there are more words in the English language that represent negative than positive emotions: James A. Russell, “Culture and Categorization of Emotion,” Psychological Bulletin 110 (1991): 426–50.
These empirical facts led many in the field to the view that positive emotions are in reality by-products of negative states: Sylvan S. Tomkins, “Affect Theory,” in Approaches to Emotion, ed. Klaus Scherer and Paul Ekman (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984), 163–95.
My hope is to tilt your jen ratio to what the poet Percy Shelley: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Longman, 1999).
DARWIN’S JOYS
Darwin’s: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1872/1998).
Perhaps most important to Darwin, the book met with modest smiles of approval from his wife, Emma: Janet Browne’s brilliant two-volume biography of Darwin reveals the at times ambivalent stance Emma Darwin took with regard to her husband’s revolutionary scholarship. Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
anatomist Sir Charles Bell: Browne, Power of Place, 364.
One of the clearest signs of dominance: For some of the most systematic work on power and nonverbal display, consult the work of John Dovidio. Dovidio et al., “The Relationship of Social Power to Visual Displays of Dominance between Men and Women,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 233–42. Judith Hall and her colleagues have also provided a definitive review of the different behaviors that accompany displays of power. J. A. Hall, E. J. Coats, and L. S. LeBeau, “Nonverbal Behavior and the Vertical Dimension of Social Relations: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 6 (2005): 898–924.
One prevailing metaphor of emotion: George Lakoff has done superb work on the different metaphors of emotion. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Zoltán Kövesces, Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Paul Ekman put Darwin’s universality thesis to a simple empirical test: The original report of Ekman’s study is found in the following: Ekman, E.R. Sorenson, and Wallace V. Friesen, “Pan-Cultural Elements in the Facial Displays of Emotions,” Science 164 (1969): 86–88. The critiques of this study are best summarized in James Russell’s assessments of the data on the universality of emotion recognition in the face: J. A. Russell, “Is There Universal Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression? A Review of Methods and Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 102–41. This critique focuses on several questions. The most important is whether people in different cultures would label Ekman’s faces in similar fashion if allowed to use their own words, rather than using the words or scenarios provided by an experimenter. The answer is yes. See J. Haidt and D. Keltner, “Culture and Facial Expression: Open Ended Methods Find More Faces and a Gradient of Universality,” Cognition and Emotion 13 (1999): 225–66.
The data gathered in this study would pit two radically different conceptions of emotion against one another: For an excellent summary of social constructionist accounts of emotion, see Keith Oatley, “Social Construction in Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 342–52.
An evolutionary approach took shape as Ekman started to publish the findings from this first study: For an early evolutionary account of the emotions, see John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments,” Ethology and Sociobiology 11 (1990): 375–424. R. M. Neese, “Evolutionary Explanations of Emotions,” Human Nature 1 (1990): 261–83. For a more recent summary of such thinking, see D. Keltner, J. Haidt, and M. N. Shiota, “Social Functionalism and the Evolution of Emotions,” in Evolution and Social Psychology, ed. Mark Schaller, Jeffrey A. Simpson, and Douglas T. Kenrick (New York: Psychology Press, 2006), 115–42.
Emotions at their core are concepts, words, and ideas that shape, and are shaped by, discourse practices such as storytelling, poetry, public shaming, or gossip: Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has done brilliant work on how emotions are embedded in social discourse and constructed in those social practices. In her work on Bedouin culture, she documents how emotions like embarrassment and modesty are constructed in patterns of dress, poetry, and gossip. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz, Introduction to Language and the Politics of Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
The Inuit were never observed to express anger: J. L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
In the critical study: Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen, “Pan-Cultural Elements.”
Perhaps the chorus of critiques arose because Ekman’s data may have been reminiscent of the claims of Social Darwinism: For an enlightening history of Social Darwinism, read Stanford historian Carl Degler’s work. Degler, In Search of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Such was the aim of Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer: Schachter and Singer, “Cognitive, Social and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State,” Psychological Review 69 (1962): 379–99.
E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1913/1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980).
On this, Linda Levine and George Bonanno have found in their research that when people report upon past experiences: L. Levine, “Reconstructing Memory for Emotions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 126 (1997): 165–77. M. A. Safer, G. A. Bonanno, and N.P. Field, “It Was Never That Bad: Biased Recall of Grief and Long-Term Adjustment to the Death of a Spouse,” Memory 9 (2001): 195–204.
