotions and human brain function came from accidental damage
of the kind that happened to poor Phineas Gage and to modern
Phineas Gages.
Among the pioneers of more modern brain research on the
emotions was Walter Cannon, who argued for a different view of the
emotions than the embodied perspective of his Harvard colleague,
William James. He started a paper in 1927 by citing observations by
commentators that James’s theory is “so strongly fortified by truth
and so repeatedly confirmed by experience” (p. 106) that he felt
trepidation at venturing to criticize it. Cannon uses the term
“trepidation” rhetorically. He probably felt no such thing. His 1927
paper was one in a line of criticisms he published of the JamesLange theory. His principal evidence was that if James were right,
then when the viscera (from which bodily feelings were supposed by
James to arise) were severed from the brain of laboratory animals,
one would expect a reduction in their emotions. With this
operation, however, no such reduction occurred.
Instead, as Cannon found it was transection of neural pathways at a
quite different level that had striking effects on emotions. Cannon
showed that when, in a laboratory cat, the cerebral cortex was
severed from the lower parts (subcortical regions) of the brain, or
removed altogether, the result was an animal that showed very
intense emotions, for instance, strong anger with no provocation.
The phenomenon contributed to the idea that the higher region of
the brain—the cortex—acts to inhibit the subcortical regions where
emotions reside, an idea that continues to this day in some studies
of emotion regulation and the brain (Braunstein, Gross, & Ochsner,
2017). Not everyone finds the idea helpful, that the main job of the
cortex is to inhibit the lower regions; most functions of the cortex
are more active and add meaning to subcortical beginnings of
emotion, as we shall see in Chapter 7.
Today, although research on brain patients continues to yield
insights, neuroscientists now study emotion-related brain activation
with a number of techniques, particularly functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which picks up changes of blood flow in
regions of the brain when the neurons in those regions are active.
Let’s consider a line of research that is growing. It’s on empathy—
the state of feeling what another person is feeling. You will learn in
this book about the centrality of empathy to parent–child
attachments, romantic partnerships, friendships and interactions at
work (Zaki & Ochsner, 2016). Frederique de Vignemont and Tania
Singer (2006) defined empathy as follows:
a. having an emotion, which
b. is in some way similar to that of another person, which
c. is elicited by observation or imagination of the other’s emotion,
and that involves
d. knowing that the other is the source of one’s own emotion.
Might empathy engage specific regions of the brain?
To answer this question, Tania Singer and her collaborators (2004)
assessed brain activity with fMRI while volunteers experienced a
painful electric shock and compared it to that elicited when these
participants received a signal indicating that their loved one—
present in the same room—was receiving a similar shock. Some
areas of the brain (for instance, the somatosensory cortex) were
activated only when the participants experienced pain through their
own senses. What was striking, though, is that other regions of the
brain were activated both when subjects received pain and when
they were signaled that their loved one experienced pain. These
regions included the anterior insula, which tracks physical
sensations in the body and represents those sensations as conscious
experiences of feeling (Craig, 2009), and parts of the anterior
cingulate cortex, which is engaged during experiences of negative
emotion and conflict and motivates action (See Figure 1.8).
FIGURE 1.8 Empathy (darker color labels) and
compassion (lighter color labels) in networks in the
brain.
This study of Singer and colleagues tells us that the emotional
aspect of pain was shared in the brain; it was affected by the
participants’ own pain and imagination of pain in their loved one.
You might be asking the following question. What about our
empathic response to other emotions in other people? Singer and
colleagues have found that similar components of this “empathy
network” in the brain—the anterior insular cortex and anterior
cingulate cortex—are activated when participants respond
empathically to other people’s experiences of fear, anxiety, disgust,
and pleasure (Bernhardt & Singer, 2012).
A second question you might ask is about sympathy and
compassion, which are closely related to empathy. In sympathy
(or compassion), we respond to others’ suffering or pain with our
own feelings of concern and the motivation to help that person
(Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010). You might think of the
empathic response to another’s suffering as a mirroring response,
with sympathy and compassion additionally involving a concern for
the other person’s welfare giving rise to an urge to help. Are
empathy and sympathy registered in different regions of the brain?
This appears to be the case. Recent studies find that sympathy
(compassion) activates different regions of the brain than empathy,
including an old region of the brain—the periaqueductal gray—that
enables nurturant behavior in mammals, and reward-related
regions of the brain, including the ventral tegmental area, the
nucleus accumbens, and the orbitofrontal cortex (Ashar, AndrewsHanna, Dimidjian, & Wager, 2017; Bernardt & Singer, 2012; SimonThomas et al., 2011). In Chapter 7, we continue this discussion of
brain processes involved in different emotions.
Novels and Films: Avatar
James Cameron’s (2009) film Avatar was a big hit, and it
continues to be worth seeing. An avatar is a conceptual being
that can represent us in a game. In this film, the avatar is a being
from another planet, into which the human mind of Jake Sully
(played by Sam Worthington) is inserted. Sully has been a
marine. He was wounded in combat, and made paraplegic.
Despite being confined to a wheelchair, he has special skills that
qualify him to join a group of humans on a mission to Pandora,
in the Alpha Centauri solar system, in the year 2154. The body
that Jake’s mind enters is that of a Na’vi, a species of nine-foot
tall, blue-skinned beings, who are lithe and elegant, who move
gracefully through beautiful forests with which they live in
harmony.
Humans have come to Pandora to obtain a valuable mineral
“unobtainium,” needed to solve the energy crisis that threatens
Earth. The film’s plot parallels the plunder of the Americas by
Europeans, with contempt for indigenous peoples. At one level,
Avatar is a conventional film in which a likeable hero first
suffers, then overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles,
and then gets the girl, the lovely Na’vi princess, Neytiri (played
by Zoe Saldana), who inducts him into ways of living in the
Pandoran forests.
But Cameron is a deeply psychological film maker (Oatley,
2009). Jake enters a series of empathetic identifications with
people who first are like him, then progressively more different
from him. His first identification is with Colonel Quaritch,
military commander of the human mission to Pandora. Having
been in the military, Jake can easily identify with him. Next,
Jake identifies with a second human, a woman: Dr. Grace
Augustine, an anthropologist who wants to understand the Na’vi
because she is in charge of the mission to cajole them into
disrupting their living place and giving up their valuable mineral
deposits. It’s she who arranges for Jake to be inserted mentally
into the body of a Na’vi, to infiltrate this group that seems to be
obstructing human purposes. Finally, Jake empathizes and
identifies with a member of another species, Princess Neytiri,
with whom he falls in love.
The most important psychological issue for Cameron concerns
our human propensity to empathize with members of the group
to which we feel we belong and our accompanying potential of
contempt toward members of groups to which we feel we don’t
belong. Such groups can be defined by nationality, by political
ideas, by gender, by skin color, or, indeed, by anything. You
might see something of this in yourself in your preferences for
an athlete or sports team.
In a review of empathy and its opposite—schadenfreude (taking
pleasure in others’ misfortunes)—Cikara, Bruneau, and Saxe
(2011) argue that although our dispositions to care about and
help each other are at the very foundation of human society,
there are powerful motivations not to care about or help
members of out-groups: sympathetic and empathic feelings
toward such people are rare and fragile. Cikara et al. review
studies in which participants have been led to increase empathy
for members of out-groups. Arguably, films such as Avatar
might contribute in this way.
Magda Arnold, Sylvan Tomkins: New Psychological Theories
… emotions involve a double reference, both to the object and to
the self experiencing the object.
Magda Arnold and J. Gasson, 1954
It is my intention to reopen issues which have long remained in
disrepute in American psychology.
Sylvan Tomkins, 1962
In the second half of the twentieth century, faintly at first, voices
were heard expressing concerns that emotions had been neglected
in the academy. Among the voices were those of Magda Arnold and
Sylvan Tomkins; in 1954 both started to speak in ways that guide
people toward the present day scientific study of emotion. Arnold
(with J. Gasson) proposed that emotions are based on appraisals
of events. In the same year, at a meeting of the International
Congress of Psychology, Tomkins offered a theory about the
relation of emotion to facial expression.
Most researchers now assume that emotions derive from people’s
appraisals of events. The typical emotion arises when a person
perceives, or thinks about something, that is relevant to what Nico
Frijda (e.g., 2007) calls a concern: something important to us. The
idea that the core to an emotion is an appraisal of something that
happens in the world was proposed in ancient times. It is similar to
Aristotle’s idea of emotions as evaluations (Nussbaum, 2001). If we
know what appraisals (or evaluations) are made of an event, we can
predict what emotion is likely to occur (Roseman, 2013). If we know
what emotion is currently being experienced, we can infer what
appraisals are likely to have been made.
In their development of this idea that emotions involve appraisals
or evaluations, Arnold and Gasson proposed that an emotion relates
self to object. Unlike perception, which is about our knowledge of
what is out there, or personality, which is about what each of us is
like in ourselves, emotions are essentially relational; emotions
mediate, or link, our interior concerns with events and objects in
the world. Arnold and Gasson put it like this: “An emotion … can be
considered as the felt tendency toward an object judged suitable, or
away from an object judged unsuitable” (1954, p. 294).
So appraisals involve at first attraction to, or repulsion from, some
object, and they determine whether the emotion is positive or
negative. Then come further distinctions, depending on whether the
object of the emotion is present or not and whether there are
difficulties in acting. “Impulsive” emotions arise if there is no
difficulty in attaining or avoiding an object. The “emotions of
contention” arise when there are difficulties in acting. Particular
emotions, Arnold and Gasson argue, arise according to these
appraisals. If an object is judged suitable and if it is present, then
the impulsive emotion tends to be love; if an object is judged
unsuitable and is not present, then the contending emotion is fear.
These ideas would be widely influential, as we shall see in our
discussion of emotion-related appraisals in Chapter 6.
In a series of books (e.g., 1962), Sylvan Tomkins developed a similar
line of theorizing. His central claim was that affect is the primary
motivational system. Emotions are amplifiers of drives. It had
long been assumed that drives, such as hunger, thirst, and sex, are
the primary determinants of behavior. Not so, argued Tomkins:
“This is a radical error. The intensity, the urgency, the
imperiousness, the ‘umph’ of drives is an illusion. The illusion is
created by the misidentification of the drive ‘signal’ with its
‘amplifier.’ Its amplifier is its affective response” (1970, p. 101).
What Tomkins meant by “drive signal” was a neural message about
some event, for instance, a signal of a potential sexual partner.
What he meant by “drive amplifier” was the “umph,” for instance, a
strong attraction to this person.
In Tomkins’s account, human action and thought reflect the
interplay of motivational systems, each capable of fulfilling a certain
function (such as eating, breathing, sex), each potentially capable of
taking over the whole person. What prioritizes these systems? It is
emotion. It does so by amplifying one particular drive signal, just as
loudness of sound on an audio system is amplified by turning up a
control to adjust its volume.
Here are two of Tomkins’s illustrations. First: when, for any reason,
there is some sudden obstruction to breathing, as when drowning or
choking, it is not the shortness of oxygen that is obvious, it is a
panicky fear that amplifies the drive signal making us struggle to
breathe again. Those pilots in World War II who refused to wear
oxygen masks suffered lack of oxygen, said Tomkins. But the effect
occurred slowly. It was not unpleasant. The signal was not
amplified, and some of these pilots died with smiles on their lips.
Second: when we are sexually excited, it is not the sexual organs
that become emotionally excited. It is the person who is excited, and
moves toward the other person and to fulfillment. The bodily
changes, for instance, in the sex organs, amplify the sexual drive,
making it urgent, and taking priority over other matters. These bold
theoretical claims would inspire young scientists, who included Paul
Ekman and Carroll Izard, to study emotion.
Erving Goffman, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Lila AbuLughod: Emotions as Moral Dramas Involving Selves and
Others
Create alarm
Slogan on an office wall of a debt-collecting agency
Sociologist Erving Goffman proposed that when William
Shakespeare wrote “all the world’s a stage” (in As You Like It, 1623)
this was not a metaphor: we literally give dramatic presentations
of ourselves to each other and create the social reality in which we
live. From such performances moral worlds are created. From them
we derive our own selfhood and from them others derive their sense
of who we are.
Goffman introduced into social science the method of careful
observation through a theoretical lens. His lens was his idea that
life is a kind of drama, in which we take on roles. For understanding
emotions, Goffman’s most instructive work is perhaps the essay
“Fun in games,” published in Encounters (1961). In this essay,
Goffman advances his general argument about life as drama,
making the case that emotions are constructed within specific roles,
such as being with your family, or with your boss, or out on a first
date.
We can think of each kind of social interaction, at a café, in the
workplace, in the family, out on a date, as like a game, says
Goffman. When we enter it, we pass through an invisible membrane
into a separate world with its own rules, its own traditions, its own
history. We take on a social role that is afforded in that kind of
interaction—when out on a date we may be the one who charms and
flirts, in a school or university our role may be that of hard working,
curious student. Within the membrane, we give a certain
performance to sustain our role, following the outline rules or
scripts that are relevant within that world. So out on a date we tell
jokes and disclose vulnerabilities, as a student we seek to find what
ideas inspires us and give us purpose. These performances are
viewed by ourselves and others as good or bad of their kind, as
correct, incorrect, or partially correct. They invite commentary from
others—including suggested modifications, blame, and praise. The
distinctive rules within each kind of membrane give rise to social
and moral worlds that provide the subject for much of our
conversation.
Now comes Goffman’s insight into emotions: as well as giving a
more or less good performance we can ask how strongly engaged we
are in a role. Games are fun because they invite wholehearted
engagement. By extension, the roles that we play in social life have
their emotional correlates. Certain roles center upon the experience
of certain emotions: love and passion expected of new romantic
partners; the sympathy and filial love expected of new parents. Our
full engagement in roles is enabled by enthusiasm and produces
emotional rewards, the feeling of pride or contentment, for
example, in fulfilling the expectations of specific roles. In contrast,
sometimes the performances in which we engage in our social lives
can produce inner conflict: we can follow the rules, enact the script,
take part in the interaction, but not be engaged. In this case, we can
feel we are not enacting the role in all its details and expectations.
Then occur various emotions—anxiety, sadness, anger, shame—that
are upsetting and unsatisfying aspects of our lives.
Arlie Hochschild was influenced by Goffman (see Figure 1.9). In her
work she explored the tension that so often occurs when the person
is in conflict about the role he or she plays, when there are
questions about who one is in oneself, and the performance one is
giving.
FIGURE 1.9 Arlie Hochschild is a pioneering scientist in
the study of emotion.
Hochschild’s parents were in the US Foreign Service, and she
describes how at the age of 12 she found herself passing round a
dish of peanuts at a diplomatic party and wondering whether the
smiles of those who accepted her offerings were real. Her parents
often commented on gesture: the “tight smile of the Bulgarian
emissary, the averted glance of the Chinese consul, and the
prolonged handshake of the French economic officer” (Hochschild,
1983, p. ix). These gestures did not just convey meaning from one
person to another—they were messages between governments. Had
the 12-year-old just passed peanuts to actors playing prescribed
diplomatic roles? Where did the person end and the job begin? How
much of emotion is not involuntary, but a dramatic performance
guided by strategy and rules and even deception?
In her scientific research, Hochschild first sought answers to this
problem: do sales people sell the product, or their personalities? She
developed a theory of “feeling rules.” These rules specify what
emotional feelings are appropriate to the specific context. They can
be private and unconscious, or socially engineered in occupations
that require us to influence other people’s emotions and judgments.
Hochschild observed the training of Delta Airlines cabin staff, which
includes learning how to act in emergencies, how to serve food, and
feeling rules that detailed emotional performances required of a
Delta flight attendant. The trainee had to play a role, much as if she
were an actor. The main aim is to induce a particular emotional tone
in passengers: “Trainees were exhorted: to ‘Really work on your
smiles … your smile is your biggest asset’ ” (Hochschild, 1983, p.
105). They “were asked to think of a passenger as if he were a
‘personal guest in your living room’. The workers’ emotional
memories of offering personal hospitality were called up and put to
use, as Stanislavski would recommend” in his well-known training
of actors, known as method acting (p. 105). It is easier to give a
convincing performance when one fully enters into the part.
Work that involves constructing emotions in oneself in order to
induce them in others is widespread: Hochschild calls it emotional
labor. When Hochschild was developing this idea, she estimated
that 38 percent of paid jobs in the United States needed substantial
emotional labor, and these burdens fell disproportionately upon
women. For many jobs, from the airline flight attendants
Hochschild studied to personal assistants of executives, the
emotional labor required performances of joy and cheerfulness.
Other jobs required threatening emotions: “Create alarm” was the
motto of one debt-collecting agency boss (Hochschild, 1983, p. 146).
Today, with the expansion of jobs in the service industry and in
health care, even more people are required to engage in emotional
labor in their careers. Zhan et al. (2016) distinguished between
surface acting and deep acting during emotional labor. They found
that those who only managed to do surface acting were more likely
to experience negative responses from customers and that they
were more likely to suffer emotional exhaustion. In contrast, those
who were able to do deep acting received more positive responses
from customers and were able to feel more positive in themselves.
The central insight of Goffman and Hochschild, that emotions are
kinds of social performances in which we embody specific roles and
identities, dovetails with the theorizing of anthropologists, such as
Lila Abu-Lughod. Abu-Lughod has devoted parts of her research
career to living with and studying the Awlad’Ali, a nomadic Bedouin
tribe in Egypt. In her book Veiled Sentiments, Abu-Lughod offers
rich descriptions of how the women perform an emotion known as
“Hasham,” which roughly translates to embarrassment, shyness,
and modesty (Abu-Lughod, 1986). Women express this emotion in
their gaze aversion, blushing, and veiling, and spatially, in terms of
who they can be in the presence of. The central concern at the heart
of the expressions of hasham is that women signal their place, and
deference, to men, who tend to occupy more powerful positions in
that society. In expressing hasham, however, women feel dignity
and strength. In another essay with her colleague Catherine Lutz,
Abu-Lughod would sum up the thinking of this section: “emotions
are a primary medium for defining and negotiating social relations
of the self in a moral order” (Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1986). In our
performances of emotions, we situate our identities within the
roles, values, and structures that make up culture. We will return to
this idea about how emotions are constructed within specific roles
and shaped by culturally specific values in Chapter 3.
Empirical Inspirations for a New Science of
Emotion
Emotions are the grammar of social living.
Iraneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989
New fields of inquiry in psychology, like the science of emotion,
often find their inspiration in the thinking of influential
philosophers, novelists, early psychologists, and pioneers in
sociology and anthropology. We have just provided one account of
how the enduring insights of thinkers from the past have shaped
the science you are about to explore. New fields of inquiry are also
inspired by timely empirical discoveries that direct scientists to
study phenomena in new ways. Here we chart a few early empirical
discoveries that inspired a new science of emotion.
One such inspiration came from the field of ethology: the study of
animals and people as they live their own lives (Eibl-Eibesfeldt,
1989). Ethologists don’t do controlled experiments in the
laboratory; they seek to understand behavior in natural settings
from an evolutionary perspective, considering the survival and
reproduction-related goals that are served. In the 1960s, ethologists
such as Iraneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt used special filming techniques to
capture the daily lives of people in remote societies in Africa, New
Guinea, and the Amazon. In a careful frame-by-frame analysis of
the film they gathered, they detailed how parents attach to their
children and soothe and comfort them, how siblings play and fight
and reconcile, how adolescents flirt and form romantic attachments,
how sexual partners relate, and how friends and rivals navigate
social hierarchies. In this careful analysis, they arrived at a thesis
captured in the quote at the beginning of this section: emotions are
the grammar of social living. Emotional expressions and
experiences are the basic elements of interactions such as flirting,
parent–child attachments, status negotiations between rivals,
fighting, and forgiveness. This theoretical insight, and the methods
it was based on, would influence evolutionary approaches to
emotion, which we consider next chapter, as well as studies of
emotional expression, attachment, relationships, and even certain
clinical discoveries you will learn of later.
A different kind of discovery that inspired the new science of
emotion came from studies of treatments of patients with epilepsy
—a kind of electrical storm in the brain. In the 1960s, patients with
epilepsy often would undergo an operation in which the corpus
callosum, a large bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and
right sides of the cortex, is severed. This split-brain operation
separates the left side of the cortex from the right to stop the spread
of epileptic disturbances. (No other treatment had been effective at
the time.) Despite the two sides of the brain being no longer in
communication, the patient’s IQ, personality, language, and ability
to engage in meaningful interactions are not diminished. Twenty
years after the first split-brain operation Roger Sperry was awarded
a Nobel Prize for his research with these patients, which showed in
a striking new way the different functions of the left and right
hemispheres.
If a picture or text is presented to the right side of the visual field,
because the information crosses over to the other side in the optic
nerve, it is processed by the left hemisphere. When anything is
shown in the left visual field, it is processed by the right
hemisphere. But with a split brain the two hemispheres do not
communicate. This neurological condition allowed scientists to
begin to ask whether emotion seems to arise in specific regions of
the brain.
Michael Gazzaniga worked with Sperry, and wrote books such as the
Social Brain (1985), which would influence the neuroscientific
study of emotion. In one of his studies, Gazzaniga showed a
frightening film about fire safety to the left visual field of a woman
split-brain patient. Because the images were not accessible to the
left hemisphere of her brain, she was not conscious of having seen
the film. Gazzaniga then interviewed the patient, as follows.
M.G. (Michael Gazzaniga):
What did you see?
V.P. (Patient):
I don’t really know what I saw. I think just a white flash.
M.G.:
Were there people in it?
V.P.:
I don’t think so. Maybe just some trees, red trees like in the fall.
M.G.:
Did it make you feel any emotion?
V.P.:
I don’t really know why but I’m kind of scared. I feel jumpy. I
think maybe I don’t like this room, or maybe it’s you. You’re
getting me nervous.
In this interaction, the patient saw the film presented to her left
visual field, and this led to experiences of fear, generated in the
right hemisphere, where nerve fibers from the left visual field go to.
But the patient could not understand the source of her fear in her
linguistically functioning left hemisphere. Her fear derived from the
unsplit subcortical regions, and was communicated to the languageusing right hemisphere, but without any indication of how it arose.
The patient drew upon her fear, and her narrating left hemisphere
offered a story about how Gazzaniga was making her feel nervous.
This work suggests that there are regions of the brain that are
engaged in emotional experiences. Other regions of the brain are
engaged as people label, narrate, and make sense of their emotional
experiences—an idea that we will return to time and again in this
book.
A third discovery that shaped the new science of emotion came from
a series of experiments by Alice Isen and her colleagues, which
revealed that transient experiences of positive emotion had effects
upon how we act in the world. In one experiment (1970) she gave a
test of perceptual-motor skills. Some people, randomly selected,
were told that they had succeeded in this test, and as a result were
made mildly happy. As compared with other participants who had
taken the same perceptual motor test but who were not told they
had succeeded, the happier participants were more likely to help a
stranger (an associate of the experimenter) who dropped her books.
Later, Isen and her colleagues (1978) induced a mildly positive
emotion in people in a shopping mall by giving them a free gift. In
an apparently unrelated consumer survey, these people said their
cars and television sets performed better than those of control
subjects who had received no gift. In subsequent research, Isen
found that positive states can lead people to more creative
thought, the recollection of more positive memories, more
collaborative negotiations, and to produce more unusual
associations to words (Isen, Shalker, Clark, & Karp, 1978). Isen’s
work provided some of the first evidence on how emotions shape
our social behavior, judgment, and decision making, themes we take
up in Chapters 9 and 10. Extending Isen’s findings, Elise Rice and
Barbara Fredrickson (2017) found that people’s spontaneous
positive thoughts made them more likely to approach, and to like
things, they had been thinking about. In a different kind of
extension, Hans Melo and Adam Anderson (2017) proposed that
positive emotions encourage exploration and may facilitate
flexibility and creativity. More generally, Isen’s results signaled a
move away from assumptions that emotions are irrational and
disruptive; instead, they have principled effects upon thought and
action.
What Is an Emotion? A Framework
In tracing the origins of the science of emotion, we have considered
different approaches to the question: “What is an emotion?” Across
different traditions, we have seen how early theorists centered on
the idea that emotions are responsive to our important personal
concerns. More recently, there’s been emphasis on how emotions
are less usually individual, and more usually relational, they prepare
us to act in the social environment. It’s also clear that the early
theorists focused on different components of emotion, including
evaluations or appraisals that give rise to emotions; emotional
expressions and bodily responses; narrative and symbolic ways in
which we regulate, make sense of, and express our emotions,
sometimes in literary or artistic form.
In Figure 1.10, we bring these insights together, portraying how
scientists today conceptualize emotion (Brosch, Pourtois, & Sander,
2010; Levenson, 1999). Following Aristotle and Arnold, today
emotions are thought to arise as a result of how we appraise events
in our environment. The most typical emotion-eliciting events are
social, but emotions can also arise from events in our bodies, for
example, when we feel anxiety and fear when thinking (often
erroneously) that a heart palpitation is a sign of a heart attack, or
when we interpret butterflies in our stomach as a sign that we are
falling in love.
FIGURE 1.10 A model of the unfolding processes of
emotion.
Emotions involve subjective feelings, patterns of expressive
behavior that were the focus of Darwin, bodily responses that
intrigued James, tendencies to act, and emotion-specific ways of
perceiving the world, which Isen began to chart.
As these patterns of emotion-related responses unfold, we label,
explain, and narrate our emotions, which we characterize in the
rightmost box of Figure 1.10. We conceptualize emotional
experiences in a language of words, phrases, images, metaphors,
and beliefs, making distinctions, for example, in whether we are
experiencing “shame” or “embarrassment,” “awe” or “fear,” or “love”
or “desire” (Lindquist, 2017). As the work of Hochschild revealed,
we can act to modify, or regulate, our emotions; we might suppress
anger or fear when it seems inappropriate to the context or for our
identity; we might try to arrive at an alternative appraisal if it seems
to be likely to trigger emotions we deem problematic (Gross, 2015).
To carry forward a phrase from Shakespeare: emotions “come not
single spies” (Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 4. Line 78). Often we experience
more than one emotion in any social situation. The implication, as
Mesquita and Frijda (2011) explained, is that among a set of
emotions that we may feel, we can choose to concentrate on one—
affection, perhaps, or embarrassment, or irritation—the one that is
important for that situation. Tomkins proposed that emotions
create urgency. As a family friend of one of the writers of this book
(K.O.) said: “one must distinguish the important from the merely
urgent.” Also, in keeping with Aristotle’s analysis of theater, we can
express our emotion in symbolic forms, such as journaling, fiction,
poetry, music, visual art, and dance.
The wisdom of sociology and anthropology, and the observations of
the ethologists, reveal how emotions are shaped profoundly by
different social contexts. To capture this important idea, our figure
places the elements of an individual’s emotion within two broader
social contexts—represented as ovals in Figure 1.10. The first is your
family, which influences how you evaluate events in your life (and
the events you are exposed to), the specific language you develop to
conceptualize your emotions, how you express your emotions, and
how you label, regulate, and express symbolically your experiences.
From your family, you inherit genetic tendencies that shape
emotion as we shall see. Within your family, you develop and form
attachments, and experience different significant events, from the
positive (warm family celebrations and reunions and traditions) to
the traumatic (intense conflict, abuse), which we consider later in
this book.
Culture—the focus of Chapter 3—is a second kind of social context
that shapes emotion in myriad ways, as we chart throughout this
book. The culture you grew up in (perhaps East Asian or MexicanAmerican), your social class, these influences on emotions can be
far reaching. Our culture of origin and current living shape the
language and concepts we rely on to interpret social contexts, how
we appraise events, the intensity with which we express emotion,
the words we use to categorize emotional experiences, and our
tendency to suppress or amplify our emotional expression.
Summing up the processes portrayed in Figure 1.10, we arrive at
this. Emotions occur usually when some event occurs—in the world
or in the mind—which, as Frijda (2007) explains, affects a concern,
such as a goal or a value. It involves different aspects of ourselves:
experiences, thoughts, changes within our bodies, expressions,
perceptions, and actions. It creates an urge, a priority, to think and
feel and do this, rather than that.
The Emotional Realm: Emotions—Moods—
Dispositions
The English language has many words that designate emotions:
Johnson-Laird & Oatley (1989) identified 590 of them. We might
say that our roommate is angry, or irritated, or hostile. We might
say that we ourselves are feeling sad or blue or depressed.
Many scientists use the word affect for phenomena that have
anything to do with emotions, moods, dispositions, and preferences,
though some people refer to this whole realm as that of the
emotions.
In Figure 1.11, we show a spectrum of emotional states in terms of
duration, and in the following paragraphs we say something about
each kind of state.
FIGURE 1.11 A spectrum of emotional phenomena in
terms of the time course of each.
Episodes of Emotion
The term “emotion” or “emotion episode” is generally used for a
state that lasts for a limited time. As indicated in Figure 1.11, facial
expressions and most bodily responses generally last for seconds,
and in the case of some bodily responses, minutes. When
researchers record states of which people are conscious and can
report, by asking them to keep structured diaries of these episodes,
or by getting people to remember episodes of emotions, people
typically report experiences lasting between a few minutes and a
few hours.
Moods and Sentiments
The term mood refers to a state that may last for hours, days, or
weeks, sometimes as a low-intensity background. When it starts or
stops may be unclear. Whereas episodes of emotion typically have
an object, moods are often objectless, free-floating (Frijda, 1993a).
We feel emotions about specific people and events. Philosophers
call the focus of an emotional experience its “intentional object.”
When you are angry, you usually have a very clear sense of what
you are angry about (e.g., your roommate’s arrogance or your dad
telling an embarrassing story about your first date). When you are
in an irritable mood, in contrast, it may not be obvious why you feel
as you do: the intentional object is less clear. The term “sentiment”
is now used less than it once was. It is a prolonged emotional state,
like a mood, but usually with an object: examples might be love or
resentment.
Emotional Disorders
The most common emotional disorders are depression and clinical
anxiety states. These may last for weeks or months, sometimes
for years. Such disorders are now routinely assessed by interviews
from which people’s experience is categorized, for instance by
means of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual, fifth edition, DSM-5, of 2013. Thus, major
depression includes depressed mood, or loss of interest or pleasure
in most activities, that lasts at least two weeks. It is a matter of
considerable interest to find what relation episodes of depression
have to normal episodes of sadness. We take up this issue in
Chapters 12 and 13.
Personality and Temperament
In a further step along the spectrum, there are terms used to
describe emotional aspects of personality that can last a lifetime.
We say that people are “warm” or “contemptuous.” Shyness implies
a tendency to feel anxiety in social settings; agreeableness involves
a tendency to feel love and compassion for others. The term “trait”
is used to designate such long-lasting aspects of personality. As we
shall see in Chapters 8 and 11, significant aspects of personality are
based on temperament, which can be thought of as the kind of
personality we are born with. Personality develops as we grow up,
and most of its traits have emotions at their core. These emotional
tendencies can shape peoples’ lives, often in profound ways.
SUMMARY
The new sciences that contribute most to this book have old and
influential roots. In this chapter, we offer a sampling of insights
into the nature of emotion. We began with Charles Darwin, who can
be thought of as starting the scientific study of emotion. We then
moved to William James, a founder of American psychology, and
Sigmund Freud, a founder of the psychological therapies. We then
reviewed formative ideas of philosophers Aristotle and René
Descartes who identified some of the abiding questions of this book.
What are emotions? How do we express them? Where do they come
from? How do they shape our reasoning? What functions do they
serve?
We then reviewed the approach of the novelist George Eliot. Her
deep concern was the role of emotions in our relationships with
others, an issue to which modern psychology of emotions is
heading, and which is a central feature of this book.
Early on, brain science drew on the study of accidents and John
Harlow’s account of the effects of the damage to Phineas Gage’s
brain. More recently, brain imaging has become important, as in the
studies of Tania Singer and her colleagues on empathy. We
described the influential theories of Magda Arnold and Sylvan
Tomkins, and the effects of inducing emotions by Alice Isen. We
saw how Erving Goffman, Arlie Russell-Hochschild, and Lila AbuLughod showed how emotions are constructed within the roles we
adopt in our social life.
In putting these insights together, we offered an account of how an
emotion unfolds, from initial appraisals to emotion-related
responses to the ways in which we categorize, regulate, and narrate
our emotions. Finally, we offered conceptions of emotion as
functional processes that relate outer events to our inner goals and
help us navigate our social world. This book is about the realm of
the emotions. It covers emotional episodes, which are briefer and
more specific than moods. By the second half of the book, we move
to longer lasting states, which include traits of emotional disorders
and traits of personality.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. Which of the approaches we’ve discussed in this chapter is most
appealing in your own understanding of emotions? Why?
2. How can studies of the brain complement studies of a
psychological kind in understanding emotions?
3. How can a piece of art such as a novel or film enable us to think
about our own emotions?
FURTHER READING
Among the several good handbooks on emotions are the following:
Sander, D., & Scherer, K. (Eds.). (2009). Oxford companion to
emotion and the affective sciences. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Barrett, L. F., Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). (2016).
Handbook of emotions, 4th ed. New York: Guilford.
A useful book with distinguished contributors, the fourth volume in
a series on Feelings and Emotions that started with the Wittenberg
Symposium in 1927 is:
Manstead, A., Frijda, N., & Fischer, A. (2004). Feelings and
emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
These books by philosophers range thoughtfully across diverse
approaches:
Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of
emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Solomon, R. (2007). True to our feelings: What our emotions are
really telling us. New York: Oxford University Press.
A history of emotions and how they have been thought about:
Oatley, K. (2004). Emotions: A brief history. Oxford: Blackwell.
2
Evolution of Emotions
CONTENTS
Elements of an Evolutionary Approach
Selection Pressures
Adaptation
Natural Design for Gene Replication
An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions
Insights from Modern Hunter-Gatherers
Insights from Nonhuman Primates
Human Ancestry
Evolution of Symbolic Representation and Language
Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships
Emotions That Promote Attachment
Emotions and Negotiation of Social Hierarchy
Emotions, Affiliation, and Friendship
Collective Emotion and Preference for In-Groups
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 2.0 About 10 minutes before this photograph
was taken these two male chimpanzees had a fight that
ended in the trees. Now one extends a hand toward the
other in reconciliation. Immediately after this, they
embraced and climbed down to the ground together.
Like all primates, humans are an intensely social species. Indeed
we probably owe our success as a species to our sociality.
Robin Dunbar (2001), p. 175
In 1860, on hearing that humans are descended from apes, the wife
of the Bishop of Worcester is said to have remarked: “My dear,
descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us
pray that it does not become generally known” (Leakey & Lewin,
1991, p. 16). Of course, it did become known: we share common
ancestors with the apes. The line that led to modern humans
diverged from that which led to chimpanzees about six million years
ago. Evolution, the theory of how species developed, has become
the central concept of biology. It also offers insights into the nature
of emotions (Keltner, Haidt, & Shiota, 2006; Nesse & Ellsworth,
2009; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, 2015).
Among the pieces of evidence that Darwin advanced for his theory
of evolution was the similarity of patterns of human emotional
expression to those of other mammals. In his book on emotions,
Darwin (1872) argued that “some expressions, such as the bristling
of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering
of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood,
except under the belief that man once existed in a much lower and
animal-like condition” (1872, p. 12).
Darwin’s analyses gave birth to the modern study of emotional
expression, which we discuss in Chapter 4. His broader theory of
evolution would change how we think about emotion.
Understanding the evolutionary approach to emotion is the task of
this chapter.
Elements of an Evolutionary Approach
In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859) described
evolution in terms of three processes. The first he called
superabundance: animals and plants produce more offspring
than are necessary merely to reproduce themselves. The second he
called variation: each offspring is somewhat different than others,
and differences are passed on by heredity. The third he called
selection: characteristics that allow better adaptation to the
environment are more likely to survive, and be passed on to
offspring. The influential philosopher Daniel Dennett (1995) has
proposed that Darwin’s theory of evolution is the single most
important idea anyone has ever had in terms of shaping how we
understand who we are.
In our first chapter, we were largely concerned with defining what
emotions are. Scientists guided by an evolutionary approach to the
emotions seek answers to related questions: Why do we experience
emotions as we do? What functions might emotions serve in the
immediate social context? And how might the functions that
emotions serve today derive from our mammalian and human
evolution? Three important evolutionary concepts bring into focus
answers to these questions.
Selection Pressures
At the core of natural selection are selection pressures. For
humans, these are features of the physical and social environment
in which humans evolved that determined whether or not
individuals survived and reproduced. Some selection pressures
involve threats or opportunities directly related to physical survival.
To survive, individuals need to find food and water, to stay at the
right temperature, to avoid predation and disease. Many human
systems such as our preferences for sweet foods and aversion to
bitter foods, our thermoregulatory systems, our fight and flight
responses developed in response to these kinds of selection
pressures.
Elements of evolution Darwin knew little or nothing, which we now
know as genes, are passed during reproduction from one generation
to the next. Two kinds of sexual selection pressure determine who
reproduces and, by implication, what genes are passed on to the
next generation (Griskevicius, Haselton, & Ackerman, 2015; Miller,
2000). Intersexual competition refers to the process by which
members of one sex select specific kinds of traits in the other sex.
For example, in nearly every part of the world, there is a tendency
for women and men to prefer mates of good character (Buss, 1989),
presumably because they will be generous, faithful partners, and
committed to rearing offspring, who require intensive care to reach
the age of viability. Through this selection process, traits related to
good character will prove to be advantageous in intersexual
competition and be selected for and more likely to become part of
the human design.
Intrasexual competition is competition for mates within a sex.
In many species there are struggles of this kind, often among males.
Stags lock horns, male hippos push one another with widely opened
mouths, and elephant seals bellow and bite each other in violent
confrontations (see Figure 2.1). These are efforts by males to find
who is dominant and who therefore has access to mates. The status
dynamics of young men—the teasing, aggressive encounters,
derogation of rivals, and tests of strength—seem to be similar:
means by which young men determine who rises in status and who
will have preferential access to young women (Buss, 2009). Within
intrasexual competition, those traits, whether it be strength, beauty,
cunning, emotional intelligence, or humor, which allow some to
prevail, are more likely to be passed on to succeeding generations.
FIGURE 2.1 These two male elephant seals are in the
midst of a struggle to determine their relative strength
and standing within a social hierarchy, which will impact
their mating opportunities.
Alongside these sexual selection processes, evolutionary theorists
have proposed that our capacity to enter cooperative social
relationships has been critical to the survival of our species (Nowak
& Highfield, 2011; Rand, 2016; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Tomasello,
2014). Nesse (2010) argued that fitness—the likelihood of
surviving and reproducing successfully—is increased for those who
are preferred by others as social partners and able to take part in
strong social networks, in the same way that fitness is increased for
those preferred as sexual partners (see also Flinn & Alexander,
2007). This claim is bolstered by findings in archeology and the
study of hunter-gatherer societies showing that we accomplished
many of the basic tasks of survival, including defense, the gathering
and preparation of food, and the raising of offspring, in
collaboration with others (Wilson, 2012). We are an ultra-social
species, one whose chances of survival rest upon evolutionarily
influenced capacities to form strong relationships and to fold into
social collectives effectively.
Adaptation
Another important concept is adaptation. Adaptations are
genetically based traits that allow the individual to respond
effectively and efficiently to specific selection pressures and to fare
well in struggles to survive and reproduce. To see human behavior
through this “adaptationist” lens, in Table 2.1 we list some
adaptations that are relevant to human emotion (for other such
adaptations, see Buss, 1999; Dunbar & Barrett, 2007; Sznycer,
Cosmides, & Tooby, 2017).
TABLE 2.1
Examples of adaptations
Problem/pressure
Adaptation
Struggle for physical survival
Avoid eating toxins
Distaste for bitter tasting food that may be
rotting
Eat high-nutrition
foods
Pleasure in eating sweet-tasting foods
Feelings of beauty in resource-rich physical
environments
Avoid predators
Fear of spiders, snakes, the dark
Struggle to find and keep mate, reproduce
Find physically robust Attraction to symmetrical faces
mate
Find fertile mate
Attraction to mate with youthful
appearance
Share costs of raising
offspring
Attraction by females to males with status,
resources
Protect partner from
leaving
Jealousy felt toward rivals
Struggle to raise offspring to age of viability
Attach to vulnerable
offspring
Affection felt in response to baby-like facial
cues
Pleasure felt when smelling infant scent
Protect vulnerable
offspring
Caregiving response to baby cries
To expand on Table 2.1, it is important to survive physically, and
many preferences serve as adaptations that enable humans to eat
the right foods and avoid predators. Consider our dietary likes and
dislikes. Of the 10,000 taste buds on the human tongue, one set—
those that give rise to sweet tastes—helps us identify foods of
nutritional value. Our distaste for bitter foods—for example,
triggered by toxic compounds in some foods—helps us avoid toxins
(Rozin & Kalat, 1971). Some have argued that our aesthetic reactions
to beautiful landscapes—with preferences for water, vegetation,
flowering plants and trees—signal to the individual the presence of
sources of food and shelter. As we will consider later, many fears
and phobias—of insects, snakes, the dark—are, in the lens of
evolutionary theory, adaptive in keeping humans away from such
perils to survival.
Turning to problems of reproduction, our genes are more likely to
be passed to subsequent generations when we mate with physically
robust individuals, a selection pressure, the thinking goes, that
produced many adaptations. For example, people find facial
symmetry beautiful (Rhodes & Simmons, 2007). Why? Because
symmetry is thought to be a sign of physical robustness. Exposure
to parasites early in development is associated with facial
asymmetry and, in more extreme cases, disfiguration. Our
preference for facial symmetry, then, may guide us toward potential
mates who have stronger immune systems that make them
resistant to parasites. Recent evidence suggests that the faces we
find beautiful may also seem inherently good to us, further
amplifying our attraction to individuals who ultimately will help us
produce healthier offspring. Tsukiura and Cabeza (2011) found that
activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region involved in the
processing of rewards, was increased both by attractiveness and by
ratings of goodness of an action, whereas activity in the insular
cortex decreased with both attractiveness and ratings of the
goodness. Our preferences for people who are physically attractive
are bolstered by inferences that they are of good character—both
tendencies leading us to attempt to reproduce with individuals with
genes that make for greater physical robustness.
This kind of analysis has been applied, with controversial effect, to
an analysis of gender differences in mate preferences (Buss, 1987;
Gildersleeve, Haselton, & Fales, 2016). Given the costs that women
incur during pregnancy and in raising infants, they should be more
attracted to potential mates with status and resources, to assist in
this resource-intensive work. Men, by contrast, should seek to pair
with women at their best reproductive age and feel attraction in
response to cues of youth. Both partners should feel intense
jealousy at the prospects of losing a partner. The extent to which
these gender differences are deep human universals or swayed by
culturally varying processes such as the economic power a culture
presents to women is debated to this day (e.g., Wood, 2016).
Finally, let’s consider how the selection pressure of raising offspring
to the age of viability produced several adaptations (Hrdy, 1999).
Because of multiple factors in human evolution—the narrowing of
the woman’s pelvis, the expanding size of the human head to
accommodate the large human brain—human infants are born
premature, and require years of intensive care, devotion, and
resources from caregivers to survive. Table 2.1 highlights three
adaptations that emerged in response to this selection pressure,
with clear emotional associations. Humans have deep, positive
emotional responses to baby-like facial cues such as those seen in
Figures 2.2a and 2.2b—large forehead, big eyes, small chin—that
enable their continuing devotion to infants despite the taxing costs
of childrearing (sleep deprivation, changing diapers, having food
spit up on a clean shirt, foregoing other sexual opportunities). The
scent of an infant has long been noted to have a special allure,
perhaps one that promotes positive emotions in caregivers. And
indeed one study found that women show activation in dopaminerich reward regions in the brain when smelling the scent on the
pajamas of a two-day-old (Lundström et al., 2013). Young parents
often feel powerful protective and caring feelings in hearing their
infant’s vocalizations. On this observation one recent study found
that within 50 milliseconds of hearing baby cries, babbling, or
laughter (but not adult or nonhuman cries or other control sounds),
human adults respond with activation in a region of the brain—the
periaqueductal gray—that is known to enable caring, nurturant
behavior (Parsons et al., 2017).
FIGURE 2.2a AND 2.2b. Given their hypervulnerability,
new babies rely on a variety of cues, evolutionary
reasoning holds, such as smiles, coos, soft skin, and cute
faces to draw parents into the provision of care, and this
intensive caregiving continues for several years.
The analysis brings into focus the way in which emotions served
important functions in the context of evolution; they enabled
humans to meet survival and reproduction-related selection
pressures. Emotions—the fear of the dark, jealousy or envy felt
toward rivals, sexual desire felt for a romantic partner, the intense
parental love felt for a child—may feel irrational in the moment, but
cast within this evolutionary framework are important solutions to
the problems of survival and reproduction (Tooby & Cosmides,
2015).
As we return to this approach at different places in the book, it’s
important to note important qualifications to this line of thought.
Not all human traits or behaviors are adaptations. Some human
traits, from snoring to nervous leg jiggles, serve no apparent
evolutionary function and are better thought of as byproducts.
Moreover, you should not conclude that all, or even most, human
traits emerged to meet survival- and reproduction-related problems
and opportunities. Evolution is a tinkerer and often endows old
anatomical and behavioral features with new functions. A trait that
acquires a new function like this is called an exaptation. Andrew
(1963, 1965) used this principle to propose how facial expressions in
primates, including humans, were developed from reflexes. Many
animals have a reflex in which they flatten their ears when startled,
or when an animal approaches another member of its species. Its
original function was to protect the ears. But as well as being
protective, the pattern is easily recognized by others: if we think a
dog looks friendly, part of this look may be due to the flattened ears.
Humans are not able to retract their ears, but raising the eyebrows
seems to derive from this same movement, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt
(1970) showed, by inconspicuous filming in many different cultures,
that a brief raising of the eyebrows, lasting a fraction of a second,
occurs when people approach one another during greeting and in
flirting (see Figure 2.3). It is probably a human universal.
FIGURE 2.3 Greeting gestures around the world often
involve smiles, eye contact, touch, and the raising of the
eyebrows.
Natural Design for Gene Replication
In the nuclei of each of the 35 to 50 trillion cells that make up your
body are 23 pairs of chromosomes that you inherited from your
parents. Each chromosome contains genes composed of DNA.
Sequences of DNA, or genes, are translated into mRNA, which, in
turn, is translated into proteins (see Figure 2.4). Those proteins
form the many structures—hands, hair, eyes, internal organs, bones
—that make up your physical body, as well as the systems—facial
muscle groups, the vocal apparatus, receptors in the skin, regions of
the brain, branches of the peripheral nervous system, and
neurotransmitters and hormones—that are part of your emotional
responses.
FIGURE 2.4 A DNA molecule.
Here is one counterintuitive notion of evolutionary theory as it has
combined with modern genetic theory. Are you ready for it? We
tend to think that our genes are in our service, that we have received
them from parents and that we pass our own genes on to our
children. No! That’s completely the wrong way around. Modern
evolutionary genetics has taught us that our genes pass themselves
on to the next generation. That’s their main property. Based on the
DNA from which they are composed, genes replicate. They copy
themselves, and the copies become the genetic code for making the
structure of plants and animals they will inhabit in the next
generation. The genes are not ours. Our bodies are their means of
passing themselves on. We are their vehicles, their robots. We are
programmed with different genetically based adaptations to
reproduce, and so enable genes to replicate (Dawkins, 1976; Nesse,
2006; Stanovich, 2004).
How do human genes program us? You’ve guessed it. A principal
way is by our emotions. We humans are very good vehicles.
Equipped with the emotion of fear, we protect our bodies by
avoiding dangers, so the genes we carry will be safe. By being
emotionally drawn to food that is nutritious, attracted to sweetness
and repelled by bitter-tasting toxins that that we reject in disgust,
we build our bodies. By being interested in sex—in lust or in love—
we enable our genes to pass themselves on to the next generation.
By means of the emotion of love for our children, we are enabled to
take good care of them. By being decent to each other, we create
societies in which our children can grow up. Our emotions are
means by which genes replicate. Evolutionary theorists encapsulate
this reasoning with the concept: natural design for gene replication.
Reliable human tendencies, including the emotions, have emerged
in human evolution to enable genes to replicate.
Let’s make this theorizing concrete with an empirical example. On
your third chromosome is a variation of a gene, or SNIP, called
OXTR, that regulates levels of oxytocin in the human body (Keltner,
Kogan, Piff, & Saturn, 2014). Oxytocin, you will learn, facilitates
uterine contractions and milk letdown at a time close to childbirth
as well as social emotional processes that enable strong social
bonds, including sharing, empathy, and sensitive parenting (Bartz,
2011). By enabling more effective childbirth and social emotional
processes such as empathy, kindness, and cooperation, the genetic
variant OXTR is increasing the chances the individual will survive,
reproduce, and raise offspring to the age of viability and, in so doing,
increases its chances for replication. Selfish genes can produce
selfless tendencies in the humans they inhabit.
Given this line of theorizing, one might be inclined to believe that
genes, or combinations of genes, determine our emotional
tendencies. This indeed was the promise when the human genome
—the 25,000 genes found in the cells of each human—was
sequenced in 2000. At that time the world expected scientists to
discover genes for depression, types of cancer, autism, and our
emotions. The story, however, has turned out to be more
complicated (Sapolsky, 2017). Instead, the field of epigenetics has
revealed that there are important biochemical processes— the
degree to which DNA is methylated and the degree to which it is
attached to proteins called histones—that turn genes on or off,
depending on characteristics of the individual’s environment
(Carey, 2013). Genes on their own don’t determine your emotional
tendencies; they have their effects only in particular social
environments.
Individual Emotion: Disgust
In his voyage around the world on the ship Beagle, Charles
Darwin took copious notes that would set the stage for his
theory of evolution. One was about a native of Tierra del Fuego
who, he wrote, touched some preserved meat that Darwin was
about to eat. Finding the meat was soft, the man made a facial
expression of disgust. This expression is now regarded as
universal (see Chapter 4). It involves wrinkling the nose and
retracting the upper lip. Darwin said that although the man’s
hands seemed clean, this quite put him off his lunch.
Disgust is an emotion of rejection, originally of something bitter.
In this sense, it can be seen as an evolved emotional reaction to
potential toxins. But during the course of children’s
development, it can extend to anything that has been, or may
have been, contaminated (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2008).
Disgust, the argument goes, comes to signal to the person that
something—a person, action, or idea—is impure and morally
wrong.
A study using neuroimaging by Wicker et al. (2003) showed that
the same area of the brain—the anterior insula—is involved both
in feeling and in recognizing disgust. The argument is that when
we recognize disgust in others, we often do so by generating the
experience of disgust in ourselves. Perhaps, for Darwin, it wasn’t
just the fact that someone he didn’t know touched his food,
which put him off his lunch. It might have been his own feeling
of disgust, which mirrored that of the man who touched his
preserved meat.
Disgust at the sight of something one would refuse to eat has
been found by Chapman, Kim, Susskind, and Anderson (2009)
to be exactly the same reaction as that of moral disgust, rejection
of an unacceptable or unjust action by another.
What this means is that in some rare instances our genes program
our emotions so closely that when certain events occur we respond
in a reflex. In his book of 1872, Darwin described the following
experiment upon himself.
I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder
in the Zoological Gardens, with the determination of not starting
back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was
struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or
two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason
were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had
never been experienced.
(Darwin, 1872/1965, p. 38)
In this reflex the programming of the genes was absolute. The
avoidance of striking snakes has been so critical, it seems that
everyone who was our ancestor had it wired in, and so do we,
whether or not we ever confront a snake.
This kind of fear response, as shown in Darwin jumping back from
the striking snake, may be the best example of his principle that
modern human emotions derive from ancestors who lived in
different ways than we do. And in fact, many of the simplest and
most automatic elements of emotions might be thought in the same
fashion—the soothing touch of parent in response to a child’s
distress calls, the wince of disgust in response to a putrid smell, the
fear of the dark a young child experiences, the visceral feeling of
anger at receiving less than someone else for comparable work.
Of course, these reflexive elements of emotional reactions are
situated within complex social relationships and are shaped by a
particular culture as we shall see in the next chapter. As we shape
our lives, our human purposes can become more important than the
purposes of our genes (Stanovich, 2004).
So the programming of our emotions and desires by our genes has a
range. At one end is the peremptory—the reflex—as with Darwin’s
leap backward when the snake struck. At the other end are all those
attractions and urges that our culture, or we ourselves, can modify.
At the closely coupled end, the genes command us. In the middle
are perhaps emotions like anger and some kinds of fear, which are
sometimes compelling but which we can sometimes modify. At the
loosely coupled end, genetically based emotions whisper
suggestions about how to act, shaped and transformed by the social
and cultural context.
An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions
So far we have found one answer to the question of why we
experience emotions as we do. Emotions can be thought of as
adaptations that help humans meet the specific selection pressures
of survival, reproduction, and getting along in the social contexts of
daily living.
Another way to ask the question “Why” is this: What is it about our
primate and mammalian evolution that laid the foundation for the
emotions that we experience today? And what shifts emerged in our
own hominid evolution, the six to seven million years we have been
evolving after branching off from the common ancestor of the great
apes that endow emotions with uniquely human qualities. In
particular, what arose during the last 200,000 years, where our
hominid predecessors began to look like modern humans, that
explain how you experience love, or awe, rage, or compassion today?
Answering these questions requires that we tell the deep
evolutionary history of the emotions. To do so, we need to
understand the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the
environment to which humans became adapted as our species
evolved during the six million years since the human line branched
off from the line that led to chimpanzees and bonobos (Nesse, 1990;
Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990, 2015). It is
within this environment of evolutionary adaptedness that humans
evolved specific emotions that enabled individuals to meet the
many selection pressures that determined who survived and
reproduced and who did not.
The way we live now with cars, cell phones, and sharing photos and
videos with friends on Snapchat and Instagram seems very different
from the environments in which human emotions evolved. About
200,000 years ago was the time when the common forbears of all
living human beings—our ancestral Eves—lived in Africa (Wilson &
Cann, 1992). Our ancestors lived in small, seminomadic groups
likely ranging in number from 30 to 75, hunting and foraging for
food, and living in small camps. Processes that today are essential to
life, such as deriving food from agriculture, began only some 10,000
to 12,000 years ago (Diamond, 1997; Marcus & Flannery, 2012). Not
long afterward, came the invention of cities as centers of trade
(Leick, 2001). In such movements, the evolution of human cultures
overtook the evolution of species. If we take the 10,000 years of
civilizations, this is just 5% of the period since the ancestral Eves
lived, and a quarter of a percent of the period since our separation
from chimpanzees. In other words, the majority of our
differentiation from ape-like beings into humans took place in a
world—our human environment of human adaptedness—that was
very different from our world today. One constant over the period
since human species began has been our intense sociality.
Insights from Modern Hunter-Gatherers
How might we gain a picture of our earlier environment of human
adaptedness? One way is to study contemporary hunter-gatherer
societies, the groups of people who live in social conditions of the
kind we humans began to develop some 200,000 years ago. By
carefully observing such modern people and studying traces of
hunter-gatherer societies in the archeological record, we find clues
to understanding the social pressures and patterns that gave rise to
human emotion. What we learn is that the environment of human
adaptedness was highly social, of humans living in groups of the
kind we now see as extended families, with patterns of attachment,
hierarchy, affiliation, and tribalism shaping the emotions we
experience today.
In Australia and in the savannas of southern Africa and rainforests
of the Amazon, some people have continued the hunter-gatherer
way of life into modern times. This was the way of life of the San of
the Kalahari who include the !Kung and the G/wi (see Figure 2.5).
(Their languages include clicks: “!” designates a click made by
drawing the tongue sharply away from the roof of the mouth, and
“/” is made by drawing the tongue away from the front teeth, like
the “tsk” of scolding.) Lorna Marshall and her family lived among
them in the 1950s (Marshall, 1976; Thomas, 1989). In the 1960s and
1970s, Lee (1984) and other American anthropologists visited these
peoples. The ethologists we wrote of in Chapter 1 did systematic
studies of similar bands of hunter-gatherers in New Guinea, the
Amazon, Indonesia, and elsewhere (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989).
FIGURE 2.5 A group of San people.
The G/wi and !Kung lived in nomadic groups of 10 to 30 people, in
extended families, meeting other family groups from time to time.
Until its recent erosion by Western influences, !Kung and G/wi
peoples lived in a semidesert land and traveled over a range of
several hundred square miles that they know intimately, meeting
other groups related by marriage or blood. Round a fire, the G/wi
scoop out shallow impressions in the ground to sleep in. The
women especially are expert botanists: they gather roots and other
vegetable foods from the land, and obtain fluid from tsamma
melons. The men hunt and shoot animals with bows and arrows
tipped with a poison made from a grub. They may have to follow a
shot antelope for a day before it dies. It is brought back to camp, and
there are complex rules about how it is divided. Nothing is wasted.
In this life, people would know about 150 others (Dunbar, 1993,
2004) to some of whom they would be related as kin.
Insights from Nonhuman Primates
A second source of evidence about our environment of human
adaptedness is the study of lives of our closest primate relatives
(see Figure 2.6), chimpanzees and their smaller, more cooperative,
less-aggressive relatives, the bonobos (Kano, 1992; De Waal, 1995).
These two species share with humans a common primate ancestor,
as well as 95 percent of our DNA (Chimpanzee Sequencing and
Analysis Consortium, 2005). They also share many social
tendencies and basic behavioral and physiological responses with
humans, as we shall see, ranging from threat displays and patterns
of reconciliation to basic systems in the nervous system and the
facial musculature. Studies of these primate relatives point to what
you might think of as the deep structure of our environment of
human adaptedness.
FIGURE 2.6 Human relatedness to the apes.
What do we learn about the emotions of our primate relatives?
Answers first emerged from the work of primatologists such as Jane
Goodall (1986) and her colleagues who spent many years observing
chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, an area of rugged forest about
the size and shape of Manhattan. Consider the following description
by Goodall:
Melissa and her daughter Gremlin have made their nests [in the
trees] some 10 meters apart. Melissa’s son Gimble still feeds on
msongati pods … Gremlin’s infant, Getty, dangles above his
mother, twirling, kicking his legs, and grabbing at his toes. From
time to time Gremlin reaches up, idly, tickling his groin. After a
few minutes he climbs away through the branches, a tiny figure
outlined against the orange-red of the evening sky. When he
reaches a small branch above Melissa’s nest, he suddenly drops
down, plop, on her belly. With a soft laugh his grandmother
holds him close and play-nibbles his neck … He goes back to his
mother and lies beside her, suckling, one arm on her chest …
Suddenly from the far side of the valley come the melodious
pant-hoots of a single male: Evered, probably in his nest too. It is
Gimble who starts the answering chorus, sitting up beside
Melissa, his hand on her arm, gazing toward the adult male—one
of his “heroes.”
(Goodall, 1986, p. 594)
With such observations, Goodall documented many chimpanzee
emotion-like responses: apprehension at a stranger, fear at an
aggressive interaction, distress when lost, annoyance at a
bothersome juvenile, anger in a fight, mourning following the death
of a parent, which could lead to immobility and death. Goodall also
catalogued emotional displays, including threats made with bared
teeth, hair standing on end during excitement (sexual or
aggressive), a pant-grunt indicating social apprehension, squeaking
and screaming indicating fear, angry barks, distressed whimpers,
laughter and panting that accompany the enjoyment of play and
body contact, and pant-hoots and roars that accompany social
excitement.
These expressions are bases of distinctive patterns of interaction.
So, when they find a tree with a lot of fruit on it, chimpanzees panthoot. Others come to the spot, and everyone eats together with
infectious enjoyment. In maternal–infant interactions, in the play
of juveniles, and in reconciliations, there is affectionate body
contact, touching, stroking, and hugging. If an animal is hurt, it
screams a distinctive SOS call, which summons others to its aid.
When patrolling their range, groups of males are tense and alert to
sounds, and they become excited when they attack an animal from
outside their community.
Significant Figure: Jane Goodall
Apart from Charles Darwin, no one has done more to explore the
relatedness of humans to our primate relatives than Jane
Goodall. Encouraged and mentored by the paleontologist Louis
Leakey, Goodall studied chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania. She
did a PhD at Cambridge, based on her early observations—one of
a tiny number of people who have been allowed to do so without
first having a bachelor’s degree
Goodall’s important work, published in her book of 1986, The
Chimpanzees of Gombe, was to document the lives of
chimpanzees as individuals, with distinctive personalities,
distinctive emotions, and distinctive relationships with each
other. First she realized that she had to gain their trust. This
involved sitting for hours close to groups, until they became
used to her and tolerated her presence. She realized that she had
to learn to identify each one as an individual and give each a
name. She made observations on groups, as well as followed
particular individuals for many days and recorded their
activities.
As we describe in this chapter, it was Goodall who first identified
chimpanzees’ abilities to hunt small monkeys, and share and eat
them. It was she who saw that chimpanzee emotions were very
much like human emotions, including the antisocial emotions
involved in killing members of groups of their own species who
had separated themselves from the main group.
Today Goodall is an advocate for chimpanzees as an endangered
species, and an advocate, also, for looking after our Earth and its
habitats.
Amid these observations, one finds social dimensions of the
environment of human adaptedness in chimpanzee and bonobo life.
A first is attachment between infants and their mothers, a process
first theorized about by John Bowlby (1969), about which we will
say more next. For example, chimpanzee mothers and infants stay
close to each other (see Figure 2.7). The mothers feed and help their
infants and show other evidence of concern, or as we might say, love
(Hirata, 2009).
FIGURE 2.7 An Orangutan mother and offspring in
Borneo.
The reproductive relations that lead to offspring involve cooperation
and competition, but differ from those of humans. Once they are
sexually mature at age 15, female chimpanzees advertise their
sexual receptiveness by a large pink patch of sexual skin (the labia).
During the period of receptiveness, typically lasting 10 days out of
the 36-day menstrual cycle, each female may copulate several dozen
times a day, with all or most of the adult males in her social group.
Alternatively she may go off with a single male consort, away from
the rest of the community. Usually females choose whom they mate
with and when. Mothers raise infants more or less on their own.
Males make contributions to the community, but not to individual
offspring.
Bonobo females are sexually active for about five years before they
become fertile. They are receptive for more than half the time in
each menstrual cycle. They copulate freely with the adult males in
their social group. Female and male homosexual relations are also
common. Younger males often engage in sexual activity with older
females in what might be thought of as sexual initiation play. Sexual
contact among bonobos is the basis of friendships, conflict
reduction, and play.
Observations of chimpanzee life reveal a second social feature of the
environment of human adaptedness. Chimpanzees live in
hierarchies, which provide heuristic solutions to problems of
distributing resources, such as mating opportunities, food, and
social attention, and the labor required of collective endeavors
(Fiske, 2010; Keltner, 2016; de Waal, 2005). Among chimpanzees
the alpha male is the individual to whom others typically defer. He
may win his position by defeating the previous holder and reinforce
his position with intimidation displays that might involve charging,
pulling branches, throwing stones, and making a great din, as you
can see in Figure 2.8 (Goodall, 1992). Often alpha males are the
most skilled at making alliances with others, through grooming, and
generosity, in particular directed at females, the sharing of food, and
breaking up conflicts that would tear the social fabric of the chimp
community asunder (Boehm, 1999; de Waal, 1986). Females too
have a parallel hierarchy. More subordinate chimps ritualistically
and systematically will show gestures of appeasement and
submission to alpha chimps—bows, fear grimaces, the averting of
gaze—to maintain the peace (Eales, 1992).
FIGURE 2.8 In chimpanzees, threat displays and chasing
are part of the negotiation of rank within hierarchies.
A third social dimension of the environment of human adaptedness
seen in chimpanzee and bonobo life is: patterns of affiliation. In
the spirit of Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal has made a career of
closely observing chimps and bonobos, making key discoveries
about their patterns of affiliation (de Waal, 1996, 2008). Caregiving
is central to the affiliative patterns among nonkin: chimpanzees,
baboons, and macaques often become intensely distressed when
they witness harm to other group members. Primates take care of
vulnerable individuals, such as those who are born blind or crippled.
Chimps and Bonobos are known to groom each other, in patterns of
close social contact that produce what look to the human eye like
alliances or friendships. Play is central to the bonds of chimps and
bonobos (Goodall, 1986). Young chimpanzees play with each other
in the rough and tumble theatrics that might remind you of your
childhood with your siblings.
So precious are affiliative ties, that nonhuman primates, and, in
fact, almost all mammals have evolved patterns of reconciliation to
repair social bonds in the face of escalating conflict. Here is one
illustration of this tendency to reconcile, to preserve affiliative ties.
de Waal compared how pairs of chimpanzees or macaques behave
after angry conflicts to the behaviors of the same pairs behaved
during calmer, less strife-ridden times. He discovered that previous
antagonists were actually more likely to remain in physical
proximity with one another and reconcile (see the photo at the head
of this chapter). Sometimes the aggressor initiates reconciliation,
sometimes it’s the defeated animal. In the latter case, he or she
would approach with trepidation and engage in submissive
behaviors, like bare teeth displays, head bowing and bobbing, and
submissive grunts. This eventually would lead to affectionate
grooming, physical contact, and even embraces that would repair
the social bond (de Waal, 2000).
Finally, one sees another dimension of the environment of human
adaptedness: preference for one’s own group and hostility
toward other groups. Our primate predecessors show an
unnerving tendency to distinguish between the in-group and outgroup and to direct violence toward the out-group, often over
territorial matters. The evolutionary origin of this kind of
motivation can be glimpsed from studies of chimpanzees, for
instance by Goodall (1986). She records how among the
chimpanzees she was studying in the wild, in Gombe, a small
contingent formed a separate community. It was with profound
shock that, in 1974, researchers saw gangs of the larger northern
community start to patrol, attack, and kill members of the southern
group if they came across them either alone or in numerically
weaker groups in the forest.
The smaller contingent, which had tended to range south of
Goodall’s camp, had six adult males. Though the two
subcommunities met occasionally, for example, to get fruit at
Goodall’s camp, and though some interindividual contacts were
sometimes friendly, in general, the two groups were tense on
meeting. They started to avoid each other. Finally, southern males
stopped visiting the camp. Violent episodes began. Northern males,
who would patrol their borders, started to make incursions into the
southern range. On one occasion, a group of six adult males, an
adolescent male, and a female came across a southern male on his
own. He tried to flee but was caught by the northern males. While
one held him, the other males beat him with fists for about 10
minutes, and one bit him several times. When they left him he was
severely wounded, and although his body was never found, he was
presumed to have died from his injuries. One by one all the other
adult animals of the southern group, including a female, were killed
in like manner. Adolescent females from the southern group joined
the northern group. The attacks were clearly meant to kill: they
lasted longer than fights within a community, and included biting
and tearing flesh of the kind seen when eating animals of other
species. Attacks were not caused by victims being strangers. Some
had previously been friends of some of the attackers.
This was a form of tribalism that has been seen in other studies of
nonhuman primates (Boesch et al., 2007). So, although
chimpanzees can be, and often are, aggressive to their companions,
it is an entirely different kind of motivation that occurs that leads
chimpanzees to kill members of groups other than their own.
Human Ancestry
What we learn about our human environment of human
adaptedness is that patterns of attachment in humans diverge in
important ways from those of our primate relatives, chimpanzees
and bonobos. A chimpanzee or bonobo family is a female and a
small group of her offspring. The human family, by contrast, is a
group that often includes both sexes and individuals of all ages,
living with a female and her offspring. In the group there is usually
at least one adult male, most often the woman’s sexual partner. The
extended family group typically includes other relatives, such as
siblings, older offspring, and their sexual partners who have joined
the family from other groups. (A taboo on incest and social
mechanisms for people to marry outside the family are other
human universals.)
Several important forces shifted attachment processes and the care
of offspring. Human offspring, we have already noted, were very
vulnerable, which led to the emergence of alloparenting—many
different individuals in addition to the mother, fathers, cousins, and
nonkin, shared in the care of infants, toddlers, and children (Hrdy,
2001; Konner, 1982; Parsons et al., 2017). This pressure for many
individuals to attach to infants and children was augmented by
other factors—the uncertainty of food, the high probability by
contemporary standards of mothers dying as the child developed. As
a result, attachment was more than just a mother caring for an
infant; it was shared by many in the group.
Reproductive relationships that led to children also diverged from
our primate relatives. Although the proportion of societies (like
Western ones) where monogamy is official policy is only 16%
among a total of 853 societies sampled (Van den Berghe, 1979), and
although extramarital activities are not uncommon in most
societies, in practice monogamy is a very common sexual pattern,
and more typical of hunter-gatherer societies. The pattern of
polygamy, of one male having several wives appears to have
emerged later in our evolution, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago as the
small bands of hunter-gatherers settled into larger settlements with
stored grains and more vertical hierarchies governed by “big chiefs”
(Flannery & Marcus, 2012). The emotional accompaniment of the
adoption of monogamy is jealousy, which tends to occur when the
pair bond is threatened by an interloper (Dunbar, 2004).
Compared to our primate relatives, human hierarchies diverged in
important ways as well, with profound implications for the
evolution of human emotion. Hierarchies in chimps and bonobos
are quite vertical, with clear alpha males and females retaining their
rank through threat displays, occasional aggression, and grooming
and sharing to preserve alliances with subordinates (de Waal, 1982).
When we fast-forward seven million years of hominid evolution and
turn to studies of hunter-gatherer societies, we encounter
something dramatically different in the hierarchies. When
anthropologist Christopher Boehm surveyed studies of the
hierarchical dynamics of 48 preindustrial societies, representing
cultures from every continent that has been populated by humans,
the first thing of note is that alpha males and females were hard to
identify; rank was more equal and deference and influence more
dependent on the social context (Boehm, 1993). And huntergatherer hierarchies were less vertical; egalitarianism in the
distribution of resources was the prevailing principle.
Early human hierarchies were shaped by leveling mechanisms,
social-emotional processes that preserve more egalitarian relations.
For example, should an individual boast, other people will mock,
tease, or ridicule the person, to render the person more humble and
preserve more egalitarian relations (now one sees why teasing and
roasting are so common today in groups). When an individual is
fortunate enough to make a big kill in the hunt, the successful
hunter will often engage in self-deprecating acts, insulting the meat,
and others will join in, to ensure the individual does not develop a
sense of superiority. More generally, friendships are rich with
laughter, play, and teasing, all means by which they remain humble
and imbued with a sense of commonality and equality.
Patterns of affiliation in hunter-gatherers are defined by
collaboration, for example, in defense, hunting animals, and, as we
have already noted, the rearing of offspring. Individuals in huntergatherer social groups share instinctively due to the uncertainty of
food sources and the collaboration required to obtain food. For
example, among the Netsilik Eskimos, each individual is assigned 12
food-sharing partners whom they keep through their lives (Flannery
& Marcus, 2012). Anytime an individual within one of these
networks kills a seal, that person carefully cuts it up into 14 parts
and shares 12 with his or her partners, keeping two for him or
herself. Through the sharing of food, social ties are solidified and
maintained. In the highlands of New Guinea, neighboring social
groups gather each year in celebration to ritualistically give away
food they have cultivated—piles of yams, pig carcasses, and arrays of
coconuts (Weissner & Schiefenhövel, 1996). The more an individual
gives away, the higher the status he or she will enjoy. This pattern
of food sharing to solidify alliances is seen in Sub-Saharan Africa, in
the Inuit social groups of the Arctic, and the dwellers of the
Amazon.
Finally, humans show a striking tendency toward instinctively
favoring the in-group and having contempt for members of outgroups. There are clear limits to the affiliative and collaborative
tendencies in the small groups that defined human evolution for
200,000 years. The last such species was of the Neanderthals, who
became extinct some 28,000 years ago. Reviewing the
paleontological evidence of contact between anatomically modern
humans (our ancestors) and Neanderthals, Mellars (2004)
concludes that there was:
Direct competition for space and resources between the two
populations, in which the demonstrably more complex
technology and apparently more complex organization of the
anatomically modern populations would have given them a
strong competitive advantage over the Neanderthals (p. 464).
Before their extinction, Neanderthals were the hominid inhabitants
of Europe. Then there was an influx—should one say colonization?
—by anatomically modern humans who, just before the extinction
of Neanderthals, came to outnumber them by 10 to 1 (Mellars &
French, 2011). Recent genetic evidence indicates that some
Neanderthals interbred with humans, but the question remains as
to whether the Neanderthals, in general, were driven to extinction
by our ancestors.
There are strong beliefs in the inherent superiority of one’s own
group over others, in the inherent morality of one’s own group, and
in preferentially allocating resources to one’s own group (Brewer,
1979). Violent raids of other groups to gain resources, territory, or
mates were common. Today, we see the vestiges of this tribalism.
When people are presented with faces of people of different ethnic
backgrounds than their own, a region of the brain, the amygdala,
known to be involved in fear, lights up, whereas this response does
not occur when viewing faces from one’s own group (Wheeler &
Fiske, 2005). When people view images of suffering of people from
their own group and other ethnic groups, they are less likely to
show activation in regions of the brain—the medial prefrontal cortex
—involved in the empathic response (Mathur, Harada, Lipke, &
Chiao, 2011). We are by no means condemned to look upon other
groups with derision and hostility. Former adversaries—the
Germans and Japanese for the Americans in World War II—can
quickly become allies. The ethicist Peter Singer has noted that in
our history, humans consistently show the capacity to expand our
circle of care, that is those individuals we deem as worthy of rights
and care, from our own families to those in our communities to
humans more generally, and even nonhuman species (Singer, 2011).
This transformation of tribalism rests upon a critical shift in human
evolution with profound implications for emotion—the emergence
of language and symbolic representation.
Evolution of Symbolic Representation and
Language
Thus far our evolutionary story has focused on what we share in our
emotional lives with our primate relatives—a deeply social
environment of human adaptedness structured by attachments,
hierarchies, alliances, and preference for in-group members. It is
within this environment of human adaptedness that emotions
enabled our hominid forebears to respond adaptively, with
genetically based systems—regions of the brain, branches of the
peripheral nervous system, facial and bodily musculature as we
shall see—to form strong attachments, navigate social hierarchies,
build strong affiliations, and protect the group.
The tale of human evolution also brings into focus new traits and
characteristics that define who we are as a species and create new
properties of human emotion. Flint tools have been found from
two-and-a-half million years ago, and they imply an emotional
engagement of acquiring and exercising the skills to make them.
The use of fire started about 700,000 years ago, and one can
imagine it was used not just for warmth, but also for preparing food
to be stored, distributed, and shared. As we detail in Chapter 4, the
oldest human art objects, shells drilled to make beads for necklaces,
are from 82,000 years ago (Bouzouggar et al., 2007) and speak to an
interest in aesthetics, beauty, and, perhaps, awe. The evidence of
ritual burials from around the same period (Bowler et al., 2003)
implies that by then emotionally moving stories were being told of
people who were dead but alive again on another plane.
The most noticeable species-typical characteristic of humans, which
distinguishes us from all our nonhuman relatives, is language,
which is estimated to have emerged some 200,000 years ago
(Henshilwood & Dubreuil, 2009). Language involves symbolic
utterances—words—that are combined according to certain rules
(syntax) to convey meaning (semantics). It is still unknown how
language emerged in human evolution. One possibility is that our
human predecessors combined a repertoire of nonverbal sounds—
cries, growls, screams, sighs, oohs, and ahhs—and gestural actions
such as pointing into more complex strings of sounds (Hauser,
2000; Jackendoff, 2002); nonverbal sounds transformed into protowords to refer to people, actions, and objects in the environment.
And gradually, our hominid predecessors began to pair these sounds
into word strings, and, eventually, with the development of syntax
into sentence-like utterances.
Whatever the process by which this occurred, today humans have
hundreds, if not thousands, of words, metaphors, idiomatic
expressions, and phrases that refer to emotional experiences
(Russell, 1991). Adding this layer of language to the emotional
response transformed emotion in fundamental ways (Barrett, 2017;
Lindquist, 2013). With language we can talk about emotions in the
abstract, about experiences that are not in the present, but in the
past or future. It allows us to talk about hypothetical emotions (“If
you date my best friend, I’ll be really angry”). Language allows us to
characterize emotion in imaginative and artistic form, such as in
poetry and novels, and complex legends about gods and mythical
figures that were so important to the many cultures of several
thousand years ago before monotheistic religions emerged.
Language allows us speak of emotion metaphorically—my sadness
is like the ocean at low tide—and to attribute emotions to things,
most typically other natural objects or forces, other than people
(Kovesces, 2012). Language transforms emotion.
More generally, our capacity to use language to represent emotional
experience helps us build social bonds through emotion-based arts
of conversation, disputation, gossip, and the making of joint plans,
social processes animated by emotion. This is the argument of
Robin Dunbar (1993, 2003, 2004).
Dunbar has proposed that chimpanzees and other primates use
grooming, in which primates sit together, pick through each other’s
fur to get rid of twigs and insects, stroke each other, to maintain
social bonds; in humans this activity has been replaced by
conversation (see Figure 2.9). Whereas manual grooming can only
be performed with one other individual at a time, with language we
can communicate with several others and do it while we are doing
something else, like preparing food. And we can communicate about
emotions of others who are not there, about emotions from the past
or in the hypothetical future. This capacity was necessitated by the
expanding group sizes of our hominid predecessors and laid a
foundation for several critically human cognitive capacities we will
speak of later—the ability to imagine others’ mental states and
develop a theory of mind; the ability to take others’ perspectives;
the ability to comment on others’ reputations and character and
spread that information through social networks; the ability to
share intentions and coordinate future behavior. These are abilities
beyond anything chimpanzees can manage (Tomasello, 1999, 2008).
FIGURE 2.9 Two chimpanzees grooming. Dunbar’s
hypothesis is that in humans this emotionally intimate
activity has been replaced by conversation.
Human brains became enlarged in part due to the growth of regions
of the frontal cortex that allow us to have mental models of people
in our social group, and, in addition, conversational language
allowed us to discuss what these others might know, how they feel,
and how to do things together. Language does not replace
communication by glance, facial expression, vocalization, or
gesture; it augments it. With language we can share aspects of
emotions with others and understand their emotional minds in
ways far beyond anything that occurs among our primate relatives.
In the next chapter, we will discuss how language and culture work
to shape the raw materials of biologically based emotions.
Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships
We have said that the most noticeable difference between humans
and apes is that we have language, whereas apes do not. More
profound and more basic—also the means by which language with
its shared meanings came into being—is our deepest characteristic
as a species: our ability to cooperate. As Michael Tomasello (e.g.,
2014, 2016) explains, this ability is at the center of being human. In
a paper that may be more important than any other in the twentyfirst-century psychology, Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, Maria
Hernandez-Lloredo, Brian Hare, and Michael Tomasello (2007)
report studies in which they compared 105 human infants aged twoand-a-half years with 106 chimpanzees aged 3 to 21 years, and 33
orangutans aged 3 to 10 years, on two sets of tasks. One set was
physical; the tasks included finding rewards that had been hidden,
using tools to retrieve rewards, and discrimination of quantity. The
other set was social; the tasks included seeing a person solve a
problem and then trying to solve it in the same way, following the
gaze of a person, being able to make and receive communicative
gestures, and understanding what a person was trying to do in a task
in which that person was unsuccessful in completing. For the
physical tasks, the humans and chimpanzees were both about 69
percent correct. Orangutans were 59 percent correct. For the social
tasks, the human infants were 74 percent correct. Chimpanzees and
orangutans were, on the whole, not able to do these tasks; they were
33 percent and 36 percent correct, respectively, (with chance level
well above zero). By the age of two-and-a-half, humans but not apes
know that they can act in the world and that others can do so too.
They can make and recognize communicative gestures. They can
empathize with others, recognize others’ plans, and help them.
Although bees work together to make honeycombs, and wolves hunt
in packs, only we humans are able to make new arrangements and
carry them out, so that together people accomplish things that they
cannot do alone. Tomasello puts it like this:
Although humans’ great ape ancestors were social beings, they
lived mostly individualistic and competitive lives, and so their
thinking was geared toward achieving individual goals. But early
humans were at some point forced by ecological circumstances
into more cooperative lifeways, and so their thinking became
more directed toward figuring out ways to coordinate with others
to achieve joint goals or even collective group goals. And this
changed everything (2014, pp. 4–5).
The stage of working for joint goals may have been reached during
foraging, when humans started to help each other gather food, then
prepare it, and eat it together. Chimpanzees do none of these things.
They do travel in groups, and when they find a tree with fruit on it,
they take enough for themselves, go off to one side, to eat it on their
own. They also hunt small animals such as monkeys or piglets.
When they catch one, there is often a squabble.
By contrast to these individual goals, humans started to develop
joint goals, perhaps including this: “You hold this animal-skin bag,
and I’ll pick up these roots and put them into it. Then we’ll take
them back to our camp where we can cook them and everyone can
have some.” Food sharing is a human universal. The cooperation
and the friendly emotions that were involved emerged probably
some thousands of years before language. One may imagine how
language complemented them and supplemented them.
Then, sometime following the development of joint goals, we
humans developed a second phase of cooperation, with what
Tomasello calls “collective group goals,” which included customs
of belief and action that applied to whole social groups, customs we
call morality and culture, which we discuss in the next chapter.
In this book we will return to these collaborative principles over and
over again. The implication for emotions is that not only are most
human emotions social, they are also most frequently about
cooperation, in emotions of attachment, love, friendship, warmth,
caring, empathy. In this family of emotions, too, we see not only
emotions of failure to cooperate in shame and guilt, but also the
inverse, emotions of competition when self-concern is more
important, or when cooperation has failed, in anger and contempt.
In the process of our hominid evolution, emotions emerged to help
us solve the problems and opportunities related to four social
relationships that proved vital: attachments, hierarchies, affiliations
or friendships, and in-group–out-group dynamics (e.g., Fiske, 1991;
Keltner & Haidt, 1999). Emotions are catalysts of attachment with
our offspring, falling in love, seeking to rise above a rival, becoming
friends, and celebrating what is best about our social group.
Emotions arise when these ties are threatened—when a parent
seems too far away, when a rival threatens our romantic partnership
or a friend leaves, or another group seeks to dominate our own.
Emotions That Promote Attachment
Much as infants are nourished physiologically through the mother’s
milk, they grow in strength psychologically through attachment
processes between caregivers and offspring. The most systematic
theoretical treatment of these ideas was offered by John Bowlby
(1951, 1969). Bowlby suggested that human attachment processes
function like imprinting of the kind Konrad Lorenz (1937)
observed when, after hatching from their eggs, goslings learn to
recognize and follow the first largish, moving, sound-making, object
in their environment. Usually this is the mother goose, but if no real
mother appears, characteristics of the first plausible moving object
are learned instead, including, on occasion, Lorenz himself. (You
may have seen pictures of Lorenz walking across a field followed by
a gaggle of goslings who thought he was their mother.)
Attachment can be thought of as a form of imprinting. Its function
is to protect and care for the vulnerable infant to thrive, in
particular during early childhood, the most vulnerable period of life,
by keeping the mother and other caregivers nearby. The mother, in
Bowlby’s framework, is a secure base, a dynamic that continues
into adolescence and beyond (Allen et al., 2003). For Bowlby,
emotions were central to the formation of attachments between
children and their caregivers, most typically the mother (Shaver &
Mikuliner, 2001). The love between mother and child forms the
core of the attachment bonds and allows the developing child to
explore the environment with interest and wonder. Should the
mother or other caregivers be too far away, feelings of distress and
anxiety, both on the part of the child and caregiver, bring the two
closer. When Mary Ainsworth (1967) carried out early naturalistic
studies of babies and mothers in Uganda in the ethological tradition
you learned of last chapter, she discerned a set of behavior patterns,
many rich in emotion, that young children showed when they were
with their mothers, but did not show with anyone else. Her list of
attachment behaviors is in Table 2.2.
TABLE 2.2
Ainsworth’s (1967) list of attachment behaviors
1. Differential crying (i.e., with mother as compared with others)
2. Differential smiling
3. Differential vocalization
4. Crying when the mother leaves
5. Following the mother
6. Visual motor orientation toward the mother
7. Greeting through smiling, crowing, and general excitement
8. Lifting arms in greeting the mother
9. Clapping hands in greeting the mother
10. Scrambling over the mother
11. Burying the face in the mother’s lap
12. Approach to the mother through locomotion
13. Embracing, hugging, kissing the mother (not seen in Ugandan
infants but observed frequently by infants in Western societies)
14. Exploration away from the mother as a secure base
15. Flight to the mother as a haven of safety
16. Clinging to the mother
When an infant’s mother is present, there is a sense of security.
When the mother is absent, the sense is entirely different.
Comparable attachment patterns can be seen in different societies,
functioning to keep the child close to the mother, away from threats
of different kinds (Bowlby, 1971).
Bowlby wrote of two other critical systems necessary for the
attachment processes required to reproduce and raise vulnerable
offspring to the age of viability. Our reproductive system enabled by
the passions of sex, of desire and lust, moves people to sexual
behavior (Diamond, 2003; Gonzaga, Keltner, Londahl, & Smith,
2001). For humans, though, sexual passion is just the beginning of
the story of reproduction. Given the vulnerability of our offspring,
long-lasting sexual relationships between specific human females
and specific human males began: pair-bonding (Lovejoy, 1981),
which is rare among other primates. Human sexual partners must
often cooperate to raise children; collaborations are animated by
love and desire (Djikic & Oatley, 2004).
Bowlby thought that love (by which he meant attachment) in the
early years was as important for emotional development as proper
nutrition is for physical development. Among his ideas was that the
attachment relationship of infancy creates a template for all later
intimate relationships, and he coined the term affectional bonds.
Here’s what he said:
Affectional bonds and subjective states of strong emotion tend to
go together, as every novelist and playwright knows. Thus, many
of the most intense of all human emotions arise during the
formation, the maintenance, the disruption, and the renewal of
affectional bonds – which, for that reason, are sometimes called
emotional bonds. In terms of subjective experience, the
formation of a bond is described as falling in love, maintaining a
bond as loving someone, and losing a partner as grieving over
someone.
(Bowlby, 1979, p. 69)
Try this little experiment on yourself. Think about the 16
attachment-related behaviors listed by Mary Ainsworth in Table 2.2.
Now imagine that instead of being patterns of infants with their
mothers, these are descriptions of an interaction between two adult
lovers. Do the patterns fit? Do lovers show differential smiling and
vocalization with each other, do they follow each other, gaze at each
other, do they show distress at separation? If so, might this support
Bowlby’s hypothesis that adult love is formed on a template of the
infant attachment relationship? Intimations of the idea were put
forward by Darwin (1872), who supposed that the infant pattern of
holding and being held is elaborated in adult caressing. Adult
romantic love and sexuality, according to this idea, is an elaboration
upon universal, evolved, behavioral patterns of earlier life.
There’ll be more discussion of human sexuality and love in
Chapters 3 and 9.
Emotions and Negotiation of Social Hierarchy
Human hierarchies, where some individuals enjoy elevated rank
over others, emerge in almost every group imaginable, from twoyear-olds in day care to strangers waiting for a bus, in which the
first arrival will get on the bus first. Hierarchies can be based on
many qualities, as we shall detail in Chapter 9, including power,
status, authority, and social class (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson,
2003). Much as you learned in the studies of chimpanzee power
politics, in humans we negotiate social hierarchies through
emotion.
One question of interest is how emotional displays and experiences
give rise to the position you might enjoy in a hierarchy, for example
in your living residence or at work (van Kleef, 2015). Do you gain
power, or respect, with displays of anger or sympathy? How might
the way in which you touch others or laugh signal your position in a
hierarchy? Emotions like anger and pride are clear signals of
elevated rank and power and enable people within hierarchies to
negotiate their rank. Emotions like embarrassment and shame, we
shall see, emerge from the submissive displays of our primate
relatives and signal subordinate status. Still other emotions fuel
behaviors that reduce status differences perceived to be unjust,
emotions such as anger and envy.
Emotions, Affiliation, and Friendship
In the human groups in which we evolved, the social fabric was
shaped by attachment patterns and forms of hierarchy, but also by
patterns of affiliation, which we might think of as friendship (Clark
& Finkel, 2005; Fiske, 1992; Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins, 1999). We
have already seen how affiliative ties, in particular between nonkin,
were critical to alloparenting—the sharing of rearing offspring. The
capacity for humans to form friendships, so important in our social
lives when compared to those of our primate relatives, proved to be
a vital force that reshaped the nature of our hierarchies: in the small
groups of hunter-gatherer societies, dense patterns of friendships
countered the exercise of coercive power and led to the
transformation of the vertical hierarchies in chimps to the more
horizontal relationships of hunter-gatherers.
Affiliative relationships are defined by a variety of emotional
processes: warmth, empathic understanding, shared laughter,
expressions of appreciation and gratitude, emotional disclosures,
and a sense of caring and commitment (Clark & Finkel, 2005; Kurtz
& Algoe, 2015). They are critical to our health and well-being (Leary
& Baumeister, 1995), so much so, that studies suggest that when
you move from one context to another (say from high school to
college, or—we hope not—life in society to life in prison), you will
re-create old patterns of friendships with new individuals. We will
have a lot more to say about the emotions of affiliation and
friendship. For now, we’ll leave this topic with the words of the
American poet Walt Whitman: “I have learned that to be with those
I like is enough.”
Collective Emotion and Preference for In-Groups
In her book, Dancing in the Streets, writer Barbara Ehrenreich
details the cultural history of how important collective joy and the
exuberance and rapturous delight we feel in group-based
celebrations is to our sense of who we are (Ehrenreich, 2006). We
find this emotion in dance, a human universal, in festivals, in song,
in patterns of collective movement of our bodies, from marches at
rallies, to waves and celebrations at sporting events to patterns of
crossing ourselves in a Catholic service. Frans de Waal has observed
that chimpanzees will show celebration responses when given an
unexpected bunch of bananas—they embrace, groom, fall into a pile
of affection—and then may share the resource (de Waal, 2006). This
basic tendency to experience collective joy is deeply elaborated in
humans in so many rituals where we share joy together, from the
religious rituals observed in all cultures, birth and death rituals, and
celebratory rituals such as Burning Man.
In Table 2.3, we outline some of the emotions that you might think
of as collective emotions that fold us into social groups and give us a
strong sense of our collective identity. Some strengthen our sense of
our connection to social collectives. Experiences of awe, ecstasy, and
collective joy, for example, at a political rally or music festival,
exhilarate in how they give us the sense that we are part of
something much larger than the self—a political movement, a new
form of culture. When our group triumphs, on the football field or
in Olympic competition or at war, we may feel triumph or collective
pride. Underlying these emotions is the robust human tendency to
define ourselves in terms of the groups to which we belong, and the
related tendency of in-group favoritism, to favor our own group over
others (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Even when our group is based on
something meaningless, such as random assignment or whether we
under- or overestimate the number of dots projected onto a screen,
our sense of group identity drives many social processes that favor
the in-group over other groups: we think of our group as more
moral, civilized, human, and reasonable, and when given the
chance, will allocate resources preferentially to our group over
others.
TABLE 2.3
Relations, recurring situations, and emotions
Relation Recurring situation
Emotion
Attachment Maintain contact with caregivers
Love
Protect vulnerable offspring
Parental love,
sympathy
Separation from caregiver
Distress, sadness
Reproductive possibility
Sexual desire
Long-term commitment,
collaboration with reproductive
partner
Romantic love
Threat of interloper
Jealousy
Separation from romantic partner Distress, anxiety
Hierarchy
Reunion
Relief
Parting, death
Sadness
Signal elevated rank vis-à-vis
others
Pride
Prevail in competition over others Triumph
Affiliation
Unfair rise in other’s status
Anger, envy
Signal lower rank
Shame,
humiliation,
embarrassment
Cooperation, caring
Affection, love
Parting, death
Sadness
Receive generosity
Gratitude
Harm other
Guilt, forgiveness
Relation
Recurring situation
In-group
Collective, celebratory action
preference
Nonsocial
goals
Emotion
Ecstasy, joy
Ritual that folds self into
collective
Awe
Group prevails over other group
Collective pride
View group as superior to other
group
Contempt, hatred
Progress toward meeting goals
Enthusiasm
Failure toward meeting goals
Frustration,
sadness
Seeking, finding
Interest
Novelty
Surprise
Threat to survival
Fear
Toxicity
Disgust
This strong tendency in humans to fold into social collectives, and
favor our own group over others, gives rise to the more disturbing
emotional tendencies that fuel group conflicts, wars, and genocides.
