In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he proposed that emotions were the thread that wove together the fabric of society. Like Hume and Reid, Smith did not regard emotion and thought as implacable enemies. For all of these thinkers, it was rational to be emotional, and no science of the mind could be complete without also addressing the heart.
Rousseau argued that reason had led man out of his innocent “state of nature” into decadence. To return to innocence meant listening to one’s feelings rather than consulting logic. The secrets of sentiment were to be unlocked by poetry, not by science.
It was then that Tim told me how happy he was that I had joined the band. I can still remember vividly the intense reaction that comment produced in me. A warm wave spread outwards and upwards from my stomach, rapidly enveloping the whole of my upper chest. It was a kind of joy, but unlike any moment of joy I had felt before. It was a feeling of acceptance, of belonging, of being valued by a group of people whom I was proud to call my friends. I was momentarily lost for words, shocked by the novelty of the sensation. In the years since then, the feeling has never repeated itself exactly, and I have never forgotten it.
I am certainly not the only person to have experienced this particular emotion. Millions of football fans and religious worshippers seem to feel something similar every weekend. And yet there is no word for it in English. Just now, when I was describing it, I had to use several words: “a kind of joy, a feeling of acceptance, of belonging, of being valued by a group of people…” Perhaps the closest thing to a name for this emotion is a phrase that was coined by Romain Rolland: the “oceanic feeling.” Would it not be easier if we just had one?
Why is there no word for amae in English? The different ways in which various languages carve up the world reflect different cultural needs. Perhaps the Japanese need a word for amae because the emotion it designates accords with the fundamental values of Japanese culture. Unlike the situation in the English-speaking world, which prizes independence, self-assertion, and autonomy, in Japan it is often more important to fit in with others and live in harmonious groups. Amae is an emotion that helps people to comply with these values.
Whatever the reason for this particular difference between the English and Japanese languages, it does not point to any fundamental difference between the people of England and Japan. As an English speaker, I do not have a precise term to describe the emotion I felt at Tim’s house, but that did not stop me from feeling that emotion.
Different cultures have elaborated on this repertoire, exalting different emotions, downgrading others, and embellishing the common feelings with cultural nuances, but these differences are more like those between two interpretations of the same musical work, rather than those between different compositions.
European attitudes to the peoples of Southeast Asia are a case in point. For a long time in England and other parts of Europe, people from Japan, China, and countries in Southeast Asia were commonly described as being mysterious and unfathomable. This stereotype of the “inscrutable oriental” was due in large part to the fact that European travelers found it hard to read their emotions. They wondered whether the poker face of the Japanese might conceal emotions that were very different from their own.
In Europe and North America, these “display rules” encourage vivid facial expressions of emotion; a poker face is generally regarded as dull or deceptive. In Japan, on the other hand, excessive emotional displays are often perceived as rude, and Japanese people consequently make more of an effort to attenuate their emotional expressions.
If you believe that the human mind works in a particular way, then, even if your theory is wildly inaccurate as an account of human psychology in general, your mind will probably start behaving partly as your theory predicts. In other words, theories about the mind are, to some extent, self-fulfilling prophecies.
In the West it is marked by special features not found elsewhere. These special features include the idea that romantic love must take you by surprise, the idea that it should be the basis for a lifelong commitment, and the idea that it is the supreme form of self-fulfillment. So, while romantic love is a universal theme, it is a theme that admits of some minor variations.
Although love at first sight is possible, it is relatively rare; it seems much more common for love to grow gradually over the space of several days, weeks, or even months. Contrast this with the emotion of fear, which typically overtakes a person in a matter of milliseconds. And, while fear is easily recognizable by its typical facial expression, there is no specific facial expression associated with the emotion of love.
While basic emotions are largely processed in subcortical structures buried beneath the surface of the brain, emotions like love are more associated with areas of the neocortex.
The fact that the higher cognitive emotions are more cortical than the basic emotions means that they are more capable of being influenced by conscious thoughts, and this in turn is probably what allows higher cognitive emotions to be more culturally variable than the basic emotions.
What other higher cognitive emotions are there, besides love? Possible candidates include guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride, envy, and jealousy. This list suggests a further property of higher cognitive emotions: all these emotions are fundamentally social in a way that basic emotions are not.
