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PSYC18 - Psychology of Emotion
Lecture 4
Professor: Gerald Cupchik
S-634
Office Hours: Thurs. 10-11, 2-3
T.A.: Michelle Hilscher
S-150
Office Hours: Thurs. 10-11, 2-3
Course Website: www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik
FIRST HALF
TVO FINALS LECTURE 2008
“Two Faces of Emotion:Actions and Reactions”
I - BASIC QUESTIONS
Scholars and people in everyday life share an interest in the topic of emotion, but ask different kinds of questions.
People in their everyday lives ask very practical questions about their own emotions and those of others.
“How can I better deal with my emotions?”
“Can I learn to recognize the emotions of others more accurately?”
“Why can’t I remember how I felt in such and such a situation…yesterday…long ago?”
Psychologists and philosophers are interested in answering fundamental questions such as:
“What is an emotion?”
“What are the relations between feelings and emotions?”
“How has evolution shaped emotion?”
I want to address both of these types of questions.
Of course, philosophers and psychologists did not ‘discover’ emotions, which are embodied in the myths and narratives of different cultures.
In the West, religious texts such as the Bible and Koran are replete with stories about conflict, fear, envy, and grace… events and situations which can stimulate our reflections upon life and, where relevant, a person’s relationship with G-d.
II – A FRAMEWORK FOR DISCUSSING EMOTION
“Emotion” emerges as a unique concept in the 18th century.
Before the mid-18th century, scholars wrote about the passions rather than about emotions as such. These passions were tied to the fate of the soul.
In the mid-1700s, emotion becomes part of secular, in other words, non-religious discourse. Samuel Johnson (1755) defined emotion as a “disturbance of mind; vehemence of passion, pleasing or painful.”
Accordingly, emotions were seen as e-motions that could put a person off course and disorient proper judgment.
This secularization of thinking about emotion in Western Europe can be linked to an increasing interest in the individual self as a force within society.
In the mid to later 19th century, with Darwin’s influence and developments in physiology of the human body, the idea of ‘having emotions’ rode to fame on a bodily horse.
Some scholars set the brain as a centre that controls emotion.
Others, like William James, proposed that emotions reflect our bodily gut reactions and expressive reactions to events.
Some Basic Principles
First, emotions exist on their own as independent phenomena… we feel happy or sad or angry. These emotions are very real experiences for us.
Second, emotions cannot exist without some kind of thought processes. So emotion and cognition are not diametrically opposed.
After all, we have emotions about something and so we have to interpret situations or reach back into our memories to reconstruct situations and the feelings that they engendered.
Third, emotions also pertain to bodily states that we can feel.
Feelings are fundamental.
We can say, “I feel pleasure or pain, nervous or excited.” We can feel our bodily states…
Fourth, emotions are more abstract than feelings and pertain to the self.
You can feel states of pleasure, pain, or excitement. But you cannot say, “I am pleasure, pain, or excitement.” You can only say, “I am happy, sad, angry, frightened, disgusted” and so on. These emotions pertain to me… to my self. In a sense, you don’t just feel it, you are it!
In summary:
Emotions exist as independent phenomena which are related to the self involving both thought and bodily responses to social or physical events and situations.
III – TWO CONTRASTING LIFE THEMES
There are two contrasting life themes which have an important impact on emotions: Adaptation and The Search for Meaning
Adaptation as a Life Theme
The theme of adaptation is very concrete and is linked with action.
It was highlighted in the Darwinian revolution and applies to all living species; vegetable, animal and human.
This theme links us with our evolutionary past and by this I really mean our “animal past”… our struggle for survival.
We are always engaged in an attempt to confront challenges, address needs, and achieve goals.
At a fundamental level, bodily needs are linked with hunger, thirst, sexual drive, and so on.
At a more complex social level, needs are associated with affiliation, power, achievement, and so forth.
What is the Role of Emotion Here?
Originally, emotions were tied to wired-in instincts in the animal world so that particular kinds of cues elicit emotions that facilitate survival and reproduction through the life cycle.
A predator evokes fear so that the animal can escape and live another day.
In the mating context, what appears like anger or rage establishes dominance and thereby maintains a social hierarchy with the result that the strongest reproduce.
In the reproduction context, acts of caring foster attachment between parent and newborn.
Adaptation in humans carries these emotions and feelings to a more sophisticated level reflecting the increased complexity of social situations that require interpretation.
Adaptation requires skills of appraisal and an ability to implement strategies.
The Search for Meaning as a Life Theme
The search for meaning in life is what separates us from the animal world – it relies on an ability to reflect.