In times of conflict, social disgust at the out-group leads to the
dehumanization of those we seek to vanquish. War-time
propaganda so often treats opponents as rats, insects, vermin—
objects of disgust. Rage and hatred can fuel violence and aggression.
In more subtle ways, expressions of contempt toward the out-group,
for example in stances of superiority toward other groups in terms
of their manners, their food, their music, or religion, can be seen as
a way of lifting up the in-group over the out-group. Moral
philosophers warn us of these collective emotions. The ancient
Stoics thought that the most dangerous emotion, the one most
important to subdue, was anger, in particular rage. In his book
Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene (2013) warns us that although we
have evolved tendencies to care, to cooperate, and form strong ties,
our tendency toward tribalism, to feel we are superior to other
groups, poses the greatest threat to peace today. It’s an
evolutionarily bequeathed tendency to genocidal aggression and
uncaring contempt for others whom we see as different from
ourselves, even though we are fundamentally the same.
Within the science of emotion, the thesis that emotions function to
help humans form and maintain important social bonds has had
many advocates (Bowlby, 1971; Ekman, 1992; Frank, 1988; Izard,
1971, 1977; Keltner & Haidt, 1999, 2001; Nesse, 1990; Oatley, 1992,
2004, 2018; Plutchik, 1991; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990; Trivers, 1971;
van Kleef & Fischer, 2016). In Table 2.3, we summarize the various
statements offered by these scientists about what emotions do in
social relationships. In our analysis, we additionally build on
Randoph Nesse’s idea (1990) that to understand the evolution of
emotions we should concentrate not on particular emotions but on
recurring situations. If we do so we find that although some
emotions, like fear of a predator, may be distinctive, many emotions
tend to overlap in particular situations.
Emotion provides the structure of human social life: outline
patterns that enable people to relate to each other. In Table 2.3, you
can see that emotions of attachment and affiliation help form and
maintain cooperative bonds, the emotions of assertion (power)
enable us to relate in the hierarchies of our lives, and the
antisocially motivated emotions of hatred and cruelty are aspects of
relations between groups. In addition, of course, there are emotions
that need have no immediate social component.
In the evolutionary approach to emotion, critical evidence concerns
whether our emotions serve social or individual functions, the
extent to which they are universal and have biological bases, and the
extent to which they are culturally distinctive.
So far we have described some evolutionary bases of social life, but
of course individual behavior and selfish behavior occur, too.
Primatologists have indeed found that chimpanzees spend a good
deal of the time acting selfishly, for instance, in disputes often
violent over status, resources, and mates. Among the most
interesting aspects of selfish behavior are acts of deception, which
involve understanding others, which we discuss in Chapter 8. Call
and Tomasello (2008) concluded that chimpanzees don’t really
understand their fellow chimpanzees as having beliefs, wants, and
feelings, but they do understand that others have certain
perceptions and goals, and this enables them to deceive others.
Do chimpanzees really have emotions? Or could it be that real
emotions are entirely human? The argument might be that, because
we can’t ask the animals, we will never know. But this is not the
view of most biologists, starting with Darwin, who observed clear
continuities between human emotions and those of other animals.
In an interview, de Waal (2011) said:
Animals probably have many of the same emotions that we have.
This is assumed in many brain studies, in which rats or monkeys
show expressions of fear of anger when parts of the brain are
stimulated that also in humans are active when we feel fear or
anger. So, neuroscientists generally have no trouble assuming
similar emotions in humans and other mammals even though in
the eyes of so-called behaviorists this is still very much taboo …
If a baboon female returns a week after the disappearance of her
offspring to the spot where it happened to climb high up into a
tree and scan the environment while uttering plaintive contact
calls, repeating her agitation and calling for weeks every time her
troop passes through this specific area, it is hard for the human
observer not to assume a sense of loss or grieving.
Panksepp (2005) argued that that our emotions derive from the
neurodynamics of brain systems that generate instinctual emotional
behavior in other mammals. As we have proposed in Chapter 1,
emotions are based on action tendencies, urges to act in this way or
that, and Panksepp identifies a set of these that are sufficiently
important for him to name with capital letters. They include:
SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY, and we
will consider them in depth in Chapter 7. These systems have been
elaborated as mammals evolved and have reached their most
elaborate versions in the lives of social primates such as
chimpanzees and ourselves.
SUMMARY
Our genes use us as vehicles to enable them to reproduce. In this
chapter, we’ve discussed how they program us, partly by means of
our emotions, to keep ourselves safe and to enable sexual activity to
occur. Some of this programming is mandatory. With some of it, we
can choose among options, at least to some extent. The evolutionary
success of the human species derives from cooperation, from living
in groups, in which emotions help humans form attachments, build
affiliative ties or friendships, negotiate status within hierarchies,
and integrate into strong groups. Among the evidence for the
sociality of our emotions are studies of chimpanzees and bonobos,
the prehistory of the human species, and studies of modern
societies living as hunter-gatherers.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. What are your reactions to the idea that we don’t pass on our
genes, but that genes use us as vehicles to pass themselves on?
2. Think of an emotion you have experienced that concerns
another person you know, such as love, or anger, or jealousy, or
envy. How has your reflection on this emotion affected how you
think of yourself? How has it affected how you think of the
person who was the object of this emotion?
3. How far do you think we humans will be able to modify the
emotions of hostility to members of out-groups? You might start
thinking about this from your knowledge of terrorism, of wars of
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and of the civil rights
movement.
FURTHER READING
An application of evolutionary theory to the emotions of
compassion and pride and to facial expression:
Goetz, J., Simon-Thomas, E., & Keltner, D. (2010). Compassion: An
evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological
Bulletin, 136(3), 351–374.
Tracy, J.L., Shariff, A.F., & Cheng, J.T. (2010). A naturalist’s view of
pride. Emotion Review 2(2): 163–177.
Hess, U., & Thibault, P. (2009). Darwin and emotion expression.
American Psychologist, 64, 120–128.
The social and emotional lives of chimpanzees and ourselves:
de Waal, F. (2005). Our inner ape: The best and worst of human
nature. London: Granta.
For readable discussions of human evolution:
Christian, D. (2004). Maps of time: An introduction to big history.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Dunbar, R. (2004). The human story: A new history of mankind’s
evolution. London: Faber.
Hrdy, S. B. (1999) Mother nature. Maternal instincts and how they
shape the human species. New York: Ballantine Books
EXTRA REFERENCES
Bouzouggar, A., Barton, N., Vanhaeren, M., et al. (2007). 82,000year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the
origins of modern human behavior. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the USA, 104, 9964–9969.
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3
Cultural Understandings of Emotions
CONTENTS
An Island Society
Two Emotional Events
Three Principles: Emotions as Interpersonal, Active, and
Value-based
Cross-cultural Approaches to Emotion
Identity
Independent and Interdependent Selves
Knowledge Structures
Values
The Construction of Emotions in the West
The Coming of Civilization to Medieval Societies
Has Violence Declined Over Time?
The Romantic Era
Sexual Love in the West
Falling in Love: Emotion as a Role
Women and Men: Different Cultures?
Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 3.0 A bronze figurine from the Han dynasty in
China, made more than 2,000 years ago, probably
representing a person from an foreign northern tribe.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must
carry it with us or we find it not.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, xii, Art)
An Island Society
For nine months Catherine Lutz (1988) went to stay on a Pacific
atoll called Ifaluk, the area of which is just over half a square mile.
She went to study the emotions of the 430 people who lived there
because, as she said, she wanted to see “if and how it was possible
for people to organize their lives in such a way as to avoid the
problems that seemed to me to diminish American culture, in
particular its pervasive inequality of both gender and class and its
violence” (p. 17). People rely on each other, on this island, the
highest point of which is just a few yards above sea level. It’s a place
where typhoons sometimes sweep the huts away, destroy the taro
gardens, and deplete the surrounding lagoon of fish.
Two Emotional Events
One day, sitting with another woman, Lutz watched a five-year-old
girl dancing and making silly faces, showing happiness, ker as it is
known in the island’s language. Lutz responded warmly to the little
girl, whom she thought was rather cute. “Don’t smile at her,” said
her companion, “she’ll think that you’re not song,” meaning
justifiably angry (p. 167). The woman was telling Lutz that the girl
was approaching the age at which she should have social
intelligence, concern for others that is valued on Ifaluk, and that she
should not show inappropriate levels of happiness, disapproved of
on Ifaluk as showing off.
In this exchange, we can see how different are the emotional lives of
people on Ifaluk from those of the industrial West. On Ifaluk, the
little girl should not have displayed ker, with its risk of misbehavior.
She should have been sitting quietly, as good socially intelligent
people do. One also sees differences in the nature of anger. On
Ifaluk, song, or justifiable anger, occurs with a public breach of
social values. So song is not anger as people in the West tend to
experience it, when it arises from another person’s hurtful action as
it affects oneself. It is people’s social duty to express song if they
notice anything that might disrupt social harmony. The proper
response to song is metagu, which means anxious concern for
others.
Differences between her own and Ifalukian culture caused Lutz to
make other social mistakes. One night she was awakened by a man
entering the small doorless hut that she had negotiated for herself.
Her scream awakened the woman and girls of her adoptive family,
who came to see what was wrong. They were asleep a few yards
away in their communal hut, with each one’s sleeping mat touching
others so that no one would be lonely. The man had fled, and the
family laughed hilariously when they heard Lutz had been alarmed
by the event. She said that she had been on the island long enough
to know that men sometimes called on women at night for a sexual
rendezvous. But she had imported the American idea that an
uninvited visit from a man inevitably meant harm. On Ifaluk, Lutz
says, although men may very occasionally seem frightening in
public if drunk, so that others may fear that a disagreement might
break out between them, interpersonal violence is virtually
nonexistent, and rape unknown. Hence, a night visitor means the
very antithesis of fear.
The incident became a topic of conversation. Although people found
it difficult to know why Lutz had been frightened, she sensed that
her adoptive mother showed some satisfaction in the story of the
event because, although the anxiety that Lutz displayed was
inappropriate, it was anxiety: her adoptive mother thought this
meant that at last Lutz was capable of showing this valued emotion!
The account that Lutz wrote about Ifaluk is a piece of
ethnography: writing that offers a portrait of a society, from the
perspective of an anthropologist, to emphasize its distinctiveness.
Clifford Geertz (1973) calls this kind of account a “thick
description.” Because in its literary depth, it invites us to imagine
being there, almost able to take part. In the case of emotions, such
accounts don’t just say what emotions occur; they offer insights into
their settings and cultural meanings. Ethnographies often focus on
discourse, the processes by which people use language in its many
forms to make sense of emotional experience. So, ethnographers
often study communications such as apologies, gossip, songs,
poetry, and community meetings about disruptive people (see for
example, Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990; Lutz & White, 1986).
FIGURE 3.1 An Ifaluk woman smiles as she makes an
impromptu head-dress for her small son. This kind of
socially responsive smiling is of a lower intensity and
signals something different from ker, meaning “excited
happiness” (from Lutz, 1988, p. 49).
Three Principles: Emotions as Interpersonal, Active, and
Value-based
A society is a group of people who live in a particular place at a
particular time. Culture is a system of ideas and practices that are
held in common in a society.
From the glimpse of the society of Ifaluk offered by Catherine Lutz,
we can see not just differences from the practices of our own society
but cultural principles of a kind on which we may reflect worldwide.
Here are three principles, which we explore further in this chapter.
Rather better than people in the West, the people of Ifaluk
recognize that most emotions are relational. Although some
emotions, such as fear of the dark or enjoyment of a certain food,
relate to circumstances that are physical, most human emotions,
throughout the world, are interpersonal. Lutz’s depiction, above, of
a five-year-old Ifalukian girl showing off her happiness and of a
young American woman, Lutz greeting the behavior with a smile are
both interpersonal. For more than a century, psychology has tended
to focus on the individual, and for a long time the psychology of
emotions reflected this tendency. But the current trend, one we
follow in this book, is to see the interpersonal aspects of emotions
as primary (van Kleef, 2016).
In the West we tend to see emotions as happening to us: she fell in
love, he felt a surge of anger, he was consumed by jealousy (e.g.,
Ekman, 1992). In these ways, people seem passive in relation to
experience. In other cultures, people tend to think of emotions as
active. A telling example was discussed by Anna Pavlenko (2005),
whose first language was Russian. When she went to live in
America, she discovered that in English “I am angry” is not only
expressed verbally as an adjective and as something that happens to
a person, it is also associated with blame of the other. She missed
the Russian form, which is expressed as a verb, and is more active,
something like “I contend,” with an expectation that the problem
will be resolved. As Mesquita, De Leersnyder, and Boiger (2016) put
it, emotions can be thought of as actions that we do. On Ifaluk,
when a man came into her hut at night, although Catherine Lutz is
American, she did “fear.” Might it be better to think more generally
of emotions as active in this kind of way?
Emotions are means by which we take part in society, in ways that
reflect its values (Mesquita et al., 2016; Tsai, 2017). Remember
how, in the previous chapter, on evolution, we discussed how a
human characteristic is to be able to cooperate in shared moralities
of a social group. So on Ifaluk, Lutz was told about how the little girl
who had been showing off needed to behave as a person should in
that society: be gentle, calm, and quiet. Following the incident of the
man in the night-time, Lutz’s adoptive mother talked with others
about the emotion-based incident in her adoptive daughter’s hut
and about Lutz’s anxiety. She talked about it in a way that she and
others could try to make sense of it. In all cultures, it seems
emotions have a relation to the values of society.
When we talk in conversation about the emotions of ourselves and
others, it has been found by Bernard Rimé (e.g., 2009) that we tend
to compare our emotions with those of others and in relation to
values that are shared in the particular society. One implication is
that the cultural variations in which values are prominent should in
turn predict cultural variations in patterns of emotional experience
(e.g., Boiger, Mesquita, Uchida, & Barrett, 2013).
In the following sections, we explore different traditions in the
cultural understanding of emotion. In this effort, we see that in
coming to understand other societies we learn not only about how
people from other cultures differ from us, but also we gain critical
insights into our emotional lives. By making comparisons, we can
reflect on the deeper issues.
Cross-cultural Approaches to Emotion
Identity
Two principal methods of understanding effects of culture on
emotions are the writings of psychological anthropologists such as
Catherine Lutz, as well as Lila Abu-Lughod (1986) who lived among
the Bedouin and studied the oral poetry in which young people
expressed their feelings, and Lorna Marshall (1976) who went to
live in the Kalahari desert with the San, nomads who lived in a way
that may have been that of all our ancestors, as we discussed in the
previous chapter. A more recent approach, in multicultural
societies, and in the global economy, is to compare how people with
different cultural backgrounds experience their emotional lives
(Mesquita et al., 2016). Each person’s cultural background has
many elements: ethnicity, a country of origin, a geographical region,
a social class, perhaps a religion. Such forms of culture affect our
emotions, sometimes even create them. Throughout this book we
shall see examples of how these forms of culture shape emotion.
Our concepts and ideas about our identity are part of a cultural
background, as expressed in art, in rituals, in social practices, and in
institutions. They shape how members of societies experience and
express emotion in often strikingly different ways.
What does it mean to take a cultural approach to emotion? We
explore how far emotions are constructed by the processes of
culture. The experience of most emotions derives from human
meanings, which are cultural. They are like languages or works of
art. They are radically different across cultures. Your experience of
love, for example, might be very different from the experience of
love of people from a different society.
Mesquita (2001) suggests that cultural approaches focus on the
“practice” of emotion, in contrast to the “potential” for emotion.
Potential means asking whether people of different cultures, if put
in an appropriate situation, would be capable of showing certain
universal emotional responses in terms of experience, expression,
and physiology (for relevant studies, see Sznycer et al., 2016; Tsai,
Chentsova-Dutton, Friere-Bebeau, & Przymus, 2002; Tsai &
Levenson, 1997; Tsai, Levenson, & Carstensen, 2000). The answer is
probably Yes, and this is in keeping with the evolutionary approach
we detailed in the previous chapter. In contrast, practice refers to
how people enact their emotions.
The day-to-day emotional experiences of people from different
cultures can differ dramatically. In some societies, public
expressions of anger are encouraged. These include Ilongot, a
hunting society chronicled by Rosaldo (1980), and the Yanomamö,
in which men in each village are constantly at war with men in
neighboring villages of the same society (Chagnon, 1968). In others
such as the Inuit people, described by Briggs (1970), anger seems
barely to occur in adulthood (see also Chapter 9). In some cultures,
such as Western ones, shame is seen as damaging and to be avoided
(Scheff & Retzinger, 2001); in more hierarchically structured
societies shame seems more valued, in particular when displayed by
the lower-status person in an interaction (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Doi,
1973; Menon & Shweder, 1994). In some cultures, excitement is
privileged as a pathway to happiness; in other cultures it is
calmness and serenity (Tsai, 2017).
As Mesquita, Frijda, and Scherer (1997) observed: “People from
different cultures appear to be similar in their emotion potential,
especially when this potential is described at a higher level of
meaning. Yet, despite the similarities in basic elements of emotional
life, concrete emotional realities in different cultures may widely
vary.”
Independent and Interdependent Selves
Consider the following quotations. The first is from the Declaration
of Independence of the United States:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness.
Now consider this, from The Analects, a book by the Chinese
philosopher Confucius:
A person of humanity wishing to establish his own character,
also establishes the character of others.
The Declaration of Independence prioritized the rights and
freedoms of the individual. It aimed to protect the individual from
having those rights and liberties infringed upon by others.
Confucius emphasized the importance of knowing one’s place in
society, of honoring traditions and roles, and of thinking of others
before the self. In Western societies, people are concerned about
their individuality, about self-actualization, about freedom, and
about self-expression. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” “If
you’ve got it, flaunt it.” In Asian cultures, homilies and folk wisdom
encourage a markedly different self: “The empty wagon makes the
most noise.” “The nail that stands up is pounded down.”
In a way of thinking that has become influential Hazel Markus and
Shinobu Kitayama (1994), Harry Triandis (1995), and others have
characterized two kinds of self-construal that affect emotions, the
independent and interdependent; see Table 3.1.
TABLE 3.1
Two different self-construals. This table outlines
contrasting elements of the independent self, prominent
in Northern Europe and North America, with the
interdependent self, prominent in Asia, Africa, and South
America
The independent self
The interdependent self
I am autonomous, separate
I am connected to others
I am the principal agent in my own
life
I fulfill roles and duties
My behavior derives from internal
causes
My behavior derives from
society
Who I am is stable across contexts
Who I am varies across
contexts
Those with independent selves tend to assert their distinctiveness
and to define themselves according to unique traits and preferences,
with a focus on internal causes that are thought of as stable across
time and social context.
People with interdependent construals tend to think of themselves
as connected with other people. They take on and perform their
roles within communities in which they take part. The emphasis is
on the social context and situational influences. Such people tend to
think of themselves as ever-changing and shifting, shaped by
different contexts and relationships.
Guided by this perspective, studies have found that cultural
differences in self-construal influence every element in the process
of emotion that we detailed in Chapter 1, from the events that give
rise to emotions to how people regulate their emotions (Mesquita et
al., 2016). For example, Michael Boiger and colleagues asked
Japanese and US participants to rate anger-inducing and shameinducing situations in terms of how likely they were to experience
them (Boiger et al., 2013). In keeping with a self-construal as
independent and separate from others, US students rated angereliciting situations as more common in their daily lives; in keeping
with an interdependent self-construal founded upon social
harmony, duty, and adhering to others’ judgments, Japanese
students rated the shame-eliciting situations as more likely. Culture
shapes the emotion-eliciting events the person is likely to
encounter.
Given the different ways of construing the self, one would expect
differences in emotion-related appraisal, and in emotion-related
responses and regulation. We will see evidence of this in ensuing
chapters, but consider this finding on emotional experience.
Kitayama, Mesquita, and Karasawa (2006) asked American and
Japanese college students to report in a diary, over 14 days, their
most intense emotional episode each day, and to say what emotions
they felt during that episode. The independent-minded American
students reported more intense experiences of positive socially
disengaging emotions (pride, high self-esteem) and negative socially
disengaging emotions (anger, frustration). The interdependent
Japanese students reported more intense experiences of positive
socially engaging emotions (e.g., respect, sympathy) and negative
socially engaging emotions (shame and guilt, which recognize
others’ evaluations of the self and motivate behaviors that restore
social relationships).
Cultural differences in self-construal also influence how people find
happiness. Look again at Table 3.1 and generate your own
hypotheses. Mark Suh and his colleagues found that people from
independent cultures experienced greater happiness in their
positive emotions, whereas those from interdependent cultures find
greater happiness in fulfilling duties and abiding by cultural norms
(Suh, Diener, Oishi, & Triandis, 1998).
Yukiko Uchida et al. (2008) found that perceived emotional support
in independent cultures of Americans of European descent had no
effect on participants’ subjective sense of positive emotional states,
whereas in interdependent cultures of Japan and the Philippines,
emotional support of others positively predicted subjective positive
emotional states, even when self-esteem was controlled for. More
recently, Belinda Campos and Heejung Kim have made the case for
different kinds of collectivism found in Latino and East Asian
cultures and how these more specific kinds of self-construal
influence emotion and social support (Campos & Kim, 2017).
You may have noticed a certain irony as you have read this. People
in independent cultures, who think they are autonomous agents, are
also those who tend to feel that their emotions just happen to them.
By contrast, those who live in interdependent cultures are more
likely to think their emotions are actions that they do.
Knowledge Structures
How does what we know guide thought, emotion, and behavior?
Kaiping Peng and Richard Nisbett (1999) have characterized ways of
knowing of East Asians and Western Europeans (see also Peng,
Ames, & Knowles, 2001). East Asians are guided by a holistic,
dialectical way of thought that has its roots in the intellectual
traditions such as Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, from
2,500 years ago. This way is based on five principles: (1) change, so
that nothing is static; (2) contradiction, that opposites often are
consistent and both true; (3) covariation, so that events are
interrelated in complex fields or systems; (4) compromise, so that
truth may lie in the synthesis of opposites; and (5) context, so that
events occur not alone but in contexts.
In light of principle 2, contradiction, one would expect that as
compared with Americans, East Asians might experience greater
emotional complexity: the simultaneous experience of
contradictory emotions, such as happiness and sadness, compassion
and contempt, or anger and love (Grossman & Ellsworth, 2017; see
also Sundararajan, 2010). Perhaps East Asians would be more
willing to endorse multiple, even contradictory, meanings for
complex social situations and, as a result, experience contradictory
emotions. By contrast, Westerners might focus more on singular
meanings of a situation and experience simpler emotions.
Individual Emotion: Amae
In Japan there is an emotion amae, for which there is no simple
translation in English (Ferrari & Koyama, 2002). It’s an
attachment emotion, an emotion of interdependence,
experienced as a merged togetherness, deriving from comfort in
the other person’s complete acceptance.
It is not that this emotion is unrecognizable in other cultures or
that it lacks universal significance. Rather, it has no fully
approved place in Western adult life. The original Chinese
ideogram of amae was of a breast on which the baby suckled. As
Westerners imagine this emotion, they may think they should
have grown out of it because it seems a bit regressed. In Japan
this is not so. This can be an emotion of an accepting
relationship within the family, or a mutual dependency between
lovers. Lebra (1983) has said that it can be the dependence a
less-powerful person feels in relation to a more-powerful one,
which allows the less-powerful person to be passive, with the
satisfying knowledge of being accepted. In relation to
attachment, which we discussed in the previous chapter,
Marshall (2012) found that within Japanese couples, people who
were anxiously attached improved their relationship quality with
amae behavior, whereas those who were avoidantly attached did
not.
Recent findings are in keeping with this prediction and speak to
how culture-related epistemologies shape the complexity of
emotional experience (Miyamoto, Uchida, & Ellsworth, 2010). Thus,
in experience sampling studies, in which students were beeped
electronically and asked to report on their current emotions, as well
as in laboratory studies, Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean
participants were more likely than Western European students to
report feeling positive and negative emotion in any particular
moment (Schimmack, Oishi, & Diener, 2002; see Kitayama,
Markus, & Kurokawa, 2000, for similar results using a different
methodology). Among Western Europeans, the more they reported
of one kind of emotion, say happiness, the less they reported of its
opposite, say sadness.
Now consider principle 5, context. People in East Asian cultures
tend to pay greater attention to the context in giving meaning to
social situations, whereas people in Western European cultures
tend to focus more on the individual (Morris & Peng, 1994). One
relevant analysis found that, several hundred paintings from East
Asian galleries devote greater space to the background than
paintings from Western European galleries, which devote greater
space to people’s faces (Masuda et al., 2008a).
In related research Takahiko Masuda and colleagues showed
Japanese and American participants cartoon figures having various
expressions on their faces (Masuda et al., 2008b). The central,
target face was always surrounded by smaller, less-salient faces,
with expressions that were similar or dissimilar to those of the
target; see Figure 3.2. For example, the target might appear to be
happy, whereas most of the surrounding faces might appear to be
sad. The Japanese judgments about the facial expression of the
target were influenced by the surrounding faces, whereas the
judgments of the Americans were not. A happy face surrounded by
sad faces was judged less happy by Japanese participants than by
American participants, and a sad face surrounded by happy faces
was judged less sad.
FIGURE 3.2 Image used in research by Masuda and
colleagues (2008b), in which the central figure is smiling
and surrounding individuals are frowning.
An important new movement in understanding how emotions are
perceived and understood has been shaped by these cultural
insights and seeks to understand how contextual factors shape the
interpretation of others’ emotions and one’s own emotional
experience, a theme we shall take up in subsequent chapters on
expression and experience (Barrett, Mesquita, & Gendron, 2011;
Hess & Hareli, 2017). How any emotion is expressed, how it is
understood, and what its implications are depend critically on the
context, and this context differs depending on a range of factors that
include the gender of the people involved, their power relationships,
and most fundamentally the practices of the culture in which it
occurs. The context of a joke made by a British person will enable it
to be understood as a token of affection by another British person,
but it may be met with incomprehension by an American and be
seen as rude by a person who is Japanese.
Values
Members of cultures that differ in the importance of specific values
experience different elicitors of emotions related to that value.
Consider the finding that elicitors of jealousy that seem obvious in
one culture seem not to work in another. In the West, jealousy
tends to occur when the sexual attention of a primary partner turns
toward someone else (Buss, Larsen, Westen, & Semmelroth, 1992;
DeSteno & Salovey, 1996; Harris, 2003; Harris & Christenfeld, 1996;
Salovey, 1991). As Hupka (1991) points out, in Western society,
monogamy, which leads to the two-parent family, is a cherished
value and a key to establishing one’s adult status, economic
security, housing, rearing of children, adult companionship, and sex.
A sexual interloper threatens this value and the accompanying
social structure, so, in Western society such a person is jealously
feared and hated.
In some other societies, the self is more interdependent, collective,
and extended. Cooperative effort supports everyone, including the
elderly. Child-rearing is distributed among several people; adult
companionship derives from many relatives; monogamy is not so
highly cherished. In some such societies, extramarital recreational
sex is customary. At the beginning of this century, the Todas of
India lived in a society of this kind (Hupka, 1991). They were not
jealous when marriage partners had lovers from within their social
group. Instead, Toda men did become jealous if their wives had
intercourse with a non-Toda man, or if a second-born son got
married before the firstborn—an unlikely elicitor of jealousy in the
West.
Cultural differences in specific values influence spontaneous
emotional response. Consider the work of Iris Mauss and her
colleagues (2010) on emotional control in different cultures. They
found that when a rude instructor commented upon mistakes made
by European American and Asian American college students as they
were doing a stressful task, although the physiological responses of
the two groups were similar, the European American students
expressed more visible anger; see Figure 3.3. The likely explanation
is that spontaneous emotional expression is more valued in
Western European cultures because it is a means by which
individuals express their authentic selves. By contrast, the Asian
American students were more likely to inhibit their expression of
anger because expression of such an emotion risks disrupting social
harmony.
FIGURE 3.3 European Americans experience and express
greater anger in response to a frustrating experimenter
(adapted from Mauss, Butler, Roberts, & Chu, 2010).
Jeanne Tsai (2007) put forward affect evaluation theory, in
which she proposed that emotions that promote cultural values are
valued more and therefore play a more prominent role in people’s
social lives. In the United States, excitement is valued; it enables
individuals to pursue a cultural ideal of self-expression and
achievement. In contrast, in many East Asian cultures greater value
is attached to feelings of calmness and contentedness, because
these emotions enable people to fold into harmonious relationships
and groups.
Sims and Tsai (2015) found that people who like to feel excitement
were more likely to follow recommendations of a physician who
expressed excitement, and those who liked to feel calm were more
like to follow recommendations of a calm physician. Tsai et al.
(2016) studied the smiles of political leaders. In America, where
excitement is valued, government leaders showed excited smiles. In
Taiwan, leaders showed calm smiles. In a study using functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Park et al. (2016) found that
when European Americans looked at photos of people’s faces, they
showed more activation in reward systems of the brain for faces
that expressed excitement, whereas Chinese participants showed
more activation in these brain areas for faces that expressed calm.
In a related way, Americans, as compared to East Asians, are more
likely to participate in risky recreational practices (e.g., mountain
biking), are more likely to advertise consumer products with intense
smiles of excitement, are more likely to get addicted to excitementenhancing drugs (cocaine), and express preferences for upbeat,
exciting music rather than soothing, slower pieces. Starting early
with this kind of socialization, children’s books in America are more
likely to feature highly excited protagonists (Tsai, 2007). These
differences are observed in influential texts as well: in the Christian
Gospels and popular books today about Christianity, high-arousal,
positive emotions (“pride,” “glory”) are valued more, whereas in
classical Buddhist texts and popular books about Buddhism, lowarousal, positive emotions (“serenity,” “contentment”) are valued
more (Tsai, Miao, & Seppala, 2007). Look, for instance, at the statue
of the Buddha in Figure 3.4. Have a look, also, at Figure 3.5, where
results are shown of research by Jeanne Tsai and colleagues on
arousal and calmness in Western and Eastern recreational activities
and religious texts.
FIGURE 3.4 Calmness and serenity are at the heart of
Buddhism, which has shaped the emotional lives of vast
parts of East Asian cultures.
FIGURE 3.5 European Americans reveal a greater
preference for exciting recreational activities (left-hand
panel adapted from Tsai, Louie et al., 2007). Christian
texts place a greater value on high-arousal, positive
emotions (HAP), whereas Buddhist texts place a greater
value on low-arousal, calm, positive emotions (LAP)
(right-hand panel adapted from Tsai, Miao, & Seppala,
2007).
What might these cultural patterns of emotional experience mean
for well-being? To answer this question, Jozefien De Leersnyder
and her colleagues propose that to the extent that an individual’s
emotional profile fits with the culture’s pattern of emotion, that
person will find greater happiness. The more our emotional
experiences resemble those of other people in our culture in
contexts of relevance to central values, the happier we will be. In
empirical tests of this intriguing hypothesis, people from Belgium,
the United States, and Korea were asked to rate their emotions in
situations that relate to the value of autonomy—a US and Belgian
value—versus relatedness, of greater import in Korea. What they
observed is that Korean participants’ well-being was more strongly
predicted by his or her fit with the culture’s pattern of emotion
associated with relatedness in the family, whereas US and Belgian
participants’ well-being was predicted by the degree his or her
emotion profile fit the culture’s profile in more autonomy-related
contexts, at work and school (De Leersnyder, Mesquita, Kim, Eom,
& Choi, 2014; De Leersnyder, Kim, & Mesquita, 2015).
The Construction of Emotions in the West
The Coming of Civilization to Medieval Societies
“The past is another country, they do things differently there.” So
wrote L.P. Hartley (1953) as the opening sentence of his novel, The
Go-Between. How far do people do things differently now than in
the past? This kind of question is answered by use of the historical
method (see Oatley, 2004c; Plamper, 2015). A hundred years from
now scientists who employ it might study recordings of talk shows
and soap operas, pop songs, cell-phone text messages, Facebook,
video games, Internet chat rooms, and tweets, to glean insights into
the emotional lives of twenty-first-century members of industrial
societies. But what if we look back from today? What were the
implicit theories of emotions of Europe in the past, in societies from
which present-day European and American societies have
developed?
First, we see a certain distrust of emotions. If you want to disparage
what someone is saying, just say that person is being “emotional,”
meaning “irrational.” The idea goes back at least to Plato (375 BCE),
who thought emotions arise from the lower part of the mind and
pervert reason. David Konstan (e.g., 2006) notes that people in
Europe and America think of their societies, including the practice
of democracy, as descended from the ancient Greeks. He portrays
the emotions of those people, as discussed by Aristotle. As we
discussed in Chapter 1, the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers took
up Plato’s misgivings and used Aristotle’s idea of emotions as
evaluations of events in relation to concerns and desires, to make
distrust of emotions central not just to their analyses but to their
lives. Doubts about the value of emotions continue today, but we in
the West are not very consistent, because we also think emotions
are the very guarantee of authenticity, our best guide to our true
selves. As Robert Solomon, an influential voice in the philosophy of
emotion, has put it: “Emotions are the life force of the soul, the
source of most of our values” (1977, p. 14). Emotions signal how
events in our environment correspond to our core concerns and
interests, and we will come to this in Chapters 6 and 10.
Second, we see that emotional life has changed substantially during
the last seven centuries or so. To look back at medieval times in
Europe, there is no better place than Johann Huizinger’s (1949) The
Waning of the Middle Ages. He starts his book by saying that the
contrasts between suffering and joy were more marked in medieval
times and that:
… it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage, and death
which, by the sacredness of the sacrament, were raised to the
rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a
task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities;
benedictions, ceremonies, formulae. (p. 9)
Huizinger’s title for the first chapter of his book is “The violent
tenor of life.” Not only did people think nothing of behaving with
cruelty, but illness and death were more prevalent. Calamity was
more difficult to guard against. So, says Huizinger, each event, in its
capacity to bring about happiness, relief, or suffering, was more
strongly marked and accompanied by emotion-based means to help
things to go well. Now, although birth, marriage, and death are still
marked by religious rituals and ceremonies, with modern
technologies of health and industry and communication, life is less
precarious. Now we are informal in our journeys, tasks, and visits.
Norbert Elias (1939) argues that in the middle ages, in Europe, men
in particular had a tendency to be wild, sometimes lustful,
sometimes caught up in cruel outbreaks, at other times taking
pleasure in the moment. We can see something of the situation in
former times from handbooks of manners (e.g., Erasmus, 1530).
Such handbooks tell people to stop doing one kind of thing and start
doing another. So, from them we can know how the writers saw
people generally behaving at the time. In medieval times, men
tended to behave on impulse, would pee on any wall that was
nearby, might take pleasure in the taste of some food and then grab
some more off a communal plate, would at one moment laugh and
in the next be involved in a violent dispute. These men then, as the
Stoic Chrysippus, whom we introduced in Chapter 1, would say,
were taken up in the first movements of emotions.
Elias describes how in aristocratic courts a process of civilization
began. In the presence of ladies of high birth, warriors and knights
started on a path of renunciation, and the transformation of their
impulses. They started to see themselves as these ladies saw them
and behaved more politely. Elias goes on to write:
The moderation of spontaneous emotions, the tempering of
affects, the extension of mental space beyond the moment into
the past and future, the habit of connecting events in terms of
cause and effect—all these are different aspects of the same
transformation of conduct … it is a “civilizing” change of
behaviour. (Vol. II, p. 236)
Elias saw this movement as starting with the upper classes, then
moving to the middle classes, and then to everyone. His analysis
was striking in its time, and it remains important. It may, however,
be that the movements of which he speaks occurred not just by
influences from the aristocracy to ordinary people, but also in the
other direction, from ordinary people, upward, for instance, from
religious groups that based themselves on community, and for this
reason elaborated means of meeting together in homes, in
synagogues, in churches, and in mosques, in ways that enabled their
concerns to be shared. Although, for instance, since the Catholic
Church’s Council of Trent, in the middle of the sixteenth century,
decreed that confession is a sacrament to be performed privately
with a priest, in earlier times it was often communal. Communal
sharing of inner concerns occurs today in places such as Quaker
meeting houses and in groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
Has Violence Declined Over Time?
As Steven Pinker (2011) explains in The Better Angels of Our
Nature, since medieval times episodes of violence have declined.
The rates of people killing each other, in individual homicides, in
group killings, and in wars, have reduced.
Pinker discusses the work of Elias and draws on data collected by
Manuel Eisner on individual killings in Europe over the centuries.
Eisner begins an article of 2003 with a record from an Eyre Court (a
judge’s circuit court), in London, in 1278. The document for that
year records that one Symonet Spinelli and his mistress, Agnes,
were with Geoffrey Bereman at his house. A quarrel broke out.
Symonet went to fetch his servant, Richard; they returned to find
Geoffrey and killed him. In these court records most such killings
were unpremeditated. Often they occurred while drinking or were
done by men because of women. In the records of this same London
court in the same year, two such killings occurred from playing
chess. In England, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the
rate of homicide was 23 per year, per 100,000 members of the
population. In 1950 the rate was 0.7, a 33-times reduction over 700
years. You can see a graph of some of these rates in Figure 3.6.
FIGURE 3.6 Homicide rates in England and in Europe as
a whole from Eisner (2003). (The data point for England
in the fifteenth century is an interpolation; Eisner did not
have enough data for an estimate for this century.)
Similar rates of decline of individual homicides have occurred in
other societies. For example, in America, in the area of New
England, Pinker shows a decline of individual homicides between
1625 and 1800, which is comparable to that of Europe.
Pinker goes on to discuss communal violence: mass killings,
insurrections, genocides, and wars. It has been said that war is
politics by other means, but the military historian John Keegan
(1994) is more insightful. He writes that war is a very emotional
matter. It arises from quarrels between in-groups and out-groups,
from greed, from retribution and revenge for wrongs, for religious
sentiments, for ideological pride, and for other such reasons.
Perhaps these events occur, as we discussed in the previous chapter,
because of the propensity of our human species to try and do away
with those who are different from ourselves, members of out-
groups, as our hominid ancestors did away with other hominid
species, most recently, the Neanderthals.
As with individual homicides, things are changing. In a thoughtprovoking table of worldwide figures (p. 195), Pinker shows
estimates of people killed in events of societal violence, such as war,
in relation to the world population at the time. In proportional
terms, the largest such killing occurred in the An Lushan revolt, in
which the Chinese Tang Dynasty was overthrown in the eighth
century. The second largest occurred with the Mongol conquests of
the thirteenth century, and the third largest with Mid-East slave
trade from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries. In raw numbers,
World War II has been the most destructive war in history, with 55
million deaths but, adjusted for population, in Pinker’s table, it
comes ninth for people killed in proportion to world population,
after the annihilation of indigenous peoples of the Americas, which
comes seventh, and the slave trade from Africa to the Americas,
which comes eighth. Pinker points out, too, that wars fought for
gain of territory or of slaves were numerous in ancient times. They
still occurred in large numbers in the sixteenth to nineteenth
centuries with European colonization, but in recent decades the
numbers of such conflicts have fallen. You might be interested, too,
to reflect on how, in the news, such events are often reported as
actions of individual leaders. Steven Pinker does this too. As he
describes this event, he writes: “Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait”
(p. 260). Do we see such events more easily as emotional when
reported as actions of individuals?
Films and Novels: The Great Train Robbery,
Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness, Things
Fall Apart
Violent contempt for others is one of humankind’s most
destructive tendencies, one that may end our species. In the
previous chapter, we depicted violence against others as an
antisocial motivation. It is one that seems to fascinate us. The
earliest film to use modern editing techniques was The Great
Train Robbery (Porter, 1903). The opening scene is of a train
dispatcher in an office. Less than 10 seconds after the film’s
beginning, two armed robbers enter the office and force the
dispatcher to send a message to stop a train. In the second scene,
the robbers are seen hiding behind a water tower as the train
stops. In the third scene, the mail messenger on the train is
killed by the robbers. Men with guns.
Perhaps the most famous film about the Vietnam War is Francis
Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, about how Captain Willard, on
his second tour in Vietnam, is sent on a mission up a long river
to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, an American Colonel who has been
remarkable but has gone berserk. The film is based on Joseph
Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, narrated by Charles
Marlow who went by boat upriver in the Belgian Congo, and met
a man called Kurtz, who was in charge of a trading station and
had written a report for the “International Society for the
Suppression of Savage Customs,” described as eloquent about
the white people’s benevolence (p. 110).
Apocalypse Now is memorable for its 15-minute-long sequence
in which, accompanied by the music of Wagner’s “Ride of the
Valkyries,” we first see a group of school children in a
Vietnamese village being hurried away as the sound of a fleet of
American helicopters is heard. Then, the helicopter gun-ships
are seen flying over the village, shooting rockets, and strafing its
inhabitants. The helicopters are followed by sleek-looking
planes, which set the remains of the village and surrounding
countryside on fire with napalm. Scenes switch among weapons,
destruction, Vietnamese people fleeing and being killed, the
attacking solders looking anxious, exhilarated, triumphant. As
Chinua Achebe put it in a lecture that became famous, in Heart
of Darkness Conrad is racist. He depicts only the Europeans,
with Africa being another world, with inhabitants who play no
important role. In Apocalypse Now, Coppola continues in a
similar tradition. The Vietnamese are there to be fought against,
annihilated. It’s the opposite of anthropologists going to stay in a
society with the people who live there, to respect and understand
them.
Achebe’s moving novel, Things Fall Apart, is set in the 1890s. It
was written in English about a man called Okonkwo, who is a
strong and fearless leader in a Nigerian village where, in an
accident, he is responsible for the death of the son of the
village’s oldest man; this is one of the things that starts to fall
apart for him. He feels guilty and, to appease the gods, he goes
into exile for seven years. While he is away, white people come
to the village, introduce the Christian religion, and impose
colonial rule. Not long after Okonkwo returns, a conflict breaks
out, which leads to the burning of the church that has been built
there. The District Commissioner invites Okonkwo and five
other leaders to the Court House that has been built near the
church. They go, and he tells them that he has brought peaceful
administration. He then has all six arrested, handcuffed, taken to
jail, where they are insulted and abused. The Commissioner
demands a fine; it is paid and the men are released. Next day, the
villagers hold a meeting, at which an orator speaks of how the
clan is weeping, because of the abomination that has come. The
meeting is interrupted by the arrival of five messengers from the
Court House, to say that the meeting must cease. Okonkwo
becomes angry and, with his machete, kills the head messenger.
Those at the meeting let the other messengers escape, and with
this Okonkwo realizes that the village people will not resist. He
hangs himself before he can be taken again to the Court and
tried for murder. In this widely read novel, it’s the colonized,
rather than the colonizers, who are the book’s protagonist and
characters.
Among novels about the experience of being in combat in a war,
perhaps the best is All Quiet on the Western Front, by Remarque
(1929) and to read about emotional effects of being in combat,
look at Elder and Clipp (1989).
The Romantic Era
Until about 200 years ago, in the English-speaking West, the term
“emotion” had not yet come into use. Terms that were used
included “passion,” “affection,” “sentiment” (Dixon, 2012).
Emotions and their implications came into prominence in Europe
and America during the Romantic era. The term given to this era
must be distinguished from the term “romantic,” when used a
synonym for “sexual” as in “romantic love.”
In the Romantic era, emotions came to be valued in personal life, in
politics, in literature, and in philosophy. The previous era, in
Europe, is called “The enlightenment,” a time in which it was
thought that reason was the means for humans to understand the
universe and themselves.
An example of the early use of the term “emotion” comes from the
preface, written by William Wordsworth, of a text, Lyrical ballads,
(second edition), that is thought to mark the beginning of the
Romantic era in Britain. Wordsworth wrote that “Poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquility” (p. 611).
On the continent of Europe, Romanticism was brought in much
earlier by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1755). He published a document
in which he argued that religious sensibility should not be based on
authority, or on scripture, or on arguments for the existence of God,
but on how you feel within yourself. He critiqued some ways in
which authorities told us to behave as artificial and corrupting. He
proposed instead that education should be natural and that people’s
natural feelings indicate what is right; people have merely to be
alive to the feelings of their conscience. His ringing phrase from the
beginning of The Social Contract (1762) “Man is born free, and is
everywhere in chains” became a rallying call in the French
Revolution, and such thoughts crossed the Atlantic to help promote
the American War of Independence.
To get a sense of the Romantic era, you might take a look at a novel
published early in this period, which became famous: Frankenstein,
by Mary Shelley, daughter of the famous feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft and the social reformer William Godwin. You can
see a copy of the book’s title page in Figure 3.7. At the age of 16,
Mary Shelley eloped with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
When she was 18, Mary, her husband, her stepsister Claire, George
Byron (also a Romantic poet), and another friend were on vacation
during an “ungenial” summer in the Alps. They read a great deal and
had long conversations on literature, philosophy, and biology. One
day, Byron suggested that each person should write a ghost story.
Retiring to bed, Mary Shelley could not sleep. Prompted by a
conversation about experiments in which electricity was used to
stimulate muscle movements in dead creatures, there rose to her
mind an image of a scientist called Victor Frankenstein, with a
powerful engine beside him, kneeling over a hideous phantasm of a
man, an artificial creature, that he had put together. Her story
became Frankenstein (1818), one of the world’s first science fiction
novels.
FIGURE 3.7 Title page of volume 1 of Frankenstein,
written by Mary Shelley but published anonymously in
1818.
We now think of Frankenstein as a horror story, but really it’s about
the emotional themes of the Romantic era, about the artificial
creature’s initial natural emotions of kindness, as he works secretly
to help a family who live in a humble cottage, and then a further set
of natural emotions, of humans becoming disgusted and attacking
him for his unnatural ugliness. This is followed, in the story, by the
creature’s anger at being treated in this way.
In Frankenstein are many of the themes of the Romantic era:
emphasis on emotions, settings amid wild scenery, the emphasis on
the natural, distrust of the artificial, apprehension of humans when
they arrogantly overstep their boundaries. There are thoughtprovoking, prescient anxieties about our construction of clever but
risky technological systems (Perrow, 1984).
More generally, we are probably still in the Romantic era: its
watchwords are that whatever you do, you should do with heart and
with style. In this era, in the West at least, core beliefs include those
of emotions being authentic causes of behavior.
Sexual Love in the West
Falling in Love: Emotion as a Role
The contemptuous emotions of interpersonal violence as shown by
humans in response to Frankenstein’s creature, and by people in
one society toward those of other societies in times of war, create in
the people involved states of horrific destructiveness. So let us, in
contrast, consider a positive interpersonal emotion, a constructive
emotion: love. What do you think of this newspaper story from the
early 1950s?
On Monday Cpl. Floyd Johnson, 23, and the then Ellen Skinner,
19, total strangers, boarded a train at San Francisco and sat down
across the aisle from each other. Johnson didn’t cross the aisle
until Wednesday, but his bride said, “I’d already made up my
mind to say yes if he asked me to marry him.” “We did most of
the talking with our eyes,” Johnson explained. Thursday the
couple got off the train in Omaha with plans to be married.
Because they would need to have the consent of the bride’s
parents if they were married in Nebraska, they crossed the river
to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where they were married Friday.
(Cited in Burgess & Wallin, 1953)
Averill (1985) showed the story to a sample of US adults. Some 40
percent of them said they had had experiences conforming to the
ideal embodied in the story, while another 40 percent said their
experiences of love definitely did not conform to it. This second
group based their responses on an unfavorable attitude to this ideal
plus any single departure they had felt from it. In responding in this
way, they, too, indicated that they were influenced by this ideal.
Averill argues that love of this kind has features that are distinctive
to Western culture. Certainly, passionate sexual love occurs
worldwide. It is experienced as joyful and energizing. To investigate
its universality, Jankowiak and Fischer (1992) surveyed
ethnographies of 166 societies, asking whether the writer, typically
an anthropologist, made a distinction between love and lust and
noted the presence of at least one of the following attributes of love
occurring within the first two years of a couple meeting, irrespective
of whether they married or not: (a) personal anguish or longing, (b)
love songs and the like, (c) elopement due to mutual affection, (d)
indigenous accounts of passionate love, or (e) the anthropologist’s
affirmation that love occurred. In 147 of the 166 cultures (88.5%),
there was evidence of this kind of passionate, sexual love.
Averill (1985) proposes that the Western ideal of love, eagerly taken
up by Hollywood, enacted 50 years ago by Floyd Johnson and Ellen
Skinner, and still very much alive today, is not just the same old
worldwide story. It has features that are distinctive to the West and
that started their development in medieval Europe.
The germ of the idea was courtly love, created in Provence in the
eleventh century and elaborated in many medieval documents. The
word courtly originally meant occurring at a royal court; the later
meaning of courtship is derived from it. The idea was that a
nobleman might fall in love with a lady and become her knight.
Courtly love had to occur outside marriage. The lady was at first
seen at a distance and was unattainable. The knight had to offer his
service, do whatever she might wish, however dangerous or
however trifling, and worship her.
For several hundred years courtly love was the subject of some of
Europe’s greatest poetry. Prototypical was the story of Lancelot and
his love for Guinevere, the queen and wife of King Arthur at his
court in Camelot, told by the French poet Chrétien De Troyes, in
The Knight of the Cart (Chrétien De Troyes, 1180).
Later came the Romance of the Rose (De Lorris & De Meun, 1237–
1277). The first part, written by Guillaume De Lorris, is an
extraordinary psychological allegory, in which the lovers are
represented as a set of emotions and psychological characteristics,
each of which is a distinct actor in the drama. The poem begins with
the lover, a young man, falling asleep and dreaming. As interpreted
by C.S. Lewis (1936), the reader experiences the story through the
young man’s eyes. He strolls by the river of life, then enters the
beautiful garden of courtly love, see Figure 3.8, and sees a lady
there. As the wooing proceeds, his consciousness is represented by
the appearance in turn of distinct characters, Hope, Sweet Thought,
Reason, and so on. The lady also does not appear as a whole. She,
too, is a cast of characters: Bielacoil (meaning “fair welcome” from
the Provençal belh aculhir) is something like the lady’s
conversational self, pleasant and friendly, and it is, of course, via
this aspect that the young man must first approach. Then there is
Franchise (the lady’s sense of aristocratic status) and Pity. But then
there are others: Danger, Fear, Shame. When the young man
sounds a false note, Bielacoil disappears for hours, and only Fear or
one of these others is present. Then, in addition, there is Jealousy,
and the god of Love, not permanent characteristics of either the
young man or the lady but able, in a somewhat unpredictable way,
to take over either of them. As the young man reaches toward the
Rose in the center of the garden, it is the god of Love who fires
arrows at him and makes him Love’s servant.
FIGURE 3.8 The origin of the culturally distinctive
version of romantic love that occurs in the West is traced
from courtly love in medieval Europe. The most famous
book depicting this was Roman de la Rose, for which this
was an illuminated illustration from about 1500
depicting the garden of courtly love.
One might argue that some elements in this pattern occur
elsewhere. For instance, in the Bible, Jacob is devoted to Rachel for
a long period before they can unite. Nonetheless, the Western idea
of being in love involves elements that do seem distinctive. Falling
in love (in the Western way) can happen suddenly and
unexpectedly. In the full pattern, devotion becomes a kind of
worship. It unfolds as a script (Schank & Abelson, 1977; see also
Frijda, 1988). It was depicted by William Shakespeare (1623) in
Romeo and Juliet.
Here is the script, in Schank and Abelson’s sense (Oatley, 2004b).
To fall in love, two people must be open to the experience. Each sees
the other, a stranger, and is attracted. Looks pass between them and
are experienced as meaningful; words are not necessary. Then there
is an interval of separation during which fantasies build. Then
comes a meeting at which there is confirmation that the fantasies
are mutual. There! One is in love. Shakespeare has Romeo show his
devotion by touching Juliet and saying in his very first words to her:
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
(Romeo and Juliet, 1, 5, 90–4)
Here, Romeo speaks to Juliet as if she is a statue of a saint (“this
holy shrine”), whom he comes to adore. What made the story of
Floyd Johnson and Ellen Skinner noteworthy is that it fits this same
kind pattern so perfectly.
As Averill (1985) points out, love becomes an interpersonal role
that enables people to overcome difficulties and to relinquish
previous commitments and relationships. Sometimes an emotion is
a change of role; for instance, anger as entry to a conflict, sadness at
a loss. Sometime as with love that leads to marriage, it can be long
term. He argues that without such cultural elaboration, we would
not experience love in the way of Floyd Johnson and Ellen Skinner
or Romeo and Juliet. La Rochefoucauld (1665) said: “Some people
would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love”
(Maxim 136). Averill and Nunley (1992) go further: they doubt
whether anyone would fall in love if they had not heard of it.
How do such modes get transmitted? A long-standing idea of how
this occurs is that people learn rules about how to behave. The idea
of rules was important in psychology, influenced by ideas of
Chomsky (e.g., Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002) on generative and
transformational rules of grammar, and by implementations in
artificial intelligence of psychological theories based on rules of
logic: if this, then the result is that, or if this, then do that. All this
was seen as rationality. In 1969, Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen used
this idea and proposed that for emotions there are display rules.
This means that when a person experiences an emotion it is subject
to cultural rules as to whether and how it should be expressed.
Recently, it has come to seem unlikely that rules generate emotions,
thoughts, or actions, but that they are post hoc summaries of
observed behavior. It is more likely that we generate our actions
based on intuitions derived from generalizations of thousands of
examples. We saw one example at the beginning of this chapter
when Catherin Lutz was told that she should not smile at a little girl
who was dancing and making funny faces. In this kind of way,
children on Ifaluk would learn that they should be gentle, calm, and
quiet. In artificial intelligence, now this process is called “deep
learning” (LeCun, Bengio, & Hinton, 2015). The generalizations that
are constructed become intuitions, often with an emotional basis of
seeming right or wrong. They can then become generative for us in
how we understand ourselves, and others, and in enabling us to feel
and act as we do.
Women and Men: Different Cultures?
As we move to the more specific areas of research on emotion in the
chapters that follow, we shall take stock of different cultural
variations, for example, in a culture of origin or a social class. What
about gender? Women and men live in every society, but do they
live in different cultures? On Ifaluk, as Catherine Lutz observed,
although some wives and husbands spent a good deal of time
together, for the most part women slept in a group in the same hut,
worked together on the taro gardens, preparing food, and tending
infants. The houses where children were born were taboo for men.
Men were to be found on the lagoon, or in their canoe houses,
which were taboo to women. They spent their time napping,
repairing their fishing gear, and looking after toddlers. Although
private sexual trysts were arranged at night, in public for the most
part women and men kept separate from each other.
What might we think about the idea of separate cultures for women
and men in America, in Europe, in Japan? And how about Saudi
Arabia, where women became able to vote in 2015, and in 2018 are
allowed, for the first time, to drive cars?
In the United States, Deborah Tannen (1991) published You Just
Don’t Understand. Chapter 1 of this book, entitled “Different words,
different worlds,” starts with the man to whom she was once
married shouting at Tannen: “I do not give you the right to raise
your voice to me, because you are a woman and I am a man” (p. 23).
He had grown up in a society in which few people thought woman
and men had equal rights. By means of many examples of
conversations, Tannen goes on to show how, in their culture, men
tend to like to do things in the world and, in interactions, strive to
be one-up rather than one-down. In their culture, women like
connection and intimacy. In a later example, Tannen writes about
Eve who had had a lump removed from her breast, so that a seam
had been left that changed her breast’s contour. She told her sister
that she found this upsetting. The sister replied that when she had
had an operation, she felt the same way. When Eve told her
husband, he said, “You can have plastic surgery to cover up the scar”
(p. 49). Whereas her sister’s remark had comforted her, her
husband’s remark upset her; she didn’t want more surgery. Eve’s
sister spoke to let Eve know she understood. Her husband gave
advice. Men, in general, suggests Tannen, like to be in charge of
things. Women in general like to connect. Both Tannen and Hazel
Markus and Shinobu Kitayama in their paper on cross-cultural
comparisons center their arguments on ideas of independence and
interdependence. See how well these ideas we have explored here
make sense of gender differences in emotion, from empathic
accuracy to sexual desire, we consider in this book (Hess, 2015).
What about your life? Do you like to talk, to let people know what
they should think or do? Or do you tend to listen and connect? With
whom do you hang out?
Are you heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual? Although
these terms are based on sexuality, none refers primarily to
biological characteristics. The terms are cultural. If you think of
yourself as female or male, what emotional–cultural aspects do you
notice in yourself and other members of your gender?
Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches
In exploring evolutionary and cultural approaches to emotion in
this and the previous chapter, we have begun to see some answers
to the question we raised in the first chapter: What is an emotion?
It is possible to emphasize differences between evolutionary and
cultural approaches to emotion, but it is just as important to
recognize their convergences (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2012). Both
approaches start from the idea that emotions contribute solutions
to basic problems of social living. Both assume that emotions help
humans form attachments, take care of offspring, take part in
hierarchies, and maintain long-term friendships. These themes are
at the heart of both approaches and are central to this book.
Perhaps the main principle that integrates evolutionary and cultural
approaches is by way of the proposal by Tomasello (2014, 2016),
discussed in the previous chapter, that the adaptation of our species,
which enables us to be as we are, is that we cooperate with each
other. We do this both by making arrangements with one or a few
others and in whole societies in ways that come to be regarded as
morality: ways of life that come to be cultures. Many of our
emotions, then, in attachment, love, friendship, comradeship,
courtesy, enable the cooperation to occur, while some others such
as feelings of belonging or of shame occur as we do or do not
manage to cooperate.
Evolutionary approaches focus on how emotions enable survival
and gene replication. Cultural approaches focus on how emotions
enable social life in particular societies. Gone is the view that
emotions are dysfunctional, maladaptive, and pernicious to social
life.
There are numerous differences, however, as one sees in Table 3.2.
A first concerns the question: What is an emotion? For evolutionary
theorists, emotions are universal programs derived from our genes
that guard against recurrent threats to survival and enable
responses to opportunity (Ekman, 1992; Plutchik, 1980; Tomkins,
1984; Tooby & Cosmides, 2008). From this perspective, emotions
are species-characteristic patterns of response and action, derived
from natural selection. For cultural theorists, the core of an
emotional experience is the social unfolding of an emotion in a
culture’s social life, often seen in acts of communication (Averill,
1985; Lutz & White, 1986; Mesquita, 2003; Shweder & Haidt, 2000).
From this perspective, emotions are roles, or changes of role, in
relationships. For these theorists, what is most striking are cultural
differences in emotion that are socially learned in social practices
and rituals and relationships, according to culturally specific
concerns about identity, social structure, and morality.
TABLE 3.2
Comparison of evolutionary and cultural approaches
Question of
interest
Evolutionary
approach
Cultural approach
What is an
emotion?
Biological processes
Interpretations,
language, beliefs,
roles
Are emotions
universal?
Yes
Possibly not
What are the
origins of
emotions?
Environments of
evolutionary
adaptedness
Practices,
institutions, values
Functions
Individual: Action
readiness
Reify intentions and
values
Dyadic: Social
coordination
Reify roles, identities,
and ideologies
Evolutionary theorists tend to concentrate on how emotions serve
functions for the species by way of species-characteristic
mechanisms possessed by individuals. At this level of analysis,
emotions prepare the individual for action in her or his best interest
(e.g., Frijda, Kuipers, & ter Schure Levenson, 1999). At the dyadic
level of analysis, the focus is on communication and coordination of
emotion through facial, vocal, and postural channels (Keltner,
Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003; Scherer, Johnstone, & Klasmeyer,
2003). At this level, emotions communicate information about
current emotions, intentions, and dispositions, to help accomplish
mutuality or conflict and coordinated responses to problems and
opportunities in the environment.
Cultural theorists offer insights at the individual and dyadic levels
of analysis, revealing how emotions are parts of the individual’s
sense of self and relationships. At the same time, cultural theorists
tend to focus on how emotions serve functions for groups and
societies. They see emotions as helping define values and enabling
group members to negotiate roles (e.g., Clark, 1990; Collins, 1990).
The ritualized experience of shame, for example, signals the
individual’s place within group hierarchies and reinforces certain
roles and values. The emotions of a culture are also essential to
defining that culture: so, for instance, people’s emotions within a
culture tend to be similar. De Leersnyder, Mesquita, and Kim (2011)
found that when people immigrated to another country, their
emotions tended to become more similar to those of the host group,
depending on their amount of exposure to, and engagement with,
the host culture.
So how would researchers working within the evolutionary and
cultural traditions approach the emotion of embarrassment?
Those guided by an evolutionary approach would document the
biological bases of embarrassment—the blush and other nonverbal
displays—and how these are universal and can even be seen in
appeasement displays of nonhuman primates and other species
(Keltner & Buswell, 1997). From this approach, embarrassment
informs the individual of transgressions to avoid. It signals to
others a sense of remorse for the transgression, thus evoking
forgiveness, and in these ways prompts reconciliation following
conflict and social transgressions.
Researchers working from a cultural approach document how the
meaning, value, and elicitors of embarrassment vary across
cultures. They might identify a culture’s specific version of
embarrassment within its social history. In ancient Japan, for
instance, embarrassment was an emotion that was focal and valued.
In The Tale of Genji (Shikibu, c. 1000), which is thought to be the
world’s first full-length novel, written 1,000 years ago by Murasaki
Shikibu, for a lady in the Emperor’s court in what is now Kyoto, we
see that embarrassment can occur by being in the presence of a
higher ranking individual. (You might get a glimmer of this kind of
emotion if you have ever felt shy in the presence of an important
person.)
Here are some glimpses from that distant culture. When the
youthful Prince Genji visits the house of his former nurse, who is
ill, the nurse speaks to Genji fondly and tearfully. Her children are
“acutely embarrassed … before so unbecoming a show of emotion in
Genji’s presence” (p. 57). The children would not have been
embarrassed if their mother had spoken to them in this way; it is
Genji’s rank that causes their embarrassment. Later in the same
chapter Genji stays the night with a lover, Yugao, who is of lower
social status. She wakes in the morning, in her humble house, to the
sound of neighbors calling out to each other. In the West one might
be annoyed at such a din, or worried that it might wake the sleeping
loved one. Not so for Yugao: she is “deeply embarrassed by this
chatter and clatter all around them of people rising and preparing to
go about their pitiful tasks” (p. 63). Had they awoken in a royal
palace, all would have been appropriate to Genji’s high status. The
morality here is of hierarchy and respect.
These examples show the importance of context in theorizing about
emotions. We suggest that to understand emotions fully in social
life, we need to approach by way of both evolution and culture.
SUMMARY
The chapter starts with two incidents from an island society whose
culture differs from that of the industrial West. We suggest that in
all societies, most human emotions are social with many of them
based on our human ability to cooperate. Although we may think
emotions just happen to us, they are also actions that we do, and
that are related to the values of each particular society. Crosscultural approaches enable us to see the relation of emotion to
identity. In the West, people tend to think of themselves as
independent, whereas in the East people are more interdependent.
In the history of the West, interpersonal violence has declined since
medieval times, and worldwide the frequency of wars for territorial
gain and the taking of slaves has declined. In Europe, in the middle
of the eighteenth century, the Romantic era began, in which
emotions came to be valued in personal life and in politics. Analyses
of sexual love suggest that an emotion is a kind of social role.
Societal morality is based on emotional generalizations about right
ways for others and ourselves to behave with each other. The
chapter ends with an integration of evolutionary and cultural
approaches and the principle that the human species is based on
cooperation, between people and in cultures.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. Think about how you have seen an individual from a different
culture express emotion in a different way than you might. How
would you explain this difference from a self-construal
perspective, or a values perspective?
2. What emotions are most important to you? Are they of
excitement, or of calmness? And are they largely individual, or
interpersonal? Are they related to your gender or sexual
preferences?
3. How do you weave evolutionary and cultural ways of theorizing
into your understanding of emotion? In what ways are emotions
universal and in what ways do they vary across cultures? Are
there general principles of emotions that can be discerned in all
cultures?
FURTHER READING
A famous European novella of the Romantic era is by Germany’s
most famous author: the scientist-novelist-playwright, Goethe. It’s
still a good read:
von Goethe, J. (1774). The sorrows of young Werther (translated by
M. Hulse). Harmondsworth: Penguin (1989).
A book based on living on a tiny Pacific island. It’s a classic of
emotional life and customs:
Lutz, C. (1988). Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a
Micronesian atoll and their challenge to Western theory.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
An excellent review is:
Mesquita, B., De Leersnyder, J., & Boiger, M. (2016). The cultural
psychology of emotions. In L. F. Barrett, M. Lewis, & J. M.
Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of Emotions, Fourth Edition
(pp. 393–411). New York: Guilford.
PART II
Elements of Emotions
4
Communication of Emotions
CONTENTS
Five Kinds of Nonverbal Behavior
Facial Expressions of Emotion
Darwin's Observations and Theoretical Analysis
Early Evidence of the Universality of Facial Expressions of
Emotion
Critiques of the Ekman and Friesen Studies
Discovering New Facial Expressions of Emotion
Inference and Context in Emotion Recognition
Vocal Communication of Emotion
The Communication of Emotions with the Voice
Tactile Communication of Emotion
Four Functions of Touch
Communicating Emotions with Touch
Emotional Expression and the Coordination of Social
Interaction
Cultural Variation in Emotional Expression
Cultural Variation in Expressive Behavior
Cultural Variation in the Interpretation of Emotional
Expression
Communication of Emotion in Art
Four Hypotheses from the Idea of Romanticism
Aesthetic Emotions in the Natyasastra
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 4.0 Most important social rituals, as at this
wedding when the groom embraces a groomsman,
involve emotional expression involving the face, the
voice, touch, and different movements of the body. In
fact, most social interactions, you shall learn, are rich
with emotional expression.
… there is a kind of universal language, consisting of expressions
of the face and eyes, gestures and tones of voice, which can show
whether a person means to ask for something and get it, or
refuse it and have nothing to do with it.
Augustine, Confessions, 1–8
Today about half the people in the world send an emoji each day to
a friend, a romantic partner, a family member, or work colleague.
They do so, in large part, to convey their feelings online, in the
midst of texting, snap chatting, or sharing posts and links on
Facebook.
Imagine that you were in charge of creating a set of emoji. What
would you create? Which emotions would you design emoji for?
What would the emoji look like? Would they have sound? The body
and hands? Dynamic cues?
This request was actually made of one of your authors (D.K.), when
a design team at Facebook asked him to assist in the design of a new
set of emoji. As a first step in this process, D.K. gave Charles
Darwin's descriptions of over 40 emotional expressions to Matt
Jones, an illustrator at Pixar at the time. Jones made emoji‐like
drawings for over 40 states. These emoji were then tested for how
well they convey emotion (see Bai et al., 2018), and then passed on
to a design team at Facebook. That team created the “Finch” sticker
packet, named in honor of Charles Darwin. These stickers, as well as
the drawings by Matt Jones that inspired them, are presented in
Table 4.1.
TABLE 4.1
Drawings and “stickers” of 16 emotions
Source: ©Matt jones
Emotion
Admiration
Amusement
Anger
Awe
Cheerful
Confusion
Illustrator's drawing Finch sticker
Emotion
Coyness
Deadpan
Disgust
Embarrassment
Gratitude
Joy
Romantic love
Illustrator's drawing Finch sticker
Emotion
Illustrator's drawing Finch sticker
Sadness
Surprise
Sympathy
Take a moment to study the drawings and stickers. Where in each
emoji is emotion conveyed? How is it that subtle movements in the
eyes, or head, convey emotion? What do you make of the addition,
in certain emoji, of shoulder shrugs (coyness), hand movements
(confusion), and tear drops (sadness)? Can you rightfully call these
movements part of the expression? And what emotions are
missing?
These questions are part of the creative challenge often confronted
by painters, cartoonists, novelists, playwrights, actors, directors, and
musicians: how to portray the subtle ways in which humans express
emotion in fleeting movements in the face, the head, the body,
touch, the eyes, and the voice? Emotion scientists have also faced
this challenge in their efforts to characterize how we communicate
emotion. The science that we will review is a rich and storied one
and meets head‐on the issues that we addressed in the last two
chapters: How are emotions part of our mammalian and primate
evolutionary heritage? And how are they shaped by culture?
Five Kinds of Nonverbal Behavior
Words such as “smile,” “laugh,” “gaze,” and “touch” seem simple
enough, but each can refer to many kinds of nonverbal behavior,
with often contrasting emotional meanings. Take the word “smile.”
There have been debates about what smiles mean and the extent to
which they accompany the experience of positive emotion (e.g.,
Fernandez‐Dols & Ruiz‐Belda, 1995, 1997; Frank, Ekman, & Friesen,
1993; Fridlund, 1992). The answer is that different smiles have
different meanings (Martin, Rychlowska, Wood, & Niedenthal,
2017). Often we smile when feeling joyful, but we also smile to be
polite, to hide feelings of disapproval, to express romantic
attraction, to signal weakness, to flirt, to pretend that we are
following what another person is saying, and so on (see Figure 4.1).
New research findings suggest that smiles can relate to love,
sympathy, and even aggression (Rychlowska et al., 2017). Often
single words like “smile” fail to describe the rich and ancient
language of nonverbal communication.
FIGURE 4.1 “Flirtation,” by the Hungarian painter
Miklós Barabás, showing characteristic elements: the
man shows direct interest with body and head oriented
toward the woman; the woman shows classic coyness,
with head and gaze cast away.
To help clarify the study of emotional expression, Paul Ekman and
Wallace Friesen (1969) organized nonverbal behavior into five
categories. First are emblems: nonverbal gestures that directly
translate to words (see Figure 4.2). For English speakers, these
include the thumbs up, the peace sign, and in the late 1960s, the
raised, clenched fist to indicate Black Power (used today in an ironic
twist by US President Trump). Researchers have analyzed over 800
emblems throughout the world. No doubt there are many more.
Emblems vary significantly in their meaning across cultures. For
instance, an American who directs the thumbs up gesture to
someone in Australia may think he's saying “good job,” but
unbeknownst to him he is actually telling that person “up yours.”
That same American wishing a Vietnamese good luck with the
crossed finger gesture used in the United States is making a really
offensive sexual gesture to that person.
FIGURE 4.2 A coarse gesture of contempt: seen in
Britain, but not in southern Europe. Such gestures are
based on learned conventions like words (from Morris et
al., 1979).
A second category of nonverbal behaviors is the illustrator, a
nonverbal gesture that accompanies our speech, to make it vivid,
visual, or emphatic. We gesture with our hands in myriad ways
when we speak—spend a few minutes observing (see Figure 4.3).
McNeill (2005) showed that these gestures slightly precede the
corresponding words we say. We also use facial gestures to illustrate
and dramatize our speech. We raise our eyebrows when articulating
the most important point in a phrase. We nod our heads to
strengthen a point we are making with words.
FIGURE 4.3 Dr. Martin Luther King using the clenched
fist, an inspiring illustrator, to add strength to his words
in a speech in Philadelphia.
Regulators are nonverbal behaviors that we use to coordinate
conversation, behaviors such as head nods and eye brow flashes and
encouraging vocalizations of interest. People look at and orient their
bodies toward people whom they want to start speaking. They look
and turn their bodies away from those they wish would stop
speaking. It is a remarkable feat of human social life that people can
carry on collaborative conversations in groups without explicitly
designating who is to speak and who is not. They often do so by
using regulators.
A fourth kind of nonverbal behavior is the self‐adaptor: nervous
behaviors that lack seeming intentions, as if simply to release
nervous energy. People touch their faces, tug at their hair, jiggle
their legs, bite their lips, and scratch their chins. We are often
unaware of self‐adaptors that are part of our self‐presentation, and
they can cost us: when you are showing self‐adaptors, people are
more likely to believe that you are lying.
Finally, there are emotional expressions: patterns of behavior in
the face, voice, body, and touch that convey emotion. How do
emotional expressions differ from other kinds of nonverbal
behavior? How can you distinguish, for example, between the
sincere facial expression of anger from the mock expression, or the
sincere vocalization of sympathy from a fake one? In three different
ways (Frank et al., 1993; Kappas et al., 2000). First, expressions of
emotion tend to last just a few seconds, whereas other expressive
behavior can be exceptionally brief or last for longer periods of time
(Bachorowski & Owren, 2001; Ekman, 1993). A smile accompanying
enjoyment will typically start and stop within a span of 1 to 10
seconds. A polite smile that does not accompany the experience of
emotion might be exceptionally brief, lasting a quarter of a second,
or it might endure for some time, for instance, when someone
smiles politely through the entire course of an unpleasant dinner
party. Second, emotional expressions involve involuntary muscle
actions that people cannot deliberately produce and that are more
difficult to suppress (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Grunedal, 2002;
Kappas, Bherer, & Thériault, 2000). The facial expression of anger,
for example, involves the action of the muscle that tightens around
the mouth, which most people cannot produce voluntarily. Feigned
expressions of anger, therefore, would lack the muscle tightening
around the mouth. Finally, the temporal unfolding of emotional
expressions tends to differ from other kinds of expressions, with
more fluid, gradual onset and offsets to the behaviors (Krumhuber,
et al., 2013). With these distinctions in mind, let's now look at three
modalities of emotional expression—the face, the voice, and touch.
Facial Expressions of Emotion
Darwin's Observations and Theoretical Analysis
You'll recall from Chapter 1 that one of the challenges that Darwin
faced after publishing On the Origin of Species was to make the case
that humans evolved from some preexisting mammalian form. One
focus in his argument was to draw comparisons between human
emotional expression and that of other mammals and to chart the
universality of human emotional expression. To do so, Darwin
(1872) drew on observations of animals at the London zoo, of his
dog Polly that sat at his feet as he wrote in his study, of peoples
from remote, hunter‐gatherer societies that he encountered in his
voyages on the Beagle, and of his own young children.
From these observations, Darwin characterized the emotional
expressions for over 40 different states. Look at some of these
descriptions in Table 4.2, and see if they align with your own
observations of emotional expressions.
TABLE 4.2
Darwin's descriptions of emotional expression from The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Negative Emotion
Anger
Tremble, nostrils raised, mouth compressed,
furrowed brow, head erect, chest expanded, arms
rigid by sides, eyes wide open, stamp ground, body
sways backward/forward
Confusion
Stammer, grimaces, twitchings of facial muscles
Contempt
Lip protrusion, nose wrinkle, expiration, partial
closure of eyelids, turn away eyes and body, nose
wrinkle, upper lip raised, snort
Disgust
Lower lip turned down, upper lip raised, expiration,
mouth open, spitting, blowing out, protruding lips,
clear throat sound, lower lip and tongue protruded
Embarrassed
Little cough
Fear
Tremble, eyes open, mouth open, lips retracted, eye
brows raised, crouch, pale, perspiration, hair stands
on end, muscles shiver, yawn
Guilt
Gaze aversion, shifty eyes, grimace
Pain
Writhe about, piercing cries, groans, lips clenched
and retracted, teeth clenched, wild stare,
perspiration, furrowed brow, nostrils dilated,
profuse sweating, pallor, utter prostration, eyes
closed, square mouth (lips contracted),
compression of eyeball, muscle around eyes
contracted, pyramidal muscle contracts, upper lip
raised, depressor muscles, nostril narrowed,
scalp/face/eyes reddened, inspiration, sobbing,
lachrymal gland squeezed, laughter, tears
Sadness
Corner of mouth depressed, inner corner of
eyebrows raised
Shame
Blush, head averted, head down, eyes wavering,
eyes down/away, turn body away, face away,
blinking eyelids, tears
Positive Emotion
Admiration
Eyes opened, eyebrows raised, eyes bright, smile
Astonishment Eyes open, mouth open, eyebrows raised, hands
placed over mouth
Contemplation Frown, wrinkle skin under lower eyelids, eyes
divergent, head droops, hands to forehead, mouth,
or chin, thumb/index finger to lip
Devotion
(reverence)
Face upward, eyelids upturned, fainting, pupils
upward and inward, humbling kneeling posture,
hands upturned
Happiness
Eyes sparkle, skin under eyes wrinkled, mouth
drawn back at corners
Joy
Muscle tremble, purposeless movements, laughter,
clapping hands, jumping, dancing about, stamping,
chuckle/giggle, smile, muscle around eyes
contracted, upper lip raised
Laughter
Tears, deep inspiration, contraction of chest,
shaking of body, head nods to and fro, lower jaw
quivers up/down, lip corners drawn backward, head
thrown backward, shakes, head and face red,
muscle around eyes contracted, lip press/bite
Love
Beaming eyes, smiling cheeks (when seeing old
friend), touch, gentle smile, protruding lips (in
chimps), kissing, nose rubs
Maternal love Touch, gentle smile, tender eyes
Pride
Head, body erect, look down on others
Romantic love Breathing hurried, faces flush
Surprise
Eyebrows raised, mouth open, eyes open, lips
protruded, expiration, blowing/hissing, open hands
high above head, palms toward person with
straightened fingers, arms backwards
Tender
(sympathy)
Tears
We hope you are struck with the nuances of Darwin's observations
and how they characterize such a wide array of states and involve
different modalities, including facial muscle movement,
vocalization, gaze activity, body movements, and the like. To explain
why we express emotions in these particular patterns of behavior,
Darwin derived three principles (Hess & Thibault, 2009; Shariff &
Tracy, 2011). First, according to the principle of serviceable
habits, expressive behaviors that helped individuals respond
adaptively to threats and opportunities in the evolutionary past will
reoccur in the future. For example, the furrowed brow, which
protects the eyes from blows, and exposed teeth, which in our
ancestors signaled that they were about to attack, tend still to occur
in modern humans when they are angry. Second, the principle of
antithesis holds that opposing states will be associated with
opposing expressions. For example, you will learn later that pride is
signaled in dominant, size‐expanding displays—chest expansion and
tilting the head back—whereas shame is signaled in submissive
behavior—drooping shoulders and downward movements of the
head. Third, the principle of nervous discharge states that
excess, undirected energy is released in random expressions, such
as face touches, leg jiggles, and the like.
Early Evidence of the Universality of Facial Expressions
of Emotion
Today, in hindsight, it is clear how Darwin's analysis of the
evolution of emotional expression was central to the unfolding of
the science of emotion, with its focus on expressive behavior,
universality, and similarities in human emotion with the expressive
behavior of other species. Yet it was largely ignored for nearly 100
years after its publication. That would change in the early 1960s,
when Sylvan Tomkins, Paul Ekman, and Carroll Izard carefully read
Darwin's book and distilled his observations into two hypotheses
(Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971; Tomkins, 1962,
1963). First, the encoding hypothesis: the experience of different
emotions should be associated with the same distinct expressions in
every culture. Second, the decoding hypothesis: people of
different cultures should interpret these expressions in similar
ways.
To test these hypotheses, Ekman and Friesen took over 3,000
photos of different people as they expressed six emotions, anger,
disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, according to
Darwin's descriptions (see Figure 4.4). Ekman then traveled to
Papua, New Guinea, and for six months lived with a people of the
Fore (pronounced “Foray”) language group who had seen no movies
or magazines, who did not speak English or pidgin (a combination
of English and a native language), and who had minimal exposure
to Westerners (see Figure 4.5). This allowed for a strong test of the
hypothesis that people, independent of modern culture, encode and
decode emotions as people in industrialized cultures do.
FIGURE 4.4 Six different emotions: (a) anger, (b)
disgust, (c) fear, (d) happiness, (e) sadness, and (f)
surprise. The expressions in these photos are similar to
those described by Darwin, to those used by Ekman and
Friesen in their universality studies, and to those used in
many other studies of facial expression.
FIGURE 4.5 Paul Ekman in New Guinea.
Ekman and Friesen devised a brief story appropriate to each of the
six emotions. For example, the sadness story was: “the person's
child had died, and he felt sad.” They then presented photos of three
different expressions with a story that matched one of the
expressions and asked participants to match the story to one of the
three expressions (chance guessing would yield identification rates
of 33%). In another task, the researchers videotaped Fore
participants as they displayed facial expressions they would show in
response to the emotion‐specific story and then presented unedited
clips of these expressions to college students in the United States,
who selected from six emotion terms the one that best matched the
Fore's pose in each clip (chance guessing would yield identification
rates of 16.6%).
Significant Figures: Sylvan Tomkins, Carroll
Izard, Paul Ekman
A seminal figure who shaped the resurgence of interest in
emotion in the second half of the twentieth century was Sylvan
Tomkins, who proposed what he called affect theory, in which
emotions are thought to be hard wired, preprogrammed
responses that are genetically transmitted to all humans. Based
on specific physiological mechanisms, Tomkins argued, affect
derives from a small set of nine basic emotions, each of which is
displayed in a distinct facial expression. As in Darwin's
theorizing, Tomkins proposed that these distinct facial
expressions are universal. What he needed was strong empirical
data in support of his theory.
Toward this end, Tomkins inspired two young scientists he was
mentoring—Carroll Izard and Paul Ekman—to go in search of
evidence of the universality of facial expressions of emotion.
Both would conduct groundbreaking studies in remote cultures
of the universality of facial expression. Izard worked, at first,
principally with children and developed a coding system based
on which features of facial expressions enabled distinct basic
emotions to be most clearly differentiated from each other.
Recently, his work has tended to focus on how understanding of
emotions can be used to improve children's and adults'
functioning and health. Ekman also developed, in collaboration
with his long‐time coauthor Wallace Friesen, a coding system for
emotions of a kind that was different from Izard's. Ekman and
Friesen's Facial Action Coding System is anatomically based and
allows researchers to identify specific emotions according to the
contraction of specific facial muscles and muscle configurations.
Ekman's work on expressions of emotion that are recognizable
in different societies of the world has been a cornerstone, both
for those who accept the proposal of a small number of basic
emotions that these expressions imply and for those who
question it. Recognized by the American Psychological
Association as someone who has been one of the most
influential psychologists of the twentieth century, he has also
made his way into popular culture with his work on how
microexpressions can indicate lying, which, as well as having
been taken up by US border officials, became the basis of a well‐
regarded television program, Lie to Me.
As you can see in Table 4.3, the Fore participants, even children,
were quite accurate in judging emotions from facial expression. The
American college students correctly interpreted the posed
expressions of the Fore, with the exception of fear and surprise. In a
synthesis of over 140 subsequent studies involving people from
many different cultures, Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady found
that on average people accurately label facial expressions of these
six emotions 58 percent of the time (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002,
2003).
TABLE 4.3
Accuracy rates for participants from New Guinea and the
United States in judging expressions of six emotions
Source: Adapted from Ekman (1972).
The Fore of New
Guinea
US college students
Judging Ekman and
Friesen's photos
Adults
Children
Judging emotional
expressions posed by the
Fore
Anger
84
90
51
Disgust
81
85
46
Fear
80
93
18
Happiness
92
92
73
Sadness
79
91
68
Surprise
68
98
27
Note: For the Fore judges (the first two columns), chance guessing would yield accuracy
rates of 33 percent. For the US college student judges, chance guessing would yield accuracy
rates of 16.6 percent.
Critiques of the Ekman and Friesen Studies
Ekman and Friesen's findings would prove to be some of the most
generative in the field (Keltner et al., 2017). Like all groundbreaking
findings, these studies have been subjected to influential critiques
that have inspired subsequent studies we review below (e.g.,
Barrett, 2011; Fridlund, 2015; Russell, 2015). First is the response
format critique. In Ekman and Friesen's study (and hundreds that
followed), participants were required to label the facial expressions
using terms the researchers provided, often in forced choice format.
This method has many problems. It might inflate the accuracy with
which people identify emotion through guessing strategies (Russell,
1994). It constrains how participants label expressions, requiring
that they use researchers' emotion concepts rather than their own.
As an example, one could easily imagine people from different
cultural backgrounds labeling a smile with different concepts than
“happiness,” such as “gratitude” or “reverence” or
“amae/pleasurable dependence” (see Chapter 3). And critically, Alan
Fridlund has argued that when we perceive the expressive behavior
of others, it is most advantageous to recognize what intentions the
person has (rather than their feeling), an inferential process not
captured in the forced choice format (Fridlund, 1992, 2015).
A second critique may be more damning and is in terms of
ecological validity, or the question of whether the expressions in
the Ekman and Friesen studies resemble those that people routinely
produce or judge in their daily lives (Russell, 1994). Instead, the
expressions portrayed in the photos are static, highly stylized and
exaggerated, only involve select facial muscle movements and not
other modalities (e.g., gaze, head movements), and do not involve
dynamic cues over time. This raises the question of whether more
subtle expressions of emotion, perhaps more typical of everyday
emotional expression, would be so reliably judged (Wagner,
MacDonald, & Manstead, 1986). For example, a number of studies
are showing that people are better able to recognize emotion from
dynamic displays than static photos (Ambadar, Schooler, & Cohn,
2005; Krumhuber, Kappas, & Manstead, 2013; van Der Schalk,
Hawk, Fischer, & Doosje, 2011).
A third critique is offered by Rachael Jack and her colleagues and
focuses on the narrow range of emotions that Ekman and Friesen
chose to study—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and
surprise (Jack et al., 2016). Why only one positive emotion? Why no
self‐conscious emotions? Darwin himself offered descriptions of
over 40 states, as you have learned. Is the realm of emotion we
signal in the human face limited to just six emotions? Jack and
colleagues suggested this narrow list may have been biased by the
Western European orientation of the researchers and provided data,
we review below, that suggests that the face can express upward of
40 to 50 emotional states, as Darwin himself long ago surmised
(Jack et al., 2016). Let's now turn to the empirical advances these
critiques have inspired.
Discovering New Facial Expressions of Emotion
Inspired by the Ekman and Friesen studies, a next generation of
scientists has charted a much richer landscape of emotional
expression (e.g., Jack et al., 2016; Keltner et al., 2016; Shiota et al.,
2017). Consider this intriguing study by Rachael Jack and her
colleagues (2016) who used computer morphing technologies to
generate a wide array of facial expressions to present to observers,
in fact, the widest array of facial expressions ever to be studied.
They did so in the following fashion. There are between 20 and 30
facial muscles underlying the surface of the skin, that, when
moving, produce visible changes in the human face. These changes
to the appearance to the face are known, thanks to the work of
Ekman and Friesen, as Action Units. All told there are at least 42
action units (e.g., “furrowed brow”; “lip corner tighten”; “nose
wrinkle”). Jack and colleagues created over 2,500 facial expressions
based on anywhere from 1 to 6 Action Units. Think of it as a
possible universe of facial expressions. They then presented these
2500 facial expressions as animations in sequences of four separate
photos unfolding over 1.25 seconds, which allowed them to show
how combinations of Action Units change dynamically the
appearance of the face. Participants from Scotland and China then
rated each of these animations in terms of the emotion they
perceived in the expression, from a list of over 50 emotion terms
that other English and Chinese speakers had generated. What Jack
and colleagues discovered is that UK observers reliably perceived 25
distinct facial expressions, and Chinese participants 37, many
overlapping with Darwin's observations.
Complementing this imaginative study, a new wave of studies has
focused on multimodal emotional expressions (Keltner & Cordaro,
2015). These expressions involve not only facial muscle movements
but also movements of the eyes, the hands, the head, and the body
(e.g., Hess et al., 2015). In some studies, scientists have documented
how distinct emotional experiences, such as love or desire, relate to
distinct multimodal expressions. In other studies, as Ekman and
Friesen did with the Fore, participants were asked to produce
expressions of different emotions based on definitions or emotion‐
specific scenarios (e.g., Campos et al., 2012). These studies, like that
of Jack and colleagues, point to a much richer landscape of
emotional expression, which we review as they relate to the four
kinds of relationships that make up human sociality.
One line of studies has documented facial expressions of the
emotions that John Bowlby placed at the center of human
attachment: desire, which motivates reproductive behavior; love,
which motivates long‐term warmth and devotion; and sympathy,
which motivates care‐giving to vulnerable others, in particular
offspring (Bowlby, 1969).
The obvious place to capture the expressions of desire and love is to
study romantic partners. This is what Gian Gonzaga and his
colleagues did (Gonzaga et al., 2001, 2006). In this study, young
romantic partners talked about their first date while being
videotaped. Intensive, frame‐by‐frame coding of the nonverbal
behaviors that made up these affectionate conversations found that
when partners experienced intense love they showed the following
brief dynamic patterns of behavior: smiling, mutual gaze, affiliative
hand gestures, open posture, and forward leans. And when feeling
intense desire, romantic partners displayed behaviors you might see
in a pivotal moment in a romantic comedy: lip licks, lip wipes, and
subtle, playful tongue protrusions (for replication, see Cordaro et
al., 2017). It is noteworthy to observe that many nonhuman
primates signal affiliation with open posture and open hands and
even kissing (see Figure 4.6).
FIGURE 4.6 Affiliation‐related displays in chimpanzees
captured by Frans de Waal.
What about sympathy, Bowlby's third emotion that enables
attachment? In a series of studies, Nancy Eisenberg and her
colleagues coded the facial actions of people witnessing someone
suffer, finding that the experience of sympathy is correlated with
pulled in, oblique eyebrows and concerned gaze (Eisenberg et al.,
1989). This finding replicates in studies in which participants in
different cultures are given a scenario that elicits sympathy—a
description of witnessing someone in physical pain—and asked to
express the emotion nonverbally (e.g., Campos et al., 2012; Cordaro
et al., 2017). This subtle display is associated with increased helping
behavior and changes in peripheral physiology—heart rate
deceleration and activation of the vagus nerve, which you will learn
about in the next chapter (Stellar et al., 2015). People are somewhat
reliable in judging this expression when portrayed in static photos
as sympathy (Keltner & Cordaro, 2016). John Bowlby was indeed
prescient in his thinking: the emotions of attachment—love, desire,
and sympathy—are registered in subtle facial and bodily actions,
which signal security and intimacy to the lucky targets of such
displays (see Figure 4.7).
FIGURE 4.7 Static photos of expressions of love, desire,
and sympathy.
Hierarchies, we argued in Chapter 2, organize individuals in groups
and solve problems related to decision making, resource allocation,
and work. Three emotions that map onto the hierarchical dimension
of social living are embarrassment, shame, and pride (see Figure
4.8).
FIGURE 4.8
Static
photos of
embarrassment, shame, and pride.
expressions
of
Let's begin with embarrassment, the emotion we feel when we have
violated a social norm that governs public interaction. Researchers
have produced this state in participants in the lab through rather
mischievous means. For instance, students have been asked to suck
on a pacifier in front of friends. Or they have been asked to model
bathing suits for others. Or make funny‐looking facial expressions
while being videotaped. In perhaps the most mortifying test,
participants had to sing Barry Manilow's song “Feelings” using
dramatic hand gestures and then watch a videotape of their
performance with a group of other students.
All of these elicitations of embarrassment produce negative
attention and a diminishing of status (Miller, 1992; Miller &
Tangney, 1994). Frame‐by‐frame analysis of the behavior people
display in these kinds of situations has uncovered a fleeting but
highly coordinated 2‐ to 3‐second display (Edelmann & Hampson,
1979, 1981; Harris, 2001; Keltner, 1995). This display includes gaze
movements down, head turns to the side, a compressed or inhibited
(one might say self‐conscious) smile, and furtive glances and on
occasion, a face touch. When presented with dynamic videos of
these displays, as well as still photographs, people from different
cultures are able to reliably identify the display as embarrassment
and not shame or amusement (Haidt & Keltner, 1999; Keltner, 1995;
Keltner & Cordaro, 2016). When feeling shame, which concerns
more serious transgressions and negative self‐attention, people
show a simpler but more poignant display of head movements down
and gaze aversion (Harker & Keltner, 2001; Lewis et al., 1989).