Higher cognitive emotions take longer to build up, and longer to die away, than basic emotions.
The function of this expression is not to let other animals know that the cat is frightened, however. On the contrary, there are some other animals — predators — that the cat would prefer not to know it was frightened, since that might encourage them to attack. The purpose of the hair standing on end is to make the cat seem bigger than it really is, and hence to deter predators or other cats from attacking.
Most mammals have tear glands, but these exist purely to protect the eye against injury. No other species cries when it is distressed — not even our closest relative, the chimpanzee.
There are many occasions in life when it is possible to cheat — to take a benefit without paying for the corresponding price. If you can be reasonably sure that you can cheat without being detected, the most advantageous thing to do is to cheat. If you have a conscience, however, the thought of the guilt that you would feel afterwards might prevent you from cheating.
Simply promising not to cheat is not convincing; for unscrupulous people, promises are easy to make and just as easy to break.
Here is where guilt comes in handy. If others know that you are this kind of person, they will seek you out as a partner in joint ventures that require trust.
If Jack commits himself to Jill because of an emotion he did not “decide” to have (and so cannot decide not to have), an emotion that is reliably indicated by such physiological signals, then Jill will be more likely to believe he will stay with her than if he had chosen her after coolly weighing up her good and bad points. “People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.”
Another commitment problem involves making credible threats of retaliation.
If the bully knows you are a rational person, he will not take your threat very seriously. After all, punching the bully on the nose will probably lead to a fight that you would almost certainly lose. If, however, you have a reputation for vengeance, then your problem is solved.
Promises and threats are credible only if there is some evidence that you will carry them out even if it costs you to do so. You must show that you are “handcuffed” in some way to the execution of the threat or promise.
Wherever the force of law is weak, self-perpetuating cycles of attack and revenge are common.
A life without fear might be less painful, but it would also be a lot shorter.
Anger, too, would seem to be rather useless today. Unlike our pre-human ancestors, most of us do not regularly engage in physical violence, so what is the benefit of conserving an emotional capacity whose function is to help us fight? One answer is that fighting need not be a physical affair. Our disputes are carried on by other means today, but they still require grit and determination, and anger provides just such internal motivation. People who never get angry never get ahead.
Aristotle based his whole ethical system around this simple idea. The virtues, he claimed, were all midpoints between the extremes of having too little or too much of a particular emotion. Courage was the midpoint between the extremes of having too much or too little fear.
By prompting them to keep a watchful eye over their mates, jealousy helped our ancestors to make sure that their sexual partners were not defaulting on their cooperative venture of having and raising children.
Too much jealousy is a bad thing, but so is too little. How many people would feel their partner truly loved them if they never showed any signs of jealousy at all?
Aristotle’s concept of the golden mean is remarkably similar to what psychologists now refer to as “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence involves striking a balance between emotion and reason in which neither is completely in control. Emotionally intelligent people know when it is right to control their emotions and when it is right to be controlled by them. Emotional intelligence also involves the ability to read other people’s emotions correctly.
We would also find it much harder to know whom to trust. Involuntary emotional signals provide some of the most reliable information about people’s characters.
It should be clear by now that a creature totally devoid of any emotional capacity would not survive for very long. Lacking fear, the creature might sit around and ponder whether or not the approaching lion really represented a threat or not. Without anger, it would be picked on mercilessly. Lack of disgust would allow it to consume faeces and rotting food. And without the capacity for joy and distress, it might never bother doing anything at all. Star Trek notwithstanding, the Vulcan race could never have evolved.
Hobbes thought that our natural emotional inclinations would almost always make us tend towards selfish behavior, and that the only way for us to behave in a moral fashion was to transcend our animal instincts and act in accordance with the law.
The implicit reasoning is clear: envy is an emotion, and not a very nice one at that, so any policy motivated by it must be similarly bad. But envy is not all bad. In fact, it may prove to be crucial for our sense of justice and for motivating us to build a fairer society; “envy is the basis of democracy.”
Ideas like this prompted Leibniz to dream about creating a machine that would apply the rules for you, thereby automating all moral decisions and finally removing all uncertainty from our moral life. If we wanted to know whether something was right or wrong, all we need to do would be to consult our moral computer.
