What are emotions?

Introduction

Over the centuries, philosophers, psychologists, and other scholars have debated the nature of emotions, offering a wide range of perspectives and theories. This debate addresses many issues, including basic questions such as why people have emotions and what their function is. Advances in neuroscience have led scientists to attempt to determine the parts of the brain involved in experiencing emotions. Child developmental psychologists address how young children understand others’ emotions, and cognitive psychologists examine how emotion affects memory. Anthropologists and social psychologists investigate whether there are cultural differences in how people experience emotions.

Reasons for Emotions

According to the English naturalist Charles Darwin
and his theory of evolution, one reason people have emotions is because of natural selection. Emotions exist because they enhance the chance of surviving and reproducing. For example, when a deer senses another animal, it reacts with fear and freezes. This reduces its chance of being attacked because animals usually attack in response to motion. When a person freezes in response to a car whizzing by, the fear response may act to save the person’s life. More generally, Dutch psychologist Nico Fridja suggests that emotions are a response to situations in which people need to do something. For example, a negative emotion suggests that something is wrong in the immediate situation and that the person must act to change the situation.

Expressions of emotions also play an important role in communicating information to others. Most people learn to read the expressions of others, infer their emotions, and monitor their behavior as a result. For example, if a person is arguing with someone who begins to raise his or her upper eyelids and show an open, “square” mouth revealing teeth (signs of aggression), then it may be time to end the argument. Nonhuman animals also communicate with emotional expressions, as documented by Darwin. For example, American psychologist Robert Plutchik described a common expression of a cat who has encountered an animal such as a threatening dog. The cat opens its incisors, pulls back its ears, erects the hair on its body, arches its back, and hisses. This expression indicates a mixture of fear and anger, signaling that it may attack the dog and making the cat look larger and more ferocious. As a result, the cat’s emotional expression has adaptive value, as it decreases the chance of its being attacked, which increases the cat’s chances of survival and reproduction. This type of emotional expression is shown by many species of animals. Plutchik notes that humans display a similar emotional expression, in which an increase in apparent size is achieved by expansion of the chest, thrusting the head forward, standing more erect, and sometimes by erection of the hair.

Despite these positive aspects of emotions, a large body of research suggests that emotions interfere with rational decision making by affecting people’s thinking and motivation. However, American psychologists DouglasMedin and Arthur Markman note that some research suggests that emotions play a positive role in decision making. As an example, they describe the research of Portuguese neurologist Antonio Damasio, who suggests that anticipatory somatic feedback (for example, skin conductance response) is necessary for good decision making. He and his colleagues studied patients with damage to their prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that plays an important role in reasoning, memory, and decision making). These patients, unlike people without such damage, never develop anticipatory skin conductance responses when evaluating risky decisions.

Damasio and his colleagues gave a gambling task to these patients. They were allowed to choose cards from four decks, A, B, C, and D. Choosing either deck A or B resulted in winning one hundred points. However, choosing either deck C or D resulted in winning only fifty points. (Points were converted into play money.) However, every once in a while, the selection of any deck would result in a loss (with deck A or B yielding a loss twice as great as deck C or D). Over the course of the gambling task, choosing from decks C and D yielded more points than choosing from decks A and B. Normal patients were initially attracted to the large number of points provided by decks A and B, but after experiencing “ punishments,” they tended to choose from decks C and D, which provided more points in the long term (over the course of the gambling task). However, patients with prefrontal damage tended to choose from decks A and B more often than from decks C and D. Further studies revealed that prefrontal patients performed poorly on these gambling tasks because they were not sensitive to anticipatory somatic feedback. Furthermore, the prefrontal patients had normal intelligence quotients (IQs) and should have been able to figure out the relative likelihood of the wins and losses in the different decks. Markman and Medin concluded that while emotion may sometimes hinder the making of rational choices, emotions are also sometimes important in correctly evaluating those choices.

Defining Emotions

By trying to understand the differences between emotions and similar concepts such as moods, sensations, temperament, and surprise, researchers can obtain a better understanding of emotions. For example, American psychologist Jeff Larsen and his colleagues suggest that moods tend to be enduring and diffuse, whereas emotions tend to be short-lived and directed at particular objects or situations. English clinical psychologists Mick Power and Tim Dagleish also suggest that moods influence emotions. For instance, a father in a happy mood might not become angry toward his child for dropping her ice-cream cone. However, if the father was in an angry mood, he might become angry.

