Randomness – Part 7

Emotional tendencies.

Continuing this essay series on randomness and its impact on our lives, these last two essays will explore human emotions, using Dylan Evans’ book Emotion: A Very Short Introduction.

Now, in some senses, emotions aren’t “random” in that they evolved to serve a certain function. But in other senses, emotions today can trigger responses that, while they may have served a more useful purpose to out ancient ancestors, don’t serve nearly as useful a purpose today. Understanding the pull of emotions on us is worthwhile, if only to give us a better sense of how our thinking actually works.

As Evans writes:

In this book I argue for a return to the view of emotions as reason’s ally, not its enemy. Like [Adam] Smith and [David] Hume, I believe that the scientific study of emotion is not only possible, but of great value … At the very least, it can be exciting to learn about the recent scientific advances in our understanding of these mysterious phenomena.

Evans explains that the study of emotion has occurred only recently in our history:

The word emotion is a modern invention—and not a particularly helpful one. The first books to use the word in the title do not appear until the 19th century. The most famous of these is The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, by Charles Darwin, which was published in 1872 … Philosophers and poets had been writing about things like anger, pity, and fear for thousands of years, of course, but they had never before grouped these mental states together under a single umbrella … Behind this terminological shift lay a deeper conceptual revolution—the birth of modern psychology, a self-professed ‘scientific’ approach to the study of the mind … Instead of attempting to provide a concise definition of emotion, it may be more fruitful to identify some typical examples. Few people would deny that anger, fear, and joy are emotions … [T]he philosopher Paul Griffiths divides emotions into three distinct groups: basic emotions, higher cognitive emotions, and culturally specific emotions. Basic emotions include joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Basic emotions are universal and innate. Emotional expressions are not like words, which differ from culture to culture; they are closer to breathing, which is just part of human nature.

Evans describes the foundational experiments that led to our understanding of the universality of some emotions worldwide:

American anthropologist [Paul Ekman’s] methodology was simple but clever. He travelled to a remote, preliterate culture (the Fore, in New Guinea) to ensure that the subjects had not seen Western photographs or films, and so could never have learned Western emotions. Ekman then told them various stories, and asked them to choose, from three photographs of Americans expressing various emotions, the photo that most closely matched the story. For example, one story involved coming across a wild pig when alone in a hut, a situation that would elicit fear in Westerners. Sure enough, the Fore pointed to the same expressions that Westerners linked to the stories. Just to be sure, Ekman asked some Fore people to make facial expressions appropriate to each of the stories and videotaped them. On returning to San Francisco, he did the experiment in reverse, asking Americans to link the Fore faces to the stories. Once again, the judgements tallied. It is now widely accepted among emotion researchers that some emotions, at least, are not learned, but innate. Our common emotional heritage binds humanity together, then, in a way that transcends cultural difference. In all places, and at all times, human beings have shared the same basic emotional repertoire. 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. The universality of basic emotions argues strongly for their biological nature. If basic emotions were cultural inventions, their ubiquity would be very surprising indeed. If we suppose, however, that they are part of humanity’s common biological inheritance, then their presence throughout the world is easy to explain. Just as all human beings have the same kind of body, with minor variations, so we all have the same kind of mind. This universal human nature is encoded in the human genome, the legacy of our shared evolutionary history. The Japanese do, in fact, take greater pains to hide their emotions than do people in Europe and North America. Every culture has its own rules that define the socially acceptable forms of emotional expression. 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. Underneath these display rules, however, the emotions are the same. In an interesting experiment conducted by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, American and Japanese men were videotaped while they watched film clips. Some of the clips were of neutral or pleasant events, such as a canoe trip, while others were of disgusting things such as a ritual circumcision, the suction-aided delivery of a baby, and nasal surgery. In one showing, the subjects watched the clips in private, while in another an interviewer was present. When alone, similar facial expressions were observed in both American and Japanese subjects. When the interviewer was present, however, the Japanese smiled more and showed less disgust than their American counterparts. The most interesting thing about this experiment, however, became apparent only when the videotapes were viewed in slow motion. Only then was it possible to observe that, when the interviewer was present, the Japanese subjects actually started to make the same expressions of disgust as the Americans did, and succeeded in masking these expressions only a few fractions of a second later. In other words, the same basic emotions were felt by both the Americans and the Japanese. These biological responses were automatic, beyond voluntary control. Only after consciousness caught up, a few hundred milliseconds later, could the learned display rules be imposed on top of the basic biological response. As the experiment with the American and Japanese men demonstrates, basic emotions such as fear and disgust are automatic, reflex-like responses over which we have little conscious control. And, like reflexes, they are much faster than anything we do voluntarily. Thus the culturally determined display rules always arrive on the scene after the basic emotional response has been set in motion. The basic emotions are hardwired, etched into our neural circuitry by our genes rather than by our culture, part of the basic mental design that is common to us all.

