The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  Maslow (1908–1970) was a complex, enthusiastic, and thoughtful man whose life had well fitted him to the task of theorizing about human motivations. One of seven children of an immigrant family in Brooklyn, he was an unhappy, neurotic child, and a chronic outsider. This motivated him to school achievement of a high order, largely overcoming his unhappiness and isolation. Moving upward through the academic ranks at Teachers College, Brooklyn College, and Brandeis, he worked closely with a variety of colleagues—behaviorists, animal psychologists, a leading neurologist, Gestaltists, and psychoanalysts (he himself underwent analysis)—seeking to understand human motivations and to fit all that he learned into a comprehensive scheme. He died of a heart attack at sixty-two, but not before completing that task.

  Maslow pictured human needs and the motivations arising from them as a hierarchy or pyramid. Its broad base, on which all else rests, consists of the physiological needs; the next higher layer, of the safety needs (for security, stability, freedom from fear, and so on); still higher, of the psychological needs, which are largely of a social nature (the needs for belonging, love, affiliation, and acceptance; the needs for esteem, approval, and recognition); and finally, at the pinnacle, of the “self-actualization needs” (the need to fulfill oneself, “to become everything that one is capable of becoming”).70

  Research by others on social motivation explored many of these topics and spelled out how social motivation is tied into personality traits. Insecure people, for instance, have a strong need for approval; as a result, they consistently strive to convey socially desirable traits. On personality tests they will lay claim to sentiments that are admirable but rarely true, such as “I have never intensely disliked anyone,” and deny others that are socially undesirable but generally true, such as “I like to gossip at times.” Most people seek a degree of social approval in this fashion, but those with a particularly strong need for approval do so to such an extreme that others see them as sanctimonious and unlikable.71

  Many other aspects of social motivation were hot topics in the field from the 1960s to the 1980s—more, indeed, than can be included in this brief account. Social motivation is so broad a topic that our sampling has given us only a taste of it. But we cannot spend more time here; there have been so many developments and discoveries in the field of emotion and motivation in the past generation, especially the past fifteen years, that we must hasten on to wander through a veritable sideshow of recent psychological curiosa.

  Patchwork Quilt

  We have come a long way from half-starved rats scurrying across an electric grid for a morsel of food, and from Cannon’s cats, hissing with rage at barking dogs although their viscera had been disconnected from their brains.

  As we followed the story, it may have seemed that early theories were disproved by later research and discarded in favor of new ones, but the reality is far more complicated: Still later evidence has often revalidated old theories without invalidating the newer ones. Once more it appears that in psychology few theories are ever proven dead wrong; rather, they are shown to be limited and incomplete but to have value when pieced together with other theories in an inclusive, if untidy, patchwork quilt of theory.

  The James-Lange theory is the prime example of an early one that still occupies a place in the quilt. It seemed to be outmoded by Cannon’s work, which located the source of emotion in the thalamus, and by the Schachter-Singer experiment, which found it to be in the mind, but in 1980 Robert Zajonc, a distinguished researcher and scientific provocateur, revived it in new form on the basis of his own finding that feeling states occur prior to cognitive evaluation.

  Zajonc (pronounced “zye-onts”) was born in Poland, and in 1940, when he was seventeen, fled from the German invaders; his life disrupted, he did not complete his doctorate until he was thirty-five. But despite the late start, he performed a great deal of significant research, especially in social psychology, and won a number of honors. The possessor of a restless mind, he has always preferred to look into questions that he has said “irritate him,” answer them in bold outline, and move on, leaving the details to others.

  In the late 1970s Zajonc conducted a number of experiments on the “mere-exposure effect”; this is the human tendency to develop a preference for a stimulus with which we become familiar, even though it has no meaning or value for us. Zajonc showed volunteers a number of Japanese ideographs, some only once, others up to twenty-seven times. He then displayed the ideographs again, asking the volunteers which they recognized and which they liked best. They preferred those they had seen most often, even though the symbols meant nothing to them—and even though they did not recognize them.

  Aside from the disturbing implications of the finding—that we can be swayed to like and prefer products or persons merely through the repeated exposure of their names or images—Zajonc saw in it something of scientific import. Affective reactions (feeling states) can occur without cognition, can precede cognitive evaluation, and are more responsible for what we do than cognition. In an article in American Psychologist, which he titled—provocatively, by his own admission—“Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” he came out flatly for the primacy of the physical source of the emotions:

  Affect should not be treated as unalterably last and invariably postcognitive. The evolutionary origins of affective reactions that point to their survival value, their distinctive freedom from attentive control, their speed, the importance of affective discriminations for the individual, the extreme forms of action that affect can recruit—all these suggest something special about affect. People do not get married or divorced, commit murder or suicide, or lay down their lives for freedom upon a detailed cognitive analysis of the pros and cons of their actions.72