This expression of embarrassment may bring to mind images of
young women in Jane Austen's novels and their film adaptations
and lead you to believe that embarrassment is uniquely human. But
this would be mistaken. Instead, human embarrassment
expressions have parallels in the appeasement displays of other
species (Keltner & Buswell, 1997). In appeasement interactions, one
individual, typically a subordinate, relies on certain signals to pacify
and reduce the aggressive tendencies of another individual, often a
dominant individual in the social hierarchy (de Waal, 1989). When
appeasing, a wide range of species avert their gaze, as in human
embarrassment. Various species, including different primate
species, pigs, rabbits, blue‐footed boobies, pigeons, doves, and
loons, use head movements down, head turns, and head bobs to
appease. These head movements reduce the size of the body,
signaling submissiveness. Certain primates have a controlled smile
to signal submissiveness. Several primates cover their faces when
appeasing, as do rabbits. The elements of embarrassment, then, are
routinely seen in the appeasement displays of other species.
If embarrassment and shame occupy the bottom of a hierarchical
dimension of social living, at the other end is pride. Pride is rooted
in elevated status brought about by socially valued actions (Shariff
& Tracy, 2011; Tracy & Robins, 2004, 2007). Many nonhuman
species, in particular primates, signal their rise in social status
through enlarging their physical size—body expansion, the classic
chest pounding you might see apes engage in at the zoo, the lifting
of the head back, or signs of expanded physicality such as loud, deep
calls. So too, it would seem, do humans, in their expressions of
pride.
In an imaginative use of naturalistic data, Jessica Tracy and David
Matsumoto (2008) analyzed the emotional expressions of sighted
and blind Olympic athletes from 20 different countries just after
they had either won or lost a judo competition. Darwin had
suggested that the expressions of blind individuals are particularly
germane to claims of evolutionary universality because they will not
have been copied from seen behavior of others. As you can see in
Figure 4.9, after victory, both sighted (the top panel) and blind
athletes (the bottom panel) alike threw their arms in the air with
chest out as an expression of pride (and perhaps triumph). After
losing, both groups of athletes dropped their heads and slumped
their shoulders in a display of shame. In other research, Jessica
Tracy and Richard Robins documented that displays of expansive
posture, head movements up and back, and arm thrusts upward
reliably signal pride to observers, both in industrialized cultures,
and in a remote people in Burkina Faso, Africa (Tracy & Robin,
2004).
FIGURE 4.9 Sighted (top panel) and blind (bottom panel)
Olympic Athletes' nonverbal displays to winning and
losing a competition (from Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008).
Still other studies that followed Ekman and Friesen's studies have
documented distinct expressions for emotions such as interest (the
eyes widened and eyebrows raised), laughter and contentment, as
portrayed in Figure 4.10 (Campos et al., 2012; Cordaro et al., 2016;
Matsumoto & Ekman, 2004).
FIGURE 4.10 Static photos of expressions of amusement,
interest, and contentment.
Based on the advances in understanding facial expression after the
Ekman and Friesen studies, Daniel Cordaro took photographs of
facial/bodily expressions of 19 different emotions and then gathered
data from 10 different cultures, ranging from Pakistan to New
Zealand (Cordaro, 2013; Keltner & Cordaro, 2016). In this study,
participants, as in the Ekman and Friesen work, were presented
with emotion‐specific scenarios for each of 19 different emotions
(e.g., for pain it would be “this person just stubbed their toe on a
rock”). For each scenario, they were required to choose from one of
four static photos of facial/bodily expressions. Figure 4.11 presents
the results of this study. As you can see from this emotion
recognition study, the landscape of emotional expression in the face
and body is increasingly rich.
FIGURE 4.11 Accuracy rates across 10 cultures in judging
emotions from static photos of facial/bodily expressions.
Chance guessing is represented in the dotted line
(adapted from Keltner & Cordaro, 2016).
Inference and Context in Emotion Recognition
A second direction in which the field has moved since the Ekman
and Friesen studies is to study more systematically the inferential
processes that occur when we perceive emotionally expressive
behavior. This development was inspired by Alan Fridlund's
behavioral ecology theory of emotional expression or, what he
prefers to call, display behaviors (Fridlund, 1994; Scarantino, 2017).
Fridlund argues that what is most critical for perceivers is to discern
an individual's intentions from expressive behavior. In Fridlund's
words, emotional expressions are: “declarations that signify our
trajectory in a given social interaction, that is, what we will do in the
current situation, or what we would like the other to do” (Fridlund,
1994, p. 130). Expressions are designed to signal intentions, not
necessarily feelings, and to prompt responses in others.
This theorizing has led the field to a broader consideration of the
kinds of social information that are communicated by expressive
behavior. Drawing upon philosophical studies of language, Andrea
Scarantino has offered one such account, which he calls a theory of
affective pragmatics (Scarantino, 2017; see also Ekman, 1997). He
makes the case that emotional expressions—in the present case
facial/bodily expressions—communicate four kinds of information:
1) the individual's current feeling (the expressive function of
expression); 2) what is happening in the present context (the
declarative function of expression); 3) desired courses of action
from other people who perceive the expression (the imperative
function of expression); and 4) intention and plans about what the
person might do (the commissive function of expression).
Emotional expressions are indeed a rich grammar of social
interaction.
Consider one recent study that lends credence to this new view of
emotion perception. Shuman et al. (2015) presented observers with
dynamic videotaped portrayals of five different emotions:
happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. The expressions were
dynamic, more realistic, and less exaggerated than those in the
Ekman and Friesen photos, more like the expressions you might see
in everyday social interactions. In different response formats,
participants could choose from a variety of options the best that
matched the emotion in the video. More specifically, participants
matched each expression to feelings (“fear”), appraisals (“that is
dangerous”), social relational meanings (“you scare me”), and action
tendencies (“I might run”). In this study, participants labeled the
dynamic but subtle expressions with the expected label 62 percent
of the time, which is comparable to accuracy rates in labeling static
photos of more dramatic facial expressions. Action tendencies
proved to be the most difficult to discern.
Still another line of research is examining how the inferences
people draw from emotional expression are shaped by the social
context. Recall that in the studies of Ekman and Friesen, and many
that followed, no information was provided about the social context.
This stands in contrast to our everyday life, where we encounter
others' emotional expressions in intimate relationships, with others
nearby, and in different settings such as at work or with family.
How do emotional expressions vary in their meaning from one
context to another? A pattern of touch will vary in the inferences it
evokes depending on whether the people are friends or strangers, at
work, or on a date. A laugh can be perceived as an expression of
affection or sarcastic critique depending on the context. A blush
could be read as a sign of self‐conscious inhibition or flirtatious
interest, again depending on the context.
Scholars such as Klaus Scherer, Ursula Hess, and Lisa Feldman‐
Barrett offered several systematic ideas about how context shapes
emotion perception (Barrett et al., 2011; Hess & Hareli, 2017;
Scherer, 1986). A first source of the contextual shaping of emotion
perception is culture. Because cultures vary in their emotion
concepts, knowledge, and representations, it is clear that culture
will influence the perception of emotion in expression.
A second source of variation is the situation—who is the person
expressing emotion, and what context are they in? How might the
gender, power, ethnicity, or social class of the individual expressing
emotion shape what emotion observers perceive? For example, we
are more likely to detect anger in men's expressions of emotion and
sadness in women's (Hess & Hareli, 2017; Niedenthal, Rychlowska,
& Wood, 2017). US participants are more likely to perceive anger in
the emotional expressions of African Americans, reflecting that
regrettable feature of the history of so many situations in the
United States (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). What other
behaviors is the expresser engaging in? For example, Aviezer and
colleagues (2008) presented a classic facial expression of disgust in
one of four contexts, in which the person expressing disgust was
engaged in different actions. Participants labeled the expression as
disgust 91 percent of the time when the individual was holding a
soiled article of clothing, 59 percent of the time when the person
displayed fearful hand and arm movements, 33 percent of the time
when the same person was clasping his or her hands sadly to the
chest, and 11 percent of the time when the person was poised with
fist clenched to punch. Clearly, the many dimensions of the context
—the nature of the expresser, the surrounding people, the formality
or informality of the setting—all influence emotion perception.
A third kind of context is perceptual context (Barrett et al., 2011).
Perceptual context refers to the mental states within the perceiver's
mind that shape his or her inferences upon observing expressive
behavior. A person's current feelings, goals, intentions, values, and
physical state give rise to context‐specific interpretations of social
stimuli and, one would imagine, expressive behavior. Later we will
talk about how touch is one medium in which we communicate
some emotions. Paul Piff et al. (2012) found that people who are
disposed to the experience of extreme positive emotion (or prone to
mania) are better able to discern positive emotions—love, sympathy,
gratitude, awe—in a stranger's touch than other participants. The
notion here is that current positive emotion felt by a perceiver
sharpens their acuity in emotion perception. The opposite can be
true as well, that is, people's perceptual states can impede their
recognition of emotion in expressive behavior. For example, recent
studies find that the likelihood that participants will label an
expression as disgust rises when an anger expression precedes the
presentation of the disgust expression, but drops when no anger
expression precedes the target disgust expression (Pochedly, Widen,
& Russell, 2012).
Vocal Communication of Emotion
When a young great ape dies, the mother of that ape will often carry
the corpse around for several days and cuddle and hold the
offspring, in what looks much like human grief. Just as striking is
that other apes nearby will emit vocalizations known as “coos,”
quiet vocalizations that would seem to convey sympathy for the
bereft mother. Social emotions like sympathy do seem to run deep
in mammalian evolution and are expressed with the voice.
The human voice is a source of varied emotional expression. As
humans began to walk upright in our hominid evolution, our vocal
chamber, or larynx, expanded in size and dropped down lower in the
esophagus, allowing for the production of a much wider array of
sounds than those heard in our primate relatives (see Figure 4.12).
To produce sounds, including emotion‐related vocalization, the
brain sends signals to the muscles around the lungs, which contract,
thus producing bursts of air particles that move up through the
trachea. Those air particles cause the vocal folds to vibrate, thus
producing sound waves. As the sound waves pass through the
mouth, they are given additional layers of sound depending on
many factors, such as the closing of the nasal passage, the position
of tongue and teeth, and the amount of saliva in the mouth.
Through this remarkable production of sound, we can speak, sing,
be ironic or sarcastic, engage in baby talk, communicate with our
pets (or at least think we do), and convey a rich array of emotions.
FIGURE 4.12 Anatomy of the vocal apparatus (from
babelsdawn.com).
Consider laughter, which is likely to have been part of the human
communicative repertoire for several million years (Dunbar, 2004;
Panksepp, 2005; Provine, 1992, 1993; Provine & Fischer, 1989;
Ruch, 1993). Laughter has a precursor in nonhuman primates—the
pant‐hoot vocalization that accompanies play. In humans, laughter
is a language of emotional expression unto its own. Next time you're
in a conversation with a group of friends, listen carefully to the
varieties of laughter. You might hear laughs that reflect tension,
sarcasm, embarrassment, and desire. Many laughs seem to involve
little emotion at all. People laugh to fill the empty gaps in
conversations, to signal that they are tracking what the speaker is
saying, or to encourage the speaker to continue.
Jo‐Anne Bachorowski and her colleagues mapped acoustic
characteristics of different laughs (Bachorowski & Owren, 2001;
Bachorowski, Smoski, & Owren, 2001; Smoski & Bachorowski,
2003). They have analyzed thousands of laughs gathered as
participants responded to amusing film clips or engaged in amusing
tasks together. There are cackles, hisses, breathy pants, snorts, and
grunts, and voiced or songlike laughs, which include vowel‐like
sounds and pitch modulation thanks to the involvement of the vocal
folds. Women more frequently produce voiced laughs, whereas men
often laugh with snorts and grunts (Bachorowski & Owren, 2001).
In a similar spirit, Adrienne Wood and her colleagues have shown
how laughs with different acoustic qualities relate to more
rewarding or more dominant intentions (Wood, Martin, &
Niedenthal, 2017). With a few bursts of sound in a couple of
seconds, we can laugh in myriad ways and communicate many
feelings and intentions, from those related to kindness and love to
aggression and domination.
The Communication of Emotions with the Voice
Let us now think about how emotional states might alter
vocalization patterns in ways that give rise to distinct vocalizations.
Klaus Scherer argued that several emotion‐related physiological
changes alter acoustic properties, including pitch, tempo, pitch
variability, variation, and loudness of speech (Scherer, 1986). For
example, when in an anxious state, the muscles around the lungs
are tense, thus restricting the air flow through the larynx. Our tense
vocal chords produce less variability in pitch. We are likely to have
less saliva in the mouth, and the shape of our lips will tighten. All of
these changes will influence the sound of our speech. Through
these and other emotion‐related changes in physiology and the
musculature of our vocal apparatus, emotions should be signaled in
distinct vocalizations.
To study whether people can communicate emotions with the voice,
researchers have relied on two methods. In one, people, often
trained actors, attempt to express different emotions in prosody, the
tone and rhythm of our speech, while reading nonsense syllables or
neutral passages of text (Banse & Scherer, 1996; Juslin & Laukka,
2003; Laukka 2014; Klasmeyer & Sendlmeier, 1999; Wallbott &
Scherer, 1986). These samples of emotion‐related prosody are
then presented to listeners, who select from a series of options to
identify the term that best matches the emotion conveyed in the
speech output. For example, Petri Laukka, Hillary Elfenbein, and
colleagues had actors from five countries—India, the United States,
Singapore, Australia, and Kenya—attempt to convey 11 different
emotions, anger, contempt, fear, happiness, interest, neutral, sexual
lust, pride, relief, sadness, and shame, while uttering sentences of
relatively neutral content (e.g., “Let me tell you something”). They
then presented these clips to people in different cultures and found
that observers could recognize nine of these 11 states when asked to
label the emotional content of the different audio clips (Laukka et
al., 2016). These findings build upon a review of 60 earlier studies of
this kind, which found that hearers can judge five different
emotions in the prosody that accompanies speech—anger, fear,
happiness, sadness, and tenderness—with accuracy rates that
approach 70 percent (Juslin & Laukka, 2003; Scherer, Johnstone, &
Klasmeyer, 2003). Judgments are best when hearers listen to
members of their own culture.
In a second kind of study, participants communicate emotions
through vocal bursts, which are brief, nonword utterances that
arise between speech incidents. Vocal bursts most resemble the coo
that great apes direct toward bereft mothers, with which we began
this section. Think of how you might communicate fear or anger
with a vocal burst. You're likely to shriek or growl. Or how about
compassion or the feeling of savoring a delicious bite of ice‐cream?
Here we suspect you might say “aww” or “mmm.” In studies of vocal
bursts, people are given a situation that produces an emotion (e.g.,
for awe it would be “you are seeing a large waterfall for the first
time”) and asked to communicate that emotion with a brief vocal
burst, and to not use words (Laukka et al., 2014; Sauter & Scott,
2007; Simon‐Thomas et al., 2009). These sounds are then played to
listeners, who attempt to label the sound with one of many emotion
terms, or to match the sound to the appropriate emotion eliciting
situation. As with emotional prosody, people are quite adept at
communicating emotions with vocal bursts. For example, Daniel
Cordaro and his colleagues presented vocal bursts of 16 emotions to
people from 10 different countries in Western Europe (Germany,
Poland), East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea), and Southeast Asia
(India, Pakistan), and Turkey, New Zealand, and the United States.
In this study, participants were asked to match emotionally rich but
simple situations (e.g., someone has insulted you; you hit your leg
on a rock) to one of four vocal bursts. Overall, people were correct
in matching stories to vocal bursts of 16 emotions 79 percent of the
time. As you can see in Figure 4.13, people in these 10 countries
were able to identify vocal bursts of eight positive emotions—
amusement, awe, contentment, desire, interest, relief, sympathy,
and triumph—and seven negative emotions—anger, contempt,
disgust, embarrassment, fear, pain, and sadness—as well as
surprise.
FIGURE 4.13 Observers in 10 cultures are able to identify
several emotions from vocal bursts (from Cordaro et al.,
2016).
Are vocal bursts universal? Can people living in cultures untouched
by Western culture reliably identify emotion from the human voice,
as they did in Ekman and Friesen's work on facial expression with
the Fore? To answer this question, Disa Sauter traveled to a remote
part of Namibia to gather evidence from the Himba people (see
Figure 4.14), a group of 20,000 individuals living with no electricity
or formal education, and with little history of contact with people
from the outside (Sauter et al., 2010). Sauter presented vocal bursts
of emotion of Western European individuals to the Himba and
found that they could reliably label vocal bursts of anger, disgust,
amusement, fear, sadness, and surprise. She also gathered vocal
bursts of the Himba and found that Western Europeans could
reliably judge those vocal bursts. Quite intriguingly, the Himba
could not reliably label the Western vocal bursts of pleasure, relief,
and admiration. And in a similar spirit, Daniel Cordaro traveled to a
village in Eastern Bhutan, made remote by its location in the
Eastern Himalayas and Bhutan's very recent opening to travelers
and technologies from the West. He had participants match vocal
bursts to emotionally rich stories and found that 13 emotions could
be reliably identified in vocal bursts (Cordaro et al., 2016).
FIGURE 4.14 A Himba woman listening to vocal bursts,
and Disa Sauter working with the Himba.
We have already seen that one of the emotions we can convey with
the voice—sympathy—may have predecessors in the vocalizations of
great apes. Is there evidence for continuity of human emotional
vocalization with that of nonhuman species for other emotions?
Cheyney and Seyfarth (1990) described how vervet monkeys have
three main predators, and an avoidant action appropriate to each
kind (see Figure 4.15). When an eagle appears, a monkey hides in
the undergrowth; when a leopard is seen the monkey climbs a tree;
if there is a snake the monkey rears on its hind legs and looks
downward. If any monkey sees a predator, he or she makes one of
three species characteristic alarm calls appropriate to the predator.
The acoustic signal is heard by monkeys nearby, evokes the specific
kind of fear in them, and induces them to take the appropriate
evasive action.
FIGURE 4.15 Three different kinds of fearful response by
vervet monkeys to three kinds of predator.
Disa Sauter (2010) and Charles Snowdon (2003) documented
several nonhuman vocalizations that resemble those of humans.
Several species have high‐pitched alarm calls with abrupt onset and
offset times that resemble human fear vocalizations. Macaque
infants will utter coos when separated from their mothers, sounds
that resemble those that human infants make when separated from
their mothers. Macaques also emit “girns,” which are purr‐like
vocalizations that occur in the context of affiliation, and these may
have parallels in humans expressing affection. Macaques in Sri
Lanka utter a food call when they discover a source of ripe fruit,
which may resemble vocal bursts of pleasure. Dominant primates
often emit threat vocalizations that resemble angry vocalizations in
humans. And chimpanzees emit calls when copulating—the male
soft, short panting calls, the female long, loud screams—that have
parallels in humans.
Tactile Communication of Emotion
In hunter‐gatherer societies, human infants are typically in constant
contact with other humans for the first year or two of life. They are
held, soothed, tickled, clasped, breast‐fed, and carried, as their first
means by which they relate to others. One could make the case that
it is in the language of touch—the most developed sensory modality
at birth—that the human infant comes to understand emotions
within early attachments and friendships (Field, 2001; Hertenstein,
2002; Stack, 2001).
Although touch may seem astonishingly simple in its form—a hug,
or clasp of the arm, or soothing hand placed on the back—those
actions are supported by a complex system of communication
shaped by human evolution. The hand is a five‐digit wonder of
dexterity, designed to do many specific things the great ape's hands
can't do, such as make tools, symbol, gesture, and touch in nuanced
and varied ways. The skin weighs six to eight pounds and has three
layers of billions of cells, some of which function like the eye or
taste buds, receiving the touch and processing information about its
qualities. The skin sends signals to the somatosensory cortex, which
begins to represent the meaning of the touch. Touch is a rich
nonverbal language in which humans flirt, express power, soothe,
play, and maintain proximity (Eibl‐Eibesfeldt, 1989; Hertenstein et
al., 2005).
Four Functions of Touch
As we explained in Chapter 2, nonhuman primate species spend a
good deal of their time grooming, in which two individuals sit
together, sorting through each other's fur (Dunbar, 1996).
Chimpanzees, for example, can devote upward of 20 percent of their
waking hours to grooming, building affectionate relationships (de
Waal, 1989). Studies of nonhuman primate grooming and human
touch reveal four functions of this kind of contact.
The first is that the right kind of touch soothes. In one study, 30
human infants were observed during a procedure in which the
infants' heels were cut by doctors (Gray, Watt, & Blass, 2000). In
one condition, infants were held by their mothers in whole body,
skin‐to‐skin contact. In the other condition, infants received the
procedure while being swaddled in a crib. The infants who were
touched during the procedure cried 82 percent less than the
comparison infants, they grimaced 65 percent less, and they had
lower heart rate during the procedure. In nonhuman primates,
grooming reduces heart rate and displacement activities related to
stress, such as striking others (Aureli, Preston, & de Waal, 1999).
Rat pups who are handled extensively by their mothers show
reduced activity of the hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis, which is
involved in stress responses, and reduced corticosterone, a stress‐
related hormone, both immediately and when they are mature
(Francis & Meaney, 1999; Levine & Stanton, 1984; Meaney, 2001).
A second function of touch is to signal safety. This insight emerged
within the attachment literature, where researchers observed that
infants need to know whether the environment is safe, and do so by
gathering information from their parent's touch (Main, 1990). In
one study, Anisfeld and colleagues compared the attachment styles
of infants who were carried in soft infant carriers that put them in
close physical contact with their parents with infants who were
more often carried in harder infant seats (Anisfeld et al., 1990;
Weiss et al., 2000). Infants who were carried next to their parents'
bodies were more likely to be securely attached later and confident
when exploring the environment.
A third function of touch is to increase cooperation. In one study,
participants were asked to sign a petition in support of a particular
issue of importance locally (Willis & Hamm, 1980). Those
participants who were touched when asked to sign were much more
likely to comply (81%) than participants who were not touched
during the request (55%). In a recent study of touch among
professional basketball players in the National Basketball
Association, Michael Kraus and his colleagues coded all of the touch
—the high fives, fist bumps, head slaps, and bear hugs so common
on the basketball court—that each team showed during one game at
the beginning of the 2008 season (Kraus, Huang, & Keltner, 2010).
Even though each player on average touched his teammates about 2
seconds during the game, that touch proved critical to team
functioning. The more players touched each other, the more the
teams proved to be cooperative on the court (e.g., helping out in
defending the other team, making good passes to each other), and
the better the team played at the end of the season.
A final function of touch is to provide pleasure. The simple touch of
the arm with a soft velvety cloth activates the region of the
prefrontal cortex that is involved in the processing of pleasurable
tastes and smells (Berridge, 2003; Rolls, 2000, 2013). Touch
provides revealing information about the more and less rewarding
times of a marriage. Couples who have been married longer tend to
touch each other less than those in the early stages of the
relationship (Willis & Briggs, 1992), and more happily married
partners touch each other more than less happily married partners
(Beier & Sternberg, 1977). Anticipating these functions of touch,
William James (1890) observed that “Touch is the alpha and omega
of affection.”
Communicating Emotions with Touch
In a paper of 1996, Frans de Waal argued that chimpanzees use
touch as a way of expressing gratitude to each other. For de Waal,
the origins of human morality run deep and are found in emotional
exchanges, and in expressive behavior such as touch. The empirical
basis of this observation concerned food sharing. Chimpanzees will
share food preferentially with those who groomed them earlier in
the day. And chimpanzees will actively groom others who are
sharing food. Gratitude, the feeling of appreciation for things that
are given, might have its mammalian roots, according to de Waal, in
these exchanges of appreciative touch for food.
This observation raises the possibility that not only might humans
be able to communicate specific emotions with touch but also moral
emotions, such as gratitude and sympathy, so critical to
collaborative and kind relationships. To explore this possibility,
Matthew Hertenstein and his colleagues carried out the following
unusual research (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka,
2006). In the first study, an encoder (or toucher) and decoder (or
touchee) sat at a table, separated by an opaque black curtain, which
prevented communication other than touch. The encoder was given
a list of emotions and asked to make contact with the decoder on
the arm to communicate each emotion, using any form of touch.
After each touch, the decoder selected from 13 response options the
term that best described what the person was communicating. As
you can see in Figure 4.16, participants could reliably communicate
anger, disgust, and fear with a brief one‐ or two‐second touch of
another's forearm, as well as love, gratitude, and sympathy. As you
can see in the rightmost columns of Figure 4.16, participants were
more accurate in communicating emotion with touch when they
were free to touch other parts of the body than the forearm; then
they could reliably communicate happiness and .sadness
(Hertenstein et al., 2009).
FIGURE 4.16 Accuracy with which individuals can
communicate emotion by touching a stranger on the
forearm (left bars in light gray) or anywhere on the body
(dark gray to right).
Emotional Expression and the Coordination of
Social Interaction
When the ethologists analyzed the basic patterns of social
interaction in remote peoples, they arrived at a central thesis of this
book—emotional expressions shape the interactions that are
essential to social relationships. Here, we have begun to envision
how facial expressions, vocalizations, movements of the body, and
patterns of touch coordinate social interactions—the soothing of a
distressed child, the flirtation between potential suitors, status
conflicts in groups, exhilarating laughter among friends sharing
stories. Let's consider a more systematic treatment of this
possibility offered by Paula Niedenthal, Ursula Hess, and their
colleagues. They reason that within 500 milliseconds, people
respond to the emotional expressions of others with mimetic
behavior and physiological reactions, responses that trigger a
cascade of neural processes and specific cognitive and social
reactions (Niedenthal et al., 2010). For example, a warm, enjoyment
smile so typical in affiliative relationships triggers neural processes
that lead the individual to seek more information about the smile
through eye contact, and then feelings of pleasure, mimetic
behavior, and the experience of positive emotion and approach
behavior. A proud, dominant smile, by contrast, triggers the same
automatic search for information about the smile and neural
activation that leads to a sense of threat and avoidant behavior and
sense of lower social status. What's true of smiling is most certainly
true of emotional communication by voice and touch: they trigger
systematic experiences and actions in the perceiver, setting the
stage for unfolding interactions between people.
This kind of theorizing reveals that expressions of emotion
coordinate social interactions in at least three general ways
(Hess & Hareli, 2017; Keltner & Kring, 1998; van Kleef, 2015). First,
through their informative function, emotional expressions
provide rapid information not only about the sender's current
emotions but also about that individual's intentions and
relationship with the other person (Ekman, 1993; Fridlund, 1992,
2017). In this way, expressions of emotion situate people in specific
relationships. For example, anger clearly communicates strength
and dominance vis‐à‐vis others (Knutson, 1996). When individuals
express anger in the face or voice, they are perceived to have more
power and are more likely to get their way in negotiations (van
Kleef et al., 2006). Emotional expressions also carry information
about the sincerity of the sender's intentions. For example, Eva
Krumhuber and Tony Manstead and their colleagues have found
that people trust interaction partners more and will give more
resources to those partners who display authentic smiles (which
have longer onset and offset times) than fake smiles, which have
shorter onsets and offsets (Krumhuber et al., 2007). Finally,
emotional expressions convey information about the environment,
allowing individuals to coordinate their responses to outside
opportunities or threats (e.g., Klinnert et al., 1986; Sorce et al.,
1985). For example, parents use touch and voice to signal to their
young children whether other people and objects in the
environment are safe or dangerous (Hertenstein & Campos, 2004).
Emotional expressions coordinate social interactions through their
evocative function, triggering specific responses in perceivers.
For example, consider the powerful reactions an infant's cry
produces in caregivers nearby, prompting protective actions that are
a basis for enduring attachment. An infant's cry includes a long,
continuous sound accompanied by acoustic variations that in one
study were found to signal different states, including anger (when
the infant's hands were pinned down), pain (after getting a shot), or
fear (upon hearing a loud sound) (Choliz et al., 2012). Within 49
milliseconds (1/20th of a second), adults will show activation in the
periaqueductal gray region of the brain, a region you shall learn
enables sympathy and caregiving behavior, in response to a baby's
cries, but not in response to animal cries, human adult sounds, and
other control sounds (Parsons, Young, et al., 2014). When specific
genes are altered that render rat pups unable to cry, they evoke no
caregiving from their mothers, and soon perish. Yes, hearing an
infant's cry, which caregivers of infants do on average for two hours
a day, is harrowing, but through the responses crying evokes, adults
nearby are stirred to provide care and security to that most
important carrier of their genes, their offspring.
Finally, emotional displays serve incentive functions, inviting
desired social behavior. Warm smiles and touches are often used by
parents to reward behaviors in children, thus increasing the
probability of those behaviors in the future (e.g., Tronick, 1989).
Laughter from interaction partners also rewards desirable social
behavior in adults (Owren & Bachorowski, 2001). And through their
informative, evocative, and incentive functions, emotional
expressions give structure to our social interactions and
relationships.
Given these three functions of emotional expression, Oatley (2009)
proposed that emotional expressions provide outline structures for
specific kinds of relationships: when we see a smile, we feel happy
and smile back, disposed to affiliate. We see tears, we feel sad, and
are prompted to help. We see a frown, begin to feel angry, and
become prepared for the possibility of conflict and the negotiation
about something that has gone wrong in a relationship. When we
hear someone's expression of alarm, we feel frightened ourselves.
Each kind of pattern of emotional expression configures a particular
kind of relationship. Think of it like this. On the stage, an actor
learns a script, a set of words. The actor's job is to use the words and
depict character‐emotions that support certain relationships with
other characters. In ordinary life, there's something like the inverse:
emotions provide us with scripts not of words, but of relating—in
happy cooperation, in sad disengagement, in angry conflict, in
shared fear, and so on—and we supply fitting words in our
interactions with each other.
Cultural Variation in Emotional Expression
If you have traveled abroad, you may have been struck by how
similar emotional expression is in different cultures. Stroll in a
zocolo (square) in rural Mexico or market place in Thailand or wait
at a bus stop in Nigeria and you're likely to be impressed by the
many similarities in emotional expression across cultures. You'll see
children smiling and laughing as they play. Courting adolescents
reveal their affections in coy expressions. People arguing furrow
their brows or sneer in disdain in recognizable ways. In this chapter,
we have seen evidence that speaks to the universality of emotional
expression.
At the same time, you will also see cultural variation in
emotional expression. You might arrive at the notion, as did early
cultural researchers, that cultures vary profoundly in which
emotions they are more likely to express. For example, Briggs
(1970) wrote that the Inuit who live in the Canadian Arctic
(colloquially referred to as Eskimos) do not express anger. In a
similar fashion, you might become convinced that people from a
certain culture seems to be more emotionally expressive. Consider
one such study: friends were observed conversing with one another
for 15 minutes, and in Puerto Rico those friends touched each other
110 times, whereas in England the friends never touched! (Jourard,
1966).
Cultural Variation in Expressive Behavior
Researchers have identified three ways that members of different
cultures vary in their emotional expression. First, members of
different cultures vary in the intensity of the emotional expression,
in particular of those emotions that are more focal in the culture.
For example, Tracy and Matsumoto (2008) found, in their study of
the emotional expressions of Olympic athletes, that competitors
from more collectivist cultures expressed more intense shame
displays (head droops, postural constrictions) upon losing, which is
consistent with the more pronounced emphasis on modesty and not
standing out in collectivist cultures. Guided by her thesis that
cultures will express emotions they value more with more intense
expressive behavior (see Chapter 3), Jeanne Tsai and her colleagues
documented that US government officials, business executives, and
university leaders smile with more intense and excited smiles than
leaders in China (Tsai et al., 2016).
A second way in which members of different cultures vary in their
expression is how they regulate their expressive behavior
according to culture‐specific display rules. Recall in Chapter 3 we
learned that people are much more likely to suppress the expression
of emotion in highly collectivist cultures like Japan (e.g.,
Matsumoto et al., 2009). This is in keeping with the notion, more
pronounced in collectivist cultures, that emotional expression
makes the individual stand out and potentially disrupts social
harmony by imposing upon others.
Finally, recent studies reveal that cultures develop unique dialects
in which they express emotions in culturally specific ways. To
understand how this is so, Hillary Elfenbein and Ursula Hess have
offered their emotion dialect theory (Elfenbein et al., 2007).
They reason that emotional expression is likely to function much
like language, such as English. Namely, languages have elements—
select phonemes, words, forms of syntax—shared by its speakers, as
well as dialects, or specific variations of the language, in sound and
word use that are specific to a geographical region. For example,
although standard English is common to the English people,
speakers from different regions, for instance, London or the
Midlands, speak their own dialects, with unique words, phrases, and
accents and forms of prosody.
In extending this idea of dialect to emotional expression, Hess and
Elfenbein predicted that people of different cultures will express
emotions with prototypical elements of the expression, but develop
shared and culturally specific ways of expressing each emotion. As
one concrete example, whereas across different cultures people
recognize embarrassment in its prototypical display—the downward
gaze, inhibited smile, head turn, and face touch—throughout much
of Southeast Asia, the tongue bite and shoulder shrug combine to
form an emotional dialect that expresses embarrassment (Haidt &
Keltner, 1999).
Several recent studies speak to the prevalence of cultural variations
in dialects in emotional expression. In these studies, people from
different cultures, including Canada, Africa, India, Japan, South
Korea, China, and the United States, were given a definition of
different emotions or a situation likely to produce the emotion, and
then asked to express the emotion with any behavior that felt
natural (e.g., Cordaro et al., 2017; Hess et al., 2007; Laukka et al.,
2016). These patterns of expression were then analyzed for their
specific facial and bodily movements, identifying what is universal
and how prevalent culturally specific dialects are. A first
generalization is just how pervasive emotion dialects are. In one
study that looked at expressions of 22 emotions, every emotion was
found to have a dialect specific to the culture, and about 25 percent
of an individual's expressive behavior across emotions was a dialect
(whereas 50% of an individual's expressive behavior adhered to the
universal prototype) (Cordaro et al., 2017). Second, it looks as
though dialects are more likely to emerge for emotions that are
more directly involved in social interactions, such as anger,
happiness, or shame, than emotions that are less directly involved
in social interactions, such as disgust or fear (Elfenbein et al.,
2007). It would seem that the emotions that are more highly social
may vary more across cultures.
Cultural Variation in the Interpretation of Emotional
Expression
Emotional expressions signal information about the sender's
intention, their relationship to others, and their appraisals of people
and objects in the environment. Given that cultures develop specific
belief systems about emotion, intentions, traits, selves, and
relationships, one is likely to observe considerable variation in the
interpretation of the meaning of an emotional expression (Barrett
et al., 2011). In keeping with this thinking, individuals from
different cultures differ in the emotional intensity that they
attribute to facial expressions of emotion (Matsumoto & Ekman,
1989). For example, Japanese participants tend to attribute less
intense emotion than Americans to all facial expressions of emotion
(Biehl et al., 1997; Matsumoto et al., 2002; Matsumoto et al., 1999).
Why might these differences occur? Matsumoto et al. (1999)
compared American and Japanese judgments of the intensity of the
outward display and of the inner experience. Japanese people
assumed that the display and inner experience of emotion were the
same. Americans, in contrast, indicated that the external display of
emotion was more intense than the inner experience, consistent
with the emphasis in the United States on expressing feelings (see
also Matsumoto et al., 2009, discussed in Chapter 3).
Reflection and Cultivation: Improving Your
Emotional Intelligence
In this chapter, you have learned about the languages of the face,
voice, and touch, through which we communicate emotion.
Throughout this book, you will learn how central emotional
communication is to social adjustment. People who have
pronounced abilities to communicate emotion and perceive
emotion, who have high levels of emotional intelligence, fare
well in all manner of relationships (see Chapter 9). People who
struggle to read the emotions of others, like children with
Autism, have difficulties with social adjustment.
Given these findings, we suggest the following. Do you want to
get a sense of how good you are at reading facial expression and
vocalization? Go to the website greatergood.berekeley.edu and
take the emotional intelligence quiz, as millions of others have.
See how well you do. Which emotions proved hard to judge for
you, if any? Why? What did you learn about how emotion is
communicated in the face and voice?
As we discussed in the previous chapter, members of collectivist
cultures tend to rely on more contextual information in
constructing the meaning of emotional expressions, a tendency in
keeping with the more general tendency for people to look to the
social context rather than inside the individual to make sense of
behavior.
Culture shapes the brain's responses people show to emotional
expressions, in ways that are in keeping with cultural differences in
the valuing of emotions. BoKyung Park and their colleagues
presented images of more intense, excited smiles and less intense,
calm smiles to Chinese and European American students while
their brains were being scanned (Park et al., 2016). In keeping with
Jeanne Tsai's theorizing about the cultural valuation of emotion,
the Chinese students showed greater activation in reward‐related
circuits—the ventral striatum and caudate—in response to the calm
smiles, whereas the US students showed more reward‐related
activation in response to the excited smiles.
Communication of Emotion in Art
In the experience of some of your emotions, you may feel drawn to
artistic expression. In a state of despair or longing, you might feel
inclined to write a story, play the guitar, or paint abstract patterns.
When euphoric about a new loved‐one, you might write poetry or
songs, or find cinematic images arising in your mind. Art is a kind of
communication. Unlike a smile or a grumble, however, which are
ephemeral, art persists in time and can travel beyond its place of
inception (Oatley, 2003). Unlike flint tools, or saucepans, or
computers, or bicycles, which are made to be useful, works of art are
often thought of as expressions of emotion that attain cultural
significance.
Art emerged in human evolution relatively recently, long after the
emergence of language. A factory for making ochre, used for
painting bodies or objects in the spirit of beautification, has been
found that is 100,000 years old (Henshilwood et al., 2011). The
oldest human art objects, shells drilled to make beads for necklaces,
are from 82,000 years ago (Bouzouggar et al., 2007). Neanderthals
also made such necklaces; Hoffmann et al. (2018) found traces of
these from even older times. Such ornaments speak, perhaps, to an
emotional interest in aesthetics and beauty.
The evidence of ritual burials from around 40,000 years ago
(Bowler et al., 2003) implies that by then emotionally moving
stories were being told of people who were dead but alive again on
another plane of existence. The earliest known human cave
paintings date back to 31,000 years. (Chauvet, Deschamps, &
Hillaire, 1996). Attraction to paintings and other works of art is now
thought to be subject to emotionally evolved preferences (Dutton,
2009; Kawabata & Zeki, 2004). The emotionally important
communication of music is at least 43,000 years old as shown by
the finding of a flute of that age (Huron, 2003).
As Mithen (1996, 2001) puts it, signs such as these indicate the
cognitive ability for metaphor. A metaphor often links something
immediate and something imagined, so when Shakespeare's Hamlet
said, “Denmark's a prison,” Denmark was present but the prison
was that of his imagination. Unlike useful objects, which are what
they are, objects of art are both what they are and are something
else. A shell is both a shell and a bead for a necklace. A cave painting
is both a set of marks on a wall and a rhinoceros or an auroch (an
extinct species of a type of wild cattle). Human burial indicates that
someone is both dead and alive in some way or in one's memory,
and stories about this person may be told. Such artistic products
have emotional significance.
Art differs widely from society to society, from epics of ancient
Babylon, to the legends of the Bhagavad Gita, to the bronzes of
Benin, to the jazz of New Orleans. It has long been believed that in
expressing our emotions in art, we come to understand them more
deeply. As the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham put it:
“The difference between the artist and the non‐artist is not the
greater capacity for feeling. The secret is that the artist can objectify,
can make apparent the feelings we all have” (cit. Gardner, 1993, p.
298).
Four Hypotheses from the Idea of Romanticism
This notion—that art is about the expression of feeling—was the
central theme of the intellectual and historical movement of
Romanticism (Oatley, 2003), which we discussed in the previous
chapter, and which we will use to organize our treatment, here of
emotional expression in art. The Romantic idea translates into four
hypotheses about the communication of emotion in art.
As Collingwood (1938) argued in The Principles of Art, sometimes
we experience emotions that we do not consciously understand, and
this prompts us to explore them by expressing them in a language,
for instance of words of poetry, prose, or screenplay, or in music, or
in painting, or sculpture. In that way we can better understand these
inchoate emotions, and those who engage in the art can do so in a
kind of resonance with it. So this is the first hypothesis of the
Romantic idea: sometimes the meanings of emotions are unclear,
when we also know these emotions are important. Does this happen
to you? Oatley and Duncan (1992) found that the proportion of
everyday emotion incidents recorded in structured diaries that had
some aspect that participants did not understand varied between 5
and 25 percent in different samples.
A second claim of the Romantic idea is that this exploration
involves creative expression. Emotions tend to occur when
expectations are not met, or when plans meet vicissitudes, when we
have no ready answer to some pressing concern. Thus, they often
demand a creative response (Averill & Nunley, 1992). Art is a
creative activity of expressing, and thereby understanding, such
emotions. Djkic, Oatley, and Peterson (2006) found by comparing
the words used in interviews by fiction writers and physicists that
the writers were preoccupied by emotions, particularly negative
emotions, in ways that the physicists were not. To investigate
further the relation of emotions to creativity, Csikszentmihalyi
(1996) and his students interviewed 91 exceptionally creative
people, including many artists. One of the themes that emerged is
indeed that creative expression arises out of emotional experience.
Here, for instance, is an excerpt from Hilde Domin, a leading
German poet, in her seventies at the time of the interview. In her
poetry, she says:
[The emotion] gets fulfilled, I guess. You know what was in you,
and you can look at it now. And it is a kind of catalyst … You are
freed for a time from the emotion. And the next reader will take
the place of the author, isn't it so? If he identifies with the
writing he will become, in his turn, the author.
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 245)
A third hypothesis that derives from the Romantic idea is that
artistic expression often itself takes on themes and dynamic forms
of emotions. For example, if you take to painting while enraged in
the aftermath of a bitter breakup, your painting might have
emotional tones of your rage and despair. Fiction that you write
about a tragic childhood might center upon themes of loss and
longing.
Further evidence of this third proposition, not so much in terms of
themes as of dynamics, has been offered for music by Gabrielsson
and Juslin (2001) and Juslin and Laukka (2003). They observed
that the voice and music share many emotionally expressive
properties, with acoustic features that the performer enacts, such as
tempo, loudness, timbre, and pitch. This may account for how
instruments such as the violin, cello, organ, slide guitar, and
saxophone can resemble the human voice. In the words of the
famous composer Richard Wagner, “the oldest, truest, most
beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes
its being, is the human voice.” The philosopher Susan Langer
arrived at a similar conclusion: “Because the forms of human
feeling are much more congruent with musical forms than with
forms of language, music can reveal the nature of feelings with a
detail and truth that language cannot approach” (1957, p. 235).
In an analysis of the cues that people use to infer emotion from the
voice and music, Juslin and Laukka (2003) found support for the
claim that emotion is communicated in the voice and in music with
similar acoustic parameters. They found that tempo, loudness, and
pitch were used by listeners of vocal communication and music
alike to infer that anger, sadness, happiness, and tenderness were
being communicated. More recently, Talia Wheatley and her
colleagues have found that people in dramatically different cultures,
including a remote community in Cambodia, use the same dynamic
qualities (direction, size, rate, smoothness) to create music and
animated movements to express several emotions (Wheatley et al.,
2013).
A fourth hypothesis inspired by Romanticism is that readers or
spectators of art should experience emotions that are
communicated in art. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in
Stories (Oatley, 2012) is about how fiction embodies themes both of
characters' emotions and of the reader's own emotions. It is a hybrid
book: a seven‐part novella written for the book, together with
psychological discussions of the emotions of each part.
People respond emotionally to the emotional content of art (e.g.,
Lipps, 1962). We experience the emotions of protagonists in novels
or films based on human action (Tan, 1996). We soar toward the
heavens in the vaulted space of a great cathedral. Kreitler and
Kreitler (1972) have even found that 84 percent of the time visitors
to museums will unwittingly imitate in their bodies the postures
conveyed in sculptures.
How accurate are we in recognizing the emotion communicated in
art? Within the domain of music, Gabrielsson and Juslin (2003)
and Juslin and Laukka (2003) reviewed studies in which a
performer was asked to sing a brief melody with no words and
attempt to communicate anger, fear, happiness, sadness, joy, and,
on occasion, tenderness or love. The listener was then asked, in a
forced choice paradigm, to choose the word from a list of words that
best matches the emotion conveyed in the performance. Across over
a dozen studies of this kind, listeners on average achieved accuracy
rates of about 70 percent, which is comparable to the accuracy with
which we perceive emotion in the face and voice.
Aesthetic Emotions in the Natyasastra
Are there benefits to understanding and feeling the emotions
expressed in art? The possibility that our health and well‐being are
enhanced through emotional expression in art is supported by
recent studies of how people benefit from arts therapy (Stuckey &
Nobel, 2010). With increasing frequency, people suffering from
depression, or at risk for dementia, or an abusive marriage, or who
are grappling with cancer or other diseases, are given the
opportunity for arts therapy. They can paint to represent their
disease, such as a heart condition. Or they can listen to music in
hospital or group therapy settings. Or they might write poetry to
represent a trauma in the family. Or the elderly might be provided
the opportunity to dance or practice Tai Chi in a nursing home.
These therapies are now being studied systematically, and a review
of this evidence suggests that expressing emotion through art
reduces anxiety, increases calm, can lead to better physiological
profiles (e.g., reduced blood pressure), and can bring enhanced
community and a sense of well‐being (for review, see Stuckey &
Nobel, 2010).
As you will recall from Chapter 1, Aristotle offered one analysis of
the healing benefits of expressing emotion through art in his
formulation of katharsis, wherein he reasoned that drama
expresses many of the universal predicaments and conditions of
humanity, and these meanings could be clarified. In drama, people
suffer, they face mortal danger, they fall in love, they encounter
infidelity, they strive for difficult goals. In viewing dramatic
expressions of emotion, the spectator arrives at a clearer
understanding of his or her own emotions. Freud arrived at a
similar view, arguing that art allows us to express aspects of inner
emotional conflicts in disguised forms that allow some satisfaction
of expression while avoiding censure (1904/1985).
What about the everyday benefits of art, when we are not suffering
from more acute physical or psychological conditions? Juslin and
his colleagues randomly beeped people on their cell phones during
the day and found that about 40 percent of the time young adults
were listening to music, and most typically felt contentment,
perhaps due to insights they gained into their own emotions (Juslin
et al., 2008). Mar, Oatley, and Peterson (2009) found that the more
fiction (but not nonfiction) people read, the greater was their
empathy for others; the effect was not due to empathetic people
being more likely to read fiction. This effect has now been replicated
many times (Oatley, 2016).
One of the most sophisticated treatments of emotional expression
in art is found in a Hindu‐Indian treatise, the Natyasastra,
attributed to Bharata from around the second‐century BC (Bharata
Muni, 200 BC). In this text, there are specific descriptions of how
actors and dancers are to express emotions in performance.
Hejmadi, Davidson, and Rozin (2000) presented participants in
India and the United States with videotapes of Hejmadi's own
renditions in dance of 10 different emotions (she performed as a
dancer in India for 20 years). The performances largely involved
face and hand movements for: anger, disgust, fear, heroism, humor,
love, peace, sadness, lajya (embarrassment/shyness/ modesty), and
wonder. Each video clip lasted between 4 and 10 seconds.
Remarkably, in both forced choice and free response exercises,
observers were well above chance, achieving accuracy rates between
61 and 69 percent, in judging the 10 emotions communicated with
dance and gesture.
In the Natyasastra, Bharata also discusses the theory of rasas,
which are distinct aesthetic emotions. They have recently been
discussed in Western theories of emotions (Hogan, 1996; Oatley,
2004c; Shweder & Haidt, 2000). Each rasa corresponds to an
everyday emotion. But the idea of the ancient theorists was that in a
rasa one would be able to experience and understand more clearly,
without—as they put it—being blinded by our usual thick crust of
egotism that covers our eyes. In Indian texts on rasas, the usual
mapping is between everyday emotions and rasas.
Pursuing our interest in communication in this chapter, we have
taken a slight liberty with this tradition in Table 4.3, in which we list
emotions as enacted by an actor, the Sanskrit name of the
corresponding rasa, and its approximate translation to indicate
what would be experienced by the spectator. Seeing an actor
suffering and sorrowful, for example, produces an aesthetic emotion
of compassion, though because it is an aesthetic emotion it also
includes the pleasure of understanding and insight. Seeing a
performer persevere against all odds—a frequent theme in stories—
inspires a heroic feeling in the spectator. A recent movement in
Western theater has been to train actors in the theory of rasas
(Schechner, 2001). You may also like to observe that each emotional
theme in Table 4.3 corresponds to a particular genre (love story,
comedy, tragedy, and so on).
TABLE 4.4
Emotions as performed by actors, rasas, and English
translations of them as aesthetic emotions that
spectators may experience
Performer's emotion Rasa
Spectator's emotion
Sexual passion
sringara
Love
Amusement
hasya
Amusement
Sorrow
karuna
Compassion
Anger
raudra
Anger
Fear
bhayanaka
Terror
Perseverance
vira
Heroism
Disgust
bibhatsa
Loathing
Wonder
adbhuta santa Awe
Within the Natyasastra's analysis of aesthetic emotion is the
possibility that in viewing the artistic portrayal of emotion, we are
free of the burdens of the ego and find aesthetic delight. This
possibility has intrigued scientists working in a new discipline
known as neuroaesthetics (e.g., Zeki, 2004). A recent review of how
our brains respond to different forms of art, from paintings to
sculpture to dance, highlights the prescient wisdom of the
Natyasastra that there is something special in the appreciation of
artistic portrayals of emotion (Kirsch, Urgesi, & Cross, 2015).
Studies within this tradition find that when viewing art our sensory
and perceptual regions of the brain are activated, as one would
expect, but so too are two areas. A first involves regions you will
learn of later such as the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal
cortex, which are involved in our experiences of reward and delight.
A second is the motor cortex area that enables specific physical
action. In viewing the artistic expression of emotion, then, we find
delight and the impulse to our own action.
Emotions, then, are communicated in everyday life, but these
communications are usually ephemeral. So important are emotions
to us, however, that artists have devised many forms of expression
that communicate emotions in longer‐lasting ways that enable us to
experience them in new ways and to reflect on them.
SUMMARY
In this chapter we examined the communication of emotion in the
face, voice, and touch, as well as in art. We began by breaking down
the realm of nonverbal behavior into five categories: emblems,
illustrators, regulators, adaptors, and emotion displays. We
considered how emotion displays, such as smiles of enjoyment,
differ from nonemotional expressions, like polite smiles, in terms of
duration and incorporation of involuntary actions. We then
considered the different ways that humans communicate emotion.
We reviewed the studies of the universality of facial expression of
emotion. We considered how vocal communication permeates
communicative acts like laughter and how people communicate
emotion in the voice. We then turned to a less well‐studied channel
of emotional communication: touch. From the first moments of life,
touch functions to soothe, to signal safety, to gain compliance, and
as a reward, and recent evidence suggests that humans can
communicate several different emotions with brief touches to the
arm, including love, gratitude, and sympathy. We next considered
how emotional expression shapes social interactions and varies
across cultures. Finally, we considered how emotion is
communicated in art, exploring this question from the perspective
of Romanticism. This perspective suggests four propositions:
emotions that we don't fully understand motivate us to explore their
meaning, this exploration is creative, artistic expression often takes
on themes and qualities of expressive channels such as the voice,
and observers experience emotions in engaging with art. We
concluded this chapter with a discussion of the ancient Indian text,
the Natyasastra, and its portrayal of how emotion is expressed in
dance and drama and the nature of aesthetic emotion.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. Spend 10 minutes observing interactions in a group of friends,
and take note of the different emblems, illustrators, regulators,
and adaptors that you observe. What did you see?
2. Think about Darwin's principle of serviceable habits. How would
you use this principle to explain why we express a particular
emotion as we do; try this for disgust, or embarrassment, or
gratitude.
3. Consider a favorite piece of music. What insights has it given
you into your emotions?
FURTHER READING
For Ekman's view of facial expression of emotion:
Ekman, P. (1993). Facial expression and emotion. American
Psychologist, 48, 384–392.
For many recent approaches to facial expression:
Russell, J., & Fernandez Dols, J‐M. (2017). Facial expression. New
York: Oxford University Press.
For a more recent evolutionary perspective on emotional
expression:
Shariff, A. F., & Tracy, J. L. (2011). What are emotion expressions
for? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 395–399.
For an extensive review of facial expression:
Keltner, D., Sauter, D., Tracy, J., McNeil, G., & Cordaro, D.T. (2016).
Expression. In L. F. Barrett (Ed.), Handbook of emotion. (pp.
467–482). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
For a review of how emotions are communicated in musical
performance:
Juslin, P. N. (2010). Expression and communication of emotion in
music performance. In P. N. Juslin & J. A. Sloboda (Eds.),
Handbook of music and emotion (pp. 453–489). New York:
Oxford University Press.
For a recent consideration of emotional expression in fiction:
Oatley, K. (2016). Fiction: Simulation of social worlds. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, 20, 618–628.
For a recent study on the vocal expression of emotion:
Laukka, P., Elfenbein, H. A., Thingujam, N. S., Rockstuhl, T., Iraki,
F. K., Chui, W., & Althoff, J. (2016). The expression and
recognition of emotions in the voice across five cultures: A lens
model analysis based on acoustic features. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 111, 686–705.
5
Bodily Changes and Emotions
CONTENTS
Early Theorizing About Emotion and Bodily Changes
Emotion and the Autonomic Nervous System
Directed Facial Action and Physiological Differentiation of
Negative Emotion
Autonomic Response and Positive Emotion
Vagal Tone and Compassion
The Blush
The Chills
Emotion and the Neuroendocrine System
The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis
Emotion and the Immune System
The Inflammation Response
Bodily Changes and Emotional Experience
Representations of Emotions in the Body Interoception
Embodiment, Cognition, and Social Interaction
Gut Feelings and Decision Making
Embodied Empathy
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 5.0 Bernini: St. Teresa. Of this sculpture
Gombrich (1972, p. 345) says that Bernini has “carried us
to a pitch of emotion which artists had so far shunned.”
A cold sweat covers me, and trembling seizes me all over.
Sappho (circa 580 BCE)
In 1977 the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched into space from Cape
Canaveral Florida, designed to fly by Jupiter and Saturn and
eventually leave our solar system. Today, just over 40 years later,
the spacecraft is over 13 billion miles from where you are sitting
reading this book.
Contained within the Voyager 1 is the Golden Record. This album
includes sounds and images selected by a committee led by renown
astronomer Carl Sagan, whose charge was to represent life on Earth,
in the event that the Voyager 1 ever cross paths with extraterrestrial
life. On the Golden Record are explanations of DNA and sexual
reproduction, the very foundation of life. The record has images of
insects, plants, and animals, and sounds of different mammals,
examples of the Earth's biodiversity. In the spirit of human
ethology, there are images of people doing everyday things, from
eating to playing with children. To capture human culture, there are
photographs of buildings, maps, and pages from important books,
some mathematics, as well as a variety of musical selections, from
the music of Mozart to Chuck Berry's “Johnny B Goode.”
The Golden Record also includes an hour of recordings of the brain
and heart rate activity of Ann Druyan, who helped design the record.
More specifically, you can see images of the patterns of activation in
her brain and heart as she experienced different emotions, including
her love for Dr. Sagan, with whom she had joined during the making
of the album. Should extraterrestrial life ever listen to the Golden
Record, perhaps they would learn something about human emotion
by looking at the recordings of the heart as one woman thought of
her new love.
The idea that our emotions—in Druyan's case love—are based in
bodily changes is an old one. In many languages people speak of
emotions as being located in the heart, or the liver, or the stomach.
Metaphors for emotion—“butterflies in the stomach,” “broken
heart”—are suggestive of this possibility as well, that emotions are
represented in changes in the body.
As you will recall from Chapter 1, this idea received its most
systematic early treatment by William James. His argument, that
bodily changes make up the experience of emotion, yields three
questions that are at the heart of this chapter. The first is simple
conceptually, but difficult empirically. Is there emotion‐specific
activation in bodily systems? A second is: to what extent is the
experience of emotion based on activation of different bodily
systems? And, finally, to what extent do the bodily responses of
emotion serve as guides to our social thought and behavior?
Early Theorizing About Emotion and Bodily
Changes
William James corresponded regularly with his brother, Henry, who
became famous as a novelist. Their letters often refer to their
physical ills and bodily sensations—vivid descriptions of back pains,
upset stomachs, muscle tension, tingly veins, and bodily fatigue.
The two brothers' near obsession with physical sensations provides
a personal clue to an idea that William James proposed, in 1884,
that would turn the field of research on emotions on its head.
Most writers until that time had argued that the experience of an
emotion is a response to an emotionally exciting event. Emotional
experience, in turn, generates emotion‐related bodily changes,
including actions in the social context. James altered this sequence,
and (as we described in Chapter 1) located the origins of emotional
experience in the body. For him, the sequence was: (a) exciting
event, (b) bodily responses to the event, and (c) perception of these
bodily responses as the experience of emotion. This would prove to
be a controversial thesis, the repercussions of which continue today.
Poets have known for more than 2,500 years that bodily changes
such as heart palpitations, sweats, trembling, heart flutters, blushes
and flushes, muscular tension, muscle movements, tears, and chills
are involved in our experience of emotion. Yet James would take
this idea further. He contended that every emotion, from anger to
sympathy to the awe or ecstasy you might feel at a concert of your
favorite band, involves a distinct “bodily reverberation.” The bodily
responses James considered are myriad and include patterns of
breathing, blood flow, heart palpitations, trembles, and goosebumps
as well as activities of glands such as the lacrimal glands that
produce tears. Muscle movements of different kinds, when we
prepare for fleeing or to strike or crouch or embrace, are involved.
So too, James posited, are organs such as the liver and stomach.
Emotion is the perception of such reverberations in all the different
systems of the body that lie below our brainstem (Price & Harmon‐
Jones, 2015).
How did James arrive at this view? Largely through thought
experiments. He asked his reader: What would be left of fear or love
or embarrassment, or any emotion if you took away the
physiological sensations such as the heart palpitations, trembling,
muscle tensions, sensations in the skin, and blush? A purely
intellectual state, James reasoned. Emotion would be absent. As
another kind of evidence, James noted that people in mental
asylums suffer from “unmotived” emotions such as fear, anger, or
sadness; their bodies produce responses that lead to intense
emotions in the absence of any event in the environment. For
James, “our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame.”
James's theorizing was not without its early critics. Walter Cannon
was first a student, then a colleague, of William James at Harvard
University. He was unconvinced by James's arguments about
emotion (Cannon, 1927, 1929). He proposed that bodily changes are
produced by the brain and that many different emotions involve
exactly the same general activation of the sympathetic autonomic
nervous system, an alternative hypothesis we shall soon consider.
Cannon offered several more specific critiques of James's theorizing
that are worth bearing in mind as we consider the evidence on
emotion and bodily changes. Specifically, Cannon argued that bodily
responses associated with emotion—shifts in heart rate, shallower
breathing, sweaty palms, goosebumps—are too nonspecific to
account for the many distinctions people make in their emotional
experience, for instance, between gratitude, compassion, love,
desire, triumph, and pride. Cannon questioned whether we are
sensitive enough to the changes in our bodily systems to give rise to
our experience of emotion. This question has spawned a literature
we will consider that centers upon “interoception”—the sensitivity
to internal events in the body, and how this sensitivity shapes
emotional experience. The specificity and nuance of different
emotions, Cannon contended, was to be found not in the body, but
in the brain.
Now, over 130 years later, we know that emotional experience arises
both in the body and in the brain. Understanding these mind–body
connections is the focus of our next two chapters.
Significant Figure: William James
William James was born in 1842, eldest of five talented children.
William's father, a dreamer, a bit of a crank, a man of leisure
with independent means, had inherited from his own Irish
immigrant father a large house in New York, where William was
born. William's mother Mary was the practical one of the family.
His brother Henry, born in 1843, became one of the world's great
novelists, while his only sister, Alice, as talented as her brothers,
was not able to overcome the barriers to women in that period,
and declined into chronic health ailments and invalidism. The
family led an affectionate but chaotic life, with a potpourri of
educational experiences for the children, including a procession
of governesses and tutors, long stays in Europe, and periods in
private experimental schools. At the age of 18, William studied
art for a year, and then took up chemistry. Two years later he
changed to medicine, gaining an MD degree in 1869. He obtained
an instructor's post in physiology at Harvard in 1872.
In 1878, a turning point occurred: he met Alice Gibbens who
introduced a degree of organization into his life, shared his
interests, and helped him concentrate his energies. From then
on, his hypochondria, which had been disabling, decreased. In
1885, James became Professor of Philosophy. He was the
founder of American Psychology, and influenced the
philosophical school of Pragmatism, whose adherents included
John Dewey. James was an amiable, tolerant, widely read man,
with a gift for thoughtful literary expression. His Principles of
Psychology is regarded still as the best textbook that psychology
has had.
Besides his Principles of Psychology, James's theory of emotions
as end‐points, as experiences of bodily changes that occur as a
result of actions, is the work for which he is best known. It has
continued to be influential, but not many Jamesians will tell you
that James himself seemed to give up his own theory. In his only
large‐scale research project, which he published in 1902 as
Varieties of Religious Experience, there is nothing of his theory
of emotions as end‐points. Instead, in this book, James found
that in religious conversions emotions are causes. They are
prime‐movers by which people could change their identities and
their lives (Oatley & Djikic, 2002).
Emotion and the Autonomic Nervous System
When William James wrote of “bodily reverberations,” he was
referring to what scientists call the autonomic nervous system, the
neuroendocrine system, and the immune system. Here we first
consider the autonomic nervous system and its role in human
emotion.
As you can see in Figure 5.1, the autonomic nervous system consists
of two branches that receive neural signals from regions of the
cortex, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus, among other areas in
the brain. Broadly speaking, the autonomic nervous system
maintains conditions in the body through activities such as blood
flow, glucose production, and digestion that enable different kinds
of action, from soothing to fight or flight to affiliation and sexual
behavior (Mendes, 2016).
FIGURE 5.1 Anatomical
autonomic nervous system.
diagram
of
the
human
The parasympathetic autonomic nervous system consists of
nerves that originate at the top and bottom of the spinal cord. The
parasympathetic system decreases heart rate and blood pressure. It
facilitates blood flow by dilating certain arteries. It increases blood
flow to erectile tissue in the penis and clitoris, and thus is essential
to the sexual response. It increases digestive processes by moving
digested food through the gastrointestinal tract. The
parasympathetic system also constricts the pupil and bronchioles. It
stimulates the secretion of various fluids throughout the body,
including those in the digestive glands, salivation, and tears. It is
thought to play a role in digestion, relaxation, and social connection,
as we shall see.
The sympathetic autonomic nervous system involves over a
dozen neural pathways originating in middle of the spinal cord. It
increases heart rate, blood pressure, and cardiac output. It produces
vasoconstriction in most arteries. It shuts down digestive processes
and is associated with contractions in the reproductive organs that
are part of orgasm. The sympathetic system leads to the contraction
of the piloerector muscles that surround the hairs on the arms, neck
and back, which helps with thermoregulation (and is involved in
experiences of awe). And it increases many processes that provide
energy for the body, including the freeing of fatty acids in the blood
stream, and reduces activity of natural killer cells, which are
involved in immune responses. Given these effects, many have
argued that the sympathetic system helps prepare the body for
fight or flight responses.
With ever‐increasing precision, psychologists measure the
autonomic nervous system in over 30 different ways, in setups such
as that seen in Figure 5.2 (Kreibig, 2010; Mendes, 2016). Given that
20 different neural bundles of the ANS produce so many changes
throughout the body, James thesis of emotion‐specific physiology is
plausible: perhaps emotions have distinct patterns in this complex
system of the body (Janig, 2003). Let's now turn to the evidence.
FIGURE 5.2 In this setup in Robert Levenson's
laboratory, two participants' autonomic physiology is
recorded as they talk with each other. Receptors help
gather measures of participants' activity, heart rate,
pulse in the finger and ear, galvanic sweat response in the
finger, skin temperature, and respiration.
Directed Facial Action and Physiological Differentiation
of Negative Emotion
In the 1970s, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen developed the Facial
Action Coding System, an anatomically based coding system that
identifies the activity of facial muscle movements based on changes
in the visible appearance of the face. In doing this, they devoted
thousands of hours to moving their facial muscles, noting how
these movements created new creases, wrinkles, dimples, bulges,
and changes to the appearance of the face. In the course of this
detailed work, Ekman noticed the following: moving facial muscles
changed how he felt. When he furrowed the brow, his heart rate
seemed to increase and his blood pressure rose. When he wrinkled
the nose and stuck out the tongue, his heart seemed to slow down.
Might moving facial muscles into emotion configurations produce
specific autonomic activity? Both Darwin and James had written of
this possibility; now the field needed an empirical test.
To examine this possibility, Robert Levenson and his colleagues
developed the directed facial action task (Ekman, Levenson, &
Friesen, 1983; Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990). They had
participants follow muscle‐by‐muscle instructions to configure their
faces into the six different expressions of the emotions that Ekman
and Friesen had studied in New Guinea. For one expression,
participants were instructed to do the following (Try it yourself):
1. Wrinkle your nose.
2. Raise your upper lip.
3. Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.
Once participants had made the pose in a fashion that conformed to
the emotional expression (which took some coaching), they held the
expression for 10 seconds. As they did so, four measures of
autonomic activity were gathered and compared to a control
condition. Table 5.1 presents results from one study using this task.
TABLE 5.1
Emotion‐related changes in autonomic
observed in the directed facial action task
physiology
Source: Adapted from Levenson et al. (1990).
Anger Fear Sad Disgust Smile Surprise
Heart rate (BPM)
5.0
5.5
4.2
.70
2.4
.20
Finger temperature
.20
−.05
.07
.07
.01
.01
Galvanic skin
response
.41
.58
.43
.52
.07
.07
Muscle activity
–.01
.01
−.01
.01
.01
.00
Let's put these results in the context of competing hypotheses about
physiological specificity. One hypothesis, in part inspired by
Cannon, is that negative emotions—anger, disgust, fear, and sadness
in this study—all involve increased arousal in the sympathetic
autonomic nervous system. By contrast, three findings portrayed in
Table 5.1 point to some physiological specificity for the negative
emotions. First, increases in heart rate occurred for fear, anger, and
sadness, but not for disgust. Second, galvanic skin response (the
measure of sweat activity) was greater for fear and disgust than for
anger and sadness. Third, finger temperature was greater for anger
than fear, because in anger blood flows freely to the hands (perhaps
to aid in combat), whereas during fear blood remains near the chest
to support flight‐related locomotion. These distinctions challenge a
one‐arousal‐fits‐all model of autonomic activity and negative
emotion (although see Cacioppo, Klein, Berntson, & Hatfield, 1993
for critique).
Guided by an evolutionist perspective, Levenson and Ekman
conducted a similar directed facial action study with the
Minangkabau, a matrilineal people in West Sumatra, Indonesia
(Levenson, Ekman, Heider, & Friesen, 1992). For the most part, they
observed similar autonomic changes associated with four negative
emotions. Subsequent studies have replicated these emotion‐
specific autonomic patterns in elderly adults, although interestingly,
in general, elderly adults (aged 65 and above) showed attenuated
autonomic responses (Levenson, Carstensen, Friesen, & Ekman,
1991). Perhaps the wisdom people achieve as they age and the
greater happiness that they enjoy is in part the result of the quieting
of emotion‐related physiology.
The DFA is but one approach to studying autonomic specificity of
negative emotion. Sylvia Kreibig has reviewed over 130 other
relevant studies (Kreibig, 2010). In these studies, participants were
led to experience emotion through viewing short film clips, or
slides, or by imagining emotionally evocative situations, or engaging
in an emotionally charged interaction with someone else, for
example, being insulted or harassed. In her synthesis of these
studies, Kreibig likewise concludes that there are differences in the
autonomic patterns of anger, disgust, sadness, and fear (although
see Siegel et al., 2018).
Autonomic Response and Positive Emotion
What about positive emotions, such as amusement, contentment, or
awe? In her review, Kreibig notes intriguing differences in the
autonomic patterns of positive emotions (Kreibig, 2010). Consider a
couple and see if they correspond to your own experience.
Contentment is associated with reduced heart rate, drops in blood
pressure, a slowing of breathing, and an absence of the sweaty
palms produced by the electrodermal response—in sum, a state of
bodily calm. Amusement shows a similar drop in heart rate but
blood pressure is actually high—reflective of the tension at the heart
of humor and play and the concomitant state of amusement.
In a more recent study, Michelle Shiota and her colleagues led
participants to feel five positive emotions through viewing
emotionally evocative slides and documented that still other
positive emotions vary in their autonomic profiles (Shiota et al.,
2011). For example, when viewing slides evocative of love,
participants showed elevated cardiac activity but no
vasoconstriction. By contrast, when viewing slides evocative of awe
(images of vast nature), participants showed evidence of reduced
influence of sympathetic influences upon the heart, a sign of the
stillness, and openness associated with awe (see also Gordon et al.,
2017). Enthusiasm elicited by viewing slides that depicted
opportunities for winning money led participants to show a sweat
response in the hands, the only positive emotion to produce this
electrodermal response typical of sympathetic activation.
In another research tradition, scientists have studied sexual desire,
the intense feelings of attraction, and interest in sexual behavior. In
several studies in which people are presented with images or films
depicting sexual intercourse, people's reports of sexual desire are
correlated with sympathetic and parasympathetic activation and
blood flow to the genital regions (Meston & Frolich, 2000). Taken
together, positive emotions such as amusement, awe, contentment,
sexual desire, enthusiasm, and love seem to differ subtly in their
patterns of autonomic response (see Kreibig, 2010).
Vagal Tone and Compassion
A defining feature of our evolution as a species is the vulnerability
of our offspring, which gave rise to our capacity for compassion,
sympathy, and tenderness (Goetz, Keltner, & Simon‐Thomas, 2010).
Might specific branches of the autonomic nervous system support
compassion‐related feelings and action? Physiologist Stephen
Porges thinks so. In a series of provocative papers, Porges
hypothesized that the ventral vagal branch of the parasympathetic
ANS is involved in prosocial emotions such as compassion and love
(1998). To make this argument, Porges draws upon cross‐species
comparisons to detail three stages in the evolution of the ANS. First
to emerge was the dorsal vagal complex; it is present in reptiles,
fish, and mammals and regulates digestive processes and the
immobilization response seen in most species when an individual is
attacked. Next came the sympathetic autonomic nervous system
that controls fight and flight behavior. And last to emerge, and
unique to mammals, is the ventral vagal complex. It is controlled
by the vagus nerve and regulates facial muscle actions, head
movements that enable gaze activity, and vocalizations, as well as
heart rate deceleration and calm. All of these responses, Porges
speculates, are involved in caregiving, a defining feature of
mammals.
Researchers measure vagal tone (activation of the vagus nerve) by
measuring the relationship between heart rate and respiration
(Grossman & Taylor, 2007). Several lines of evidence suggest that
caregiving‐related states such as compassion are associated with
elevated vagal tone. For example, in one series of studies, Jennifer
Stellar and her colleagues presented participants with evocative
images of suffering, such as children crying or suffering from
malnutrition or cancer (Stellar et al., 2015). When feeling
compassion, participants showed elevated vagal tone, whereas
participants feeling other emotional states—pride or inspiration—
did not.
Kok and Fredrickson (2010) assessed people's vagal tone at the
beginning and end of a nine‐week study, and in between these two
assessments they had participants report on their daily experience
of positive emotions and the strength of their social connections.
Over the nine‐week period, people who at the start of the study had
high levels of vagal tone experienced greater increases in positive
emotion and social connection over the nine‐week period of time.
Just as importantly, increases in social connections over the nine
weeks led to rises in vagal tone at the end of the study (see Figure
5.3). Not only does vagal tone predict more positive emotion and
social connection over time, but the complement holds as well:
increases in positive emotion and social connection will increase
vagal tone. More recent studies have begun to explore whether vagal
tone also predicts emotion regulation, prosocial tendencies, and
even better sleep (Kogan et al., 2014; Mendes, 2016; Werner et al.,
2015).
FIGURE 5.3 Participants who begin the study with
elevated vagal tone (solid line) show greater increases
over time in social connectedness and positive emotion,
which in turn track increases in vagal tone (from Kok &
Fredrickson, 2008).
The Blush
The blush is a paradox. Of the autonomic responses you will learn
of, the blush is clearly the most visible. But it flares up most
typically in situations when we least want to be noticed, often to our
chagrin. To gain insight into this paradoxical bodily response,
psychologist W. Ray Crozier analyzed the contexts in which people
blush in the novels of Jane Austen (Crozier, 2016). In Austen's
novels—Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility—the
blush figures prominently, often accompanying critical turns in the
plot. What Crozier found is that in Austen's novels the blush is
sometimes a sign of forbidden thought being made public. Other
times it is a sign of desire that spreads from one young person to
another and ends in feelings of mutual attraction. Or very simply,
characters blush when feeling embarrassed and ashamed and sense
the undesired regard of others nearby. The results of this literary
analysis remind us of a complexity: the same bodily response, such
as the blush, can accompany many mental states and social
contexts.
Let's turn from literary to scientific analysis. The blush involves the
spontaneous reddening of the face, ears, neck, and upper chest
produced by increases in blood volume in the subcutaneous
capillaries of the face (Cutlip & Leary, 1993). By contrast, the flush
is a nonsocial response that often is associated with physical
exertion, temperature changes, or alcohol consumption. In a
chapter devoted to the blush in The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals, Darwin observed that the blush is associated
with modesty, embarrassment, shyness, and shame. Darwin
reasoned that when we direct our attention to any part of the body,
physiological activity is stimulated in that region; in shyness or
embarrassment we think of our face as an object of attention, and,
in Darwin's view, blood flows to that region.
Mark Leary and his colleagues analyzed studies of people's reports
of when they blush (Leary, Britt, Cutlip, & Templeton, 1992). The
results are illuminating. We don't necessarily blush when we
receive any kind of attention from others, or when we think of what
others think of us. Rather, we blush when we are the objects and
recipients of undesirable social attention, that is, attention that
is potentially damaging to our self‐concept, in particular in the eyes
of others. This too, it would seem, was Jane Austen's thesis—that
we blush when others are attending to us in ways that jeopardize or
directly harm our social reputation.
So how, then, is the blush related to emotion? When asked to
describe a typical experience of embarrassment, people commonly
mention that they blush (Edelmann, 1990; Miller & Tangney, 1994).
Studies of the actual blush response converge with these narrative
findings. In one such study, participants' blush and anxiety‐related
autonomic responses were recorded in two conditions (Shearn,
Bergman, Hill, Abel, & Hinds, 1990). In an embarrassment
condition, the participant and four confederates of the experimenter
watched a videotape of the participant previously singing “The Star
Spangled Banner.” In the fear condition, the participant and
confederates watched the classic shower scene from Alfred
Hitchcock's movie Psycho (which we will talk about some more in
the next chapter). Participants' cheek blood flow, cheek skin
temperature, and finger skin conductance increased more while
they and others watched themselves singing than while they
watched the frightening film clip, and these responses correlated
with people's experiences of embarrassment (see also Shearn et al.,
1992). More recent work has shown that people from different
cultures—Western Europeans and people from India—show a
similar blush response in terms of its physiology, but Western
Europeans report they blushed more (Drummond & Lim, 2000).
In a different empirical approach, Aan het Rot and her collaborators
had students at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands
report upon their social interactions every day for two weeks (het
Rot, Moskowitz, & De Jong, 2013). In these daily reports, they
detailed whether or not they had blushed and whether they felt
ashamed and embarrassed, as well as other emotions. Participants
blushed about once or twice a day (you are not the only one who
finds blushing to be a regular occurrence!). People were more likely
to blush around large groups of people and when interacting with
romantic partners—yes blushing can lead to romantic attraction, as
Jane Austen long ago revealed. And as one might expect, when
people blushed (as opposed to not blushing), they reported higher
levels of embarrassment, shame, feeling exposed, and
submissiveness.
Let's now consider one of the painful paradoxes of blushing: its
irksome visibility. Often, when we least want others to attend to us,
the blush draws their attention in. Why might that be? On this, the
American satirist Mark Twain observed that “humans are the only
species who blush, and the only one that needs to,” suggesting that
we blush in times of need, likely to correct our tarnished reputation.
Building upon this intuition, Corine van Dijk and her colleagues
proposed that the blush is an involuntary, costly way in which
people signal their awareness and regret for the mistake they have
made (van Dijk, de Jong, & Peters, 2009). In keeping with this
hypothesis, van Dijk and colleagues found that social observers
responded more positively to individuals who blushed after they
made mistakes than people not seen to blush.
How might this “remedial” property of the blush work? What
changes when social perceivers observe another person blushing?
Here, as before, we find insight in considering the signaling
behavior of other species. Many primates (and bird species) show
skin reddening as a signal of robust health; the opposite, pallor,
signals illness and weakness. Given that we tend to want to affiliate
with people who are healthier, these findings lead us to the notion
that we blush when embarrassed to trigger the affiliation felt toward
those who are healthier, to restore our reputation jeopardized by
our untoward and embarrassing actions.
The Chills
“The chills” is a phrase people use in many languages to refer to the
contraction of small muscles surrounding hair follicles; it is a
sympathetic autonomic nervous system response. In mammals, this
response, known as piloerection, produces the fluffing up in the fur
seen in the great apes, dogs, cats, and rodents. Humans often
experience the chills in some of the loftiest moments of life, when
graduating from college or getting married, at a concert or when
hearing a speaker at a political rally, or when witnessing a morally
inspiring act. Music is a common elicitor of the chills (Benedek &
Kaernbach, 2011; Guhn, Hamm, & Zentner, 2007). So too is nature.
For example, take a moment to read the two diary entries of
naturalist John Muir, as he hiked alone in the Sierra Nevada
Mountains near Yosemite (based on these experiences, Muir would
found Sierra magazine, and eventually the National Parks in the
United States).
June 5, 1906
A magnificent section of the Merced Valley at what is called
Horseshoe Bend came full in sight—a glorious wilderness that
seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices. Bold, down‐
sweeping slopes, feathered with pines and clumps of manzanita
with sunny open spaces between then, make up most of the
foreground, the middle and background present fold beyond fold
of finely modeled hills and ridges rising into mountain‐like
masses in the distance…The whole landscape showed design, like
man's noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its
beauty! Gazing awestricken, I might have left everything for it.
Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and
being made forever.
June 6, 1906
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling
enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and
cell of us. Our flesh‐and‐bone tabernacle seems transparent as
glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it,
thrilling with the air and trees, streams, and rocks, in the waves
of the sun – a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor
well, but immortal… How glorious a conversion, so complete and
wholesome it is, scarce a memory enough of the old bondage
days left as a standpoint to view it from.
These passages capture many of the features of awe‐related
experiences in nature—the sense of design, wonder at the beauty of
things, and the sense of the breakdown of the boundaries between
the self (Muir's “Flesh and bone tabernacle”) and other things (e.g.,
Campos et al., 2013). We suspect that Muir's reference to “making
every nerve quiver” is about the chills. From Muir's writings one
might hypothesize that “the chills” might accompany experiences of
emotions such as awe.
At the same time, though, we often use the term “chills” to describe
more menacing experiences of horror, terror, or dread. When people
sense the presence of a person when no person is there, or see
someone who reminds them of someone who's recently passed
away, or they see the carnage of war, they may report experiencing
“the chills.” When contemplating the horrors of the Nazi holocaust
or the Rwandan genocide, you may do the same—shudder at the
horror of what humanity can do.
How is one to make sense of this, that is, “the chills” refers to such
different kinds of emotional experience? To answer this question,
Laura Maruskin, Todd Thrash, and Andrew Elliot have had people
report on their experiences of chills in diaries and narratives as well
as the emotions that occurred with these sensations (Maruskin,
Thrash, & Elliot, 2012). What they discovered is that the word
“chills” corresponds to two distinct bodily sensations: the first is a
tingling, goosebumps sensation in the arms and back of the head
(which they call goosetingles); the second is a cold shiver and
shudder in the back (which they call cold shivers). Other work has
found that these two sensations occur with different emotions. For
example, Maruskin and colleagues had participants report on their
experiences of the chills each day for two weeks and found that
goosetingles most strongly correlated with surprise, awe, and
intense positive affect, whereas cold shivers correlated with reports
of fear and disgust. Belinda Campos and her colleagues found that
awe more so than gratitude, compassion, love, and joy was
associated with reports of goosebumps (Campos et al., 2013;
Maruskin, Thrash, & Elliot, 2012).
Individual Emotion: Awe
Awe is the emotion that is felt when you are in the presence of
something that is vast and transcends your understanding of the
world (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). People experience awe in
response to some of the most dramatic of life experiences—
around spiritual and political leaders, in seeing great cultural
artifacts like the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris or the Taj Mahal
in India, when encountering vast natural objects like the great
Redwoods or the Grand Canyon, or in response to music and art.
It was a sense of awe and wonder that Darwin experienced in his
travels on the Beagle that stirred him to develop his theory of
evolution. In many ways, awe defines what is most meaningful
to us and what binds us to other members of our group.
Just in the past five years the science of emotion has seen
considerable interest in this most transcendent of emotions,
awe. The field has documented distinctions between awe and
feelings of beauty (Cowen & Keltner, 2017), as well as the
distinct facial displays and vocalizations associated with awe (see
Chapter 4). Here in this chapter you have learned about the
physiology of awe. Still other studies are finding that brief
experiences of awe, for example, when found walking amidst tall
trees or looking at expansive views, lead us to be more generous,
humble, and happy, and, expand our sense of time (Rudd, Vohs,
& Aaker, 2012).
There is also, as you might imagine, a dark side of awe, one that
is imbued with the sense of threat and peril and alienation. You
might experience this threat‐based awe when thinking about the
Nazi Holocaust or climate change or the brevity of life. Studies
are finding that this threat‐based awe comprises about 25
percent of experiences of awe and has a different physiological
profile (more related to stress) and reduces happiness when felt
(Gordon et al., 2017).
Emotion and the Neuroendocrine System
The neuroendocrine system involves a network of over different
glands distributed throughout the body, including the pituitary and
reproductive glands, that release hormones into the bloodstream.
These hormones have effects upon different organs and muscle
groups and serve many functions related to physical growth,
homeostasis (the balance of the body's systems), and reproduction.
These hormones are also linked to emotionally relevant behaviors,
including defense, sex, and status‐enhancing actions (Mehta &
Prasad, 2015).
The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis
One well‐studied branch of the neuroendocrine system is the
Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal (HPA) axis, whose
activation results in the release of the stress‐related hormone
cortisol into the bloodstream. As you can see in Figure 5.4, stressful
events activate regions of the brain (e.g., the amygdala) that send
signals to the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, which,
in turn, sends electrochemical signals to the anterior pituitary,
which produces Adrenocorticotropic Hormone (ACTH). ACTH
stimulates the adrenal glands (which are on top of the kidneys) to
release the stress hormone cortisol into the bloodstream
(Rodrigues, Sapolsky, & LeDoux, 2009).
FIGURE 5.4 The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis
that releases cortisol into the blood stream.
Cortisol has many effects upon the body. It activates glucose
production needed for metabolically demanding action. It increases
heart rate and blood pressure, thus enabling the distribution of
blood to appropriate muscle groups involved in fight‐or‐flight
behavior. It suppresses our immune system. In the short run,
activation of the HPA axis and the accompanying increase in cortisol
enabled our ancestors to respond to threats to physical survival—for
example, an approaching predator or an enraged rival. Today, this
same stress response helps us respond to immediate threats and
problems: enabling us to study late into the night for an exam, to
avoid danger, or to devote ourselves to taking care of a sick friend or
child.
In one line of research that employs the Trier Social Stress Task,
participants are required to deliver an impromptu speech to an
audience of evaluators, who are instructed to look critical and
frustrated. Needless to say, this task, perhaps inspired by those bad
dreams we all have about public speaking, elicits elevated
sympathetic autonomic nervous system activation as well as a
cortisol response. In a review of relevant studies, Sally Dickerson
and Margaret Kemeny (2004) made the important point that the
Trier Social Stress Task is most likely to trigger cortisol release
when participants appraise their positive social identity as
being threatened. Similarly, studies that have looked at how
viewing slides and film clips produces a cortisol response find that
elevated cortisol tends to accompany appraisals of worry, threat, and
uncertainty (Denson, Spanovic, & Miller, 2009).
More recent work outside of the lab is mapping cortisol levels to the
emotion of fear. Craig Anderson and his colleagues studied
teenagers' and veterans' emotional reactions to white‐water rafting
on a river in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in
California (Anderson, Monroy, & Keltner, 2017). They gathered
measures of saliva before and after the rafting trip (to assess levels
of cortisol), self‐reported emotion during the trip, and vocal bursts
and facial expressions of emotion as the participants actually
navigated dangerous rapids (see Figure 5.5).
FIGURE 5.5 Teenagers navigating white‐water rapids on
a river in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (photo by Craig
Anderson).
Individuals who showed cortisol rises over the course of the day
reported greater fear during the trip (but not other emotions such as
pride or awe). And, they emitted more vocal bursts of fear (screams)
but not other emotions (pride). In yet another demonstration of
how contagious emotions are, people who spent the day on the raft
with really fearful, screaming participants ended up screaming more
and having higher cortisol levels by the end of the day. Emotion‐
related hormonal responses are contagious (see also Akinola, Page‐
Gould, Mehta, & Jackson, 2016).
Alongside the HPA axis, a second branch of the neuroendocrine
system releases sex‐related hormones into the blood stream,
including testosterone and estradiol. These sex hormones are
produced in the ovaries in women and testes in men and regulate
many of the astonishing physical changes that humans go through
during puberty. They also influence feelings of sexual desire, both in
men and women (for review, see Meston & Frolich, 2000). When
people are administered testosterone, their feelings of sexual desire
rise, as does their sexual response and sexual behavior. When
women view film clips depicting sexual intercourse, or even
emotional intimacy between an adult and child, their estradiol rises
(Edelstein, Kean, & Chopik, 2012). The romantic passions have
hormonal correlates.
Emotion and the Immune System
The immune system is a network of cells and glands distributed
throughout the body that helps the body fight infections and heal in
response to injury. Understanding how emotions influence the
immune system will illuminate how emotional tendencies influence
our physical health.
The Inflammation Response
One branch of the immune system of increasing interest to
scientists studying emotion is the cytokine system. Pro‐
inflammatory cytokines are released in immunological cells and
help produce an inflammation response that fights bacteria and
viruses. Cytokines also send signals to the brain to trigger “sickness
behaviors” that include increased sleep and withdrawal as well as
inhibited social, exploratory, and aggressive behaviors, all of which
help the body recuperate from illness or injury (Kemeny, 2009).
When you are in the midst of a flu, the effects of the cytokine
system are strong.
In general, as with cortisol, elevated social and physical stress
produce increased inflammation. For example, one review of 34
studies revealed that stress is associated with elevated
inflammation in the body, as indexed in the elevated levels of a
biomarker known as interleukin 6, or IL‐6 (Marsland et al., 2017).
Quite worrisome is the literature showing that poverty, a powerful
form of social and physical stress, predicts increased inflammation
in young children, as do traumatic events, such as a parent's job loss
or divorce (John‐Henderson et al., 2015; Miller et al., 2009). In
adults, similar results hold. People who feel of lower status and
rejected because of their social class or race tend to show elevated
levels of pro‐inflammatory cytokines (John‐Henderson, Stellar,
Mendoza‐Denton, & Francis, 2015). College students at UCLA who
feel of lower social status within their social hierarchy and who are
given negative feedback from a stranger respond with a stronger
inflammation response (Muscatell et al., 2016). When people are
given a toxin that produces an inflammation response, they report
greater negative emotion, dejection and depression, and a sense of
isolation (Muscatell et al., 2016).
These findings relating heightened inflammation to lower rank and
dejection provide clues to how this response might relate to human
emotion. One emotion that has these qualities of dejection,
isolation, and submissiveness is shame (Gilbert, 1998; Tangney,
Miller, Flicker, & Barlow, 1996). In the English language, people
often refer to submissive emotions with metaphors of disease—“I
nearly died of shame,” or “I'm sick with envy.” Perhaps these
metaphors capture a relationship between submissive emotions and
the activation in the cytokine system.
Work by Sally Dickerson and her colleagues suggests that the
relationship between submissive emotion and activation of the
cytokine system is more than just poetic metaphor (Dickerson,
Gruenewald, & Kemeny, 2004). In one illustrative study,
participants had to deliver a speech about why they would be the
perfect applicant for a job in a condition of high social evaluative
threat (SET in Figure 5.6). More specifically, in this condition two
audience members looked on as the participant gave the speech but
reacted with common triggers of shame—critical, cold, rejecting
facial expressions (Dickerson et al., 2004; Dickerson, Gable, Irwin,
Aziz, & Kemeny, 2009). As you can see in Figure 5.6, being judged in
a critical, rejecting fashion led to an increase in one marker of the
cytokine system. These observations raise the intriguing possibility
that submissive emotions like shame might actually relate to
activation of the cytokine system.
FIGURE 5.6 In situations of increased social evaluative
threat, or SET (dotted line), one measure of cytokine
release (TNF‐alpha) increases when participants must
give a speech about why they would be a good candidate
for a job (from Dickerson et al., 2009).
Are there emotion‐related processes that calm the inflammation
response? This is increasingly a pressing question given fairly
robust associations between elevated inflammation and depression,
cardiovascular problems, and autoimmune disease. In light of what
you just learned about shame, one might expect emotions
associated with an expansive self that is connected to others to
reduce the inflammation response. And new studies are lending
credence to this possibility. Experiencing a wider range of positive
emotions on a daily basis—and not just intense episodes of a single
positive emotion—predicts lower levels of inflammation (Ong et al.,
2017). So too do experiences of awe. Awe involves a sense of self
expansion and feelings of being integrated into social collectives
(e.g., Bai et al., 2017). And indeed, one study by Jennifer Stellar,
Neha John‐Henderson, and their colleagues found that people who
report feeling regularly elevated positive emotion showed lower
levels of pro‐inflammatory cytokines, and the strongest predictor of
this healthy immune profile was the regular experience of awe and
wonder (Stellar et al., 2015). It is perhaps because of awe that
regular experiences in beautiful nature have been found to lower
levels of pro‐inflammatory cytokines as well.
As we transition to the study of bodily changes and emotional
experience, it's wise to take stock of what we have learned thus far
and bear in mind important caveats that should caution our
interpretation of these results. We have seen that anger, fear,
sadness, and disgust differ in subtle ways in their patterns of
autonomic activity, as do positive emotions such as contentment,
desire, amusement, awe, enthusiasm, and love. Compassion seems
to activate the ventral vagal complex. The blush occurs during
experiences of embarrassment, and perhaps shame. “The chills”
really refers to two sensations—goosetingles and cold shivers—that
map onto different emotional profiles most closely related to awe
and fear (or horror). The release of cortisol accompanies the sense
of social threat, worry, and perhaps fear. And the inflammation
response appears to covary with feelings of dejection, lower rank,
and shame, but is reduced by experiences of awe.
While these findings clearly refute a one arousal fits all account of
negative and positive emotion, it's important to bear in mind that
these emotion‐related differences are often subtle. We hope that it
is also clear that there are not distinct regions of the autonomic
nervous system devoted to one emotion; there is no love gland or
organ of anger. Rather, emotions are associated with subtle
differences in the patterning of activity across measures of the
different branches of the peripheral nervous system.
Bodily Changes and Emotional Experience
Alongside the thesis of physiological specificity, William James
made a second argument we will now consider: emotion‐specific
activation in the bodily systems gives rise to experiences of distinct
emotions (Price & Harmon‐Jones, 2015). In James's own words: the
“arousal of the so‐called manifestations of a special emotion ought
to give us the emotion itself.”
Some 80 years after James, the influential theorist Sylvan Tomkins
(1962), made a similar point, arguing that the experience of emotion
closely tracks emotion‐specific bodily responses:
Affects are sets of muscle and glandular responses located in the
face and also widely distributed through the body, which
generate sensory feedback which is either inherently “acceptable”
or “unacceptable.” These organized sets of responses are
triggered at subcortical centers where specific “programs” for
each distinct affect are stored. These programs are innately
endowed and have been genetically inherited. They are capable of
simultaneously capturing such widely distributed organs as the
face, the heart, and the endocrines and imposing on them a
specific pattern of correlated responses. (pp. 243–244).