It enables us to come to terms with the uniqueness of our experiences… to understand these experiences… to place them in the context of critical life situations.
We don’t really appraise these situations and events in terms of their relative benefit for us.
Rather, we interpret them… we respond spontaneously and very rapidly to them… we resonate to them with our whole bodies.
In contrast to the process of adaptation, where strategy addresses needs and challenges, the effort after meaning is a more interpretive and constructive process.
It can be shaped by either personal or collective interpretations of events.
Complex emotions, such as ecstasy or vexation, or blends of emotion, such as happiness and sadness, reflect responses to the unique meanings of situations and events for each of us.
Our powerful reactions to situations that don’t affect others in the same way are like the tip of the iceberg that takes us dep into our life histories.
We achieve perspective on our lives when we can relate emotional experiences to our personal histories and their original contexts.
This act of contextualizing the roots of our emotions is central to personal growth.
When we are clear about these contexts, we gain closure and are no longer bound by our emotions… slaves to our passions.
In other words, we learn to appreciate ourselves in a more abstract way; accepting our emotional experiences but realizing that their origins lie elsewhere… earlier in our lives or those of others with whom we share a cultural background. And we can accept ourselves at different stages within our own lives.
IV – SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
A central point in this analysis is that emotion emerged as a concept in Western European society during the past 300 years. It parallels the secularization of society and an emphasis on the self.
There are two contrasting traditions in philosophy, art, and psychology that emphasize either adaptation or the search for meaning.
Adaptation and Philosophy
Philosophers of the 18th Century Enlightenment in England, like John Locke, set the stage for Darwin’s emphasis on a struggle for survival. They spelled out the dynamics surrounding the human process of adaptation.
They focused on thoughts about the self and choices which ‘men’ would have to make to maximize benefits.
Individuals were described as acting in a calculating manner based on cool desires.
Events in the environment are appraised as facts to determine whether or not they match our needs, concerns, and fears.
The resulting feelings of pain or pleasure provide feedback as to the success or failure of their efforts.
So, feelings play an important role in this model because they provide us with a sense for the success or failure of our adaptive efforts.
Feelings serve as the shadow of cognition!
Message: We must learn to be strategic to accurately appraise our stimulus environment and then engage in concrete actions that help us resolve our interests and concerns.
Adaptation and the Arts
The aesthetics of the Enlightenment stressed manipulating an audience’s imagination and emotions. This could be accomplished by carefully selecting subject matter that represented universally shared natural and social worlds.
In art, the goal was to create an accurate illusion of the natural world, governed by laws of causality, that could be immediately apprehended in a single glance.
In drama, French neoclassicism emphasized the importance of the three unities of time, place, and action in determining dramatic illusion.
Illusion in theatre involved a kind of passive response in which the audience responds “in sympathy with increasing emotional stimulation until reason surrenders to the force of the passions.”
Today, people can manipulate their own affective states. When we are bored, we can choose to read books or watch films that are filled with uncertainty and suspense. When we want to feel connection, we might select books or films with a more romantic theme.
In other words, we can intentionally choose materials that will modulate our affective states.
Our research has shown that people in a negative affect state prefer artworks that express emotion in a direct and readily accessible manner.
Adaptation and Psychology
There is a clear continuity over 300 years from the Enlightenment to modern mechanistic psychology associated with linear thought.
The three traditions included in this view are:
Centralism – Behaviourism/Functionalism – Cognitivism
19th century Centralism holds that emotion is located in and shaped directly by centres in the brain. The brain, in essence, guides and controls emotional processes.
Functionalism appeared at the turn of the 20th century and held that emotions have adaptive value as automatic responses to threatening events in the environment.
Behaviourism, which emerged as a viewpoint in the early 1900s, treated emotion as primarily disruptive and disregarded it as a unique phenomenon. Rather, in accordance with the formula: Emotion = Cognition + Arousal, it emphasized the evaluation of situational factors as either beneficial or harmful and attributed a potentially energizing and attention focusing quality to moderate levels of bodily excitation.
Cognitivism elaborates on the process of evaluation within a logical and sequential paradigm having to do with the resolution of needs or concerns through pragmatic action.
The Search for Meaning and Philosophy
The importance of imagination and emotional experience is central in Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries.
According to this humanistic, organic and open-ended viewpoint, experience is constantly changing and the person is perpetually ‘becoming’.
The Romantics developed a cult of feeling that would counter a world ruled by reason in which all subjects could be considered.
They wanted to achieve an intellectual appreciation of human experience facilitated by intense feelings.