Temperament is more enduring than either emotions or moods, as it is a personality characteristic or trait of a person. Therefore, an angry type of person may become easily upset in many situations in which a happy person would not become upset.

Researchers have argued that surprise is not an emotion. For example, American psychologists Andrew Ortony and Terence Turner note that emotions are characterized by valenced states (positive or negative feelings). However, they point out that surprise is not defined by a valenced state: A person can be surprised about winning a huge prize (a positive feeling), or surprised about the failure of his or her brand-new car to start in the morning (a negative feeling), or be surprised by some highly improbable but personally irrelevant fact such as that all the members of some committee, by chance, share the same birthday (a neutral feeling).

Basic Emotions

Many theories of emotions assume that a small set of basic or fundamental emotions exist. Ortony and Turner suggest a number of reasons why this might be true. Some emotions appear to exist in all cultures and in some nonhuman animals. They also seem universally recognizable by characteristic facial expressions. There might also be a set of basic emotions with biological functions that are particularly important to the survival of the individual and of the species. Finally, some researchers believe that there may be many emotions. If there is a small set of basic emotions, then researchers may be able to understand the larger set of emotions by using the basic emotions as building blocks for constructing nonbasic emotions.

As evidence for the existence of basic emotions, Power and Dagleish cite American psychologist Paul Ekman, who noted that every proponent of the existence of basic emotions who has conducted investigations has obtained evidence for six basic emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust (though Ortony and others argue that surprise is not an emotion). They also note that Ekman and his colleagues have shown that different cultures label emotions in the same way. A study authored by Rachael E. Jack, Oliver G. B. Garrod, and Philippe G. Schyns and published in the January 2014 issue of Current Biology, narrowed the scope of basic emotion to just four, finding that the differentiation between fear and surprise, and anger and disgust is likely more social than biological, proposing a revised list of basic emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise/fear, and anger/disgust.

The claim that there are basic emotions is still a controversial and complicated issue. American psychologist Gerald Clore and Ortony argue that contrary to traditional views, emotions do not have clear boundaries or distinctive properties that allow them to be straightforwardly identified. For example, they do not have distinctive facial expressions or physiological states. Emotions do involve facial expressions, psychophysiology, and brain structures, but these properties are not sufficient to characterize basic emotions such as anger or fear. Instead, emotions are more variable.

Similarities and Differences Among Cultures

Scholars are divided on whether emotions are universal or whether they differ across cultures. Defenders of the universalist approach claim that emotions are the product of human evolution and are part of humans’ biological hardware (for example, Ekman and Plutchik). Therefore, cultures have similar experiences and expressions of certain basic emotions. Ekman found his six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise—to be universal. In contrast, the cultural relativist approach suggests that experience and expressions of emotions vary considerably and may even be socially constructed. Defenders of this view argue that all emotions are the product of a person’s culture. Social values and cultural beliefs can affect how people express their emotions. Therefore, people in different cultures may have different emotional experiences and reactions to similar social situations.

Researchers have examined how cultural values and beliefs influence emotions. The influential Dutch writer Geert Hofstede developed a set of four dimensions that characterize cultures. The dimension of individualism reflects the extent to which a culture is
individualistic or
collectivistic. An individualistic culture tends to socialize its members to think of themselves as individuals and to give priority to their personal goals (for example, the culture of the United States). A collectivistic culture tends to socialize its members to think of themselves as members of the larger group and to place the group’s concerns before their own (for example, the cultures of China, Japan, and Korea). Power distance reflects the extent to which members of a culture accept unequal distributions of power within institutions and organizations. Uncertainty avoidance reflects the degree to which members share beliefs and build institutions that protect them from discomfort and fear of ambiguous situations. Masculinity characterizes how much the culture values stereotypical masculine qualities (such as financial awards) rather than feminine qualities (such as caring for others).

Canadian psychologist Ulrich Schimmack found differences in how some cultures recognize emotions. For example, individualistic cultures were better at recognizing facial expressions of happiness than collectivistic cultures (though it is not clear why). Cultures high in uncertainty avoidance were less accurate at identifying fear. Schimmack suggests that this finding supports American psychologist David Matsumoto’s hypothesis that cultures high in uncertainty avoidance have formed institutions to minimize fear, which may explain why they have difficulty identifying fear compared with cultures that are not high in uncertainty avoidance.