In Chapter 7 we will examine studies of a special region of the brain
—the anterior insular cortex—that integrates signals from the body
and that figures in experiences of most emotions that have been
studied. Here we will consider intriguing and early literatures on
how bodily changes influence emotional experience.
Representations of Emotions in the Body
To test this second thesis of James, scientists have taken one of two
approaches. A first is to capture the degree to which the bodily
changes of spontaneous emotion relate to reports of emotional
experiences. On this thesis, the evidence is mixed. In general,
distinct facial muscle movements do predict emotional experience;
for example, when people furrow their brow and tighten the lips,
they are likely to report greater anger; the patterned movements of
embarrassment predict the experience of that emotion (for review,
see Duran, Reisenzein, & Fernandez‐dols, 2017; Matsumoto et al.,
2008). In turning to physiological response, in some studies self‐
reports of emotional experience do track bodily changes, for
example in the links we have considered between the blush and
embarrassment, elevated vagal tone and compassion, increased
blood flow to the genitals and sexual desire, and goosebumps and
awe. In other studies, though, bodily changes of emotion, such as
heart rate or blood pressure, do not predict spontaneous
experiences of distinct emotions (e.g., Mauss et al., 2005).
This ambiguity led Iris Mauss and her colleagues to propose that
some measures of experience more so than others may better track
emotion‐related bodily changes. More specifically, we can report on
our experience with explicit measures that directly refer to the
emotion (“I feel sad” or “blue”). We can also report on emotional
experience with what are known as implicit measures that indirectly
refer to the emotion. Implicit, indirect measures of emotional
experience include concepts that are associated with the emotion
(as “loss” is related to sadness), memories, images, and patterns of
thought (e.g., as pessimism about the future relates to sadness).
Many studies that have gathered direct, or explicit, measures that
refer directly to the experience of emotion (“I feel content right
now”) yield weak relations between emotional experience and
bodily changes, if any at all. This is because explicit, direct reports of
emotional experience are shaped by many factors, including cultural
norms, culturally imbued beliefs about emotions, and many
features of the current social context (e.g., Barrett et al., 2007). As a
result, explicit reports of emotion may be less likely to track the
kinds of subtle, emotion‐related bodily changes we have studied
thus far. Jan Evers, Iris Mauss, and their colleagues reason that
more implicit, indirect measures of emotional experience may be
less biased by such factors and track more closely physiological
changes produced in the body. In one experiment that illustrates
this hypothesis, participants were caused to experience anger by the
actions of an impertinent researcher who harshly corrected their
efforts on a mental arithmetic task (Evers et al., 2014). In this study,
participants' more implicit anger—captured in how fast participants
could identify anger‐related words—was correlated with the rise in
blood pressure produced by interacting with the aggressive
researcher. Participants' explicit, direct reports of anger were not.
What we learn from this study is that indirect, implicit measures of
emotional experience—images, metaphors, colors, patterns of
thought, the likelihood one might detect emotionally relevant
themes in other stimuli—may better track bodily changes of
emotion than directly reporting on emotional experience.
Building upon with this intriguing possibility, consider a fascinating
line of research by Lauri Nummenmaa and his colleagues from
Finland (Nummenmaa et al., 2014). Nummenmaa and his
colleagues gave participants 13 emotion words—anger, anxiety,
contempt, depression, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, love, pride,
sadness, shame, surprise—and asked them to color in the areas of
the body where they felt each emotion. You might think of this
colored in bodies task as a kind of implicit measure of emotional
experience. Figure 5.7 presents the results from this study. What is
striking is how people's experiences of emotion in the body track
actual physiological changes we considered earlier in this chapter.
Anger is sensed in the hands (and upper body and face), which
corresponds to the blood flow and finger temperature rise
documented in the DFA studies of that emotion. Participants'
sensations of fear portray cold hands, also in keeping with the
findings from the DFA studies. It should not surprise that disgust is
sensed in the stomach and mouth region and love in the heart and
genital regions. Pride, given its pattern of upper body expansion and
head lift, is sensed in the torso and head. And shame is acutely
sensed in the face, no doubt a visualization of the blush.
FIGURE 5.7 Body maps of emotion‐specific sensations
Brighter areas indicate where participants report
increased physical sensation for the emotion.
In follow‐up studies, participants' spontaneous experiences of
emotion produced similar representations of emotion in the body.
And Finns, Swedes, and participants from Taiwan represented their
experiences of emotion with similar body maps, suggesting some
degree of universality in emotional experience.
James's hypothesis that bodily changes give rise to emotional
experiences has been tested in a second way: prompting people to
produce body changes to ascertain whether such action leads to the
experience of emotion. A study of this kind that became well known
was one of the few direct tests of William James's theory that bodily
change can produce emotion. It was by Strack, Martin, and Stepper
(1988). They found that getting participants to hold a pen between
their teeth, and in this way making muscle movements
characteristic of a smile without the people realizing it, gave rise to
judgments of cartoons that they looked at as being funnier than
they were for participants who held a pen between their lips, and in
this way inducing a pout. An important new movement in
psychology has been on whether influential findings are replicable.
In a meta‐analysis of 17 direct replications of Strack et al.'s study by
Wagenmakers et al. (2016), only a tiny and nonsignificant effect of
the induced smile as compared with the pout was found (a mean
difference between the conditions for funniness on a 10‐point scale
of 0.03 units, as compared with 0.86 units in Strack et al.'s original
study). In another study, Ranehill et al. (2015) tried to replicate
findings that adopting a pose to express power and dominance
(power posing) increased people's likelihood of taking financial
risks, in tasks that invited them to do so, as well as changing
hormone levels. With a substantially increased number of
participants, Ranehill et al. found that power posing did show a
significant effect on people's self‐reports of feeling power, but they
did not find any change in risk‐taking or hormone levels.
In studies of this kind, participants move emotion‐specific facial
muscles, or shift their posture, for example in a slouch of shame, or
in standing up to do a power pose, or they are led to breathe in deep
patterns associated with contentment. Across studies of this kind,
changes in facial muscles, posture, and patterns of breathing can
lead to reports of changed emotional experience (Price & Harmon
Jones, 2015; Winkielman, Niedenthal, Wielgosz, Eelen, & Kavanagh,
2015), but not all effects have been reliable.
Interoception
Every bodily response we have spoken of thus far sends signals to
regions of the brain. The brain tracks the functioning of the
branches of the peripheral nervous system. For example, specific
receptors near muscles send electrochemical signals to the brain.
Baroreceptors in veins and arteries and near the heart stretch in
response to changes in circulation and blood flow, sending signals
about cardiovascular activity to the brain. The same is true of
respiration, as the tissue of the lungs shifts with inhalation and
exhalation. The body's inflammation response is transmitted to the
brain through the vagus nerve, as well as hormones in the blood.
And large regions of the cortex, the somatosensory cortex, track
where the body is being touched. As the brain tracks and represents
these and other changes in the body, it gives rise to an awareness of
the bodily responses known as interoception (Craig, 2009;
Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017). Interoception is our awareness of the
body's internal responses.
Hugo Critchley and Sara Garfinkel break interoception down into
three distinct processes (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017). A first is the
objective awareness of bodily responses. To assess this, participants
provide estimates of how fast their heart is beating or, less
commonly, the rate of their respiration, which are then compared to
actual heart rate or respiration rate to yield an index of objective
interoception. A second dimension to interoception is the
individual's subjective awareness of their bodily sensations; that is,
are they, like William James, often aware of possible changes in
their body, heart palpitations, or shallow breathing, or movements
in the intestines, for example. Or is their awareness of their body's
responses impoverished. A third dimension is what Critchley and
Garfinkel call metacognitive interoception, or what you might think
of as insight into the bodily changes of emotion. A measure of
metacognitive interoception is found by comparing participants'
performance on the objective interoception task we just described
and their subjective sense of how skilled they are at tracking their
body's sensations. Some people are good at tracking their body's
responses and aware of this fact, and have high metacognitive
interoception; others less so.
In this line of research, a first finding of note is that people's
objective interoception accuracy correlates only modestly with their
subjective awareness of different bodily sensations. As you might
imagine, some people are quite accurate in their judgments of the
body's responses, and others are not. Still other findings suggest
that these individual differences in interoception matter (Critchley
& Garfinkel, 2017). For example, people who are skilled at
interoception experience more intense emotions. They are better
able to reinterpret their emotions in ways that enable them to
respond adaptively to their present circumstances. At the same
time, they are a bit more vulnerable to anxiety, perhaps overly
sensitive to shifts in heart rate, circulation, blood pressure, and
sweaty palms that accompany anxious states. By contrast, people
with autism are not as skilled at reading the cues in their body (they
don't do well in the heart beat detection paradigm), but think they
do (Garfinkel et al., 2016). These authors reason that this lack of
emotional information streaming in to conscious awareness from
the body may in part account for the emotional difficulties
individuals with autism sometimes encounter.
Reflection and Cultivation: Developing
Emotional Calmness
In this chapter you have learned about the profile of fear,
anxiety, and stress: that it involves elevated activation of the
sympathetic autonomic nervous system and the HPA axis. This
study of emotion‐related bodily responses just as readily reveals
certain practical tips for finding emotional calm. Perhaps the
most powerful is what you see on many bumper stickers:
“Breathe.” Many of the contemplative practices found in
meditation and yoga focus on patterns of deep breathing. In
different meditation traditions, for example, people are
encouraged to slow down their breathing through deep patterns
of exhalation and inhalation. One common technique, for
example, is to breathe in for a count of six (while expanding the
chest), and breathe out for a count of six (while pulling in the
abdominal muscles), and to continue this for 10 or 20 times. A
central focus in the different kinds of yoga is what is known as
pranayama breathing, which emphasizes slower, deeper patterns
of breathing, with a particular focus on deep exhalation. What
you have learned in this chapter, and as anticipated by James's
second prediction, is that these patterns of breathing engage the
vagus nerve, which quiets stress‐related physiology, and opens
up possibilities for greater calm and positive emotion.
Embodiment, Cognition, and Social Interaction
Emotions are more than just brief responses contained within the
body; in fundamental ways, they shape how we interact with others
and how we think about our social environment. Given this,
perhaps we have been thinking about James's thesis in an overly
narrow fashion, focusing on how bodily responses give rise to
emotional experiences. The broader possibility is that emotion‐
related bodily responses shape higher order patterns of thought and
how we interact with others.
This possibility is at the center of theorizing about embodiment
(Barsalou, 2008; Niedenthal, 2007; Papies & Barsalou, 2015;
Winkielman et al., 2015). Embodiment is the idea that higher order
thought processes—how we categorize objects, what we deem fair or
risky, what we remember from the past, or how we understand
other people's intentions—are influenced by bodily processes of the
kind we have studied thus far. Consider your judgment of what is
fair and just. An embodiment perspective would suggest that this
abstract judgment of fairness is rooted in bodily changes related to
anger, for example, the rise in muscle tension in the face and body
and shifts in blood flow and blood pressure.
One implication of this theorizing is that when the emotion‐related
bodily systems are activated, higher order thought patterns will shift
in systematic ways. Consider the following study that illustrates this
thesis as it applies to how emotion‐related facial muscle movements
shape how we categorize stimuli. In the study, Paula Niedenthal and
colleagues gave participants lists of words related to three emotions
—anger, joy, and disgust—and asked them to determine whether the
word was related to one of the three emotion categories
(Niedenthal, Winkielman, Mondillon, & Vermeulen, 2009). For
example, they would be presented with the word “vomit” or “sun” or
“fight” and asked to judge which of the three emotion categories the
word belonged to (i.e., “disgust” “anger” “joy”). This task of
categorizing words led to the activation of emotion‐specific facial
muscle movements, as you can see in Figure 5.8. Categorizing
words related to emotions engages aspects of the body related to
those emotions.
FIGURE 5.8 Processing concepts related to specific
emotions activates emotion‐specific facial muscles for
happiness, anger, and disgust (adapted from Niedenthal
et al., 2009). Corrugator muscle movement furrows the
eyebrows; Levator muscle movement raises the upper lip;
Orbicularis muscle movement raises the cheek; and
Zygomaticus muscle action pulls the lip corners up.
In a next study, Niedenthal and colleagues had participants hold a
pen in their mouths while they made judgments about which of
three emotion categories—disgust, joy, or anger—offered the best fit
for emotion‐related words. In holding the pen in their mouths,
participants were prevented from moving facial muscles related to
disgust (the upper lip raise) and joy (the smile). Without this
embodied response, participants found it harder to categorize
disgust‐related and joy‐related words. The lesson from this study is
that emotion‐specific bodily changes are involved in categorizing
objects in the world.
In similar work, Joshua Davis and his colleagues had participants
read sentences with positive and negative themes (Davis,
Winkielman, & Coulson, 2015). As they did, they held a pencil in
their mouths that blocked the activity of the zygomaticus major
muscle that produces the smile. In this study, blocking facial muscle
actions associated with positive emotion—the smile—reduced
activation in regions of the cortex involved in conceptual processing.
Absent the spontaneous activation of emotion‐specific facial
muscles involved in our understanding of words, sentences, or
faces, we are less adept at categorizing emotionally relevant
information (see also Oberman, Winkelmien, & Ramachandran,
2007).
Still other work has documented how emotion‐related autonomic
responses guide categorization and perception. On this intriguing
possibility, Sarah Garfinkel, Hugo Critchley, and their colleagues
have focused on the patterns of thought that occur during the brief
period after the heart has contracted and pumped blood into the
circulatory system (Garfinkel et al., 2016). As you might know, the
strength of the contraction of your heart and circulation of blood
through your body is manifest in your blood pressure. Systolic blood
pressure captures the strength of the heart's contraction and can be
measured in the signal that baroreceptors near the heart send to the
brain. Diastolic pressure is measured in the veins and arteries when
the heart is at rest between beats. Garfinkel, Critchley, and
colleagues found that during the fleeting phase of the rhythm of the
heart that produces the measure of systolic blood pressure, more
typically associated with fear, people show greater sensitivity to
threat (Garfinkel et al., 2016). Specifically, during the systolic phase
of the heart's rhythm as compared to the diastolic phase, exposure
to fear faces triggers greater activation in the amygdala, an old
region of the brain engaged in the processing of threat. Additionally,
during the systolic phase of the heart rhythm, when the body is
alerting the mind to threat, people are more likely to perceive an
association between the social category “African American” and
guns (Garfinkel et al., 2016).
In a similar spirit, it appears that the body's inflammation response,
associated with the sense of social submissiveness, dejection, and
shame, prompts higher order cognitive processes to be more
attuned to social threat (Eisenberger et al., 2016). For example, in
one study Keely Muscatell and her colleagues gave participants an
endotoxin that produced an inflammation response characteristic of
dejection and shame. These participants, compared to appropriate
control participants, showed greater activation in the amygdala
when they received negative feedback from another person, a sign
of inflammation‐related heightened sensitivity to socially
demeaning information (Muscatell et al., 2016).
This new work on embodiment reveals how subtle bodily responses
—facial muscle movements, shifts in systolic blood pressure, and
immune system activity—influence how we categorize words,
whether or not there is threat, people from different ethnic groups,
and social communication. Our construal of the social world is
indeed embodied, and guided by processes in the branches of the
nervous system that lie below the brainstem. Now we turn to a
complementary literature on gut feelings.
Gut Feelings and Decision Making
If emotion‐related bodily responses guide categorization and
perception, in keeping with an embodiment perspective, one would
also expect bodily responses to be involved in important decisions
and choices, for example, what we deem risky or fair or of value or
what is sacred (e.g., Phelps, 2016). This notion was treated by
Antonio Damasio (1994) in his somatic marker hypothesis.
Remember Phineas Gage (discussed in Chapter 1), the railroad
construction foreman whose frontal lobes were damaged when an
iron bar was shot through them by an accidental explosion and who
became unable to organize his life. Hanna Damasio and colleagues
(1994), using computer methods with Gage's skull, determined that
the region of his brain that was destroyed was the lower middle part
of the frontal lobes. Antonio Damasio (1994) and his colleagues
have now studied many patients with this kind of brain damage and
have noticed that, like Phineas Gage, their emotions seem blunted.
These patients also make disastrous social decisions such as
associating with the wrong kinds of people, while dithering
endlessly over issues that are inconsequential (see also Rolls, 2014).
They showed many deficits in the moral realm, for instance,
inappropriate manners and a lack of concern for the well‐being of
others (Stuss & Benson, 1984).
To explain this pattern of results, Damasio (1994) proposed the
somatic marker hypothesis: For patients with damaged
ventromedial prefrontal cortex, they lack access to emotion‐related
bodily responses or symbolic representations of such reactions—
somatic markers—that guide judgments and decisions. In keeping
with this thinking, compared to control participants, patients with
damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex showed little galvanic
skin response to emotionally evocative slides, such as nudes or
scenes of mutilation (Tranel, 1994; Tranel & Damasio, 1994). In a
paradigm known as the Iowa Gambling Task, patients with
ventromedial prefrontal damage showed an inability to stay away
from high‐risk gambles (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio,
1997). In this task, participants must choose cards from four
different decks. Some cards gave monetary rewards, other cards
signaled losses. Two of the decks were risky: they offered a chance
of a big win but when chosen repeatedly, they led to overall loss of
money. The other decks represented safer routes: the chance of
smaller wins, but when chosen repeatedly they led to small gains.
Typical control participants develop a heightened galvanic skin
response to the risky decks and typically avoid them. In contrast,
the ventromedial patients show no such sympathetic system
response to the risky decks and often chose them and lost money
(see Ohira, 2010, for review).
Would the complement also prove to be true, that is, people who
have more refined awareness of their body's responses—somatic
markers in Damasio's terminology—make more effective decisions?
In one intriguing test of this possibility, Kandasamy and colleagues
assessed the interoception abilities of London stock traders by
having them do heart detection tasks we described earlier
(Kandasamy et al., 2016). They then related it to their performance
on the stock floor, in choosing stocks that gain and lose. Their
finding: those traders with greater interoception abilities had better
records of making money in their investments. An awareness of
emotion‐related bodily responses proves to be an effective guide in
investing and decisions more generally (Rolls, 2014).
Embodied Empathy
People show a profound tendency to spontaneously and often
unconsciously mimic the emotional behavior of others (e.g., Hess &
Fischer, 2014). In relevant empirical studies, people have been
found to mimic others' smiling behavior, laughter, and sadness,
often outside of their awareness (Hess & Fischer, 2014). We mimic
certain autonomic responses in others, such as the blush (Shearn et
al., 1999). Recent evidence even shows that our cortisol profiles will
tend to match the profiles of people we are with (Akinola et al.,
2016; Anderson et al., 2017). Our body often mirrors the bodily
changes of other people.
Why? Ursula Hess and Agneta Fischer offer two insights, very much
in keeping with the central theme of this book—that emotions
coordinate our social interactions and relationships. A first is that
our bodily mimicry of the emotional behavior of others brings us
closer to others; it builds affiliative relationships through the sense
of similarity and collaboration such mimicry creates. This notion
helps makes sense of studies showing when we mimic others and
when we do not. Namely, we are more likely to mimic the
expressive behavior of people we feel close to or who are part of our
group; we are less likely to mimic the expressive behavior of
adversaries or strangers (Hess & Fischer, 2014; Miller et al., 1994).
We are also more likely to mimic the emotional expressions, such
as smiling, that are affiliative and less so expressions that are
adversarial, such as anger (Hess & Fischer, 2014). And for some
emotions, we are more likely to mimic the expressive behavior of
high‐power individuals, perhaps as a way to affiliate with, and find
similarity to, those with power and influence (Carr, Winkielman, &
Oveis, 2014).
Hess and Fischer reasoned that a second reason why we mirror
others' emotion‐related responses is to solve a deceptively complex
social problem: to know the mental states of others. More
specifically, guided by the insights of embodiment theorizing, Paula
Niedenthal, Piotr Winkielman, and Ursula Hess all converged on
the idea that when we mimic the expressive behavior of another
person, we simulate that emotional experience in our own mind
(e.g., Winkielman et al., 2015). When we see a friend laugh, we
ourselves begin to laugh, a behavior that triggers a simulated
experience of amusement, which helps us understand how our
friend perceives the current context and what they are likely to do.
When mimicry generates our own experience, we are better able to
understand and feel the emotions of others (see also Gallese,
Gernsbacher, Heyes, Hickok, & Iacoboni, 2011). As an example,
when we blush at another person's blush of embarrassment (e.g.,
Shearn et al., 1999), in our own simulated experience of
embarrassment, we come to understand how the other person
construes his or her present circumstances as warranting
embarrassment. When we smile at another's smile, we experience
our own joy and contentment and quickly appreciate the other
person's mental state, and by implication the features of the
situation that would give rise to such joy. When we mimic the anger
expressions of others, we show greater sympathetic autonomic and
brain‐related responses to their emotional condition (e.g., Lee et al.,
2013). A complementary line of studies has taken advantage of the
botox craze, which reduces wrinkles in the upper face by disabling
movements of muscles in the face. Botox tends to diminish the
individual's own experience of emotion (Davis et al., 2010). It also
prevents people from mimicking the emotional expressions of
others and renders people less able to judge the emotions of others
(Neal & Chartrand, 2011).
SUMMARY
William James argued that emotional experience is the perception
of emotion‐specific bodily responses, especially those in the
autonomic nervous system. We first reviewed what is known about
emotion‐specific bodily responses, looking at recent studies of the
directed facial action task, the blush, the parasympathetic
autonomic nervous system, the neuroendocrine system, and the
immune system. Grounded in this understanding of emotion‐
related bodily responses, we then looked at the contribution of
bodily responses to emotional experience and interoception. We
concluded with recent theorizing known as embodiment, which
helps illuminate how emotion‐related bodily responses help us
categorize objects in the world, make decisions, and understand
others.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. One bodily response related to emotion that has begun to be
studied scientifically is the chills, or goosebumps. What
emotions do you think are involved when you have
goosebumps? How might you study the relationship between
goosebumps and emotion? Can you come up with a Darwinian
evolutionary account of the goosebumps?
2. Try to think of an occasion in a movie or novel in which a
character blushed. What happened in the aftermath of the
blush? How does it fit recent findings suggesting that the blush
triggers increased trust and liking?
3. Try an experiment in embodiment and see how it influences
your emotions. You might stand in the posture of pride with fists
clenched and chest expanded. Or furrow your eyebrow and
tighten your lips. What sensations and emotions seem to arise
out of these postures for you?
FURTHER READING
For a review of the autonomic nervous system, and emotion‐
relevant findings, read:
Mendes, W. (2016). Emotion and the autonomic nervous system. In
L.F. Barrett, M. Lewis, & J. Haviland‐Jones (Eds.), Handbook of
emotions, 4th ed. (pp. 166–181). New York: Guilford.
For the latest thinking on interoception:
Critchley, H.D., & Garfinkel, S.N. (2017). Interoception and emotion.
Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 7–14.
For an excellent treatment of embodiment and emotion, see:
Winkielman, P., Niedenthal, P., Wielgosz, J., Eelen, J., & Kavanagh,
L.C. (2015). Embodiment of cognition and emotion. In M.
Mikulincer, P. R. Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), APA
handbook of personality and social psychology, Vol. 1. Attitudes
and social cognition (pp. 151–175). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
6
Appraisal, Experience, Regulation
CONTENTS
Appraisal and Emotion
Historical Background and Concepts
Primary Appraisals, Good and Bad
Which Is Stronger, Good or Bad?
Secondary Appraisals
Discrete Approaches
Dimensional Approaches
Extending Appraisal Research: Tests of Theories and Patterns
of Variation
A Third Phase of Appraisal: Verbal Sharing Words and
Concepts
The Emotion Lexicon
Conceptualization of Emotion
Emotion Metaphors
Prototypes
Variations in Emotion Lexicon
Emotional Experience
The Perspective That Emotions Are Discrete
The Perspective That Emotions Are Constructed
Comparing Perspectives
Regulation of Emotions
Distraction, Reappraisal, Suppression
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 6.0 Diagram from Descartes's book, Traite de
l'homme, showing how the soul—which can be moved by
emotions—can open valves to let vital fluids from the
reservoir in the brain (labeled F) into the tubes to work
the muscles and produce actions.
Herein too may be felt the powerlessness of mere Logic
… to resolve these problems which lie nearer to our hearts.
(George Boole, 1854, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, p. 416)
Appraisal and Emotion
In the previous chapter, we mentioned the scene of a woman taking
a shower in Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho. Have you seen the
poster? It's based on a still from this scene, which is said to be the
most famous in film history. The poster shows the face of a woman
with her mouth wide open as she screams, thinking she is about to
be killed. The actor—Janet Leigh—has depicted an appraisal. She
has evaluated an event and is terrified. You can see this image by
going to Google and typing "Leigh Psycho shower." We review
another Hitchcock film later in the chapter.
Appraisal is probably the most important concept in the science of
emotions (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). An event occurs, usually in
the outside world but sometimes within, most often something
about another person, which affects something important for us: a
concern. It's a signal that there is something to which we should
attend.
Historical Background and Concepts
Magda Arnold and J.A. Gasson (1954; whose analyses we described
in Chapter 1) wrote a paper that is generally taken as the founding
of the modern notion that emotions are based on appraisals. An
influential developer of the idea was Richard Lazarus, who studied
challenges that people faced in their lives and their capacities to
cope with them (Lazarus, 1991). Challenges invite attention and
heightened activity in the sympathetic branch of the autonomic
nervous system. But each kind of challenge promotes a different
emotion, depending on how it is appraised. Here is how Lazarus
describes these processes:
This approach to emotion contains two basic themes: First,
emotion is a response to evaluative judgments or meaning;
second, these judgments are about ongoing relationships with
the environment, namely how one is doing in the agenda of living
and whether the encounter of the environment is one of harm or
benefit.
Lazarus proposed that appraisals involve evaluative judgments of
how good or bad an event is for the person. A second aspect is that
appraisals concern the individual's goals and aspirations, which
Frijda (2007) calls “concerns.”
In 1948, Robert Leeper wrote an article in the influential journal,
Psychological Review, in which he reviewed the idea, prevalent at
that time, that emotion is "disorganized response." At that time, too,
as seen by behaviorists who were becoming dominant in American
Psychology, emotion was of no importance and ignored. Now we
know that these attitudes were misleading. With the understanding
of emotion as based on appraisal, linking events in the world to our
inmost concerns, emotion became, as it ought to be, central to
psychology, seen not as disorganized, but as fundamental to the
organization of our lives (Roseman, 2013).
Central to appraisal‐related approaches is the idea that emotions
help people meet their goals within the immediate social context.
Agnes Moors (2009, 2014) has argued, for example, that the
approach by way of appraisal is critical to the study of emotions as
processes that articulate events with people's goals (or concerns).
Stein, Trabasso, and Liwag (1994) extended the idea of goals to
plans that are generated from them and the beliefs on which they
are based. They propose that aspects of emotion‐related appraisal
unfold as follows:
1. An event, usually unexpected, is perceived that changes the
status of a valued goal.
2. Beliefs are often challenged. This can cause bodily changes and
expressions to occur.
3. Plans are formed about what to do about the event to reinstate
or modify the goal, and the likely results of the plans are
considered.
These stages lead to questions that correspond to them:
1. What happened?
2. What do I think about it?
3. What can I do about it, and what might then happen?
To illustrate this analysis, Stein and colleagues provide the example
of a 5‐year‐old, Amy (Stein, Trabasso & Liwag, 1994). Her
kindergarten teacher told the class that she had a paint set for each
child, and that after painting pictures for Parents' Night, the
children could take their paint sets home. When the children had
been given their paint sets, Stein et al.'s research assistant noticed
Amy looking apprehensive. She asked why. Amy said: “I'm jittery.
I'm not sure why she wants to give me the paints. So do I have to
paint all of the time at home? I really don't want to do this. I didn't
think teachers made you paint at home. I don't like painting that
much. Why does she want me to paint at home?”
Here we see that Amy has a goal that has been violated (1): she
doesn't want to paint. The idea of being given something to do at
home violates a belief about what teachers do (2). The conversation
continues with Amy's plans (3):
Research assistant:
What will you do, Amy?
Amy:
I don't want to take the paints home. I want to know why I have
to do this.
Research assistant:
Well Amy, what are you going to do about this?
Amy:
I'll take the paints home, but when I get home, I'll ask my mom
why I have to do this.
Two weeks later, the research assistant talked casually to Amy, who
was still worried about the paints. She said she had used them only
once. But she had not told the teacher, fearing that the teacher
might be mad at her.
Evident in this example is one of the central ideas in appraisal‐
related approaches to emotion (see Figure 1.7 in Chapter 1): how a
person construes an event—which depends on the person's goals
and values—will determine how the event is perceived and what
emotions are elicited (e.g., Lazarus, 1991). We return this idea
throughout the remainder of the book to understand, for example,
how the emotional lives of people from different cultures or from
different class backgrounds differ, often in profound ways. Now let's
turn to a more systematic treatment of the processes involved in
appraising events that give rise to different emotions.
Primary Appraisals, Good and Bad
Into our lives come events that have repercussions. You arrive at
your new college dorm and meet your roommate, who instantly fills
you with a reassuring sense of comfort. In the following year, you
have to search for an apartment to rent, but the places elicit feelings
of unease and discomfort. What appraisal processes give rise to
these reactions?
First tends to come a primary appraisal, an automatic evaluation,
usually of an event or person in terms of whether what you perceive
seems threatening or rewarding (Ferguson & Zayas, 2009). Even
amoeba appraise environments in these basic ways: they move away
from bright lights, which are threatening to them. Primary
appraisals are basic operations of the mind. They correspond to
what Chrysippus (discussed in Chapter 1) called first movements of
emotion. At the head of this chapter is a drawing from Descartes
(1648), of how this kind of movement can be thought of as
fundamental to how the brain works. Next come secondary
appraisals, which Chrysippus called second movements. These
provide more deliberative, conscious, complex assessments to
decide what to think and what to do about what has happened (e.g.,
Smith & Lane, 2017).
Two decades of research have documented that within milliseconds
of encountering an event, our mind is appraising it in terms of
whether it is bad—or threatening—or good—or rewarding. The mind
is equipped to appraise as threatening, necessary to avoid, such
events as the appearance of a snake or a menacing person. The mind
also appraises as inviting approach smiles, food, babies, and even
money (Pool, Brosch, Delplanque, & Sander, 2016). Primary
appraisals prepare the individual to respond to threats and
opportunities in the environment.
This idea of primary appraisal, sometimes called “automatic
evaluation,” was explored by Robert Zajonc. Consider a study by
Murphy and Zajonc (1993). They presented participants with photos
of people smiling or displaying facial anger. In a “subliminal”
condition, participants viewed these photos for 4 milliseconds and
then looked at Chinese ideographs and rated how much they liked
them. These participants had no idea whether they had seen a happy
or angry face. In a second condition in which participants viewed
the same faces for one second, they were aware of which faces they
had viewed. Then they, too, looked at Chinese ideographs and rated
how much they liked them.
As you can see in Figure 6.1, with subliminal presentation, smiling
faces prompted participants to feel good and express greater liking
for the Chinese ideographs that followed them and angry faces
prompted less liking for the ideographs that followed them (the
participants could not read Chinese). No such priming effects
emerged with the optimally presented faces. When we are
consciously aware of emotionally charged stimuli, they are less
likely to sway our judgments of other events that have nothing to do
with them (Clore, Gasper, & Garvin, 2001; an effect that we discuss
further in Chapter 10).
FIGURE 6.1 People liked Chinese ideographs more after
they had first been subliminally presented with a smile,
suggesting that the smile had activated positive feeling at
an unconscious level. When presented with a smiling
face long enough to be consciously aware of it, the smile
did not lead participants to evaluate Chinese ideographs
more positively.
(Source: Murphy & Zajonc, 1993).
Do automatic appraisals generate emotion‐related responses other
than more general preferences? Piotr Winkielman and his
colleagues suggest that they do (see also Dimberg & Öhman, 1996;
Winkielman, Berridge, & Sher, 2011). This literature has relied on
the evocative power of facial expressions of emotion and in
particular, smiling and facial expressions of anger. In these studies,
scientists present images of smiling or threatening expressions of
anger either so quickly, or immediately blocked by the presentation
of another picture, that participants can't consciously report what
they have seen. Being exposed to smiling faces triggers the primary
appraisal that things are good and worthy of approach. It triggers
smiling behavior, a willingness to consume a drink when thirsty, a
willingness to look favorably upon a bet. By contrast, exposure to
angry faces leads people to furrow the brow in worry, and not
consume a drink or look favorably upon a bet (see also Dimberg,
Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000; Whalen et al., 1998). In other work,
Öhman and Soares (1994) presented people who had snake phobias
with photos below their awareness and found that these photos of
snakes generated a galvanic skin response and negative emotion. In
further studies that used the technique of priming by subthreshold
stimuli, Moors, De Houwer, and Eelen (2004) also found a phase of
primary automatic appraisal about whether an event was good or
bad. Their subthreshold (priming) images were words in semantic
categories such as profession or animal, which had been rewarded
and therefore had become good, or had been nonrewarded and
therefore had become bad.
Priming studies have come into question with concerns that
replication is important in psychology. In the previous chapter, we
discussed this in relation to studies of whether making facial
expressions and postures could affect emotional experience. The
issue of replication in psychological studies made it into the New
York Times (van Bavel, 2016). In their explanation of why some
studies fail to replicate, Van Bavel, Mende‐Siedlecki, Brady, and
Reinero (2016) have shown that effects such as priming are
sensitive to contexts, which include participants' cultural
backgrounds. As Locke (2015) argues, priming is only a technique,
and what is really needed is more development of theory. The
theory we suggest is that in the process of relating an event to a
concern about whether something is good or bad, there is a primary
appraisal process that is fast and automatic so that when this
occurs, outside conscious awareness, it can produce an immediate
feeling of good or bad; our understanding of circumstances in which
this can occur does indeed need more development.
Which Is Stronger, Good or Bad?
Research on automatic appraisals of good and bad qualities of an
event raises another question: which is stronger, good or bad?
Reviews by Cacioppo and Gardner (1999), Baumeister et al. (2001),
and Rozin and Royzman (2001) offer a perhaps unsettling answer:
negative evaluations are more potent than positive evaluations. The
bad is stronger than the good. This bias to be more responsive to
danger rather than to satisfaction makes evolutionary sense.
Without it, our chances of survival would be diminished; we only
die once.
Negative events, such as the occurrence of frightening sounds or
disgusting smells, trigger more rapid, stronger physiological
responses than positive events, such as pleasing sounds or delicious
tastes. In various experiments, it has been shown that losing $10 is
experienced as more painful than the pleasure of gaining $10.
Negative trauma, such as the death of a loved one or sexual abuse,
can change a person for a lifetime. It is hard to think of analogous
positive life events that alter life in such profound and enduring
ways. Or consider contamination, the process by which a disgusting
object endows another object with its vile essence through simple
contact (Rozin & Fallon, 1987). Brief contact with a cockroach will
spoil a delicious meal (the negative contaminates the positive). The
inverse—trying to make cockroaches delicious by touching them
with a favorite food—just does not work (Rozin & Royzman, 2001).
To address whether negative evaluations are more potent than
positive evaluations, Ito et al. (1998) presented participants with
positively valenced photographs (e.g., of pizza or ice cream) and
negatively valenced photographs (e.g., of a mutilated face or of a
dead cat). They recorded participants' electrocortical activity
focusing on a region of brain activity associated with evaluative
responses. They discovered a clear negativity bias in evaluation:
negative slides prompted greater brain activity than positive or
neutral slides.
Secondary Appraisals
What happens when we move beyond automatic primary appraisals
to secondary appraisals? Modern research on appraisal has tended
to be in two families: discrete approaches, which propose that
appraisals give rise directly to distinct emotions, and dimensional
approaches, for which an initial primary appraisal is simply of
whether what has happened is good or bad. Then secondary
appraisals are socially constructed, but can have several dimensions
and give rise to ranges of emotions.
Discrete Approaches
In his theory of discrete emotions, Lazarus (1991) proposes a
primary appraisal stage, which we show in Figure 6.2. A person
appraises the event in terms of its relevance to goals. An early
evaluation is of whether an event is relevant to a personal goal. If it
is, an emotion is elicited; if not, there is no emotion. If an event is
relevant, it is appraised as to whether it is congruent or incongruent
with a goal. Goal‐congruent events elicit positive emotions, and
goal‐incongruent events produce negative emotions. These stages
together make up a primary appraisal. Then secondary appraisals of
the event occur in relation to specific goals, or issues for the ego.
Events can concern moral values, for example, to be kind, or to
avoid doing to others what one would not want done to oneself.
Events might bear upon issues of the self and identity, for example,
whether one is excelling in areas that are central to self‐definition,
such as one's academic work, or performance in the arts or sport, or
work for charities. Events can pertain to important ideals, for
example, that societies should be fair and just. In light of emotions
that occur to other people about whom we care, the goals and well‐
being of these people are also our concerns, and such events thus
give rise to emotions in us also.
FIGURE 6.2 Decision tree of appraisals based on three
features (goal relevance, goal congruence, and ego
involvement), plus the emotions that can occur with
these appraisals (Lazarus, 1991). Further differentiation
among emotions occurs in secondary appraisals.
An approach to discrete emotions that is related to Lazarus's is that
of Oatley and Johnson‐Laird (1987; 2011; 2014), who postulate
appraisals with two components, as we have been discussing. A
primary appraisal of an event occurs in relation to goals. It is
automatic and unconscious. It occurs in terms of distinct emotions
(such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, love, and
contempt), each of which sets the brain into a mode adapted to deal
with a recurring situation (progress toward a goal, loss, frustration
by another, threat, and so on). Each mode is a set of states of
action‐readiness (Frijda, 1987, 2016), which we discuss further,
below.
The effect is a bit like having several sound devices in your house: a
smoke detector, a doorbell, a telephone bell, and a burglar alarm. If
one goes off, you are alerted to something potentially important and
your readiness changes accordingly—to escape from the house, or
go to the door in a friendly way to meet a caller, but initially you do
not know what the event was. You need to investigate. Similarly, an
emotion can start, but its meaning in mental and verbal terms is
supplied by a secondary process that occurs in awareness, in which
you make a mental model of the event, of what caused it, and how
to act in relation to it.
In the second stage of appraisal, the individual considers a causal
attribution for the event, how to respond to the event or person in
question, and future consequences of action. At this level, Lazarus
calls the process the core relational theme of the emotion: its
essential meaning, so on this scheme anger is caused by a
demeaning offence against me or mine, anxiety is caused by an
existential threat, sadness is experience of a loss, and so on. You can
think of emotions in relation to these themes as summaries of the
different classes of events that elicit them. In evolutionary terms,
these themes map onto the problems and opportunities to which
people respond with emotions—the slights (anger), dangers (fear),
moral transgressions (guilt), losses (sadness), and sufferings of
others (compassion), for example, that have been critical to human
survival, reproduction, and cooperative group living. You can also
think about these themes as the language of our emotional
experience: they indicate issues that organize our emotional
experience.
Nico Frijda (1987; 2016) is responsible for suggesting that when an
appraisal is made, we are prompted to readiness for a certain mode
of action or interaction, appropriate to what has happened. As he
explains, when an appraisal happens, priority is given to a certain
concern or goal, and sets up one, or perhaps more, of these modes
of action readiness. Frijda and Parrott (2011) have called these
modes ur‐emotions (meaning primitive emotions), which have
some but not all the attributes of full emotions.
Fridja's scheme is, perhaps, currently among emotion researchers,
the most widely accepted account of the nature of emotions. As
Andrea Scarantino remarked at the International Summer School in
Affective Sciences, in July 2014 in Geneva: “We are all neo‐Frijdians
now” (see Frijda, 2016). Why? Because central to analyses of
emotion‐related experience and physiology is the idea that emotions
enable actions within specific contexts that are attuned to our
specific concerns. This idea has animated the study of emotion‐
specific bodily changes, which are often thought to support specific
kinds of action. It will reappear in the next chapter when we think
of the mammalian patterns of brain activation related to emotion
and specific action. We present this scheme in Table 6.1.
TABLE 6.1
Modes of action readiness
Source: Frijda (2016)
1. ACCEPTANCE
accepting presence or interaction
2. NONACCEPTANCE not accepting presence or interaction
3. ATTENDING
acquiring information
4. DISINTEREST
not acquiring information
5. APPROACH
facilitating interaction
6. AFFILIATE
achieving close personal interaction
7. AVOID
decreasing interaction
8. REJECT
refusing interaction
9. HOSTILITY
modifying unwanted target action
10. REACTANCE
increasing effort and persistence
11. DESIRE
achieving positive hedonic outcome
12. CARING FOR
improving dependents' well‐being
13. EXUBERANCE
achieving gratuitous interactions
14. DOMINATION
controlling others' actions
15. SUBMISSION
following someone else's wishes
16. INTIMACY
seeking intimate interaction
17. HELPLESSNESS
desiring to act but not knowing how
18. APATHY
no readiness for action
Dimensional Approaches
Can you think of aspects of emotional experience that are not well
explained in terms of discrete emotions, or distinct modes of action
readiness? Are there aspects of your emotional life that don't seem
readily to follow from this approach? Phoebe Ellsworth (e.g., 1991)
has suggested that we need to think about emotion‐related appraisal
in a way that's different from that of discrete emotions: the
dimensional approach (Ellsworth, 2013).
Approaches to emotions as discrete highlight differences between
emotions in terms of their eliciting appraisals. Yet many emotions
are similar in fundamental ways. Anger and fear, for example, at
their core, feel similar: they feel unpleasant and arousing. The same
could be said about gratitude and love, which both feel quite
pleasant and are marked by a feeling of devotion for others. An
appraisal theory, Ellsworth contends, needs to account for the
interesting similarities across emotions, as well as for their
differences.
A second gap in approaches to emotions as discrete, according to
Ellsworth, is their inability to account for transitions between
emotions. Very often in our emotional experience, we move from
one emotion to another; we shift from anger to guilt quite rapidly,
or from sadness to hope, or (hopefully not often) from love to
anger.
In light of such issues, Phoebe Ellsworth and Craig Smith (1985,
1988) developed a theory of appraisal that can account for
interesting similarities among the emotions, as well as the many
differences (for comparable accounts see Frijda, 1986; Ortony,
Clore, & Collins, 1988; Roseman, 1984, 2013; Sander, Grandjean, &
Scherer, 2005; Scherer, 1988; Weiner, 1986). Smith and Ellsworth
reviewed numerous studies of the semantic content of emotions
and derived eight different dimensions of meaning that capture the
appraisal processes that lead to various emotions. These dimensions
are presented in Table 6.2. Think of these dimensions as units of
meaning ascribed to events in your life: how positive or negative the
event is, who is responsible for it, whether it is fair, how much
energy is required, to what extent the event requires intense
attention, how certain things seem, and so on.
TABLE 6.2
Dimensions of appraisal
Source: Adapted from Smith & Ellsworth (1985)
1. Attention: Degree to which you focus on and think about the
event
2. Certainty: Degree to which you are certain about what is going
to happen
3. Control/coping: Extent to which you have control over outcomes
in the environment
4. Pleasantness: Degree to which the event is positive or negative
5. Perceived obstacle: Extent to which the pursuit of your goals is
blocked
6. Responsibility: Extent to which others, you, and situational
factors are responsible for events
7. Legitimacy: Extent to which the event is fair and deserved or
unfair and undeserved
8. Anticipated effort: Extent to which you must expend energy to
respond to the event
To document the patterns of appraisal associated with the different
emotions, Smith and Ellsworth had 16 participants imagine
experiencing 15 different emotions. The participants then rated the
original emotional experience on the eight dimensions presented in
Table 6.2. Each was defined by a pattern of appraisal. For example,
interest was associated with appraisals of elevated pleasantness, the
desire to attend, the sense that situational factors are producing
events, the perceived need to expend effort, moderate certainty
about future outcomes, together with little sense of perceived
obstacle or illegitimacy of events. Hope was associated with
appraisals of elevated attention and effort and situational agency,
moderate pleasantness, and little certainty or sense of perceived
obstacle or illegitimacy. Happiness was the emotion that was
pleasant, associated with low effort, high certainty, and high
attention.
A second result found by Smith and Ellsworth was that certain
dimensions stood out in their ability to differentiate among related
emotions. They found that a combination of control and
responsibility were at issue. Important was agency, a critical
dimension identified by Roseman (1984), which, for instance,
differentiates three negative emotions: anger, sadness, and guilt.
When we blame others, we become angry; when we attribute
negative events to circumstances, we become sad; when we
attribute negative events to ourselves, we become guilty. Agency
also differentiates certain positive emotions. The same positive
event attributed to the self is a source of pride, but when attributed
to others, it's a source of gratitude.
This importance of causality in emotion‐related appraisal is likewise
seen in the work of Weiner and Graham (1989). They found that
some distinct emotions depend on attributions, the explanations
of the causes of events that people give. They describe how children
between the ages of 5 and 11 were given vignettes and asked to
decide what emotion would occur. One was this:
This is a story about a boy named Chris. Chris's teacher gave a
spelling test and he got all the words right. Chris received an “A”
on the test
(Weiner & Graham, 1989, p. 407).
If the children were told that Chris had studied all the words the
night before (implying that the cause of his success was his own
action), they tended to say that he would feel pride; but if the cause
was that the teacher gave an easy test (a cause external to Chris),
then the children, especially the older ones, thought Chris would
not feel pride. Comparable results were found with guilt: if an event
that caused damage could have been controlled, the children
thought the person causing it would feel guilt, but if it was an
accident, the older children thought the person would not feel guilt.
The finding that causal attributions differentiate among emotions
has an important implication: a particular negative event may
happen to you (perhaps you don't do as well on an exam as you had
hoped), but which emotion you experience will depend on how you
appraise the causes. Attribute the event to yourself and you're likely
to feel guilt. Attribute it to others and you'll feel anger. Attribute it
to circumstantial factors and you'll be more likely to experience
sadness.
Reflection and Cultivation: Prejudice
When we make a negative primary appraisal without thinking
—"I don't know about that person, who is different from me"—
there's a word for it: “prejudice,” the making of a judgment
before anything else, "prejudice" = "pre‐judgment." It can
happen with skin color, or gender, or age. Here is an experiment.
Kerry Kawakami et al. (2009) asked self‐identified white and
Asian people to complete a survey that included asking whether
they would be upset by a racist act. They predicted they would
be. Not long afterward, with the experimenter out of the room,
they saw a black man (an experimenter's confederate) say he had
to go and get his cell phone and, as he left the room, gently
bump the knee of a white man (another confederate). In
different experimental conditions, and with the black man now
out of the room, the white man either made no comment, or
made a moderately racist remark, “Typical, I hate it when black
people do that,” or an extreme racist remark, “Clumsy n‐‐‐‐‐!”
Within minutes, the experimenter and the black man returned
to the room and participants were asked to rate the intensity of a
list of emotions. Those who had heard either of the racist
remarks were no more upset than those in the condition in
which no comment had been made. When later asked whom
they would choose to collaborate with, participants were found
also to have overestimated the degree to which they would reject
the man who made the racist remark.
A recent study has shown that the way primates, including
ourselves, identify individual faces is in terms of spatial
separations of salient points, for example, tip of the nose,
corners of the eyes and lips, from average (Chang & Tsao, 2017).
What individuals take as average is of the faces they are used to
seeing. The mechanism is one by which humans come to
recognize people whom they know. Kang Lee and his colleagues
(e.g. Quinn et al., 2015) have found that children as young as six
months distinguish between faces of their own ethnic group and
those of other ethnic groups. Even such young children can see
as individuals, people in the group with which they are familiar.
By contrast, people from groups that diverge from the average of
faces they have often seen are perceived just in terms of
categories. They become people from other groups: stereotypes.
In a study of a different kind, Corado Guillietti et al. (2017) sent
some 20,000 e‐mails to government officials in nearly every
county in the United States: to sheriff's offices, to school district
offices, to librarians. The e‐mails asked simple questions such as
"Could you please tell me when your opening hours are?" The e‐
mails were identical except that half of them had been addressed
as coming from someone called DeShawn Jackson or Tyrone
Washington, names associated with black men, and half were
from Greg Walsh or Jake Mueller, names associated with white
men. Though most of the e‐mails received polite and timely
responses, those that could be interpreted as coming from black
people were less likely to be answered by sheriff's offices, and a
smaller deficit of this kind occurred also with librarians. Overall
the e‐mails interpretable as coming from black people were 13
percent less likely to be answered and were 8 percent less likely
to include friendly or polite words like "Hi," or "Dear," or
"Thanks."
Part of the problem with prejudice is that not only does it occur
without thinking, but we may not be aware of it in ourselves.
One way to deal with this has been suggested by Jo Altilia (see
e.g. 2017, founder of a program called Literature for Life, in
which young women who had become pregnant while still at
school join reading circles). "When I am entering a new
situation, or meeting new people," she says, "I ask myself: 'What
prejudices am I having right now?'"
Extending Appraisal Research: Tests of Theories and
Patterns of Variation
Tests of the discrete and dimensional theories of appraisal are
surprisingly difficult. Most critically, these theories propose that
appraisals cause distinct emotions, but evidence, such as that
generated in the study by Smith and Ellsworth, is not direct
evidence of causality; rather, when researchers ask participants to
report on appraisals that gave rise to past emotions, that evidence is
retrospective, and could reflect lay theories about the causes of
emotion rather than actual causes of experience (Parkinson,
Fischer, & Manstead, 2004).
There is evidence that manipulating appraisals can cause distinct
emotions. In one study, Ira Roseman and Andreas Evdokas (2004)
recruited people for an experiment on substances with pleasant and
unpleasant tastes. People were assigned to different groups; some
were told they would definitely experience a taste, others that they
would probably experience a taste. The researchers found that when
people appraised the situation as one in which they would definitely
avoid an unpleasant taste, relief was caused. When they appraised
the situation as one in which they would probably experience a
pleasant taste, hope was caused.
Other work has ascertained whether emotion‐specific appraisals
relate to other measures of emotional response. For example, in a
study guided by Lazarus's framework, Bonanno and Keltner (2004)
coded the narratives of people who, six months previously, had
experienced the death of their romantic partner. These narratives
were complex, moving accounts of participants' lives with their
partners, how they had met and fallen in love, how they had raised
families, and ultimately how their partner had died. When people
referred to core relational themes of loss, they showed greater
sadness in the face and reported more intense feelings of sadness;
when people referred to appraisals of injustice, by contrast, they
showed more anger in the face and reported greater feelings of
anger.
Kornelia Gentsch, David Grandjean, Klaus Scherer and their
colleagues have tested predictions relating appraisals and facial
muscle movements as detailed in Scherer's Component Process
Model (Scherer, 2001). This model of appraisal suggests that we
evaluate events in a sequence of appraisals. We first assess whether
it is novel and relevant to us, then appraise it in terms of how
certain we are, then assess whether its conducive to our goals, and
then assess the agency or cause of the event, our degree of control,
and whether we have power in the situation. In a final stage of
appraisal, we assess the event for how normative or societally
appropriate it is. In this model, there is an unfolding of emotion as a
function of specific appraisal components and emotion‐related
responses. To test this model, these researchers have exposed
participants to evocative stimuli such as odors, faces, pictures, or
opportunities to win money and then varied whether the stimulus
was novel or not, or whether it was pleasant and conducive to goals,
or whether participants felt as though they had power in the
situation (Gentsch, Grandjean & Scherer 2015). Across modalities
(e.g., odors, pictures), the novelty appraisal triggers the raising of
the eyebrows, and pleasantness and unpleasantness trigger the
smile or frown, respectively.
One truth that comes through strongly in understanding emotion is
that people vary in their emotional appraisals and responses.
Depending on a person's gender, or social class, or personality, or
culture of origin, the same event—say going on a date or getting a
good grade—can elicit different emotions. One way to understand
such variation is found in how people appraise events. For example,
people clearly vary in their primary appraisals, in terms of whether
the environment is threatening or rewarding, worthy of approach or
avoidance (Carver & White, 1994). People who appraise
environments in terms of threat, for example, tend to experience
more negative affect and fear. You may see that occurs for people
who feel less powerful in a social context, who may include those
who come from less‐advantageous class backgrounds, or who have
more neurotic or anxious traits of personality. You may also be
surprised to discover that the appraisal tendency to see threat and
negativity in the environment is more characteristic of political
conservatives than liberals (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2014).
Variations in secondary appraisals also help explain how people's
emotions can vary. For example, when asked to think about a
successful event, US students reported greater pride than Japanese
students, who reported feeling more lucky. These differences could
be attributed to differences in appraisals: US students explained
their personal successes in terms of their own personal agency
(which triggered pride), and Japanese students appraised their
successes more in terms of situational agency (Imada & Ellsworth,
2011).
Kuppens, van Mechelen, Smits, de Boeck, and Ceulemans (2007)
found that appraisals can have different meanings for different
people: although for some people, anger is caused by frustration, for
others, it is usually caused by a sense of deliberate unfairness. For
yet others, it is caused by a threat to one's selfhood. Such
meaningful appraisals can become habitual styles and hence aspects
of personality (Power & Hill, 2010), and we discuss this further in
Chapter 11.
We analyze discrete and dimensional perspectives more deeply later
in this chapter.
A Third Phase of Appraisal: Verbal Sharing
So far, we have spoken of appraisal as something that is inside the
individual's head. Yet much of how we make sense of our emotions
occurs in our conversations with others. Earlier in the chapter, we
described two phases of emotion: a brief initial phase that is
automatic and then an extended second phase that can be reflective.
Sharing emotions is a third phase, a tertiary appraisal carried out
with other people.
Novels and films: Vertigo
Detective stories (mysteries) are based on an appraisal, not just
of an event but of a whole situation. A crime has been
committed, then a detective works on events to reappraise them
and ends by showing that beneath the surface there has been a
very different world. Before we've finished the story, we will
have undertaken a large reappraisal.
In the 1958 film, Vertigo, the director, Alfred Hitchcock,
prepared not just one change of appraisal for the characters and
audience members, but several.
In the surface layer, the film's protagonist, Scottie (played by
James Stewart) was a San Francisco police detective. Chasing a
suspect across rooftops, he was left hanging from a roof. A
colleague who tried to save him fell to his death. Scottie takes
early retirement, suffering from guilt, vertigo, and a phobia for
heights. An old college friend gives him something on which he
can employ his detective skills. It's to follow his wife, Madeleine
(played by Kim Novak), who seems to have become mentally
possessed by a dead person. Scottie starts to follow Madeleine
and he sees her sitting for hours in an art gallery, gazing at a
portrait of this dead person, her great‐grandmother, Carlotta.
Now comes the second layer: a reappraisal by Scottie. His
principal concern becomes no longer his friend's commission.
It's the cool, blonde, sophisticated, Madeleine. He falls in love
with her. When she makes a suicide jump into San Francisco
Bay, he rescues her and takes her to his apartment. When this
film was made, sex could not be depicted on the screen. But we
see Madeline in Scottie's bed, waking up and asking how she got
there while every bit of her clothing is hanging up to dry.
Next there is another layer: Scottie comes to be not just in love
but obsessed. Madeline tells him of a dream of Carlotta at a
place with a tower, south of San Francisco. Scottie drives her
there because he thinks a visit might free her from her states of
possession. When they arrive, they declare their love for each
other. But she breaks from him and runs up the steps of the
tower. As Scottie follows her, he is overcome by his phobia for
heights. A scream is heard. Through a window, we see her body
hurtle downward. Then there is a shot of the dead Madeleine
face‐down on a rooftop.
Next comes yet another appraisal: Scottie in a state of depression
and redoubled guilt wanders the city and sees a woman who
reminds him of Madeleine: a brash redhead, Judy (also played
by Kim Novak). They start going out. He coerces her to have her
hair dyed blonde. He takes her to a shop and buys her a gray suit
of the kind Madeleine used to wear. Then, in one of the film's
memorable scenes, Judy walks toward him through a luminous
mist. She is Madeleine—as Scottie remembers her. Now he can
love her.
We won't give the ending away but, in the next appraisal, we in
the audience realize that Judy was indeed Madeleine and was
hired by Scottie's college friend to impersonate his wife. As
Goffman (1959) has said: “It is always possible to manipulate
the impression the observer uses as a substitute for reality
because a sign for the presence of a thing, not being that thing,
can be employed in the absence of it” (p. 251).
An accomplishment of this film is its central question: “How far
does that all‐consuming emotion of sexual love depend on an
appraisal based on projection, and how far does it derive from
perceiving who the person actually is?”
Using diary methods, Bernard Rimé and his colleagues have found
that people have a strong tendency to confide their emotional
experiences to others, which Rimé et al. (1991) call social sharing.
In this research, people were found to share with others, verbally,
between 88 percent and 96 percent of emotions remembered at the
end of the day. The rates were similar across the age range, for
males and females, and for the interdependent Surinamese
population living in the Netherlands as well as the individualistic
Dutch. Sharing occurred even for emotions such as guilt and shame.
Our capacity to represent our emotions with language and to share
these representations with others is a deep human tendency and
may be what is most unique about human emotion.
When we share our emotions with others, we necessarily rely upon
our knowledge of emotions, and we use specific words, concepts,
categories, and narratives to convey our experiences to others.
Words and concepts
The Emotion Lexicon
The English language has many words that name or refer to
emotion, in what is known as the emotion lexicon, which can be
organized into categories at different levels. In one important study,
Shaver et al. (1987) gave participants 135 emotion terms written on
cards and asked them to sort those words into as many or few
categories as they thought appropriate. Based on this sorting,
Shaver et al. captured English speakers' organization of emotion
lexicon, finding three levels to our emotion knowledge.
At the superordinate level, there is a distinction between positive
and negative emotions. This seems to fit well with how people
appraise the goodness and badness of events immediately and
automatically. At the next level, known as the basic level of
knowledge, are six emotion concepts: love, joy, surprise, anger,
sadness, and fear. One might expect these terms to be those that
people most frequently use to describe their emotional experience.
This same list of emotions replicates (with slight variations) in
analyses of other languages (Romney, Moore, & Rusch, 1997).
Below each of the basic emotion terms are many more specific
states. This is known as the subordinate level of emotion
knowledge. These are likely to be states that share properties of the
basic emotion concept above them, and that are in important ways
similar to one another. For example, below the basic emotion
concept love is: love, compassion, lust, and longing. Below the
concept happiness is: amusement, enthusiasm, pleasure, pride,
hope, enthrallment, and relief. Below sadness is: agony, depression,
disappointment, guilt, embarrassment, and pity.
Johnson‐Laird and Oatley (1989) offered a semantic analysis of the
English lexicon with primary emotion terms for emotions which
cannot be analyzed into anything more basic, and complex
emotions, which derive from them, which combine a basic emotion
with some propositional content; so jealousy (in Britain and the
United States) is an emotion of anger and/or fear toward a person
who has intruded on a relationship of love or attachment.
To explore how cultures vary in their language of emotion, Russell
(1991) read hundreds of ethnographies written by anthropologists
who had lived in different cultures and were familiar with the
language and life of that culture. After observing that almost all
languages have terms for anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and
disgust, Russell paints a fascinating picture of how cultures differ in
their language of emotion. Cultures vary in the number of words
that represent emotions. Researchers have identified 2,000
emotion‐related words in English, 750 in Taiwanese, 58 in Ifaluk in
Polynesia, and 8 in the Chewong of Malaysia.
Cultures vary in which states they represent with emotion terms. In
the Gifjingali language of the Aborigines of Australia, fear and
shame are captured by the same word, gurakadj. The distinction
between shame and embarrassment is not made by the Japanese,
Tahitians, Indonesians, or Newars of Nepal. There are states
represented by a single word in other languages that are not
represented by single English terms. For example, in Czech, one
finds litost, which means the sudden realization of life's tragic
circumstances. In German, there is the word schadenfreude,
pleasure at the failure or suffering of another person. In a related
way, some cultures represent kinds of experience with numerous
words and concepts. For example, in Tahiti, there are 46 separate
terms that refer to anger. When this kind of effect occurs, people
may be more likely to experience many shades of meaning for
certain kinds of emotion.
Clearly, emotion words vary extensively across cultures. Given such
variation, Anna Wierzbicka (1999), a linguist who is fluent in many
languages, has been critical of attempts to infer universal categories
of emotion from intuitions by members of English‐speaking
cultures. She proposes, instead, universal concepts of emotions
based on the following kind of (somewhat abbreviated) analysis that
focuses on universal semantic elements. Happiness: (a) X was
happy because X thought something, (b) X thought: “Some good
things happened to me,” (c) X thought: “I wanted things like this to
happen,” (d) X thought: “I don't want anything else now.”
Conceptualization of Emotion
When we use words to describe emotion experiences, we engage in
an act of conceptualization; we interpret the experience with our
ideas and notions, for example, about what caused the emotion, do
we have control over it, is it appropriate, is it inherently a good or
bad experience, and how does it express our relationship to others
(Ford et al., 2018; Ford & Gross, 2018).
Studies of emotion words reveal several different conceptual
properties of the language of emotions. One of these is that applying
a word to an emotional experience helps identify its intentional
object: what the emotion is specifically about (Ben Ze'ev & Oatley,
1996). (The philosophical term intention means “aboutness”:
thinking, knowing, and usually feeling are intentional in this sense
because they are about something.) Emotion words direct us to the
focus of the experience, some event relevant to our concerns, and
likely courses of action (Ben Ze'ev, 2000). As you stand at the edge
of a room at a party you might suddenly realize: “I'm feeling
jealous.” This word is likely to sharpen the focus of your experience
and guide you to attend to specific events: perhaps your partner is
smiling flirtatiously at your best friend. The experience, the word,
and the concept may evoke past experiences of a similar theme,
perhaps with this current partner. Emotion words, then, appear to
shape diffuse states into more specific emotional experiences. A
study by Anderson et al. (2011) showed how verbal emotional
information can affect perception. When a piece of negative verbal
emotional gossip was paired with a face, this face was recognized
more easily in confusing circumstances than were faces that had
been paired with neutral or positive gossip.
Emotion Metaphors
Many emotion words are metaphorical. A metaphor is a concept
that points to something other than itself. We might say, “This party
is a blast.” The image, the blast of a bomb, can characterize complex
features of a party. Or we might say “Justice is blind” to characterize
a hoped‐for property of the process of justice: to indicate it should
be applied similarly to everyone, independently of who they are.
We often use metaphors to describe experience, and these
metaphors reveal how we conceptualize emotion within a particular
culture. In their study of metaphor, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson,
and Zoltán Kövesces have argued that there are five types of
metaphor that speakers of English use frequently for emotional
experience (Kövesces, 2003; Lakoff, 2016; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
First, emotions can be natural forces. We speak of being swept away
by our emotions as if they were waves. Second, emotions can be
opponents. We may struggle with grief or frustration. Third,
emotions can be diseases. We say that we are sick with love or envy.
Fourth, we can think of emotions as fluids in containers. We
simmer with rage or burst with joy. Fifth, we can think of emotions
as animals. People who kiss a lot in public are “lovey‐dovey.” Citron
et al. (2016) found sentences based on metaphor, such as "She's a
sweet child," are associated with more activation of the brain region
of the amygdala, than those that do not, such as "She's a kind child"
because, they say, such metaphors induce more emotional salience.
What is clear is that in English, metaphors often conceptualize
emotions as unbidden, unwieldy, and disruptive forces in our social
lives.
Prototypes
Russell (1991) suggested that although in science we need to
understand defining characteristics of terms that are used, in
ordinary life we think in terms of prototypical examples with no
sharp boundaries to separate good from less good examples.
Are there necessary and sufficient features of the concept of
emotion, or of specific emotions? For some concepts, we can give a
definition with necessary and sufficient features—so a grandmother
is “the mother of a person who is a parent.” For most concepts,
exact definition is difficult or impossible because the natural world
is not so neatly divided into categories, and for many objects we just
do not know enough. So, when you say “tree,” you mean that kind of
thing called “tree” of which we all know typical examples but about
which, if need be, those scientists in the Botany Department could
tell us more. In this kind of way, language and thought have the
wonderful property of allowing us to talk and be understood even
when we do not know very much. To do this, we rely on kinds of
thinking that the hearer can summon into mind (Putnam, 1975).
For Russell, then, rather than emotions being able to be analyzed,
semantically, in the manner suggested by Johnson‐Laird and Oatley
(1989), emotions are based on prototypes. A prototype can be
thought of as an example of an object in a category that exhibits
typical features of the category, so a prototypical bird is a robin. It
flies, is of medium size, sings, builds nests, and so on. When
invoking prototypes to explain things, we can also specify
modifications. Although our prototype for "tree" might include the
concept "large," we can modify it and say, of a bonsai: “It's a tiny
tree that has been grown in a pot and pruned to keep it small.” (We
showed some prototypical emotional expressions in the previous
chapter.)
In several studies, Fehr and Russell (1984) present evidence that
suggests that people think about emotions in terms of prototypes.
People's everyday prototype of an emotion is something like a
script, which refers to a characteristic outline of a sequence of
events. In a systematic exploration of prototypical scripts for
different emotions, Shaver et al. (1987) had participants write about
the causes, thoughts, feelings, actions, and physical signs of
different emotions. They coded these writings and identified
features of the emotion prototypes as features that occurred in at
least 20 percent of either the person's descriptions or the emotion's
descriptions. The prototype for sadness is shown in Table 6.3.
TABLE 6.3
Prototype of sadness
Source: Adapted from Shaver et al. (1987)
Causes:
Death, loss, not getting what one wants
Feelings:
Helpless, tired, run‐down, slow
Expressions: Drooping posture, saying sad things, crying, tears
Thoughts:
Blaming, criticizing self, reflection on past actions
Actions:
Negative talk to others, withdrawal from what was
lost
By this narrative methodology, participants offer scripts, or as De
Sousa (1987) calls them, paradigm scenarios, of different
emotions (see also De Sousa, 2004). The idea has been useful for
researchers in differentiating various emotions. Researchers using
these methods have sought to identify the distinct prototypes of the
self‐conscious emotions, including embarrassment, shame, and
guilt (Keltner & Buswell, 1996; Miller & Tangney, 1994; Parrott &
Smith, 1991). Embarrassment most typically follows violations of
conventions that increase social exposure (e.g., after pratfalls or a
loss of body control). Shame tends to arise from failure to live up to
expectations, either one's own or those of significant others, that
define the “core self,” “ego ideal,” or character. Guilt appears to
follow transgressions of moral rules that govern behavior toward
others. The common antecedents of guilt, therefore, include lying,
cheating, stealing, infidelity, and neglecting personal duties
(Tangney, 1992; Tangney et al., 1996).
The prototype perspective is consistent with the idea of emotions
based on core affect (Russell, 2003). This perspective helps account
for the varieties of experiences that are represented by one category
of emotion. For example, there are numerous varieties of anger:
some involving blame, others being accidental; some directed at
others, others directed at the self; some experiences of high
intensity (like rage), others more modest (like irritation). A
prototype perspective suggests that within each emotion category,
there are better examples of an emotion that possess the
prototypical features of an emotion, such as those that we presented
for sadness. Then there will be many variations of that emotion that
have fewer of those features, or other features as well.
Variations in Emotion Lexicon
It is clear that people vary dramatically in terms of the words they
use to describe their emotional lives. For some, the realm of
emotion is captured in a rich array of words, metaphors, concepts,
and narratives. For others, such as the character Heath Ledger plays
in Ang Lee's film, Brokeback Mountain, emotional life is registered
in a few simple words that are expressed in the simplest of terms.
Todd Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Jordi Quoidbach and their
colleagues refer to such variation in the language of emotion as
emotional complexity (Kashdan, McKnight, & Barrett, 2015;
Quoidbach et al., 2014). Some people differentiate emotion into a
wide variety of categories and distinctions; they lead emotionally
complex lives, of experiences of many kinds of emotion, both
negative and positive. For others, the emotion realm has fewer
varieties of experience. With self‐report methods, and daily diary
reports, scientists can discover whether people differentiate
between many negative and positive emotions, or whether their
emotion knowledge is less differentiated. In general, a more
complex emotional life has many benefits, including reduced use of
alcohol, better health as indexed in fewer visits to a doctor, reduced
depression, and healthier romantic relationships.
For those who have a narrower language of emotion, one finds a
different pattern of outcomes. This is known as alexithymia
(Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997), which means having few words for
emotions; it's a difficulty in being able to identify or express
emotions verbally. It is associated with being less aware of
emotions, a paucity of fantasies, and a cognitive style oriented to
outside events rather than to the inner world. Research on
alexithymia is now extensive, with implications for social
interaction and mental health. David Preece et al. (2017) review this
field and propose a model in which alexithymic people have a
difficulty in appraisal, which leads to problems in identifying and
describing their emotions, and then combines with problems in
attending to emotions. These researchers found evidence for this
model in a community sample. In a study that used functional
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), van der Velde et al. (2015)
studied viewing and reappraising pictures designed to induce
negative emotions. When participants first looked at the pictures,
those who had higher scores on an alexithymia scale had lower
activation brain regions associated with recognition and attention
than did those who were less alexithymic. But when people were
asked to reappraise, no comparable differences in activation were
found between the more and less alexithymic participants. In a
study of brain volumes, Grabe et al. (2014) found that alexithymic
people had less grey matter, or neuronal cells, than comparison
participants in areas of their anterior cingulate cortex that are
associated with language processing.
As our experience of emotions is translated into verbal forms, we
are enabled to extend the meanings and uses of our primary
experiences. In this act something extraordinary occurs, which is
available only to humans. Emotions and thoughts can themselves
become objects of emotion and thought. We can turn them over in
our minds, reflect on them, and share them with others. Rimé
(2009) argues that in sharing emotions verbally, relationships are
extended, social support is enabled, and experience is compared
with the experiences and intuitions of other members of our
community.
The question of what emotions are really about, and how situations
are appraised at the deepest level, may need to be coaxed out in
verbal terms. James Pennebaker et al. (1988) had 50 students write
either about emotionally significant issues or about superficial
topics for 20 minutes on four consecutive days. Those who wrote
about the deeper emotional issues showed improvements in
immune function in the form of higher lymphocyte responses to an
antigen challenge and fewer medical consultations at the University
Health Center. Although participants who wrote about emotionally
important issues found the actual writing more distressing than did
control participants, three months later they were significantly
happier than the controls and, looking back, they viewed the
experience of confronting the emotional issues about which they
wrote as a positive experience. These effects have been replicated
many times, both in Pennebaker's laboratory and by other research
groups. Pennebaker has found therapeutic effects of confronting
traumatic experiences by writing or by talking. He understands the
process in terms of alleviating a debilitation caused by suppressing
traumatic experiences. He has concluded that the debilitation is
relieved by confiding, turning the emotions over in consciousness,
and by coming to understand the emotions and their implications
(Pennebaker, 2012; Pennebaker & Chung, 2011; Pennebaker &
Seagal, 1999).
Novels and films: Welcome to the Sticks
A wonderfully funny film that illustrates appraisal processes is
Welcome to the Sticks. It was said to be the most popular film of
all time in France. If you are French, you will know about it:
Bienvenue chez les Cht'is.
The film is about a post‐office manager, Philippe (Kad Merad).
His wife, Julie (Zoé Félix), is grumpy and difficult. She wants
Philippe to get a transfer to the French Riviera. To move to such
a favorable spot is difficult, so, to help his chances Philippe
decides that he needs to be disabled. He buys a wheelchair.
When an inspector arrives, his ruse is discovered and, perhaps as
a punishment, the Post Office Human Relations Department
transfers him, instead, to Bergues at the opposite end of France,
which people who live in the south of France appraise as being
the North Pole. Philippe sets out for his new job in his car. He
goes alone because Julie won't accompany him. He's stopped by
the police for driving too slowly on the highway. He explains to
the cop that he has been transferred to the North. “Be brave,”
says the cop, and lets him go without a fine.
The staff of the Bergues Post Office are so warm and kind to
Philippe that he becomes happy in his new position but, as this
occurs, almost unintentionally, in phone calls to his wife, he
finds himself saying the place is terrible; he pretends his
appraisal is far worse than it is. Where Julie had been
demanding, she becomes understanding; where she had been
cold, she becomes affectionate. Every two weeks, Philippe goes
south for the weekend, to see her. Just as his job is appraised as
better than it's ever been, so, now, is his marriage—so much
better that, after a few weeks, Julie decides to move to Bergues,
too. Philippe confides to his post‐office staff that he has told his
wife that the people of Bergues are coarse and his situation is
miserable. So, when Julie arrives, they put on a show of making
everything seem far more awful than anyone could possibly
imagine.
As we appraise these events we join together and laugh with the
actors in the film, as if we in the audience are taking part. The
idea of living in the north of France was appraised by Philippe as
too awful, but when he arrives he appraises his job as much
better than it's ever been. These simultaneous and opposite
appraisals seem to audiences rather funny. Philippe tells Julie
that Bergues is a terrible place, and when she arrives, people
there have made it more awful than Philippe said. Again, there
are two different appraisals, the initial one of Julie and that
which is put on for her by Philippe's workmates.
The question of why we laugh was asked by Henri Bergson
(1900/1911). First, he thought laughter is solely human. We
don't laugh at landscapes, and we laugh at animals only when
they seem human. Bergson wrote about how we may laugh when
we see a human behaving in a machine‐like way. He didn't use
the term "appraisal," but to see someone as machine‐like is to
appraise that person as both human and not‐quite‐human.
Bergson suggests this is odd, and funny, because being human is
such a fragile state. Second, Bergson said, we need to be a bit
detached to laugh. We don't laugh when we feel sympathy for a
person. Third, said Bergson, laughter needs a social echo. We
laugh usually only when we are in touch with others.
We started our discussion of laugher in the previous chapter,
where we saw that laughter is both a bodily activity and, as Jaak
Panksepp (2005) proposes, typically social. It begins in infancy
and continues in children's play. In chase games, the child being
chased laughs more than the one who is chasing. Panksepp has
found that rats make chirping sounds when they play with each
other: animal precursors of laughter. When we humans tickle
them, we are doing something odd, so that they make these
sounds, the rats become bonded to these particular humans. In
some human cultures, such as that of England, people cultivate
bonding by making jokes with each other and even at each other.
Emotional Experience
For many, the defining feature of an emotion is its subjective
experience, how the unfolding process of emotion feels to the
individual. Most typically, we represent our emotional experience
with words, in ways that capture what is happening in the social
context, and what is happening in our bodies (Barrett, Mesquita,
Ochsner, & Gross, 2007).
Emotion scientists take many approaches to measure emotional
experience. The most direct is simply to ask people to report on how
they currently feel with self‐report measures, ideally tailored to the
specific context and administered as close to the emotion‐eliciting
stimulus as possible. In this spirit, people can complete adjective
checklists, such as the following (Green, Goldman, & Salovey,
1993; Mauss & Robinson, 2009):
Positive
Negative
cheerful
blue
contented
depressed
happy
downhearted
pleased
gloomy
satisfied
sad
warmhearted unhappy
Sets of adjectives that are synonyms of emotions and moods (as
above) are offered to participants in a scrambled order. Participants
are asked to check any adjective that applies to them. Points are
given separately for positive and negative adjectives.
A second method is to offer statements like: “I am feeling sad and
dispirited.” Then ask people to indicate agreement on a scale—a
common five‐point scale is “strongly agree, agree, not sure, disagree,
strongly disagree.” Alternatively, you can make up a scale indicating
the extent to which each statement “Describes me.”
A third method is to use a scale like the following:
Circle a number on the scale below to indicate how sad you feel:
Not at all 0–1–2–3–4–5–6–7–8–9–10. The most intense I have felt
in my life.
The ends of this kind of scale are marked with verbal expressions
called anchor points, with which the participant can compare his or
her current experience.
There are several established self‐report scales that measure
tendencies toward global positive and negative moods (Watson,
Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), distinct positive emotions like awe, love,
and compassion (Shiota, Keltner, & John, 2006), the tendency to
express specific emotions like anger (Spielberger, 1996), shame and
guilt (Tangney, 1990), embarrassment (Miller, 1995), and fear
(Spielberger, 1983), as well as emotions in relation to others such as
gratitude (McCullough, Tsang, & Emmons, 2004) and empathy
(Davis, 1983). In a useful development of emotion diaries is called
experience sampling: participants are beeped on a mobile phone or
other device at random times during the day, and at that instant,
they provide information about their current feelings (Barrett &
Barrett, 2001; Bolger, Davis, & Refaeli, 2003).
In many ways, the question of what gives rise to our emotional
experience is a pressing question of the field and still remains a
scientific puzzle. Two theoretical perspectives have emerged
(Reizensein, 1992a). In one form, the very experience of emotions,
such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, is basic, so that it
cannot be reduced to lower‐level components. Fridja and Parrott's
(2011) idea of ur‐emotions is also a version of this idea. In the
second form, the experience of emotions derives from elements that
are not themselves emotions. This is the position of those who
think of emotions as socially constructed. For instance, Russell
(2003) and Barrett (2017) think of an initial positivity or negativity,
followed by a phase in which the experience is constructed from
what is perceived in the context, elements in upbringing, and
culture. A lively debate is taking place in emotion research in which
these two perspectives are explored.
The Perspective That Emotions Are Discrete
Earlier in the chapter we discussed how emotions have often been
taken as discrete (Frijda, 1987; Ekman, 1992; Keltner & Lerner,
2010; Panksepp, 1992; Roseman, 2011; Oatley & Johnson‐Laird,
2014). With these ways of measuring emotional experience, we
need to say some more about it and the alternative approach here.
From the discrete perspective, our experiences of emotions such as
sadness, embarrassment, awe, or amusement are fairly distinct
from one another. Our conscious experience of different emotions
integrates emotion‐related responses in the body and represents
courses of action (Winkielman, et al., 2011). From this perspective,
our emotions are discrete, because this is how we can see their
functions in our individual and social lives, love to form
relationships with others, sadness to deal with loss, anger when
another has done something to demean us, and so on.
In important ways, the idea of discrete emotions can be taken as
starting with Charles Darwin's book of 1872, and his analysis of the
universal patterns of expressive behavior. Emotions originate in
human evolution as a primate species and can be recognized by
their expressions: a smile for happiness, a frown and clenched fists
for anger, tears and a downcast look for sadness, and so on.
According to this view, an appraisal immediately produces an
emotion of a particular kind. Although each kind can be further
elaborated, the basic emotions can, in general, be identified by
words that occur in human languages; they correspond to distinct
kinds of emotions as they are experienced.
In different chapters, we have encountered studies that were
motivated by a discrete approach to emotion and emotional
experience. Distinct patterns of expressive behavior—the warm
smile or embarrassment display or lip puckers and lip licks of desire
—correlate with self‐reports of distinct experiences of emotions.
When asked to represent the bodily sensations of different
emotions, people refer to different parts of the body as locations of
those emotions. Still other evidence comes from feelings that occur
without any appraisal, for instance, in the auras that precede
seizures caused by temporal‐lobe epilepsy. MacLean (1993) reports
that these are strong feelings of six kinds: desire, fear, anger,
dejection, self‐congratulation, and affection, and that they are free‐
floating "completely unattached to anything, situation, or event" (p.
79). In a study of emotions of these kinds in presurgical
investigations in 74 patients with epilepsy, Melitti et al. (2006)
electrically stimulated the temporal lobes of the patients and found
that emotions of this free‐floating kind were caused: most
frequently fear, also happiness and sadness, but not anger or
disgust.
In a diary study, Oatley and Duncan (1994) found in 175 episodes of
emotion recorded by 47 employed people that 6 percent of the
emotions were not caused by an appraisal. Emotions that arose in
this free‐floating way were of happiness, anger, fear, and sadness. If
distinct basic emotions are primitives of experience (as argued by
Oatley & Johnson‐Laird, 1987), an emotion or mood is a basic state
and a complex emotion derives from it by adding secondary
appraisals about the emotion's cause, its object, and plans in
relation to it. So envy is anger at a specific person who is envied,
embarrassment is fear for oneself at a specific action, thought, or
event. Oatley and Duncan found no free‐floating emotions that were
of this complex kind. They did, however, find that whereas most
theories of basic emotions assume that emotions occur one at a
time, 31 percent of emotional episodes recorded by their
participants occurred as mixtures, with anger plus fear being the
most common, and that 32 percent of the emotions changed as they
proceeded, so that although happiness was usually stable, it was not
uncommon for anger to change to sadness.
Psychoactive drugs can cause emotions without any appraisal.
Especially striking is the drug cholecystokinin, which, in healthy
humans, reliably produces a state of panicky fear (Eser, et al. 2005).
The Perspective That Emotions Are Constructed
The alternative perspective on emotional experience is known as
constructivist (Russell, 2003; Barrett, 2017; Clore & Ortony,
2008; Lindquist, 2013). This approach can be traced back to William
James (1884), who thought that emotions are perceptions of inner
physiological processes so that, like perceptions of the outer world,
there are many ways of experiencing and talking about them.
Development of this position, away from James's theory, has been
strongly influenced by insights from anthropology and sociology.
(We reviewed findings of this kind in Chapter 3). On this view, the
emotion we feel and the language we use to talk about it don't fall
into discrete categories; rather, our experience of emotion is
constructed as we go along, based on our individuality, our gender,
our class, our upbringing, and the culture in which we live.
Contemporary, constructivist approaches to emotional experience
are founded on a few core assumptions. A first is an assessment of
the empirical literature on emotion‐related response, and the
critique that emotions are not natural kinds, in the way that
pigeons, robins, and seagulls are naturally occurring kinds of birds
(Barrett, 2007, 2017). Within any emotion category, such as anger,
fear, or love, there is too much variation in emotion‐related
response, the critique goes. And very often our experiences of
emotion don't robustly track emotion‐related responses, as assumed
by a discrete perspective. For example, in a review of studies of this
kind, Reisenzein, Studtmann, and Horstmann (2013) found that
coherence between the expression of smiling and the joyful
experience of amusement was high, but for other emotions,
coherence between expression and experience was lower (see also
Matsumoto et al., 2008). There is no essence to emotion and no
clear boundaries between the different emotions. A central truth of
emotion is variation within categories of emotion, according to your
genetics, your background, your culture of origin, your family life.
A second core assumption of constructivist approaches, first
articulated by James Russell, is that emotions are based on core
affect, based on a primary appraisal dimension of goodness or
badness, with an orthogonal dimension of energization or lassitude
(Russell, 2003). The thinking, here, is that we are continually
appraising the workings of our bodies and what is happening in the
social context in terms of how good or bad it is; this is the
foundational layer of emotional life. Core affect, the reasoning goes,
reflects the most fundamental and continuing assessment of how
one is doing in the world. When experienced in more global terms,
it is felt as more diffuse moods (“I feel warm and energetic" or “I
feel unenthusiastic”).
Finally, common to constructivist approaches is the idea that
specific emotions arise out of conceptual acts with attributions that
arise from the situation, which can then be grounded in language
(e.g., Barrett, 2006; 2017; Russell, 2003). In this sense, the language
we use to represent and report on our emotional experience is not a
reflection or reaction; rather it creates or constitutes our emotional
experience (Lindquist, 2013). Within constructivist approaches, it is
more generally assumed that the language we rely on to represent
emotion shapes every facet of emotion; it is not just a passive
reflection of emotion‐related responses. As examples, the specific
language we use, shaped by our culture, our gender, our social class,
our individuality, shapes our perception of eliciting causes of
emotion (Bai et al., 2017), how we interpret others' emotional
expressions (Doyle & Lindquist, 2015), bodily sensations, and what
emotional expressions we remember (Doyle & Lindquist, 2018).
Language constitutes all facets of emotion.
Comparing Perspectives
Often in our daily lives, our emotional experiences will feel quite
distinct and map onto emotion‐related facial expressions, or bodily
responses, or dynamics in the social context. This may be especially
true for certain individuals, and for certain emotional episodes, such
as those that are more intense (e.g., Mauss et al., 2009). Just as
powerfully, how we conceptualize emotion is deeply shaped by
culture, which will shape every facet of emotion, as well.
As one example of how discrete and constructivist approaches
influence emotional experience, consider a recent study by Cowen
and Keltner (2017). In this study, participants watched a subset of
emotionally evocative video clips, from a library of 2185 video clips
that Cowen had culled from the Internet that could potentially elicit
different emotions. After viewing each clip, people reported on the
discrete emotions that they felt, and they appraised each clip in
terms of different primary (good, bad) and secondary (fairness,
agency) dimensions. Figure 6.3 is a map of emotional experience
that the clips produced. In this map, the proximity of one clip to
another is determined by the similarity of the emotional experience
it generated.
FIGURE 6.3 A spatial arrangement of different emotional
experiences triggered by 2185 different video clips.
A new statistical technique revealed that people reported 27 distinct
types of emotion. They included emotions usually included as basic
such as joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust, but also admiration,
amusement, awe, boredom, calmness, desire, disappointment,
embarrassment, empathetic pain, and sympathy. This is in keeping
with a discrete approach to emotion. A second finding, though, is
not, and jumps out: there are not clear boundaries between
experiences of emotion; our emotional life is filled with mixed,
complex emotions, even in response to short video clips (Grossman
& Ellsworth, 2017; Larsen & McGraw, 2014). Finally, the authors
looked at what accounted for participants' experiences of 27
emotions, the use of more discrete emotion words, such as “anger”,
or the dimension of good–bad. They found that discrete categories
were more effective at structuring the results than were dimensions
of good–bad and excitement–enervation. It would appear from this
study that when people report on their experiences, it is discrete
emotion terms—“love”, “awe,” “anger”—that drive emotional
experiences more so than general appraisals of goodness/badness,
arousal, dominance, and so on.
Regulation of Emotions
Intense thought about regulation of emotions goes back to ancient
times. In the East, the question of how to live without being
affected by suffering was the problem that practices of meditation
were developed to solve (and we discuss these in the final chapter).
In the West, regulation of emotions was the problem on which
Epicureans and Stoics worked, more than 2,000 years ago. In this
section, we aim to show how regulation can work in adulthood, and
in the chapter after next (Chapter 8), how it develops in childhood.
At the beginning of this section, here, we should point out
something curious. An appraisal that elicits an emotion tells us that
something has happened to affect a concern: it's important! So why
would we want to regulate it, to turn this signal down, or turn it off?
For some emotions, such as anxieties when there is nothing to be
done about a situation, we can see why we might want to turn off
the signal: to stop unnecessary worry. For depression, too, when
there seem no possibilities for moving forward, reappraisal of
despair to get going again can be important (Oatley & Perring, 1991).
But what about other emotions? The question of whether and how
to try and regulate will be treated in this section. The question of
whether and how to work through the implications of emotions
themselves will be treated in the final chapter, in our discussion of
the psychological therapies, including self‐therapies.
Distraction, Reappraisal, Suppression
Most often the term “emotion regulation” refers to changing an
emotion's intensity and/or its duration. If you are in a traffic jam on
the way to an appointment, you might try to feel less anxious: listen
to music, think how to take care of being late, take deep breaths. If
you work at a customer interface, you can increase your enjoyment
of your job by being friendly to customers or clients.
One approach to regulation is to think of emotions as having a
dimension of pleasantness. Regulation can be the attempt to move
from the unpleasant toward the pleasant.
Nico Frijda (1986) and James Gross (1998) have argued that
regulatory processes affect every stage of the emotion process
(Gross, 2015). Gross, Sheppes, and Urry (2011) propose five stages
at which regulation can work, for self or others: selection of
situations, modification of situations, direction of attention,
cognitive change, and modulation of responses. Selecting and
modifying situations in childhood are discussed in Chapter 8.
Among regulatory interventions at the attentional stage is
distraction, getting oneself caught up in something else, like binging
on Netflix, or fiddling with one's phone, or chatting with a friend. As
to cognitive change, the appraisal one makes of an event affects
both the type of emotion and its intensity, so reappraisal can make
for transformation. Further along comes response modulation:
people can seek to suppress or emphasize expression of an emotion,
usually by behaving or not behaving in particular ways. When one
seeks to enhance an emotion, one can take William James's advice
and explicitly enact what one wants to feel so that, by means of the
inner feedback from expressive processes, one might feel it more
strongly.
Among attempts to reduce emotions, as suggested by Gross (2014),
are trying to calm down when angry and trying to stop young
children from giggling when they should be going to sleep. Among
attempts to increase emotions are firing oneself up before a big
game and sharing good news with friends or relatives. In this field,
researchers tend to talk about strategies of regulation; Webb, Miles,
and Sheerhan (2012) have reviewed their different effects. So, for
instance, distraction can work, and reappraisal (cognitive change)
can be effective in reducing the experience of negative emotions.
Suppression of certain emotional expressions can be effective in
interpersonal behavior, but attempts to suppress experience or
thoughts of an emotion tend not to work.
Different kinds of regulation can have different repercussions.
Butler et al. (2003) had women view an unpleasant film clip. Then
each woman met with another woman she did not know. Some
women who had viewed the clip were asked to suppress their
emotions by not expressing them. Others were asked simply to
respond naturally. Yet others were asked to reappraise the
experience by thinking of their current situation. Women who were
asked to suppress, and the women they met, were found to have
increased blood pressure as compared with those who responded
naturally and those who reappraised (see Figure 6.4).
FIGURE 6.4 Increases in blood pressure by partners of
those instructed to reappraise or to suppress their
emotions, and control participants, in the study by Butler
et al. (2003).
Suppression also reduced rapport, probably because emotional
responsiveness is important for communication. It made the people
to whom the women spoke less willing to take part in a friendship.
Instructions to suppress an emotion in experiments have generally
been found to be ineffective in decreasing the intensity of emotions
that are experienced in the experiments (Ehring et al., 2010).
In another study of reappraisal and suppression, van't Wout, Chang,
and Sanfey (2010) looked at regulation of emotional reactions to
unfairness in the Ultimatum Game (to be discussed in Chapter 10,
in which a responder decides whether to accept a proposer's
suggested division of a sum of money). Participants worked through
24 trials of the game. Some people received no instructions as to
regulating their emotions. Some received instructions to suppress,
which included the phrase: “It is very important to us that you try
your best not to show any signs of emotional feelings and suppress
any emotional feelings as you watch the offers” (p. 817). Others
were given instructions to reappraise: “It is very important to us
that you try your best to adopt a neutral attitude as you watch the
offers. To do this, we would like for you to view the offers with
detached interest or try to come up with possible reasons why
someone might give you a certain offer” (p. 817). As compared with
those who were asked to suppress their emotional reactions, those
asked to reappraise were less likely to reject unfair offers. So, van't
Wout et al. argue that their results extend previous findings:
“Emotional reappraisal as compared to expressive suppression, is a
powerful regulation strategy that influences and changes how we
interact with others even in the face of inequity” (p. 815).
Several studies have been performed to examine the effects of
different kinds of emotion regulation. Thus in an
electroencephalographic (EEG) study, Thiruchselvam et al. (2011)
found that distraction operates early in the emotion process. In an
fMRI study, Goldin et al. (2008) found that next in the chain of
events is appraisal, or reappraisal, which affects the prefrontal
cortex. Suppression, for instance, by not expressing an emotion,
although it, too, can affect the prefrontal cortex, tends to come later
in the process and affects the insula and amygdala. Bigman et al.
(2016) found that people who were led to believe that they could be
successful in regulating their emotions were indeed more successful
in doing so when negative emotions were induced, whereas people
in a control condition, who were not given this belief, were less
successful.
Laboratory studies of regulation have been informative, but how do
people regulate emotions in their day‐to‐day lives. Some people
distract themselves, when something upsetting occurs. Some people
tend to reappraise, and have developed the habit of making the best
of things. Others tend to suppress. Effects depend on context and
social goals (English et al., 2017; Haines et al., 2016). Here, too,
there can be repercussions. It has often been suspected that people
who habitually try to suppress their emotions make themselves
vulnerable to depression. In a study in which suppression was
compared with reappraisal in people who had a history of depressive
episodes as compared with people who had not, Ehring et al. (2010)
studied recovered‐depressed and never‐depressed people and found
that those who had experienced depression tended to suppress their
emotions. In a meta‐analysis, Visted et al. (2018) found that people
who were depressed or who had experienced a period of depression
had difficulties in emotion regulation.
