Good Reasons for Bad Feelings
Page 8
The Polish philosopher and linguist Anna Wierzbicka, now living in Australia, addressed these questions with profound clarity and depth.76 She began by demonstrating large cultural differences in words for emotions, deftly destroying the notion that universal basic emotions could ever be described by a handful of English words. She went on, however, to show that all humans share what she calls universal “semantic primitives,” concepts such as “big—small,” and, notably, the concept of “feeling.” The concept of emotion in English is culture bound, but the experience of feeling is universal, as are a few emotions, including fear, joy, sadness, and shame.
Wierzbicka concluded that each emotion corresponds to a specific situation, and most of the situations are remarkably universal. She developed a sophisticated but complicated system to define the situations that correspond to each emotion, such as being betrayed by a supposed friend. Her system shows that beneath cultural differences, emotions are consistent responses to situations, and the universality of some situations has shaped universal emotions.
The old dichotomy of biology versus culture is fading, replaced by a more sophisticated view of how they influence each other. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work exemplifies this advance by describing a “psychological construction” view of emotions that is positioned between appraisal theories and social construction theories.77,78 Her work recognizes that the basic ingredients of emotions are shaped by natural selection and shared with other animals but emphasizes that this does not mean that emotions are each separate with dedicated brain circuits and a fixed pattern of expression. Instead, they are overlapping states that interweave with one another and cognition and perception influenced by culture to get the job done.79 This is progress entirely consistent with the recognition of evolved organic complexity.
Are Emotions Ignoble?
A stream of thought that goes back to philosophers in ancient Greece views emotions as maladaptive interlopers that undermine human reason. In Phaedrus, Plato viewed human lives as chariots pulled by two horses. The one representing reason is “noble . . . upright, and cleanly made.” The other, emotion, is “ignoble . . . a crooked lumbering animal . . . the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.”80 Leave it to a philosopher to take sides with reason and disparage emotion.
More than two thousand years after Plato wrote, I received an email invitation to a lecture entitled “Unbridled Passions.” The metaphor endures for good reasons. In states of passion, we may accuse a lover, attack a boss, insult a friend, or have sex with someone entirely inappropriate. Emotionally inspired actions often arouse regret. Emotions also cause useless suffering. Baseless fears keep bird phobics from picnics, flying phobics from wonderful trips, and agoraphobics trapped in the house for years. Unjustified feelings of guilt and unworthiness burden many lives, especially those of people who tend to be more moral than average. Envy, rage, and jealousy wreck the lives of many others. Between maladaptive actions, unwarranted suffering, and causing social conflicts, a lot of emotion seems ignoble and useless. Why did natural selection leave us with so much useless, painful emotion? An answer requires understanding why we care so much about our goals and how emotions help us to reach them.
Our ancestors encountered situations in which emotions were useful. A few are specific physical situations aroused by specific physical cues. Falling, the sight of blood, a looming shadow, and sudden loud noises all indicate possible danger, so they connect to fear directly, or they get connected very readily by learning.81,82,83,84 However, more subtle situations also shape emotions, especially those that arise in the course of pursuing goals.
Organisms try to get sex, power, and resources and to avoid danger and loss. Pursuing these goals gives rise to a set of defined situations. Each one poses different adaptive challenges that shape a different emotional state. Opportunity arouses enthusiasm. Success arouses joy. Threat arouses anxiety. Loss arouses sadness. I was delighted to find that the four situations that arise in goal pursuit map so neatly to four emotions. Philosopher friends Allan Gibbard and Peter Railton pointed out that this is a very old idea: Plato recognized four closely related basic emotions: hope, fear, joy, and sadness.85 Moreover, they noted, variations on this four-part scheme were central to most theories of emotions in ancient Greece and again in Europe since the Middle Ages. It can be expanded by separating physical from social situations and by adding the emotions aroused by alternative outcomes, disappointment when pursuit of an opportunity fails, and relief when a threat is avoided.
EMOTIONS FOR SITUATIONS THAT ARISE IN GOAL PURSUIT
BEFORE
AFTER
ALTERNATIVE
OUTCOME
OPPORTUNITY
PHYSICAL
Desire
Pleasure
Disappointment
SOCIAL
Excitement
Joy
THREAT
PHYSICAL
Fear
Pain
Relief
SOCIAL
Anxiety
Sadness
The word goal is completely inadequate to describe the diversity of human pursuits. Some goals are long term, such as raising happy children, while others are instantaneous, such as trying to convince your conversation partner that your joke was less offensive than it really was. For simplicity, I use the word goal to mean anything that someone is trying to get, find, become, lose, escape, or avoid. Psychologists have used many other descriptors, including mission, life task, enterprise, aim, purpose, objective, or pursuit of personal meaning or possible selves. Each of those terms connects to its own rich literature that explores emotions and goal pursuit.86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93 Psychologists know all about how goal pursuit influences emotions. Psychiatrists, not so much.