  The article exasperated many cognitive psychologists and created lively controversy. Richard Lazarus, of the University of California at Berkeley, became Zajonc’s chief opponent and vigorously disputed Zajonc’s thesis. In the same journal he offered an array of contrary evidence, the most salient being his own data on how the emotions aroused in volunteers by motion pictures could be altered by versions of the soundtrack that gave different information. Lazarus had used a film of Australian aborigines performing subincision, the ritual slitting of the underside of the penis of a male adolescent with a sharp stone. The film distressed viewers greatly when the soundtrack emphasized its pain and cruelty but far less when the soundtrack stressed how the adolescents looked forward to undergoing the ritual and thereby earning the status and benefits of adulthood. Lazarus’s conclusion:

  Cognitive activity is a necessary precondition of emotion because to experience an emotion, people must comprehend—whether in the form of a primitive evaluative perception or a highly differentiated symbolic process—that their well-being is implicated in a transaction, for better or worse. A creature that is oblivious to the significance of what is happening for its well-being does not react with an emotion.73

  In fact, he later came to take “the strongest position possible” on the role of cognition in emotion, namely, that it is both a necessary and sufficient condition. “Sufficient means that thoughts are capable of producing emotions; necessary means that emotions cannot occur without some kind of thought.”74

  Zajonc and Lazarus continued their debate for some time, but the work of others indicated that both were right and their findings not incompatible.

  One such indication is the finding of the developmentalist Michael Lewis and his colleagues, discussed earlier, that six primary emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and surprise) appear at or shortly after birth, but that six others (embarrassment, empathy, envy, pride, shame, and guilt) do not appear until the child develops cognitive capacity and self-awareness.75 Lewis and his team did not discuss the Zajonc-Lazarus debate, but their observations make room for both noncognitive and cognitive interpretations of emotion. (Carroll Izard’s infant photos document much the same development of emotions and their expression.)

&
nbsp; Social psychologist Ross Buck said that the resolution of the controversy lay in the recognition that there is more than one sort of cognition: “knowledge by acquaintance,” or direct sensory awareness, and “knowledge by description,” the cognitive interpretation of sensory data, a distinction expounded some decades ago by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Feelings may occur first, said Buck, but are transformed by the mind’s knowledge into cognitive judgments about the information they convey—which then modify the feelings. The process is a continuing interaction. “Feeling, expression, physiological responding, cognition, and goal-related behavior are interrelated processes, playing integrated and interacting roles in motivation and emotion.”76

  Robert Plutchik identified the Zajonc and Lazarus views as only parts of a larger whole. He defined an emotion as a chain of events in a complex feedback-loop system. A stimulus starts the process, but from then on there is an interplay between cognitive evaluations, feelings, and physiological changes, impulses to action, and overt actions, the results altering their own causes in a continuing process.77 Plutchik interpreted both the Zajonc and Lazarus data as products of research methods that look at single events rather than the whole process:

  One can put an electrode in the brain of a cat, or of a human being, and produce emotional reactions without a cognitive evaluation of an external event…It is obviously possible to focus attention on any of the elements of the chain. One can then produce theories that emphasize, for example, the primacy of arousal, or the primacy of expressive behavior.78

  The ancient theory that emotions are a major source of motivation that often overpowers the better judgment of the mind seemed to be made obsolete by the Darwinian evidence that emotions are signals and cues calling forth behavior with survival value. Yet how could the Darwinian view be reconciled with the ample evidence that we are often governed by useless or harmful emotions—panic, depression, jealousy, self-loathing, persistent grieving for a lost love, phobias, and even more crippling and tormenting emotional disturbances?

  The question is quicksand; tread upon it and you may never escape. Let us be cautious; let us only look at it from afar and for an instant.

  Although there is nothing like general agreement, a number of leading figures in the field hold a generally neo-Darwinian view of the emotions. They regard them as a source of information that enables us to appraise situations and judge what actions to take to achieve valued goals.79 But the classic antagonism of emotions and intellect has largely vanished; in the light of cognitive psychology, it has come to appear that emotions and cognition serve the same end, self-preservation. Robert Plutchik has argued that in simple animals, emotions are the cues to actions with survival value, and in more complex animals, including humankind, cognitive capacity performs the same function, correcting or amplifying the predictions of the emotions—though we still need their power to produce the behavior:

  The appropriateness of an emotional response can determine whether the individual lives or dies. The whole cognitive process evolved over millions of years in order to make the evaluation of stimulus events more correct and the predictions more precise so that the emotional behavior that finally resulted would be adaptively related to the stimulus events. Emotional behavior, therefore, is the proximate basis for the ultimate outcome of increased inclusive fitness. 80

  This still left unanswered the question of why we so often experience emotions that mislead us, are useless, or are damaging. Nico Frijda of the University of Amsterdam, a leading emotion researcher, offered several answers, among them that dysfunctional emotions sometimes result from a faulty evaluation of the situation, sometimes from contingencies that are more than one can cope with, and sometimes are emergency reactions in situations where slower and more thoughtful evaluation would serve us better.81

  Psychosomatic research has shown, too, that when we cannot escape from or take action against a threatening or tense situation, our emotions are no guide to action but a source of pain and illness.82 The hostage held by fanatics, the front-line soldier, the terminal cancer patient, cannot benefit from most of their emotions but only be damaged by them. Finally, when we have opposing or incompatible desires, or desires that are in conflict with social constraints, we experience emotions that are pathological.