There are, however, differences of culture: Soto, Perez, Kim, Lee,
and Minnick (2011) asked European Americans in the United States
and Chinese people in Hong Kong about their use of expressive
suppression, their life satisfaction, and their depressed mood. They
found that expressive suppression was associated with poorer
psychological outcomes for European Americans but not for
Chinese participants. Politeness in Chinese society involves
different procedures from those in America. Chinese people seem to
have become more skilled at suppression in ways that are not at
odds with how one lives in that society.
In a study of twins, Kateri McRae et al. (2017) found that people's
successful use of reappraisal to regulate emotions is less due to
genetics than are such personality traits as neuroticism, the
tendency to experience heightened negative emotion, which we
shall consider in other chapters. They suggest that an importance of
environmental "influences specific to reappraisal and adaptive
emotional functioning speaks to the potential impact of social
context, social partners, and psychosocial interventions on
reappraisal habits" (p. 772).
So far we have concentrated on individuals, but there are political
implications; might our understanding of these issues help make
the world a better place? Eran Halperin et al. (2011) did a laboratory
study in which Israeli participants were assigned to be trained in
reappraisal or to be in a control condition, and were then presented
with anger‐inducing information about the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict. Those in the reappraisal condition were more likely to favor
conciliatory practices, and to be less likely to stereotype those in
positions other than their own. Then the researchers ran a similar
study in the field, with a real political event, the Palestinian bid for
recognition by the United Nations. Here again, Israelis trained in
reappraisal showed more support for conciliatory policies and less
for aggressive policies toward Palestinians (see also Halperin, 2014).
In this section on regulation, we have left to the last an idea about
the relation of emotions to each other. It is by Batja Mesquita and
Nico Frijda (2011), who pick up on the finding, mentioned earlier in
this chapter, that about a third of emotion episodes recorded in
diaries involve mixed emotions and that emotions often change as
they proceed. Here is what Mesquita and Frijda say:
Emotional events in real life have the potential of eliciting
several emotions—that is, several modes of action readiness—at
the same time. We are happy as well as embarrassed when our
guests sing the “Happy Birthday” song at our birthday party. The
same event is relevant to multiple concerns, and evokes multiple
modes of action readiness—happiness and embarrassment—
simultaneously (pp. 782–783).
At the birthday party, we can choose to be happy or embarrassed. In
more serious situations, as with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and
in conflictual situations in our daily lives, we might choose to
prioritize our anger, to be aggressive and vindictive, or to prioritize
empathy, or even affection. In general, then, to regulate an emotion,
the issue is often, by reappraisal perhaps, to concentrate on an
emotion we choose. This same principle is one we will revisit in our
final chapter, when we discuss psychological therapies.
SUMMARY
Appraisals are evaluations of events in relation to an individual's
goals or concerns. We started this chapter by thinking about how
primary automatic appraisals occur unconsciously, when objects or
events are evaluated in terms of the appropriateness of an event to a
goal. Secondary appraisals then occur when we identify what caused
an emotion and when we think what we might do about it. We
showed how there are arguments for both discrete and dimensional
approaches. Some aspects of emotions are best seen as prototypes
or scripts, but at the same time there seem to be boundaries in
people's representations of emotions. The important social process
of tertiary appraisal starts when we turn our emotions into verbal
forms and share them with others. Putting emotions into words
helps focus emotional experience and enables us to explore
implications, for instance, in metaphorical ways and in relation to
others. Regulation has become important in the psychology of
emotion. Five kinds of process can be recognized: choice of
situations, modification of situations, direction of attention,
cognitive change, and suppression. Regulation is important not just
for individuals, but in social situations, and in political and
international events.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. Think about a happy emotion that you are interested in, perhaps
love or enjoyment of what you are doing, and reflect on what
generally causes it for you. What concerns are at issue? Do the
same for a negative emotion such as anger or sadness.
2. What functions for you have the expression of emotions in
verbal forms, in thinking or talking with others, or writing?
3. There are three systems of emotion: experiential (what you are
conscious of), behavioral (as in facial expressions and gestures),
and physiological (e.g., heart rate and skin conductance). Why do
you think these systems are not always closely coordinated?
FURTHER READING
For a cognitive account of emotions and their nature:
Frijda, N. (2007). The laws of emotion. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
An excellent review of appraisal is:
Moors, A. (2009). Theories of emotion causation: A review.
Cognition and Emotion, 23, 625–662.
For a discussion of emotion in relation to language and metaphor:
Kövesces, Z. (2003). Metaphor and emotion. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.
For a dimensional account of emotions:
Russell, J. (2003). Core affect and the psychological construction of
emotion. Psychological Review, 110, 145–172.
A useful discussion of emotion regulation and how to think about it
is here:
Gross, J. (2014). Emotion regulation: Conceptual and empirical
foundations. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion
regulation, second edition (pp. 3–20). New York: Guilford Press.
7
Brain Mechanisms and Emotion
CONTENTS
Historical Approaches to the Neuroscience of Emotion
Early Research on Brain Lesions and Stimulation
The Limbic System
Emotion Systems in the Mammalian Brain
A Framework from Affective Neuroscience
Emotion‐Related Appraisals and Subcortical Processes in the
Brain
Appraisals of Novelty and Concern Relevance: The Amygdala
Appraisals of Possible Rewards: The Nucleus Accumbens
Appraisals of Pain, Threat, and Harm: The Periaqueductal Gray
Bodily Awareness and Subjective Feeling: The Anterior Insular
Cortex
From Conceptualization to Empathic Understanding: Cortical
Processes in the Brain
Learning Associations Between Events and Rewards: The
Orbitofrontal Cortex
Emotion Conceptualization: The Prefrontal Cortex
Emotion Regulation: Regions of the Prefrontal Cortex
Empathy and the Cortex
Social Pain and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Anterior
Insular Cortex
The Search for Emotion‐Specific Patterns of Brain Activation
Distinct Emotions Are Constructed in the Cortex
Emotions Engage Discrete Patterns of Brain Activation
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 7.0 Images from a study by Saarimäki and colleagues
showing different patterns of brain activation for anger,
disgust, fear, happiness, and surprise elicited by movies,
imagery, and both (Adapted from Saarimäki et al., 2016).
Herein too may be felt the powerlessness of mere Logic … to resolve
these problems which lie nearer to our hearts.
George Boole, 1854, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, p. 416
Black Mirror is a dystopian television series that portrays the perils of new
technologies, from augmented reality to online platforms resembling
Facebook. At the center of one unsettling episode, Arkangel, are familiar
tensions between a nervous, single mother and her daughter. Early in the
episode, during a visit to their neighborhood park, the mother loses track
of her three‐year‐old daughter who has wandered after a cat and
disappeared. This leads to a frantic search for the young girl, who
eventually is found. In the aftermath of this harrowing experience, the
mother pays a visit to a new biotech firm, Arkangel. In its spotlessly clean,
high‐tech offices, the mother chooses to have an implant placed in her
daughter's brain, neatly and painlessly inserted near her temple.
The neural implant sends signals to a tablet that the mother keeps with
her. It allows her to keep track of where the young girl is—no more fear of
losing her. Through transmission from the girl's optic nerve, the mother
can tap a button and see on the tablet what the young girl sees in the
world. This becomes a source of conflict later in the show when the prying
mother spies on her adolescent daughter's sexual escapades.
The implant also notifies the mother that her daughter is experiencing
fear. It does so by tracking cortisol levels and then sending a signal to the
mother when the girl's cortisol has spiked. The mother can then apply a
filtering device to what the young girl perceives, rendering the source of
stress hard to see and hear. A ferocious barking dog becomes pixilated and
mute. Aggression on her middle‐school playground becomes blurry.
At the center of this drama is a familiar theme: parents want to protect
their children from sources of stress. The story also is built upon a
common intuition about emotion and the brain—that there are specific
areas of the brain where emotions such as fear are generated. If emotions
are located in such regions, it follows that people can alter their emotional
tendencies with neural implants and pharmaceuticals. Shut down the brain
region that produces fear, and childhood becomes calm and beatific.
It is tempting to think that there are distinct regions, or modules, of the
brain where specific emotions reside —sympathy neurons, perhaps, or an
anger center, or a love neurotransmitter. Perhaps this is a by‐product of
the language of emotion, which provides us with terms such as “fear” or
“awe” to describe distinct emotions, thereby leading to the assumption that
specific regions of the brain map onto these states (LeDoux, 2018). But the
neuroscience of emotion has arrived at a more complex and nuanced view.
A consensus is emerging in the field that emotions engage multiple regions
of the brain in complex, unfolding processes (e.g., Brosch & Sander, 2013;
Kragel & LaBar, 2017; Nummenmaa et al., 2018; Satpute & Barrett, 2017;
Smith & Lane, 2017). An experience of disgust, awe, or sympathy, for
example, will not activate just one region of the brain; instead a network of
regions shows patterns of activation that unfold over time. This insight
follows from the framework we presented six chapters ago in Figure 1.7:
that emotions are complex, unfolding processes involving appraisals,
bodily changes that we feel, expressive behavior, and acts of language‐
based conceptualization and regulation. The task of this chapter is to
understand how these emotion‐related processes engage patterns of
activation in the brain. Before setting off on this journey through the
emotional brain, let's first briefly cover some neuroanatomy and trace the
history of the study of emotion and the brain.
FIGURE 7.1 Early thinking some 100 years ago about the brain
assumed that distinct functions were located in very specific
regions of the brain, as portrayed in this drawing. Today, it is
more widely believed that processes such as emotion are
distributed across different regions of the brain.
Historical Approaches to the Neuroscience of Emotion
The human brain has about 86 billion neurons (Azevedo et al. 2009;
Herculano‐Houzel, 2016); typically each may have perhaps 10,000
synapses, some as many as 150,000 (Presti, 2017). Neuroanatomists have
mapped the brain into dozens of regions (e.g., the cortex has been mapped
into over 50 distinct regions known as Brodmann areas) and begun to trace
pathways through which the different regions connect.
The different regions of the brain connect via different kinds of
neurochemicals. A first is neurotransmitters, of which there are over
100 kinds in the brain. Neurotransmitters are released from the synapses
of neurons and diffuse in milliseconds across the tiny synaptic gaps
between cells to activate or inhibit receiving neurons (see Figure 7.2). As
well as acetylcholine, they include norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin,
glutamate, and gamma‐amino butyric acid (GABA). A second family of
neurochemicals in the brain are the neuromodulators, many of which
are peptides, or sequences of amino acids, which influence the activation
of neurotransmitters. Endogenous opiates (chemically similar to drugs
such as opium and heroin), for example, modulate the pain system, and
other peptides (such as cholecystokinin) have important emotional effects.
Some peptides are transmitters, but when they act as neuromodulators,
they are released by some neurons and diffuse some distance to affect
many thousands of nearby neurons.
FIGURE 7.2 An image of a neuron. Neurotransmitters are
released from vesicles near the synapse, and then they travel to
nearby neurons, stimulating an electrical impulse up the axon
of the neuron.
The challenge for the science of emotion is to map different emotion‐
related processes to these interacting regions of the brain. Scientists do
this with neuroimaging techniques. In these, a machine monitors
biochemical events in a series of digitally animated slices through a
person's brain, while a computer takes this information and constructs
visual images to show which regions have been metabolically most active.
These methods are noninvasive. They include Positron Emission
Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI),
in which pictures are constructed to show brain activity changing over time
in the course, for instance, of different emotional states. Alongside these
imaging methods, neuroscientists can study how accidental or disease‐
related damage to brain tissue influences emotional processes, while
others have made localized lesions in the brains of animals for
experimental purposes. Neuroscientists who use electrophysiological
methods have stimulated parts of the brain with electric currents or with
magnetic fields (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, TMS), and measured
electric signals (electroencephalography, EEG) or magnetic signals
(magnetoencephalography, MEG) generated by populations of neurons.
Pharmacological neuroscientists deliver neurotransmitters or
neuromodulators to small regions of the brain to examine their effects on
emotion‐related processes. That is it: anatomy, lesions, stimulation,
electrical and magnetic recording, pharmacology.
With these methods, researchers have begun to discover the functions of
regions of the brain, which we portray in Figure 7.3. The hindbrain
includes regions that control basic physiological processes: the medulla
regulates cardiovascular activity, the pons controls sleep and breathing; the
cerebellum is involved in motor coordination and automatic movements,
such as blocking an incoming ball to the face. The so‐called forebrain
includes the thalamus, which is involved in integrating sensory
information and memory and decision‐making, the hippocampus, which is
critical for memory processes, and the hypothalamus, which is involved
with biological functions such as eating, sexual behavior, aggression, sleep
and the sleep/wake cycle, and bodily temperature. The forebrain also
includes the amygdala—and the system of the cerebral cortex, which,
because it is so large in humans, distinguishes our brains from those of
other species. The large size of our brains is probably due to our
profoundly social lives (Dunbar, 2003; Lieberman, 2013). It is thought,
too, that the frontal lobes of the cortex are involved in planning, decision‐
making, and intentional action, as well as in emotion regulation.
FIGURE 7.3 Exploded view of the human brain. This slice of the
brain brings into focus the areas involved in emotion.
Subcortical regions of this kind include the amygdala (part of
the limbic system) and hypothalamus, as well as the ventral
striatum and periaqueductal gray (not pictured). Cortical
regions clearly involved in emotion include the orbitofrontal,
dorsolateral, midline, and anterior cingulate, all located in the
frontal region of the cerebral cortex.
Over 350 years ago, Descartes (1649) proposed that sensory stimuli pulled
little strings that ran inside the sensory nerves to open the valves that
would let fluids from a central reservoir in the brain run down tubes (the
motor nerves) to inflate muscles (Figure 6.0). This, he thought, was the
mechanism underlying the human reflex. We now know that nerve
messages are carried not by strings and hydraulics but by neurons that
conduct electrical signals and between neurons by means of
neurotransmitters at the synapses. Nevertheless, Descartes' analysis of the
reflex—as involving stimuli that excite sensory receptors, which send
messages along the sensory nerves to the brain, which in turn send signals
to motor nerves to work the muscles and organs of the body—remains a
principal framework today.
Emotions, however, are more than reflexes. We need additional concepts
to understand brain mechanisms of emotion, concepts such as the
individual's concerns and appraisals of the social context.
Early Research on Brain Lesions and Stimulation
One of the first theories of the brain mechanisms of emotion was proposed
by Walter Cannon (whom we discussed in Chapter 1). Work in Cannon's
laboratory, particularly by his student Bard (1928), indicated that cats
deprived of their cerebral cortex were liable to make sudden, inappropriate,
and ill‐directed attacks, which came to be called “sham rage” (Cannon,
1931). If fed artificially and carefully tended, these cats could live for a long
time, but would show few spontaneous movements except this angry sham
rage (Bard & Rioch, 1937). Such observations prompted Cannon to propose
that the cortex usually inhibits emotional expression, a theme we will
revisit shortly in our discussion of emotion regulation.
Cannon and Bard's formulation was really the continuation of the
nineteenth‐century hypothesis of the nervous system proposed by
Hughlings‐Jackson (1959). In this view, lower levels of the brain (the
hindbrain) are reflex pathways related to simple functions such as posture
and movement. At the next level are more recently evolved structures,
including those that support the emotions. At the highest and most
recently evolved level, the cerebral cortex controls all levels below it.
According to this argument, children are abound with uncontrolled
emotion until their cortex develops sufficiently to inhibit their lower
functions. Similarly, it was thought that brain trauma (as with poor
Phineas Gage, the railroad construction foreman whose accident you may
remember from Chapter 1) leads to the diminished activity of the higher
regions of the brain, thus releasing the lower ones from inhibition. This
idea that the function of the cortex, in life, is to inhibit the lower parts of
the brain is now seen as not very helpful.
The Limbic System
The neuroscience of emotion gained momentum with a theory offered by
MacLean (1990, 1993), who proposed that the human forebrain includes
three distinct systems, each of which developed in a distinct phase of
vertebrate evolution to fulfill new functions related to its species‐
characteristic repertoire. Apart from the hypothalamus, the earliest and
most basic part of the forebrain is called the striatal region (which includes
the caudate, putamen, and striatum nuclei). This area became enlarged
with the evolution of reptiles, argues MacLean, and it is devoted to
scheduling and generating basic behaviors, including: preparation and
establishment of a home site, marking and patrolling of territory,
formalized fighting in defense of territory, foraging, hunting, hoarding,
forming social groups including hierarchies, greeting, grooming, mating,
flocking, and migration. When striatal areas are damaged in humans, for
example, in the early stages of a hereditary disease called Huntington's
chorea, patients become unable to organize daily activities and carry out
goal‐directed behavior, though they happily partake in activities planned
for them.
MacLean (1993) next asked: “What do mammals do that reptiles do not?”
His answer: maternal caregiving with infant attachment, vocal signaling,
and play, all of which were served by a second subcortical region of the
forebrain, the limbic system, which includes the thalamus, hippocampus,
and amygdala, which have close connections with the hypothalamus, and
influence the autonomic nervous system and the cortisol response. In
contrast to reptiles, which hatch from eggs and start life on their own,
every mammal is born in close association with another. As mammals
diverged from reptiles in the course of evolution, the limbic system
developed, according to MacLean (1993), to support emotions that allow
for mammals' increasing sociality.
This insight derived from several early discoveries. When large parts of the
limbic system in wild monkeys housed in a laboratory were removed, the
wild monkeys, normally aggressive, would become docile, hypersexual,
disinhibited and approach everything without fear (Klüver & Bucy, 1937).
When Olds and Milner (1954) implanted electrodes into septal regions of
the limbic system in rats who were neither hungry nor thirsty, they would
press a lever repeatedly for up to four hours a day to deliver stimulation to
themselves in these regions.
Early analyses of temporal lobe epilepsy, caused by viruses or brain disease
(Gibbs, Gibbs, & Fuster, 1948), found that the neural discharges contained
within the limbic region triggered attacks defined by auras and suffused
with strong emotions. The Russian novelist Dostoevsky, who suffered
from epilepsy, wrote of the aura of his attacks: “a feeling of happiness such
as it is quite impossible to imagine in a normal state and which other
people have no idea of … entirely in harmony with myself and with the
whole world” (Dostoevsky, 1955, p. 8; see also Hughes, 2005). About these
feelings, MacLean says: “Significantly, these feelings are free‐floating,
being completely unattached to any particular thing, situation, or idea” (p.
79, emphasis in original). These observations led MacLean to orient the
field to the limbic system as a brain region likely to be centrally involved in
emotion—a hypothesis that would eventually be abandoned for claims
about more specific anatomical regions and their role in emotion.
Emotion Systems in the Mammalian Brain
MacLean's theorizing directed the early study of emotion to the limbic
system and regions such as the amygdala, thalamus, and hypothalamus.
Jaak Panksepp, a founding figure in the study of the emotional brain,
added precision and complexity to this thinking in his research, which
spanned 40 years. He and his colleagues would make the case that seven
basic emotion systems can be found in the limbic system and other regions
of the mammalian brain (Panksepp & Biven, 2013; Panksepp et al., 2016).
Panksepp primarily studied rodents —rats, mice, guinea pigs. In some of
his experiments, he would stimulate specific regions of the brain
electrically with implants. In other studies, he would inject certain
neurochemicals, such as oxytocin or opioids, into the brain. In the spirit of
Darwin, Panksepp then would look for shifts in specific emotional
behaviors—exploration of the environment, physical attack, freezing and
flight, copulatory behavior, distress calls, protective behavior of offspring,
and even the rat equivalent of laughter (subsonic vocalizations).
Through studies such as these, Panksepp arrived at the view that the
mammalian brain has seven basic emotion systems that guide adaptive
behaviors in response to significant threats and opportunities, largely of a
social nature. He calls these systems: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST,
CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. In Table 7.1, we outline Panksepp's framework.
Consider a few supportive findings. When the regions of the brain of the
SEEKING system are electrically stimulated, a rat will explore the
environment, sniffing, perhaps in search of food. When opioids are
injected into the brain of rodents (opioids reduce the pain response),
distress vocalizations associated with mammalian separation and grief are
dramatically reduced.
TABLE 7.1
Jaak Panksepp's ideas of social–emotional systems of the brain.
System Behaviors Emotions Brain Regions Neurochemicals
SEEKING Exploration
Enthusiasm, Ventral
Dopamine
Euphoria,
Tegmental Area,
Excitement Nucleus
Accumbens,
Caudate,
Amygdala,
Periaqueductal
Gray
RAGE
Attack,
biting
Anger, Rage Hypothalamus, Testosterone,
Amygdala,
Noerepinephrine,
Periaqueductal GABA (reduces)
Gray
FEAR
Freezing,
flight
Fear,
Anxiety
Amygdala,
Anterior and
Medial
Hypothalamus,
Periaqueductal
Gray
LUST
Copulation
Sexual
Desire,
Romantic
Love,
Excitement
Preoptic Area,
Testosterone,
Ventromedial
Estrogen,
Hypothalamus, Oxytocin
Periaqueductal
Gray,
Amygdala,
Ventral
Tegmental Area
Benzodiazapene
(reduces),
Serotonin
(reduces)
System
Behaviors
Emotions
Brain Regions Neurochemicals
CARE
Nurturance, Sympathy,
protection
Filial Love
Periaqueductal Oxytocin,
Gray,
Estrogen,
Ventromedial
Progesterone
Hypothalamus,
Ventrotegmental
Area
PANIC
Distress
Sadness,
vocalizations Distress,
Grief,
Depression
Anterior
Cingulate,
Dorsomedial
Thalamus,
Periaqueductal
Gray,
Cerebellum
PLAY
Rough and
tumble,
laughter,
ticklish
stimulation
Amusement SEEKING
system
Opioids (reduce),
Oxytocin,
Corticotropin
Releasing Factor,
Glutamate
Dopamine,
Cannaboids
Panksepp's theorizing had a large influence on the study of oxytocin,
involved in the CARE and LUST systems, as you can see in Table 7.1.
Oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus and released into both the brain
and blood stream. Receptors for this peptide are found in the olfactory
system, limbic–hypothalamic system, the periaqueductal gray, and regions
of the spinal cord that regulate the autonomic nervous system, especially
the parasympathetic branch (Uvnas‐Moberg, 1994). Oxytocin is involved in
lactation, maternal bonding, and sexual interaction (Carter, 1992).
Oxytocin is involved in CARE. Blocking oxytocin prevents maternal
behavior (Pederson, 1997; Insel & Harbaugh, 1989). In primates, injections
of oxytocin have led to increases in the frequency of touching and watching
infants and decreases in aggressive yawns and facial threats (Holman &
Goy, 1995). Oxytocin injections have caused ewes to become attached to
unfamiliar lambs (Keverne et al., 1997). Rat pups show preferences for
odors of mothers, except when pretreated with oxytocin antagonists
(Nelson & Panksepp, 1996). It also is involved in LUST. Comparisons
between prairie voles who display pair‐bonding, and the closely related
montane voles, who do not pair‐bond, have revealed differences in the
location of oxytocin receptors in the brains of each species (Carter, 1998;
Insel et al., 1997). Moreover, in the prairie vole, injections of oxytocin
directly into specific areas of the brain have been found to increase
preferences for a single partner over other partners, while injections of
oxytocin antagonists depress single partner preference (Williams, Insel,
Harbaugh, & Carter, 1994).
We hope that you are noting how social Panksepp's theorizing is: the seven
emotion brain systems support social behavior—fighting, copulation,
caregiving, seeking comfort when distressed. Make note of certain brain
regions that are important as we continue our tour of the emotional brain:
the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, the periaqueductal gray, the
anterior cingulate. Panksepp also makes important theoretical points in
detailing how these seven systems are involved in our emotional lives.
Often the systems interact with each other as emotions unfold. For
example, the SEEKING system supported by dopamine release —which
leads to goal‐directed behavior—is involved in many emotion systems,
such as the RAGE and LUST systems. One could imagine how our
experience of romantic love might involve the interaction between the
LUST and CARE systems. Or perhaps jealousy is the interaction between
the RAGE, LUST, and PANIC systems.
Panksepp also notes that there are certain neurochemicals that are widely
distributed throughout the brain and affect all emotions. Glutamate is
likely involved in increased activation in each emotion system, whereas
GABA and serotonin inhibit the activation of the seven emotion systems
(see also Carver et al., 2008). It is perhaps for the calming effects of
serotonin that people take serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Prozac,
which increase levels of serotonin, whose efficacy we consider in Chapter
13.
In an extension of Panksepp's theorizing to humans, Shiota and colleagues
have made the case that distinct positive emotions are supported by
different neurotransmitters (Shiota et al., 2017). Shiota and colleagues
argue that dopamine is the foundation of positive emotions, but that other
neurotransmitters map onto experiences of distinct emotions. Oxytocin is
engaged during experiences of love, for example (Gonzaga et al., 2006),
testosterone during experiences of sexual desire, and the opioids during
experiences of savoring and liking things.
Finally, Panksepp's theorizing helps us think about clinical issues, drug
addictions, and problems in society. For example, note how the opioids
reduce PANIC and associated feelings of sadness, distress, and loneliness.
Perhaps it is for this reason that people are drawn to opiates in the United
States right now, to combat loneliness, which is of epidemic levels (30% of
Americans report feeling lonely on a regular basis). Panksepp's theorizing
is a source of hypotheses and understandings of the emotional brain.
A Framework from Affective Neuroscience
Building upon early observations, emotion scientists have carried out
hundreds of studies of people experiencing emotion while patterns of brain
activation are recorded, most typically with fMRI methodologies (e.g.,
Kober et al., 2008; Kragel & LaBar, 2018; Lindquist et al., 2012;
Numennmaa et al., 2018; Rolls, 2013; Smith & Lane, 2015, 2017). The
movement of which these studies are part goes by the name of affective
neuroscience. In many such studies, people watch emotionally evocative
film clips. Or they recall emotional experiences. Or they might be led
through controlled and scripted emotional imagery (e.g., imagining
interacting with someone they have just fallen in love with or being
humiliated by someone). Or on occasion, they engage in carefully crafted
social interactions, for example, in hearing kind words from a friend or
being rejected by others while playing a game.
Syntheses of these literatures reveal two important themes.
A first is that the elicitation of emotion consistently produces activation
systematically in certain regions of the brain (Kober et al., 2008). This is
seen in both subcortical regions of particular interest to Panksepp—the
hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the periaqueductal gray – as well as
several cortical regions, including the visual cortex (the studies used visual
means of eliciting emotion), regions to the back of the brain involved in
understanding others and in bodily awareness, and regions in the frontal
cortex (Kober et al., 2008). This synthesis provides a map, if you will, for
us to understand how these regions are involved in the unfolding process
of emotion.
A second theme helps answer the question: how are specific regions of the
brain involved in different emotion‐related processes, such as appraisal,
bodily feeling, facial expression, conceptualization, or regulation (e.g.,
Brosch & Sander, 2013; Ochsner, 2008; Rolls, 2013; Smith & Lane, 2015,
2017)? In broad strokes, studies have illuminated how the brain is engaged
in basic appraisal processes by which an event (internal or external) is
novel, relevant to personal concerns, potentially rewarding, or signaling
harm. We shall see how the brain tracks emotion‐related responses in the
body. And we shall consider what brain regions are involved in the
conceptualization and regulation of emotion and the empathic response to
others' emotions. In our review, we will focus on relatively specific regions
of the brain, recognizing that as this science evolves, it is increasingly
showing how connected networks of regions of the brain are engaged in
different emotion‐related processes (Kragel & LaBar, 2017; Satpute &
Barrett, 2017).
Emotion‐Related Appraisals and Subcortical
Processes in the Brain
Emotions begin with appraisals, interpretations of sensory information
through the filter of our present concerns (Ellsworth, 2013). This complex
process begins in fast, even unconscious appraisals—the first movements
of emotion as described by Chrysippus—of how unfolding events are
relevant to our basic concerns, for example, over a sense of security,
fairness, or acceptance. These basic appraisals arise within 100–350
milliseconds of first perceiving an event; more complex appraisal processes
add layers of meaning to the event, interpreting the context in terms of
agency (who caused the event), social norms, certainty, power,
responsibility, and possible courses of action (Brosch & Sander, 2013;
Smith & Lane, 2015). In this first section, we shall see how subcortical
processes (see Figure 7.4) support fast appraisals of events, providing
information about: the novelty and concern relevance of the event (in the
amygdala), potential sources of rewards (in the nucleus accumbens), and
whether there is harm (in the periaqueductal gray).
FIGURE 7.4 Subcortical regions involved in emotion, including
the reward circuit (the nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental
area (VTA) and prefrontal cortex) and the amygdala.
Appraisals of Novelty and Concern Relevance: The Amygdala
In one of the most important developments in the science of emotion,
Joseph LeDoux (1993, 1996; Rodriques, Sapolsky, & LeDoux, 2009) argued
that the claims about the limbic system were imprecise because some of its
functions can be more specifically localized to the amygdala. LeDoux has
argued that the amygdala is the central emotional computer for the brain:
it evaluates sensory input for its emotional significance (LeDoux & Pine,
2016). LeDoux's thesis derives from neuroanatomical analysis. The
amygdala receives inputs from regions of the cortex that support visual
perception of objects and auditory perception of sounds. The amygdala also
has rich interconnections with the hypothalamus, which regulates
emotion‐laden behaviors such as sex, eating, and aggression. Rewarding
self‐stimulation can be demonstrated in the amygdala (Kane, Coulombe, &
Miliaressis, 1991), and components of emotional behavior and autonomic
responses can be elicited by electrical stimulation in this region (Hilton &
Zbrozyna, 1963).
As well as inputs from the visual and auditory cortex, the amygdala
receives visual and auditory inputs directly via the thalamus—not via
routes that result in the recognition of objects or events. Experiments by
LeDoux and his colleagues (e.g., LeDoux, 1990; LaBar & LeDoux, 2003;
LeDoux & Pine, 2016) use Pavlovian conditioning (also called classical
conditioning), which is considered a basic mechanism of learning about
the emotional significance of events that signal something pleasant or
unpleasant. The standard arrangement involves two stimuli. One is called
the conditioned stimulus, perhaps a flashing light or an auditory tone.
Before the experiment, it has no significance other than being noticeable;
its significance in signaling a reward or punishment is what will be
learned. The so‐called unconditioned stimulus is the event that has
biological significance; in Pavlov's original experiments, it was delivery of
meat powder into the mouth of a hungry dog (Pavlov, 1927). What is
learned in Pavlovian conditioning is an emotion about the biologically
significant event: readiness for something pleasant (happy anticipation), or
for something unpleasant (fear or anxiety). Such emotional effects are
expressed as species‐typical actions, for example, a dog wagging its tail and
salivating when it sees its meal being prepared, or the same dog freezing,
slinking, cringing, struggling to escape, when threatened. Emotional
conditioning for negative stimuli is quickly learned and slow to extinguish
—one of the reasons why anxiety can be such a severe and long‐lasting
clinical disorder.
LeDoux and his collaborators have found that with conditioned stimuli of
simple auditory tones or flashing lights, and with an unconditioned
stimulus of an electric shock to the feet, rats will learn an association so
long as the amygdala and the thalamus are present. This learning occurs
even if the cortex has been removed. LeDoux interprets this as meaning
that the amygdala can receive sensory information that has not been
processed by the cortex. Based on the simplest features of stimuli,
emotional learning can occur; the amygdala is a core of a central network
of emotional processing. Very much in keeping with this thesis, Elizabeth
Phelps and her collaborators have documented that in humans, as in
nonhuman species, the amygdala is centrally involved in learning about
fearful stimuli and remembering them (Hartley & Phelps, 2011). For
example, highly anxious people show greater amygdala responses to
fearful stimuli (Hartley & Phelps, 2011). Sonia Bishop and her colleagues
have documented that the left amygdala is activated when people detect
changes in facial expression from a neutral expression to a fear expression,
but it is not activated with other kinds of changes to facial appearance
(Achaibou, Loth, & Bishop, 2015).
One might conclude that the amygdala is something like a fear module in
the brain, but that would be misleading. In different meta‐analyses of
emotion‐related brain activation, it is not always the case that fear
activates the amygdala (Kober et al., 2008; Lindquist et al., 2012). Instead,
it looks as though the amygdala is involved in appraisals of novelty and the
concern relevance of objects and events; it would appear to support
appraisals of what is new in the environment and relevant to your current
goals and concerns.
Two kinds of neuroimaging studies support such a thesis (Baxter &
Murray, 2002; Brosch & Sander, 2013; Gottfried, O'Doherty, & Dolan,
2003). A first is that the amygdala is often activated during momentary
emotional reactions of different kinds to evocative stimuli and not just
fear‐eliciting stimuli. The amygdala (along with other brain regions) has
been found to increase activation in response to: sad film clips (Levesque,
Eugene, et al., 2003), erotic film clips (Beauregard, Levesque, & Bourgoin,
2001), disturbing slides (Lane et al., 1997; Phan, Taylor, et al., 2004),
unpleasant tastes and odors (Zald, et al., 1998), and the perception of fear
and sad faces (Whalen et al., 1998; Blair et al., 1999). The amygdala is
activated by positive stimuli as well (Liberzon, Phan, Decker, & Taylor,
2003; see Zald, 2003, for a review). In making judgments of positively and
negatively valenced concepts such as “murder,” “love,” “gun control,” and
“abortion,” participants' amygdala activation was predicted by their reports
of the intensity, but not the valence, of the word (Cunningham et al.,
2004).
Second, objects and events are more likely to elicit activation when they
are relevant to a present concern of the participant. For example, people
who look at life in terms of the potential rewards that situations offer
showed greater amygdala activation to intense, positive stimuli, whereas
people who look at life in terms of its costs and threats show greater
amygdala activation in response to negative concepts (Cunningham et al.,
2005; for similar work, see Canli et al., 2001; Canli, Sivers, Whitfield,
Gotlib, & Gabrieli, 2002). Pictures of food elicit larger amygdala responses
in hungry people as compared to satiated individuals (LaBar et al., 2001).
People who are more selfishly oriented show bigger amygdala responses to
the prospect of winning money than do more altruistic people (Brosch et
al., 2011). The amygdala is activated by objects and events, both good and
bad, when they are relevant to our current concerns.
Given this pattern of findings, Brosch and Sander reason that the amygdala
responds to the novelty of a stimulus and the degree to which it is relevant
to your present concerns (Brosch & Sander, 2013). It gets the process of an
emotion underway.
Appraisals of Possible Rewards: The Nucleus Accumbens
Almost all living organisms find rewarding objects in their environment—
in humans, sources of food, comfort, security, esteem, status, and beauty—
and act in ways that maximize those rewards. Positive emotions are
essential to this most basic task of evolution, helping us approach and
enjoy the rewards of life (Fredrickson, 1998; Ruff & Fehr, 2014; Shiota et
al., 2017). The feeling of enthusiasm propels us toward what we find
rewarding. The beauty of a potential suitor's face propels us forward in the
euphoria of desire toward acts of affection. The feeling of contentment
enables us to savor what is good (Cordaro et al., 2016). Feelings of pride or
love signal more specific social rewards—the esteem of a valued friend, the
affection of someone we cherish, the favorable regard of individuals in
groups to which we belong (Tracy, et al., 2014).
In recent summaries of the neuroscience of reward, Suzanne Haber and
Brian Knutson (2010), Christian Ruff and Ernst Fehr (2014), and Michelle
Shiota et al (2017) detail what might be thought of as a reward network in
the brain, likely involved in many positive emotions, such as enthusiasm,
awe, and joy. One part of this reward circuit that is engaged by pleasing
stimuli—nice tastes, pleasant touches, pleasing sounds, and the like—is the
ventral medial prefrontal cortex. A second is an older region of the
subcortex known as the ventral striatum, and in particular, dopamine‐rich
networks in the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental areas (which
produce dopamine). Importantly, the ventral striatum receives neural
input from the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the hippocampus and
sends signals to the prefrontal cortex as well as regions such as the
hypothalamus, which controls more basic bodily processes related to
eating, sleep, and sex.
With this neuroanatomy as a basis, let's look more carefully at some
empirical studies of this reward network, focusing our efforts on the
nucleus accumbens. It is rich in dopamine and opioid neurotransmitter
pathways and has long been thought central to the experience of positive
affect (Panksepp, 1998; Rolls, 2013). For example, dopamine release and
activation in the nucleus accumbens increase in response to pleasurable
food (Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997), the opportunity for sex (Fiorino,
Coury, & Phillips, 1997), and conditioned neutral stimuli that have been
repeatedly paired with food, sex, or rewarding drugs (Di Ciano, Blaha, &
Phillips, 1998). The duration of response in this reward circuitry predicts a
person's well‐being (Heller et al., 2013). As you might imagine, people
suffering from depression, when asked to maintain their positive emotion
in response to positive slides, do not show sustained activation in the
nucleus accumbens as nondepressives do; they have to struggle to keep the
neural underpinnings of positive emotion active (Heller et al., 2009).
In light of this evidence, you might conclude that the nucleus accumbens
and dopamine are central to the experience of pleasure. Work by Kent
Berridge and colleagues offers a more finely detailed picture of the neural
underpinnings of positive emotion. They have found that activation of
opioid receptors, but not dopamine receptors, enhances the value of the
taste of sucrose, as measured by behavioral reactions in rats to sweet tastes
(Berridge, 2000; Berridge & Kringlebach, 2013; Kringelbach & Berridge,
2009; Pecina & Berridge, 2000). This work has led Berridge to distinguish
between wanting and liking.
Dopamine and activation in the nucleus accumbens are central to wanting;
they motivate a variety of approach‐related, goal‐oriented behaviors,
including exploration, affiliation, aggression, sexual behavior, food
hoarding, and nursing, SEEKING in Panksepp's framework (Depue &
Collins, 1999; Panksepp, 1986). Lesions to the nucleus accumbens reduce
the motivation to work for reward (Caine & Koop, 1993). Studies by Brian
Knutson and his colleagues have documented how the nucleus accumbens
is involved in the anticipation of pleasure (see also Bowman et al., 1996;
Schultz et al., 1997; Ruff & Fehr, 2014). In a gambling paradigm, Knutson
and colleagues give participants the opportunity to win money. They
consistently find that it is the anticipation of rewards that activates regions
of the brain such as the nucleus accumbens and the medial prefrontal
cortex (Knutson & Greer, 2008). This research clearly suggests that
activation of networks of dopamine neurons signals potential rewards in
the environment and is likely involved in such emotions as enthusiasm
and desire.
In contrast, the opiates are central to our experience of liking stimuli.
Liking is involved in the enjoyment of rewards registered in feelings of
contentment and sensory pleasure (e.g., Cordaro et al., 2016). The opiates
are released by lactation, nursing, sexual activity, maternal social
interaction, and touch, social interactions in which the savoring of close
contact is pronounced (Insel, 1992; Keverne, 1996; Matheson & Bernstein,
2000; Nelson & Panksepp, 1998; Silk et al., 2003). The release of opiates
makes consumption pleasurable and rewarding. In contrast to dopamine, it
produces a state of pleasant calmness and quiescence, the kind of
emotional experience you might enjoy after a great meal, a soothing
massage, or a sunny and relaxing picnic with friends in a park.
What about rewards other than money or good tastes, social rewards such
as favorable attention, affectionate contact, or play, which are so important
to human emotional life? There are several new theoretical accounts of
this idea (see Ruff & Fehr, 2014). Matthew Lieberman and Naomi
Eisenberger reason that the reward circuits we have been considering are
also engaged when we enjoy the social rewards of life, the esteem of a
friend, affection from a loved one, or praise from a superior or group
member (Eisenberger, 2016; Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2009). In keeping
with this line of reasoning, studies find that when people think about being
in love, the nucleus accumbens is activated (Aron et al., 2005). When
people cooperate in an economic game or give money to a charity, they
show activation in parts of a reward circuit (Harbaugh, et al., 2007). You
may be intrigued to learn that practicing gratitude enhances activation of
the reward circuit, as does witnessing charitable acts (Karns et al., 2017).
So, the reward circuit is activated by more complex social rewards
alongside pleasing tastes and money.
Given these results, several theorists have offered the following analysis of
affiliative bonding, which prioritizes the roles of dopamine and the opiates
(DePue & Morrone‐Strupinsky, 2004; Panksepp & Biven, 2013). They
propose that distal affiliative cues such as smiles and gestures serve as
incentive stimuli, they motivate approach‐related tendencies served by
dopamine release. These cues trigger dopamine, which promotes actions
that bring individuals into close proximity with one another. As one
illustration, the nucleus accumbens is activated in heterosexual males by
viewing attractive female faces (Aharon et al., 2001). Once in proximity,
affiliative behaviors such as touch and soothing vocalizations elicit the
release of opiates. The opiates, in turn, bring about powerful feelings of
warmth, calmness, intimacy, and connection (e.g., Shiota et al., 2017).
Recent work, for example, by Lauri Nummenmaa, Sandra Manninen and
their colleagues, has found that laughing with friends and touch lead to the
release of opiates in specific regions of the brain (e.g., Manninen et al.,
2017). When the opiates are blocked in juvenile rats, they spend less time
with their mothers after separation (Agmo et al., 1997). Human females
given naltrexone, which blocks opiate release, spend more time alone,
less time with friends, and enjoy social interactions less (Jamner et al.,
1998). Tristen Inagaki, Naomi Eisenberger and their colleagues have found
that when people take naltrexone, they report reduced feelings of social
connection on a daily basis and less social connection when reading kind
words written to them by a friend (Inagaki et al., 2016). Feelings of
support, connection, and attachment have deep roots in regions of the
brain where dopamine and opioid networks are present.
Appraisals of Pain, Threat, and Harm: The Periaqueductal Gray
A final subcortical region known to be implicated in emotion is the
midbrain periaqueductal gray, which is situated above the hindbrain
and below the forebrain (Kober et al., 2008). This region appears to be
involved in three different processes related to emotion that collectively
suggest that it is involved in appraisals of pain, threat, and harm.
First, this region is involved in the release of opioids, which inhibit
ascending pain signals before they reach the cortex. This may allow an
individual to escape threat before attending to bodily harm, which will be
signaled by pain (Heinricher et al., 2009; Lovick & Adamec, 2009). The
periaqueductal gray, then, helps in the avoidance of pain when something
more important occurs.
Second, the periaqueductal gray is activated by threatening images that
evoke negative emotions, more broadly defined, along with pain (Satpute
et al., 2013). In one recent investigation, participants showed increased
activation in the periaqueductal gray in response to thermal pain as well as
when viewing distressing slides (Buhle et al., 2012). The periaqueductal
gray, then, is activated by negatively valenced images of a distressing and
threatening nature.
Third, emerging evidence suggests that the periaqueductal gray may be
part of a caregiving system in the mammalian brain that is responsive to
harm (for reviews, see Panskepp & Biven, 2013; Swain, 2010). In Chapter
2, we noted how this region is activated within 40 or 50 milliseconds upon
hearing an infant's distressing vocalizations. Studies of nonhuman
mammals find that care‐giving behaviors such as crouching over pups,
retrieval of pups and bringing them back to the nest, licking, and prolonged
nursing engage the periaqueductal gray (e.g., Stack et al., 2002). In
humans, alongside other regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex and
thalamus, the periaqueductal gray has been found to be activated in
studies of mothers viewing images of their own versus acquainted or
unknown infants, or viewing video clips of their own infants exhibiting
attachment‐figure soliciting behaviors such as smiling and crying
(Noriuchi et al., 2008). Periaqueductal gray activation was also observed,
along with activation in other empathy network regions, in participants
instructed to generate unconditional love toward images of disabled people
(Beauregard et al., 2009), while participants viewed sad facial expressions
with instructions to extend a “compassionate attitude” toward them (Kim
et al., 2009), and when participants viewed prototypical images of suffering
and need (Simon‐Thomas et al., 2011). These studies begin to paint a
picture: the periaqueductal gray attenuates the pain response, it is
activated by signs of distress and negative emotion, and it engages
caregiving tendencies.
In our tour of the emotional brain thus far, we have learned about
subcortical regions concerned with three kinds of signals. The amygdala
processes sensory information quickly in terms of its novelty and
relevance. The nucleus accumbens tracks the possibility of rewards.
Periaqueductal gray activation relates to pain, negative affect, and
caregiving. Now we shall consider how these subcortical neurochemical
signals are transformed by different cortical regions of the brain into more
complex experiences as the process of emotion unfolds.
Bodily Awareness and Subjective Feeling: The
Anterior Insular Cortex
If there is a defining element of an emotion it is that it is felt in the body
and experienced in the mind—the pangs of sympathy, the heat of
embarrassment in sensations in the face, the tense body, arms, and hands
of anger, the bodily surge of desire, the goosebumps of awe when moved
by a piece of music. Is there a region of the brain that is involved in the
feeling of these bodily sensations and awareness? Bud Craig has devoted
his career to answering this question. His theorizing and hundreds of
empirical studies suggest that the anterior insular cortex is centrally
involved in the experience of emotion; it receives incoming neural signals
from the organs, muscle groups, and veins and arteries distributed
throughout the body (Craig, 2002, 2016). The anterior insular cortex
appears to be where emotional experience begins to take shape.
Craig makes the case for this idea with several streams of evidence (see
also Smith & Lane, 2015). A first is found in considering the anatomy of
the anterior insular cortex. Through various neural pathways in the spinal
cord that connect regions of the body to the brain, the anterior insular
cortex tracks information about breathing, cardiovascular activity such as
the contraction of the heart and blood flow, the arousal of the sexual
organs, digestive processes, as well as skeletal muscle actions involved in
bodily movements. Many of the emotion‐specific bodily changes that we
considered in Chapter 5 send neurochemical signals that converge upon
the anterior insular cortex. It is where bodily changes appear to be
transformed into physical sensations that enter our conscious awareness.
This region also registers information about others' emotions —it is
activated by emotional touch and, in some studies, by perceiving facial
expressions in others. This region, in Craig's thinking, tracks the changes
in the systems of the body.
Second, the anterior insular cortex is involved in several processes that
enable the conscious awareness of bodily sensation. Most notably, it is
engaged by self‐awareness. For example, when we look at images of our
face, this region is activated; it is not necessarily activated by the faces of
others. The anterior insular cortex is involved in our awareness of the
present moment and context. Finally, this region is engaged when we think
about making choices of different courses of action, for example, whether
to remain silent or express frustration to a coworker. Awareness of self, the
present context, and deliberating over possible courses of action—
processes supported by the anterior insular cortex—are central to the
subjective experience of emotion. Craig's argument is this: as
neurochemical signals from the body arrive at the anterior insular cortex,
it engages self‐awareness, awareness of the context, and thoughts of what
to do, the beginnings of the experience of an emotion.
Craig's thesis that the anterior insular cortex is central to the awareness of
bodily changes and the emergence of emotional experience is bolstered by
hundreds of studies (Kober et al., 2008; Lindquist et al., 2012). One of the
most reliable effects in the study of emotion and the brain is that when
people report on their experience of emotion, the anterior insular cortex is
activated. In fact, this has been shown to be true for just about every
emotion studied, including: maternal and romantic love, anger, fear,
sadness, happiness, sexual arousal, disgust, feelings of unfairness,
inequity, indignation, uncertainty, disbelief, social exclusion, trust,
empathy, sculptural beauty, a “state of union with God,” and a
hallucinogenic state (induced by ayahuasca). When we are aware of bodily
sensations and begin to feel an emotion, the anterior insular cortex is
engaged.
From Conceptualization to Empathic Understanding:
Cortical Processes in the Brain
The amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and the anterior insular cortex
send electrochemical signals via neural pathways to different regions of
cortex. The cortex (meaning “outer layer”) of the human brain is between
0.06 and 0.12 inches thick, but it is deeply folded and makes up about 80
percent of the brain. If spread out flat, it would have an area of about 310
square inches. What emotion processes are supported by this part of the
human brain?
One source of insight is found in the study of specific patients with damage
to cortical regions of the brain, such as Phineas Gage. One such patient
goes by the name of J.S. and has been studied by James Blair (Blair &
Cippoloti, 2000). One day in his mid‐50s, J.S. collapsed and lost
consciousness. He suffered damage to particular regions of the prefrontal
cortex. Although he retained his abilities to speak and reason, he became a
textbook example of acquired sociopathy (see Chapter 1). During his
recovery in a hospital, he threw furniture at other patients. He groped
female nurses. On another occasion, he body‐surfed on a gurney through
the hallways of the hospital. In Blair's research, J.S. demonstrated normal
capacities to learn, to recognize faces, and to identify whether faces are
male or female. But he showed specific deficits in knowing what emotions
are appropriate in specific contexts, in recognizing certain emotions, in
regulating his emotional impulses, and in understanding the emotions of
others.
The frontal lobes that J.S. damaged are seen as centers of regulation or
executive control (Gazzaniga, Ivry, & Mangun, 2002). The thinking is that
regions of the frontal lobes receive signals from regions such as the
amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and the anterior insular cortex. In the
prefrontal cortex, representations of such feelings can be held in short‐
term memory and used to form plans tailored to the social context (e.g.,
Beer, Knight, & D'Esposito, 2006; Smith & Lane, 2015; Smith et al., 2017;
Wallis, 2007).
In this section, we will consider how regions of the cortex are involved in
emotion‐related processes. We shall focus on: associating emotional
rewards to specific contexts; how we conceptualize emotion with words
and concepts; how we regulate emotions; and how we understand the
emotions of others.
Learning Associations Between Events and Rewards: The
Orbitofrontal Cortex
Edmund Rolls has studied people who have damaged their orbitofrontal
cortex (See Figure 7.5) and found that they have difficulty tracking how
rewards are associated with context‐specific objects and events (Rolls,
2013; Ruff & Fehr, 2014). As a result, people with damage to the
orbitofrontal cortex will often show emotion that is inappropriate to the
context, disinhibited behavior, or oddly flat affect. This region of the brain
enables the tracking of context‐specific sources of rewards (and positive
emotion) and acting in accordance with that knowledge.
FIGURE 7.5 The orbitofrontal cortex is highlighted in a monkey
brain (left) and brain of a human (right).
Here is the evidence that Rolls considered. First, in both nonhuman
primates and humans, rewards with evolutionary significance that are not
learned through conditioning processes activate certain regions of the
orbitofrontal cortex, for instance, pleasant tastes, nice odors, soft touch to
the skin, and smiling faces (Rolls, 2013). The orbitofrontal cortex
generates a neurochemical signal in the brain when we encounter such
basic pleasures. It is engaged, too, by the experience of social pleasure
(Ruff & Fehr, 2014).
It also tracks changes in events that yield these rewards, or what are called
stimulus reinforcement contingencies. If one kind of action leads to
pleasing food in one context but not another, the orbitofrontal cortex
tracks that change. If one kind of action leads to affection in one context
but not another, the orbitofrontal cortex tracks these associations. It is no
wonder that when people experience damage to this region, they have
trouble tracking changing elicitors of rewards. They are less sensitive to
different types of punishment and reward. As a result, their social behavior
is often inappropriate and lacking in positive emotion. If your life involves
learning what elements of your environment provide you with delight, the
orbitofrontal cortex is engaged in this process.
Emotion Conceptualization: The Prefrontal Cortex
Unique for human emotion, as compared to emotion in nonhuman
species, is the possibility of conceptualization: our use of words, phrases,
metaphors, and concepts to attend to, represent, make sense of, and share
our emotional experiences in communicative acts of different kinds.
Emotion conceptualization is at the heart of the socialization of emotion in
families and how children learn to talk about their feelings—central to
healthy adjustment (see Chapters 8 and 12). Acts of emotion
conceptualization are part of therapy, and art, and the identities we
assume. They are imbued with the values and ideas of culture.
When people report on their current feeling (e.g., “I am really mad” or “I'm
slightly amused”), they are engaging in the simplest act of conceptualizing
emotion—using language to represent feelings (Smith, Alkozei et al., 2017).
Ajay Satpute, Kevin Ochsner et al. (2016) have documented that reporting
on emotional experiences with words actually involves two distinct
processes: attending to the state and categorizing it. They have found that
when people attend to emotional states in themselves or others, one region
of the prefrontal cortex is activated: the dorsal medial prefrontal
cortex. By contrast, when people categorize emotional states, a different
region of the prefrontal cortex is activated: the ventrolateral prefrontal
cortex.
Box Individual Emotion: The Feeling of Beauty
Understanding our experience of beauty has long inspired poets,
artists, and philosophers. We experience feelings of beauty in response
to a wide array of events and objects. Scientists are actively engaged in
examining which faces we find beautiful, how music elicits the chills
associated with aesthetic appreciation, how different kinds of natural
scenes seem beautiful to people around the world, and how painting,
architecture, and dance move us, sometimes literally. A small group of
neuroscientists have taken up the call to understand beauty in a new
field known as neuroaesthetics. A review of this field by Nadal and
Pearce points to the promise of this inquiry (Nadal & Pearce, 2011).
These neuroscientists first offer an important theoretical point: rather
than finding the “beauty center” of the brain, it is much more likely
that various regions in the brain will be found to contribute to the
experience of beauty. Very basic perceptual processes—related to
perceiving faces or sounds, for example —will be involved. So too will
more integrative processes, such as signals sent by the amygdala or
nucleus accumbens, that give the perception of the stimulus an
affective quality. Cortical processes will be involved in giving the
experience conceptual meaning, for example, how what is experienced
relates to the individual's self or identity. Here is a small sampling of
Nadal and Pearce's review. Both beautiful paintings and pretty faces
activate the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex, regions of
the brain involved in basic reward processing and attaching social
significance to the reward signal. Watching an inspiring dance
performance activates parts of the visual cortex as well as the premotor
cortex, as if the body is getting ready to dance. And music activates
parts of the auditory cortex and either the amygdala or nucleus
accumbens depending on the emotional content of the music, as well
as the orbitofrontal cortex. These preliminary discoveries on the feeling
of beauty make contact with much that has been learned thus far in the
neuroscience of emotion and shed light on the neural underpinnings of
one of the most mysterious sentiments, the feeling of beauty.
Gabrielle Starr is a professor of English, but in her research group, she
uses neuroimaging to understand the experience of beauty (Starr,
2015), as something valued in an emotional sense. Ed Vessel, with
Starr and Nava Rubin (2012; 2013), asked people to look at paintings
from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, Eastern and Western,
representational and abstract, which would be unfamiliar because they
were often reproduced in art books. Participants were told: “The
paintings may cover the entire range from ‘beautiful’ to ‘strange’ or
even ‘ugly.’ Respond on the basis of how much this image moves you.”
Participants gave the highest rating, of most moving, to 16.7 percent of
the paintings. They did not, however, agree among themselves as to
which these were; their judgments were personal and idiosyncratic.
The researchers found that for paintings each person found most
moving, first as she or he was asked to look, there was deactivation of a
region known as the default mode network (particularly the medial
prefrontal cortex), which we will consider at the end of this chapter,
and that is involved in self‐referential processing. This is what
happens, in this network, when someone is given a task. Then there
was activation in the network, as the person felt moved by the beauty
of the picture. We say more about this network at the end of this
chapter. It is activated when a person thinks spontaneously, or reflects
on matters that concern the self. When this network is activated by a
painting the participant finds beautiful, it's an indication that the piece
of art has reached within.
In their 2013 paper, Vessel, Starr, and Rubin say “certain artworks can
“resonate” with an individual's sense of self … “the neural
representations of those external stimuli obtain access to the neural
substrates and processes concerned with the self.”
These findings raise the possibility that when we conceptualize our
emotional experience with words, the patterns of brain activation change.
This possibility is in keeping with a constructivist account of emotion, that
language shapes emotional response (Barrett, 2017; Lindquist et al., 2015).
Two kinds of evidence lend credence to this possibility. A first emerges in a
synthesis of 386 studies by Jeffrey Brooks, Kristin Lindquist et al. (2017),
studies in which investigators sought to understand the patterns of brain
activation for anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and happiness. In these studies,
researchers generally had participants label their emotional reactions to
evocative stimuli (e.g., pictures of gore or delicious looking food) with
emotion words. In other studies, although the eliciting stimuli were the
same, the study did not engage participants in the conceptualization of
their emotions with words. Across these studies, labeling emotions with
words activates what Brooks, Lindquist, and colleagues call a semantic
association network that includes several regions of the cortex.
A second kind of study has explored how conceptualizing emotion with
words alters activation in other regions of the brain. A widespread intuition
is that when we use words to conceptualize emotion, we gain perspective
upon our passions, and perhaps act a bit more wisely. Parents teach
children the language of emotion—“to use their words”—on the
assumption that they may gain more control over their bursts of anger or
inappropriate and out‐of‐control laughter. Insights achieved in therapy,
gained through acts of conceptualization, would seem to pave the way for
less stress and greater acceptance and understanding. Might a region of the
prefrontal cortex be involved in these striking shifts in emotion? Indeed
this appears to be the case. Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues have
found that when we label negative emotional experiences with emotion
words, it activates the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (see
Figure 7.6). Action in this region of the cortex, in turn, leads to decreased
activation in the amygdala (Lieberman et al., 2007; Lieberman et al., 2011;
Satpute et al., 2017; Torre & Lieberman, 2018).
FIGURE 7.6 Emotion labeling activates the right ventrolateral
prefrontal cortex, pictured here, which is associated with
reduced activation in the amygdala.
Grounded in this understanding of the effects of conceptualizing emotion,
it is interesting to consider the influences of mindfulness meditation
upon patterns of brain activation (We consider in greater detail this kind of
contemplative practice in Chapter 14). In some ways, these mindful
practices are a sophisticated form of emotion conceptualization, in which
in a physically calm state the individual directs attention and categorizes
transient emotional states or the stresses and difficulties of social living.
Scientists such as Richard Davidson, Tania Singer, and Philippe Goldin
have studied what happens in the brain during states of mindfulness, and
it very much is in keeping with what you have learned about with respect
to the interplay between the prefrontal cortex and subcortical regions of
the brain, in particular the amygdala (Davidson & Goleman, 2017; Klimecki
et al., 2013). Namely, practicing different kinds of mindfulness—focusing
on the breath, or bodily sensations, or the suffering of others, or warm
feelings we feel toward those individuals we care about—increases
activation in regions of the prefrontal cortex, it lessens activation in the
amygdala, and in some studies activates reward‐related regions of the
brain, such as the ventral striatum.
Emotion Regulation: Regions of the Prefrontal Cortex
Early studies in cognitive science identified different regions of the
prefrontal cortex that would likely be involved in emotion regulation, given
their functions in more general cognitive processes (Buhle et al., 2014).
Namely, different regions of the prefrontal cortex, which we shall soon
consider, support cognitive processes, such as directing attention, choosing
among response options, and reflecting upon current experience, that are
central to emotion regulation—the different ways in which we modify our
emotional responses once they are underway, and in ways that fit the
demands of the current social context (see chapters 8 and 14 for fuller
discussions). Two kinds of evidence suggest that the prefrontal cortex is
important to the regulation of emotion.
First, patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex—the J.S.s and Gages of
the world—have problems regulating their emotional behavior; their
emotional reactions are often wildly inappropriate to the social context.
Orbitofrontal patients like J.S. we described above have been observed to
greet strangers by kissing on the cheek and hugging (e.g., Rolls, Hornak,
Wade, & McGrath, 1994), to engage in tasteless joking and teasing (Stuss &
Benson, 1984), and to disclose to a stranger in an inappropriately intimate
fashion (Beer, 2002). They often experience and express emotions that are
inappropriate to the context, for example, showing a great deal of pride
after teasing a stranger, when most people feel embarrassment, even
mortification, at such an awkward social encounter (Beer et al., 2003).
Neuroimaging studies offer a second kind of evidence that speaks to how
the prefrontal cortex is activated when people try to regulate their
emotional responses (e.g. Buhle et al., 2014). In one of the first of such
studies in this literature, Kevin Ochsner and his colleagues had 15 females
view 114 photos, two‐thirds of which were evocative of negative emotion,
and one‐third of which were relatively neutral in content (Ochsner, Bunge,
Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002). For the negative photos, one half of the trial's
participants were asked to reappraise the photo so that it would “no longer
elicit a negative response.” This reappraisal condition led to greater
activation in the dorsal and ventral regions of the left lateral prefrontal
cortex and the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex.
That study inspired dozens of similar studies. In reviews of over 50 studies
of this kind, Jason Buhle, Kevin Ochsner, James Gross and their
colleagues summarize the evidence as follows (Buhle et al., 2014; Ochsner
& Gross, 2008). Simply labeling emotions with words can activate regions
of the prefrontal cortex we have been considering, and it tends to
deactivate amygdala response as well as the anterior insular cortex
(Burkland et al., 2014).
When people engage in a reappraisal of their emotional response, in a
fashion described above, there tends to be activation in the dorsal
prefrontal cortex, a region known to be involved in selecting what to
attend to and where to focus attention. Reappraisal also activates left
lateralized regions of the frontal cortex. Clearly this is in keeping with the
core of reappraisal, which involves shifting attention away from one
appraised meaning of a stimulus or event (e.g., how I do on this
standardized test will determine which college I get into!) to another (this
test is just one test of many, and my future will be based on many of my
talents and efforts).
A third kind of emotion regulation that has been studied with
neuroimaging techniques is taking a third person perspective upon
current emotions. For example, in the heat of an emotional episode, you
might look upon yourself from a third person perspective, or as if you were
an actor in a play or character in a novel, or from a distant point of view.
This kind of regulation engages the medial prefrontal cortex, known to
be involved in self‐representation (Kross & Ayduk, 2017).
Box Focus on film
John Huston's Treasure of Sierra Madre from 1948 is a classic in
American cinema and speaks to the importance of the frontal lobes in
emotion and emotion regulation. Humphrey Bogart plays expatriate
Fred Dobbs, who is tired of bumming smokes and meals off expatriate
Americans in Tampico Mexico. He decides to encamp with two other
down‐on‐their‐luck prospectors in the arid mountains of Mexico's
Sierra Madre. They are in search of gold. Initially they find success, and
the social complexities of accumulating wealth. As their bags of gold
dust mount in weight and number, the three men do their best to trust
each other, in spite of the opportunities for exploitation. Still the band
of desperate prospectors holds tight, bound together in cooperative
spirit by the enthusiasm of their quest, the camaraderie of their work,
the reverie of the meals and clothes and farms and white picket fences
they envision with their newfound fortunes, and the laughter, banter,
back slapping, and firm hand‐shakes of strangers trying to get along.
When a mine shaft collapses on Bogart, he suffers a blow to his head,
in particular his frontal lobes. He loses his social emotional talents,
and the story takes a dramatic turn. He misreads the intentions of his
comrades and assumes erroneously that they are hiding gold from him.
He comes to view his comrades as being guided by malicious intent. He
becomes more remote and cold: the language of friendship— “buddy,”
“friend,” and nicknames—shifts to the sharp, impersonal tones of last
names. He becomes disinhibited in his emotions and is prone to name
calling and gun pointing confrontations. Even before the neuroscience
of the frontal cortex really got off the ground, we see evidence of the
importance of these regions of the brain to emotional functioning in
classic tales such as the Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Empathy and the Cortex
In Chapter 1, we introduced Tania Singer, who has devoted her career to
understanding the networks of the brain that support empathy and
compassion. In this chapter, we have encountered other efforts to
understand the neural underpinnings of compassion: the CARE system
that Jaak Panksepp studied, the role of the periaqueductal gray in
nurturant and compassionate behavior. Let's consider empathy in a bit
more depth.
Our ability to mimic others, to read others' mental states, and ultimately to
feel what others feel, is central to social relationships (See Chapter 9).
Recent neuroscientific studies are starting to chart how different empathic
processes engage different regions of the cortex. Studies reviewed by Jean
Decety and Claus Lamm (2006) and Kevin Ochsner and Jamil Zaki (2016)
reveal that certain regions of the medial prefrontal cortex, in particular
regions of the anterior insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex,
are engaged when people respond empathically to the emotions of others.
For example, when we feel a painful prick on the finger, the anterior
insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex are activated. And hearing that
someone else is experiencing this same kind of pain activates those regions
as well; our own experience of pain and our appraisal of another's pain can
activate the same regions of the brain. This basic empathic process extends
to other emotions: when we feel disgust, the anterior insular cortex is
activated; when we see other individuals feel disgust, the anterior insula
cortex is activated. These regions of the cortex are helping humans cross
the gulf between self and other, ensuring we know what others feel.
A different form of empathy—the cognitive understanding of others'
mental states, or what has been called theory of mind—engages different
regions of the cortex. Singer refers to these regions of the brain as the
empathy network; Rebecca Saxe calls them the theory‐of‐mind network
(Bruneau et al., 2012; Jacoby et al, 2015). This cognitive empathy network
includes the medial prefontal cortex, the precuneus, and the temporal
parietal junction, an associative region of the cortex that receives input
from the prefrontal cortex. These cortical regions are more likely to be
involved when we understand cognitively, in the abstract, what others are
feeling, and that they feel different states than we do.
When the frontal lobes are damaged, then, as in the case of the patient J.S.,
abilities to feel empathically and to understand what other people feel may
be lost, and social relationships can suffer profoundly (Beer, Shimamura, &
Knight, 2004; Blair & Cipolotti, 2000; Hornak, Rolls, & Wade, 1996). For
example, in one recent line of research, Howard Rosen and Robert
Levenson (2009) have begun to characterize the emotional deficits that
accompany one kind of dementia known as frontal temporal lobar
dementia: it's an organic brain disease that strikes in the middle of life and
devastates specific regions of the prefrontal cortex as well as the temporal
lobes—regions involved in empathic processes as we have been discussing.
In keeping with a theme of this section, frontal temporal lobar dementia
patients, compared with matched control samples, show deficits in
empathic behaviors: they are less accurate in reading the emotions of
others, they engage in less mutual gaze with their romantic partners, and
they don't show the usual levels of embarrassment—an emotion that is
rooted in the understanding of others' judgments—when being put through
the embarrassment of watching themselves sing on videotape.
Social Pain and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Anterior
Insular Cortex
Thus far, we have seen how cortical processes enable the social aspects of
emotion, from empathic responses to others to regulating our emotions
according to the demands of the current social context. What about other
social dimensions of emotions and their representation in cortical process?
One recent focus is the social pain of separation (Panksepp & Given, 2013).
Separation from close others manifests in the feeling of distress and
sadness, for example, when separated from a romantic partner, the grief
we feel when a loved one passes away, and even the feeling of shame at
being socially rejected and excluded. John Bowlby, whom we introduced in
Chapter 1, proposed in his attachment theory that the social pain of
separation helps us stay close to attachment figures, so vital to our
survival.
How might such social pain engage cortical processes? To answer this
question, Naomi Eisenberger suggests an important role for the dorsal
anterior cingulate cortex (Eisenberger, 2015; Eisenberger &
Lieberman, 2004, Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2017). Eisenberger proposes
that a specific region of the anterior cingulate cortex, its dorsal region,
might be thought of metaphorically as the mind's alarm system that is
attuned to social pain and separation. This thesis draws upon several
findings: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is thought of by cognitive
scientists as a discrepancy detector, detecting conflicts between stimuli or
the individual's goals and intentions. The dorsal region of the anterior
cingulate cortex is also active during the experience of physical pain, or
noxious physical sensations, and in particular seems to track the felt
unpleasantness of such pain. It is for this reason that surgeons at times
may resort to ablating part of the anterior cingulate cortex when someone
suffers from intractable pain. And you just learned that regions of the
dorsal anterior cingulate cortex are activated (along with other regions
such as the insula) when we respond empathically to the pain of others.
Given these findings, Eisenberger suggests that our experiences of social
pain likewise engage the anterior cingulate cortex, in particular its dorsal
region (Eisenberger, 2015). Here are some relevant findings that support
this claim (see Figure 7.7). In mammalian species, ablating the dorsal
region of the anterior cingulate cortex leads to a decline in distress calls
when separated from kin, and reductions in affiliative behavior—classic
attachment behaviors. It also impairs the mothering behavior of rat moms,
who no longer retrieve rat pups in distress when their dorsal anterior
cingulate cortex is impaired. Opiates can be used not only to reduce
physical pain, but social pain as well. Building upon this evidence and
reasoning, Eisenberger posits that the dorsal region of the anterior
cingulate cortex also helps humans detect and respond to nonverbal and
verbal cues of rejection, separation, and exclusion.
FIGURE 7.7 The Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (the darker,
shaded area in the two images of the brain) is activated by
different forms of social pain and separation.
In an early demonstration of this social rejection thesis, Eisenberger and
her colleagues had participants play a ball toss game on a computer with
two other participants (Eisenberger et al., 2003). In this game, the
participant tossed a virtual ball back and forth to the other participants. At
a preset point in this playful exchange, the computer was programmed so
that the two other players stopped tossing the ball to the participant, thus
placing the participant in a situation of social rejection reminiscent of
being ignored on the school playground. This act of social rejection
triggered activation in the dorsal region of the anterior cingulate cortex,
and participants' reported experiences of distress correlated with activation
in this region.
Since that study, several other studies have shown that this region of the
cortex is responsive to different forms of separation and social rejection
(Eisenberger et al., 2015). Namely, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is
activated by the threat of negative social evaluation, viewing rejection‐
related images, reliving a romantic rejection, or being reminded of a lost
loved one (Kross & Ayduk, 2017). Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues
have further shown that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex initiates the
body's inflammation response, which can have costly effects on health, as
you learned in Chapter 5 (Eisenberger et al., 2017). More recently,
Eisenberger and her colleagues have begun to make the case that feeling
socially supported by friends and loved ones acts as a buffer against these
effects in the brain of social rejection and separation (Hornstein,
Fanselow, & Eisenberger, 2016).
It would seem that in the course of human evolution, social connection
became so important that social rejection and social separation recruited
the use of ancient pain regions of the cortex for more social purposes.
The Search for Emotion‐Specific Patterns of Brain
Activation
Thus far, we have seen how different emotion‐related processes —simple
and complex appraisals, bodily awareness, conceptualization, regulation,
and social understanding— engage different subcortical and cortical
networks of regions of the brain. This tour through the emotional brain
may have left you wondering the following questions: How should we
think about the brain mechanisms for specific emotions? What are the
patterns of activation for negative emotions such as anger, disgust, fear,
and sadness? What about the self‐conscious emotions, embarrassment,
shame, guilt, and pride? Or the various positive emotions such as
amusement, awe, contentment, desire, and love? Our tour through the
emotional brain, you will recall, began in important ways with the
influential work of Jaak Panksepp, who argued for seven distinct emotion
systems in the brain in different mammals. In closing this chapter, we
shall consider two different perspectives on the question of how and where
distinct emotions arise in the brain.
Distinct Emotions Are Constructed in the Cortex
One answer to the question of how distinct emotions arise in the brain is
found in the writings of Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kristin Lindquist, and Ajay
Satpute, and their theorizing about how emotions are constructed in the
brain (Barrett, 2017; Lindquist, 2016). They propose that broad networks in
the brain are activated by appraisals of valence (goodness/badness) and
arousal of events in the environment. These basic appraisals give rise to
core affect, the feeling of how good or bad and how arousing things are.
What, then, produces our experiences of more specific emotions? Within
constructivist theorizing, more specific emotions—anger versus disgust, for
example, or love versus pride—arise in language‐based acts of
conceptualization that are shaped by individual experience, culture, the
present context, and the language we use to conceptualize emotion.
Emotions are constructed as acts of meaning.
Some of the findings that we have reviewed align with this theory of
emotions as constructed in the brain. Namely, we have seen how broad
networks in the subcortex and cortex do provide a general appraisal of the
salience and concern relevance of the event. We have seen how different
linguistic acts—attending, labeling, categorizing, and regulating—produce
specific patterns of activation in cortical regions. Acts of conceptualization
prompt specific brain activation.
Emotions Engage Discrete Patterns of Brain Activation
A different account of the neural processes of different emotions is offered
by a new generation of neuroscientists who include Philip Kragel, Kevin
LaBar, and Lauri Nummenmaa and their collaborators (Nummenmaa et
al., 2018; Kragel & LaBar, 2016; see also Wager et al., 2015). These
researchers have looked beyond emotions such as anger and fear to more
specific comparisons, for example, between amusement and contentment,
or embarrassment, shame, and guilt. These more specific comparisons
have been enabled by advances in studying more specific regions of the
brain (called voxels) and new statistical techniques that identify emotion‐
specific patterns of activation. These studies are revealing distinct, and
different, patterns of activation throughout the brain for a number of
different emotions (Nummenmaa & Saarimäki, 2018; Saarimäki et al.,
2016).
For example, in one study, Kragel and LaBar had participants watch
evocative film clips and listen to emotionally moving pieces of music. The
clips and music pieces were selected to evoke three negative emotions—
anger, fear, sadness—in participants, as well as two positive emotions—
amusement and contentment—as well as surprise and a neutral state
(Kragel & LaBar, 2015). Across the two modalities, the six emotions
elicited distinct patterns of activation in the brain, as you can see in Figure
7.8 (see Kragel & LaBar, 2016).
FIGURE 7.8 Networks of activation associated with six
different emotions and a neutral state (from Kragel & LaBar,
2016).
In a similar spirit, researchers have been actively asking whether
embarrassment, shame, and guilt are associated with distinct networks of
activation in the brain. These three self‐conscious emotions are elicited by
different events and produce different subjective experiences (Tangney et
al., 1996). We feel embarrassment when we have violated a social
convention (e.g., of how to address someone or use the butter knife),
shame when we fail to live up to the aspirations of others, and guilt when
we have harmed someone. Might these states be associated with distinct
patterns of activation in the brain?
Indeed, this appears to be the case. Coralie Bastin, Sarah Whittle and their
colleagues reviewed 21 studies in which people were led to feel
embarrassment, shame, and guilt (Bastin et al., 2016). In some studies,
people recalled an experience of one of these emotions while their brains
were scanned. Or they posed their face and head and gaze in the
configuration of the expression typical of embarrassment or shame
(Morita et al., 2013). Or they imagined experiencing one of these three
emotions in a hypothetical situation. Across these studies, the three self‐
conscious emotions were associated with different patterns of brain
activation. Shame was associated with increased activation in the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the
sensorimotor cortex. Embarrassment was associated with increased
activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. And guilt
was associated with activation in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex,
posterior temporal regions, and the precuneus.
Still other studies have begun to map distinct patterns of brain activation
for other emotions. For example, the elicitation of pride has been found to
activate the posterior medial cortex, a region known to be associated with
self‐referential processing (Simon‐Thomas et al., 2012). Experiences of
sexual desire are associated with activation in the hypothalamus, a finding
very much in keeping with discoveries about the mammalian brain
(Brunetti, et al., 2008). Feelings of gratitude when watching stories of
holocaust survivors led to activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and
medial prefrontal cortex (Fox et al., 2015). Romantic partners asked to
imagine scenes that prompt romantic jealousy showed activation in the
basal ganglia (Sun et al., 2016). People prone to experience envy showed
activation in the inferior/middle frontal gyrus and the dorsomedial
prefrontal cortex (Xiang et al., 2016).
Toward the end of this chapter, now, let's consider a new branch of
affective neuroscience that would have intrigued William James, given his
lifelong interest in religious experiences. Led by neuroscientists such as
Roland Griffiths and Robin Carhart‐Harris, there has been a concerted
attempt to understand the patterns of brain activation that accompany
mystical experiences, for example, of the kind that people encounter in
meditation, yoga, prayer, ritual, and—in certain traditions—through
hallucinogens such as psilocybin, which are now being tested for their
potential therapeutic benefits for people suffering from drug addiction,
depression, and trauma (Barrett & Griffiths, 2017). The philosopher Walter
Stace, in part inspired by William James, argued that there is a core to
mystical experiences: a sense of unity with other living beings, the
dissolution of the self, a sense of things being sacred, the conviction that
one is encountering ultimate truths about reality, paradoxicality, and
transcending space and time (Stace, 1960). Also at the heart of mystical
experiences are self‐transcendent emotions such as awe, joy, ecstasy, and a
love of humanity (Stellar et al., 2017).
Neuroscientists have examined people during religious prayer, they have
looked at the brains of deeply committed practitioners of meditation, such
as Tibetan Buddhist Monks, or they have looked at the changes in patterns
of brain activation brought about by a controlled, and blind (unaware to
the participant) experience of psilocybin (see Barrett and Griffiths, 2017).
What patterns of activation might support mystical experiences? In this
research, we learn that what is deactivated is also central to emotional
experience.
The brain focus in this research is on the default mode network, which,
as Jessica Andrews‐Hanna, Jonathan Smallwood & Nathan Spreng (2014)
explain, includes the medial prefrontal cortex, several other prefrontal and
temporal cortical regions, subcortical areas that include parts of the
hippocampus, as well as parts of the cerebellum and striatum. It is
activated when the person engages in spontaneous self‐generated thought,
which can be musing, reflective, or creative. The network has been found
to be activated when people engage in self‐directed, goal‐centered activity,
in activities that involve autobiographical memory, in thoughts about the
self in relation to other people, in imagination of novel scenes or
narratives, and in thinking about moral dilemmas or personal futures. The
network comes alive in spontaneous processes that involve the self, and
they often involve emotions. The research of Li, Mai, & Liu (2014) was on
the role of this network in social understanding of others (theory‐of‐
mind), while Xie et al. (2016) found evidence that social regulation of
people's emotional states by a therapist, including reduction of aversive
emotions, was associated with activations of parts of the network. This
network is deactivated when people engage in externally based activities,
for instance, doing tasks they are required to do, which depend on
perceptual input from the outside world (see also Andrews‐Hannah et al.,
2018).
So what might we make of the default mode network? Is it, as Gabrielle
Starr and her coauthors suggest (as we discussed earlier in this chapter, in
the Box on the Feeling of Beauty), involved in inner emotional meaning
and value? Or is it a network that, given Stace's analysis that we offered
above, is something that in mystical experience—with its loss of the sense
of self, and its sense that one is transcending time and space—might be
switched off?
Barrett and Griffiths find that intense experiences of meditation and
experiences with psilocybin, consistent sources of enduring joy, ecstasy
and awe that can last for weeks, reduce activation in the default mode
network (Bruer et al., 2016; Cathart‐Harris, et al., 2014). When regions of
the default mode network are surgically altered, there is an increase in
self‐transcendent emotions, such as joy and awe (Urgesi et al., 2010). In
Japan, there is a sense of wonder, awe, joy, and ecstasy that accompanies a
state called Kando—the vanishing of the self. Could it be, in such cases,
that what vanishes in the brain are activations of the default mode
network?
We started this chapter with an episode of a television story in which a
mother is worrying about her daughter. Like most stories, this one is based
in emotion, in this case on attachment and, in the brain, on Jaak
Panksepp's CARE system. As we have gone on in this book, we have
emphasized how most human emotions are not about the individual. Our
most important emotions are about our relationships with others. They
depend on understanding these others: described in psychology in terms of
mentalizing, theory‐of mind, empathy and sympathy. These issues have
been given primacy in the work of Tania Singer, discussed above. Let's end
this chapter, then, with a quantitative integration of neuroimaging studies
by Raymond Mar (2011). He found a brain network that jointly supports
the functions of understanding stories and theory‐of‐mind: the core‐
mentalizing network. It includes the medial prefrontal cortex, which is also
part of the default mode network. The function of the mentalizing
network, in understanding others, may be at the center of the emotions of
our relationships.
SUMMARY
In this chapter, we turned to the human brain to explore what regions
might be involved in emotion and in what ways. We reviewed current
understandings of how the brain works and how different regions of the
brain serve different functions. We considered different methods for the
study of the brain, ranging from studies of patients with brain damage to
the imaging of brain regional activity as humans respond to different
stimuli and the effects of psychoactive drugs. We then focused our
attention on subcortical processes involved in emotion‐related appraisals.
In this section, we saw that a small portion of the forebrain, the amygdala,
is involved in appraisals of novelty and concern relevance, the nucleus
accumbens signals the potential rewards of different stimuli, and the
periaqueductal gray in the midbrain is related to appraisals of threat, pain,
and caregiving. We then considered the role of the anterior insular cortex
in the awareness of body sensations and the experience of emotion. We
then turned to different regions of the cortex and how they are involved in
emotion conceptualization, regulation, empathy, and social pain and
separation. We considered two different approaches to the question of how
distinct emotions arise in the brain and ended by discussing networks that
are involved in our conceptualizations of ourselves and others.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. To what extent does Jaak Panksepp's model of mammalian emotion
systems in the brain map onto human emotion? What emotions are not
well accounted for by his seven systems?
2. What are some specific emotions that map onto wanting versus liking,
or anticipating pleasure versus consuming pleasurable things?
3. Is it fair to say that the cortical regions are primarily involved in
emotion regulation, once emotions are underway?
FURTHER READING
For excellent and wide‐ranging introductions to the neuroscience of
emotion:
Panksepp, J. & Given, L. (2013). The Archeology of the Mind:
Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. New York: Norton.
Rolls, E.T. (2014). Emotion and Decision‐making Explained. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
LeDoux, J. (2015): Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear
and anxiety. New York: Penguin.
Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.
Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
For an understanding of the social brain:
Lieberman, M. (2013). Social. New York, NY: Crown Publishing.
For a discussion of how human emotions, and their brain functions, are
involved in the appreciation of beauty:
Starr, G. (2015). Feeling beauty: The neuroscience of aesthetic experience.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
For recent syntheses of the mechanisms of the brain involved in different
emotion‐related processes:
Panksepp, J., Lane, R.D., Solms, M., & Smith, R. (2016). Neuroscience and
biobehavioral reviews.
Smith, R., & Lane, R.D., (2015). The neural basis of one's own conscious
and unconscious emotional states. Neuroscience and biobehavioral
reviews, 57, 1–29.
PART III
Emotions and Social Life
8
Development of Emotions in Childhood: This
chapter was written with Michelle Rodrigues and
Sahar Borairi
CONTENTS
Theories of Emotional Development Emotional
Expression
The Developmental Emergence of Emotions
Social Emotions: 18 Months and Beyond
Developments in Language and the Understanding of Other
Minds
Recognition of Emotions
Facial Expressions
Vocal Expressions
Postures and Gestures
Multimodal Recognition of Emotions
Brain Mechanisms in Infants' Recognition of Emotions
The Negativity Bias
Regulation of Emotions
Regulatory Processes
Neurobiological Development of Emotion Regulation
Temperament
Biological Contributions to Temperament
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 8.0 This picture of a four‐year‐old girl was taken
after her father had photographed her sister in her
confirmation dress: finally, this little girl jumped forward
and shouted: “I want to have my picture taken too.” The
picture shows a characteristic angry expression
(eyebrows raised, square mouth) and posture.
… for all the time of our infancy and child‐hood, our senses were
joint‐friends in such sort with our Passions, that whatsoever was
hurtfull to the one was enemy to the other…
Thomas Wright The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604).
The story of emotional development is about how children come to
participate in the social world (e.g., Denham et al., 2003; Jones,
Greenberg, & Crowley, 2015; Camras, Fatani, Fraumeni, & Shuster,
2016). From infancy to childhood, we see a growth in children's
abilities to perceive and signal emotions. As their brains develop, so
too does their ability to express and understand their own and
others' emotions. They become social partners so skilled in
signaling and responding to emotion that complex interactions can
take place, forming the basis of different relationships that are
central to human social living. Think of a newborn. She or he can
cry and all those around try to figure out what the baby needs.
Contrast this with a six‐year‐old boy, playing a game with his older
siblings. He gets mad at them because he feels left out. He can
modulate his upset enough to talk. He can elaborate the reasons for
his upset. He can make them feel sufficiently guilty that they
include him in their next game. These changing patterns of
emotional behavior indicate major developments in the recognition,
expression, and regulation of emotion. This chapter is about how
emotional development from early infancy into childhood allows
children to become skilled social partners who are able to take part
in complex social exchanges.
Emotion is the first language of us all. Within seconds of birth, the
human baby makes its first communication: it starts crying.
According to Paul MacLean, such sounds during evolution were
momentous. Reptiles are largely silent. With the emergence of
mammals, emotional sounds, which you learned about in Chapter 4,
marked the beginnings of a new kind of adaptation in which social
communication and cooperation within tight knit relationships
began to emerge and define our evolution (see Lambert, 2003 for
review).
In a recent statement about emotion and our sociality, Michael
Tomasello (2016) has argued that what is unique to humans is that
they are “group‐minded creatures whose collective intentionality
includes all kinds of things not just in their personal common
ground with other individuals, but in their cultural common ground
with the group…” (p. 63). According to Tomasello, this collective
intentionality is the basis of society and culture, including
cultural conventions, norms, and institutions. It is based on shared
gestures, joint attention and language, emotional mimicry, as well
as an interest and motivation to share thoughts and act
cooperatively with one another. Tomasello's research has focused
on when (both phylogenetically and ontogenetically) the neural
architecture becomes available for shared thinking and
cooperation. John Bowlby (1969) worked on a similar idea that he
referred to as the “goal‐corrected partnership.” He viewed the goal‐
corrected partnership as a neural structure (both cognitive and
emotional) that developed in the context of the parent–child
relationship as each lets the other into their mind where the goals,
desires, and beliefs of each are represented. The goal‐corrected
partnership is how people share thinking and joint actions, starting
from approximately 18 months of age.
What do these human goals of shared thinking and cooperation
have to do with emotions? In this chapter, we argue that a wide
range of emotions have developed precisely to enable and foster the
goals of shared thinking and cooperation. In exploring this thesis,
we will focus on two emotion‐related responses that humans have
developed. The first is the multiple ways that people express
emotion, which provides a window for social partners into
understanding each other's goals and desires. When a friend
becomes angry with you, and after you have finished being angry
back, you will be likely to think about the event from both of your
points of view; you will arrive at a shared perspective upon the
event. This kind of experience will enable the opportunity to
rebalance your individual goals within the context of shared lives
with others. The second dimension of emotional life we will
consider involves a basic motivation toward others: a positive and
prosocial orientation of folding into collective living rather than the
individual life. In this chapter, we consider the age‐related changes
to emotional expression and shared thinking that facilitate our
interactions with others.
Theories of Emotional Development
A central theoretical question for emotion research is this: to what
extent are our emotion‐related responses present from the start of
life and then simply unfold with time and to what extent are our
emotional tendencies shaped by the context around us: our family,
culture, and neighborhood? As adults, our lives are filled with
experiences of joy, sympathy, anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment,
and so on. We identify the causes of our emotions, we have a rich
language to categorize them, and we express our emotions in
patterns of facial, vocal, and bodily behavior. In many ways, our
emotions are discrete, and Carroll Izard has theorized that these
discrete emotions are present early in development (Izard, 1991;
2007; 2011). With development, changes in basic processes such as
the emergence of locomotion, self‐awareness, face processing, and
the ability to think about others' mental states influence the
development of emotion (e.g. Cassidy & Krendl, 2016; Harris,
2008). The emotions also are shaped by culture and context
(Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss‐Moreau, & Barrett, 2012; Vytal &
Hamann, 2010). These influences on the developmental unfolding
of emotion will be of interest as well.
To account for how emotions develop, Saarni, Campos, Camras, &
Witherington (2006) think of emotions as relational processes
in which children establish, alter, and maintain their relationships
with the environment, especially the environment of caregivers,
siblings, and peers. With this theory, emotions are more than
simply intrapersonal feelings: they shape interactions and
relationships and have interpersonal meanings. For example, a
child's joy does track the child's success in reaching a particular
goal, but often those goals are shared, for example, with parents,
and pursued socially. Cries of sadness express feelings of loss and a
desire for comfort. Look at Figure 8.1 and assess the impact on
yourself of a baby's smile versus a baby's cry. Expressions of anger
signal to others nearby that their actions are interfering with a
child's goal‐directed action. Within this theorizing, emotional
experience and expression are communicative, and shape
interactions. More generally, emotional development takes place as
children establish new goals, often social, new ways of evaluating
emotional events, and as the relationships with others change over
time (Witherington & Crighton, 2007). Emotions unfold in
bidirectional interactions between individuals. For example,
comforting a person feeling sad depends on the relationship with
that individual (e.g., friend versus stranger), context (e.g., physically
present versus phone conversation), and prior experiences with the
person (e.g. their personality) (Walle & Campos, 2012).
FIGURE 8.1 Babies showing emotional expressions: (a) a
positive or happy expression, (b) a negative expression.
We see discrete emotions present in the lives of infants, both in
terms of expression and recognition. We also see cultural and
family influences (discussed in Chapter 11) such that emotional
experience is constructed within a relational and cultural context.
We see too that emotions set up, maintain, and change
relationships: to help us understand the thoughts and goals of those
with whom we interact and through the negotiation of emotion
events to achieve better understandings of those close to us.
Physiological systems involved in emotion unfold as the brain
develops, but these responses are sufficiently malleable that they
take direction from the contexts in which we live. This fine dance
between the biological basis of emotion and our attunement to the
environmental contexts in which we grow up is the story of emotion
development.
In the sections that follow, we will track emotional development in
“typically developing children.” We will also look at the emotional
lives of children with autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder.
Children with autism have a difficult time with certain elements of
communication and understanding others' intentions and feelings.
They also have core deficits in their ability to form social
relationships and communicate with language. Much of this is
because of the challenge of shared thinking. It is difficult for a
person with autism to read someone else's mind, to understand
what an emotion means, and what caused it. This also translates
into deficits in many aspects of emotion recognition (Uljarevic &
Hamilton, 2013) and expression (Brewer et al., 2016). The study of
these children reveals deep insights into the complex mixture of
biological and contextual influences that are at the core of
emotional development.
Emotional Expression
The Developmental Emergence of Emotions
Watch a group of children playing in a park, and you cannot help
but be struck by the seemingly chaotic nature of emotion during
childhood. But in fact, we can think about the developmental
emergence of emotions as a sequence of steps in building an
emotional repertoire that will support a child's functioning in a
complex social world. The scientific evidence that supports this
thinking is based on studies of children's facial expressions of
emotion. Coding systems developed in adults and adapted for
infants and children are used to ask the question, “Do infants
express anger, sadness, etc?” (Izard 1983/1995; Oster, 2006). First
let's consider when expressions of emotion are seen. Later we will
consider whether the emotions have the same meaning in
childhood that they have in adulthood.
Crying occurs in very young infants, really from the first moment
of life in response to a wide range of elicitors. Likewise, satiation,
attention, and interest in the environment represent a state of
general pleasure (see Lewis, 1993). As far as expressions of distinct
emotions go, the earliest seems to be disgust, which can be seen in
newborns in response to sour tastes. Steiner, Glaser, Hawilo, and
Berridge (2001) have shown that the expressions that human
infants make to sour tastes—the wince and upper lip raise of disgust
—are similar to those of other primates. This early emergence of
disgust makes sense evolutionarily; this emotion enables successful
adaptation to one's environment by reducing exposure to potentially
life‐threatening pathogens (Tybur, Lieberman, Kurzban, & DeScioli,
2013).
At about two months of age, babies begin to smile (Lavelli & Fogel,
2005). Although babies occasionally smile in their first month,
these early smiles are not considered social, as they are often made
during sleep (Cecchini et al., 2013). Actual social smiles emerge
after the first month (Messinger & Fogel, 2007). In the second
month, smiles occur with gentle stroking, and by the third month,
they occur frequently in interaction with caregivers (Striano,
Henning, & Stahl, 2005; Ikeda & Itakura, 2013). Three‐month‐olds
also smile in response to the same kinds of events that make older
children smile: attention from others, invitations to play, and even
mastery of goals, (e.g., learning how to pull on a string to get a light
to go on, Lewis & Ramsay, 2005).
Infant smiles are a source of interest and delight for parents. Those
early social smiles signal the dawning of visible mutuality in the
relationship. The baby smiles and the parent responds with talk,
play, and interaction (Thompson‐Booth et al., 2014). As we will see
in Chapter 11, the responsivity of caregivers and siblings (the
“serve and return” involved in interaction) is central to early brain
development as well as children's understanding of other minds
(Browne, Wade, Prime, & Jenkins, 2018). It is quite striking, upon
reflection, that by six weeks, the infant has a behavior (the smile)
that serves to elicit the engagement and responsivity in caregivers
that catalyzes brain development. The importance of children
developing emotional expression is bidirectional; children's
emotional displays shape their parents' emotions more so than the
reverse (Beebe et al., 2007; Chow, Haltigan, & Messinger, 2010).