Turning Emotions On
How does the brain know when to turn on an emotion? As already mentioned, some cues, such as looming shadows and sudden noises, race along special brain pathways to get fear up and running fast, as Alfred Hitchcock knew so well. Other cues arouse emotions only after learning. A buzzing noise that initially arouses only mild interest will evoke terror after being paired with a shock a few times, as Ivan Pavlov demonstrated to the vexation of his dogs. A light that has no effect at first will stimulate copious salivation after being paired with food a few times, as dog owners observe when a proffered biscuit results in saliva dripping on the carpet. Extra saliva in the seconds just before food arrives must give a selective advantage big enough to keep the classical conditioning mechanism intact.
Rewards and punishments also cause emotional learning. Memories of excruciating embarrassment the morning after you put a lampshade on your head at a party should arouse uncomfortable emotions that inhibit any impulse to do it again at tonight’s party—unless, that is, your anxiety again floats away on a tide of tequila.
Humans share these learning capacities with other creatures, but we also have an extraordinary special ability. Our minds make models of the world and project alternative futures across months and years.94,95,96 The outcomes of different possible actions play out in our minds. As we plan, fantasize, dream, and imagine, emotions nudge us toward some paths and away from others. What would marriage with the exciting person be like? What about the stable, boring one? The mind generates fantasies infused with emotions that direct us toward plans that will benefit our genes—and perhaps us as well.
Thanks to this ability to use internal models to predict alternative futures, we can pursue larger goals over longer time scal
es than any other species can. Our strategies often involve complex social relationships and difficult decisions. Decisions about whether to give up on big projects that are failing are especially tough. Is it worth living yet another year with the exciting one who won’t commit? What about trying out for the basketball team again this year? Is there any point in applying for a promotion? Is it worth continuing to restore that 1955 Thunderbird without an engine? What about continuing the search for genes that cause schizophrenia? We are pulled constantly by the demands of multiple different projects and conflicting strategies. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues convincingly that this explains why we have large brains.97
While some goals are universal, many are not. Human values and identities are gloriously diverse, so predicting what emotion will be aroused by new information requires knowing an individual’s values, goals, projects, and strategies. The big news in emotions research is that emotions arise from the “appraisals” people make about the personal significance of information.98,99,100 That tiny pink spot on a positive pregnancy test may induce tears of despair in a teenager or tears of joy in a woman who has been trying to get pregnant for years.
This is a world beyond crude stimulus-response models. It involves not only subtle social learning and information processing but also an individual’s interpretation of the meaning of information for ability to make progress toward personal goals using his or her idiosyncratic strategies. People value health, money, status, and attractive partners to vastly different degrees. Some people mainly care about money; others care only about love or being good. Not only do values differ, but people also use diverse social strategies. One person seeks to gain social influence by being generous, another by being the life of the party, another by making threats. The first two will avoid revealing selfishness, while the third person will avoid revealing sympathy. Goals differ even in the same individual over time, so the same information may arouse very different emotions. For instance, that tiny pink spot.
An evolutionary view of emotions is sometimes thought to imply a rigid impersonal view of human behavior. However, far from assuming that everyone is identical, an evolutionary perspective encourages giving close attention to the hopes, dreams, fears, and manifold peculiarities of diverse individuals.
Regulating Emotion
Some people are extremely emotional, while others hardly react no matter what happens. Such extremes are laid bare in certain marriages. A couple came for help because of conflicts throughout their twenty years of unhappiness together. He manages a local bank branch. She is a graphic artist. He found her exciting from the time they first met in the college library on a Friday night. He says, “She was gorgeous and exciting. She got me out of my shell. But she won’t listen to reason.” She says, “I had a couple of drinks. My plan was to seduce a business student, but look what I got—a calculator!” Together they often make good decisions, but they don’t much enjoy the process or each other. The futures they imagined proved poor predictors. The self-deceptions induced by romantic infatuation are exhilarating, but they benefit our genes more than our selves.
Some people worry for days about the meaning of a raised eyebrow that may have just been a twitch; others hardly notice direct insults. Some people are thrilled by small opportunities; others hardly shift in their chairs at a windfall. Both extremes have costs. People prone to intense emotions experience enthusiasms that shift their efforts from one unfinished project to another and demoralization that blinds them to new opportunities. People who hardly experience emotion neither take full advantage of opportunities nor fully protect themselves from threats. Why such a wide range of responsiveness? A good guess is that people across the range have generally had similar Darwinian fitness. There is no one normal genome. There is no one normal personality.