The range of things that can make us joyful or distressed is simply vast. Witnessing a beautiful sunset, making love, eating an ice cream, and listening to Bach’s cantatas are four very different kinds of activity, but they are all capable of inducing joy. On the downside, losing your favorite teddy bear, failing an exam, and hearing about the death of a loved one can all provoke distress.
Happiness is not the same as joy, but it is closely linked. Joy is a basic emotion, and, like the other basic emotions, a single episode lasts only a few seconds, rarely more than a minute. Happiness is a mood, and moods last much longer — from several minutes to several hours. Moods are background states that raise or lower our susceptibility to emotional stimuli. In a happy mood, for example, we will be more likely to react joyfully to good news, while, in a sad mood, we might not react so intensely. Someone in a sad mood is more likely to cry at bad news, while a person in a happy mood might laugh it off. In an anxious mood, we are more easily frightened, while an irritable mood makes us more readily angered.
People are more interested in happiness than joy because happiness lasts longer and makes joy more likely. The joy produced by witnessing a beautiful sunset lasts barely longer than the sunset itself, but the experience may put us in a happy mood that stays with us for hours.
Suddenly, this obscure preacher’s son had become a rock star. Then his luck ran out. His 5th single was successful, but not quite as much as the previous ones. His 6th record did not even get into the charts. On Christmas Eve 1954, Johnny put a revolver to his head and blew his brains out. According to one account, he was just clowning about with the gun. It seems more likely, however, that the sudden rise to fame left him ill prepared for the setbacks that most other musicians get used to dealing with early on in their careers.
Natural selection did not design our minds to think directly about how best to pass on our genes. Instead, it gave us the capacity to feel happy, and then it made the experience of happiness contingent on doing the things that help our genes to get into the next generation. The reason that falling in love makes us happy is that those of our ancestors who liked falling in love were more likely to pass on their genes than those who preferred solitude.
He generally grows weary too soon, and is provoked, by the sullen and suspicious pride of the one, and by the saucy contempt of the other, to treat the first with neglect, and second with petulance, till at last he grows habitually insolent, and forfeits the esteem of all. If the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved, as I believe it does, those sudden changes of fortune seldom contribute much to happiness. He is happiest who advances more gradually to greatness.
In the stone age and before, the only way for our ancestors to be happy was by doing the things that helped them to pass on their genes, such as having friends and lovers. In the past few thousand years, however, the development of technology has changed all that. Alone among all animal species, humans have invented artificial means of inducing pleasurable moods. These technologies of mood short-circuit the routes to happiness designed by natural selection. Instead of wasting months or years looking for a romantic partner, we can get an instant high by taking a drug. In order to be happy, we no longer need to do the things that help us pass on our genes. It appears we have outsmarted natural selection.
There are not many evolutionary advantages to be gained from pursuing and taking delight in false information. Yet this is exactly what seems to underlie the universal human love of fiction and drama. The evolutionary benefits of our sense of humor, to which jokes appeal, are even more mysterious. Miller proposes that stories and jokes delight us because they do, in fact, provide useful information — information about the intelligence of the narrator. When someone makes up a story, he is calling attention to his own creativity. When someone tells us a joke, he is displaying his understanding of what makes others laugh.
When one chamber was lit by a blue light and the other by a red light, the monkeys consistently preferred the blue one. They would venture into the red chamber out of curiosity, and then quickly retreat into the blue chamber, where they would remain. Red mad the monkeys irritable and nervous, while blue put them in a relaxed mood.
A single uniform patch of color is not always more emotionally powerful than a mosaic, however. What the mosaic loses in simplicity it can gain from careful arrangement. The emotional effects of such arrangements vary much more from person to person than the effects of single colors, so that one painting may produce a profound effect on one person while leaving another person cold.
The original paintings must embody features that the human visual system is programmed to find most appealing. At present, scientists do not know what these features are, but the artists who painted the popular paintings must have had some intuitive appreciation of them.
Music, like visual art, is a technology designed to tap directly into our perceptual capacities purely for the sake of producing pleasure. Music is “auditory cheesecake,” music was also the food of love, music can also induce emotions other than happiness.