The sacred power of individual unique consciousness is affirmed and life episodes become the focus since all humans have the capacity for intense and honest feelings.
The Experience of Meaning in Art
German Romantic dramatists, like Johann Schlegel (1719-1749) believed that theatrical drama should reflect the social realities and historical traditions of the audience and also heighten social awareness.
By selecting critical moments in life and expressing them in carefully fashioned dialogue, playwrights can expose the hidden workings of a character’s mind. The unity of action is more important than the unities of time and place.
By providing a meaningful context to account for action, the author brings coherence and meaning to the audience’s experience.
August Schlegel (1767-1845) saw dramatic illusion as a “waking dream, to which we voluntarily surrender ourselves.” He included audience participation as an important aspect of theatre and added that their awareness of participating in sustaining the illusion contributes to the overall aesthetic process.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the English critic and poet, described aesthetic illusion as the product of a “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” The logic of the imagination provides a basis for the fluid continuity of conscious experience.
In our experimental work, we have found that viewers and readers can develop deep relationships with texts, artworks, and industrial design objects.
People can feel a personal relationship with creative works, see them as an expression of their identities, or as embodiments of idealized social values and messages.
Encounters with artworks can simulate reflections about personal growth and encourage people to come to terms with their personal or collective histories. In the search for meaning, people encounter not just the artists but themselves.
Some artworks that relate to the search for meaning…
Some artworks that relate to the search for meaning…
The Experience of Meaning in Psychology
The Romantic viewpoint is embodied in a more organic and [w]holistic approach in psychology with three major traditions:
Peripheralism – Psychodynamism – Existential Psychology
Peripheralism originated in the later 1800s with William James who founded American psychology. In an attempt to unify body and mind, peripheralism holds that emotion is shaped by feedback from changes in the viscera (heart, lungs, gut) and expressive responses in the face and body to significant affect evoking events.
Psychodynamism is the idea, folllowing in the Freudian tradition, that critical emotional episodes in our lives have a long term impact so that when we substantially encounter events like them, we re-experience the emotion.
The unconscious plays a role here because emotions which are too powerful and unpleasant can be repressed and become difficult to access. The challenge of therapy is to have clients find a narrative that links critical early life experiences to current and sometimes inaccessible feelings.
Existential phenomenology is concerned with the structure of experience in relation to being and becoming. It holds that significant life experiences are associated with intensifications, distortions or transformations in our experiences of time, space, causality, sensory awareness and connection with others. Like the style of a painting, these transformations become the crucible within which life’s narratives are experienced.
Feelings shape the form of our emotions.
V – TWO CONTRASTING EMOTIONAL STYLES IN LIFE
With the increasing secularization of Western European society over the past 300 years, “emotion” has emerged as a phenomenon associated with an individual’s self. It is a phenomenon integrating mind and body, one that is not passively undergone but which results from the interpretation of personally and collectively meaningful situations.
We can see, however, that there are two very different approaches to this phenomenon, one emphasizing adaptation and the other a search for meaning.
A rational approach, associated with the Enlightenment, is strategic and relates to an adaptive appraisal of environmental options to outcomes which can be felt along a pain-pleasure dimension.
A romantic approach, associated with German Romanticism, is holistic and emphasizes a spontaneous and expressive reaction to personally meaningful situations and events.
These contrasting approaches to emotion are embodied in very different emotional styles in everyday life. Some people appear better at adaptation whereas others are more disposed to a search for meaning in emotional experiences.
I’m now going to describe these styles; their upsides and down sides.
Adaptation-Oriented People
“Adaptation-oriented” people appraise their worlds in a very precise manner, matching things (people, objects and events) against their needs and concerns.
They work efficiently; their attention focused and energy mobilized. In the extreme, think of the Type-A personality.
They closely monitor their reactions as well, the feelings or pain or pleasure that follow from the careful execution of strategies or plans. These feelings help them to choose their next move.
But they also restrain or suppress potentially distracting emotions. After all, you can’t make a good and rational decision if you are distracted by emotion.
That raises a good question:
Can adaptation-oriented persons get stuck in their mode (or mold) and have trouble finding their emotions? Always being rational at the front end of stimulus analysis but unable to find emotion at the back end of personal reaction?
Too much objectivity… too much restraint!
The adaptation-oriented person risks being lost in objectivity. This person must reawaken to the depth and unique nature of life’s situations… to slow the disposition to evaluate things and events in terms of good or bad utility… to search for the structure and meaning embedded within individual events.