The frequency of smiling in babies, as with other emotional
responses, is influenced not only by features of the social context,
but also by genetically based factors. Consider the genetic
influences upon autism, which profoundly shapes a child's
emotional tendencies. About 19 percent of younger siblings with an
older sibling with autism develop autism themselves (because the
disorder shows substantial genetic influence, Ozonoff et al., 2011).
For this reason, the infant siblings of children with autism have
been studied to understand the unfolding of biological risk. Well
before autism can be diagnosed, the younger siblings of children
with autism show lower levels of social smiling than typically
developing children. Thus, these children are disadvantaged in their
emotional expressions even when they are 15 months old (Nichols,
Ibanez, Foss‐Feig, & Stone, 2014; Filliter et al., 2015).
Anger appears after smiling, between four and seven months of age
(Stenberg, Campos, & Emde, 1983; Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis,
2002b; 2005). It is linked to children's ability for means‐end
thinking (Sullivan & Lewis, 2012; Lewis, Sullivan, & Kim, 2015)
and requires that a baby has knowledge of a goal and that the goal is
being blocked. In keeping with this idea, anger expressions increase
as the child increases his or her autonomous crawling. Crawling
elicits increased limit setting from parents and thus, more
experience of goal blocks for infants; the end result is that the
infant expresses more anger after the onset of crawling. In Figure
8.2, we see infant anger to arm restraint before they started
crawling compared to two and six weeks after crawling began. As
you can see, anger increases with arm restraint in proportion to the
amount of time the baby has been crawling (Roben et al., 2012). In
other research, we see increased anger and frustration when
mothers withhold responses that had previously resulted in reward
(Lewis, Sullivan, & Kim, 2015). Brain studies show significant
developments in the processing of anger between seven and twelve
months (Grossman, Striano & Friederici, 2007), although the neural
correlates between infants and adults are different (Missana,
Grigutsch & Grossman, 2014). We can conclude that anger is
elicited by similar events and that facial expressions of anger are
similar in infants and adults. Neural correlates show differences
between infants and adults, however.
FIGURE 8.2 Effects of crawling status on frequency of
anger expressed during the Arm Restraint procedure in
Roben et al.’s (2012) study.
Regarding the expression of sadness and fear, infants begin to
make both sad (Lewis, 1983) and fearful (Braungart‐Rieker, Hill‐
Soderlund, and Karrass, 2010) expressions at around four months.
At this age, infants expect caregivers to respond to their overtures
(Van Egeren, Barratt, & Roach, 2001), and when this does not
happen, sadness tends to occur. We see a marked increase in fear
between 4 and 12 months (Braungart‐Rieker, Hill‐Soderlund, and
Karrass, 2010). This is linked to increased capacities to attend to
facial expressions in others that signal potential danger (Peltola,
Hietanen, Forssman, & Leppanen, 2013; Leppanen & Nelson, 2012).
With increasing mobility, infants also tend to express more fear, as
they encounter more novelty and potential peril in the environment
(Burnay & Cordovil, 2016).
Fear in response to separation from parents shows a universal
pattern as can be seen in Figure 8.3. Across cultures, separation‐
related fear begins toward the end of the first year, peaks around 15
months, and then decreases after that. The developmental
emergence of this response, and its apparent universality, makes
evolutionary sense; such an emotional response was selected,
during our evolutionary history, to increase the likelihood that the
developing child avoids harm from predators.
FIGURE 8.3 The development of children's distress
responses when separated from their mothers in four
different cultures. Copied from Kagan, Kearsley &
Zelazo, 1978.
Alongside the regularity of this response across cultures, studies
also show reliable individual differences in separation‐related
anxiety and the fear of strangers. For example, one study assessed
1285 children at four different times between 6 and 36 months,
documenting four groups of children who differed on the
persistence and severity of stranger fear (Brooker et al., 2013). We
present these results in Figure 8.4.
FIGURE 8.4 Observed trajectory groupings of children's
stranger fear from 6 to 36 months in the Brooker et al.,
2013 study.
As with anger, fear in young children has been shown to have
specific neural correlates. Thus, Diaz and Bell (2012) exposed 10‐
month‐old infants to three types of fear elicitor (stranger approach,
exposure to masks, and toy spiders) and found that all the fear
elicitors were associated with increased right frontal EEG
asymmetry. Fear responses are also reliably correlated with a
specific cardiovascular response in infants (respiratory sinus
arrhythmia; Buss, Davis, Ram, & Coccia, 2017). At the same time,
culture shapes the emergence of separation and stranger‐related
fear as we saw in Figure 8.3; the timing and length of the fear
response to separation vary across cultures, and caregiver responses
to expressions of fear contribute to individual differences
(Braungart‐Rieker, Hill‐Soderlund, & Karrass, 2010).
What about the emotion of surprise? Although there has been
some controversy over how surprise is expressed in young infants,
for instance, by facial expression, gesture, or freezing (Camras et al.,
2002; Scherer, Zentner, and Stern, 2004), that it occurs is not in
question. As you might expect in light of appraisal‐based analyses of
emotion, surprise in young infants occurs in response to a violation
of expectancy. Experiences of surprise during infancy contribute to
learning. Stahl & Feigenson (2015) exposed 11‐month‐old infants to
events that violated their expectations and events that did not. In
the violation of expectation condition compared to the nonviolation
condition, babies did more exploration with objects, and they
learned more about them (as assessed by infants learning
something about an object that they could not have known before).
Surprise, as a critical mechanism in learning, has also been
demonstrated for toddlers and preschool children (Stahl &
Feigenson, 2017).
Before we leave our discussion of infancy and the emergence of
different emotions, consider an important finding that holds across
emotions. Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis (2002) examined four‐
month‐olds' facial expressions in response to situations that are
expected to produce certain emotions (jack‐in‐the‐box to produce
surprise, arm restraint to produce anger, masked stranger to
produce fear). Children showed more anger expressions during arm
restraint, than during any other situation (tickling, jack‐in‐the‐box,
and appearance of a masked stranger). However, during arm
restraint, more children demonstrated surprise than anger (see
Figure 8.5). What this tells us is that the same event can elicit
different emotions, with considerable variability across children.
This variability depends on culture and the stable individual
differences of children. The relationship between elicitors and their
expected emotions become less variable with age (Bennett,
Bendersky, & Lewis, 2005), but the finding that temperament plays
an important role in understanding variation in elicitor–response
relationships continues across the lifespan. One child will react to
an arm restraint as if it is a game, while another will experience it as
a parent blocking his or her goal, and interfering with personal
autonomy. Clearly, though, it is important to remember that in
children and adults, there is no one‐to‐one correspondence between
events and emotional reactions, although this relationship does
seem to be better for positive than negative emotions (Castro,
Camras, Halberstadt, & Shuster, 2017).
FIGURE 8.5 Proportion of children showing specific
emotions as a function of elicitors in the Bennett,
Bendersky, & Lewis, 2002 study.
As in so many places in this book, the study of emotion during the
first year of life in the developing child reveals evidence of both how
evolution has endowed us with certain emotional tendencies and
how those tendencies are shaped by the context of development. We
see that within the first year, infants do show similar expressions,
for example, of fear, anger, or cries of distress, to adults, they show
these expressions in familiar circumstances, and there is some
evidence for distinct patterns of brain activation that differ across
various emotions. At the same time, one cannot help but be struck
by how much infants vary in their emotional expression, and in
their response to emotional elicitors. In Chapter 11, we will consider
how such emotional variations are shaped by the caregiving and
cultural context in which a child is raised.
Social Emotions: 18 Months and Beyond
As the child moves from infancy to preschool and school age, we see
the development of more complex emotions that allow for
increasingly complex social interactions (Boiger & Mesquita, 2012).
The child's emotional life becomes more social and other focused
and includes the emergence of the self‐conscious emotions
beginning at around 18 months, including embarrassment and envy,
as well as more prosocial emotional tendencies such as empathy
and sympathy‐based altruism (Brownell, 2013; Warneken &
Tomasello, 2006; Eggum‐Wilkens, Lemery‐Chalfant, Aksan, &
Goldsmith, 2015; Steinbeis & Singer, 2013).
Within the prosocial emotions, we see significant developments in
emotion expression that are a consequence of children's growing
abilities to understand others (Reschke, Walle & Dukes, 2017).
Between 12 and 24 months, children respond to another's distress
by comforting, bringing a parent, or offering an object (Zahn‐
Waxler, Radke‐Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992). At this age,
children tend to offer comfort in ways that reflect their own
preferences for being comforted. By three years of age, however,
children offer comfort in a manner tailored to the individual needs
of others. For instance, children comfort a child in distress by
fetching the child's mother.
During this period of development, three types of prosocial behavior
are reliably observed: offering instrumental help, offering comfort,
and sharing resources. Children provide instrumental help by 18
months. Warneken and Tomasello (2006) have shown that at this
age toddlers offer spontaneous instrumental help even when they
gain nothing from the action (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006;
Warneken, Chen, & Tomasello, 2006). In Figure 8.6, we portray
these developmental changes in prosocial behavior. Dunfield and
Kuhlmeier (2013) suggested that offering comfort appears after the
offering of instrumental help. Of interest is the finding by Hepach,
Vaish, and Tomasello (2012) that children react similarly when
either they do the helping or when they see someone else help. This
suggests a primary motivation for others being helped rather than
wanting credit for the helping. Sharing is complex. It can occur prior
to one year of age, as children offer objects to play partners (Hay,
1979), but it has developmental progression in the preschool years
related to a variety of factors including emotional reward (Paulus &
Moore, 2017), perceived distribution of resources (Dunfield,
Kuhlmeier, O'Connell & Kelley, 2011), competition (e.g., in a
coloring contest children are less likely to share crayons, Pappert,
Williams & Moore, 2017), and so on. Supporting the idea that there
are different kinds of helping, Paulus, Kuhn‐Popp, Licata, Sodian, &
Meinhardt (2013) found that there were different neural correlates
for instrumental helping (right temporal activation) and comfort to
distress (left frontal cortical activation).
FIGURE 8.6 Mean percentage of 18‐month‐olds in
Warneken and Tomasello's (2006) study who tried to
help the adult experimenter in experimental and control
conditions.
Within the next couple of years, children build toward enacting
well‐timed complementary behaviors in which they collaborate to
achieve joint goals with others (Ashley & Tomasello, 1998; Prime,
Plamondon, & Jenkins, 2017). By four years of age, they carry out
role assignments during pretend play. Observe young children
engaging in such pretend play, and you come to appreciate how
complicated these social behaviors are. Pretend play is based on
abstraction as it occurs in the imagination of two play partners. Role
assignments such as “I'm the fireman, you're the mother and I save
you,” involve adopting a role and enacting a series of behaviors
within it, which are coordinated with the play partner (Lillard et al.,
2013). These remarkable developments in thinking about the other
and being motivated to coordinate with the thoughts of the other
are supported by emotional tendencies. Empathy, sharing, and
comfort (as well as other emotions such as sadness and anger)
ensure the building and enactment of complex plans involving
individuals with different perspectives. Through these emotions,
children signal to their play partner what helps and what hinders in
their goals, joint plans, and coordinated actions, and when they are
not understood.
As with other early emerging emotional tendencies, we need to
consider the role of genetic influence in prosocial emotions.
Toddler‐aged siblings of children with autism who later receive the
same diagnosis themselves show less‐empathic responsiveness to a
distressed infant and an adult partner expressing physical pain
(Campbell, Leezenbaum, Schmidt, Day, & Brownell, 2015) than
children with no genetic vulnerability for this condition. Thus, for
empathy, caring, and helping, like other emotions, whether we have
a lot or a little of such prosociality is, in part, related to a roll of the
genetic dice. Remembering the genetic dice may help during those
periods of intense irritation with another person when we feel them
to be un‐empathic!
The development of consciousness and mentalizing abilities in
the second year (Lewis, 1992) allows for experience of
embarrassment, as well as the beginning of empathy that we
considered above. These emotional changes are founded upon two
complementary processes. First, children must understand the
subjectivity of others' experiences and know that these experiences
are different from their own. Second, and particularly for
embarrassment, shame, and other self‐conscious emotions, there
must be an awareness of the self as it might be seen by other people
(Muris & Meesters, 2014). The ability to self‐recognize is typically
assessed in the mirror rouge paradigm (Amsterdam, 1972). In this
task, children are marked with a spot of rouge and then look at a
mirror. Children who detect the mark and know how to touch it are
said to recognize the objectivity of their own body. This ability
emerges around 18 months both in Western and non‐Western
countries (Brownell, Zerwas, & Ramani, 2007; Ross et al., 2017).
This cognitive ability is what Lewis argues allows for
embarrassment (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss,1989). We see
this in Table 8.1.
TABLE 8.1
Numbers of children who showed embarrassment as a
function of whether they recognized themselves from the
rouge‐on‐the‐nose test (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, &
Weiss, 1989).
Showed self‐
recognition
Did not show self‐
recognition
Showed
embarrassment
19
5
Showed no
embarrassment
7
13
Between the second and third year of life, a more complex set of
emotions is expressed, including pride, shame, guilt, and regret.
These have been referred to as the self‐conscious evaluative
emotions (Lewis, 2010). They involve children's beliefs and
reactions to their own selves. For instance, when something good
happens, a child may experience pride if the occurrence of the event
is ascribed to his/her own attributes or behavior. In contrast,
feelings of shame may arise when a child attributes a negative event
to his/her own negative characteristics or actions (Muris &
Meesters, 2014). We see the first signs of guilt and shame in two‐
year‐old children, as evident in gaze aversion and bodily tension
upon breaking a social partner's toy. By this age, children will also
try to make amends, a common action involved in guilt
(Drummond, Hammond, Satlof‐Bedrick, Waugh, & Brownell, 2017;
Bafunno & Camodeca, 2013).
Developments in Language and the Understanding of Other
Minds
The acquisition of language during a child's development, and how
it shapes the child's expression and knowledge of emotion, is one of
the most important influences in emotional development (Beck,
Kumschick, Eid, & Klann‐Delius, 2012). Children start talking
about emotions and desires at around 18 months, and the
proportion of time they spend doing this gradually increases with
age. By two years, children use the emotion words “happy”, “sad,”
“mad,” and “scared” (Wellman, Harris, Banerjee, & Sinclair, 1995).
Although they mainly talk about their own feelings at this age, they
also attribute emotions to other people. Therefore, children as
young as two years of age have the beginning of mentalistic
conceptions: they know that emotions are about certain kinds of
events and that consequences of emotions are different from the
emotion itself (Widen & Russell, 2010). They also understand that
fulfillment of a desire will lead to positive emotions and a desire
unfulfilled will give rise to negative emotions (Wellman & Woolley,
1990). These changes in the language of emotion are an important
step in understanding the experiences of others and why people
behave the way they do. With such knowledge about others' minds,
children become more capable of engaging in social activities such
as cooperation.
It is not until the age of three or four that children begin to attribute
representational states—that is, mental states that refer to beliefs,
thoughts, and knowledge (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). For
instance, they may reason that: “John cheated because he believed
the teacher was not in the room.” According to Widen & Russell
(2010), this conceptual shift in children's understanding of others'
minds “complements and perhaps underlies their fuller
understanding of emotion concepts they already have in elementary
form and their division of emotion into ever finer discrete
categories” (p.356). Indeed, a significant characteristic of the social
emotions we observe in three‐ and four‐year‐olds is that they
involve beliefs about eliciting situations. Pride, for example, is a
feeling of accomplishment that is based on the belief that one has
successfully reached a goal. Shame involves feeling bad about
something based on the belief that one has let down or disgraced
others. Thus, the capacity to attribute beliefs to oneself or
others between the third and fourth year of life closely parallels the
development of these social emotions (Ball, Smetana, Sturge‐Apple,
2017).
In general, the ability to understand oneself and others in terms of
mental states (emotions, desires, and beliefs)—termed theory of
mind—is critically important for children's socioemotional
development. As this ability becomes more sophisticated, we see an
increase in the prosocial emotions and other oriented behaviors of
children. As you might expect, the emergence of theory of mind and
prosocial emotions such as empathy and sympathy result in better
peer relationships. Thus, Caputi, Lecce, Pagnin, and Banerjee (2012)
found that five‐year‐olds' theory of mind predicted seven‐year‐olds’
peer relationships, with this operating through improved prosocial
skills at six years of age. Thus, the ability to represent the internal
states of others, including their beliefs, paves the way to children
showing more caring and empathy toward others, which in turn
improves their peer interactions.
As children's theory of mind is developing, so are their language
skills. By the time children are three, Judy Dunn and her colleagues
(1991) have shown that half of the conversations they have about
emotions are related to the causes of feelings. Between the ages of
three and seven, children become more competent in talking about
negative emotions, such as sadness in relation to loss and anger in
relation to control (Hughes & Dunn, 2002). By learning to talk
about emotions and their causes, children move well beyond simply
expressing their emotions in facial, vocal, and bodily behavior. Here,
language about emotions becomes part of the negotiation of
relationships and enables the development of shared meanings
about internal states (Stern, 1985). The child can talk about a
feeling, give their version of its cause, refer back to emotions, and
alter their understanding of them.
We offer a summary timeline for this developmental progression of
emotional expressions in Figure 8.7.
FIGURE 8.7 Summary timelines for the developmental
progression of emotional expression. The top line shows
the age at which certain emotions are expressed, and the
bottom line shows the cognitive milestones associated
with the emergence of various expressions across time.
As we think about the developmental emergence of the self‐
conscious and prosocial emotions, let us return to pillars of human
social life—shared thinking and cooperation. As Tomasello and
colleagues have argued, a primary direction of social development is
the ability to engage in shared thinking and perspective taking.
Across minds and history, with individuals being motivated to
cooperate and build on one another's thinking and achievements,
cultures and societies themselves develop and thrive (Tomasello,
2010; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Children
enter into these dimensions of social life early in their lives
(Browne, Leckie, Prime, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2016), and they could
not do it without emotions. In their first year, they can signal basic
emotions to caregivers to let them know what is working well for
them and what is not. Then the self‐conscious and evaluative
emotions develop, enabling the child to develop a sense of self in
relation to others within joint endeavors and to signal when things
have gone awry. Prosocial emotions such as empathy and sympathy
pave the way for mutual understanding. Cooperative endeavors with
family members and playmates are well underway.
Recognition of Emotions
For children to cooperate with others and engage in shared
thinking, they must be able to recognize emotions in social partners
and keep track of how the interaction is proceeding (Russell,
Bachorowski, & Fernández‐Dols, 2003). Cultural experience also
shapes this capacity (Xiao et al., 2017). To this end, it has been
suggested that emotional expression and recognition coevolved
(Izard, 2007).
A range of methods have been used to understand the development
of emotion recognition in early childhood, all of which must work
around the fact that infants do not use words. A widely used method
has been the habituation paradigm, which is based on the
finding that infants look at patterns that are new to them for longer
periods of time than patterns that are familiar. For instance, infants
can be presented with a picture of a facial expression (e.g. a smiling
face) until they no longer look at it. They are then presented with
another smiling face along with a new facial expression (e.g. a sad
face). If they look at the new face more than the old face, this
indicates that they can discriminate between the expressions. More
recently, noninvasive neuroimaging techniques such as the
Functional Near‐Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS, which uses blood
flow in the brain to assess brain activity), the electroencephalogram
(EEG), and event‐related potentials (ERPs: a brain response that is
the direct result of a specific event) have become popular in
emotion research (Nishiyori, 2016; Saby & Marshall, 2012; Luck,
2014).
Soon after birth, children begin to pick up information from others'
faces, voices, and gestures. This ability is rooted in newborns'
preference for faces (Di Giorgio, Leo, Pascalis, & Simion, 2012) and
voices (Grossman, Oberecker, Koch, & Friederici, 2010). This
preference is essential for newborns' ability to discriminate among
people and to derive information about others' emotional states.
According to Grossman, Oberecker, Koch, and Friederici, (2010)
emotion recognition relies on the interaction between the
maturing perceptual system and the capacity to discriminate
emotional information. Newborns do not have the visual acuity
to discriminate subtle differentiations in facial expression that are
needed to recognize expressions of emotion but over the first year,
these skills develop (Leppanen & Nelson, 2009).
Facial Expressions
Using variations of the habituation method, two‐ to three‐month‐
old infants have been shown to discriminate happy, sad, and
surprise facial expressions (Barrera & Mauer, 1981; Young‐Browne,
Rosenfeld, & Horowitz, 1977). Four‐ to six‐month‐olds can recognize
anger expressions (Montague & Walker‐Andrews, 2001; Striano,
Brennan, & Vanman, 2002). Using an electrocardiogram
methodology, it has been demonstrated that five‐ to seven‐month‐
olds can discriminate fear, as evidenced by more pronounced and
longer lasting heart rate deceleration in response to fearful faces
(Peltola, Hietanen, Forssman, & Leppänen, 2013). Notice that this
pattern of development closely matches infants' own expression of
emotions, where we learned that starting at age four months or so,
infants start showing facial expressions of fear.
In typically developing infants, emotion face processing has
been found to be dominant in the right hemisphere and
orbitofrontal cortex regions (Fox, Wagner, Shrock, Tager‐Flusberg,
& Nelson, 2013). In contrast, infants at risk for autism spectrum
disorder show a different pattern of brain activation when viewing
facial expressions (greater activation in the left orbitofrontal
cortex). A meta‐analysis shows that children on the autism
spectrum show deficits in facial expression recognition, which vary
depending on the emotion and also increase with age (Lozier,
Vanmeter, & Marsh, 2014).
How do infants use the information communicated in facial
expression in the first year? Social referencing is the ability to
use the emotional displays of others to guide one's own behavior.
The visual cliff provides an example (see Figure 8.8). In a classic
experiment, Sorce, Emde, Campos, and Klinnert (1985) showed that
12‐month‐olds were likely to cross the visual cliff—a not dangerous
but fear‐provoking situation—when their mother looked happy
(74% crossed), but were unlikely to cross when their mother looked
fearful (none crossed). The same pattern is seen for fathers. When
fathers expressed anxiety (e.g., wide eyes, muscle tension, and
verbal messages such as “be careful”), 11‐month‐old infants showed
anxiety and avoidance (e.g., wide eyes, muscle tension, and verbal
messages such as crying (Moller, Majdandzic, & Bogels, 2014).
FIGURE 8.8 The visual cliff: visually the baby sees a steep
drop—notice the finer grain of the checker‐board pattern
to the right of the baby's right knee—but actually a plate
of thick glass supports the infant safely.
Vaish and Striano (2004) took the examination of social referencing
one step further. They were interested in whether babies used facial,
vocal, or combined facial and vocal expressions in social
referencing. They found that infants were more likely to cross the
visual cliff in response to maternal vocalization, or a combination of
maternal vocalization and facial expressions, than they were to
mothers' facial expressions alone. Thus, attending to and acting on
emotions occurs earlier when the emotions are vocally versus
facially presented, an issue we consider further below. The use of
emotional information from parents to guide action in dangerous or
novel circumstances is not a behavior shown by all children.
Genetically at risk 18‐month‐old infants, who were later diagnosed
with autism spectrum disorder, show less social referencing than
their normally developing counterparts (Cornew, Dobkins,
Akshoomoff, McCleery, & Carver, 2012).
By preschool age, children have a modest ability to offer
emotional labels for photographs of facial expressions, with happy,
angry, and sad emerging first, followed by scared, surprised and
disgusted (Widen & Russell, 2010). By school age (around five years
of age), children are quite good at recognizing emotions in other
people. Battaglia and colleagues (2004) documented a 72 percent
correct identification rate of pictures of emotional expressions—joy,
fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, and a neutral expression—by
children in Grades 2 and 3. In general, recognition of facial
emotions improves across the childhood years (Durand, Gallay,
Seigneuric, Robichon, & Baudouin, 2007; Widen & Russell, 2008;
Widen, 2013), but this does depend on the emotion studied. Rodger,
Vizioli, Ouyang, & Caldara (2015) used a threshold‐seeking
algorithm to manipulate the number of signals shown in a study of
anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness. Individuals
from five years old to adulthood participated in the study. Emotion
recognition varied for different emotions, with happiness needing
the fewest signals for accurate identification and fear needing the
most. Change in emotion recognition by age was steepest for disgust
and anger, less marked for sadness and surprise, and not age related
for happiness and fear. Widen and Russell (2013) also showed that
the ability to recognize disgust is strongly age related even into
adulthood.
We talked earlier about the importance of developing a theory of
mind to understand emotional development. Although there is a
milestone around age 4 in children's theory of mind understanding
as Harris (2008) points out, there are multiple stages in the
unfolding of the understanding of others' minds beyond this point
that influence children's recognition of emotion. More specifically,
Harris details developments in theory of mind understanding: the
link between belief and emotion, the potential discrepancy between
felt and expressed emotion, guilt, emotion regulation, and mixed or
ambivalent feelings. Pons, Harris, and de Rosnay (2004)
demonstrate changes in nine different components of emotion
recognition, over half of which are still developing at nine years of
age.
Before we leave the subject of emotion recognition, we have to
think about the complexity of emotion recognition outside of
laboratory tasks. Sometimes the experimental paradigms we use
oversimplify the task and assume that recognition of emotion, and
indeed the relationship between internal experience and facial
expression, is more straightforward than it might be. Castro,
Camras, Halberstadt, and Shuster (2017) showed children film clips
of a conflict discussion that they had had with their mothers. Seven
to nine‐year‐old children were asked to choose the emotion that
captured what they were feeling. Facial expressions of emotion were
rated by observers for the same clips in which the children
identified specific emotions. Although when children reported joy,
raters recorded joy, this was not the case for any of the negative
emotions. When children said they experienced anger, emotions
coded by observers included surprise, joy, anger, fear, in that order.
This may reflect the lack of clear relationship between elicitor and
emotion, discussed above. Another explanation, however, is that
emotions are complex and often involve blends in unfolding
interpersonal events. To make sense of emotions expressed
dynamically, children are thinking about appraisals, their emotions,
their interpersonal partner's intentions, appraisals and emotions,
the social context, and so on. Thus, the task of emotion recognition
runs the gamut from perceptually decoding facial expressions to
making sense of highly complex emotional exchanges in daily life.
We will see in Chapter 11 that the development of these skills does
matter in people's lives: those who are more skilled at reading the
emotions of others do have better quality relationships.
Vocal Expressions
From the moment newborns enter the world, their brain is
equipped to process emotional information from human vocal
expressions. Cheng, Lee, Chen, Wang, and Decety (2012) using
EEG found that newborns (1–5 days old) were able to differentiate
between fearful, happy, and neutral voices. This ability to
discriminate emotions from voice is even evident during sleep.
Zhang and colleagues (2014) exposed newborn sleeping infants to
human voices saying the same words using a fearful tone and an
angry tone. The patterns of neural activation were different for
angry versus fearful voices (i.e., a female saying “dada” using stress
and intonation patterns indicative of extreme fear and anger, and
rated as such by independent coders). Such discriminations are not
only evident for adult voices. When babies are presented with infant
laughter or cries, they also show different patterns of neural
activation (Missana, Altvater‐Mackensen, & Grossmann, 2017).
Even more remarkable is the degree to which 12‐month‐old babies
can make distinctions between different vocal expressions of
positivity (e.g., funny, exciting, delicious) and tie these vocalizations
to the likely eliciting circumstance (Wu, Muentener & Schulz, 2017).
Thus, by 12 months, infants have some capacity to think about the
causes of emotion in another person! These are remarkable building
blocks for being able to engage in the shared thinking and joint
plans that we described at the beginning of the chapter.
Interestingly, infant siblings of children with autism spectrum
disorder (between 4 and 7 months old) showed less ability, even in
infancy, to discriminate a sad voice from a neutral voice. Unlike
typically developing children, those at increased genetic risk for
autism also failed to show a consistent preference for speech
compared to nonspeech, suggesting that the social and
communicative deficits are broader than emotion (Blasi et al.,
2015). Thus, as we saw when we looked at emotion expression
among children at risk of autism, we see the same pattern of
compromised development with respect to attending to vocal
signals of emotion.
Postures and Gestures
Children's recognition of emotions from postures and gestures
has been less studied than that of facial or vocal cues, but we do
know a bit about this from studies of infants watching point light
body (PLB) displays of adults in motion, displaying certain
emotions (Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004; See Figure
8.9 for an example of the technique). Infants' responses to these
PLB clips are captured through event‐related brain potential (a
measured electrophysiological response to a stimulus). Four‐
month‐olds are not able to perceive the difference between fear and
happiness on the basis of body posture, but eight‐month‐olds can
make this discrimination (Missana, Atkinson, & Grossmann, 2015).
Thus, there is a developmental transition that occurs between four
and eight months of age in neural processing of emotional body
expressions (Missana, Rajhans, Atkinson, & Grossmann, 2014).
Infants as young as six‐and‐a‐half months have been found to
discriminate happy from neutral bodily gestures and prefer the
happy actions (Zieber, Kangas, Hock, & Bhatt, 2014).
FIGURE 8.9 Example still photos of (a) full light
expression and (b) matching point‐light expression of
anger (from Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young,
2004).
Multimodal Recognition of Emotions
Thus, we see that in the first year, babies are using vocalizations,
facial expressions, and body postures to discriminate between
different emotions within the first year of life. These cross‐modal
abilities raise an interesting issue about how infants and children
combine the different modalities of communication in emotion
recognition. In everyday life, we can be exposed to facial, bodily, and
vocal anger, or even combinations of emotions as their expressions
unfold (e.g., a sibling might speak in a pleading tone of voice, show
a puzzled facial expression, and angrily grab a toy). What do we
know about how infants and children integrate information from
sounds and sights?
Multimodal recognition of emotions is present early in life.
Six‐month‐olds have been shown to be able to match happy and
angry bodily expressions to corresponding vocalizations of
happiness and anger (Zieber, Kangas, Hock, & Bhatt, 2014). When
the modalities of communication are in conflict, as you might
imagine, infants have greater trouble in emotion recognition.
Rajhans, Jessen, Missana, and Grossmann (2016) presented infants
with emotional body expressions using point‐light displays (fearful
and happy) that were followed by matching (congruent) or
mismatching (incongruent) facial expressions (see Figure 8.10). Of
course, in ordinary life, expressions of fearfulness and happiness
are not likely to occur together, but by studying how babies react to
incongruent information, we can understand the value of
multimodal displays. Using event‐related potential, the
investigators found that viewing incongruent body and facial
information for fearful and happiness reduced the ability of infants
to discriminate facial expressions of these emotions. This suggests
that multiple modalities are used to enhance infants' abilities to
discriminate between different types of emotion.
FIGURE 8.10 Example of the stimuli and the design of the
priming paradigm used in the Rakhans, Jessen, Missana,
& Grossmann (2016) study.
It may be, however, that multiple modalities enhance emotion
recognition when children are very young but that the multimodal
advantage diminishes with development. Nelson and Russell (2011)
examined three‐ to five‐year‐olds' ability to recognize emotions in a
face‐only, a voice‐only, a posture‐only, and a multi‐cue (face, body
and voice) condition. Children of this age were most successful at
recognizing emotions in the facial condition. The multi‐cue
condition enjoyed an advantage over the voice‐only and body
posture‐only conditions, but not over the face‐only condition.
Perhaps, then, as children get older, they pick up cues from several
sources, but concentrate on the faces of others whose emotions they
want to understand.
What we have learned thus far is that infants can discriminate
between different emotions. Next we might ask to what extent do
they develop an understanding of what these emotions mean? Can
they make links between emotional expression and the appraisals,
goals, and intentions of the expresser? As we reported above, by 12
months of age, infants show the ability to do this for vocal displays
of positivity (Wu et al., 2017). Reschke, Walle, and Dukes (2017)
provide other evidence that the understanding of the
interconnection between emotion displays and a person's
goals does develop over the first 18 months of a child's life. For
instance, Chiarella and Poulin‐Dubois, (2013) examined whether
infants of 15 and 18 months react differently to an emotionally
unjustified versus an emotionally justified event. An unjustified
event involved a mismatch between the emotion expression and
event (e.g., negative emotion in response to a positive event) or a
match between emotion and event (e.g., positive event, positive
emotion). The 18‐month‐olds were more perplexed by the mismatch
condition, but this was not evident for the 15‐month‐olds. This
shows that by 18 months, infants are beginning to understand the
relationship between a person's goals and their emotional
expressions. This suggests a growing specificity in babies' relying on
the expression of emotion of others to understand the goal states of
others.
Brain Mechanisms in Infants' Recognition of Emotions
The amygdala (a brain structure discussed in Chapter 7) is
consistently engaged in detecting emotionally significant events
relevant to personal concerns and is fully developed in newborns. It
appears to have a role in directing infants' attention toward faces
(see Johnson, 2005). The orbitofrontal cortex also has a role in the
recognition of emotions, as seen by its activation in response to
happy versus neutral faces in both children and adults (Fox,
Wagner, Shrock, Tager‐Flusberg, & Nelson, 2013; Goodkind et al.,
2012; Tsuchida & Fellows, 2012). Findings of this kind point to
certain early developing brain mechanisms for recognition of facial
expressions.
Humans have an evolved bias to attend to facial cues. The
preparedness to process facial expressions may be specified by early
emerging neural circuits, but maturation of these circuits
requires actual exposure to human facial expressions (Leppänen &
Nelson, 2009). As a result, the context in which the child develops—
patterns of communication of caregivers, the presence of trauma or
comfort, the norms of the culture—are likely to influence the
development of facial recognition. Curtis and Cicchetti (2013)
examined facial affect perception in a sample of 15‐month‐old
maltreated and nonmaltreated infants using event‐related brain
potential (ERP), which captures the magnitude of the brain's
response to an object or event with EEG. Guided by the habituation
framework that we discussed above, one would expect infants to
show higher ERPs to facial expressions for which they have less
familiarity. What Curtis and Cicchetti showed is quite dramatic:
Maltreated infants showed greater ERP amplitude to happy
expressions, while nonmaltreated infants showed greater amplitude
to angry expressions (see Figure 8.11). Other studies have also
documented how traumatic events in the social environment (e.g.,
abuse, marital conflict) do alter our processing of anger expressions
(Curtis & Cicchetti, 2011; Pollak & Sinha, 2002; Pollak & Tolley‐
Schell, 2003). Effects of abuse on emotion processing have been
found to extend into adulthood. Van Harmelen et al. (2012)
examined amygdala reactivity in adults who had experienced
maltreatment as children. They found enhanced amygdala reactivity
to a range of both negative and positive emotion expressions. This
suggests hypervigilance of the amygdala toward emotional facial
expressions. Thus, infants and children do develop brain circuitry as
a means of understanding their own emotional environment. These
are issues to which we return in Chapters 11 and 12.
FIGURE 8.11 ERP processing elicited in response to the
angry and happy face conditions in a sample of
maltreated and nonmaltreated 15‐month‐old infants
(from Curtis & Cicchetti, 2013).
The Negativity Bias
The negativity bias, which we discuss in Chapter 6, in which the
bad affects us more strongly than the good, develops early in life.
The study described earlier by Cheng, Lee, Chen, Wang, and Decety
(2012) provides neural evidence that the negativity bias emerges
early in the neonatal period. Infants showed a stronger neural
response when hearing fearful and angry voices compared to happy
voices.
From an evolutionary perspective, the negativity bias enables
children to learn quickly about threatening situations. Children also
show heightened memory for details of negative compared to
positive social actions (Baltazar, Shutts, & Kinzler, 2012). This may
help children navigate the social world and avoid situations in
which future threatening events may take place.
Let us come back to the ideas of shared thinking and cooperation so
central to the development of emotion. Think about the basic
building blocks of understanding social partners. Within the first
moments of life, the infant is discriminating different emotions
from the voice. Within the next few months as visual acuity
improves, they are also able to do this for facial expressions. By
eight months, developing infants are able to understand emotions
through posture and gesture and to use multimodal information to
make even more reliable and fine‐grained distinctions between
different emotions. For these developing capacities in emotion
recognition to shape shared thinking and cooperation, though, the
developing child needs to make inferences from emotional
expression about internal states and goals. We saw that between 12
and 18 months, babies are starting to reason about the causes of
emotion. Their rapidly developing competencies in language have
them talking about emotions from 18 months resulting in half of
their conversations being about the causes of emotion by the time
that they are three years old (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982; Jenkins,
Turrell, Kogushi, Lollis, & Ross, 2003; Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall,
1991). By the age of 4, their theory of mind takes a further leap
forward. Thus, by the time that children go to school, many, if not
most, have become wonderfully competent social partners, being
able to discriminate others' emotions, read others' goals, and
thereby navigate the ever‐changing social interactions that make up
human social life. Of course, even though these skills of emotion
recognition and understanding the internal states of others are in
place for most children, their utilization at any given moment is
unsure. One of the things that this relies on is the development of
emotion regulation.
Box Novels and films: “My Oedipus complex”
Although it's not a novel or a film, we're putting the short story
“My Oedipus complex,” by Frank O'Connor, in as a box because,
better than any other piece of fiction we know, it depicts the
emotions of a young child. It's also one of the world's best short
stories.
The story depicts the feelings and thoughts of a five‐year‐old,
Larry, and his relationship with his parents. Larry recounts how
his father would appear mysteriously from time to time, like
Santa Claus, but mostly he was away during the war, so Larry
has his mother to himself. He would get up in the morning, look
from his window, then go to snuggle in his mother's bed and tell
her his schemes for the day, which they would spend together.
One day, father returns, and it's the end of the war, which the
boy and his mother have been praying for. Out of uniform
Larry's father seems altogether less interesting. During the day,
Mother is looking anxious as Father talks to her. Naturally, Larry
doesn't like his mother looking anxious, so he interrupts.
“'Do be quiet, Larry!' she said impatiently. “Don't you hear me
talking to Daddy?”
That was the first time I heard those ominous words, ‘talking to
Daddy.’”
Larry's mother gets his father to take the boy for a walk, but
Larry finds this man is not good company. At tea‐time, “talking
to Daddy” begins again, but Larry's father has an advantage. He
reads pieces of the evening newspaper to Larry's mother.
“I felt this was foul play,” thinks Larry.
Next morning when Larry gets into his mother's bed, she
reprimands him. “Don't wake Daddy.” Another new
development! He asks why.
“'Because poor Daddy is tired.' This seemed to me a quite
inadequate reason, and I was sickened by the sentimentality of
‘poor Daddy.’ I never liked that sort of gush; it always struck me
as insincere.”
That night Larry's mother gets the boy to promise not to come
into the bed in the morning and wake his father. He promises.
But, he can't keep the promise. Next morning he gets into bed
beside his mother. His mother says he can stay if he doesn't talk.
“But I want to talk,” I wailed.
“That has nothing to do with it,' she said with a firmness that
was new to me … full of spite I gave father a kick.”
Father wakes: “'That damn child! Doesn't he ever sleep?'”
Larry thinks the man looks very wicked, so he gets out of bed
and dashes for the furthest corner, screeching.
“Father sat bolt upright in bed.
‘Shut up you little puppy!’ he said in a choking voice.
“'Shut up you!' I bawled, beside myself.”
Mother tries to intervene, and his father says: “'He wants his
bottom smacked.'”
“All his previous shouting was as nothing to these obscene
words referring to my person. They really made my blood boil.
‘Smack your own!’ I cried hysterically. ‘Smack your own! Shut
up! Shut up!’”
Life for Larry only gets worse when a new baby arrives. But there
is a resolution in the end. Read this story; it's wonderful.
Regulation of Emotions
The concept of emotion regulation refers to the set of processes
that modulate the onset, intensity, duration, physiology, and
expression of emotional experience (Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2004;
Thompson, 2007; Gross, 2015). These processes may be automatic
or voluntary. For example, a fearful experience may give rise
automatically to physiological changes such as increased heart rate,
yet a child may voluntarily avoid making any expression that would
indicate fear to others.
People often think of emotion regulation in individual terms: for
instance, an individual might worry about how to control their
anxiety or struggle to tamp down an urge to laugh in class. But
emotion regulation is in many ways interpersonal. In
childhood, caregivers are very concerned to modulate the emotions
of their children: to soothe them when they are distressed, to
encourage them when they are joyful, to prevent them from having
angry tantrums, to avoid occasions when fights might break out,
and so on.
In Chapter 14, we will discuss emotion regulation in adulthood, and
it will be evident that an interpersonal framework continues to be
the best one in which to conceptualize emotion regulation across
the lifespan.
Regulatory Processes
A rich literature in developmental psychology has focused on
interpersonal factors associated with emotion regulation (see Cole,
Martin, & Dennis, 2004). For instance, as James Gross and Ross
Thompson (2007) explain, regulation of emotions is often
accomplished by means of changing the situation. The child's
parents are usually responsible for managing a child's emotions by
selecting play environments, creating predictable schedules,
creating opportunities for social interaction, and offering a
supportive emotional climate at home. A related process is trying to
alter situations. A mother may help her child retrieve an out‐of‐
reach toy, and thus, avoid an outburst. Children may prompt
modifications by words and expressions. Indeed, when parents
respond appropriately to their children's emotional displays,
children can cope with their emotions more adaptively (Ispa, Su‐
Russell, Palermo, & Carlo, 2017).
The growth in children's language starting from 18 months
plays an important role in emotion regulation (Cole, Armstrong, &
Pemberton, 2010). The explosion of language that happens over the
next few years introduces many new ways in which the developing
child can regulate his or her emotions: through requests,
conversations about emotional distress, and various acts of emotion
labeling.
As children mature and experience different opportunities to learn
to regulate their emotions, their abilities of executive function
improve (Chevalier, 2015; Kharitonova, Martin, Gabrieli, &
Sheridan, 2013). Executive function is an umbrella term that
includes processes such as inhibitory control, working memory, and
attentional flexibility, which enable individuals to complete goals
and adapt to novel situations. When there are problems with
executive functioning, emotional and behavioral problems can be
marked (Schoemaker, Mudler, Dekovic, & Matthys, 2013). An early
emerging example is managing attention. Rothbart, Ziaie, and
O'Boyle (1992) found that children aged from 3 to 6 months pay
attention to particular visual locations. Their ability to reorient is
associated with less negative emotion and more soothability (see
Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner, 2011). Being able to disengage
from an emotionally upsetting event by shifting attention elsewhere
is an effective way for infants to regulate their social and emotional
experience. Executive functioning continues to develop well into
adulthood. Children who are on the autism spectrum commonly
experience difficulties with executive functioning, which may
underlie difficulties in regulating emotions, monitoring their
behavior and responding appropriately within social settings
(Pellicano, 2012).
Another method of regulating emotions is by cognitive change,
which refers to altering the way an emotionally charged situation is
appraised (Gross & Thompson, 2007). For example, a child may
interpret an event as: “Billy pushed me” or interpret it as “Billy
bumped into me because the hallway was so crowded.” Changing
the meaning changes the emotional impact. A more tolerant
reappraisal (Gross, 2002) can be fostered by parents' explanations
of emotional situations (Root & Jenkins, 2005). However, the
ability to appraise requires an understanding that events can be
interpreted in different ways. This involves both beliefs and the
ability to change one's beliefs. Children's ability to make
reappraisals and mental transformations depends on their cognitive
maturation. In investigating the neural underpinning of reappraisal
abilities, an fMRI study found a strong increase in cognitive
reappraisal ability with age and this was coupled with increases in
the activation of the left prefrontal cortex, a region associated with
reappraisal abilities in adults (McRae et al., 2012). Samson and
colleagues (2015) found that children and adolescents with autism
exhibited fewer instances of cognitive reappraisal during an
emotion reactivity and regulation situation task compared to
typically developing children. Children were presented with negative
scenarios, asked to imagine themselves in the scenario and then to
generate different ways of thinking about it so that it appeared less
worrisome. Individuals with autism had greater difficulty
generating such cognitive reappraisals. Impairments in language,
executive functions, and theory of mind may underlie the
difficulties of reappraisal.
Recent research has moved beyond cognitive flexibility to examine
flexible control of emotional material, referred to as affective
flexibility (Malooly, Genet, & Siemer, 2013). This kind of flexibility
requires an individual to process the meaning of a situation by
shifting between emotional and nonemotional aspects of a
situation. Early evidence of this skill may be demonstrated in
emotion masking. The disappointing gift paradigm was developed to
see how children may mask their emotional response in order not to
upset a social partner (Cole, 1986). Kromm, Farber and Holodynski
(2014) showed that in children between four and eight years of age,
this ability improves markedly, with evidence of emotion masking
by age 6. Emotion masking can be seen as “prosocial lying,” or lying
to protect another person's feelings. This has been shown to depend
on developments in theory of mind understanding (Ding, Wellman,
Wang, Fu, & Lee, 2015).
Whereas a young child may only be able to look away from an
upsetting event or close their eyes, a school‐aged child may be able
to think about the consequences of their emotional expression on
someone else. A teenager may be able to select and modify the
situation, distract themselves, and cognitively reappraise the
situation. Using multiple forms of regulation simultaneously may
prove most effective at controlling one's emotions and engaging in
effective social interactions (Chevalier, 2015).
Neurobiological Development of Emotion Regulation
In life, the diffuse excitatory processes that underlie arousal become
more ordered. This includes changes in the hypothalamic–
pituitary–adrenocortical axis in response to stressful events
(Gunnar & Quevedo, 2007; Apter‐Levi et al., 2016), as well as
maturational changes in the autonomic nervous system. These
result in less marked changes of arousal, which allows other child‐
and parent‐initiated regulatory processes to operate effectively. As
mentioned above, one rudimentary strategy that infants use to
regulate emotional experience is attentional control, which enables
them to disengage from emotionally arousing situations (see Posner
& Rothbart, 2000). The parasympathetic nervous system—which
undergoes rapid development in the first year of life—is particularly
important in this regard (Porges, 2003; Feldman, 2015). As we
discussed in Chapter 5, activity in the vagus nerve lowers heart rate,
and enables, later in adulthood, the focusing on others and prosocial
behavior. During an emotionally arousing event, elevated vagal
tone is involved in successful regulation of negative emotions
(Porges, 2003). Differences in vagal tone contribute to differences
in emotion regulation in infants (Jones, 2012) and preschoolers
(Perry et al., 2013; Perry et al., 2014).
Response inhibition affords children the ability to regulate overt
expressions of emotions and tolerate arousing situations. In the
second year of life, language becomes important in moderating
emotions both through talk with others about the meaning and
consequences of emotional experiences and, later in development,
through self‐directed calming (see Thompson, Lewis, & Calkins,
2008).
It has been shown that there is not much functional connectivity
between brain structures during infancy, but that these connections
become stronger by two years of age (Gao et al., 2009). By two
years, the default brain network (regions of the brain that show
high levels of correlated activity with one another) resembles the
adult network, including the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior
cingulate cortex. Whereas brain networks in infants are
characterized by local anatomical connections, later in development,
these networks show longer range connectivity, with separate
regions of the brain being able to communicate with one another
(Fair et al., 2009). For example, by age 2, the anterior cingulate
cortex—which is critical for executive function (a theorized
cognitive system that controls and manages other cognitive
processes)—shows strong connectivity to the frontal and parietal
areas, and this connectivity continues to increase throughout
childhood (Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner, 2011).
By three to five years, development of the executive functioning
system further contributes to emotion regulation through
psychological processes such as inhibitory control, conscious self‐
reflection, reappraisal, and self‐monitoring (Zelazo & Müller, 2010).
A concept called effortful control—the ability to regulate
attention and behavior deliberately and voluntarily—develops
strongly during the preschool period (Nigg, 2017). Good effortful
control is related to less negativity in children's emotional lives and
to better attentional control, processes that are supported by neural
development in prefrontal brain regions (Bridgett, Oddi, Laake,
Murdock, & Bachmann, 2013; Rothbart & Rueda, 2005). Both
attentional control and effortful control have been found to be
strongly heritable, with heritability estimates of over 40 percent
(Yamagata et al., 2005). Effortful control can be thought of as the
emotional aspect of executive functioning. It is associated with
activity of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (MacDonald, 2008) and
involves a different brain mechanism than another stream of
executive functioning that is less concerned with emotions, which is
more deliberative and involves the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
These brain areas develop progressively from infancy through
adolescence into the early twenties (Giedd, 2004; Nie, Li, & Shen,
2013; Lenroot & Giedd, 2006; Nigg 2017; Shaw et al., 2008). We
summarize the developmental timeline of emotional regulation in
Figure 8.12.
FIGURE 8.12 Summary timelines for the development of
emotion regulation from infancy through mid‐
childhood. The top line represents approximate temporal
onset of particular regulatory processes, and the lower
line
represents
associated
neurobiological
underpinnings of those processes. Dashed arrows at age
3 to 5 indicate that these processes occur within this time
frame, at roughly the same time.
Children with autism spectrum disorder have been found to have
lower levels of effortful control (the ability to inhibit a dominant
response) and are less able to delay gratification independent of
intelligence (Faja & Dawson, 2015). These differences may underlie
difficulties in social and emotional functioning.
Overall, there appears to be a developmental shift from simple
orienting networks early in life to more sophisticated executive
networks later in life (see Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner, 2011).
Children and adolescents become progressively more capable of
using several means that are crucial for the establishment and
maintenance of social relationships and regulation of themselves in
the social world (Nigg, 2017). Children with poor regulatory skills
experience more psychosocial difficulties, including more
aggression (Halligan et al., 2013), more peer rejection (Kim &
Cicchetti, 2010), and lower school readiness (Ursache, Blair, &
Raver, 2012). Without an ability to regulate emotions of the
interpersonal kind, socioemotional well‐being is compromised, an
issue that we return to in Chapter 12.
Temperament
Although children develop regulatory skills through socialization
and cognitive maturation, dispositions also contribute to
development. One such set of characteristics is a child's
temperament, defined as a genetically based, emotional pattern to
the individual's personality: for instance, to be generally shy,
generally cheerful, generally negative, and so on, across situations.
Izard (1971) referred to these as affective‐cognitive structures.
Temperament has been shown to have a neurobiological basis, it is
evident early in development, and it shows stability over time
(discussed in Chapter 11).
Many conceptual models of children's temperament have been
proposed, and they converge upon important themes. Emotions are
always a core feature of temperament, as we show in Table 8.2
(Campos et al., 1983). Both temperament in babies (Campos,
Barrett, Lamb, Goldsmith, & Stenberg, 1983) and personality in
adulthood (Magai, 2008) can be thought of as affective biases that
shape how people tend to feel, how they are likely to construe life
events, and how they will usually act in the environment across the
lifespan. Aspects of functioning such as sociability, negative and
positive affect, activity levels, and impulsivity/constraint are
included in all temperament systems. Temperament is certainly
moderated by our experience, but fundamentally, it reflects the
individual differences among people that have neurobiological
bases: a tendency to feel fearful or a tendency to feel happy while
interacting with others. These emotion‐based tendencies are most
frequently assessed by people who know us well: for children that is
most often their parents. Because parents bring their own
perspectives (we can even think of these as biases) to how they see
their children, investigators have also developed measures based on
observational techniques to assess children's temperaments (Dyson,
Olino, Durbin, Goldsmith, & Klein, 2012; Gagne, Van Hulle, Aksan,
Essex, & Goldsmith, 2011; Binnoon‐Erez, Rodrigues, Tackett,
Perlman, & Jenkins, 2018).
TABLE 8.2
Mapping of dimensions of temperament onto aspects of
emotions, for two well‐known schemes of temperament:
Buss and Plomin's (1975) and Rothbart's (1981).
Source: adapted from Campos et al. (1983)
Dimensions of
temperament
Aspects of emotion into which each
dimension maps
Buss & Plomin (1975)
Emotionality
Fear, anger, and distress
Activity
General arousal of the motor system
Sociability
Interest and positive emotions expressed
toward people
Impulsivity
Time taken to express emotion or activity
Rothbart (1981)
Activity
General arousal of the motor system
Smiling and laughter
Happiness or pleasure
Fear
Fear
Distress to limitations Anger
Soothability
Recovery time from negative emotions
when soothed
Persistence
Duration of interest
How does temperament relate to the age‐related changes that we
have covered in the rest of the chapter? Temperament refers to the
individual differences that characterize people's emotional styles.
We can think of it as an underlying pattern of tendencies toward
emotion expression, emotion recognition, and emotion regulation.
Some children experience fear more readily and show it earlier than
others. Some children have a temperament that allows them to
change their attentional focus and thus, regulate their emotions
more than other children.
One of the features of temperament that has received attention in
children's emotional development is the tendency to avoid new
people, objects, and experiences—called behavioral inhibition
(Fox, Henderson, Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera, 2005; Clauss, Avery,
& Blackford, 2015). This can be assessed in toddlers and
preschoolers. A range of behaviors contribute to the construct and
examples include: children clinging fearfully to their mothers,
crying when unfamiliar people are present, being very slow to
approach others, and being shy with peers. Individuals with high
levels of inhibition, who tend to avoid novelty, are at risk for
anxiety. There is now a well‐articulated account of the neurobiology
involved in this temperamental pattern and the individual
differences in neurobiology that differ for children who are
behaviorally inhibited and those that are not. The brain circuitry
includes the amygdala, several regions of the prefrontal cortex, and
several regions of the basal ganglia as shown in Figure 8.13. This
temperamental style, involving emotional reactivity in novel
circumstances and the appraisal biases that we discussed here, is
evident during infancy and early childhood, which can influence
behavior over the life course.
FIGURE 8.13 The brain circuitry includes the amygdala,
several regions of the prefrontal cortex, and several
regions of the basal ganglia.
(Source: Copied from Clauss, Avery & Blackford, 2015.)
These biases in temperament are also associated with how children
construe the world. Children with behavioral inhibition are more
likely to pay attention to threat‐related stimuli (Fox, Henderson,
Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera, 2005), and this is a pattern of appraisal
that has been noted for other kinds of anxiety too (Bar‐Haim, Lamy,
Pergamin, Bakermans‐Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007). When
behavioral inhibition is accompanied by a strong appraisal bias that
favors threat, it is more persistent across childhood (White et al,
2017). It is interesting to note that some children with behavioral
inhibition disattend to threatening stimuli. Remember how earlier
in this chapter we talked about how attention shifting is one
method that children use to regulate their emotions? Morales and
colleagues (2017) demonstrated that behaviorally inhibited children
were more likely across tasks to either persistently attend to or
persistently avoid threat‐related stimuli. Perhaps persistently
disattending to threat develops in behaviorally inhibited children as
a means of handling high and discomforting levels of arousal.
Another pattern of early temperament that has consequences for
long‐term adaptation relates to disinhibition. There are a group of
children who boldly approach novelty, who are more likely to be
impulsive, inattentive, and aggressive (referred to as externalizers),
and this is another aspect of early temperament thought to be
important over the life course (Caspi et al., 2003., Hirshfeld‐Becker
et al., 2007, Zastrow, Martel & Widiger, 2016).
Appraisal biases are also seen in the children with the more
disinhibited/externalizing aspect of temperament too. Such children
attribute more hostile intent to others and react with higher levels
of anger to perceived slights (Hazebroek, Howells & Day, 2001). We
return to the way in which these neurobiologically‐based patterns of
emotionality are associated with life course trajectories in Chapters
11 and 12.
Positivity is associated with its own biases to how the world is
construed. Raila, Scholl, and Gruber (2015) looked at how long
people looked at positive and neutral stimuli using eye tracking
methods. They found that individuals who showed higher levels of
trait happiness paid more attention to positive stimuli. We have
shown the stimuli in Figure 8.14 so that you can test yourselves on
whether you are drawn to the positive or neutral stimuli!
FIGURE 8.14 A sample of neutral and positive images
from the Raila, Scholl, and Gruber, 2015 study.
Biological Contributions to Temperament
We started this section by saying that temperament has a
neurobiological basis. What evidence do we have for this
proposition?
Most of what we know about the biological origins of temperament
comes from research on genetics, but there are also prenatal
influences on the child's developing brain that affect the child's
temperament. Thus, influences such as maternal weight gain and
obesity, infection, stress, and toxicity in utero have been found to be
associated with elevations and intensity of children's negative affect
(including anger, sadness and fearfulness), as well as emotion
regulatory behaviors such as inattention and activity (Gartstein &
Skinner, 2017). While some prenatal influences directly affect the
developing brain, others operate on gene expression or in
combination with genes (Gartstein & Skinner, 2017), an issue that
we return to in Chapter 12. Thus, a propensity to negative
emotionality and inattention is influenced both by a child's DNA
and by nonoptimal exposures in the uterine environment.
Heritability plays a large role in all human traits (Plomin, DeFries,
Knopik, Neiderheiser, 2016). By examining differences between
monozygotic twins (who share 100% of their genetic information)
and dizygotic twins (who share 50% of their genetic information),
we get a good overall indication of the extent to which traits are
heritable. If monozygotic twins show approximately twice the
similarity to one another on a particular trait, than the similarity
shown by dizygotic twins, then we know that a substantial amount
of that trait is due to genetics. When twins show a high degree of
similarity to one another, after similarity due to genetic influence is
accounted for, then this is referred to as the “shared” environment
(and all the rest of the variation on the child outcome is attributed
to the nonshared environment). There have been hundreds of twin
studies that have examined the heritability of psychological traits
and a statistical technique has been developed that allows for the
aggregation across all of these studies to determine on average the
extent to which the outcome in question is influenced by genetics,
shared or nonshared environments. In a recent meta‐analysis that
included all the twin studies published in the last 50 years,
including 14 million twin pairs, across 39 countries, and covering
many psychological traits including temperament in children,
heritability has been found to play a very significant role in every
trait studied (Polderman at al., 2015). In Figure 8.15, we present
correlations between monozygotic (rMZ in Figure 8.15, for the total
sample, Males and Females separately) and dizygotic twins (rDZ in
Figure 8.15) on temperament from the Polderman et al., 2015 meta‐
analysis. You will see that the temperaments of monozygotic twins
are much more similar than the temperaments of dizygotic twins,
suggesting substantial heritability. Across many studies,
heritability has been found to account for between 30 and
50 percent of the variance in temperament and personality and
including traits such as empathy (Knafo & Plomin, 2006) and
aggression (Lahey, Van Hulle, Singh, Waldman, & Rathouz, 2011). It
is important to keep in mind that this conclusion is based on sibling
similarity involving siblings of different degrees of genetic
relatedness; the twin design does not involve the measurement of
specific gene variants.
FIGURE 8.15 Correlations between monozygotic and
dizygotic twins on temperament from the Polderman et
al., 2015 meta‐analysis. The correlation is given for the
whole sample, as well as males and females separately.
There are also studies that involve the direct measurement of gene
variants. These are referred to as molecular genetic studies, and
they are of three types: candidate gene studies, genome‐wide
association studies, and polygenic risk studies. In studies of
temperament and personality, the variance accounted for by any
single gene is usually less than 1 percent. Thus, effects of individual
genes are extremely small and replication has proven challenging
(Plomin, DeFries, Knopik, & Neiderhiser, 2016; Vinkhuyzen et al.,
2012). Candidate gene studies concentrate on specific
neurobiological systems in which pathways of influence have been
identified. They are still carried out but, arguably, more attention is
generated by molecular findings based on sequencing of the whole
genome (genome‐wide association; polygenic risk). Here we
mention a few genetic variants consistently found to be associated
with temperament.
One of the most widely studied genes in the area of temperament is
the serotonin transporter (5‐HTT) gene. It has been found to
be involved in emotional processing, mood regulation, social
interaction, and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis regulation
(Booij, Tremblay, Szyf, & Benkelfat, 2015). The 5‐HTT
polymorphism has two common alleles, the short and the long. The
short allele has been linked to reduced serotonin reuptake. The
presence of the short allele has been found to be associated with
increased emotional reactivity. A meta‐analysis involving 10 studies
found that short‐allele carriers exhibit increased attentional
vigilance toward negatively valenced events (Pergamin‐Hight,
Bakermans‐Kranenburg, van Ijzendoorn, & Bar‐Haim, 2012).
The catechol‐O‐methyltransferase (COMT) gene, which is
associated with degradation of dopamine, has also been found to be
associated with emotion regulation and temperament. Variants
(specifically low‐active allele, which results in higher concentrations
of dopamine) have been associated with seven‐month‐old children's
brain responsiveness to facial expressions of emotion (Grossman et
al.,2011). It was also linked to infant's recovery from distressing
events. In addition, there is evidence that this gene is also
implicated in emotion regulation (Barzman, Geise & Lin, 2015).
Oxytocin has been found to be associated with prosocial behavior,
altruism, and facial expression recognition. A study by Melchers,
Montag, Markett, and Reuter (2013) examined the link between a
variant of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and ability to
recognize emotions in faces. As hypothesized, a variant of the OXTR
gene, the TT‐genotype, was associated with greater accuracy in facial
recognition. Administration of oxytocin is associated with increased
emotion recognition abilities (Van Ijzendoorn & Bakermans‐
Kranenburg, 2012). Facial emotion recognition abilities are
important for accurate perception and response to others' emotional
states and experiences (Skuse et al., 2014). Interestingly,
adolescents with autism spectrum disorder who were administered
intranasal oxytocin showed improved emotion recognition abilities
(Guastella et al., 2010; Domes, Kumbier, Heinrichs, & Herpertz,
2014; see Figure 8.16).
FIGURE 8.16 Percentage of correct answers of the
Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) for
participants under oxytocin or placebo. Oxytocin
improved performance in the RMET in comparison with
placebo (from Guastella et al., 2010).
SUMMARY
While some accounts stress how emotions emerge in development
as a result of maturation, others emphasize variations in emotions
as a function of circumstance, family, and culture. Our emphasis in
this chapter, and in this book in general, is the importance of
emotions in social interaction. Expression and recognition of
emotions are discussed in three domains: facial, vocal, and gestural.
These expressions are made at first in relation to caregivers. As
children develop beyond 18 months, they include emotions that
depend on achieving a sense of self, on recognizing emotions of
other people, and of being able to make comparisons with these
others. By 18 months old, children are starting to talk about their
own and others' emotions. Regulation of emotions is an important
topic in development, as children's emotions tend to be thought of
at first as insistent and unsocialized. Regulation is first managed by
parents, but within the preschool years, children are able to regulate
their emotions in relation to their goals and relationships. In a final
section, we discussed the genetic contributions to emotional
development. Throughout the chapter, key differences in emotional
development in children with autism spectrum disorders were
highlighted.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. Arm restraint is sometimes used by psychologists to provoke
anger in young children, and jack‐in‐the‐boxes are used to
provoke surprise. Why don't these always have the expected
effects?
2. What aspects of emotional functioning develop so that by the
time they attend school children can remain, on the whole, fairly
even tempered even when things don't go their way?
3. Given that both genes and environment affect the development
of emotions, which do you think has the stronger effect? Inborn
genes and temperament? Or the environmental influences of
parents, family, and school?
FURTHER READING
A developmental psychologist writes about his daughter's growing
capacities in the emotion and social worlds.
Fernyhough, C. (2008). A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's
Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind. Penguin.
On what children understand about emotion and when they
understand it.
Harris, P. L. (2008). Children's understanding of emotion.
Handbook of emotions, 3, 320–331.
On the relationship between emotion understanding and social
cognition.
Reschke, P. J., Walle, E. A., & Dukes, D. (2017). Interpersonal
development in infancy: The interconnectedness of emotion
understanding and social cognition. Child Development
Perspectives, 11(3), 178–183.
On the significance of children's emotions in social interaction:
Judy Dunn (2003). Emotional development in early childhood: A
social relationship perspective. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, &
H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences (pp. 332–
346). New York: Oxford University Press.
A review of the processes in temperament that lead to emotion
regulation:
Rothbart, M. K., Sheese, B. E., Ruedo, M. R., & Posner, M. I. (2011).
Developing mechanisms of self‐regulation in early life. Emotion
Review, 3(2), 207–213.
9
Emotions in Social Relationships
CONTENTS
Emotions Within Intimate Relationships
Principles of Sexual Love
Emotions in Marriage
Emotions in Friendships
Gratitude
Emotional Mimicry
Social Support
Emotions in Hierarchical Relationships
Emotional Displays and the Negotiation of Social Rank
Power and Emotion
Social Class and Emotion
Emotion and Group Dynamics
Group and Collective Emotions
Group and Collective Emotion and Between‐Group Conflict
Infrahumanization
Emotional Processes That Improve Group Relations
Emotional Intelligence
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 9.0 Auguste Renoir, “Dance at Bougival,” 1882–
83. This painting was used to illustrate a story, by Lhote,
about an artist seeking to persuade a young woman to
model for him. In the painting, we see the man thrusting
his face eagerly toward the young woman, and grasping
her possessively. We also notice from her ring that she is
married. Keeping her polite social smile, she turns away.
To be means to be for another, and through the other, for
oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly
and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks
into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
After hearing composer Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, Tim
Page immersed himself in the study of a kind of contemporary
music known as minimalism, which burst upon the music scene in
the 1960s. Minimalism features repetition and simplicity in
composition; often entire songs are based on iterative, slight
variations on simple patterns of notes. In conceptualizing this
movement in music, Page observed that Reich's music had achieved
the equivalent of imposing a frame upon a moving river—a striking
characterization. Today, Tim Page is one of the most important
music critics working in the United States and a Pulitzer Prize
winner.
Tim Page has also lived his life with high functioning autism—a
condition characterized by relative difficulties in understanding the
thoughts and feelings of other people. We have discussed this
condition in the previous chapter on emotional development; here
we take the discussion further. People with high functioning autism
often reason like other people, their language is largely unaffected
by their condition, and they can demonstrate prodigious talents. In
the words of Hans Aspergers, the Viennese pediatrician who first
characterized the condition: “For success in science or art, a dash of
autism is essential.”
Where people with high functioning autism struggle is in the realm
of emotion. Studies show, for example, that they often struggle to
judge emotion, in particular more complex emotions like
embarrassment, in facial expressions, or in subtle movements in the
eyes (Heerey et al., 2003). They tend to avoid looking into the eyes
of others (Madipakkam et al., 2017) and, as a result, have greater
difficulty in judging the gaze of other people (Panelis & Kennedy,
2017). When looking at faces or scenes, they orient their gaze to
specific features rather than taking in the gist of a face or scene
(Wang, Jiang, et al., 2015). They likewise appear to have difficulties
in the realm of interoception, which we considered in Chapter 5,
and don't appear to be as guided as other people are by emotion‐
related bodily sensations in their judgment or behavior (Garfinkel
et al., 2016).
Given these emotional variations, people with high functioning
autism often struggle in their relationships. As a child, Page did not
throw himself into the social activities that connect children to one
another—playdates, soccer teams, friendships on the playground,
and for today's youth, Snapchat and Instagram. Instead, he followed
his personal interests in the quiet of solitude: he was obsessed with
maps of towns in Massachusetts, obituaries, memorizing the 1961
edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, and the music of a Scottish
comedian named Harry Lauder. In high school, Page publicly
declared his contempt for the Beatles in his school newspaper, a
sure sign that he cared more about staying true to his convictions
than in fitting in or being popular. Sexual relations were often a
mystery for Page. As a teenager, while many boys become
romantically interested in young women, Page would avoid making
eye contact with them. Later he confessed that as a young adult
making love felt like being the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.
In summing up his social life in his book Parallel Play, Page writes:
“I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent
in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart
from, the rest of humanity.” The clear implication is that when we
struggle to track others' emotions, or to express our emotions, or to
be guided by emotion‐related sensations in the body, our
relationships are disrupted and more complicated. Tim Page's life
reveals the central theme of this chapter: emotions are vital to our
social relationships (Butler, 2015; Tiedens & Leach, 2004; Tibbett &
Lench, 2015; van Kleef, Cheshin, Fischer, & Schneider, 2016).
We can think about how emotions shape our social relationships in
two different ways (Keltner & Haidt, 1999; Lench et al., 2015). The
first is to think about how emotions create specific social
relationships. For example, Stephanie Shields has made the point
that as new parents navigate the stressful complexities in assuming
the role of parent, feelings of sympathy and filial love enable
individuals to transition to the role of care‐provider (Shields, 1991).
As you learned in Chapter 4, emotional expressions help us
establish specific relationships: a smile is an invitation to a
cooperative relationship; an angry expression a declaration of
conflict or a statement of power; a vocalization of fear prompts
everyone to join together in feeling wary and orient to shared peril
(e.g., Anderson et al., 2017; Aubé & Senteni, 1996; Oatley, 2004c). As
we also discussed in Chapter 4, emotions can be thought of as
scripts for distinctive kinds of relationships; they help us establish
and maintain relationships of different kinds. William Shakespeare
depicted this in A Midsummer Night's Dream. If the juice of “a little
western flower” (Act 2, Scene 1, line 166) is dropped into the eyes of
a sleeping person, on opening their eyes this person falls in love
with the one they first see. The script of love, however strange it
may seem, is enacted.
The mutual influence of emotions upon social relationships can be
thought about in a second way: the relationships that characterize
different social contexts shape emotion‐related appraisal,
experience, expression, and physiology (Roseman, 2013). As you
move through the day, you will find yourself shifting from one
context to another, and these varying contexts are defined by
different relationships—with friends or romantic partners or stern
bosses at work or critical or caring parents (Fiske, 1991; Moskowitz,
1994). Within these different relationships, our sense of self shifts,
for example, in whether you feel care‐free or the burden of duties
and ideals placed upon you (Anderson & Chen, 2002). Our sense of
attachment, warmth, and power likewise shifts from one
relationship to another (Anderson et al., 2012; Moskowitz, 1994).
The sight of your new romantic partner might trigger a rush of
desire and thoughts of infatuation. Hearing the laughter of a group
of friends approaching may trigger feelings of mirth and gratitude.
Your boss may trigger feelings of anxiety and modesty or
inspiration. Your parents may trigger feelings of guilt,
contentedness, or family pride. Different relationships give rise to
different patterns of emotional response.
To consider how emotions create specific relationships, and how
relationships, in turn, shape our emotional lives, we will rely on a
framework that we introduced in Chapter 2. More specially, we will
consider what has been learned about emotions in four kinds of
social relationships: intimate ties to romantic partners; friendships;
hierarchical relationships; and dynamics between groups.
Emotions Within Intimate Relationships
In her book, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage,
Stephanie Coontz details the remarkable changes that the
institution of marriage has undergone (Coontz, 2005). Early in
its history, marriage was arranged by families to secure economic
ties. It often was between cousins. Polygamy was common, and
monogamy not expected, particularly for men. These kinds of
arranged marriages are common in the great dramas of
Shakespeare, or what you might see on “Game of Thrones.”
Marriage changed as a result of the shift from an agricultural
economy to a market economy and movement of the population
from small rural villages to a more mobile existence in urban
centers. Most notably, people could choose whom they marry. And
starting around 250 years ago, it was increasingly assumed that
marriage should be based upon emotion, and not on economics and
strategic alliances between families. Marriage should be about love.
In the last 100 years, we have seen yet more changes to love‐based
marriage—the emergence of equal rights within marriages for
women and more recently, the increasing acceptance of gay
marriage in many countries.
Reasons for marriage arise in our deep evolutionary history: the
hyper vulnerability of human offspring call on the care of more than
one individual. Thus, Owen Lovejoy (1981) proposed that, long ago,
our ancestors gave up the promiscuity that characterizes
chimpanzees, who therefore never know who their fathers are, in
favor of one woman being with one man. In this way, she gives him
exclusive sexual attention (more or less) and he gives his resources
to the raising of their offspring. And so arises a linkage of mothers
to fathers in enduring bonds (Hrdy, 2001) and the coming of family.
In John Bowlby's (1969) writing about attachment, one finds a
theory about how emotions are a core of intimate relationships,
from cradle to grave. In this section, we focus on romantic
partnerships. From the sparks of initial sexual attraction to the
passions that enable enduring romantic love, emotions are central
to intimate life (Fisher, 1992; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2002; Shaver,
2006).
Principles of Sexual Love
The experiences of loving and of being loved give life meaning.
Healthy relationships with loved ones—romantic partners, children,
and dear friends—are one of the strongest determinants of
happiness and robust physical health (Lyubomirsky, 2007).
Love is celebrated in the arts. Here, for instance, is Laura Esquivel
in the novel Like Water for Chocolate:
My Grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that
each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't
strike them all by ourselves … the oxygen would come from the
breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of
food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion
that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by
the intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us … Each
person has to discover what will set off these explosions in order
to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is
ignited is what nourishes the soul.
(Esquivel, 1992, Chapter 6)
Turning from literary narrative to marriage statistics, we encounter
an intriguing mystery. On the one hand, almost all of us will
eventually have relationships centered upon sexual love; only about
1 percent of adults in the United States and United Kingdom are
asexual. Most humans will have sex, form long‐term intimate
relationships, and at some time live with a romantic partner. But
here's the puzzle (or perhaps it's not a puzzle to you!): sexual love
leads us to intimate relationships, but they are so often hard to
maintain. For example, while upwards of 80 percent of young
people in the United States will get married, only 50 percent or so of
those marriages will last. We suggest that different emotions hold
the key to this mystery about sexual love.
What emotions bring individuals together into romantic
partnerships? John Bowlby's theorizing about attachment points to
two candidates: sexual desire and romantic love (Diamond,
2003; Djikic & Oatley, 2004; Gonzaga et al., 2006; Hatfield &
Rapson, 2002). Sexual desire is a motivational state defined by
sexual interest and ideation that prompts people to seek to engage
in sexual behavior (Impett, Muise, & Peragine, 2014). Initial
feelings of sexual desire are responsive to specific cues of physical
attractiveness: beautiful skin, full lips, and warm, glistening eyes;
physical signs of youth and strength; facial symmetry (Miller,
2000). Nonverbal signals of elevated rank and power—the open,
expansive body posture—also trigger feelings of desire in potential
suitors (e.g., Vacharkulksemsuk, et al., 2014). From an evolutionary
perspective, these signs of physical beauty and strength are thought
to reveal the person to be a physically robust person, one with good
genes, so to speak, and a good partner to reproduce with (e.g., Buss,
1992; Miller, 2001). A recent review of dozens of studies of sexual
attraction found that physical attractiveness proved to be the
strongest basis of initial desire, much stronger than a person's
wealth or earning potential (Eastwick et al., 2014). We are moved
emotionally by physical beauty.
We describe our feelings of sexual desire in metaphors: young
lovers can feel “knocked off their feet,” “hungry” for each other,
“mad” with desire, “swept away” by passion (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980). These metaphors speak to the single‐mindedness and loss of
control characteristic of early sexual desire. Sexual desire is
registered in specific patterns of touch, cuddling, and sexual
signaling. For example, romantic partners who cuddle, touch, and
kiss in the context of sex feel closer and happier (Muise, Giang, &
Impett, 2013). They may idealize their loved ones, attributing rare
virtues to them that set them apart from others (Murray & Holmes,
1993, 1997).
One argument from an evolutionary perspective is that sexual
desire motivates reproductive behavior. If so, then one would expect
women to feel more sexual desire during ovulation, when their
sexual behavior is most likely to yield conception. A host of findings
support this prediction. During ovulation, women report higher
levels of desire, they show increased blood flow to the genital region
when viewing erotic films, they prefer more erotic art and films,
they are more likely to walk with swaying hips, and they are more
likely to masturbate (Bullivant et al., 2004; Provost et al., 2008).
Around the time of ovulation, women are more likely to initiate sex,
have affairs, and be accompanied by their husband. Ovulating pole
dancers in bars even earn bigger tips (Miller, 2001; Miller et al.,
2007).
Thus far, we have described the nature of sexual desire within the
individual. How do such intense emotional experiences give rise to
romantic relationships, the complex dynamic involving two separate
people, and often a host of rivals and alternatives looming nearby?
In a synthetic review of decades of research on romantic attraction,
Eli Finkel, Jeffry Simpson, and Paul Eastwick identify a core
principle of early sexual desire: uniqueness. When our sexual
desire is unique to one person, the stage is set for long‐term
romantic bonds. Consider this illustration that emerged in a speed‐
dating approach to the empirical study of sexual desire (Finkel &
Eastwick, 2008). In this research, much as would happen at a
weekend social gathering, a dozen or so young heterosexual women
and a dozen or so young heterosexual men arrived at the lab and
engaged in a series of two‐minute conversations with all the other
members of the other sex. After each brief interaction, participants
rated their sexual desire and felt chemistry for one another.
Attesting to the principle of uniqueness, when one individual felt
unique desire and chemistry for another, those feelings were
reciprocated by the person (Eastwick, Finkel, Mochon, & Ariely,
2007). By contrast, those speed daters who felt sexual desire for
many other people actually evoked little desire or chemistry in
others. Uniqueness of sexual desire matters in helping create more
enduring relationships.
As romantic partners spend more time together, their intense
feelings of sexual desire for one another will often give way to the
experience of a second emotion—romantic love—defined by feelings
of deep intimacy, devotion, and commitment (Acevedo & Aron,
2009). Recall the nonverbal display of love —its inviting smile and
relaxed and open bodily posture and gesture. Patterns of mutual
gaze, so typical of love, are thought to activate oxytocin release,
involved in feelings of trust and commitment (Gonzaga et al., 2006;
Keltner et al., 2014). In experiences of mutual romantic love, the
couple will feel comfort and security in being close, in knowing each
other, in the feeling of their identities coming to merge. As part of
increasing intimacy, romantic partners come to include their
partner's perspectives, experiences, and characteristics in their own
self‐concept (Aron & Aron, 1997; Aron, Aron, & Allen, 1989; Aron &
Fraley, 1999). Experiences of romantic love are organized by a
second relationship principle: integration, or merging (Finkel et
al., 2014). Feelings of love lead partners to merge their interests,
goals, daily lives, and identities.
One of the great writers of the Romantic period (whose novels are
also romances in the day‐to‐day sense) was Jane Austen. In an
accompanying box, you can see a brief description of her most
famous novel Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813. If you read
the book or see television series or film versions of the book (see
Figure 9.1), you encounter a challenging account of the transition
between sexual desire and romantic love: you are asked to consider
the idea that you can't love someone just by projecting your desire
onto them, as a kind of hallucination. You can only love by getting
to know who the person is, though this knowledge by no means
precludes trying to change the person into whom you would like
them to be.
FIGURE 9.1 Colin Firth in his role as Mr Darcy in the 1995
television series of Pride and Prejudice.
Very often, sexual desire and romantic love co‐occur, or are
intertwined in unfolding experiences of romantic partners (see
Figure 9.2). But they can be differentiated in systematic ways,
revealing them to be distinct emotional states, as Bowlby theorized
(e.g., see Diamond, 2003; Panksepp & Biven, 2012). They have
distinct patterns of expressive behavior and peripheral and central
nervous physiology, as we saw in previous chapters (see also
Chojnacki & Walsh, 1990; Panksepp & Biven, 2012; Sternberg, 1997;
Whitley, 1993). Turning to the realm of conceptual knowledge,
people often nominate love as a prototypical emotion and express
the belief that sexual desire overlaps only modestly with the content
of love (Fehr & Russell, 1984; 1991; Shaver et al., 1987). In one
study where participants were asked to exclude emotion terms that
did not belong in the category of love few participants excluded the
words caring (8%), and affection (27%), but many participants
excluded the words desire (59%), infatuation (82%), and lust (87%),
suggesting that in how people think about desire and love, they are
often separate (Fehr & Russell, 1991). Those people whom
participants say they love overlap only partially with those for
whom they say they feel sexual desire (Myers & Berscheid, 1997).
FIGURE 9.2 This balcony in Verona Italy is where the
courtship between Romeo and Juliet is alleged to have
taken place. Today when people visit, they write the name
of their loved one on “Juliet's Wall” nearby, and they
leave love letters as well.
Box Novels and films: Pride and prejudice
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice may still be the West's best
love story. It's about Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of an
affectionate but silly mother and a clever but sardonic father. At
a dance she is slighted by the rich, proud, and eligible Mr Darcy.
Speaking to a friend he says of Elizabeth, loudly enough for her
to overhear: “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to
tempt me.” In conversation with her sister (a few chapters after
Darcy's snub), Elizabeth says: “I could easily forgive his pride if
he had not mortified mine.” Her love for Darcy has first to
surmount this obstacle.
An important premise of any love story is that, to start with,
neither of the lovers‐to‐be knows much about the other. Part of
the beauty of Jane Austen's story is that Elizabeth's love for
Darcy is not of the kind that is usual in the Western cultural
script of falling in love, in which love comes into being in almost
complete form with a meeting of the eyes between two strangers
across a room. Rather, in this story, love grows only gradually as
Elizabeth starts to know Darcy, at exactly the same time as we
readers also come to know both him and Elizabeth (see Oatley,
2016b).
Laura Vivanco and Kyra Kramer (2010) have noticed that a
recurring theme in love stories is transformation, with Pride and
Prejudice being an early example. The theme continues in
romantic stories of today, for instance, those marketed by the
publisher Harlequin. Although Jane Austen writes of Darcy's
“utmost force of passion,” he is not complete as a person. His
pride prevents him from being a fully formed man. The story is
about how Elizabeth, with her intelligence and determination,
accomplishes his transformation. As she comes to know Darcy,
he becomes able to know himself, becomes thereby able to admit
his shortcomings, becomes more aware of others and, in the end,
becomes able to love. Only when Darcy's pride is transformed in
this way, does Elizabeth consent to marry him. At the same time,
Elizabeth has to come to terms with and change her own
prejudices. Vivanco and Kramer see this theme of
transformation as a version of the ancient idea of alchemy in
which, by means of the philosopher's stone, an alchemist would
transform a base metal into gold. In Pride and Prejudice,
Elizabeth becomes the alchemist who transforms the base metal
of the imperfect Darcy into the gold of a man who is able to love
her.
How might sexual desire and romantic love vary across cultures
(See Figure 9.2)? Studies yield intriguing differences. For example,
studies find that people in collectivist cultures—Russia and
Lithuania—fall in love faster than in the United States, often within
a couple of weeks (Munck, Koratayev, de Munch, & Khaltourina,
2011). Once married, deep romantic love occurs later in the
relationships of the Japanese than between partners in the United
States (Ingersoll‐Dayton, Campbell, Kurokawa, & Saito, 1996).
Scientists have also documented fairly robust gender differences in
sexual desire, likely shaped by culture and evolution (Baumeister,
2001; Impett et al., 2014). First, women and men view the purpose
of desire differently: for women, desire is more often about
intimacy, and for men, sexual intercourse. Second, women
report more varying and lower levels of desire than men. In fact, in
one study of 48 nations, men consistently reported higher levels of
desire for sex in the absence of commitment and intimacy (Schmitt,
2005). And finally, desire is more fluid for women, in terms of who
they feel it for, and what its aims are.
Emotions in Marriage
One of the most systematic emotional changes in the trajectory of
romantic relationships is the diminishing of sexual desire (Impett et
al., 2014). Nationally representative surveys of adults in the United
States indicate that married people are having sex with each other
10 times a month in their 30s, five times in their 40s, and two times
in their 50s and 60s (Delamater & Sill, 2005). It's not all dispiriting
news though. Studies find that many old couples in their 70s and
80s are feeling intense desire and still have sex. People who remarry
later in life often feel youthful surges of intense sexual desire.
Within these emotional patterns in intimate relationships, as sexual
desire declines, feelings of intimacy and romantic love often rise as
relationships progress (Impett et al., 2014).
As partners persist in their relationships, new principles hold the
relationship together (Finkel et al., 2014). First, couples can be
responsive to one another; be timely and attentive to the emotions
of their partner. A second principle is resolution; partners can
reconcile and collaborate in meeting the stresses and conflicts that
become more prominent as lives progress. And finally, the principle
of maintenance: partners can find ways to continue to build their
affection and commitment. Finding how to enact these principles in
romantic relationships matters a great deal. Divorce rates in many
industrialized nations hover near 50 percent, and marital
dissatisfaction is high (Myers, 2000). Conflictual marriages
diminish personal well‐being and take their toll on children in
terms of stress and anxiety and even difficulties at school
(Lyubomirsky, 2007).
John Gottman and Robert Levenson were pioneers in documenting
how specific emotional processes predict when marriages will fail.
In the spirit of the ethological approach we covered in Chapter 1,
they turned to naturalistic methods and studied the emotional
dynamics of married partners as they engaged in a 15‐minute
conversation about a conflict in their relationship. For 15 minutes,
the couple might have haggled over unsatisfying sex, or the
husband's inability to get better‐paying work, or a child's struggles
with drugs. These interactions were then carefully coded in frame‐
by‐frame fashion for several emotional behaviors.
In one study that started in 1983, Gottman and Levenson followed
the marriages of 79 couples from Bloomington, Indiana,
documenting what they call “the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse”—toxic emotional behaviors that are most damaging
and most likely to predict divorce. First of these kinds of behavior is
criticism. Partners who are more critical, who continually express
their irritation and frustration by finding fault with their partners,
have less satisfying marriages. The next two toxic emotional
behaviors concern partners' tendencies to engage in emotionally
open conversations. These two tendencies are defensiveness and
stonewalling (the latter being defined as shutting down
conversation about stresses and conflicts). When romantic partners
counterattack in response to comments made by their partners with
defensive comments, dismissive laughs, and sarcasm, they are in
trouble. The same is true when they shut down, or stonewall, any
open emotional communication about the relationship. It is better
to express and share emotion. Finally, a fourth horseman of the
apocalypse is contempt—the feeling of superior rejection of the
partner expressed in sneers and eye‐rolls and disparaging,
condescending comments (see Figure 9.3). Contempt is a
particularly humiliating and toxic behavior to direct at others and
may be the most toxic emotion in romantic relationships and other
relationships as well (Fischer & Giner‐Sorolla, 2016; Roseman et al.,
2017). This first influential study of Gottman and Levenson (2000)
found that some 93 percent of couples who showed evidence of the
four toxic behaviors were divorced 14 years later.
FIGURE 9.3 Anger may be an important part of intimate
relationships. It is typically less destructive in
relationships than is contempt.
More recent studies have identified several emotional patterns that
help romantic partners stay committed and close. One is to share
what is good in life with your partner, which Shelly Gable and her
colleagues refer to as capitalizing upon the good (Gable,
Gonzaga, & Strachman, 2006; Gable, Reis, Impett, & Asher, 2004).
When romantic partners share their joys and respond to each
other's good news with engaged enthusiasm, they are more likely to
feel committed to one another (Gable et al., 2006). The same is true
nonverbally: when partners share affection through cuddling,
encouraging touches, holding hands, and kissing, ancient ways of
capitalizing upon the good, they report greater commitment and
closeness (Muise et al., 2013). Thus, instead of stonewalling or
criticizing, it is wiser to express appreciation and encouragement for
good things that happen in your partner's life and in your
relationship (e.g., Gordon et al., 2012).
Intimate relations also fare well when partners cultivate humor,
amusement, and play. The middle phases of romantic partnerships
often involve a great deal of drudgery and stress: paying bills and
doing housework, and should you choose to have children, diaper
changing, sibling squabbles, helping children with stomach aches,
coping with adolescence and raising teens in a historical period
where they feel greater stress than in the past. Not surprisingly,
intimate relationships are least satisfied at this stage of the
relationship (Myers, 2000).
Amusement, mirth, and play are emotional antidotes to the stresses
and quotidian conflicts of intimate relationships. In one sense, they
are the alternative to criticism and defensiveness. For example,
happier romantic partners often possess many playful nicknames
for each other, and more readily playfully tease one another during
conflict instead of directly criticizing (Keltner et al, 1998). Humor
and laughter during negotiations between romantic partners can de‐
escalate intense conflicts to more peaceful exchanges (Gottman,
1993). In studies of couples engaged in conversations, couples who
share laughter report greater closeness and satisfaction (Kurtz &
Algoe, 2015, 2017; see also Randall et al., 2015). In one experiment,
spouses who had been married several years who played silly games
actually reported significant boosts in their satisfaction (Aron,
Norman, Aron, McKenna, & Heyman, 2000). Shared laughter and
play help couples maintain their satisfaction by increasing positive
emotions, reducing stress, and heightening the sense of similarity
between partners (Kurtz & Algoe, 2017). The moral for a happier
intimate life: stay playful.
Another emotional tendency to cultivate is compassionate love:
such a sentiment involves a positive regard for the partner, and
appreciation of the partner's foibles and weaknesses, and the sense
of sharing a common humanity with the partner. In longitudinal
research, partners who reported high levels of compassionate love
for one another early in the relationship were less likely to divorce
four years later (Neff & Karney, 2009). When partners are linked by
mutual feelings of caring and commonality, they feel more intimate
on a daily basis and enjoy more sex (Le et al., 2018). When
individuals make a regular practice of cultivating compassion and
kindness, their relationships fare better. Compassion and kindness
catalyze romantic love.
Alongside compassionate love, it is also important to forgive.
Forgiveness involves a shift in feeling toward someone who has
done you harm; it is defined by a shift away from ideas about
revenge and avoidance toward a more positive understanding of the
humanity of the person (McCullough, 2000; McCullough, Sandage,
& Worthington, 1997; Worthington, 1998). Forgiveness isn't a
mindless glossing over the harm a partner has done; it involves
recognizing that to err is human. Forgiving someone who has
caused harm has been found to reduce blood pressure and anger
(Snyder & Heinze, 2005; Witvliet, Ludwig, & Vander Laan, 2001).
Box Individual Emotion: Compassion
Is there a master social emotion, an emotion that helps you form
stronger social relations of all kinds? The religious historian
Karen Armstrong thinks so (2006). In her survey of the great
traditions of religious and ethical thought that emerged some
2500 years ago—Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism,
and early Greek and Judeo‐Christian thought—she argues that
compassion emerged as the cardinal emotion of virtue.
Compassion is the feeling of concern for another, accompanied
by a desire to enhance that person's welfare (Goetz et al., 2010).
All of these great traditions center upon compassion, Armstrong
argues, in their sayings and aphorisms and practices that
encourage a concern for others, an interest in enhancing the
welfare of others, of not causing harm, and a devotion to treating
others as you would have them treat you. Compassion is a pillar
of the great ethical traditions. Its conception is similar to
sympathy, which Adam Smith (1759) in Theory of Moral
Sentiments proposed is the glue that holds society together.
The evidence seen in scientific studies supports this wisdom of
the ages. People feeling compassion see greater common
humanity with strangers (Oveis et al., 2010), they punish others
less (Condon & DeSteno, 2011), and they are more generous and
cooperative and willing to sacrifice for others (Eisenberg et al.,
1989). As you are learning in this chapter, compassion is a vital
element of good relationships, from romantic bonds to nations
with competing interests. It is perhaps for this reason that many
meditation practices and prayers focus on instilling compassion,
and it is considered by many the most social emotion.
Michael McCullough and his colleagues have studied how
forgiveness influences the level of satisfaction in romantic
partnerships and families (Hoyt, Fincham, McCullough, Maio, &
Davila, 2005). They measured three dimensions related to
forgiveness: the urge for revenge, the desire to avoid the partner,
and a more compassionate view of the partner's mistake. They
found that forgiveness promotes relationship satisfaction. For
example, in one 9‐week study (Tsang, McCullough, & Fincham,
2006), students who had suffered a recent transgression in a
relationship reported classic kinds of harm: being cheated on,
insulted, rejected, or left out of a social activity. Partners who were
earlier to forgive reported greater closeness and commitment to
their partner weeks later.
Emotions in Friendships
Friendships are often the source of what is most meaningful in life.
Important social movements such as the abolitionist movement, the
civil rights movement, and the women's rights movement have
emerged out of friendships. Out of great friendships come world‐
changing innovations, as when Steve Jobs and David Wozniak
invented the computer in a garage in Job's childhood house in Los
Altos California. Out of great friendships often emerges romantic
love. In Jane Austen's novel Emma, Emma Woodhouse and Mr.
Knightley are first admiring and at times prickly friends before they
fall in love. In friendships, children learn their generation's morals
and values (often to their parents' chagrin).