We all struggle to get relief from painful emotions. They are painful for a reason: to motivate efforts to change, escape, and avoid such situations. But changing or escaping a bad situation is not always possible. When it isn’t possible to help an addicted child or a dying spouse, useless terrible feelings arise. Even in everyday life, useless feelings plague us. Controlling them is an understandable goal. Scores of books and articles suggest strategies for emotional regulation.101 Most emphasize changing habits of thought or changing the meaning of the situation. Some try to dampen emotions directly by exercise, distraction, meditation, or psychotropic drugs. Some encourage trying to change the situation despite the costs.
Then there is the most common and effective strategy: just wait. The situation changes. The emotional fog clears. Anger fades. Becoming a paraplegic is terrible, and winning the lottery is wonderful, but one’s overall level of subjective well-being tends to revert toward the level before the accident or big win.102 We spend our lives chasing carrots and fleeing from possible calamities. We feel great when we succeed and terrible when we fail—for a while. Then the “psychological immune system” kicks in and helps us bounce back from disappointment much faster than we anticipated.103 This may be because, like levels of emotionality, the average set point for subjective well-being may not influence fitness much. What matters is the ability to respond appropriately when circumstances change.
Emotional Disorders
An evolutionary perspective on normal emotions is the essential but mostly missing foundation for making sense of abnormal emotions. Every bodily response can go awry. The two obvious ways are too little response or too much. People who never cough have a serious disorder, as do those who cough for no reason. Deficient immune response results in infection; excessive response causes inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. People who lack the capacity to feel pain die young; those with chronic pain sometimes wish they had.
Research on emotional disorders has focused on negative emotions, mostly anxiety and low mood. The new field of positive psychology brings needed attention to deficits of positive emotions.104 The tendency to focus on excess negative emotions and deficient positive emotions is readily explained by the pleasure principle: we want to get pleasure and avoid pain. But this neglects two other important kinds of emotional disorders.
Positive emotion can be excessive.105,106,107,108,109 The extreme version is the serious and sometimes fatal abnormal state of mania. Some people in its grip are euphoric, but others are swept up in the uncontrollable pursuit of grandiose goals that generate a pressure cooker of mixed subjective states. Milder versions of unjustified positive emotion are great for those who experience them, but some perky people can be insufferable, while others blithely ignore social cues that make others wish they would be more sensitive.
Negative emotions can be deficient. Few complain, but these are serious diseases. Hypophobia, insufficient anxiety, can be fatal. Lack of jealousy reduces reproductive success. Lack of sadness can result in doing the same stupid things over and over.
Positive psychology and negative psychology get all the attention. An evolutionary perspective highlights the neglect of “diagonal psychology,” that is, excess positive emotions and deficient negative emotions. Excesses and deficiencies of anxiety, low mood, embarrassment, disgust, surprise, guilt, pride, envy, jealousy, and love all deserve attention.
DIAGONAL PSYCHOLOGY
NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
POSITIVE EMOTIONS
EXCESSES
Excessive negative emotions
Excessive positive emotions
DEFICIENCIES
Deficient negative emotions
Deficient positive emotions
Excesses and deficiencies are only the most obvious kinds of emotional abnormalities. Responses can also be too quick, too slow, too enduring, or in response to the wrong cues. A quick temper is a problem, but so is a slow one or a tendency to hold grudges or taking offens
e for no reason. Anger can be useful if it is aroused by the right cues at the right rate to the right intensity for the right duration, but it can go awry in many ways.
An evolutionary framework will eventually help us find new kinds of treatment for emotional problems, but it has practical implications even now. Emotions have meaning. We should try to understand their messages. They are usually trying to get us to do or stop doing something. Sometimes they are wise and we should heed them.110,111,112,113,114,115 But not always. Sometimes they push us to do things that help our genes but harm us. Sometimes they arise from our distorted views of the world. Sometimes they come from brain abnormalities. Considering all the possibilities provides a framework for making wise decisions. We can often do that for ourselves, but an expert’s advice can be invaluable.
Emotion experts who think like mechanics diagnose what is wrong and recommend a treatment that is likely to work. They tend to blame one kind of cause and provide treatment for that cause, whether crooked thinking or brain pathology. Emotion experts with an evolutionary perspective take an engineer’s point of view. They recognize the utility of emotions and the historical and design constraints that make us all vulnerable to emotional problems. This encourages consideration of multiple causes and possible treatments. Instead of assuming that positive emotion is good and negative emotion is bad, experts with an evolutionary perspective can analyze the appropriateness of an emotion for the situation. Instead of assuming that the emotion regulation mechanism is awry, they can assess whether the severity of the symptoms is proportional to the situation. Instead of assuming that normally aroused symptoms are good for the individual, they recognize the possibility that an emotion is advancing the interests of genes at a cost to the individual. Instead of lumping together factors that arouse emotions as “stress,” they can dig in to do the hard work of trying to understand the origins of an individual’s problems. In short, they can think and act like physicians.