Meaning-Oriented People
“Meaning-oriented” people respond to situations in a deep and personal way. Powerful events can hit them like a tsunami and elicit strong emotions. These events are rich in substance and structure… not just passing stimuli… complex meanings related to family and friends, related to the group with which one identifies so strongly… with its history and very soul!
These emotional experiences have a strong bodily component both somatic and expressive; they feel their gut responses… they feel the sadness in their own faces.
But they can feel overcome and sometimes even overwhelmed.
They can also be trapped in these emotions which, after all, are based on interpretations of life events and not on absolute truth which is how it might feel to them.
The meaning-oriented person risks being lost in subjectivity, weighted down by emotions that so powerfully affect them… not being able to stand outside themselves and see the intensity of it all… and the possible arbitrariness of interpretation shaped by earlier life experiences with which they have lost touch.
It may help this person to realize that there are different ways to construe or understand situations and that there is no one fixed or correct way of doing so. In other words, there are different ways of constructing meaning, different contexts into which events might be placed… some shared with others… some that are unique to each of us.
VI – REVIEW
So we have a layer cake of two traditions reaching back 300 years in Western European culture.
Two Themes:
Adaptation and Search for Meaning
Two Intellectual Traditions:
Enlightenment Realism and Romantic Emotionalism
Two Traditions in Psychology:
Centralism/Behaviourism/Functionalism/Cognitivism
Peripheralism/Psychodynamism/Existential Phenomenology
Two Personal Styles:
Restrained Adaptation and an Expressive Search for Meaning
VII – A NEW PARADIGM
How do we bring balance into our lives and unity to these contrasting intellectual traditions and ways of being-in-the-world?
We have been looking at emotion within the framework of contrasts and now we will look at emotion such that the separate processes are integrated one within the other while preserving the potential for uniqueness.
The paradigm of complementarity: Every challenge has a silver lining! In a sense, we bring an Eastern view to our Western way of living.
Complementary Relations Between Adaptation and the Search for Meaning:
I have talked about these two themes as if they were unrelated… as dichotomies.
And yet, one lies within the other…
Is it not true that in an effort to adapt to a new society, to a changing society, people have to understand the different meanings in that society?
Isn’t it also true that, in our search for meaning, we must come to terms with the challenges and rapid changes to which we must adapt as time unfolds?
The same principles apply to societies as well as individuals. The multicultural as well as the society in transition must address both ways of being-in-the-world. This creates a dynamic energy which can help both the society and the individual to achieve a new level of integration.
Today’s Message:
We need to face the challenges in our lives and yet realize how actively involved we are in the construction of personal and collective meaning.
We need to balance objective detachment and subjective engagement.
We need to see the many layered nature of our own being-in-the-world; a world of situations, and one in which we ourselves can evolve over time.
SECOND HALF
Continuing from last week…
FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH TO EMOTION
“WHAT WORKS, IS!”
This reflects a pragmatic interest in activities of the mind and body in adapting to the environment.
William James (1890) – consider the TOTAL SITUATION
THE 3RD PHASE OF ACTION THEORY
1920 - PRESENT
The Wittenberg Symposium on Feelings & Emotion
October, 1927 at Wittenberg College in Ohio
Published as a book in 1928 by Martin Reymert
“What is above all important to an organism is action.”
(Edouard Claparède, 1928)
“The press throughout the country carried daily accounts of the sessions. Many important publications sent special representatives to
report the proceedings.”
(Reymert, 1928, p.ix)
ACTION THEORY IN THE 20TH CENTURY REFLECTS TWO OLD THEMES:
(1) During the Enlightenment the focus was on the effects of internal desires.
(2) After Darwin the emphasis was on adaptation to environmental demands.
EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
William McDougall
It emphasizes the “capacity to strive toward an end or ends, to seek goals, to sustain and renew activity adopted to secure consequences beneficial to the organism or the species.
“…feeling and emotion are incidental to the striving activity, the conations of the organism” and “are distinguished in terms of the conative activities which they accompany.”
Specific emotions are the affective phases of specific instincts.
EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
G.S. Brett
“Instincts are equivalent to muscular reactions and emotions are equivalent to visceral reactions”
For Aristotle, “feeling is controlled chiefly by success or failure in the realization of purpose, conscious or unconscious, …pleasure as the accompaniment of unimpeded activity”.
D.T. Howard
It is evident in lower species, such as bees or ants, whose adaptive habit patterns of the nervous system are reflexive, automatic, routine and predetermined.
EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
Francis Aveling
“Conation - an experienced act, mental or bodily, of doing (striving or effort).”