To capture the objective subjective, Ekman and Wallace Friesen devoted seven years, without funding or promise of publication, to developing the Facial Action Coding System: For a full description of the system, see Ekman and Friesen, Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1978). For a compilation of dozens of studies that have fruitfully applied the Facial Action Coding System to the scientific study of emotion, see Ekman and Erika L. Rosenberg, What the Face Reveals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
hundreds of studies have discovered that the muscle configurations that Darwin described for many emotions: For summaries of the research on the universality of emotion recognition in the face, see Hilary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady’s definitive reviews. Elfenbein and Ambady, “On the Universality and Cultural Specificity of Emotion Recognition: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 128 (2002): 203–35, and “Universals and Cultural Differences in Recognizing Emotions,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 12 (2003): 159–64.
RATIONAL IRRATIONALITY
Had I read Nobel Prize-winning economist: Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
The commitment problem has two faces: See also Frank, Passions Within Reason; R. M. Nesse, “Evolutionary Explanations of Emotions,” Human Nature 1 (1990): 261–83.
The very nature of emotional experience: One of the founding figures in the study of emotion, the Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda, was one of the first to observe that emotions, while being inherently subjective, feel absolute, as if based on non-negotiable truths. Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and “The Laws of Emotion,” American Psychologist 43 (1988): 349–58.
The potent pangs of guilt help us repair our dearest relations: Guilt is a source of many pro-social actions. See T. Ketelaar and W. T. Au, “The Effects of Guilty Feelings on the Behavior of Uncooperative Individuals in Re
peated Social Bargaining Games: An Affect-as-Information Interpretation of the Role of Emotion in Social Interaction,” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2002): 429–53. June Tangney and Rowland Miller have also done definitive work on the more pro-social character of guilt, and how it differs from a close relative, shame. J. P. Tangney, “Assessing Individual Differences in Proneness to Shame and Guilt: Development of the Self-Conscious Affect and Attribution Inventory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59, no. 1 (1990): 102–11; “Moral Affect: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (1991): 598–607; “Situational Determinants of Shame and Guilt in Young Adulthood,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18 (1992): 199–206. Tangney, R. S. Miller, L. Flicker, and D. H. Barlow, “Are Shame, Guilt, and Embarrassment Distinct Emotions?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (1996): 1256–64.
Emotional displays provide reliable clues to others’ commitments: For an analysis of truthfulness and deception in the signaling of nonhuman species: John R. Krebs and Nicholas B. Davies, An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), chap. 14, and “Animal Signals: Mind Reading and Manipulation,” in Behavioral Ecology, 2nd ed., ed. Krebs and Davies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 380–402. Paul Ekman has offered precise statements about which muscle movements are the reliable indicators of an accompanying emotional state. See Ekman, “Facial Expression and Emotion,” American Psychologist 48 (1993): 384–92.
leads to actions that enhance the welfare of others: N. Eisenberg et al., “Relation of Sympathy and Distress to Prosocial Behavior: A Multi-method Study,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 55–66.
Robert Frank reasoned, in a synthesis of Schelling’s insights and Ekman’s methodological labors: Frank, Passions Within Reason.
It involves the pulling in and upward of the inner eyebrows, and has been shown: N. Eisenberg et al., “Relation of Sympathy and Distress to Prosocial Behavior.”
Emotions, Martha Nussbaum argues: Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9–88; See also Abu-Lughod and Lutz, Introduction to Language and the Politics of Emotion.
It may have been his somatic oversensitivities that led James to publish his radical thesis about emotion: William James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9 (1884): 188–205.
“My thesis”: William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1890/1999), vol. 2, 449–50.
The most general function of the ANS: For an excellent, detailed overview of the autonomic nervous system, see W. Janig, “The Autonomic Nervous System and Its Coordination by the Brain,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Richard Davidson, Klaus Scherer, and Hill Goldsmith (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 135–86.
The autonomic nervous system is like the old furnace: My colleague and former mentor Robert Levenson has done some of the most rigorous and original research on James’s thesis about emotion. He is the source of the furnace metaphor, and of much of my thinking about the autonomic nervous system’s role in emotion. For his own thinking, see Levenson, “Autonomic Specificity and Emotion,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, 212–24.