Most humans have a tight network of close friends, say six or
seven, and a broader network of people they feel supported by
(Leary & Baumeister, 1998). From an evolutionary perspective,
friendships were initially something of a mystery: why cooperate
and sacrifice for non‐kin? As an answer to this puzzle, Trivers (1971)
proposed that friendships emerged in human evolution to enable
the cooperation so essential to reproduction, survival, and the
raising of vulnerable offspring (see also Hrdy, 2001). Building upon
this analysis, Randolph Nesse and Phoebe Ellsworth (1990; 2008)
argued that emotions such as love and gratitude help build
cooperative, affectionate alliances between friends (see also Smith,
McCullough et al., 2017). The studies guided by this theorizing have
focused on gratitude, empathy, laughter and mimicry, and the
broader emotional benefits of feeling embedded in a network of
friends who provide social support.
Gratitude
In Chapter 2, we introduced the idea, proposed by Michael
Tomasello (2014; 2016), that cooperation emerged in evolution as
the means by which we human beings became human. When Adam
Smith (1959) surveyed the new industries that were emerging in the
British industrial revolution, he was struck by the cooperation that
emerged within networks of people striving to maximize their own
self‐interest (see Figure 9.4). He argued that gratitude was the
sentiment that held people together in the spirit of common cause.
For Adam Smith, gratitude is a “sacred” part of the fabric of human
society.
FIGURE 9.4 Although Adam Smith is known for his
enduring analysis of self‐interest, trade, and capital, in
his book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” he lays out
how emotions are the source of moral judgment, a thesis
we take up in next chapter. For Smith, gratitude may be
the most important moral emotion and binder of social
relations.
In fleshing out this idea, Michael McCullough, Robert Emmons, and
Joanne Tsang (2001) reason that gratitude is a moral emotion, one
that provides glue to cooperative social living in three different
ways. First, gratitude serves as a barometer; it helps us keep track of
which friends are generous and which are not. It is much like the
grooming between nonhuman primates; our feelings of gratitude
track who is cooperative with us, and who is not.
Second, gratitude motivates altruistic behavior. It produces the
generosity, the favors, the expressions of appreciation, which are
critical to long‐term commitments among friends (Algoe, 2012). As
an illustration, David DeSteno and his colleagues had participants
engage in a study in which, out of the blue, they were helped by a
confederate to fix a computer problem (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006;
Condon & DeSteno, 2006; Desteno et al., 2010). Being the recipient
of generosity led participants to feel gratitude, and in this state they
then proved to be more generous in allocating their time and
resources to other strangers (see Figure 9.5). Experiences and
expressions of gratitude promote prosocial behavior, the very fabric
of cooperative social networks (see also Smith et al., 2017).
FIGURE 9.5 When feeling gratitude, people will give
more of their time both to someone who's helped them
(benefactor) and to a stranger (from Condon & DeSteno,
2006).
Finally, McCullough and Emmons posit that the expression of
gratitude, either verbally or nonverbally, acts as a reward; it
reinforces cooperative behavior. The gifts that we give gratefully,
the simple statements of “thank you,” the more elaborate ways in
which we appreciate others, all serve to reward their generosity and
increase the chances of further cooperative behavior. One might
think of the kind of touching of another person to express gratitude
(see Chapter 4) as inherently rewarding in this fashion, and a way to
increase cooperative behavior among non‐kin. In one relevant
study, participants helped an experimenter edit a letter online
(Grant & Gino, 2010). In the gratitude condition, participants were
thanked via e‐mail. In the control condition, participants received a
polite message of equal length, but without a note of thanks. When
asked if they would help the experimenter edit a second letter, those
who were thanked responded affirmatively 66 percent of the time
compared to 32 percent in the control condition.
Given these benefits of gratitude, one would expect the experience
and expression of gratitude to benefit friendships, and other
relationships as well. In keeping with this claim, Sara Algoe and her
colleagues have documented that verbal expressions of gratitude
predict increased closeness in the friendships that form in groups
over time (Algoe, Haidt, & Gable, 2008). More generally, Alex Wood
and colleagues find that a more general grateful orientation predicts
various processes that are vital to healthy friendships, including
increased helping, trust, praise, forgiveness, and a positive view of
others (Wood et al., 2010). Good friendships are rooted in the
experience and expression of gratitude.
Emotional Mimicry
Take a look at any social gathering, and you'll discover interesting
forms of mirroring, or mimicry (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson,
1994). People imitate each other's facial expressions, postural
movements, tones of voice, and styles of gait. In experiments,
participants will unconsciously imitate smiles presented in photos
so fast they do not know what they have seen (Dimberg & Ohman,
1996). We are especially likely to imitate the positive emotions of
others (Hess & Fischer, 2014). Simply hearing another person laugh
can trigger laughter (Provine, 1992). If a friend blushes in an
embarrassing situation, our cheeks will redden too (Shearn,
Bergman, Hill, Abel, & Hinds, 1992).
Emotional mimicry is a central ingredient of friendship, because it
heightens feelings of similarity, so central to the formation of
friendships. We feel closer to other people who share our attitudes,
our preferences, our beliefs (Montoya et al., 2017). Our interactions
with similar others are often more gratifying, and they are more
likely to develop into enduring friendships. Emotional mimicry is a
basic way in which friends build common ground and become
closer.
Consider laughter. As we noted in Chapter 4, Jo‐Anne
Bachorowski has analyzed the acoustic profiles—the rhythm, pitch,
and variability—of different laughs (Bachorowski & Owren, 2001).
In a study of friendships, within milliseconds of participating in
amusing tasks, the laughs of friends but not strangers began to
mimic each other (Smoski & Bachorowski, 2003). The implication is
that friends quickly imitate one another's signs of amusement and
thereby enjoy the lighthearted pleasure of humor and play.
Does emotional mimicry actually increase people's liking for
potential friends? People engage in all sorts of rituals to increase
their mimicry—from dance to clapping to marching in unison. The
end result is likely to be greater friendship and cooperation among
those who might otherwise become adversaries. In an ingenious
test of this hypothesis, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno
(2011) had participants and confederates sit across from one
another and tap their finger to patterns of tones they heard over the
headphone. The participant and confederate either listened to the
same patterns of tones, and therefore mimicked one another in
their synchronous tapping, or they listened to different patterns of
tones, and therefore tapped their fingers at different times.
Participants whose tapping was mimicked by the confederate looked
upon this confederate as more like a friend: they felt more similar
to the confederate, had higher levels of compassion, and were more
likely to help that person complete a long and uninteresting task
later in the study. Physical mimicry is a basis of increased closeness
among potential friends.
Complementing this experimental work, Cameron Anderson and his
colleagues have found that emotional mimicry builds close
friendships (Anderson, Keltner, & John, 2003). In one study, new
roommates came to the laboratory in the fall and spring and at each
visit reported their emotional reactions to different evocative
stimuli, such as humorous or disturbing film clips. As a
demonstration of the tendency for friends to mimic one another,
the roommates' emotions became increasingly similar (compared to
two randomly selected individuals) over the course of the year. This
emotional mimicry, furthermore, predicted increased closeness in
friendships.
Social Support
Friendships are built up through our human capacity to cooperate,
based on emotions such as friendly warmth, happiness, gratitude,
mimicry and, laughter. Once established, they are an essential part
of our sense that we are supported within social networks of friends
and acquaintances. In Table 9.1, we present a widely used measure
of social support, which captures this sense of being socially
connected to others. As evident in this measure, friends give the
individual a sense that there are people to turn to in times of need,
people with whom to share complex emotions.
TABLE 9.1
Measure of social support
Source: From Zimet, Dalhem, Zimet, & Farley (1988).
1. There is a special person who is around when I am in need.
2. There is a special person with whom I can share my joys and
sorrows.
3. My family really tries to help me.
4. I get the emotional help and support I need from my family.
5. I have a special person who is a real source of comfort for me.
6. My friends really try to help me.
7. I can count on my friends when things go wrong.
8. I can talk about my problems with my family.
9. I have friends with whom I can share my joys and sorrows.
10. There is a special person in my life who cares about my
feelings.
11. My family is willing to help me make decisions.
12. I can talk about my problems with my friends.
Strong social support reduces feelings of stress, anxiety, and
uncertainty during challenging times. People with high social
support show lower baseline levels of cortisol, suggesting that
having many good friends calms the hypothalamic–pituitary‐
adrenal axis (Kiecolt‐Glaser & Glaser, 1999). Shelley Taylor and her
colleagues have found that social support reduces the cortisol
response to one of the most powerful triggers of anxiety: giving a
public speech (Taylor et al., 2008). Having friends present in
stressful contexts likewise reduces stress‐related physiology. In one
illustrative study, women had to perform challenging tasks either in
the presence of a friend or alone. Those with a friend showed less
stress‐related cardiovascular responding to the challenging tasks
(Kamarack, Manuch, & Jennings, 1990). Hearing the supportive
comments of friends can activate dopamine rich areas of the brain,
such as the ventral striatum (Inagaki & Eisenberger, 2013). Other
studies find that if you are in networks of good friends, as assessed
with scales like that presented in Table 9.1, you benefit in many
ways. In one study in Alameda County, California, people who had
fewer meaningful connections to others were 1.9 to 3.1 times more
likely to have died nine years later (Berkman & Syme, 1979).
Emotions in Hierarchical Relationships
In 1938 and with fascism on the rise in Europe, the philosopher
Bertrand Russell offered the following observation about power:
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same
sense that Energy is the fundamental concept in physics … The
laws of social dynamics are laws which can only be stated in
terms of power (p. 10)
For Russell, power—the capacity to influence others—is the basic
medium in which we relate to each other. Power shapes the
moment‐by‐moment interactions between children and parents,
older and younger siblings, school children on the playground,
friends, colleagues at work, and romantic partners (e.g., Guinote &
Chen, 2017; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003; Keltner, 2016).
The implication of Russell's quote is that power influences our
emotional lives in fundamental ways.
How so? Within the field of emotion, two animating ideas have
emerged as answers to this question (e.g., Shields, 2005). A first is
that our experience and expression of emotion enable us to
negotiate our rank, or status, or relative power vis‐à‐vis others,
within social hierarchies. As one example, recall Abu‐Lughod's
analysis of “Hasham” in the Bedouin community she lived with and
studied: the experience and expression of this mixture of
embarrassment, modesty, and shyness situate women in
subordinate roles vis‐à‐vis men (Abu‐Lughod, 1986). Within this
perspective, our emotional experience and expression help us
assume power‐related roles in social structures, roles as parent,
manager, or woman.
A second idea in effect reverses the causal order of the previous
formulation and is this: power‐related dynamics within social
hierarchies influence emotion‐related appraisal, experience,
expression, and physiology (Cowen & Keltner, 2017; Moors,
Ellsworth, Scherer, & Frijda, 2013; Roseman, 2013). Here the
thinking is that the power we feel in a particular context shapes how
we appraise events, which in turn gives rise to power‐related
patterns of emotional response. Let's now look at more specific
empirical studies that bear upon these ideas.
Emotional Displays and the Negotiation of Social Rank
The desire to enjoy greater power and status, or what we will call
rank within a hierarchy, is a universal motive (Anderson et al.,
2015). So deep is this motive to enjoy influence, esteem, and what
William James called our deepest craving—to be appreciated—that
one hormone, testosterone, when combined with low levels of
cortisol, motivates power‐enhancing behavior (Mehta & Prasad,
2015). In his work, Pranj Mehta and his colleagues have found that
high levels of testosterone combined with low levels of cortisol
drive status‐seeking behavior such as risky action, assertive
leadership, a lack of empathy for others, and even aggression, which
can lead to the acquisition of power at the expense of others (Mehta
& Prasad, 2015). For those lucky enough to enjoy greater rank, the
benefits are many, and include: greater physical health, the reduced
likelihood of depression and anxiety, increased opportunities for
reproduction, and greater physical and psychological health for
offspring (e.g., Gilbert, 2016; Keltner, 2016).
It should not surprise, then, that people are continually jockeying to
rise in their rank within social hierarchies. Negotiations about social
rank—status conflicts—can be costly and even deadly affairs. In
many species, from chimpanzees to Narwals out at sea, combatants
in status conflicts can incur enormous physical costs. The same is
true in humans. For example, in his fieldwork with the Yanomamö,
a group who live in the forests of southern Venezuela and northern
Brazil, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon observed how young men
fought in duels, where adversaries would take turns striking each
other over the head, to assess their relative toughness, and
negotiate their rank within social hierarchies (Chagnon, 1968).
Chris Oveis and Joey Cheng and their colleagues have recently
found that people signal their social rank with more subtle vocal
behavior, such as laughter (Cheng et al., 2016; Oveis et al., 2015).
Given the costs of status contests, many nonhuman species rely on
nonverbal displays to negotiate their rank within hierarchies. Apes
pound their chests, frogs croak, stags roar for hours, chimps flash
their fangs, and deer lock up in their horns. Humans, too, negotiate
their places in hierarchies, through the experience and expression of
certain emotions.
In his Social Rank Theory of emotion, Paul Gilbert argues that
power (or powerlessness) is layered into our experience and
expression of certain emotions (e.g., Gilbert, 2005, 2016). Gilbert's
theorizing is rooted in evolutionary claims about how human
emotions such as shame resemble in their outward expression, the
submissive tendencies of nonhuman primates; in both, one sees
patterned behaviors including gaze aversion, constricted posture,
and head movements down (Harker & Keltner, 1998). The
implication is that certain emotions—shame, embarrassment, and
pride in particular—are related to feelings of rank. Relevant
empirical evidence does indeed find that our experience of select
emotions tracks our rank within hierarchies. For example, in one
study, Gilbert found that UK college students' and adults' self‐
reports of the experience of shame and social anxiety (the fear of
being evaluated negatively by others) correlated highly with the
sense that one is less powerful, or inferior, to others (e.g., Gilbert et
al., 2007; see also Öhman, 1986).
Pride, by contrast, is the quintessential emotion of elevated rank, as
Jessica Tracy (2016) argues. In the study we just described,
individuals' feelings of pride correlated highly with the sense of
elevated rank vis‐à‐vis others (Gilbert, 2000). More recent work
finds that across cultures pride is elicited by actions that are socially
valued and associated with elevated power. On this, Daniel Sznycer
and his colleagues presented 25 scenarios to participants in 16
countries, from the Netherlands to the Philippines to India and
Japan (Sznycer et al., 2016). The scenarios included: being judged
trustworthy by others, being able to support children, being
educated, winning a marathon, and taking on a bully—all actions
what would lead to the esteem of others and elevated rank. In each
of the 16 countries, one group of participants rated how socially
valued the action in the scenario is, and another group rated how
much pride they personally would feel in each scenario. The critical
finding was that across cultures there was strong agreement in what
actions would be socially valued and what actions are evocative of
the experience of pride. It would seem to be a human universal that
the experience of pride occurs when we do things that are valued by
others and worthy of elevated rank.
Other emotions drive rank behaviors that enable individuals to
negotiate their position and that of others within social hierarchies.
One clear example is envy. Envy is the feeling of pain that is
associated with wanting what someone in the group has (Cherish &
Larson, 2017; van de Ven, 2017). Jealousy, a close relative, is fearing
the loss of something of value—in particular a romantic partner—to
a rival. Feelings of envy triggered by thoughts of the success of
others lead to activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of
the brain, as you learned in Chapter 7, that is involved in feelings of
social rejection (Takehashi et al., 2009). This is the neural
underpinning of the motivating pain of envy.
Niels van de Ven has further distinguished between two kinds of
envy that produce different patterns of rank‐related behavior. A
first, malicious envy, arises when others within a social group have
something of value but obtained it in an undeserved fashion; it
motivates us to act in ways that undermine the individual we envy
(van de Ven, 2017). Should a work colleague be promoted before
you because his father is the boss, you would likely feel malicious
envy, and do things to undermine that individual's position in the
organization. Benign envy, by contrast, is felt toward individuals
who rise in the ranks through their own hard work, and motivates
the individual to work harder at tasks and pursue self‐improvement
that will lead to rises in status (van de Ven, 2016). Our fear of
others' envy also motivates us to act in ways that will preserve our
high standing in social groups. For example, when we enjoy elevated
rank, but fear others' malicious envy, studies show that we will
engage in more prosocial behaviors toward others, offering helpful
advice and even sacrificing, to preserve our rank (van de Ven,
Zeelenberg, & Pieters, 2010). When we respond to our own
successes and elevated rank with arrogant, hubristic pride, we
trigger more malicious envy in others (Lange & Crucius, 2015).
Envy motivates actions that enable individuals to negotiate their
positions within social hierarchies.
If experiences of certain emotions, such as shame, pride, and envy,
motivate actions that situate the individual in positions within
social hierarchies, our expression of certain emotions signals our
rank to others (e.g., Gilbert, 2000). Our displays of shame—the head
droop, gaze aversion, and constricted posture—signal submissive
rank (Harker & Keltner, 1998). By contrast, Jessica Tracy and her
colleagues have found that displays of pride—the expanded chest
and head tilt back—signal elevated power within social hierarchies
in different cultures (Tracy & Robins, 2004). Quite remarkably,
when we convey our elevated rank through nonverbal displays of
pride, people believe we are more powerful, and are more likely to
follow our actions (Martens & Tracy, 2013; Williams & De Steno,
2009).
Expressions of anger, as well, convey power, and elevated rank
(Knutson, 1996; Tiedens, 2000; Tiedens, Ellsworth, & Mesquita,
2000). When political and business leaders express anger in certain
situations, rather than other emotions, people attribute greater
power to them (Tiedens, 2001). In our experience and expression of
emotions such as envy, pride, anger, and embarrassment, we find
our place within social hierarchies.
Social rituals are sequenced patterns of actions involving
gestures, words, and ceremonial acts, which occur in designated or
sequestered locations and that allow us to express specific
emotions. We grieve at funerals, express joy at weddings, find pride
and allegiance in group initiation rituals, express our rage in mosh
pits, and navigate the passions of young adulthood at Quinceañeras,
Bar Mitzvahs, and graduations.
Many rituals center upon the expression of emotions that solidify
group members' rank within social hierarchies. Consider food
sharing rituals observed in most hunter‐gatherer societies
(Weissner & Schiefenhövel, 1996). For example, in the highlands of
New Guinea neighboring tribes gather each year in celebration and
ritualistically give away food they have cultivated—piles of yams, pig
carcasses, and arrays of coconuts. In these generous actions, the
more an individual gives away, the greater the gratitude and
admiration the people express toward that person, and the higher
the rank that person will enjoy.
More informal social rituals—sequenced patterns of interactions—
fill our daily lives, and also allow us to express emotions that enable
the negotiation of social rank. One such ritualized social interaction
is teasing, a common means by which people playfully, and at times
destructively, use emotion to negotiate social status. Teasing
involves a playful provocation in which we most typically, with
words, comment on another individual's counter‐normative
behavior (Keltner et al., 2001). We tease for many reasons, playfully
to express affection, sexual interest, criticism, and to negotiate rank
within social hierarchies. For example, in one study, US fraternity
members teased each other by making up nicknames and
embarrassing stories about each other in foursomes comprised of
two low‐ and two high‐power members (Keltner et al., 1998). The
individual's power was defined according to his position in the
fraternity. As you can see in Table 9.2, high‐power members tended
to display smiles of pleasure, anger, and contempt, emotions
associated with high power. In contrast, the low‐power members
were more likely to show submissive emotions such as fear and
pain (see also Öhman, 1986). In their subtle emotional displays
embedded within their banter and teasing, the group members were
signaling their elevated or lower rank relative to one another.
TABLE 9.2
In groups of four, high‐power (HP) and low‐power (LP)
fraternity members teased one another. During these
interactions, high‐power individuals were more likely to
smile with delight and to show facial displays of anger
and contempt, especially when being challenged by a low‐
power member. Low‐power fraternity members, in
contrast, were more likely to show displays of fear and
pain.
High power (HP)
Low power (LP)
Teasing
LP
Teased by
LP
Teasing
HP
Teased by
HP
Duchenne
smiles
83.3
95.8
56.5
95.8
Facial anger
8.3
25.0
0.0
0.0
Facial
contempt
4.2
16.7
0.0
0.0
Facial fear
0.0
0.0
16.7
8.3
Facial pain
4.2
4.2
12.3
25.0
Note: Duchenne smiles involve the action of the zygomatic major muscle, which pulls the
lip corners up, and the orbicularis oculi muscle surrounding the eye, and are closely tied to
the experience of positive emotion.
Power and Emotion
Thus far, we have seen how through our emotional experience and
expression, we navigate our rank within social hierarchies. Let's
now ask how the power we experience within a social context
influences our emotional tendencies. If Bertrand Russell is right,
and power imbues social interactions of all kinds, then the study of
power's shaping of emotion should reveal a great deal about our
emotional lives.
We know from studies of humans and nonhumans alike that
individuals who occupy positions of lower rank within a hierarchy
face greater threats of most kinds. As a result, they tend to be
attuned to threat, on guard, and vigilant to the actions of others (de
Waal, 1996; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). Individuals who
enjoy elevated power, by contrast, enjoy greater access to resources
and freedom and are less dependent upon others. These power‐
related differences in appraising social contexts should have
profound effects upon the emotional lives of individuals.
In keeping with this analysis, power influences the emotions people
feel moment‐by‐moment. Because power is associated with
increased rewards and freedoms, those who enjoy positions of
elevated power tend to experience greater positive emotion, elevated
enthusiasm, joy, and excitement, in different situations than low‐
power people (Anderson & Berdahl, 2003; Hecht & LaFrance, 1998).
In interactions with friends and strangers, for example, it is the
person who feels more powerful who tends to report higher levels of
positive emotion (Gonzaga, Ward, & Keltner, 2008; Langner &
Keltner, 2008). Not surprisingly, people who feel that they enjoy
power and influence tend to report greater well‐being (Anderson,
John, & Keltner, 2012). It isn't really lonely at the top: it's quite
enjoyable.
Continually appraising the environment in terms of threats, people
feeling less powerful, by contrast, are more likely to experience
negative emotions such as sadness, shame, guilt, and anxiety
(Hecht, Inderbitzen, & Bukowski, 1998; Tiedens et al., 2000). They
show higher baseline levels of the stress hormone cortisol (e.g.,
Kraus et al., 2012). They are more vulnerable to enduring anxiety
and depression.
Power also influences how individuals respond to the emotions of
others, often in ways that are in keeping with Lord Acton's well‐
traveled phrase that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.” In general, people feeling elevated power are worse
judges of other people's emotions (Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, &
Gruenfeld, 2006; Galinsky et al., 2016). When power is
illegitimately attained, though, and high‐power individuals feel a
sense of uncertainty about their rank, they prove to be more
accurate in judging subordinates' anger, likely looking for signs that
they may be seeking to take their power (Stamkou, van Kleef,
Fischer, & Kret, 2016).
Given these empathy deficits, it should not surprise that high‐power
individuals are less responsive to the emotions of people around
them, a theme that Gerben van Kleef has documented in different
ways (van Kleef, De Dreu, & Manstead, 2006). In one notable study,
high‐power individuals responded with less compassion than people
feeling less power when listening to another person describe an
experience of suffering (van Kleef et al., 2008). In another study,
pairs of strangers told stories about what inspired them in life, and
reported on their feelings of interest and inspiration (van Kleef et
al., 2015). Low‐power individuals reported greater inspiration in
listening to the stranger recount what had inspired them. High‐
power people, showing a dash of narcissism, felt more inspired by
their own stories of inspiration. In keeping with these findings,
friends who feel less powerful vis‐à‐vis other friends are more likely
to mimic their emotions (Anderson et al., 2003).
These basic influences of power upon emotion—the excitement and
enthusiasm felt by high‐power individuals, and their accompanying
problems in astutely discerning how others feel—can give rise to
social problems. One social problem relevant to these findings is
sexual harassment, when powerful individuals, most typically men,
advance upon low‐power individuals sexually, or make unwanted
sexual overtures or comments that create a hostile climate. What
psychologists have documented is that high‐power men tend to feel
greater excitement and low‐power women greater anxiety, but high‐
power men erroneously assume that women feel the excitement
they themselves feel, ignoring their signs of anxiety (Gonzaga et al.,
2008; Kuntsman & Maner, 2011).
Social Class and Emotion
In what many believe to be an apocryphal exchange, the writer F.
Scott Fitzgerald observed to Ernest Hemingway that, “The rich are
different from you and me.” Hemingway's response: “Yes, they have
more money.” The lives of the rich and poor are depicted in
literature, and stereotypes abound about how our emotional lives
are shaped in immutable ways by our status in society. We
colloquially speak of life being nasty, short, and brutish in the
bottom rungs of society, the despair of the poor, and the blasé lives
of the well‐to‐do. Scientific study reveals a much more complex and
nuanced influence of class upon emotion.
Intuitively, we think of our own social class and that of other people
in terms of categories such as rich and poor, or working class and
bourgeoisie, or the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Social scientists
define social class in terms of the combination of wealth,
education, and prestige of work that the individual enjoys within a
particular society (Adler et al., 1994; Kraus et al., 2012).
How might your social class influence your emotional life? One
answer comes from theorizing about how upper‐ and lower‐class
individuals appraise their environments differently as a function of
possessing different resources (e.g., income) and inhabiting quite
different social and physical environments (e.g., Piff, Kraus, &
Keltner, 2018). The increased material resources that upper‐class
individuals enjoy grant them greater autonomy and reduced
exposure to social and environmental threat, which gives rise to an
internal, self‐oriented focus. This is evident, for example, in the how
upper‐class individuals show greater attention to personal goals,
more self‐interested behavior, and increased independence from
others. By contrast, lower‐class individuals are exposed to more
threats to their well‐being (e.g., increased crime, poorly funded
schools), and they possess fewer resources to cope with these
threats. As a result, lower‐class individuals develop an external,
other‐oriented focus––greater vigilance to the social context and
interdependence with others, as demonstrated, for example, by
more affiliative and prosocial behavior (Kraus et al., 2012; Piff et al.,
2010, 2018).
Given this analysis, it should not surprise that a number of studies
find that as one rises in the class ladder, one is likely to experience
more general happiness. For example, surveys of large samples of
individuals from different countries find that upper‐class
individuals tend to report greater overall happiness with their life
(Diener et al., 2010; Kahneman & Deaton, 2010). Hailing from an
upper‐class background does not guarantee reports of greater
positive emotion, though (e.g., Lucas et al., 2015). In some studies,
upper‐class individuals report more happiness in the present
moment or from the past day, and in other studies this influence of
class upon positive emotion is not observed.
One solution to this puzzle is to look at more distinct positive
emotions. Toward this end, Paul Piff and Jake Moskowitz gathered
participants' reports of their regular experiences of different positive
emotions in a nationally representative sample in the United States
(Piff & Moskowitz, 2018). Upper‐class individuals reported feeling
higher levels of more self‐focused emotions, most notably pride and
contentment. Lower‐class individuals, by contrast, reported higher
levels of other‐focused emotions that bind individuals into
collaborative relationships—love, awe, and compassion.
Turning to the emotional lives of lower‐class individuals, given that
lower‐class individuals live in more uncertain, resource‐scarce, and
threatening environments, it should not surprise that they
experience higher levels of anxiety. For example, in studies of
children and adults, lower‐class people tend to report greater
anxiety, to respond with increased heart rate and blood pressure
when reading ambiguous, social threatening scenarios, and they
show diminished reduction in daily cortisol levels over the course of
the day, relative to their upper‐class counterparts (e.g., Chen &
Mathews, 2001; Hajat et al., 2010). In more recent work by Neha
John‐Anderson, Edith Chen, Greg Miller and their colleagues, it has
consistently been found that starting as early as the age of 5, lower‐
class individuals show elevated levels of the proinflammatory bio
marker IL‐6, which you will recall indicates elevated activation in
the cytokine system and is associated with shame, social threat, and
anxiety (Miller & Chen, 2009; Neha‐Anderson, et al., 2017).
Regrettably, occupying a lower‐class position in society is
accompanied by more frequent and intense experiences of threat,
anxiety, and stress‐related physiology and elevated inflammation
response. As we will see in Chapter 13, an accompaniment of this is
that countries which have steep hierarchies and great disparities of
income—the United States is an example—are also those with the
highest rates of emotional disorder, poorer physical health, higher
rates of crime, more distrust, and many other ills (Wilkinson &
Pickett, 2009). For most of us, we're better off in terms of quality of
life—with the same money and income—if we live in a more equal
rather than a less equal society.
Another focus in the literature on social class and emotion is how
class influences the individual's emotional responses to other
people. Vigilant to the emotions of others, lower‐class people should
prove to be better judges of others' emotions, much as we saw in the
tendencies of low‐power individuals. This hypothesis has received
support in several studies. For example, people from lower‐class
backgrounds, or individuals experimentally prompted to think of
how they are less well off than others, proved to be better judges of
emotion from photographs of facial expressions (Kraus, Côté, &
Keltner, 2010). Lower‐class people tend to be better judges than
upper‐class people of their own friends' negative emotions (Kraus et
al., 2011).
As with power, these class‐related differences give rise to the
tendency for lower‐class people, as compared with upper‐class
individuals, to respond to others' emotions empathically. In a study
of friendship, Michael Kraus and his colleagues found that over the
course of several interactions, the emotions of the lower‐class
friend came to resemble those of the upper‐class friend, but this
pattern of empathic response was not observed in how the upper‐
class friend responded to the emotions of the lower‐class friend
(Kraus et al., 2011). Lower‐class people also respond with greater
compassion in terms of self‐report and autonomic physiology (heart
rate deceleration), to the suffering of others (Stellar, Manzo, Kraus,
& Keltner, 2012). The emotional lives of the rich and poor do differ,
in many different ways, from differences in positive emotion to
empathetic tendencies.
Emotion and Group Dynamics
On the evening of April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Juvenal
Habyarimana of Rwanda, a Hutu, was shot down near Kigali,
Rwanda's capital. The incident would fuel anti‐Tutsi sentiment
among the majority Hutus. Shortly thereafter, in newspapers and on
local radio stations, rumors were spread about the disgusting habits
of the Tutsis, whom they called cockroaches and insects. Crowds of
Hutus began congregating in the streets, dancing, chanting, and
calling for the death of Tutsi living in the country. In 100 days of
genocidal rage that followed, one group of Hutus would massacre
approximately 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The study of this alarming event, and so many others in history,
reveals how much of our emotional life is attached to the groups we
belong to, and how so often what is disturbing about human groups
and what is inspiring has to do with emotion (van Kleef & Fischer,
2016). One of the first social scientists to make sense of our group‐
based sentiments was Emile Durkheim (1972). He, like other
sociologists who followed him (Collins, 2004), argued that much of
our sense of collective identity is found in our experience of
collective emotions—“collective effervescence” in Durkheim's
phrasing—in which our shared emotional experiences, in particular
during rituals oriented toward symbols and ideas associated with
the group, lead to greater solidarity and cohesiveness in the group.
Grounded in these early arguments, emotion scientists differentiate
between two classes of emotions that are part of collective life.
Group‐based emotions are emotions we feel that are related to
actions of the groups that matter to us and are part of our group
identity (Doojse et al., 1998; Halperin et al., 2016; van Kleef &
Fischer, 2016). Individuals will feel pride when their country's
football team wins the world cup, joy at a political party's election
victory, and guilt and shame at the moral transgressions of their
country or group (Gavin, 2016). Guided by this notion, political
scientists have recently shown how group‐based anxiety—for
example, that felt by working class Whites in the United States—
drives political attitudes toward issues of immigration, taxation, and
government policy (Albertson & Gardarian, 2015).
A second kind of emotion related to our group life is collective
emotions, emotional experiences in group contexts. Whereas
group‐based emotions can be felt alone by the individual, collective
emotions are the emotions we feel when around other group
members; Alone while listening to your favorite musical artist you
might feel joy; in a group at a concert appreciating the same music
the emotion transforms, and you collectively feel a different kind of
joy, or perhaps what you might call ecstasy. In silent contemplation
in meditation or prayer, you might feel a quiet contentment;
meditating together with people, the emotion again transforms into
a collective emotion, perhaps best described as collective joy, or
ecstasy. Individual emotions become collective emotions through
emotion‐related contagion, our capacity to mimic the behavior
nearby, and a cognitive process by which we infer that there is
something that unites the people present – a “we‐ness”— that is
part of the emotion. Guided by this distinction between group‐based
and collective emotion, let's look at how emotions are integral to
our group identity and social life.
Box Novels and films: Harry Potter and the
philosopher's stone
In J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, we
meet Harry, a young wizard. His parents were killed by the
wicked Lord Voldemort, who vanished after trying to kill Harry,
with the attack leaving a distinctive scar on his forehead. Now
Harry has been placed for safe‐keeping with relatives who are
muggles (nonwizards), who neglect and mistreat him. At the age
of 11, he discovers he is famous among wizards for having
escaped Voldemort and that he has been accepted at Hogwarts
School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, a boarding school, which is
its own enclosed world, with friends and adversaries.
As to emotions: under cover of a cloak of invisibility, Harry is
able to search the school library, where he finds the Mirror of
Erised. When Harry looks into it, he sees his parents. He
becomes addicted to this sight until he is rescued by the school's
headmaster, Dumbledore, who explains that one sees in the
mirror whatever one most desires. Readers of Understanding
Emotions will know that this is Harry's attachment desire for his
lost parents.
Emotional themes continue: so when Voldemort feels emotions,
Harry's scar itches. Finally there is a confrontation with
Voldemort. Harry ends up in a hospital, where Dumbledore tells
him he survived Voldemort's attack because his mother
sacrificed her life for him, and Voldemort could not understand
such love.
How do we explain the emotional power of the Harry Potter
books? As well as the attachment theme, part of the answer is
that it's about identification with groups: wizards as compared
with muggles, good people such as ourselves as compared with
bad people, and as compared with outright wicked people such
as Voldemort (in stories outgroups are often depicted as wicked).
Gabriel and Young (2011) investigated this idea by asking people
to read an extract either from Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone, or Stephanie Meyer's Twilight (which is
about vampires). Readers were given a test of implicit
associations to “wizard” and “vampire” words and were also
asked explicit questions such as “Do you think, if you tried really
hard, you might be able to make an object move just using the
power of your mind?” and “How sharp are your teeth?”
Gabriel and Young found that people who read the Harry Potter
excerpt took on characteristics of a wizard, and those who read
an excerpt from Twilight took on characteristics of a vampire.
Readers' identification with wizards or vampires put them in a
good mood, and it prompted higher scores on a life satisfaction
scale. Such identification demonstrates a basic need for
connection. It can alleviate loneliness by attaching people to a
social group and can offer a rewarding psychological identity.
Group and Collective Emotions
A central notion in the analysis of group‐based emotions is that they
are felt during rituals and strengthen group solidarity. One
emotion common to many collective rituals—religious ceremonies,
doing the wave at a sporting event, singing in unison at a concert—
is awe (see Figure 9.6). Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of
vast things that you don't immediately understand (Keltner & Haidt,
2003). Empirical studies find that people in different cultures, such
as China and the United States, report that awe is most commonly
triggered by other people who represent the best qualities of their
group and are admired and during collective action, such as being at
a political protest, being in the crowd at a rock concert, or cheering
euphorically at a sporting event (Bai et al., 2017; Gordon et al.,
2016). The experience of awe is intertwined with your group
identity.
FIGURE 9.6 Ceremonies and celebrations, as in this one
in Taiwan, often evoke emotions such as awe and joy that
solidify group identity.
Relevant empirical studies find that awe triggers of awe trigger
patterns of thought and social behavior that make for more
cohesive, strong groups. For example, studies show that brief
experiences of awe, triggered by watching awe‐inspiring videos, lead
people to be humbler, to define the self in terms of group identities
(e.g., I'm a student at this university; I am a social activist) more so
than individual preferences and to think of the self as smaller and
embedded in strong social networks (Bai et al., 2017; Darbor et al.,
2016; Stellar et al., 2017; Shiota et al., 2007). Awe leads the
individual to be more aware of how he or she is integrated into
social collectives.
Not only does awe lead people to shift their attention from self‐
interest to the concerns of the group, it also leads people to rely on
collective belief systems to make sense of events in the world.
Humans have long created collective belief systems, most notably
found in different religions, that help explain what feels like the
unexplainable—death, birth, random twists of fate; in religious
systems of thought, people make sense of these events by
attributing them to a God, or supernatural force that is an all
knowing, or perhaps benevolent force (Mercier, Kramer, & Shariff,
2017; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007). And awe tends to promote the
endorsement of these collective belief systems (e.g., van Cappallen
& Sargalou, 2014). For, example, Piercarlo Valdesolo and Jesse
Graham led people to experience awe by viewing expansive and
awesome nature scenery (e.g., from the BBC's Planet Earth)
(Valdesolo & Graham, 2014). While experiencing awe, participants
were more likely to endorse the belief that supernatural forces, such
as god, have a causal impact on the events in their lives. In this line
of research, brief experiences of awe led people to believe that some
kind of human agency was involved in the production of a string of
random numbers. Awe leads us to adopt collectively shared beliefs
that explain the more challenging events in life.
Group and Collective Emotion and Between‐Group Conflict
The horror of the Rwandan genocide brings into sharp relief how
readily group‐based and collective emotions can escalate group
conflict. Historical analysis of many ethnically motivated genocides
of the twentieth century, including the Nazi Holocaust, killings of
individuals for being minorities by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia
between 1975 and 1979 (Kiernan, 2008), and the 1995 massacre of
Muslims in Srebrenica, Bosnia, by the Army of the Serbian Republic
(Leyesdorff, 2011), likewise find a prominent role of group and
collective emotion as catalysts of genocide. Positive emotional
appeals to national pride are common in the propaganda and mass
communication that precede genocidal behavior. Within the group
fears of being denounced by acquaintances and terror of
imprisonment and death for nonconformity set the stage for
conforming to violent actions against the outgroup (Evans, 2005;
2008; Larson, 2011).
Two emotions that have been a particular focus in analyses of
conflict and violence between groups are anger and disgust. What
factors increase the likelihood of one group feeling rage and anger
toward another and thus being more likely to act aggressively?
Diane Mackie and Eliot Smith and their colleagues have offered an
answer (Mackie et al., 2000; Mackie, Devos, & E. R. Smith, 2000;
Mackie & Smith, 2002; E. R. Smith, 1993; see also Dumont et al.,
2003; Yzerbyt et al., 2003). They have found that anger directed at
the outgroup is more likely when group members individually feel
that their own group is strong as compared with the outgroup and
when the members are very identified with the group. And
regrettably, incidental feelings of anger, once set in motion, will
increase prejudice and hatred toward outgroups (DeSteno et al.,
2004).
Disgust is a clearly toxic emotion between groups and can fuel
violence. Here, for instance, is a description of the result of the
Aztecs under Montezuma offering a gift of precious works of art in
gold and other materials, hoping to buy off the aggression of Cortez
and the Spaniard invaders:
The Spaniards faces grinned: they were delighted, they were
overjoyed. They snatched up the gold like monkeys … They were
swollen with greed; they were ravenous; they hungered for that
gold like wild pigs … They babbled in a barbarous language;
everything they said was in a savage tongue.
(Wright, 1992, p. 26)
While the Spaniards treated the Aztecs with contempt, the Aztecs,
from whose eye‐witness reports this is taken, observed the
Spaniards' behavior with disgust. They viewed those alien others as
behaving not as people but as animals. This tendency to respond to
other groups with disgust is common during periods of rising
violence between groups. Groups in conflict will dehumanize one
another with references to each other as disgusting rats or vermin.
These feelings of disgust set the stage for laws—such as the anti‐
Semitic laws of the Nazis—that limit contact across group
boundaries and set the stage for violence.
Early in the study of disgust, Paul Rozin and his colleagues
proposed that disgust, though originally derived from taste, often
extends from protecting the body from disease, to protection against
contamination of all kinds, to anything that might harm our soul, or
the social order (Rozin, Haidt, McCauley, 1993). This extends to
others groups: people can feel disgusted with other groups and be
guided by the irrational belief that contact renders one's own group
contaminated and less pure.
Guided by these claims, recent work has documented that disgust is
a powerful engine of prejudices toward outgroups. For example,
people who report a trait‐like tendency to experience high levels of
disgust also report high levels of dislike for groups and in particular
homosexuals (Inbar et al., 2009, 2016; Tapias et al., 2007). Yoel
Inbar and his colleagues have led people to experience disgust by
spraying nearby trash cans with a foul odor. Smelling a disgusting
scent led participants to express negative attitudes toward gays
(Inbar et al., 2012). Disgust can amplify prejudicial feelings: us‐
versus‐them propensities.
Infrahumanization
The tendency to think of one's own group as superior compared to
other groups is what many believe to be a human universal (Brewer,
1984; Brown, 1991). Moral philosopher Joshua Greene argues that
this kind of in‐group versus out‐group sentiment is one of the
greatest challenges to peace and stability that the human species
faces. This us‐versus‐them thinking extends to the realm of
emotion, as evident in studies of infrahumanization (Cortes,
Demoulin, Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Leyens, 2005).
Infrahumanization is the tendency for ingroup members to
attribute animal‐like qualities to outgroup members—that is, to
deny them full human attributes. Emotions play a critical role in
infrahumanization. In many different parts of the world, group
members assume that their own group is more likely than outgroup
members to experience more complex, sophisticated emotions such
as pride or sympathy (Cortes et al., 2005). These more complex
emotions involve more uniquely human cognitive capacities—a
sense of self, taking others' perspectives, empathy—and are
especially important in the value group members attach to their
own identity (and by implication, how they might devalue other
identities). By contrast, group members attribute similar levels of
more basic emotions, such as anger or disgust, to their own group
and different outgroups. For example, as one recent example,
Agneta Fischer and her colleagues presented European participants
with photos of Europeans and Arabs displaying embarrassment
(Fischer et al, 2017). In keeping with the idea of infrahumanization,
European participants attributed embarrassment to the expressions
of fellow Europeans, but disinterest to the same emotional behavior
expressed by Arab individuals.
Emotional Processes That Improve Group Relations
Much as emotions can readily accelerate divisions and violence
between groups, emotional processes can also improve relations
between groups. For example, friendships across group boundaries
have been found to reduce the negative emotions that escalate
tensions between people from different groups (Page‐Gould &
Mendoza‐Denton, 2011).
Another solution to conflict between groups is one that we have
seen is powerful in intimate relations and families: forgiveness,
which has its roots in the reconciliation processes nonhuman
primates so routinely engage in to maintain peaceful communities.
We saw earlier that forgiveness is important to marriages and
family intimacy. Forgiveness has been a central process to repairing
relations between groups in conflict. In South Africa, after the end
of apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set out to
bring white perpetrators of violence face to face with their black
victims, with the intention of promoting forgiveness. In informal
“truth and reconciliation” gatherings in Rwandan villages, Hutu
perpetrators apologized to relatives of their victims, who were given
a public arena to air their rage and sense of injustice. Today,
although tensions persist, levels of aggression between the Hutus
and Tutsis are low.
Emotional Intelligence
We began this chapter with the story of Tim Page, the music critic
who has struggled in personal relationships because of living with
high functioning autism. We have seen through this chapter how
important the expression and experience of different emotions are
to intimate relations, friendships, hierarchical relationships, and
even dynamics between groups. Emotions are a grammar of human
relationships.
Is there a general concept that might capture the importance of
emotion in relationships? Peter Salovey, John Mayer, and Marc
Brackett think so, and in an important development, they have
outlined the concept of emotional intelligence (Brackett et al.,
2008; Mayer, Caruso & Salovey, 2016; Salovey & Mayer, 1990).
Their argument is that just as people vary in terms of the verbal,
quantitative, analytic, or artistic intelligence, they likewise vary in
terms of their emotional intelligence.
Salovey and Mayer (1990) and Salovey, Caruso, and Mayer (2016)
proposed that emotional intelligence involves four different skills.
First, it involves an ability to be accurate in perceiving others'
emotions, through the careful reading of others' facial expressions,
vocalizations, and posture and gesture. One way to think about the
effects of power on emotion, then, is that in people who occupy
positions of high power, this first component of emotional
intelligence is compromised. Second, emotional intelligence
involves an ability to understand one's own emotions, a skill that is
compromised, for example, by particular kinds of brain damage (see
Chapter 7). Third, emotional intelligence involves an ability to use
current emotions to help thinking, for instance in making decisions,
which we describe in Chapter 10. Fourth, emotional intelligence
includes the ability to manage one's emotions in ways that are
fitting to the current situation: emotion regulation (discussed in
Chapter 7).
Given the arguments of this section, one would expect those who
score high on emotional intelligence to fare better in their
relationships. Several studies show this to be true (Brackett et al.,
2008). For example, five‐year‐old children who scored higher on
emotional intelligence were better adjusted socially three years
later. Adolescents who scored higher on emotional intelligence
reported having more friends and better social support. Young
adults who scored higher on emotional intelligence had more
constructive and cooperative interactions with their romantic
partners. Later in life, adults who scored higher on emotional
intelligence enjoyed greater respect and rank at work and were
perceived to be better workplace citizens. Emotional intelligence,
then, benefits the four kinds of relationships we have considered in
this chapter: intimate bonds, friendships, hierarchical relations, and
relations with other group members.
SUMMARY
This chapter concentrated on a central theme in this book: that
emotions are social. We began by suggesting that there are two ways
to think about the social nature of emotions: Emotions can
structure social relationships; and emotional responses are shaped
by relationships we are in. Within intimate relationships shaped by
attachment goals, we looked at how desire and love help create
intimate bonds and how negative emotional processes (e.g.,
contempt) and positive emotional processes (e.g., forgiveness)
contribute to the quality of the marital bond. In friendships defined
by the goal of affiliation, gratitude, mimicry, and social support are
ingredients for good friendships and the broader sense of being
socially connected. In hierarchical relationships, emotional displays
are one means by which we negotiate positions of rank, and our
position of power and social class influences the emotions we feel
and our capacity to empathize with others. Finally, we discussed
how emotional processes bind us to groups, and how ingroup–
outgroup dynamics are shaped by emotion, by feelings of rage and
disgust and infrahumanization, but also how these can be
moderated by the tendency to forgive. Putting these findings
together, Emotional Intelligence, defined by four skills, proves to
enhance many kinds of relationships.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. Consider yourself and someone you know well. How do you and
this other person negotiate emotional transitions between
sexual attraction and commitment?
2. Think of the different social hierarchies among people you
know: perhaps of intelligence, fashion sense, sporting ability,
money, success with romantic partners, confidence when
speaking. Which hierarchies are important to you? How do your
emotions affect and respond to your movements up and down
these hierarchies?
3. With what social group or groups are you most identified?
Perhaps you are a feminist, a keen member of your university or
college, a supporter of a sports team? What feelings do you have
of belonging, and what feelings do you have toward people who
are not members of your group?
FURTHER READING
Inbar, Y., Westgate, E. C., Pizarro D. A., & Nosek, B. A. (2016). Can a
naturally occurring pathogen threat change social attitudes?
Evaluations of gay men and lesbians during the 2014 Ebola
epidemic. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7, 420–
427.
Crawford, J., Inbar, Y., & Maloney, V. (2014). Disgust sensitivity
selectively predicts attitudes toward groups that threaten (or
uphold) traditional sexual morality. Personality and Individual
Differences, 70, 218– 223.
For an excellent review of research on emotions in social life:
Tiedens L. and Leach C. (Eds.) (2004). The social life of emotions.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Among the best single‐authored works on love is a book by an
anthropologist:
Fisher H. (1992). Anatomy of love. New York: Norton.
For an overview of how emotions are social:
Van Kleef, G. A. (2016). The interpersonal dynamics of emotion:
Toward an integrative theory of emotions as social information.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A fascinating account of an American family witnessing the changes
that took place in Germany after the Nazis had come to power.
Larson E. (2011). In the garden of the beasts: Love, terror, and an
American family in Hitler's Berlin. New York: Crown.
10
Emotions and Thinking
CONTENTS
Passion and Reason
Emotions Prioritize Thoughts, Goals, and Actions
Emotion and Mood in Economic Behavior
The Ultimatum Game
Classical Economics
Affect Infusion, and Affect as Information
Styles of Processing
Effects of Moods and Emotions on Cognitive
Functioning
Perceptual Effects
Attentional Effects
Effects on Remembering
Emotion‐Related Biases in Memory
Eyewitness Testimony
Persuasion
Morality
Intuitions and Principles
Cooperation
Emotions and the Law
Obligations of Society
Dispassionate Judgments?
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, iv
On July 2, 1860, Eadweard Muybridge, a founding figure in
photography, boarded a stagecoach for St. Louis, where he was to
catch a train and make his way to Europe to buy rare books for his
San Francisco bookstore. In northeastern Texas, the driver of the
stagecoach lost control of the horses, and the coach careened down
a mountainside. In the crash, Muybridge was thrown headfirst into
a tree. Miraculously, he survived and, although he suffered serious
brain damage, he made the trip to England, where he spent six
vague years recuperating.
Muybridge returned to California in 1866, but he was not the same.
His photography had an eerily risky and often obsessive quality. He
would take thousands of photographs of animals in motion. He took
hundreds of photos of himself, often naked, with his characteristic
furrowed brow glaring into the camera.
In 1872, Muybridge married Flora Shallcross Stone, 21 years his
junior. Not long after the wedding, while Muybridge was away on
assignment, Flora had an affair with a dashing young man, Harry
Larkyns, with whom she had a baby. At an acquaintance's house,
Muybridge saw a photo of the baby he thought was his, and casually
looked at the back of the photo. On it were written the words “Little
Harry.” The acquaintance confirmed Muybridge's suspicion that the
baby was not his.
Muybridge went to the ranch in Calistoga, California, where Larkyns
worked. He greeted the man by saying: “I am Muybridge, and this is
a message from my wife.” He raised a Smith & Wesson six‐shooter
and killed Larkyns.
At Muybridge's highly publicized trial, witnesses spoke of how
different he seemed upon his return from England. Silas Selleck, a
friend and fellow photographer, observed: “After his return from
Europe he was very eccentric, and so very unlike his way before
going.” M. Gray noted that before the accident Muybridge was
“much less irritable than after his return; was much more careless
in dress after his return.”
Passion and Reason
Eadweard Muybridge's orbitofrontal cortex had been damaged. In
Chapters 1 and 5, we referred to Antonio Damasio's (1994) work
with people who suffered a similar damage, with effects on their
emotions and social lives. Here we extend that line of thought.
Without a functioning orbitofrontal cortex and the social emotions
that this brain area is involved in processing, people lack social
judgment; their decision‐making is askew. It isn't that on the one
hand there is rationality and on the other hand there is emotion.
Without social emotions, these brain‐damaged people become no
longer rational. We see Muybridge's shooting of Larkyns as driven
by jealousy.
We can understand jealousy and may have suffered it ourselves. In
Muybridge's case, however, the jealousy was so magnified, so
unaffected by other emotions—love for the child he had thought
was his son, who was innocent of the events that upset Muybridge,
compassion for his victim, fear of consequences for himself—that
the jealousy seemed to have grown larger than the man himself. For
us to be functioning members of society, our emotions need to be in
working order in relation to each other so that they may guide our
reasoning and action wisely.
A striking quality of emotions is how they influence reasoning.
Jean‐Paul Sartre (1962) referred to this as magical
transformation. This is reflected in aphorisms about effects of
emotion upon how we may see the world through “jaundiced eyes”
or “rose‐colored glasses.” When angry, afraid, euphoric, or in love,
each emotion invokes its own world though seldom, perhaps, as
completely as jealousy did for Eadweard Muybridge. Usually, it's
more temporary, but convincing at the time. Each emotion is its
own lens through which we view the world. We are aware of
particular themes or events. We recall particular experiences from
our past. We envision a certain future.
In the Western philosophical tradition, emotions have often been
regarded with suspicion. The position taken by the ethical
philosophers of the third century BCE, the Epicureans and Stoics,
was that to lead a good life, emotions should be extirpated
(Nussbaum, 1994). If Epicureans or Stoics heard about Muybridge's
jealousy, they would say: “There, you see!” Drawing on this
skepticism, many philosophers have assumed that the emotions are
unsophisticated, primitive ways of perceiving the world. The
implication is that human society is better off when the more
primitive passions are reined in by rational thought. Have a look, for
instance, at Figure 10.0 at the head of this chapter. A rare exception
was the eighteenth‐century philosopher, David Hume (1749–
1740/1972), who contended in a famous statement that, “Reason is
and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
FIGURE 10.0 Reason, advised by Divine Grace, holds the
Passions, Feare, Despaire, Choler, and others in chains.
The caption starts: “Passions araing'd by Reason here
you see/As she's Advis'd by Grace Divine… .” From
Senault (1671).
What do we mean when we ask whether emotions can be rational?
A first meaning has to do with whether beliefs and appraisals that
support our emotions correspond to events in the world? Most
often our emotions meet this criterion of rationality. The literature
on appraisal (see Chapter 6) suggests that emotions are often
products of complex beliefs about events in the world. A good way
of thinking about this is that emotions are locally rational (Levy,
1985); they are rational in relation to certain concerns, but they are
not globally rational because they may exclude consideration of
other concerns.
A second meaning of rationality concerns whether emotions help
individuals function in the social world. We think of rational human
beings as those who navigate their environment effectively.
Delusional beliefs of grandiosity (overweening pride) or paranoia
(pervasive fear) are irrational in this sense. They make it difficult
for a person to be reliable in society. A central assumption of this
book is that emotions in many contexts are rational in that they
help people respond adaptively to the environment. This is certainly
not true all the time, as we shall see in Chapters 12 and 13, but
many, if not most, occurrences of emotion help people act
adaptively.
A third meaning is relevant to this chapter. Do emotions guide
perception, thinking, attention, memory, and judgment, in
organized and constructive ways? Or do they interfere with these
processes? Certain extreme levels of emotion can get the better of
us. Extreme anger may prevent us from perceiving cooperative
gestures of an ideological opponent or romantic partner. Yet
research over the last 50 years indicates that emotions give us
information, structure perception, direct attention, give preferential
access to certain memories, and bias judgment in ways that
generally help people and are valuable to our humanity (Huntinger,
Isbell, & Clore, 2014; Forgas, 2014; Keltner & Horberg, 2015; Lerner
et al., 2015).
Emotions Prioritize Thoughts, Goals, and Actions
The notion that emotions guide cognitive processes in an adaptive
fashion emerged within a movement known as cognitive science,
which matured in the 1960s and included among its methods the
construction of mind‐like processes in computers. The question is
this: If you had to design a mind, what problems would you have to
consider and what principles would you need to embody?
Nobel Prize Laureate Herbert Simon (1967) argued that emotions
would be necessary in any intelligent being; a human, a Martian, or
an intelligent computer. Emotions, Simon continues, are a solution
to a general problem: they set priorities among the many different
goals and concerns that individuals have at any moment.
This need for some sort of interrupt and prioritization process
emerges in complex organisms like humans (De Sousa, 1987;
Oatley, 1992). In very simple animals, behavior is controlled by
reflexes. Consider the female tick (Von Uexküll, 1934). After mating,
she climbs a tree and hangs at the end of a lower twig. When she
detects the chemical, butyric acid, she lets go. Because tiny
quantities of butyric acid are released into the air by mammals, this
gives a fair probability of falling onto the back of an animal such as
a browsing deer. If the tick lands on a mammal's back, warm
temperature causes the tick to burrow through the fur toward the
warmth. When she reaches the mammal's skin, another stimulus
triggers burrowing into it, to suck the mammal's blood, which will
be necessary for laying her eggs. In the simple world of the female
tick, the perceptual system is tuned to just a few events. In the tick's
world, there is no need for emotions.
Now imagine a being at the other end of the scale of complexity, one
vastly more intelligent than ourselves, perhaps a god. A god is often
conceived of as omniscient and omnipotent or, as a cognitive
scientist might say, having a perfect model of the universe and no
limitations of resources. Such a being could predict the results of its
every action. Again there is no need for emotions. Everything would
be known, everything anticipated.
We humans are somewhere in between ticks and gods. Our world is
complex and we act with purposes. But our actions sometimes
produce effects we don't anticipate. We have limitations of
knowledge and resources. Sometimes we need encouragement to
continue what we are doing. Sometimes events occur—small
successes, losses, frustrations, threats—for which we have no ready‐
prepared response and which may make it better to switch goals or
change plans. Such events occur when we don't know enough to be
certain what to do next. They are signaled by emotion, which don't
tell us exactly what to do next, but they do prompt us. Each one
creates an urge, a readiness to act in a certain direction or in a range
of ways that, on average during the course of evolution and our own
development, have been better either than acting randomly or than
becoming lost in thought trying to calculate the best possible action.
The notion that emotions occur because we can't ever know enough
was a focus of classical Greek dramas, of some of Aristotle's work,
and of much of Freud's. What became new in the era of cognitive
science was the idea of just how important emotions (or something
like them) are for any complex being that has several motives and
that operates in a complex world. Emotions help guide action in a
world that is always imperfectly known and that can never be fully
controlled. It is not so much that emotions are irrational, but rather
that individuals cannot have fully rational solutions to many of the
problems of life. Emotions are bridges toward rationality.
In elaborating this view, Oatley and Johnson‐Laird (1987, 2011)
proposed that emotions involve two different kinds of signaling in
the nervous system. One kind occurs automatically and derives
from primary appraisal. In evolutionary terms, it is simple and
carries no specific information about objects in the environment. It
sets the brain into a particular mode of organization, or
readiness. It gives a priority, and urge to act, prompted by an
emotion such as joy, anger, sadness, or fear. It has the
phenomenological feeling tone of an emotion but no other content.
It is an urge toward the kind of thing to do next, joy to continue
what we are doing, anger to contend with another, and so on. It is
significant that phenomena of emotional priming, in which stimuli
are shown subliminally to participants in experiments, operate at
this automatic, unconscious level (Schooler et al., 2015;
Winkielman, Zajonc, & Schwarz, 1997), and are resistant to
attributional interventions.
The second kind of signal derives from secondary appraisal. It is
informational. The information it carries enables us to make
mental models of the events, their possible causes and their
implications for future action. On the basis of these two kinds of
signal, we act in accordance both with how we feel and with what we
know.
Normally, the organizational and informational signals occur
together to produce an emotional feeling with a consciously known
cause and object. But the two kinds of signal can be dissociated.
According to Oatley and Johnson‐Laird (1996), the dissociation
accounts for why we can sometimes have emotions that are free‐
floating, and how psychoactive drugs such as tranquillizers can
change our emotional state without doing anything to events of the
world. It is also how we can know about some events in the world
without caring about them. Figure 10.1 is a diagram of the two kinds
of signal.
FIGURE 10.1 Modules of the brain and different kinds of
messages that pass among them (to illustrate Oatley &
Johnson‐Laird's, 1987, theory). In (a) the signals are
informational and travel along particular pathways. In
(b) an emotion‐control signal spreads diffusely from one
module (2.3), turning some other modules on and some
off, thereby setting the system into a distinctive mode.
Normally, in (c), these two kinds of signals occur
together.
To illustrate the organizational and informational aspects of an
emotion, consider fear. In humans, the organizational part
interrupts ongoing action. It makes ready physiological mechanisms
and actions for freezing, flight, or for defensive fight, and urges us
toward action of one of these kinds. It directs attention to the
environment for any sign of danger or safety, and it induces
checking on the results of actions just completed. In this mode, we
can think of the brain's resources as marshaled into a combination
of forms of action readiness to respond to danger. The emotion is a
turning‐on of this mode of organization. Moods are based on the
same organizational signals, but they maintain the brain in a certain
mode despite events that might tend to switch it into some other
mode. The informational part of fear is about what we are
frightened of. Sometimes this can be insubstantial.
Emotion and Mood in Economic Behavior
In this section, we look at the role of emotions and moods in
activities that are thought to be entirely rational: economic
decision‐making. We do this at the individual level and then at the
group level of economic policies in communities and nations.
The Ultimatum Game
In the Ultimatum Game, there are two players: a proposer who
offers to share a sum of money (provided by the experimenter) in a
certain proportion, and a responder who decides to accept or reject
the offer. If the responder decides to accept, the money is shared in
the proportion proposed. If the responder rejects the offer, neither
proposer nor responder gets anything. When proposers offer to
share the money equally, such offers are typically seen as fair and
are accepted. But contrary to conventional economic theory, when
shares of money offered are in the proportions 7 to 3, 8 to 2, or 9 to
1 in the proposer's favor, responders are usually upset at their
unfairness and they reject them.
This behavior is often labeled irrational, because the responder fails
to get any money. It is thought that this occurs for emotional
reasons. Osmi and Ohira (2009) found that, in comparison with
effects of offers that would be accepted, offers that would be
rejected slowed down the responders' heart rate: the more unfair
the offer, the more the heart slowed. Gospic et al. (2011) monitored
responders' brains in an fMRI machine as they played this game.
They found that unfair offers that were rejected activated the
amygdala, suggesting that such behavior triggered a basic concern
over fairness, and which the researchers labeled as aggressive. They
found, too, that giving responders a benzodiazepine drug, which has
a calming effect of the neurotransmitter GABA, decreased their
rejection rate of unfair offers from 37.6 to 19; this decrease was
associated with decreased amygdala activation.
Harlé and Sanfey (2010) found that rejections of unfair offers in
this game were usually prompted by emotions of withdrawal such
as disgust, more so than by emotions of approach such as anger.
The idea of deservingness (Feather, 2007) has become important;
emotions affect our sense of who deserves what. In five
experiments, Forgas (2016) found that in the Ultimatum Game and
similar games, when positive emotions such as happiness were
induced, selfish decisions were more likely to be made, whereas
when negative emotions such as sadness were induced, these were
more likely to result in unselfish decisions.
Classical Economics
An interesting conjunction of an academic discipline with an
emotion term is that of economics as the “dismal science.” As
Thompson (2013) explains, the term was coined by the philosopher
Thomas Carlyle, and is widely thought to derive from the proposal
of Thomas Malthus that population growth always outstrips
provision of resources and thereby sentences humanity to misery.
(Malthus was a major influence on Darwin in his thinking about
evolution.) But as Thompson points out, really Carlyle was writing
about slavery: to dismiss its economics as “dreary, desolate, and
indeed quite abject … a dismal science.”
Economics is the science of how to provide means for us human
beings to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves, and enable us to do
other things that we find important. Is there reason to think of it,
generally, as dismal? There may be. Frank, Gilovich, and Regan
(1973) looked at how economics starts by assuming that we human
beings act in narrow self‐interest (see also Frank, 1988). Frank et al.
found that people who took a degree in economics became more
likely to act in self‐interested ways. Dismal?
In the opening chapter of the book you are reading, we introduced
Tania Singer, with her finding that certain brain areas that are
activated when we feel pain are also activated when we know a
loved one is in pain (Singer et al., 2004). In a paper that extended
Singer et al.'s result, Beckes et al. (2013) reported on a study of
people in an fMRI machine when they, or a friend, or a stranger,
were threatened with an electric shock. Areas of the brain that were
activated when participants were threatened were almost identical
to areas that were activated when the friend was threatened, but not
when the stranger was threatened. Beckes et al. write that, “from
the perspective of the brain, our friends and loved ones are indeed
part of who we are.”
From results of this kind Singer (2015) has argued that “Research in
the fields of psychology and neuroscience shows beyond doubt that
the assumptions about human nature that underpin mainstream
economic models are simply wrong.” Of course, says Singer, we
humans are selfish. Sometimes we can be very selfish. But to say
that economic activity is guided only by self‐interest is to mistake
the part for the whole (see also Tamarit & Sanchez, 2016). Research
in psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that other people
are important to us, parts of our very being. Recall what you learned
in Chapter 7, that dopamine‐rich centers of the ventral striatum are
activated not only when we experience pleasure, but when we
cooperate and share resources with others. With more empathy and
compassion for others, we humans could become more cooperative,
more responsible, and reduce forms of social harm, such as poverty
(1 in 5 children in the United States live in poverty). “If we are to
address some of our most pressing global problems, such as climate
change and inequality,” says Singer, “we need to devise new
economic models that accommodate the real complexity of human
nature.”
Affect Infusion, and Affect as Information
How do emotions guide thought processes, perception,
remembering, attention, and so on? How, for example, does fear
shift your judgment, for example, of what risks you are vulnerable
to in the course of life? And how do we think when we are feeling
joyful or proud?
Eich and Macaulay (2000) have concluded that effects which can be
influenced by particular moods such as happiness, sadness, or
anxiety, are salient in memory and perception, but these effects also
depend on the tasks, and on who the participants are. So as Eich,
Macaulay, and Ryan (1994) put it:
Two individuals—one happy, the other sad—are shown say, a rose
and asked to identify and describe what they see. Both
individuals are apt to say much the same thing and to encode the
rose event in the same manner. After all, and with all due respect
to Gertrude Stein, a rose, is a rose is a rose … memory for the
rose event will probably not appear to be mood dependent under
these circumstances. Now imagine a different situation. Instead
of identifying and describing the rose the subjects are asked to
recall a specific episode, from any time in their personal past,
that the object calls to mind (p. 213).
When people recall an autobiographical event, Eich and his
colleagues found that mood effects occur, but they vary because
people's experiences are different (Miranda & Kihlstrom, 2005).
In Joseph Forgas's Affect Infusion model (Forgas, 1995; 2014),
emotions or extended moods infuse into a cognitive task, to
influence judgment, particularly if the task is complex. In a study of
reasoning from syllogisms, Goel and Vartanian (2011) found that
negative emotions could induce people to pay more attention to the
problem as stated and draw conclusions in a way that their prior
beliefs did not affect their reasoning. In an extension of the affect
infusion model, Lowry et al. (2014) found that when people visit a
new website, if the site works well for them, a positive mood occurs,
and this enhances trust in the vendor whose site is visited.
A related approach, proposed by Gerald Clore, is of affect as
information (Clore & Palmer, 2009; Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore,
2014). In this perspective, emotions themselves can be informative.
The account rests on two assumptions. The first is that emotions
provide us with a signal. For example, anger can signal that an
injustice has occurred and something needs to be changed. A second
assumption is that many of our judgments are too complex to
enable us to review all the relevant evidence (see the point raised by
Simon, 1967, discussed earlier in this chapter). For instance, to say
how satisfied you are with your political leader you might think
about environmental policy, the state of health care, inequality of
income, global warming, and whether the leader is living up to her
or his campaign promises. It is almost impossible to know enough
to provide a thorough judgment. Given the complexity of so many
judgments, we often rely on a simpler assessment based on our
current feelings. In evaluating a leader, we might just think: “How
do I feel about this person?” Only seldom can human beings act
with full rationality, and think through all the relevant evidence.
Emotions are heuristics, guesses that often work better than
chance (Polya, 1957): shortcuts to making judgments or taking
action.
One test of this affect‐as‐information perspective was by Schwarz
and Clore (1983), who studied effects of bright sunny days and
gloomy overcast days on people's emotional lives. They telephoned
people in Illinois either on a cloudy or on a sunny day and asked
them: “All things considered, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you
with your life as a whole these days?” In one condition, participants
were simply asked this question. In a second condition, participants
were first asked: “How's the weather down there?” and only then
asked the question about life satisfaction. Schwarz and Clore
predicted that only those participants who had not been asked about
the weather would use their current feelings as heuristics. As you
can see from Figure 10.2, people tended to use their emotions as
heuristics in making judgments, but not when they attributed those
feelings to another source.
FIGURE 10.2 People say they are more satisfied with their
life on sunny than on overcast days, except when they are
explicitly asked to think about the weather (adapted from
Schwarz & Clore, 1983).
In 1992, Clore wrote: “The most reliable phenomenon in the
cognition‐emotion domain is the effect of mood on evaluative
judgment” (p. 134); a mood acquired in one situation can affect a
judgment made about something entirely different.
A striking study of this effect was by Dutton & Aron (1974): one of
the most imaginative studies in psychology. The researchers
recruited young male passers‐by who were not accompanied by a
female, who crossed the Capilano suspension bridge (near
Vancouver, Canada). This bridge is 450 feet long and has cables that
act as handrails. One walks alone on boards suspended from the
cables, see Figure 10.3. The whole bridge rocks and sways
alarmingly, so one fears one will fall 200 feet to the rocks and rapids
of the Capilano River below. The comparison group was of young
men who crossed a fixed cedar bridge further upstream that is firm,
wide, and only 10 feet above the river. At the other side of each
bridge, each man was met either by a young woman or by a young
man, who asked them to take part in a study she or he was
conducting for a psychology class on the subject of scenic
attractions. Participants were asked to fill out a short questionnaire
and look at an ambiguous picture of a young woman covering her
face with one hand and reaching out with the other. After the man
had completed the questions, the interviewer wrote her or his
phone number on a piece of paper, gave it to the participant, and
asked him to phone if he wanted to talk further.
FIGURE 10.3 Capilano Suspension Bridge. Photo Markus
Säynevirta; acknowledgment by e‐mail would be greatly
appreciated. Wikipedia, Creative Commons License.
Sexual imagery in response to the ambiguous picture shown to the
men who had crossed the high suspension bridge and were met by
the female interviewer was significantly higher than that of men
who crossed the low bridge or who were met at either bridge by the
male interviewer. Not only that, but many more phone calls to the
female interviewer were made by men who crossed the high bridge
than by those who crossed the low bridge. Dutton and Aron also
reported a second field study and a laboratory experiment to show
that the correct explanation of the effect was that anxious
excitement had transformed to sexual attraction.
When in a positive or negative emotional state, feelings are likely to
affect judgments, even when the objects being judged have no
relation to the cause of the emotion. Positive and negative moods
have been shown to influence a wide array of judgments, which
include evaluations of consumer items (Isen, Shalker, Clark, &
Karp, 1978), political leaders (Forgas & Moylan, 1987; Keltner,
Locke, & Audrain, 1993), and evaluations of losses and gains
(Ketelaar, 2004, 2005). In more recent work in keeping with this
theme, Elizabeth Phelps and her colleagues exposed some people to
a physiological stressor—they had to keep their arm submerged in
freezing water for three minutes (Kubota et al., 2014). These
participants showed a subsequent spike in the stress hormone
cortisol, and evaluated other people portrayed in written scenarios
more negatively, and were less aware of how situational factors
might shape their behavior. Negative emotions lead us to look upon
others through a more cynical lens.
Do current moods and emotions affect judgments of the future?
Indeed they do. Negative moods lead people to view the future
pessimistically, whereas positive moods lead people to look at the
future optimistically. Johnson and Tversky (1983) had participants
read newspaper accounts about the death of a young man, which
induced a negative mood. People in a negative mood (for instance,
sad) judged negative life events in the future, like contracting a
disease, to be more likely than people feeling a positive mood (such
as feeling happy).
Different emotions are associated with more specific strains of
pessimism or optimism. For example, Keltner, Ellsworth, and
Edwards (1993) asked whether people feeling angry or sad would
judge different events to be more likely in their future. They
reasoned that angry people, attuned to the blameworthy actions of
others, would judge unfair acts caused by others to be frequent in
the future. In contrast, sad people, attuned to situational causes of
negative outcomes, should judge negative life events caused by
situational factors as more likely.
To test this hypothesis, they asked angry or sad participants to
estimate the likelihood of different events, some of which were
caused by other people (a pilot's error causes a friend to die in a
plane crash) and some caused by situational factors (icy roads cause
a car accident). Consistent with expectation, angry people judged
the negative life events caused by other people to be more likely
than sad people, who judged the events caused by situational factors
to be more likely.
In similar work, DeSteno and colleagues (2000) asked people
feeling anger or sadness to estimate the likelihood of “sad” events
(of 60,000 orphans in Romania, how many will be malnourished)
and “angry” or unfair events (of 20,000 violent criminals put on
trial in the upcoming year, how many will be acquitted because of
legal technicalities). Whereas sad participants judged the sadness‐
inducing events to be more likely, angry participants judged the
anger‐inducing events to be more likely. In similar work, fearful
individuals have been shown to have heightened estimates that
risky, dangerous events will be part of their future (Lerner &
Keltner, 2001). For similar reasons, guilt amplifies the personal
sense of control, and can lead to more risky action (Kouchaki, Oveis,
& Gino, 2014).
The theory of affect as information helps us understand social
interactions (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007; Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore,
2014). With others, we carefully choose our actions and what we say
to maintain a tone that is compatible with our identity and our role;
our emotion supplies information that enables us to act in this
identity‐supporting fashion.
Styles of Processing
An emotion or mood can promote a style of processing. When
you feel guilty or angry, grateful or enthusiastic, you engage in a
different form of reasoning, of weighing evidence, and of drawing
conclusions than you might when you are feeling something
different.
A prominent theme to emerge in cognitive psychology in the last 20
years is that when it comes to thinking, reasoning, and making
decisions, two types of system are at work: System 1 and System
2. This idea was developed by Keith Stanovich (2004) and Daniel
Kahneman (2011). System 1 is fast, involuntary, and based on
heuristics. Here is a question. Please answer it as fast as you can:
“What do cows drink?” For most of us the answer that comes to
mind is “milk.” It's triggered by the association of the words “cows”
and “drink.” This is System 1 at work. But if we go at it more slowly
and deliberatively, System 2 starts up and we may think something
like: “Milk, perhaps. Well … some cows—calves actually—drink
milk, but in the ordinary way I suppose cows must drink water.”
Both systems are good for particular kinds of problem.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman (2011) describes research
with his longtime friend and collaborator Amos Tversky in which
they showed that when people are asked to do problems that require
deliberative thinking, the heuristic response often gets in first.
Although the deliberative System 2 is capable of overriding System
1, it is often effortful, and even a bit lazy. Our preference is often for
System 1 to make decisions.
Given these distinctions, we might ask: Which emotions are
associated with heuristic thought based on System 1, and which are
more likely to engage the deliberative System 2? The answer is that
that positive moods tend to facilitate use of heuristic rather than
deliberative thinking. Anxious moods facilitate deliberative thought
and careful attention to details (Bless, Schwarz, & Wieland, 1996;
Lambert et al., 1997). It's probably a good idea to be anxious when
doing one's income taxes!
But there are differences among negative emotions. If people feel
sad, they are less likely to rely on stereotypes than if they feel angry
when they make social judgments of others (Bodenhausen,
Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994; see also Forgas, 2013).
Positive moods can, however, prompt us to think in more flexible
ways (Isen et al., 1987). In an important theory, Barbara
Fredrickson (e.g., Fredrickson, 1998, 2003; Fredrickson & Branigan,
2005) has argued that the function of positive emotions is to
broaden and build our resources. Positive emotions enable more
creative thought and aid formation of important bonds. The
creativity associated with positive emotion that Isen found builds
schemas and intellectual resources by enhancing our perspective
taking, our novel ideas, and our learning. Positive emotions also
help us build interpersonal resources by motivating us to approach
others, to cooperate, and to express affection. Research carried out
by Fredrickson and her colleagues has found that when we
experience positive emotions like joy, amusement, contentment,
and relief we are more likely to see global patterns in stimuli rather
than focus on specific details, we are more likely to see connections
between our group and other groups, and within our close
relationships, we are more likely to see similarities between
ourselves and our relationship partners (Fredrickson, 2001;
Johnson & Fredrickson, 2005; Waugh & Fredrickson, 2006).
Moreover, Catalino, Algoe, and Fredrickson (2014) have found that
people who prioritize positivity do have more resources.
Effects of Moods and Emotions on Cognitive
Functioning
Let's now review the influence of emotions and moods on
perception, attention, memory, and persuasion. As we do this, we
ask you to consider whether emotions are rational, and how the
findings conform to the claims of the accounts just given: feelings‐
as‐information, and styles of processing.
Perceptual Effects
Do moods and emotions influence our perceptions? Do they shape
the categories or kinds of information that we perceive in any
situation? Experience suggests so. You may have gone to a family
gathering and had your perception of the event shaped by your
feelings. When feeling blue, you might have been more attuned to
what has been lost, or the unfulfilled hopes that perhaps hover
behind many such gatherings. In an exhilarated mood, the same
event might strike you entirely differently, as full of conviviality and
promise.
Are we attuned to perceiving things that are congruent with our
mood? Niedenthal and Setterlund (1994) induced happy and sad
moods by playing music throughout an experimental session. To
put people in a happy mood they played pieces such as the allegro
from Mozart's Eine Kleine Nacht Musik. To induce sadness they
played pieces such as Adagietto by Mahler. Participants performed a
standard psychological task, called a lexical decision task, in which
strings of letters were flashed on a screen: some were words and
some were nonwords that can be pronounced in English, like
“blatkin.” Participants were asked to press one button if the letters
formed a word, another if it was a nonword. Words were from five
categories: happy words such as “delight,” positive words unrelated
to happiness such as “calm,” sad words such as “weep,” negative
words unrelated to sadness such as “injury,” and neutral words such
as “habit.” Consistent with the hypothesis of emotion congruence,
when participants were in a happy mood, they identified happy
words more quickly than sad words. When sad, they were quicker at
identifying sad as compared with happy words. But the effects of
happy and sad moods did not extend to the positive or negative
words that were unrelated to the specific emotions of happiness or
sadness.
Baumann and DeSteno (2010) started their report of how emotions
can affect perception with this:
The death of 23‐year‐old Amadou Diallo, who was shot and killed
on February 4, 1999 by New York City Police officers, stands in
most people's memories as a tragic example of rapid threat
detection gone wrong. When the young African American man
reached into his jacket to produce his wallet and identification,
police officers—believing that he was in fact reaching for a gun—
opened fire, shooting Diallo 19 times (p. 595).
This case is discussed, as well, in Blink: The Power of Thinking
Without Thinking (2005), by Malcolm Gladwell, a psychologically
knowledgeable writer who works for the New Yorker, and who
produces wonderfully thoughtful books.
In their follow‐up of this case, Baumann and DeSteno conducted
experiments in which participants first wrote about an emotional
memory so that they came to feel the corresponding emotion, and
then made a judgment. Under the influence of a specific emotion,
participants judged whether a man, shown in a photograph for
three‐quarters of a second, was holding a gun or a neutral object.
Anger increased the probability that neutral objects were
misidentified as guns. It did not increase the probability that guns
were seen as neutral objects. The effect was not one of negative
emotions in general, but stemmed from cues of threat evoked by
anger.
Our current moods and feelings lead us selectively to perceive
emotion‐congruent objects and events. This in part helps explain
why emotions and moods can persist: because built into our
experience is a tendency to perceive emotion‐congruent objects and
events, thus prolonging our experience.
Niedenthal (2007) explains that when one embodies a particular
emotion in oneself, for instance, by making a facial expression or
gesture appropriate to happiness or disgust, for example, one is
more likely to make judgments appropriate to that emotion (for
other evidence, see Chapter 5). The findings reviewed in this section
suggest that moods and emotions can redirect perception to objects
and events that are relevant to current feelings; often this occurs in
ways that are likely to guide action according to current goals and
concerns (Zadra & Clore, 2011).
Attentional Effects
In his textbook of psychology (1890, vol. 1, p. 402), William James
wrote: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” It is also what
we attend to even when we do not consciously agree to it. Emotions
affect attention. The effects range from largely unconscious
processes of filtering incoming information to conscious
preoccupation of the kind that we have when we worry.
Among the most studied effects of emotions on attention are those
that concern anxiety. Anxiety narrows attention (Mineka, Rafaeli, &
Yovel, 2003). When we are anxious, we focus on what we are
anxious about. If we are doing a task that involves arithmetic and
it's important not to make a mistake, a focusing anxiety can be
useful. But if people persistently focus on feared events, or on
keeping safe from them, they can come to disregard many, or even
most, other issues (Eysenck, Derekshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007).
Anxiety can come to monopolize processing capacities and even
whole lives. People for whom this is the case suffer from an anxiety
disorder, which we discuss in Chapter 13.
In another kind of study, Calvo and Avero (2005) presented pictures
of scenes that were either neutral or emotional (positive, harm
related, or threat related). In each trial, a neutral and an emotional
picture were presented side by side for three seconds and
participants' eye movements were measured. As compared with
non‐anxious people, anxious participants more often looked first at
the emotional picture than at the neutral one in a pair; then they
looked longer at emotional pictures during the first half‐second of
viewing. In the later phase of viewing, they tended to avoid looking
at the emotional pictures. In a review of studies like these, Hartley
and Phelps identified two effects of fear and anxiety on attention
(Hartley & Phelps, 2012). First, anxiety and fear lead people
systematically to attend to threats in their environment. And
second, anxiety and fear lead people to make more negative
interpretations of ambiguous stimuli. When feeling fearful you
might be more likely to attend to the negative possibilities of a
friend's joke.
An important implication of attention is that its effects of emotional
prioritization enable us to concentrate on just those events and
objects that are relevant to what we are doing. Fenske and Raymond
(2006) review these effects, based on fMRI studies, and offer
evidence for a reciprocal influence in which, when we concentrate
on a task, patterns, objects, and even perhaps people irrelevant to
that task, that previously were neutral, become less emotionally
attractive. Sharot, Korn, and Dolan (2011) have found that
optimistic people (about 80% of us, although we wouldn't
necessarily label ourselves in this way) maintain our optimism by
being biased to focus on positive rather than negative events in the
future.
Effects on Remembering
To understand the effect of emotions on how we remember, we
need first to explain how remembering works. This is best seen in
the work of Frederic Bartlett (1932). He asked people first to read a
story and then to reproduce it as exactly as possible, both
immediately after reading and at intervals up to several years later.
In one famous experiment, Bartlett had people read a Native
American folk story called “The War of the Ghosts” twice, at their
normal reading speed. It starts like this:
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to
hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm.
Then they heard war‐cries, and they thought: “Maybe this is a
war party.” They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now
canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw
one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe,
and they said:
“What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up
the river to make war on the people.”
One of the young men said: “I have no arrows.”
“Arrows are in the canoe,” they said.
“I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know
where I have gone. But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may
go with them.”
So one of the young men went …
Then follow 11 lines about how the young man who went with the
men in the canoe took part in a fight in which he was shot but did
not feel sick, and thought, “Oh, they are ghosts.” The story ends
with his return home. Here are the story's last lines:
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he
fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face
became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.
He was dead.
One of Bartlett's participants had been asked to reproduce the story
several times in the first months after reading it, but had then not
thought of it for two‐and‐a‐half years. Here is what this person
wrote:
Some warriors went to wage war against the ghosts. They fought
all day and one of their number was wounded.
They returned home in the evening, bearing their sick comrade.
As the day drew to a close, he became rapidly worse and the
villagers came round him. At sunset he sighed: something black
came out of his mouth. He was dead.
Much has been lost and much has changed. In the remembered
story the man dies at sunset rather than sunrise. But the
emotionally charged detail “something black came out of his
mouth” was preserved, as it was in most of the reproductions that
Bartlett reported.
Bartlett concluded that when we remember a verbal account, our
words are never exact. What we perceive is assimilated to our own
structure of meaning, which Bartlett called a schema, which
includes a great deal of our own general and personal knowledge.
On recall, a participant takes a few significant remembered details
and a general emotional attitude to the story. Then, by means of the
schema, undertakes a construction (see also, Wagoner, 2017) of
what the story must have been. So style becomes the participant's
style. Events are recounted in the way they would be in the culture
and individuality of the person who is doing the remembering. It's
in this way, that dying, in the story, is remembered as happening in
the evening rather than at sunrise.
As Bartlett said, remembering:
is an imaginative reconstruction, built out of the relation of our
[emotional] attitude towards a whole active mass of organized
past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail … It
is thus hardly ever really exact … and it is not at all important
that it should be (1932, p. 213).
This idea holds not just for remembering, but for our whole way of
understanding ourselves, each other, and the world more generally.
The process is highly influenced by emotion. In one group of 20
participants, Bartlett reported that in their early reproductions only
10 remembered the excuse of the young man saying he had no
arrows, but 18 remembered the excuse that the man's relatives
would not know where he had gone. Bartlett ran this study toward
the end of World War I, and he wrote that anxieties about
separation from relatives were salient at this time. Was this,
perhaps, why the idea of making an excuse about relatives could
easily enter participants' minds, and why they remembered it?
It's with Bartlett's theory of construction that emotional effects on
remembering and understanding make sense.
Emotion‐Related Biases in Memory
Much of our emotional life involves representations of past
emotional episodes (Levine & Pizzarro, 2004; Levine et al., in
press). Our memories of childhood guide how we feel about our
family. Our recollections of the early days of being in love shape
how we feel about our current relationship. An intriguing
implication of the notion that our memories are reconstructed is
that emotions should shape how we reconstruct the past.
In an important line of work, Linda Levine has documented several
biases in how we remember the past. First, we tend to
underestimate the intensity of our emotions in the past. For
example, in one study, Kaplan, Levine, and colleagues gathered
people's reports of emotions after the 2008 and 2012 U.S.
Presidential elections and then, a month later, had these
participants estimate what those emotions had been (Kaplan et al.,
2016). Although people were fairly accurate in recalling what
emotions they had, they tended to underestimate how intense these
emotions were after the election. Our emotions that relate to
important events tend to get fainter; perhaps as we go along in life,
new things come to be more important.
Levine and colleagues have also found that our present emotions
bias our memory of emotions from the past (Levine & Pizarro,
2004; Levine, Lench, Karnaze, & Carlson, in press). For example,
bereaved individuals' reports of past grief were more highly
correlated with their current grief than with actual levels of past
grief (Safer, Bonanno, & Field, 2001). Romantic partners who had
become more attached to their partner over time recalled having
more positive initial feelings about their partner than was actually
the case; those who became less attached to their partner over time
recalled initial feelings that were more negative than they actually
experienced (McFarland & Ross, 1987). Our present emotions about
the loss of a favorite sports team bias our memory of how we would
expect to feel about that loss (Meyvis, Ratner, & Levav, 2010).
Eyewitness Testimony
What if you witnessed a crime, or were affected by one?
Psychologists know from Bartlett's (1932) principles, and from more
recent research (Loftus, 1996; 2013; Kaplan et al., 2016) that
eyewitness testimony is sometimes mistaken. A sense of certainty
does not mean a memory is correct. In Britain, the Devlin Report (of
an official committee set up to examine cases of wrongful
conviction for crimes) recommended that it is not reliable to convict
someone on the basis of eyewitness testimony unless the
circumstances are exceptional or the testimony is corroborated by
evidence of some other kind.
There has now been much research on memory for stressful events
(Phelps, 2012; Kaplan et al., 2016). Such events are subject to
reconstruction of the kind that Bartlett (1932) discussed. Pynoos
and Nader (1989), for instance, interviewed children who attended a
school where a sniper had “shot repeated rounds of ammunition at
children on an elementary school playground” (p. 236) from an
apartment opposite the school in Los Angeles on February 24, 1984.
One passer‐by and one child were killed, while 13 other children and
a playground attendant were wounded. In the accounts of 113
children who were interviewed between 6 and 16 weeks afterward,
characteristic distortions occurred. Children who were wounded
tended to distance themselves emotionally from the event, and five
did not even mention their minor gunshot injuries when
interviewed. By contrast, children who were not at school that day,
or who were on their way home, tended to place themselves nearer
to the events (see also McNally & Robinaugh, 2015).
A conclusion from research in day‐to‐day life as well as in the
laboratory (Levine & Edelstein, 2009; Levine & Pizarro, 2004;
Phelps, 2012) is that we are better able to recall events that were
emotionally intense for us. If an event is important and unusual,
the condition is set both for an emotion to occur and for
remembering it. If an event is thought about often, or if flashbacks
occur as they can do with traumas, then the event becomes salient
in memory.
The question of whether there is some special form of repressed
memory of especially intense and emotionally traumatic incidents,
for instance, of childhood sexual abuse, which can be recovered in
therapy, has induced widespread controversy. Many researchers do
not discount this possibility but are also skeptical on the grounds
that it is relatively easy to suggest, advertently or inadvertently, that
certain events occurred in the past, and then, because of the
constructive nature of remembering, the person involved can then
come to believe they really happened (Hardt & Rutter, 2004;
Kaplan, Van Damme, Levine, & Loftus, 2014; Loftus & Davis, 2006).
Persuasion
In Chapter 1, we described how Aristotle wrote that emotions are
important in persuasion. The relevant research offers a more
complex message about emotion and persuasion, but in keeping
with Aristotle's treatment of emotion.
Factors that affect persuasive messages include congruence of
emotions in the receiver of the message with those of the message
itself. If, for instance, a politician is running for office and trying to
mobilize an angry group of supporters, it is most effective to frame
the communication in anger‐related terms, centering upon injustice
and blame.
DeSteno, Petty, Rucker, Wegener, and Braverman (2004) induced
participants to feel either sad or angry by reading hypothetical
newspaper stories that elicited one of these emotions. Participants
were then presented with one of two messages about raising taxes
(not a popular message for many Americans). One message was
sadness‐framed, and emphasized how increasing taxes would help
special‐needs infants and the elderly. The other message was anger‐
framed, and emphasized how increasing taxes would keep criminals
from getting off on legal technicalities and would prevent
aggravating traffic jams. Sad people changed their attitudes more
toward raising taxes when presented with the sadness‐framed
message, whereas angry people changed their attitudes toward
increasing taxes more in response to the anger‐framed message.
Briñol, Petty, and Barden (2007) found that emotion can affect
persuasion in a different way by influencing the confidence people
have in their thoughts. Participants first read a strong or weak
persuasive message. After listing their thoughts about it, they were
induced to feel happy or sad. People who became happy reported
more confidence in their thoughts than those who became sad. As
compared with those who were made sad, for happy participants,
the quality of the argument in the message had a greater effect on
changes of attitudes.
Morality
We began this chapter with Eadweard Muybridge, and how the
damage to his orbitofrontal cortex altered his emotions and his
ability to live a decent life. Emotions, when they function properly,
act as guides to morality: to judgments about right and wrong,
about character and virtue, which are bases of social life.
More prevalent in the past has been the view that moral judgment is
guided by deliberative processes like cost–benefit analyses and
considerations of rights and duties. Within this tradition, moral
philosophers have been skeptical about the place of emotion in
moral judgment. For example, intuitively you might think that
feelings of sympathy and compassion are important to moral
judgment, but not in the eyes of the influential Immanuel Kant
(1784), who argued that sympathy should not be relied on in
judgments of right and wrong because it is subjective, blind, and
unreliable as a guide to moral judgment across contexts.
Intuitions and Principles
In 2001, Jonathan Haidt made a splash in psychology with an article
entitled: “The emotional dog and its rational tail.” In it he argued
that although morality is usually thought to derive from reasoning,
really it derives from emotion‐based intuitions. It occurs first by
means of quick heuristic‐appraisal processes, operations of what
Stanovich (2004) and Kahneman (2011) call System 1 (a term we
introduced earlier in this chapter). Only later are these followed by
slower, deliberative secondary appraisals, of System 2, which (as we
discussed in Chapter 6) may be followed by tertiary appraisal of
discussion with others.
Novels and films: Decalogue 8
The Decalogue, written by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof
Piesiewicz and directed by Kieslowski, is a set of 10 films
inspired by the Ten Commandments. The films are about the
effects of human actions on other people. The filmmakers said
they wanted to make films about situations that could be
recognized universally but at the same time were out of the
ordinary, in which the characters would face difficult choices
that could not be taken lightly.
In psychology, the dilemmas of ethical decision‐making were
studied by Kohlberg (1969). He constructed vignettes about
which people could be asked questions. The most famous is
about Heinz, whose wife is dying. A drug that might save her is
being sold by the town druggist for 10 times its cost. Heinz has
no money and cannot borrow any. Kohlberg's question was,
“Should Heinz steal the drug?” He then traced, in the course of
child and adolescent development, the choices people would
make and the reasons they gave these choices to try and solve
this problem.
Such vignettes have been convenient to study the development
of ethical thinking, but enormously better for understanding the
emotions of ethical choice are novels, short stories, plays, and
films. The Decalogue films were designed to put problems to us
so that we could imagine ourselves into situations of ethical
choice, and experience the social world in relation to our fears
and our yearnings to do the right thing. One could imagine a
psychology course on the emotions of morals and social actions
in which, instead of using vignettes, each week, in class, students
would watch one of these films and discuss it to understand
themselves better in their doing of good and doing of harm to
others.