While most people feel more positive and energetic immediately after eating a chocolate bar, this effect soon wanes, and an hour afterwards they tend to feel worse than they did before eating the chocolate in the first place. Tea and coffee have similar effects, with a short-term boost in mood being followed by a medium-term decrease. Most drugs have the same effect. In fact, the distinction between foodstuffs and drugs is a rather arbitrary one.
The same people might have no qualms about drinking a glass of wine, smoking a joint, or even taking a line of cocaine for recreational purposes, but when it comes to using mood-altering drugs for therapeutic purposes there is a curious aversion. Depression, they feel, is something that one must overcome on one’s own. Using drugs to deal with it betrays some kind of moral weakness.
The most intense combination of pleasures, however, may well be the rave.
In these events, the whole gamut of technologies of emotion — linguistic, sensory, chemical, and bodily — are combined to produce an extremely intense form of happiness. Since the dawn of humanity, people have regularly come together to dance and take drugs. The party may well be the ultimate short cut to happiness.
Attention is the name that psychologists give to our capacity to focus on a particular thought or activity. It is rather like a spotlight in the head that can be pointed at different mental activities.
Spotlights can be more or less focused. When focused to their maximum extent, they illuminate a very small area with a very bright light. When de-focused, they illuminate a larger area, but the light is less intense.
When we are afraid, then mental spotlight focuses on the thing that frightened us. Anger makes us dwell on the thing that annoyed us. Love makes it hard to think of anything except the beloved. Emotions are often blamed for distracting us, so it might seem strange to say that they help to focus our attention. There is, however, no contradiction; emotions distract us from one thought only in order to make us pay attention to another.
In this situation, anxiety is clearly a useful thing. A person in an anxious mood is on the lookout for possible threats, and is therefore able to respond more quickly should anything untoward actually occur. The threats need not to be physical. Anything that might prevent you from achieving a goal can be seen as a threat.
“I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world.”
I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.
There are two ways of forming judgment about complex issues. One way is slow but very precise. The other is quick and dirty. The slow but precise way relies mainly on logic, but the quick and dirty way relies heavily on emotion.
“Subliminal” just means that something enters your mind without you noticing it; it enters by means of a secret passage beneath the threshold of consciousness. This happens all the time without the need for fancy technology. When you walk past a billboard, most of the time you do not stop to read the blurb. You may not even notice it consciously. But the image may have been processed by some bit of your brain without you knowing.
Familiarity does not, it seems, always breed contempt. On the contrary, what is already known can bring a sense of reassurance. The known is inherently less threatening than the perils of the unknown. More prosaically, the preference for what is known underlies the pleasures of nostalgic reminiscence and the company of old friends.
If something has been perceived subliminally, it is stored in a part of the memory that is inaccessible to conscious recall.
Whenever you have a gut reaction to someone you have never met — whenever, that is, you “just don’t like the look of someone” — it is probably because your amygdala is telling you that the stranger looks like someone who has done something bad to you, even though you don’t have any conscious recall of the old foe.
Definitions are useful for resolving disputes, but they can easily become intellectual straitjackets, tempting people into the mistaken belief that words have fixed or essential meanings that should be defended against the tide of cultural change and scientific progress.
To say that an alien was incapable of emotion just because it lacked a few bizarrely shaped neural structures that we have inherited from our furry ancestors seems arbitrary and perhaps even chauvinistic, like the European colonists who denied souls to native Americans on account of their skin color.
The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. When people speak of cognition and emotion, or of reason and the passions, they are usually referring to two distinct mental faculties. One of them is cool and calm and collected, and works towards its conclusion slowly by means of explicit logical rules. The other is hot and colorful, and jumps to conclusions by consulting gut feelings. However, just because the heart works independently of reason does not mean it lacks reasons. One the contrary, the things that emotions do, from making us flee from danger and prompting us to court attractive people, to concentrating our minds and influencing our judgment, all have their reasons, and sometimes these reasons are very good ones. Not ony are there passions within reason, but there are reasons within passion.
People in a good mood regularly overestimate their chances of succeeding at a given activity, while those in a bad mood tend to be more accurate in the predictons.
On one level, being in a good mood seems to make people less rational by leading them to have higher expectations of success than the objective facts justify. On another level, however, being overconfident can be more rational than being realistic, since some prizes only go to the bold. It seems that emotions can sometimes exhibit a kind of super-rationality that saves pure reason from itself.