Some research suggests that there are both universal and cultural differences in recognizing and communicating emotions. When people were asked to identify emotions in other people, they were always able to outperform anyone making random guesses; however, Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady found that they were more accurate at identifying emotions when the emotions were expressed by members of their own culture rather than by members of a different culture. These researchers concluded that expressions of emotions are largely universal, but the subtle differences that exist across cultures challenge effective communication. For example, they suggested that people visiting a different country often intuit that their basic communication signals tend to be misinterpreted more often by people of a different country than people of their own.

On the basis of these and other findings, Elfenbein and Ambady developed the dialect theory of emotional expressions. The theory proposes that people’s culture shapes their emotional expressions in a way that creates subtle differences in their appearance compared with the appearances of people from other cultures. Cultural differences in emotional expression also result from display rules—informal nonverbal rules about socially acceptable ways to use and control expressions. For example, most American women are likely to cry if a loved one dies in a war; however, Ekman reported that samurai women would smile rather than cry so as to conform to a display rule that women should hide distress and show joy in public.

Theories of How Emotions Are Experienced

Many theories of emotions have been proposed. Almost all the theories in the last few centuries have been influenced by the work of philosophers such as Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, and William Lyons. Some of the theories have been particularly influential in the study of emotion. The James-Lange theory of emotion was independently developed by two nineteenth century scholars, William James and Carl Lange. It states that as a response to experiences in a particular situation, the autonomic nervous system produces physiological changes such as muscle tension, increase in heart rate, perspiration, and dryness of the mouth. Emotions are feelings that come about as the result of these physiological changes. For example, a person who starts crying infers that he or she is sad because of the crying, and not the other way around. To most people this view of emotions is counterintuitive and goes against common sense.

The James-Lange theory was challenged in the 1920s by the physiologists Walter Bradford Cannon and Philip Bard. The Cannon-Bard theory of emotion suggested that emotions cause physiological change (a view that is opposite of the James-Lange theory). For example, if a person sees a strange man outside the window late at night, that person might experience the emotion of fear, which causes physiological changes such as trembling and sweating.

Perhaps the most important theory of emotions is appraisal theory, of which there are a number of variations. An important assumption shared by all appraisal theories is that the experience of an emotion is the result of how people interpret, evaluate, or appraise a particular situation. Put more simply, people decide to feel an emotion after interpreting or explaining what just happened. Differences in how people appraise the same situation can lead them to experience different emotions. For example, if an average skier and an expert skier are skiing down a mountain and come on a very steep slope, the expert skier interprets the upcoming situation as an exciting challenge and consequently experiences happiness. However, the average skier, who lacks the skill to tackle such a slope, interprets the situation as being dangerous and experiences fear. Also, the mental processes that a person uses to appraise a situation need not be slow, deliberate, or conscious. Appraisal of a situation and its resulting emotion can occur rapidly and unconsciously.

Psychologists Clore and Ortony have proposed an appraisal theory that involves two kinds of mental processes: a relatively slow reasoning process and a faster associative process. These processes serve different adaptive functions. The associative process prepares a person for a developing situation (such as hearing a loud animal noise). It is based on responses such as reflexes, release of adrenalin, and so on, that according to Clore and Ortony often get the emotional process started. The reasoning process is similar to the mental processes of other appraisal theories.

Bibliography

Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen. Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Cues. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1975. Print.

Jack, Rachael E., Oliver G. B. Garrod, and Philippe G. Schyns. "Dynamic Facial Expressions of Emotion Transmit an Evolving Hierarchy of Signals over Time." Current Biology 24.2 (2014): 187–92. Print.

Lewis, Michael, Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, eds. Handbook of Emotions. 3d ed. New York: Guilford, 2008. Print.

Ortony, Andrew, Gerald L. Clore, and Allan Collins. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. New York: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print.

Plutchik, Robert. Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution. Washington: American Psychological Association, 2003. Print.

Power, Mick J., and Tim Dalgleish. Cognition and Emotion: From Order to Disorder. Hove: Psychology Press, 2008. Print.

Sieb, Richard. "The Emergence of Emotions." Activitas Nervosa Superior 55.4 (2013): 115–45. Print.

Wassmann, Claudia. "'Picturesque Incisiveness': Explaining the Celebrity of James's Theory of Emotion." Jour. of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 50.2 (2014): 166–88. Print.