The order of events in emotion would seem to be:
1. Cognition of a significant stimulus
2. Conative ‘set’ towards it (action readiness)
3. The ‘stirred-up’ characteristic of emotion proper
Therefore, “since the somatic resonance is regularly subsequent to the conation, conation is the cause of emotion”
EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
Harvey Carr
In fact, “an immediate, effective, and well-coordinated response prevents the arousal of an emotional reaction.”
This highlights the “orderly and coordinated character of non-emotional adjustments as opposed to the relatively uncoordinated and somewhat chaotic course of events in the emotional reactions.”
Motor Psychology - Margaret Washburn
1. “Consciousness has at its disposal certain motor processes… motor phenomena… motor accompaniment of thinking rather than sensation...”
2. The “motor accompaniment of thinking, as distinguished from sensation, has slight, incipient or tentative muscular reactions to a situation… but which as only tentatively performed are a kind of rehearsal of the reactions…”
3. “All thinking involves…organization of tentative movements into systems” and the “persistent influence of an idea of an end or purpose that is due to an association with a persistent bodily attitude or static movement system…activity attitude” - “feeling of effort”
We see here a focus on the response side of adaptation… rather than on stimulus processing.
WHEN DOES AN EMOTION OCCUR?
Edouard Claparède
“Emotions occur precisely when adaptation is hindered for any reason whatever. The man who can run away does not have the emotion of fear… Fear occurs only when flight is impossible.”
Emotion is “a confusion of instinct, a miscarriage of instinct”.
Emotion is “useless” or “harmful” and “from the functional point of view, appears to be a regression of conduct”.
WHEN DOES AN EMOTION OCCUR?
D.T. Howard
John Dewey (1894, 1895) provided the first “unambiguous statement of a functional theory of the emotions.”
1. Emotional behaviour consists of interruptive forms of action stimulated by rapidly changing circumstances with slight or intense organic and visceral processes
2. Refers to the “confusion and excitement which disrupt behaviour that normally takes place in response to the stimulus…”(p. 141)
“The extreme gross emotional states have no value”
WHEN DOES AN EMOTION OCCUR?
In a more poetic vein:
“The affective tone of an emotional state… is one of blankness and lostness; a condition in which the thousand colors of feeling lose all definiteness and are mixed indiscriminately in the star-dust of general psychical confusion…”
THE TWO FACES OF EMOTION
1. It can be viewed as functional or else it would not have survived the evolutionary process.
2. Excessive emotion can be disruptive and hinder the adaptation process.
HOW DOES EMOTION FACILITATE ADAPTATION?
Harvey Carr
“The emotional reactions are those that are awakened when the organism is unable to respond in an orderly and efficient fashion to a highly stimulating situation…”
Emotion is “a somatic readjustment which is instinctively aroused by a stimulating situation and which in turn promotes a more effective adaptive response to that situation; this greater efficiency is sufficient to increase materially the chances for the organism’s survival…”
“An emotional stimulus is a very effective one, and being denied any motor outlet, it necessarily discharges into the somatic mechanisms - the only available outlet at the time - and tends to awaken a vigorous appropriate adjustment.”
HOW DOES EMOTION FACILITATE ADAPTATION?
Robert S. Woodworth
Emotions are extensions of instinctive reactions when the automaticity that was present in the animal world no longer exists.
It facilitates survival activity by pairing “characteristic modes of overt behaviour and characteristic affective states.”
For example:
“Instinctive avoidance behaviour and the emotion of fear.”
“Instinctive aggressive behaviour and the emotion of anger.”
“Exploratory behaviour and the emotion of wonder.”
EMOTIONS CUE ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOUR
1. You can focus on the stimulus side (analyzing inputs)
OR
2. You can focus on the response side (analyzing adaptive behaviour).
WHAT ABOUT FEELINGS?
Claparède
1. Feelings are like attitudes and express a relation or evaluation about a particular situation.
2. “Feeling… is an instrument of adjustment”.
3. “Consciousness of the danger of a situation… results in a feeling of danger…[and] the emotion of fear follows the feeling of danger
4. We “project onto external situations feelings they arouse in us.”
So, “to comprehend is to take an attitude towards things. To understand that a situation is ‘dangerous’ is to take, with regards to this situation, an attitude of flight or of protection.”
SUMMARY: The Processes Underlying Action Theory
1. HELPS… An appraisal of the situation stimulates an attitude or set towards appropriate action and the somatic accompaniments are experienced as emotion, a feeling of effort to react to a stimulating situation.
2. HINDERS…When the level of visceral excitement becomes too great, there is a potential “miscarriage of instinct” and a failure to cope.