Evans describes how a set of “higher” cognitive emotions are not as uniform:

The second group of emotions identified by Paul Griffiths are the higher cognitive emotions. These are not so automatic and fast as basic emotions, and nor are they universally associated with a single facial expression. Love is a case in point. Although love at first sight is possible, 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. Higher cognitive emotions involve much more cortical processing than basic emotions. While basic emotions are associated with subcortical structures buried deep below the surface of the brain, emotions like love are more associated with areas of the neocortex. The neocortex is the part of the brain that has expanded most in the past five million years of human evolution and supports most of our most complex cognitive abilities such as explicit logical analysis. 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 what allows higher cognitive emotions to be more culturally variable than the basic emotions. However, despite their greater cultural variability, the higher cognitive emotions are still universal. Like basic emotions, the higher cognitive emotions are part of human nature, shaped by our common evolutionary history… 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. You can be afraid of, or disgusted by, inanimate objects and non-human animals, but love and guilt require other people for their existence … The higher cognitive emotions seem to have been designed by natural selection precisely to help our ancestors cope with an increasingly complex social environment.

Evans makes the point that, whatever benefits there are to pure logic today, humans could not have successfully evolved without the emotions they developed to help further the survival of the species:

The creators of Star Trek were wrong to suppose that the Vulcans, an imaginary alien race that had learned to suppress their emotions, would be more intelligent than humans. Spock notwithstanding, an intelligent creature that lacked emotions simply could not evolve. Emotions are complex traits, and such traits rarely evolve unless they convey some advantage. So the fact that we have emotions now means that, at some point in our evolutionary history at least, they must have helped our ancestors to survive and procreate. The question is—how? It is easy to see how some of the basic emotions such as fear and anger helped our ancestors to survive. The capacity for fear is clearly useful in a world where hungry predators pose a serious threat. Fear allows animals to react very swiftly to any possible sign of danger, pumping their bodies full of hormones that facilitate a fast escape and flooding their minds with one thought: flee! Anger is similar, except that it prepares the organism for a fight rather than for flight. Surprise and disgust are also fairly easy to decipher. The emotion of surprise helps animals to respond to novel stimuli. When something unexpected comes along, the surprise reaction stops us in our tracks and forces us to pay attention to it. Our eyebrows arch, allowing the eyes to widen and take in as much of the new scene as possible. The body readies itself for a possible change in activity. Likewise, the capacity for disgust is helpful in a world where rotting food and faeces are homes to colonies of infectious bacteria. By causing animals to steer clear of such objects, disgust helps them to avoid being poisoned or infected … It should be clear by now that a person who lacked emotions would not survive for very long. Lacking fear, he might sit around and ponder whether or not the approaching lion really represented a threat or not. Without anger, she would be picked on mercilessly. Without the capacity to feel disgust, he might be tempted to consume faeces and rotting food. And without the capacity for joy and distress, she might never bother doing anything at all—not a good recipe for survival.

Possible evolutionary explanations for other emotions are more nuanced. As Evans explains:

The evolutionary rationale for the other two basic emotions—joy and distress—is more complex. They probably evolved to act as motivators leading us to pursue or avoid certain courses of action. We tend to feel joy when we do things that, in the stone age, would have helped us to pass on our genes. The reason why having sex, meeting old friends, and receiving gifts make us joyful is that all these things were conducive to the reproductive success of our ancestors. Conversely, the reason why the death of a friend or the loss of an important possession are so distressing is that these things were bad for the reproductive success of our ancestors. This does not mean that our ancestors made the connection in their minds between these emotions and genetic success. 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 joy, and then made the experience of joy contingent on doing the things that help our genes to get into the next generation. Although preferences differ from person to person, the fundamental causes of joy and distress are common to us all, so we can learn from other people’s experiences too. The same applies to other basic emotions such as fear and disgust. Children who see that their parents are afraid of bathing in a particular river can infer that the river is dangerous without having to test it out for themselves. Likewise, children who see that their parents react with disgust to a particular kind of food can save themselves the trouble of tasting something horrible. In a social species like Homo sapiens, then, emotions are doubly useful. On the one hand, the internal feelings and the bodily changes of emotion cause the organism to pursue or avoid particular courses of action. On the other hand, the external expressions of emotion provide information to others, allowing them to learn from our experiences. The same phenomenon occurs in other social species, including many primates. In one experiment, rhesus macaques reared in a laboratory were unafraid of snakes when they first saw them. However, after watching a film of another monkey reacting to a snake with fear, they too began to show the fear response to snakes. There are limits, however, to this kind of learning from experience. When shown films of other monkeys being frightened by a flower or a rabbit, the laboratory-reared macaques did not develop fears of such harmless things. Emotional learning is a combination of environmental inputs and an innate disposition to learn some things rather than others.