Decalogue 8 is based on the Commandment, “Thou shalt not
bear false witness.” It's about a professor of ethics who uses
pieces of biography in exactly this way. It's about Zofia (played
by Maria Koscialkowska), a senior professor of ethics at Warsaw
University. A researcher from New York, Elzbieta (Teresa
Marczewska), comes to visit and is invited to sit in on one of
Zofia's classes. A class discussion begins and Elzbieta takes an
opportunity to pose a problem, as follows. The time is 1943. The
place is Warsaw, occupied by the Nazis. A family has said they
will be godparents to a 6‐year‐old Jewish girl, so that she can be
christened and adopted rather than sent to a Nazi concentration
camp. But the woman who had volunteered to be the godmother
said she had changed her mind. She said that her religion
forbade the bearing of false witness.
It looks as if, in this decision, the woman condemned the 6‐year‐
old to death. Was it right for her to change her mind after having
made an undertaking? Did she refuse for the reason she gave?
In the story that Elzbieta tells, another family saved the 6‐year‐
old, who grew up and moved to America. The young girl was
Elzbieta, who became the researcher, from New York. Zofia, the
professor, is the woman who had been expected to be her
godmother. Why did Zofia refuse to adopt Elzbieta? Is there
anything Zofia could now say that would satisfy Elzbieta, in this
dramatic confrontation in the middle of a university class on
ethics? The film is beautiful and emotionally moving. It puts the
question in a way that engages us completely.
Haidt does not mention that a comparable proposal was made 500
years ago by Erasmus (1508), in his book Praise of Folly, in which
we read how Folly stands up and gives a speech in praise of herself.
It's a foolish thing to do, particularly, as she points out, because she
as a woman is already at a disadvantage. She says it's common to
see people in public speak from the pride of being superior, when
everyone else is wrong, or from the emotional desire to be the
center of attention. But, of course, these people don't own up to
such emotions. They think themselves to be guided only by reason,
without any emotions. Folly suggests that they do this because “It's
confessed on all sides that the emotions are the province of folly.
Indeed, this is the way we distinguish the wise man from the fool,
that the one is governed by his reason, the other by his emotions.”
She goes on to say that, really, “emotions not only serve as guides to
those who press towards the gates of wisdom, they also act as spurs
and incitements to the practice of every virtue.”
It seems likely that it was Shakespeare's reading of Praise of Folly
which, in or about 1594, gave him the idea for his next two plays: A
Midsummer‐night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, whose
emotional connection became the very emblem of Western love.
Haidt (2007) has suggested five emotion‐based moral intuitions, or
principles, which you can see in Table 10.1
TABLE 10.1
Moral principles and characteristics
Moral principle
Characteristics
1. Harm and care
People are vulnerable, and often need to be
looked after
2. Fairness and justice People have rights to resources and fair
treatment
3. Loyalty and
patriotism
People belong to an in‐group, opposed to
out‐groups
4. Obedience and
hierarchy
People should behave as required by leaders
or the law
5. Spiritual and bodily People should live in a sanctified rather
purity
than carnal way
These principles are based on social–moral intuitions (Haidt, 2001;
McCullough et al., 2001) that prompt judgments (Horberg, Oveis, &
Keltner, 2011). From this perspective, fast, automatic experiences of
specific emotions provide intuitions of right and wrong, virtue, and
punishment without elaborate calculation at the conscious level
(Graham et al., 2013; Greene, 2015; Greene & Haidt, 2002; Haidt,
2003).
For the first principle of Table 10.1, emotions relate to harm and
care. They include empathy, sympathy, and compassion, which
derive from vulnerability. They motivate prosocial actions (Goetz,
Simon‐Thomas, & Keltner, 2010). These emotions likely arose
during our evolution because of our mammalian heritage of taking
care of offspring, and extending this care to others in families.
Recent studies find that feelings of compassion lead people to see
their common humanity with others, and this encourages more
prosocial behavior (Oveis, Horberg, & Keltner, 2010). People feeling
compassion also are less punitive (Condon & DeSteno, 2011).
Scientists such as Tania Singer and Mary Immordino‐Yang are
charting the regions of the brain that are activated by our response
to harm and feelings of compassion (e.g., Immordino‐Yang et al.,
2009), which suggests, in keeping with Haidt's thinking, that this
intuition has neural correlates in the brain, likely shaped by
evolution. Even infants have been found to have moral intuitions.
Warneken and Tomasello (2009) observed 12‐month‐old children
begin to comfort victims in distress, and 14‐to‐18‐month‐olds begin
to help others in ways that were spontaneous and unrewarded.
Among methods on harm and care is “trolleyology,” a paradigm
invented by Philippa Foot (1967/1978) that involves giving people a
vignette in which a trolley rolls out of control toward five people on
the line who would be killed if the trolley were to hit them, see
Figure 10.4. Participants are asked whether they would switch some
points and divert the trolley onto another line so that it would hit
only one person.
FIGURE 10.4 The trolley problem for testing moral
intuitions by means of vignettes, invented by Philippa
Foot.
Waldemann and Dieterich (2007) compared results using a vignette
describing this scenario with one in which participants had to decide
whether to push a very large person from a bridge onto the trolley
line so that this person would be killed but would halt the trolley
before it could kill five people on the line. Although they were
willing to switch the points so that the trolley, an inanimate object,
would be affected, participants' intuitions made them reluctant to
act directly on a person, by pushing in a way that condemned her or
him to death, even if it were to result in saving the larger number of
people. Greene et al. (2001) had people engage in moral dilemmas,
including trolley problems, while undergoing brain scanning using
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They found that
moral dilemmas varied systematically in the extent to which they
engaged brain areas involved in emotional processing, and that
these variations in emotional engagement were associated with
moral judgments, a finding in keeping with Haidt's formulation of
the emotional nature of moral judgment.
For the second principle in Table 10.1, emotions relate to fairness
and justice. We are exquisitely sensitive to who deserves what and
to cheaters. Many emotions here involve condemnation of others in
anger, disgust, and contempt, when they are seen to do immoral
actions that lead to unfairness or harm to others (Lerner, Goldberg,
& Tetlock, 1998; Russell & Giner‐Sorolla, 2011). When we receive
fair offers in the ultimatum game described earlier, brain regions
involved in the processing of rewards are activated (Tabibnia,
Satpute, & Lieberman, 2008). Buckholz et al. (2008) found in fMRI
scans that activity in brain regions that included the amygdala and
medial prefrontal cortex predicted the size of punishment that
participants deemed appropriate for various crimes.
For the third principle, moral intuitions engage emotions of the
dynamics of in‐groups and out‐groups, such as group pride, which
we discussed in Chapter 9 (see also Fourie et al., 2017).
The fourth principle is of status in hierarchies. It involves
obedience, deference to leaders, and loyalty. It reaches back into our
primate ancestry, where, as researchers like Goodall (1986) have
shown, each community of chimpanzees is arranged in hierarchies,
in which there is an alpha individual to whom others defer, and in
which others know their places (see also Lindebaum et al., 2017). As
you learned in Chapter 9, several emotions, such as admiration,
contempt, envy, and anger, serve to situate individuals within
different positions of rank within hierarchies (Park et al., 2013).
The fifth principle, spiritual and bodily purity, often involves the
emotion of disgust. The principle is important in many societies and
involves moral judgments of the purity or impurity of others'
actions (Horberg, Oveis, & Keltner, 2009; Schnall, 2011).
In some societies, just one of these may predominate. In others,
there are several. In political parties of Europe and North America
that are liberal, Principles 1 and 2 predominate, whereas in some
conservative political parties all five are important. If you enter the
medical profession, you may be drawn to the first principle. If you
are a lawyer or civil servant, you may be drawn to the second. If you
join the military or the police, Principles 3 and 4 may feel right for
you. If you enter a convent or monastery, Principles 4 and 5 are
likely to be important. As Haidt (2013) says, moral intuitions bind
people together emotionally, but they can also blind people in their
understanding of others.
Cooperation
As we explained in Chapter 2, on evolution, members of Michael
Tomasello's research group compared human infants aged two‐and‐
a‐half years with chimpanzees and baboons of any age (Herrmann
et al., 2007). They found that although humans and chimpanzees
were about equal in doing physical tasks such as seeing where a
reward was hidden or using tools to retrieve rewards, in social tasks
such as seeing that a person was trying to perform a task that
couldn't be completed and, then, empathetically helping the person
complete the task, the human children were far better. They were
generally able to do such tasks, whereas chimpanzees and baboons
could not really do them at all.
As we explained, too, Tomasello (2014, 2016) has gone on to show
that what is perhaps the most distinctive and deepest trait of
humans as a species is our ability to cooperate, and that it arose
in two stages: shared intentionality and collective
intentionality. In shared intentionality, people construct and
enact plans with “we” goals rather than just “I” goals. In collective
intentionality, people act together in groups, and this is how
cultures and morality are formed. In this mode, each person must
do what is right, avoid doing what is wrong, play her or his part, take
no more than a fair share, not cheat, and so on.
In shared intentionality, emotions of love and friendliness are
critical, with anger tending to occur when we think someone did not
do what they promised, or what was expected in a plan that had
been jointly arranged (Larocque & Oatley, 2006). In collective
intentionality, the moral emotions arise. These can be directed
against oneself in a critical way: shame, embarrassment, and guilt,
when we have violated moral codes (Baumeister, Stillwell, &
Heatherton, 1994; Keltner & Anderson, 2000; Keltner & Buswell,
1997; Tangney et al., 1996). They can be directed at others, in anger
and contempt when others don't do what they are supposed to.
Haidt has described, too, a set of other‐praising emotions: gratitude
and “elevation” or awe that signal our approval of others' moral
virtues (Haidt, 2003; Keltner & Haidt, 2003).
Emotions and the Law
Emotions and the law is a newly emerging field to which
philosophers (Nussbaum, 2004), psychologists (Finkel & Parrott,
2006), and lawyers (Maroney, 2006, 2016) have contributed.
Obligations of Society
Terry Maroney's (2006) thoughtful article is a good place to start
because, as she points out, different emotions are closely linked to
different kinds of law.
Criminal law reflects theories of fear, grief, and remorse; family
law seeks (ideally) to facilitate love and attachment; tort law
measures emotional suffering; litigants seek emotional
satisfaction by invoking legal mechanisms; legal decision makers
may have strong feelings about parties in their cases (p. 120).
Some laws decree that we should do actions like stopping at a red
light. Others decree that we should not do actions like assaulting
people who have not harmed us. We generally regard such laws as
good for most people. But there is another side to the law: coercion
by fear of punishment, which can involve police, courts, fines, and
imprisonment.
Laws are distillations of moral attitudes and emotions. Based on the
emotional–moral intuition of avoiding harm to others, discussed in
the previous section, people feel it's right for those who behave
badly to be punished. In some societies, impulses to harm others
are regulated by fear of revenge. This kind of regulation is seen in
ancient literatures, for instance, in medieval Icelandic sagas (Miller,
2006). From Germanic and English law comes the tradition that
angry vengeance should not be enacted by individuals because feuds
are destructive to society and can continue indefinitely, so special
officers of the state should take over the function of apprehending
and punishing criminals. In societies of this kind, as H.L.A. Hart
(1961) has explained, law takes place in two phases. In the first,
legislators work together to distill emotion‐based attitudes about
morality (typically one of the principles of morality seen in Table
10.1) in their society, and enact them into law. In the second, an
elaborate and expensive apparatus of police, courts, and lawyers is
put in place to discover law‐breakers and punish them.
Both these phases draw on emotion‐based intuitions. For instance,
people tend to like and approve those who behave well and to
dislike and feel anger, disgust, or contempt toward those who
behave badly. One may see this in fiction. Zillmann (2000) has
proposed disposition theory, according to which we are disposed
to like fictional characters who behave well and to dislike those who
behave badly (see also Weber, Tamborini, Lee, & Stipp, 2008).
Zillmann says that each person who engages with fiction is “a moral
monitor who applauds or condemns the intentions and actions of
characters” (p. 38). When a good character achieves retribution for a
wrong, or when a bad character is punished, people are sensitive to
the level of revenge or punishment that occurs. We enjoy stories
more when this seems appropriate. There is even a name for this:
poetic justice.
Watch a television show that includes courtroom scenes, like Law
and Order, and reflect on your likes, dislikes, and emotions in
relation to criminals and their apprehension. Watch how the
detectives in the show use a method used by actual police in the
United States, called the Reid technique: first they assume guilt and
verbally attack a suspect based on this assumption, then they detain
the suspect to increase anxiety, then they confront the suspect with
evidence of guilt (which may be fabricated), and finally they try to
gain the suspect's trust by saying they understand (Gudjonsson &
Pearce, 2011). How would you fare if subjected to this? It's a
technique with a rate of false confessions that is higher than had
been thought.
Politicians often say they will be tough on crime. This means that
they will increase punishments, and they do. This can resonate with
voters because our emotional‐intuitive sense is that punishments
should be visited on people who do immoral things. Although being
tough is supposed to decrease crime, what politicians don't tell us is
that the strong weight of evidence is that harsher judicial penalties
do not diminish crime (Webster & Doob, 2011). A likelier route to
decreasing crime would be to increase the certainty that crimes will
be detected (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011), but this is more difficult to
arrange.
The basic appeal of fictional mysteries and detective stories isn't so
much in following a trail of clues, although this is enjoyable. It's the
sense that seriously bad behavior, like murder or rape, causes a
breach in the fabric of society, and that identification and
punishment of criminals might repair the breach so that we can all
go on living with each other. Similar emotions are projected into the
larger world when international crimes are committed, as occurred,
for instance, in the angry American response to the attacks on New
York and Washington on September 11, 2001 (Hogan, 2009).
And what about newspapers? Open any one and stories you see are
likely to include: “Here's what a certain person did. It's criminal.”
And, “See how those people live, over there, in that other country?
It's terrible.” And, “Look at this leader or that one. See what they say
and what they do. It's appalling.” And, of course, the writer of the
article, and its readers, know better.
Dispassionate Judgments?
Here's a paradox. Although the roots of law and its enforcement
could scarcely be more emotional, the traditional attitude in law is
that apprehension and punishment of perpetrators should be
“dispassionate,” that prosecutors and defending lawyers should set
aside their feelings, but also that emotionally they should defer to
judges (Bergman Blix & Wettergren, 2016).
Maroney (2011) has described how, in nominating a new member of
the U.S. Supreme Court, President Obama said he wanted to
nominate someone with empathy, and listed among the
qualifications of his nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a sense of
compassion. But Sotomayor knew the right thing to say at her
hearings:
“Judges can't rely on what's in their heart[s],” she testified before
the Senate Judiciary Committee, because “[i]t's not the heart that
compels conclusions in cases, it's the law”
(Maroney, p. 639).
Maroney discusses how Obama's proposal that empathy and
compassion are important for a Supreme Court Judge was criticized
by some, with sneers such as “touchy‐feely.” If people understood
how emotions can inform judgment and mediate relationships, such
sneering might decrease.
A further area in which emotions enter processes of law is in the
deliberations of jurors. Reid Hastie (2001) has written that
emotional reactions of jurors in criminal trials include:
… reactions to events that led to the trial, primarily anger;
reactions to participants involved in the trial, primarily anger,
sympathy and fear; and reactions to evidentiary exhibits,
primarily disgust and horror (p. 1007).
A cogent account of the psychology of jurors as they listen to cases
in criminal courts is by Pennington and Hastie (1988), who observe
that, in each case, jurors construct a story as a causal explanation of
what happened and that, rather than basing their reasoning on
some form of logic (such as Bayesian logic, as an alternative theory
holds), they decide on the basis of this emotion‐based story. In fact,
two stories are typically offered in court, one by the prosecution and
one by the defense. As Hastie (2008) has argued, jurors are
generally willing to convict if the prosecution's story has no large
holes and no large pieces of counterevidence. But in the end, jurors
have to construct their own version of the story. This version allows
some inferences and prevents other inferences. Unlike the stories
offered by prosecution and defense, which both end with a question
mark, the story offered by the jury reaches a conclusion: guilty or
not guilty.
Emotions that jurors feel as they listen to evidence change priorities
because, as with any story, people have their own feelings as they
construct their version (Oatley, 2011). Anger tends to make the
constructed story aggressive and end in punishment. Anger has
been found to lead people to blame others for actions, whereas
sadness leads people to attribute events to impersonal, situational
causes (Feigeson, Park, & Salovey, 2001; Keltner, Ellsworth, &
Edwards, 1993; Lerner, Goldberg, & Tetlock, 1998; Quigley &
Tedeschi, 1996). Empathy and compassion are likely to make the
constructed story protective and to focus on restitution.
Among jurors, Hastie describes emotions of feeling satisfied after a
trial that one has played one's part in punishing someone who was
guilty or in freeing someone wrongly accused. There may also be
feelings of regret and sadness at rendering a guilty verdict against a
sympathetic person. We don't suggest that jurors should engage in
some activity other than story‐construction, but rather that justice
may be better served by understanding more deeply how we make
judgments that can convict people of crimes, or free them.
SUMMARY
Emotions are usually rational in relation to particular concerns.
This is called local rationality. We've described how emotions can
guide thinking to enable people to respond to immediacies of the
environment when perfect, global, rationality is impossible, for
instance, because of insufficient knowledge. This view is in keeping
with a central premise of this book: that although emotions are by
no means infallible, they generally serve important social functions.
Theoretical perspectives offer explanations of how emotions can
affect cognition: they can infuse into thinking, they can be
informative, and they can lead to different styles of reasoning.
Evidence was offered that emotions affect people's perceptions of
events and also affect attention. In terms of memory, people tend to
recall emotionally salient events and current emotions can bias
what is recalled from the past. Moral intuitions are now understood
as being affected by emotions, which can guide judgments of right
and wrong in the social world, and we discuss how this connection
between emotions and morality extends to the law and
administration of justice.
TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
1. When does an emotion or mood affect your decision‐making?
Does this effect make sense to you, or are there aspects you
would like to change? Consider the same questions in relation
someone close to you: a parent or sibling or a boyfriend or
girlfriend.
2. Think about how anxiety, or anger, or happiness affects your
recall of past memories. What, for you, is the principal effect
here? How does it work for you?
3. Think about some social arrangement with which you are
familiar, perhaps the family, perhaps a work setting. How is
emotion related to what gets said and decided in this setting?
FURTHER READING
Perhaps the most important philosopher of emotions in recent
times, and an engaging teacher, has been Robert Solomon. He died
in 2007, but the book he wrote before that is a fine introduction to
his work and to the relation of emotions and thinking:
Solomon, R. C. (2007). True to our feelings: What our emotions are
really telling us. New York: Oxford University Press.
A useful introduction to the way in which emotions affect thinking:
Clore, G. L., & Huntsinger, J. R. (2007). How emotions inform
judgments and regulate thought. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
11, 393–399.
A good review of the relation of emotion to memory:
Kensinger, E., & Schachter, D. (2016). Memory and emotion. In L. F.
Barrett, M. Lewis & J. Haviland‐Jones (Eds.), Handbook of
emotions, fourth edition (pp. 564–598). New York: Guilford.
A provocative statement of the role of emotion in moral judgment:
Jonathan Haidt (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A
social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological
Review, 108, 814–34.
PART IV
Emotions and the Individual
11
Individual Differences in Emotionality: This
chapter was written with Heather Prime and
Alessandra Schneider.
CONTENTS
Emotionality Over the Life Span
Continuities in Emotionality from Childhood to Adulthood
From Temperament to Personality
Individual Differences in Emotion Shape How We Construe
the World
Age‐Related Changes in Temperament and Personality
Propensities in Emotionality That Shape the Relational
Environment
Emotionality Moderates Environmental Risk
Attachment and Emotionality
What Is Attachment?
Attachment Status and Emotional Outcomes
Parental Sensitivity and Shared Thinking
From Parent Attachment to Child Attachment
The Role of Environmental Risk in Children's Attachment
Relationships
Genetic Influences on Attachment
Parental Behaviors Beyond Attachment
Biobehavioral Synchronization
Parental Mentalization and Reflective Capacity
Talk About Emotions
Parental Socialization of Emotion
Beyond Parenting: Influences of Siblings, Peers, and the
Broader Social Context
Siblings
Peers
Broader Social Context
Programs That Optimize Emotional Development
Summary
To Think About and Discuss
Further Reading
FIGURE 11.0 A mother picks up her child after an
absence. Notice the child clasping the mother and
pushing away the babysitter.
A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeared on all things round doth rove
And seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love.
George Eliot
In this chapter, we think about the propensities of emotion that are
at the core of personality. Some of us are easily angered while
others remain calm; some are excitable and enthusiastic while
others are shy. Elements of personality start in childhood, when
they are referred to as temperament (see Chapter 8) and carry on
into old age, influencing how our lives are lived. How do these styles
of personality develop? In Chapter 8, we considered the biological
influences on temperament and personality. There are also
influences on temperament and personality from the contexts in
which we live, our relationships, opportunities, communities, and
schools. This chapter deals with how individual differences in
emotionality come to be and how they affect us over the life course.
Emotionality Over the Life Span
Continuities in Emotionality from Childhood to Adulthood
In Chapter 8, we talked about the neurobiologically based individual
differences that were evident very early in childhood. What happens
to these individual differences as children mature? Are children
who are angry and impulsive in childhood more likely to show
emotional difficulties as adults? Are inhibited, fearful children
likely to develop into deferential, timid adults? A sample of over
1,000 children in New Zealand was originally tested at three years
old and the children were then followed into their mid‐twenties
(Caspi et al., 2003). Caspi and colleagues found that the
temperament of children at three years old did explain personality
traits over 20 years later. Children who were impulsive, restless, and
easily distracted grew up to score the highest on the trait of negative
emotionality and were described by their informants as
disagreeable, tense, and anxious. Inhibited children (those who
were socially reticent and fearful), on the other hand, showed the
highest levels of constraint as adults and demonstrated low levels of
a positive emotionality. Confident children grew up to be the most
disinhibited (low constraint), had the highest scores on the Positive
Emotionality factor (e.g., emotions such as happy, joyful, excitable),
and had other people describe them as extraverted.
Emotionally rich personality traits then show continuities over
time; who we are as children remains with us as we age. Personality
traits also affect how our lives play out, which one would expect
given how immediately our emotional tendencies influence our
patterns of thought and social interactions. Asendorpf and
colleagues (Asendorpf, Denissen, & van Aken, 2008) followed
German children from ages four to six years old until they were 23
(see Figure 11.1). They compared the 15% most inhibited children
with controls who were below average in preschool inhibition. Their
results demonstrated that the inhibited children were more likely to
be rated by their parents as inhibited as young adults, to be delayed
in entering their first stable relationship and finding their first full‐
time job. They also looked at the 15% most aggressive children and
how they fared into early adulthood. As young adults they continued
to be aggressive and showed low levels of agreeableness,
conscientious, and openness. They were also likely to be educational
and occupational underachievers. It is clear from these studies that
the temperaments of shy‐inhibited and aggressive children do play
out in different ways over the life course.
FIGURE 11.1 Outcome (means) of degree of inhibition,
time until first relationship, and time until first full‐time
job of 23‐year‐olds who were inhibited or not inhibited at
age four to six (Asendorpf et al., 2008).
The personality traits that are associated with successful
trajectories, even in the presence of significant adversities in life,
are captured by some of the so‐called Big Five model of
personality traits: high Openness to experience, Agreeableness,
and Conscientiousness, along with low Neuroticism (Shiner &
Masten, 2012). High Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and low
Neuroticism have been described as an overarching meta‐trait of
Stability, which has been found to be important for adaptive
functioning across social, emotional, and motivational domains
(DeYoung, 2006).
Positive emotionality has a long and significant reach across our
lives. Harker and Keltner (2001) rated the intensity of women's
smiles in their college yearbook photos and looked at how these
ratings related to their well‐being over the next 30 years. The
intensity of the yearbook smile was related positively to well‐being
and competence and negatively to negative emotionality in middle
age (see Table 11.1).
TABLE 11.1
Positive emotionality, as assessed in the magnitude of the
smile shown in a photograph at age 20, predicts adult
personality, relationship satisfaction, and personal well‐
being over the next 30 years
Source: Harker & Keltner, 2001.
Measure
Negative emotionality Age 52
Positive emotionality
−.27**
Affiliation Age 52
.14
Competence Age 52
.29**
Well‐being Age 52
.28**
Marital well‐being Age 52
.20*
Note: **= p < .01, *= p < .05.
Interestingly, yearbook smiles also related to relationships. Women
who displayed more positive emotion in their yearbook pictures
were more likely to have satisfying marriages 30 years later. In the
same way that we saw that emotional characteristics from early in
childhood, such as shyness and anger, predicted ways of being in
adult life, we see the same from late adolescence to middle age.
Emotions matter to the ways that we construct our lives. Positive
emotionality is not only a trait that influences life satisfaction. It is
also associated with mortality rates. Carstensen et al. (2011) studied
the emotions of participants between 20 and 90 years old (mean age
around 55 years old), asking participants to report on their positive
emotions five separate times per day for one week. Participants
were then followed for 13 years to understand the role of emotions
in life expectancy. The more positive emotions a person reported,
the better their survival 13 years later (see Figure 11.2).
FIGURE 11.2 Survival function over 13 years for
participants who recorded a high number as compared
with a low number of positive emotions when paged five
times a day for a week (from Carstensen et al., 2011,
Figure 2, p. 28).
Let us take a moment to reflect on the degree of continuity that we
see from childhood to adulthood in these longitudinal studies. The
degree of prediction is significant but not strong. (Remember that a
correlation of 0.3 explains 9% of the variance in adult personality.)
This means that a lot changes from childhood to adulthood, in our
experiences, or circumstances, and, ultimately, in our personalities.
Lives are filled with so many dynamic and changing relationships,
experiences, chance encounters, unexpected opportunities,
disappointments, and tragedies that one might assume that our
emotional tendencies would not show any continuity whatsoever.
But as we have seen, this is not the case. There are core aspects of
ourselves that persist. We can think about these early emotional
styles as forming a kind of outline of who we might become.
From Temperament to Personality
How do we translate conceptions of childhood temperament (e.g.,
shyness, confidence) to measurements of personality for adults? In
adulthood, the Big Five model of personality (John, Naumann, &
Soto, 2008; McCrae & Costa, 2008) has come to be a widely used
framework for this kind of conceptual endeavor. Let's explain these
traits a bit more. Neuroticism involves the emotional tendencies
of anxiety, hostility, and depression. Extraversion is defined by
warmth, gregariousness, tendencies to experience and express
positive emotions, such as joy, enthusiasm, and excitement (Shiota,
Keltner, & John, 2006). Agreeableness includes trust, altruism,
and compliance and is associated with emotions such as sympathy,
love, and gratitude (Shiota et al., 2006). Conscientiousness
includes achievement striving, self‐discipline, and dutifulness.
Openness is attraction to fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, ideas and is
uniquely associated with awe (Shiota et al., 2006). Among these,
Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness are all
straightforwardly emotional. Conscientiousness and Openness also
involve emotions, but perhaps less obviously.
There is much overlap between the Big Five and those dimensions
of temperament assessed in children. Soto and John (2014)
proposed a model of personality applicable to children and youth,
which derives from the advances that led to the Big Five. This has
been called the Little Six. They proposed six dimensions that lie at
the heart of childhood and adolescent personality: extraversion,
agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to
experience, and activity (Soto & Tackett, 2015). The idea is that
activity in childhood is characterized by physical energy and motor
activity, which shifts to include psychological aspects (e.g.,
motivation, competition) in adolescence, and disintegrates by late
adolescence/early adulthood as a result of being captured by other
dimensions (i.e., extraversion and conscientiousness; Soto &
Tackett, 2015).
Thus far, we have considered how childhood temperament and
personality are stable, or similar over time. Let's now consider the
complementary possibility—Does personality change and what are
the events that might precipitate changes in personality? Positive
turning points, that change expected trajectories, have been
described. These are of several kinds. Macro social changes in
context have been shown to change trajectories of antisocial
behavior and socioeconomic status. Thus, Sampson and Laub (1996)
studied the impact of military service in World War II for
disadvantaged men, some of whom were delinquent prior to the war
and some of whom were not. Military service varied in terms of the
extent to which the men experienced overseas duty, in‐service
training, and G.I. Bill training. Exposure to these opportunities was
associated with positive socioemotional outcomes and also good
economic outcomes. This was especially true for men who were
delinquent before military service. Their experiences in the military
helped to turn their lives around, with more economic opportunity
and more positive emotional functioning. Glenn Elder (1986)
showed a very similar effect for military service in World War I. For
many men, their service was positively transformational. Part of the
transformation related to the strength of the friendships that they
formed with other people in the military, alongside negative effects
of combat exposure (Soloman, 2013).
Negative life events also change personality. Shiner, Allen, and
Masten (2017) followed individuals from 10 to 30 years old. A
distinction was made between independent and dependent negative
life events (the extent to which individuals might have influenced
the occurrence of the event). Independent events included
occurrences such as the death of a close other or physical health
problems; dependent events included school suspensions, break
ups, and grade failure. They found that both dependent and
independent events predicted an increase in neuroticism from age
10 to age 30. Conscientiousness and agreeableness decreased as a
function of dependent events. It may be that those negative events,
to which we contribute, with the accompanying emotions of shame
and guilt, fundamentally change how we experience ourselves.
Individual Differences in Emotion Shape How We Construe
the World
In Chapter 8, we considered how certain temperamental
characteristics such as behavioral inhibition and disinhibition are
associated with specific appraisal biases. We see the same pattern
for adult personality.
Neuroticism is associated with a negative bias in perceiving,
processing, and recalling information (Ormel et al., 2013). In
contrast, Extraversion involves a bias toward making positive
appraisals (Lucas & Baird, 2004). Individuals who score higher in
Neuroticism also react more strongly to negative events, whereas
individuals high in Extraversion react more strongly to positive
events (Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991). Personality is also associated with
emotion regulation (Gross, 2008). Individuals high in Neuroticism
demonstrate relatively poor coping strategies, which is associated
with neuroimaging findings indicating dysregulated amygdala
functioning during emotion regulation (Ormel et al., 2013).
An empirical example will highlight how this plays out. When 152
undergraduates were given a stressor task (i.e., a vocal mental
mathematical task), individuals who were high in Neuroticism
interpreted the task as more threatening and were less emotionally
stable. In contrast, individuals who were high in Extraversion and
Openness responded to the task with more positive affect and less
negative affect. In turn, individuals characterized as higher in
Neuroticism had weaker performance on the task as a result of their
threat appraisals (Schneider, Rench, Lyons, & Riffle, 2012).
The relationship between Extraversion and positive affect is so
strong that some researchers claim that positive emotionality forms
the core of the personality dimension of Extraversion (Lucas,
Diener, Grob, Suh, & Shao, 2000). Interestingly, when you tease
apart positive emotionality into components such as joy,
contentment, pride, love, compassion, amusement, and awe, it's the
components of joy, pride, and contentment that are most strongly
related to Extraversion (Shiota et al., 2006). In a more recent study,
Extraversion was associated with feelings that were both positively
valenced and positively activated (i.e., energetic), rather than simply
pleasant feelings regardless of activation (Smillie, DeYoung, & Hall,
2015)
Several studies have shown that emotional dispositions to anxiety
and to aggression shape how adults perceive emotional facial
expressions (Dimberg & Thunberg, 2007; Hall, 2006; Rubino et al.,
2007; Van Honk, Tuiten, de Haan, vann de Hout, & Stam, 2001).
Biases in perception of emotional faces were demonstrated in
adolescents and young adults not only for anxiety and
aggressiveness but also for other personality traits (Knyazev,
Bocharov, Slobodskaya, & Ryabichenko, 2008). Specifically, when
asked to rate “happy,” “neutral,” or “angry” faces in terms of their
friendliness or hostility, Knyazev et al. (2008) found that anxious
adults showed a tendency to perceive facial expressions as more
hostile (see Figure 11.3).
FIGURE 11.3 Photos of a female and a male with,
respectively, happy, angry, and neutral faces as used by
Knyazev et al. (2008).
In this same study, high Agreeableness and high Conscientiousness
predisposed individuals to perceiving all faces as friendlier, while
extraverts were sensitive to positive facial expressions only and
rated “happy” faces as friendlier. Speed et al. (2015) also showed
that extraversion was linked to the processing of positive emotions.
Using event‐related potential (see Chapter 8) analysis, they showed
that extraverts show high levels of sustained attention to positive
stimuli. Thus, extraverts pay particular attention to positive
emotional stimuli.
Age‐Related Changes in Temperament and Personality
What do we know about how emotions change over development?
The intensity of both positive and negative emotions, based on
parent and teacher ratings, as well as the degree of emotional
expressivity in general, decreases across the elementary school
years (Sallquist et al., 2009). As children enter adolescence, their
positive mood drops (Larson, Moneta, Richards, & Wilson, 2002),
and this reduction in positive emotional experience continues
through adolescence, to the chagrin of adolescents and their
parents. As one illustration of this trend, Weinstein and colleagues
(Weinstein, Mermelstein, Hankin, Hedeker, & Flay, 2007) used the
experience sampling method to examine changes in adolescent
mood between Grade 8 to Grade 11. At each wave, adolescents
carried a computer for seven days and were prompted five to seven
times per day to report on their positive and negative mood. Overall,
positive mood was found to decrease over time; the normative
decline in adolescent mood was attributable to declines in positive
mood as opposed to increases in negative mood.
As youth shift from adolescence to early adulthood, studies find
changes in personality traits: females tend to become more
conscientious, males become more open, and members of both
genders tend to show more agreeableness, which is in line with the
maturity principle (Borghuis et al., 2017). Adolescence, though, is
also marked by dips in personality maturity, deemed the
disruption hypothesis (Soto & Tackett, 2015), wherein adolescents
show dips in conscientiousness, openness, and emotional stability
(Denissen, Aken, Penke, & Wood, 2013). As people mature into
adulthood and beyond, people tend to decrease in Neuroticism and
increase in Conscientiousness over time, a pattern of change that is
most strongly the case in young adulthood—age 20 to 40—but can
continue into middle and old age (Roberts & Mroczek, 2008).
As people undergo the transition through their early adulthood to
old age, they tend to become less sociable (particularly in young
adulthood and again in old age) and imaginative, more responsible
and orderly, more fair and less self‐entitled, more comfortable with
themselves (with a decline in old age), and less inclined to
moodiness and negative emotions (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005;
Milojez & Sibley, 2017; Orth, Trzesniewski, & Robins, 2010).
Further, individual differences in personality become increasingly
stable from infancy until about age 30, which is primarily associated
with the increasing stability of life experiences such as employment
and partner relationships (Briley & Tucker‐Drob, 2014). Of course,
these are simply normative trajectories in life‐span development.
Variations in the rates and amounts of change people undergo still
occur (Borghuis et al., 2017; Mroczek, Almeida, Spiro, & Pafford,
2006).
Propensities in Emotionality That Shape the Relational
Environment
We have seen how early styles of emotionality, whether a child is
tense and shy or hostile, predict a similar emotional style when that
child is much older. There is another way, however, in which our
earlier emotionality influences our later personality, and this relates
to how we choose contexts for ourselves and what we elicit from the
people in our contexts. This has been called gene–environment
correlation (rGE) (Knafo & Jaffee, 2013; Plomin, DeFries, &
Loehlin, 1977). There are two types of gene–environment
correlations relevant to how our emotions shape our environments.
The first is active rGE. This refers to how our genetically
influenced traits lead us actively to create environments for
ourselves. Thus, our emotional style may lead us to befriend
particular peers (e.g., peers who are introspective and shy or
outgoing and excitement‐seeking). For instance, Van Ryzin and
Dishion (2013) found that adolescents who are oppositional and
delinquent are likely to befriend oppositional, deviant friends and
partners on Facebook, whereas individuals who are high in
Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Extraversion are more likely
to have friends of the same characteristics (Noë, Whitaker, & Allen,
2016).
The second kind of gene–environment correlation is evocative
rGE, in which partially heritable traits evoke unique responses
from social partners. To take one example, within families, parents
can be differentially irritated or delighted by their different children,
and this differential parenting is explained, in part, by emotional
differences between children (Avinun & Knafo, 2014; Jenkins,
McGowan, & Knafo‐Noam, 2016). Both types of gene–environment
correlations influence later personality development. Thus,
choosing to hang out with deviant peers increases the child's own
deviance (Lansford, Dodge, Fontaine, Bates, & Pettit, 2014;). When
parents respond with anger to this temperamental characteristic in
their children, they increase the likelihood that their children will
become even more oppositional and angry (Hayden et al., 2013;
Plamondon, Browne, Madigan, & Jenkins, 2017; Tuvblad, Bezdjian,
Raine, & Baker, 2013). Thus, our genetically based emotional
propensities actively influence the relational environments that
shape our lives and the reactions that we elicit from our family and
friends.
Does angry and oppositional behavior elicit negative reactions from
everyone in the family, not just parents? The social relations
model developed by David Kenny and colleagues (Kenny, Kashy, &
Cook, 2006) provides a conceptual framework for answering this
important question. This model requires that researches observe an
individual interacting with several other people, thus allowing the
determination of the extent to which the emotions that they direct
to others (called actor effects) and the emotions that they receive or
elicit from others (called partner effects) show characteristic
patterns for the individual. In a study of 680 families, Rasbash,
Jenkins, O'Connor, Tackett, and Reiss (2011) observed the
emotionally based interactions of all dyads in the family. They
found that certain individuals (both children and parents) did evoke
negativity (anger, irritation, opposition) from everyone and that this
partner effect accounted for 9% of the overall variance in negativity.
At least within families, and we would suggest in friendship groups,
neighborhoods, and at work, some people are emotionally
challenging for those with whom they interact, consistently eliciting
negative reactions from others.
In summary, not only do our personalities influence whom we
befriend, but they also influence the ways that people react to us,
thus setting in motion patterns of development and change. Thus,
for each of us, emotion‐based aspects of our personality build a path
from childhood to adulthood (Caspi et al., 2005; Roberts, Wood, &
Caspi, 2008), shaping all manner of relationships, from the
romantic to those at work (Li, Fay, Frese, Harms, & Gao, 2014;
Mund, Finn, Hagemeyer, & Neyer, 2016).
Emotionality Moderates Environmental Risk
Temperament shapes development in another profound way: it
shapes our reactions to events in our lives. Thus, our temperament
influences how we respond to the problematic test at school, dealing
with the difficult colleague at work, or a romantic breakup. Early in
development some children are more susceptible to challenging or
bad things that happen to them because of their temperaments
(Bakermans‐Kranenburg & van Ijzendoorn, 2015; Belsky & Pluess,
2009). These emotionally/physiologically reactive children have
been referred to as “orchids”; (orchids are hard to grow, requiring
just the right amount of water to thrive), while children who are
less reactive have been referred to as “dandelions” (dandelions can
grow in any environment). We illustrate this idea with a finding
from a study by Kochanska, Aksan, and Joy (2007).
Figure 11.4 shows the effect of fathers’ power assertion (harsh
caregiving) on children's compliance among two groups of children:
those with low fear (dandelions) and those with high fear (orchids).
For the dandelions, the level of their fathers' power assertion was
irrelevant to their compliance. For the orchids, however, the more
the fathers showed power assertion, the more the children were
noncompliant; they reacted with resistance. It is important to notice
how well the orchids did when the dad's power assertion was low.
The observation that orchids do better than dandelions in optimal
environments is an important aspect of differential susceptibility
theory (Roisman et al., 2012).
FIGURE 11.4 The relationship between father power
assertion (harshness) and children's oppositional
behavior as a function of orchids and dandelions
(Adapted from Kochanska, Aksan & Joy, 2007).
Negative emotionality and emotion dysregulation do make it harder
for individuals to deal with less‐than‐optimal environments. In a
meta‐analysis of longitudinal and experimental data, it has been
found that infants scoring high on negative emotionality (i.e., a
tendency to be easily distressed) were more vulnerable to parental
hostility and negative control (Slagt, Dubas, Dekovic, & van Aken,
2016). Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) has also been found to
be a physiological marker of emotion regulation (Scrimgeour, Davis,
& Buss, 2016) and to indicate differential vulnerability to
environmental stresses (El‐Sheikh & Hinnant, 2011).
It is, of course, not only the temperament that we are born with that
influences personality development. Next, we outline the ways in
which many different experiences with caregivers, friends, and
teachers shape our personalities.
Attachment and Emotionality
What Is Attachment?
In keeping with the central focus on the social context of emotion,
as we turn to thinking about the impact of relationships on
children's developing emotionality, we begin with the notion of
attachment. In Chapters 8 and 9, we talked about the centrality of
emotion for the formation and negotiation of relationships,
including different attachments within families. Through shared
thinking and cooperation, humans accomplish collectively what
could not be accomplished individually (Tomasello, 2009, 2014).
This entry into the community of shared thought is achieved
through attachment relationships. In Chapter 8 we showed, as well,
how maturation in emotion expression, recognition, and regulation
provide the building blocks for shared thinking and cooperation.
Now we consider the relational experiences that children need to
effectively operate in this space between people. Attachment
relationships are central.
John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory (1969/1982),
detailed how attachment is a biobehavioral system that evolved for
the protection of the young, a defining challenge in the evolution of
our species. He argued for an evolutionarily‐based, safety‐regulating
system in which the parent is the child's haven of safety.
Attachment behaviors are activated in the presence of threats to the
child, which, in turn, keep the child in close proximity to caregivers
in the first few years. Through experiences with the caregiver in
moments of danger, illness, and distress, infants construct a model
of the caregiver as a protector and buffer, allowing them to use the
protector as a secure base and explore the world. Mary Ainsworth
worked with Bowlby and made further observations in Uganda and
in the United States (Ainsworth, 1967; Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, &
Wall, 1978).
A sensitive mother was described by Ainsworth as “alert to perceive
her baby's signals, interprets them accurately, and responds
appropriately and promptly … temporally contingent upon the
baby's signals” (Ainsworth et al., 1978, p. 142). With her colleagues,
Ainsworth developed the Strange Situation Test, in which an
infant is first with her or his mother in a room that is strange to the
child. Also in the room is someone the infant doesn't know. At a set
point the mother leaves the room and later returns. Ainsworth and
Bell (1970) found that in this situation babies in their second year
respond to the mother's absence, in the presence of a stranger, in
different ways. Three different styles of attachment were found in
these observations: Secure, Anxious, and Resistant (Ainsworth et
al., 1978).
Securely attached infants have experienced sensitive and
consistent caregiving, which allows them to learn to expect parental
availability in the face of stress. Avoidant attachment, in
contrast, is associated with a consistently insensitive caregiving
style. Infants adaptively respond to this environment by minimizing
signs of distress in the face of stress, as they have learned their
emotions will be ignored or rejected. Resistant (sometimes called
Ambivalent) attachment is thought to develop in the context of
inconsistent caregiver sensitivity, wherein infants maximize their
expression of distress in order to obtain a response from their
parents. A fourth pattern of responding was subsequently added,
called the Disorganized style (Main & Solomon, 1986), which is
thought to develop in the context of a chaotic and/or frightening
caregiving environment. Such children lack a developed means to
regulate painful emotions in the face of attachment distress. These
attachment styles and their relationship to parenting vary across
cultures, suggesting that although attachment is a human universal,
the relation of styles to parenting patterns falls short of a human
universal (Cheung & Elliott, 2016; Mesman et al., 2017; Mesman,
van IJzendoorn, & Bakermans‐Kranenburg, 2012).
Attachment Status and Emotional Outcomes
Why is attachment security important? A series of recent meta‐
analytic studies yielded findings of significant associations between
early attachment security and children's socioemotional
development (Groh, Fearon, van IJzendoorn, Bakermans‐
Franenburg, & Roisman, 2017). Attachment security is most
strongly associated with social competence and externalizing
behaviors (anger, aggression, hyperactivity) in children. It is less
strongly associated with children's internalizing problems
(depression and anxiety) and their temperaments. There is evidence
that such effects can be cascading. For instance, Simpson and
colleagues (2007) found attachment security in infancy was related
to peer competence in early elementary school, which, in turn,
influenced friendship security in adolescence, and ultimately
collaboration in romantic relationships in adulthood. These findings
reflect the importance of early attachment to interpersonal relations
across the life course.
Further, secure attachment relationships are important for
children's understanding, regulation, and expression of emotions
(Cassidy, 1994; Cooke, Stuart‐Parrigon, Movahed‐Abtahi, Koehn, &
Kerns, 2016). In a seminal study, Spangler and Grossmann (1993)
found that Avoidant babies showed fewer facial and vocal displays
of emotion in the Strange Situation Test than did Secure babies.
During this test, though, the Avoidant babies had similar heart rates
as the Secure babies and had higher cortisol levels after. This
suggests that despite less overt, visible distress, Avoidant children
may nevertheless experience physiological arousal. In essence, their
Avoidant behavior is not completely effective as a coping strategy
(Spangler & Grossmann, 1993).
Indeed, the impact of early attachment experience on children's
emotional development may be, in part, due to changes in
physiological systems related to stress. As you learned in Chapter 5,
cortisol is a hormone that tracks responses to stress. Infants
categorized as Insecure and/or Disorganized, as compared to
Secure, have been shown to have larger cortisol stress responses in
distressing attachment contexts (Bernard & Dozier, 2010; Luijk et
al., 2010) as well as dampened diurnal cortisol (Luijk et al., 2010;
Oskis, Loveday, Hucklebridge, Thorn, & Clow, 2011). Thus,
particular adaptations to caregiving environments, as indicated by
styles of attachment, may alter stress‐related physiological systems.
Such physiological changes may have implications for brain
development, particularly in areas with a high density of cortisol
receptors, such as the amygdala. Longitudinal studies have
documented morphological differences in brain structure, with
larger amygdala volumes in adults previously categorized as
Insecure and/or Disorganized, which, in turn, are functionally
related to emotionality (Lyons‐Ruth, Pechtel, Yoon, Anderson, &
Teicher, 2016; Moutsiana et al., 2015). Further, early attachment
experiences have been shown to persistently alter neural substrates
associated with emotion regulation. Moutsiana and her colleagues
(2014) carried out a 22‐year follow‐up of individuals whose
attachment status was assessed in infancy. Individuals were
exposed to negative and positive pictures while brain activation was
being measured and they were asked to increase or decrease their
emotional response to the picture. Effects of attachment status were
most marked as individuals tried to increase positive affect.
Individuals categorized as Insecure in infancy (compared to secure
in infancy) showed a relatively inefficient neural processing system
(involving the left and right anterior prefrontal cortex, the rostral
anterior cingulate cortex, and the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex) as
they tried to increase their positive responses to pictures. This
suggests that such individuals require greater cognitive effort, at a
neurobiological level, to experience positive emotions. Thus, early
patterns of attachment organization, which develop in response to
caregiving environments, have lasting implications for the
neurobiological systems that involve emotion and stress regulation.
Parental Sensitivity and Shared Thinking
The relationship between parental sensitivity and infant attachment
is well established both in correlational studies and intervention
studies that seek to alter parenting styles (Bakermans‐Kranenburg,
van IJzendoorn, Juffer, 2003; Lucassen et al., 2011; Mountain,
Cahill & Thorpe, 2017). Let us think about parental sensitivity and
children's attachment in the context of preparing children for
shared thinking and cooperation over the life course. Kochanska
(2002) argues that a “mutually rewarding orientation” is the
basis for cooperation between parents and children. More
specifically, her argument is that children develop an openness to
their caregiver's direction even in discipline contexts, such that
children will regulate their emotions and listen to their parents'
demands. This willing stance develops in the context of sensitive
parent–child relationships, and it shows stability over time. It has
been shown to predict positive socialization in the form of reduced
children's externalizing behavior, internal sense of obligation to
follow the parent’s requests (in the absence of parental monitoring),
and perception of parental trustworthiness at age 10. We can think
of these influences as reciprocal: when parents are positive with the
children, the children are positive with their parents and this
reciprocal process goes on through development (Kochanska, Kim,
& Boldt, 2015).
The process of a mutually rewarding orientation starts in infancy
and toddlerhood. Secure parents, (called Autonomous on the Adult
Attachment Interview, which we describe below), evaluate their
own infants' pictures more positively, rate infant crying as less
aversive, and process infant cries in an infant‐oriented, as opposed
to mother‐oriented, manner (Ablow, Marks, Shirley Feldman, &
Huffman, 2013; Leerkes et al., 2015; Spangler, Maier, Geserick, &
von Wahlert, 2010). Secure parents are more able to read and
respond appropriately to the range and fluctuation of emotions that
their infants show.
Consider now the mutually rewarding orientation in adolescence.
Remember when you were allowed to spend more time away from
home during this period? Did you tell your parents about your
friends and activities? Parental monitoring of adolescent activity
has been found to decrease risky adolescent behaviors (Stattin &
Kerr, 2000). But parents knowing what their adolescents are doing
is partly dependent on adolescents being prepared to confide in
their parents. They do this more when earlier trust has been built
up (Fletcher, Steinberg & Williams‐Wheeler (2004). A positive
parent–child relationship provides the basis for the shared thinking
and willingness toward others that is needed over the course of a
lifetime.
From Parent Attachment to Child Attachment
A central idea in attachment theory is that parents can behave in
sensitive and responsive ways when they themselves were the
recipients of responsive parenting in their own childhoods: thus,
attachment begets attachment in the next generation. The Adult
Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985) was
developed to examine this intriguing possibility by capturing adult
narratives on their relationships with their parents, and in these
narratives classifying adults into three different adult styles:
Autonomous (cf. Secure), Dismissing (cf. Avoidant), or
Preoccupied (cf. Resistant). Recent meta‐analytic evidence,
based on over 2,000 parent–child dyads (Verhage et al., 2016), has
summarized the degree of the relationship between the parents'
attachment status as an adult and their children's attachment
status. This can be seen in Table 11.2. The strongest concordance is
between Secure parents and their children (54%), the next for
Dismissing parents and children (28%), and the lowest for
Preoccupied parents and children (17.8%).
TABLE 11.2
Number of individuals in three different categories for
caregiver's adult attachment status and their children's
attachment status, in 2,774 dyads
Source: Verhage et al., 2016, table 4, p. 77.
Child attachment
Caregiver's
Adult
attachment
Secure Avoidant Resistant Total Percent
Autonomous
1079
191
166
1436
53.9
Dismissing
314
309
133
756
28.4
Preoccupied
216
100
158
474
17.8
Total
1609
600
457
2666
Predicted transmission patterns are in bold font.
Another method of investigating links between parent and child
attachment is to examine the attachment of the offspring of adults,
whose attachment status was examined in their infancy. One study
that involved a high‐risk sample reported something striking for
disorganized attachment. Among mothers who themselves had
disorganized attachment patterns as children, 50% of their infants
also showed disorganization (Raby, Steele, Carlson, & Sroufe, 2015).
Thus, across these studies we see some expected parent–child
concordances that appear to be strongest for secure and
disorganized attachment. Lack of concordance is also seen.
Explanations for discontinuity in attachment styles focus on
changes in life circumstances, both good and bad, that might alter
how individuals relate to their children (Barbaro, Boutwell, Barnes,
& Shackelford, 2017).
Are parental attachment styles (measured through behavior)
correlated with parental brain activity? Riem and colleagues (2012)
used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine
whether activity in the amygdala (which is activated during
exposure to infant crying) varied by adult attachment status. They
found that, when exposed to infant crying, Insecure (as compared to
Secure) adult attachment was associated with more irritation, use of
excessive force, and heightened amygdala activation. This suggests
that early relational emotion patterns are represented at the
neurobiological as well as behavioral levels.
The Role of Environmental Risk in Children's Attachment
Relationships
You may be wondering about the role of environmental factors in
children's attachment status. And on this question, we arrive at a
challenging conclusion: The more compromised the caregiving
environment, the more problematic the child's attachment status.
Thus, children in economically disadvantaged homes, those who
have experienced abuse, and those who have been raised in
institutional care (see Chapter 12) show high rates of disorganized
or insecure attachment. In a meta‐analytic review that included
4,792 children, Cyr, Euser, Bakermans–Kranenburg, and Van
IJzendoorn (2010) found that maltreatment was a particularly
potent risk factor for the development of insecure and disorganized
attachment styles, as shown in Figure 11.5. These researchers also
looked at the role of being exposed to multiple environmental
risks simultaneously (poverty, low education, single parenthood,
ethnic minority, teen parenting). The children experiencing multiple
risks in their environment showed a similar degree of risk of
disorganized attachment to the maltreated children. Thus, the
extent to which parents can provide a sensitive and responsive
environment for their children is in part related to their own social
disadvantages.
FIGURE 11.5 The effect sizes for cumulative risk and
maltreatment in explaining insecure and disorganized
attachment (based on Cyr et al., 2010).
Genetic Influences on Attachment
In Chapter 8 you learned that a child's individual temperament is
influenced by her or his genetic profile, inherited from his or her
parents. Given this, you might expect strong relations between
genetics, childhood temperament, and early attachment patterns.
This proves to not be the case. Early attachment patterns are not
strongly related to child temperament (Groh et al., 2017). Nor do
studies find that infant attachment patterns (particularly secure and
insecure attachment) have a strong genetic basis (Bokhorst,
Bakermans‐Kranenburg, Fonagy, & Schuengel, 2003; O'Connor &
Croft, 2001). Furthermore, although many parental behaviors (such
as negativity and control, Avinun & Knafo, 2014) are strongly
influenced by children themselves, the evidence suggests that this is
less so for parental attachment behavior. Fearon and colleagues
studying twins (2006) found that parental responsivity across
children was very similar. The likely explanation is that as these
parental behaviors are so important for the species‐specific goals of
shared thinking and cooperation, they do not vary across siblings
but instead show a trait‐like presentation (i.e., the parent treats all
siblings similarly).
Although there has been minimal support for genetic contributions
to attachment differences in early childhood, this is not the case in
adolescence. Based on a twin study of 551 adolescent twin pairs,
Fearon and colleagues (2014) found 40% heritability for security of
attachment. In accounting for the discrepancy between early
childhood and adolescent heritability estimates, the authors suggest
that children's genetic predispositions may evoke changes in the
behavior of caregivers over the course of childhood, which, in turn,
feeds back to affect children's attachment styles (evocative gene–
environment correlation, see above).
Although genetic influences on attachment categories in general
appear to be low, it may be that some categories are more
genetically influenced than others. For instance, the largest
genome‐wide association study of 657 14‐month‐old infants has
identified a number of genes associated with disorganization (Pappa
et al., 2015). Furthermore, infant subcortical structures at six weeks
of age, using ultrasound imaging, have been found to predict
attachment disorganization at 14 months (Tharner et al., 2011),
suggesting that there are very early vulnerabilities in brain
development evident for at least this one category of attachment.
Parental Behaviors Beyond Attachment
Of course, there are other aspects of close relationships that
influence the development of differences in personality that are not
related to attachment processes. We consider some of these now.
Biobehavioral Synchronization
The concept of biobehavioral synchronization takes the
behavioral reciprocity that we see in the mutually responsive
orientation (described above) to the physiological level. Feldman
(2012) has shown that brains of parents and infants transform to
integrate the other as an interaction partner. The process of
interactional synchrony starts during pregnancy. Interactional
synchrony is the dance of mutually rewarding, turn‐taking
interaction. Over the course of the first year of life, as parent–infant
synchrony gets established, such synchrony becomes more closely
interconnected with physiological and behavioral stress regulation
systems. For instance, parent–infant emotional synchronization
promotes the coordination of heart rhythms between the parent and
infant (Feldman, Magori‐Cohen, Galili, Singer, & Louzoun, 2011)
and affiliative hormones such as oxytocin (Feldman, Gordon, &
Zagoory‐Sharon, 2011), demonstrating important links between the
neurobiological underpinnings of bonding and parent–infant
synchrony. Parental contingent coordination serves as an external
regulator for infants' developing regulatory capacities, which, over
time, transforms into child self‐regulation.
Parental Mentalization and Reflective Capacity
Parental mentalization refers to parents' abilities to represent and
hold in mind the internal states, such as emotions, thoughts,
desires, and intentions, of their children. It involves the awareness
and accuracy of parental interpretations of children's mental
worlds. Several constructs have been studied under this umbrella—
parental mind‐mindedness (Meins, 1997; Zeegers et al., 2017),
parental insightfulness (Oppenheim & Koren‐Karie, 2002), parental
reflective functioning (Slade et al., 2005; Wade et al., 2018), and
parental cognitive sensitivity (Prime et al., 2015).
Mothers' tendencies to comment appropriately on their infants'
inferred internal states are related to enhanced mentalizing and
language abilities (Laranjo, Bernier, Meins, & Carlson, 2014; Meins,
Fernyhough, Arnott, Leekam, & Rosnay, 2013), emotion
understanding (Centifanti, Meins, & Fernyhough, 2016), and
behavioral adjustment (Meins, Centifanti, Fernyhough, & Fishburn,
2013). In contrast, Meins et al., (2013) demonstrated that maternal
inappropriate mind‐related comments were associated with weaker
understanding of perspective differences in children at age 2, which,
in turn, predicted weaker mentalizing abilities in children at age 4.
Previously, we discussed parental sensitivity in the context of
children's emotions. Now, we turn to the way in which it contributes
to multiple aspects of children's cognitive development. In a
longitudinal birth‐cohort study, Browne et al. (2018) found that
maternal sensitivity when children are 18 months old explained a
variety of cognitive outcomes when the children were five and just
entering school (reading, math, language, theory of mind). So why is
the influence of maternal sensitivity upon cognitive function so
important to emotional development? It is because of the role of
maternal sensitivity in building the neural architecture that
promotes social interaction. Language and being able to represent
and understand others' mental states are the cognitive skills that
allow children to interact successfully with others (Fernyhough,
2008; Tomasello, 2009; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behn, & Moll,
2005). The mutually responsive orientation is not only an
emotional stance of one person toward the other. It is also a
cognitive stance in which the neural architecture has developed to
support thinking about other people.
This idea led Jenkins, Perlman, and colleagues (Prime et al., 2015;
Browne, Leckie, Prime, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2016) to broaden the
concept of parental sensitivity to cognitive sensitivity. Cognitive
sensitivity is defined as the extent to which any social partner
considers the knowledge and abilities of their partner during an
interaction that involves the achievement of a joint goal. Cognitive
sensitivity, then, is not just applicable to caregivers and children,
but includes all those relationships in which a child takes part.
Theoretically, instead of sensitive responding operating in the
service of the protection of young (Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins,
1999), it operates in the service of shared thinking and its neural
architecture. Browne et al. (2016) showed a “climate” effect in the
family for this skill: the more that everyone behaved with cognitive
sensitivity (including behaviors such as mind‐reading, rephrasing
ideas to improve understanding), the more the child was able to
engage in shared thinking and cooperation (Browne et al., 2016).
Over and above parental inputs, cognitive sensitivity of older
siblings has also been found to predict the younger siblings'
language and theory of mind (Prime, Pauker, Plamondon, Perlman,
& Jenkins, 2014; Prime, Plamondon, Pauker, Perlman, & Jenkins,
2016).
Talk About Emotions
Through the learning of emotion language, parents and other
caregivers structure a world that will shape the emotional
experience of children. Parents do this in several ways. One way is
to talk with children about the kinds of events that evoke emotions.
For instance, a father says to his son who is recoiling at the sight of
a big dog: “You don't need to be scared of him.” On another occasion
he wanders into the cycle path, and a bicyclist narrowly misses him.
His father rushes to him and says, “That's dangerous! You really
frightened me.” Such emotional communications teach children
about what events appropriately elicit emotions in their
community, inducting the child into the cultural rules of emotion.
This type of talk structures the child's own internal experience and
lets the child know about the internal experience of others. This talk
is referred to as mental state talk and includes talk about
emotions, desires, and thoughts.
As you might imagine, parents tailor the complexity of their mental
state talk to children's age. Taumoepeau and Ruffman (2006) found
that maternal use of desire language (e.g., love, want, hope, wish,
dream) with 15‐month‐old children predicted children's mental
state language and emotion task performance (i.e., their ability to
discern how a person felt) at 24 months. When children were 24
months of age, mothers' reference to others' thoughts and
knowledge, a more advanced form of mental state talk, was the
most consistent predictor of children's later mental state language
at 33 months (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008). Maternal talk was
adjusted according to their child's developmental stage; mothers'
talk about more sophisticated mental states (i.e., thoughts and
knowledge) increased significantly between 15 and 33 months and
24 and 33 months, while less‐sophisticated talk (i.e., about desires
and emotions) remained relatively stable. van der Pol et al. (2015)
found that not only does emotion talk vary as a function of age,
there are subtle differences in the type of talk parents direct toward
boys versus girls. For instance, when referring to gender‐neutral
characters in a shared reading task, parents were more likely to use
female gender labels when describing pictures of more submissive
or collaborative emotions (i.e., sadness, happiness) and male gender
labels when describing pictures of competitive or adversarial
emotions (i.e., anger). This study also found that mothers
elaborated more on emotions during shared booking reading than
did fathers.
In summary, parental talk about emotion, geared to the child's
developmental level, is important for building children's cognitive
structures. Interestingly, when these conversations are more
attuned, with ideas going back and forth, it enhances children's
neural architecture in the language areas of the brain (Romeo et al.,
2018).
So do parents who talk more about emotions promote children's
socioemotional development? The answer appears to be yes.
Parental talk about emotions is positively related to differences
in children's own emotion talk, their emotion understanding, and
their prosocial behavior. During a child's toddler years, Brownell
and colleagues (2013) showed that parents' encouragement of their
children's participation in discussing others' emotions, rather than
the amount of emotion talk parents used themselves, was
particularly important to children's observed sharing and helping
behavior.
Emotion talk is important beyond toddlerhood, too. One study
found, for example, that in middle childhood, children who engaged
in complex emotion discourse with their parents (e.g., promoting
thinking about self and others' internal perspectives, and causal
reasoning/problem solving) were more effective when it came to
prosocial problem solving, which, in turn, was related to teacher‐
reported social skills in middle childhood (Fenning, Baker, &
Juvonen, 2011).
Together, these studies highlight a process that is part of healthy
emotional development: when parents engage their children in talk
about emotions, they help their children understand their own
emotions and those of others, which, in turn, supports socially
adaptive action in different contexts. This may be especially true
when it comes to stressful and traumatic events. Conversations
about emotion in the context of reminiscing about negative events
(once the emotional heat has subsided) might be especially
influential in promoting children's emotional and relational
understanding (Coppola, Ponzetti, & Vaughn, 2014; Gottman, Katz,
& Hooven, 1996; Laible, 2004; Laible & Panfile, 2009; Ramsden &
Hubbard, 2002). Laible (2011) found that in negative event
conversations, as opposed to positive event conversations, mothers
were more likely to discuss the causes of emotions with children,
had in‐depth discussions, and were also more likely to confirm the
child's emotional experiences (“yes, I remember you were sad”). A
longitudinal study (Laible, Murphy, & Augustine, 2013) identified
two important aspects of this discourse that were correlated with
children's socioemotional functioning: (i) children's active
participation in reminiscing and (ii) parents and children
collaborating to construct a shared narrative about the negative
event. Such effects are not just correlational. In a training study in
which mother–child dyads were randomly assigned to an emotion‐
rich and elaborative reminiscing condition, children talked more
about emotions and their causes than children in the control
condition (Bergen, Salmon, Dadds, & Allen, 2009). It is important to
note that it is not just parents who influence children's talk about
emotions; Older siblings are also a critical influence (Jenkins,
Turrell, Kogushi, Lollis, & Ross, 2003).
We can see that emotion talk, like mentalization, allows for the
construction of shared meanings and provides a communicative
basis for shared thinking. Such foundational skills help children
negotiate and manage their relationships with others.
Parental Socialization of Emotion
In the emotional exchanges that make up so much of family life,
parents not only teach their children a way of talking about
emotion, but they also socialize their children into specific familial
and societal norms about emotional experience and expression. This
socialization of emotions occurs in the emotions parents show to
children, in how they respond to children's emotions, and in how
they discuss and make sense of emotional exchanges (Eisenberg et
al., 1996). It is important to recognize that these socialization of
emotion processes are bidirectional: parents socialize their children,
and children socialize their parents (Grusec, 2011; Kuzynski, 2003).
Children are active agents in this process, with some being
temperamentally responsive to parental efforts and others are not.
Emotions to Which Children Are Exposed
As great writers and artists have long known, families differ with
respect to what emotions seem prominent: one family may be full
of laughter, joy, and affection, another full of fiery displays of anger,
and another still committed to the avoidance of any emotional
display. This family climate (which can only be estimated when
everyone in the family interacts with everyone else) accounts for
about 15–20% of the variability in emotionally based interactions
(Browne, Leckie, Prime, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2016; Eichelsheim,
Deković, Buist, & Cook, 2009; Rasbash, Jenkins, O'Connor, Tackett,
& Reiss, 2011). Thus, after we account for what individuals
contribute to the family (e.g., one child being very angry and hostile
to everyone) and the role of specific dyads (e.g., the mother and
child clash with one another), there is still a large family climate
influence. We think of this as a process of emotion contagion or
spillover: watching parents fight with one another makes it more
likely that sibling dyads (Margolin, Christensen, John, 1996) and
parent–child dyads will fight with one another (Stover et al., 2012;
Stroud, Meyers, Wilson, & Durbin 2015). Young children may be
particularly influenced by the emotion contagion that occurs in
their families. For example, Browne and colleagues (2016) found
that for young children, the emotional climate of the whole family
played a much larger role in their mental attunement to others than
the role it played for older children and mothers. Although some of
this contagion of emotion in families is likely to be genetically
mediated (Ganiban et al., 2009), negativity in the marital dyad is
associated with parent–child negativity in adoptive families in
which no genetic relationship occurs (Stover et al., 2012). These
findings highlight how dysfunction in one family dyad can erode the
functioning in other family dyads and, as a result, shape a child's
emotionality.
“Positive contagion” can also occur, too. Children raised in families
with greater positive emotionality show higher levels of empathy
and affection (Eisenberg, 1992; Jenkins et al., 2012). In a
longitudinal study that gathered measurements at three time
points, constructive marital conflict (characterized by cooperation
and resolution) predicted better peer relationships in children as
well as higher levels of prosocial behavior (McCoy, Cummings, &
Davies 2009; McCoy, George, Cummings, & Davies, 2013).
A number of accounts of this process of contagion, particularly
related to prosociality, have been proposed (Paulus, 2014). One
focuses on the intriguing possibility that family members share
emotion‐related autonomic reactions. Ebisch and colleagues (2012)
observed mothers reacting empathically to their preschool children
inadvertently breaking an examiner's toy. Mothers and children's
facial temperature variations were found to change together,
suggesting affect sharing and sharing of autonomic arousal.
Parental Reactions to Children's Emotions and Emotion Coaching
As babies develop language, they learn ways to communicate about
internal states. As parents see their infants having more flexible
ways of expressing their needs, they change how they respond to
their children's emotions. They may pay attention to what they
consider acceptable forms of emotional expression and ignore
others. For example, Brooks‐Gunn and Lewis (1982) found that
mothers responded more to crying in their babies' first six months
than in their second year. As their children reached a year and then
two years, they increased their responding to their child's efforts to
speak. Such behavior says: “I'll pay attention to you when you talk
to me, but not just when you cry.” They also found that mothers
responded less to the crying of boys than to the crying of girls.
Similarly, Dunn, Bretherton, and Munn (1987) found that mothers'
references to feeling states following a child's distress decreased as
the child aged from 18 to 24 months, presumably to deemphasize
negative emotions (see also Kochanska & Aksan, 2004). By the time
children are age two, parents are decreasing their response to
negative emotions, thereby inducting their children into a culture in
which it is less acceptable to cry to achieve goals. As children age,
we see that the effect of parental behavior on children's emotions
change. In a study of three‐to‐six–year‐old children, the balance
between children's positive and negative expressions of emotion
(called regulatory balance) was found to be differentially associated
with parents' emotional support as a function of children's age. It is
possible to see that while parental supportiveness is associated with
higher regulatory balance in young children, this is not the case for
older children (see Figure 11.6).
FIGURE 11.6 The relationship between parental
supportive emotion
socialization
and children's
regulatory balance varies as a function of children's age.
(Source: Mirabile, Oertwig, and Halberstadt, 2016).
We might think from our discussion about attachment and parental
responsiveness that the best thing for parents to do as soon as a
child is distressed is to respond immediately and sympathetically.
But parents' goals are more complex than simply protecting or
comforting children, particularly as children get older. As infants
become toddlers, parents make complex evaluations about how
distressed their child is, what the context is, how important the
situation is to building autonomy, and so forth (Dix, 1991; Mesman,
Oster, & Camras, 2012).
In light of the developmental changes in the emotional dynamics
between parents and children, it is clear that parents develop beliefs
about their own and their children's emotions, which are known as
Parental Meta‐Emotion Philosophy (PMEP) (Gottman et al.,
1996). An emotion coaching philosophy is characterized by
parents' awareness and acceptance of their own emotions and those
of their children and a perception of negative emotion as an
opportunity for growth and/or connection. In contrast, emotion‐
dismissing philosophies tend to minimize the importance and
expression of emotion and focus on ridding children of negative
emotions.
These emotion philosophies are important determinants of parental
behaviors. For instance, during emotion‐eliciting conversations with
their children, parents who value negative emotions encourage their
expression (Lozada et al., 2016). Parents who have more of an
emotion coaching philosophy are also more accurate in labeling a
range of emotions including anger, sadness, fear, and happiness
(Morey & Gentzler, 2017). In turn, parental beliefs about emotion
have been associated with children's emotional development and
subsequent adjustment (Katz, Maliken, & Stettler, 2012). For
instance, mothers with stronger beliefs that emotions are dangerous
(assessed by a questionnaire that asks them to rate how problematic
or dangerous it is to express both positive and negative emotions)
raised children with poorer emotion understanding. In turn,
children with poorer emotion understanding were rated by teachers
as less well‐adjusted in the classroom (Garrett‐Peters, Castro, &
Halberstadt, 2017).
How do parents' beliefs, or philosophies about emotion, shape their
children's emotional and social tendencies? When mothers respond
to children's negative emotions so that the child is encouraged to, or
helped to, deal with the source of a problem, children's constructive
coping is enhanced (Eisenberg et al., 1996). Other parental reactions
such as minimization of children's emotions, negative and
dismissing responses have been linked to a different style: that of
avoidant emotion regulation and more displays of anger in parent–
child interactions (Eisenberg, Fabes, Carlo, & Karbon, 1992;
Eisenberg et al., 1996; Snyder, Stoolmiller, & Wilson, 2003).
Moreover, punitive reactions in parents are associated with escape
and revenge‐seeking behaviors in children (Eisenberg & Fabes,
1994; Eisenberg et al., 1992). Being negatively reactive to children's
anger and sadness is the response most strongly associated with
poor outcomes in children. Indeed, in families with a conduct‐
disordered child (which is a mental health problem characterized by
aggression that we discuss more in Chapter 12), parents have been
found to respond to their children's aggression and negativity with
increased aggression and negativity. This pattern of escalating
reciprocal negativity plays a causal role in the development of
conduct disorder (Patterson 1986; Plamondon et al., 2017).
Before we leave our discussion of parental response to children's
emotions, let us remember that much of what we know of children's
emotion socialization comes from research in Western European
countries. It will be important for research to extend the findings we
have been considering to other cultures, for as we saw in Chapter 3,
culture influences every aspect of emotion. For instance, Caucasian
mothers living in the United States reported more sympathy and
showed high rates of encouragement toward their children's
expression of sadness and anger as compared to mothers in old city
and suburban India (Raval, Raval, Salvina, Wilson, & Writer, 2013).
We should also bear in mind that these differences in the parents'
emotional response may be due to differences in how the children
respond. For example, one study found that, as compared to
American infants, Chinese infants were less expressive overall,
showed less distress responses, and produced fewer smiles (Camras,
Oster, Campos, & Bakeman, 2003). In this same study, Japanese
infants were more similar to American than to Chinese infants in
their expressiveness. Given these differences in the infants'
emotionality, it is easy to imagine how parents might, in turn,
respond differently.
The studies described above were correlational, limiting the
conclusions that we can draw about causality. Recent studies have
shown, though, that teaching parents in a six‐session parenting
group about the value of emotions, how to respond to children's
emotions, and how to regulate their own emotions results in
enhanced emotion coaching and empathy among parents, as well as
a significant increase in children's emotion knowledge, and social
and behavioral adjustment (Havighurst et al., 2013, 2015). The
results from this study can be seen in Figure 11.7.
FIGURE 11.7 Following the emotion intervention parents
showed improved skills in being less dismissive of
children's emotions, being more empathic, and showing
less negative expressiveness. ** = difference in change
from baseline to follow up between groups is significant
at < .001; * = difference in change from baseline to follow
up between groups shows a tendency.
Intergenerational Transmission and Genetics in Parenting
Above, we learned about the intergenerational transmission of
attachment styles. Do other aspects of parenting also show
intergenerational transmission, passing from parents to
children, and then to the next generation? Do succeeding
generations in a family show consistency in warm or hostile
parenting tendencies, for example?
Indeed, evidence suggests this is the case. For example, children
who have been parented with positivity and warmth in their
childhoods grow up more likely to be warm parents with their own
children (Belsky, Jaffee, Sligo, Woodward, & Silva, 2005; Kovan,
Chung, & Sroufe, 2009). The same kind of intergenerational
transmission has been shown for hostility. Individuals who have
received harsh parenting in their own childhoods are more likely to
parent their own children more harshly (Kovan et al., 2009; Neppl,
Conger, Scaramella, & Ontai, 2009).
These intergenerational continuities are also affected by individuals'
choices of marital partners. For example, in one study that followed
children into adulthood, children who had been parented harshly
proved to be more likely to choose partners who parent harshly
(Conger et al., 2012). It would appear that early experiences in
childhood of being parented harshly lead to preferences for partners
who parent harshly, only increasing the likelihood those individuals
will themselves parent in harsh ways. However, in circumstances
wherein children who were treated harshly by their parents
partnered with a person with a warm parenting style, the
transmission of harsh parenting did not occur (Conger, Schofield, &
Neppl, 2012). This has also been found in a meta‐analytic study:
having a good and caring relationship with a caregiver in childhood,
or a spouse in adulthood, results in a lower intergenerational
transmission of maltreatment (Schofield, Lee, & Merrick, 2013). We
discuss the “protective effects” topic at more length in Chapter 12.
Earlier in this chapter we discussed the role of children's genetically
driven characteristics, and the way in which they elicited different
kinds of parenting behaviors (the evocative gene–environment
correlation). Twin studies have shown that parenting is
substantially heritable; between 30 and 50% of the variance in
parenting is explained by genetic influence, as can be seen in
Figures 11.8a (parental warmth) and 11.8b (parental negativity)
(Klahr & Burt, 2014). In these figures, “A” refers to the percentage
of variance attributable to genetic influence, “C” refers to the shared
environment (the similarity between siblings once genetic effects
have been accounted for), and “E” refers to the nonshared
environment (differences between siblings attributable to the
environment). Notice how genetically driven characteristics of
children (A) shape parental negativity more than these genetically
driven characteristics shape parental warmth. Note also that the
negativity of mothers is more influenced by genetically based child
characteristics than the negativity of fathers. Mothers may be more
driven by challenging child behavior because of the greater time
that they spend with children or because of their perceived roles as
disciplinarians.
FIGURE 11.8 The role of genes (A), shared environment
(C), and nonshared environment (E) in mothers' and
fathers' warmth and negativity to children (Klahr & Burt,
2014).
These findings are a reminder that children are not passive in the
parent–child relationship; rather, as we have considered in different
places in this chapter, it is a mutually reciprocal process between
parents and children.
Beyond Parenting: Influences of Siblings, Peers,
and the Broader Social Context
A multilevel perspective is important for understanding the
development of children's emotionality (Bronfenbrenner, 1992;
Jenkins, Madigan, & Arsenault, 2015; Lerner, 2006). Parents—
largely our focus thus far—are just one influence upon a child's
developing emotion. There are many other influences, including
macro influences such as socioeconomic influences, neighborhoods,
and schools (distal factors), and those that are spatially and
temporally closer to the child, such as their relationships with
family and friends (proximal factors).
Siblings
Psychologist Laurie Kramer describes the contexts in which siblings
influence one another's emotional development (Kramer, 2014):
Social learning appears to be a most important process by which
siblings acquire knowledge about emotions—what specific
emotions look like when enacted by others, how to identify and
label them, the markers that distinguish one emotion from one
another, ways to respond in the face of confusing mixed or
blended emotions, the display rules that govern the socially
appropriate expressions of emotions with respect to context, as
well as how to form realistic expectancies about the
consequences of emotional expression—and what they can expect
to happen when emotions are expressed in particular ways in
particular contexts.
Sibling relationships are one of our earliest and longest lasting
relationships, characterized by a range of intense emotions and
opportunities for learning, for better and for worse (Dunn, 1983;
Kramer & Conger, 2009). What do emotionally based sibling
interactions look like? Perlman and colleagues (2015) looked at the
moment‐to‐moment interactions of siblings during a 10‐minute free
play observation when younger children were 18 months and older
siblings were around 4 years. From these interactions, children were
classified according to how their interactions unfolded over time.
Older siblings showed a wider range of interaction patterns. Twenty‐
five percent were harmonious, showing stable or increased
positivity over the course of the interaction. Another 25 percent
played positively but also showed a bit of disengagement from their
younger siblings (called the casual group). Another group
deteriorated across the interaction becoming increasingly negative
(31%). Then, there was an interesting group of older siblings that
were referred to as the recovery group (22%). Their negativity rose
early in the interaction, but then they recovered with an increase in
positivity and decrease in negativity. These patterns were related to
some of the family processes that we have already described.
Mothers of children in the recovery group were more sensitive and
warmer than those in the deteriorating group; mothers of children
in the casual group showed less reflectiveness (mentalization) than
mothers in the deteriorating group. Perhaps in those families,
disengagement, or a kind of avoidance, is an implicit strategy for
managing conflict.
Beyond positivity and negativity, broader measures of sibling
relationships focus on reciprocity and positive affection, use of
mental state talk, and sensitivity toward one another's cognitive
needs and abilities (Hughes, Fujisawa, Ensor, Lecce, & Marfleet,
2006; Jenkins et al., 2003; Prime, Perlman, Tackett, & Jenkins
2014; Recchia, Howe, & Alexander, 2009). A close and confiding
relationship with a sibling is associated with better adjustment,
especially for girls (Buist, Dekovic, & Prinzie, 2013; Kim, McHale, &
Crouter, 2007), and it enhances resilience among children exposed
to stressful circumstances (Gass, Jenkins, & Dunn, 2007).
One of the issues that siblings struggle with is the extent to which
they are parented differently from each other (called differential
parenting). Differential parenting has been found to be an
important predictor of the quality of the sibling relationship
(Richmond, Stocker, & Rienks, 2005). In one study on this theme,
change over time in sibling relationship quality was predicted by the
extent of the differential parenting that children received, with
sibling relationship quality decreasing as differential parenting grew
(Jenkins et al., 2012). The experience of differential parenting and
its effect on the sibling relationship can last a lifetime. Even in old
age, memories of differential parenting still continue to wrangle—
having a negative effect on the relationship (Suitor et al., 2008).
Siblings show marked similarities to one another on emotional
characteristics (Ma et al., 2015), with strong ties between sibling
relationship quality and children's adjustment (Buist et al., 2013),
leading investigators to attempt to differentiate behavioral
influences in which siblings learn behavior from one another (called
sibling training) from genetic influences. What emotions might be
learned from a sibling and how might this occur?
Siblings have been found to influence one another's empathy
development (Jambon, Madigan, Plamondon, Daniel, & Jenkins,
2018). In one study, younger and older siblings' empathy in
response to an experimenter being hurt or needing help was
assessed separately for each child on two occasions, 18 months
apart. Empathic younger siblings predicted increases in their older
siblings' empathy, and older siblings' earlier empathy did the same
for the younger siblings. In their interactions, siblings teach one
another in the ways of empathy, a foundation of shared thinking
and cooperation. Sibling interactions, beyond parental inputs,
matter for these skills (Prime, Plamondon, & Jenkins, 2017).
Do siblings train one another on aggression or are siblings similar
on aggression because of their genes? To tease apart these
influences, Daniel and colleagues (2018) assessed 916 children in
the preschool and early school age years over a four‐year period.
They found that once genetic influences upon aggression were
controlled, younger siblings' oppositional behavior operated to
lessen the oppositional behavior of their older siblings. This
suggested that older siblings learn from their younger siblings what
not to do! Experiencing the aggressive tendencies of their younger
siblings was sufficiently noxious that they started to behave better
themselves.
Given that emotions and dynamics between siblings matter, is there
any way to improve these relationships? Kramer and colleagues
(Kennedy & Kramer, 2008; Kramer & Radey, 1997) worked with
sibling pairs aged four to eight years old to promote prosociality in
sibling relationships. After five 1‐hour training sessions, positive
intervention effects were observed for children's emotion
regulation. With older children between Grade 2 and Grade 5,
Feinberg et al., (2013) evaluated a 12‐session group program that
involved siblings attending to one another's feelings, learning to
cooperate and engaging in fair treatment. Children showed
improved sibling relationships as well as increased socioemotional
functioning and self‐control.
Peers
Over 60 years ago, Sullivan (1953) suggested that peer interactions
in childhood and early adolescence provide opportunities for
learning important social skills, such as cooperation, altruism, and
empathy. This socialization starts early. Denham (1986) when she
observed two‐to‐three‐year‐old children in group play found that
children were more responsive to other children's anger than they
were to their sadness. A few years later, children respond more to
children's expressions of sadness than anger. They give more
empathic responses to happy expressions than to all other emotions
combined, and fewer in response to anger than to all other emotions
combined. This is the socialization of emotion. Even very young
children train their peers on the emotions to which they will attend
and those they'll ignore.
Peer relationships, influence, and are influenced by, children's
understanding of other people. As we saw in Chapter 8, there is a
profound growth in social cognition (thinking about others) that
occurs around age four leading to important developments in
pretend play, responsive communication, use of mental state talk,
and emotion understanding (Brown, Donelan‐McCall, & Dunn,
1996; Cutting & Dunn, 2006; Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991). But
it is also the case that peer interactions influence children's
understanding of mind. Maguire and Dunn (1997) showed that
earlier friendship interactions influence children's emotion
understanding; children who had higher levels of play complexity at
age six (including concessions and reassurances reflecting an
appreciation of the other's interests) were more adept seven months
later at understanding that people experienced ambivalent or mixed
emotions. The reciprocal effect of peer relationships and
understanding of minds was confirmed in a longitudinal study that
examined change in both of these processes simultaneously
(Banerjee, Watling, & Caputi (2011). Children's experience of peer
rejection was found to influence their acquisition of social
understanding and difficulties in understanding social concepts
were found to predict increased peer rejection (particularly in older
children). The results of meta‐analyses support the same
conclusion: these processes are intertwined (Slaughter et al., 2015).
The emotions children evoke in their peers are in part genetically
influenced. Remember back to our discussion of the “gene–
environment correlation” as you think about this study. Using a
twin and sibling sample of five‐year‐old children, DiLalla, Bersted,
and John (2015) explored genetic and environmental contributors
to children's positive behaviors (i.e., prosocial and easy‐going)
during peer interactions. Children were matched with unfamiliar
peers and asked to play for 20 minutes. Play behaviors were
subsequently rated by objective coders. They found that particular
temperamental traits (i.e., less withdrawn) and genetic propensities
toward acting prosocially evoked positive play behaviors from
unfamiliar peers. Thus, the positive behaviors that our peers direct
toward us are, in part, in response to our own emotionality.
Layous and colleagues (2012) tested this experimentally in the
preadolescent, or “tween”, age group. They randomly assigned
classrooms of 9‐to‐11‐year‐olds to either (i) perform three acts of
kindness or (ii) visit different locations (places control group). Then
they looked at the effect of the experiment on (i) students' ratings of
their own well‐being (i.e., life satisfaction, happiness, and positive
affect), and (ii) classmate ratings of individuals' peer acceptance
(assessed by determining with whom they would like to spend
time). They found that although both groups showed enhanced
well‐being after the experiment, students in the “kindness” group
had a larger number of peer nominations as compared to classmates
in the “places” group. Shifts in well‐being in these children brought
about more positive interactions. Why do we need to pay attention
to the quality of children's social relationships? It is because healthy
friendships matter for the life course. Individuals who have close
friends in childhood are more likely to have close friends in
adulthood (Lansford, Yu, Pettit, Bates, & Dodge, 2014).
To conclude, we see similar mechanisms of emotionality for peer,
sibling, and parent–child relationships and two points are central to
remember. First, our temperaments have a bearing on the relational
experiences that we have. If we are joyful, easy to laugh, and calm,
people engage with us in more positive ways. More good things
happen to us. If we are generally negative with more anger,
irritability, and distress, we elicit more of the same from others. Our
emotional propensities shape our relationships, which, in turn,
influence how we develop. Second, the quality of relationships that
we have with peers, siblings, and parents are critically influenced by
our capacity for shared thinking and cooperation. The cognitive
skills in understanding others provide the tools for healthy
relationships (Fink, Begeer, Peterson, Slaughter, & Rosnay, 2015).
Broader Social Context
As we considered in Chapter 9, societies are hierarchically organized
along economic and social factors. The amount of money and
opportunities that families have profoundly shape the well‐being of
family members and the emotional dynamics in families (Bradley &
Corwyn, 2002; Conger & Donnellan, 2007). So how can
socioeconomic status influence the emotions of children and
families? The answer to this lies in the relationship between
compromised brain development and negative emotionality.
Socioeconomic influences on child development operate through
three pathways: (a) inequitable allocation of resources like
nutrition, health care, housing, and education; (b) stress
reactions caused by parenting, environmental hazards, adverse life
events, violence, and neighborhood problems; and (c) health
behaviors such as tobacco, alcohol, and illicit substance use
(Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). We consider these issues at length in
Chapter 12.
In part, the pernicious effects of low socioeconomic status on
children's emotions come about through children's compromised
cognitive development. Consider the findings by Hart and Risley
(1995), who observed talk between parents and children in low‐,
middle‐, and high‐income homes from infancy to preschool. They
found that children in low‐income homes heard 616 words per hour
compared to 2,153 in the high‐income families. They estimated that
by three years old, there was a gap of 30 million words between
children in low‐ and high‐income families. This difference in
exposure will also be the case for emotion talk, with children from
high‐income families experiencing much greater opportunities to
talk about their feelings and conceptualize and regulate them with
language. Furthermore, socioeconomic deprivation results in
decreased responsivity (both cognitive and affective) within parent–
child and sibling relationships (Browne, Leckie, Prime, Perlman, &
Jenkins, 2016; Browne, Wade, Prime, & Jenkins, 2018; Prime et al.,
2015; Vernon‐Feagans, et al. 2013). Given that responsivity is so
crucial for providing the neural architecture for shared thinking, the
lack of this experience has long‐term consequences.
An important part of a child's social context is his or her
neighborhood and school. When children are in classrooms with a
high proportion of aggressive children, even after controlling for
their own earlier aggression, they show an increase in aggression
over time. This contagion of aggression has been documented in
childcare centers and schools (Howes, 2000; Kellam, Ling, Merisca,
Brown, & Ialongo, 1998) and for children and adolescents (Dishion,
Ha, & Véronneau, 2012; Faris & Ennett, 2012; Molano, Jones,
Brown, & Aber, 2013). There are both selection effects (i.e.,
choosing friends with similar aggressive behavior) and
socialization effects (increasing one's own aggression as a
function of the aggression of the social group; Fortuin, Van Geel, &
Vedder, 2015). In a similar fashion, other kinds of emotional
difficulties appear to spread through social groups, including
depression (e.g., Giletta et al., 2011; Kiuru et al., 2012), anxiety (Van
Zalk et al., 2011), and disordered eating (Rayner et al., 2013).
There is also evidence for the intergenerational continuity of
economic hardship, wherein children who come from families with
economic hardship go on to themselves experience economic
hardship as adults (Conger et al., 2012; Jeon & Neppl, 2016). The
impacts of childhood poverty have far‐reaching effects into
adulthood and across generations. Such effects are not set in stone;
rather, positive changes to children's family socioeconomic
situation can shift their trajectories for the better. For these
reasons, researchers have suggested that policies that aim to reduce
family poverty may be important for children's brain functioning
and well‐being (Noble et al., 2015).
Programs That Optimize Emotional Development
Some individual differences can be thought of as simply interesting:
this person is an extravert, that one is conscientious. But some
differences take the form of disabilities to some, but not others.
How might we think of these? By looking at the continuities in
negative emotionality across the life course, we know that people
would have better individual lives if we could lower the occurrence
of negative emotionality, in particular when it comes to anxiety,
sadness, and hostility. Let's assemble what we know about the
causes of negative emotionality from the findings that we have
reviewed above. Can societies provide people with tools to lessen
the risks of negative emotionality? The causes include genetic and
prenatal influences, parenting that is unresponsive to child emotion
and stimulation, family climates involving exposures to high levels
of negative emotion with low levels of reflection, talk and
negotiation about these emotions. Finally, we have to think about
the distal contexts that make the emotional lives of families harder:
do parents have enough money for basic needs, such as food?; do
they have the opportunity for a good education?; do they live in
neighborhoods that support rather than threaten children? We have
examples of prevention in all of these areas that give us real hope
that the burdens of negative emotionality can be lessened.
Take genetic risk for negative temperament which we reviewed in
Chapter 8. We might think there is little possibility of influencing
this without drugs or gene therapy, but this is likely to be incorrect.
Although we do not have direct evidence that we can prevent the
development of negative temperament, we do have evidence that we
can prevent compromising, genetically influenced neural
development. By targeting for prevention, the younger siblings of
children already diagnosed with autism, investigators were able to
reduce the development of autistic symptoms (Green et al., 2015).
They did this by teaching parents enhanced skills in sensitivity and
stimulation. Thus, even in the presence of a biological program that
directs neural development (given that the heritability of autism is
high; Tick, Bolton, Happé, Rutter, & Rijsdijk, 2016), the likelihood
of autism can be reduced by parental behaviors that push neural
development toward shared understanding, empathy, and
cooperation. No one has yet done such an intervention for the
younger siblings of children with negative emotionality, but
parental interventions for negative emotionality have been
successful (Boom, 1994).
With respect to the prenatal exposures that contribute to negative
emotionality, intervening during the prenatal period improves the
pregnancy outcomes (e.g., birth weight, prematurity) that cascade
into less‐optimal parent–child relationships (Browne et al., in
press) and children's negative emotionality (Abu‐Saad & Fraser,
2010; Aarnoudse‐Moens, Weisglas‐Kuperus, van Goudoever, &
Oosterlaan, 2009; Kramer, 1987). In meta‐analyses, preventions
targeting maternal diet have been shown to improve obstetric
outcomes (Thangaratinam et al., 2012) and targeting parenting has
been shown to improve a range of parent and child outcomes as
shown in Figure 11.9 (Pinquart & Teubert, 2010).
FIGURE 11.9 The effect of parenting education (classes
on different aspects of raising children) to improve
parenting and child outcomes. Figure derived from
Pinquart and Teubert et al., 2010.
Olds and colleagues developed a program for home visiting by
nurses for the prenatal and infancy periods for socioeconomically
disadvantaged families. These visits involved educating mothers on
the health and well‐being of babies, as well as supporting mothers
whose lives were very challenging. This program has been shown to
improve child emotional and educational outcomes into late
adolescence (Kitzman et al., 2010; Olds, Henderson, Tatelbaum, &
Chamberlin, 1986, 1997, 2007).
Another form of prevention effort involves the identification of
high‐risk babies and their mothers (e.g., low birthweight,
prematurity) and enhancing maternal levels of responsivity and
stimulation once their babies are born in order to avert poor brain
development. For instance, in a meta‐analysis of early interventions
to improve neurodevelopment of babies born prematurely,
Vanderveen et al., (2009) found that parent‐based interventions
(e.g., parent education, infant stimula