THE NATURE OF EMOTIONS

What are emotions? Are emotions cultural or biological, or both? Are they nothing more than constructs of folk knowledge? Are they merely bodily responses, dictated by hormones, skin conductance levels, and cerebral blood flows? Are there basic emotions? Affects? Feelings? Thoughts? Why do we have them? What functions do they serve? What about the so-called social emotions? Are there universal emo­tions across cultures? Are emotions rational? Controllable? To which actions do emotions lead? Is there an automatic link between emotion and action?

William James (1842-1910), one of the fathers of psychology, was interested in research on emotion; however, his immediate successors were much less so.

Today we know that thought, behavior, and feeling are closely connected. Hence, interest in learning about emotions, though resuscitated only very recently, is now exploding and already rapidly changing. Up until only a few years ago, researchers were intent upon constructing classifications categoriz­ing the fundamental “basic” emotions. For those who are interested, Andrew Ortony and Terence J. Turner (1990) give a tabular overview of some of the classification systems.

Today, the new cohort of researchers no longer endorses a single perspective on emotion, preferring a multilayered approach that conceptualizes elaborated emotions as comprehensive packages of meanings, behaviors, social practices, and norms that crystallize around primordial emotions. James R. Averill (1997) dis­cusses how emotional experiences are “scripted.” Jan Smedslund (1997) describes the psycho-logic inherent in our dealings with emotion.

This approach has invalidated the old nature versus nurture debate. We are learning that emotions are both hardwired and malleable, and adaptive to social and cultural influences. Hardwired basic affects such as the fearful fight or flight reaction or its opposite, pleasurable approach, are the bedrock on which elaborated emotions build. Our primordial emotions are universal, biologically based response systems that have enabled humans to meet the problems of physical survival, repro­duction, and group governance. Culture, however, has loosened the link between those primordial emotions and their functions. New solutions to old problems have emerged, as well as new uses for old emotions.

Humans display the greatest variety of feelings and emotions of all species and this is reflected in the complex web of connections between the more recently developed prefrontal area and the older limbic structures of the brain. The historical evolution of the brain and emotions is mirrored in each human being’s individual development. Ontogeny (development of an individual organ­ism) often recapitulates phylogeny (evolution of a particular species). Newborns process basic affects in lower brain structures. Emotions, which are more recent in human evolution, become possible only when certain cognitive milestones have been reached in the life of a child. In the second half of the second year of life, the cognitive capacity of objective self-awareness emerges, with accom­panying emotions such as embarrassment, empathy, and envy. Between two and three years of age, the complex ability to evaluate one’s behavior accord­ing to an external or internal standard emerges. Self-conscious evaluative emotions such as pride, shame, or guilt are now possible.

The most immediate function provided to us by our emotional apparatus is to warn us. Fear alerts us to potential danger or to potential benefit. We hear a noise. It could be a thief—or just our favorite cat. The first brain structure to react is the amygdala, an almond-shaped neurostructure in the lower cortical brain. This structure identifies shapes, sounds, and other perceptual charac­teristics, sorting for threats and, very quickly and automatically, responding with avoidance if necessary. It acts as a preattentive analyzer of our environ­ment and works without our conscious control, triggering fast and automatic emotional changes in autonomic tone and heart rate. Is it a thief? We jump up from our chair, breathe heavily, and feel frightened. Fear is a primary reaction that is processed via adrenergic neurons (as opposed to dopaminergic neurons). This system developed early in human evolution and dominates our first years as children. In adults, stress brings it to the fore again, often in unfortunate ways.

Let’s assume the noise proves to emanate from our favorite cat, back home from an excursion! If a situation shows itself to be rewarding, rather than a threat, the amygdala can relax, passing the data on to the basal ganglia to encode and store, awash in positive-valence dopaminergic neurons. We get ready to approach the situation. We open our arms to our purring pet. This simple daily stimulus response is aided by information from two internal “library” structures (left prefrontal cortex and a posterior area), from which our brain draws stored abstract semantic and associative knowledge. All this is automatic. We are not in control.

Our brain “wakes up” to controlled emotion processing when another, higher brain structure (the anterior cingulate, ACC) signals discrepancy, uncertainty, errors, conflicts, pain, or violations of expectations.

As we see, when Eve faces Adam—or when global neighbors negotiate nuclear disarmament—the participants’ brains loop through at least six brain structures that deal with emotion, from lower to higher brain structures, from evolutionarily older to more recent components, from stored memories of how we reacted as children to new modes of responses that are open to us as adults. There are several distinctions and dualities. Feelings can be hot or cold, they can be positive or negative, and they can be automatic or controlled. Further­more, there is the doer-watcher duality. The duality of attention and processing is based on the fact that we can perform a task and at the same time watch our­selves performing this task. Emotions can interfere in this duality and disturb task focus and performance.

What we discussed so far indicates that emotions serve at least three func­tions. First, emotions monitor our inner world; second, they monitor our rela­tionships with the outer world; and third, they help us act. There is order and coherence in these emotional processes, but that order can quickly degenerate into chaos if we are unaware and insufficiently in control. Research indicates that our behavior is regulated by feedback loops that are organized hierarchi­cally. Superordinate loops attend to longer-term, abstract goals. Embedded within them are subordinate loops for short-term tasks. We create or maintain destructive conflict when we allow lower-order mechanisms to supersede higher-order mechanisms.

Earlier, we discussed that emotions are hardwired and malleable. How can we imagine the various levels playing together in daily life? There is the hardwired physiological response and negative state of “feeling bad” or, at the psychological level, “this is bad for me.” Parallel, there is the hardwired positive state of “feeling good” or “pleasure” or “this is good for me.” As the “me” acquires social identity, these basic responses form the nucleus for our more elaborated emotions toward other persons, groups, notions, or ideologies. Rejection and enmity as well as affection, attachment, loyalty, cooperation, and other posi­tive emotions are no longer automatic. A very simple example shows this. Spi­ders or worms are greeted as welcome delicacies in some cultures and in others with disgust. Or, for a vegetarian, eating meat is sickening, while it is a joy for a nonvegetarian. The example of Eve and Adam shows how our emotional reac­tions are embedded in broader historic transformations of normative contexts. The term “domestic chastisement” expresses positive valence—the “man of the house” has the right and duty to “chastise” his wife and children, and it is regarded as “good” for all involved to be reminded of “their place.” Nowadays, particularly in social contexts influenced by human rights values, this term transmutes into the negative concept of “domestic violence.” In other words, the same sequence of behavior is no longer regarded as “good for everybody,” but as “bad for everybody.”

It would be easy to overwhelm readers with an overabundance of concepts and terms. Goals, attitudes, affects, feelings, emotions, emotional states, moods, consciousness, self, psyche—the list of terms is endless and often scholars do not agree on their definitions. For our purposes, it is sufficient to understand that we have to give up any quest for rigid, context-free classifications of com­plex elaborated emotions. Elaborated emotions are multifaceted clusters embed­ded in culture and history. It is important to recognize, furthermore, that there is an ongoing tension between older, more primitive emotional responses and our more recently achieved capabilities. To some extent, we manage to resolve this tension through a series of hierarchically structured feedback loops. If we succeed, emotions can be helpful and guide us well. Unfortunately, those loops are too often overridden in conflict situations, when the older parts of the brain leap into action to ensure the organism’s immediate survival. This can lead to disaster. Learning to recognize and defuse this tension may be one of the most important skills an individual committed to healthy conflict resolution can achieve.