What followed was a rather strange and controversial study: Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen, “Autonomic Nervous System Activity Distinguishes Among Emotions,” Science 221 (1993): 1208–10. For a follow-up study, see Levenson, Ekman, and Friesen, “Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity,” Psychophysiology 27 (1993): 363–84.
these distinctions are not the kind of emotion-specific physiological signatures that James envisioned: For a superb and fair-minded critique of the work using the Directed Facial Action task, see John T. Cacioppo, D. J. Klein, G. C. Berntson, and E. Hatfield, “The Psychophysiology of Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Lewis and Haviland, 119–42.
Levenson and Ekman subsequently packed their physiological equipment up: Levenson, Ekman, K. Heider, and Friesen, “Emotion and Autonomic Nervous System Activity in the Minangkabau of West Sumatra,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (1992): 972–88.
And in other research: Levenson, L. L. Carstensen, Friesen, and Ekman, “Emotion, Physiology, and Expression in Old Age,” Psychology and Aging 6 (1991): 28–35.
“A man goes to the supermarket once a week”: For a full complement of these moral scenarios, see J. Haidt, S. H. Koller, and M. G. Dias, “Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 613–28.
People’s responses to this kind of thought experiment have led Jonathan Haidt: Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34, and “The Moral Emotions,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, 852–70. M. D. Hauser, Moral Minds (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). J. D. Greene, and Haidt, “How (and Where) Does Moral Judgment Work?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6 (2002): 517–23.
well-known theory of moral development: Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach,” Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and Social Issues, ed. T. Lickona (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), 31–53. For excellent extensions of some of Kohlberg’s claims, see the work of Elliot Turiel: The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); The Culture of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Turiel, M. Killen, and C. Helwig, “Morality: Its Structure, Functions, and Vagaries,” in The Emergence of Morality in Children, ed. Jerome Kagan and S. Lamb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 155–243.
In one study: D. Keltner, P. C. Ellsworth, and K. Edwards, “Beyond Simple Pessimism: Effects of Sadness and Anger on Social Perception,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 740–52.
consider the following neuroimaging study: J. D. Greene et al., “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment,” Science 75 (2001): 2105-08.
When the Dalai Lama visited: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York; Riverhead, 1999), 63.
Confucius was on the same page: Armstrong, The Great Transformation, 249.
Martha Nussbaum, bucking the trends of moral philosophy: Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 297–454.
Emotions have not fared well in these thought experiments: For an excellent survey of treatments of emotion in Western thought, see Keith Oatley, Emotions: A Brief History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).
consider the metaphors that we routinely use in the English language to explain our emotions: Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things; Kövesces, Metaphor.
SURVIVAL OF THE KINDEST
In November 1943, S. L. A. “Slam” Marshall, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel: S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947/2000).
they would reach contrasting conclusions: For an excellent summary of early evolutionary views of altruism, see Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 15.
In Descent, Darwin argued that the social instincts: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), chap. 4.
“The following proposition”: Ibid., 84.
“Such actions as the above”: Ibid., 95.
at the top of my list would be the field notes of a Cro-Magnon anthropologist: Several books portray the social lives of our hominid predecessors: David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). 139–332; Stephen Mithen, After the Ice: A Global History of Human History 20,000 to 5000 BC (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Nicholas Wade Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 51–180.
A detailed po
rtrayal of the day in the life of our hominid predecessors would shed light on our environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA): John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 163–228.
We can turn to studies of our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos in particular: Several books capture the social dimensions of mammalian evolution that lay the foundation for the analysis of emotions that I offer: Frans B. M. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); John R. Krebs and Nicholas B. Davies, An Introduction to Behavioral Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1993); Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992); Frans B. M. de Waal, ed., Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 121–43; Marc Hauser, The Evolution of Communication, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
first attempts at visual art and music: Stephen Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); D. Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
detailed observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies: Paul R. Ehrlich, Human Natures. Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (New York: Penguin, 2002); Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, 2003); Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989).
the prevalence of caregiving, a hallmark feature of higher primates: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written brilliantly about the prevalence of caretaking behavior in different primates and how it is an often overlooked basis of alliances and strategic exchanges. Hrdy, Mother Nature (New York: Ballantine, 1999). For a rigorous discussion of human caregiving, read Shelley E. Taylor, The Tending Instinct (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).
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