  In recent years many researchers have been mining narrow lodes, not making large illuminating discoveries but adding bits and pieces of all sorts to an emerging multicausal—or, to put it more candidly, patch-work—theory of emotion and motivation. Their work ranges widely from the somatic to the neural, the cognitive, and elsewhere. What follows is a hodgepodge of latter-day examples; feel free to sample as much or as little as you like.

  —Some researchers have explored how specific neurotransmitters influence emotion and motivation. The molecules of cholecystokinins, for instance, plug up certain neural receptors in the GI tract and the CNS, and thereby affect appetite; obese men, given doses of the chemical, eat less.83

  —Others have sought to link specific emotions to particular parts of the body. In one such study, 172 volunteers named the parts in which they felt different emotions: shame mostly in the face, fear in many areas but especially the anal region, disgust in the stomach and throat, and so on. But the researchers did not feel that this meant the emotions were based primarily on bodily experience; rather, they saw the somatic information as part of a composite in which awareness, cognitive appraisal, and body feeling all interacted.84

  —In seeking the sources of empathy, researchers have observed children over time to see when precursor emotions appear and develop. They have found that an infant will cry when it hears another infant cry, apparently out of a primitive form of empathy (the same infant will not cry if it hears a tape recording of its own crying). And as we saw earlier, a child nearing one year will react with distress to the sight and sound of another person in pain, but at two or three will try to comfort or even help the other person. The reasonable conclusion: Compassion is a product of personality development and socialization, building on the empathetic emotional foundation.85

  —Antonio Damasio has distinguished between emotional states (bodily symptoms of an emotion) and emotional feelings (cognitive awareness of the symptoms). This far, he sounds like William James, but he goes beyond James by saying that emotional states and emotional feelings can be unconscious and that the physiological experience of a strong emotion, once learned, becomes a somatic marker— an automatic guide to swift action in emergencies and to swift decision-making. To prove the existence of somatic markers, Damasio tested patients who had ventromedial frontal lobe damage and compared them with control subjects: Both reacted to an innately alarming stimulus (a sudden loud sound) with increased skin conductance, but when they were shown pictures of disaster scenes or mutilations (stimuli which should produce a learned emotional response), the control subjects showed a sharp spike in skin conductance; the patients with ventromedial cortical damage showed none. What the patients had learned was no longer connected to their somatic systems.86

  —Other research, related to Damasio’s, compared the startle responses of patients with damage to the amygdala (as mentioned earlier, a small area of the medial temporal lobe involved in emotional processing) with those of normal people. People in both groups were startled by a sudden loud noise, but when the noise occurred in the context of a dark, empty street, the control subjects showed a much stronger startle response and the amygdala-damaged patients did not. Yet, most curiously, the patients were able to say that the dark street stimulus was the far more arousing one; they knew it was arousing—but were unaroused.87

  —A number of researchers have been interested in the effects of emotions on perception and memory. In one very recent study, participants saw a key word flashed for 4/10 of a second, and then two words, one of which was the same one they had so briefly seen. If that key word was related to either a positive or negative emotion, they were more likely to identify it correctly than if it was emotion
ally neutral; evidently, we see more clearly if what we see has some emotional impact. As for memory, various studies found that participants could more easily recall events or information when they happened to be in the same mood as when they first had the experience or learned the information. In a good mood, one can recall more pleasant or positive events in one’s life than when in a bad mood.88

  —For the past dozen years the subject of “emotional intelligence”(EI) has been the focus of a good deal of research and theorizing. What EI is depends on who’s talking about it. From one point of view, it is the ability to understand and regulate our emotions; from another point of view, it is the reliance on emotions to aid us in making judgments as to how to behave. Psychologist Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence says that people can be smart in a way that has nothing to do with IQ scores but with self-awareness, impulse control, zeal and motivation, empathy and social deftness; our emotions, in short, are often very smart—but, he admits, can also be very stupid. As for the research evidence: In a study employing personality tests and a special scale that rates EI, students who scored high in EI were more likely to report positive relationships with others, including greater perceived support from their parents and fewer negative interactions with their close friends, than those who scored low. In a study of people with careers in insurance, employees with higher EI scores were rated by their supervisors as more tolerant of stress, more sociable, and having greater potential for leadership than employees with lower EI scores. Higher scores were also related to higher salary and more promotions.89

  These few examples illustrate the extent to which the old field of emotion and motivation is showing new vigor. Can the resulting mass of findings of the past eighty-odd years be pieced together into a unifying coherent theory?