Other emotions evolved to be obvious to others, but deceptive in effect. As Evans writes:

Not all emotional expressions are designed to allow other animals to learn vicariously. Some emotional expressions are not honest signals of the underlying emotion but acts of deception. When a cat is frightened, for example, its fur stands on end. 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. When considering the evolution of the emotions, then, we must take into consideration all the elements of each emotional response. It is not enough to focus on the internal feelings; we must also consider the facial expressions and other signals. Darwin was the first to emphasize the importance of these signals, and his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) examines the continuity of many of them over long stretches of evolutionary time. Darwin was interested in these expressions because he thought they were good evidence that humans had descended from other animals. He argued, for example, that the way our hair stands on end when we are scared is an evolutionary leftover from a time when our ancestors were completely covered in fur. Our ancestors would puff up their fur when scared just like cats do today. Now, of course, a few hairs standing up on our arms are unlikely to make us look much bigger, so the reaction has become much less pronounced, but it is still there nonetheless, a legacy of our pre-human ancestors.

Tears, however, remain mysterious. As Evans writes, “The question of why we cry when distressed has baffled many evolutionists. Emotional tears are uniquely human. 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.”

The biological sources of our emotions have evolved in different parts of our brains. As Evans writes:

In all mammals, including ourselves, fear and anger are mediated by a set of neural structures known as the limbic system. These include the hippocampus, the cingulate gyrus, the anterior thalamus, and the amygdala. All these structures are tucked away in the centre of the brain, underneath the outer layer of neural tissue known as the neocortex. The neocortex is, in evolutionary terms, much more recent than the limbic system. While there is a kind of neocortex in the brains of fish, amphibians, birds, and reptiles, in mammals it is very much larger and completely envelops the limbic structures. The much larger neocortex is, indeed, the main difference between the brains of mammals and those of other vertebrates. According to the neuroscientist Paul MacLean, the evolution of the mammalian brain involved the expansion of the neocortex, while the older limbic structures were much less modified, though of course the latter did not remain exactly the same. In making these cross-species comparisons, everything is a question of degree; my limbic structures are different from those of a chimp (I hope), but the chimp’s brain and mine are quite similar when compared to the brain of a fish. Location of the hippocampus and amygdala and surrounding cortical areas. If basic emotions like fear are mediated exclusively by the limbic system, the higher cognitive emotions such as love and guilt seem to involve much more cortical processing. This would suggest that they evolved much later than basic emotions, long after the point when the neocortex began to expand with the emergence of the higher mammals. In other words, higher cognitive emotions might be no more than sixty million years old, which is very young compared to the 500 or so million years for which the vertebrate brain—and the basic emotions—have been around. In fact, they may well be even more recent than that.

Evans then discusses the possible evolutionary purposes of emotions like guilt and love:

It is easy to see how the capacity for fear or disgust helped our ancestors to survive, but it is harder to understand what benefits they gained by falling in love or feeling guilty. Yet a number of intriguing suggestions have been put forward that might explain why these emotions too are useful. These suggestions are still largely speculative but they do provide some further insights into the possible benefits of having emotions. Guilt is a case in point. On the face of it, it is hard to see why natural selection would have endowed us with this emotion. There are many occasions in life when it is possible to cheat—to take a benefit without paying the corresponding price. If you can cheat without being detected, the most advantageous thing to do is surely to cheat. If you have a conscience, however, the thought of the guilt that you would feel afterwards might prevent you from cheating. Thus it seems that an animal with the capacity for guilt would be outcompeted by less scrupulous rivals. The capacity for guilt would be eliminated by natural selection. This analysis has been challenged by the economist Robert Frank. Frank argues that it is advantageous to have the capacity for guilt because people who are known to have a conscience are more likely to be trusted by others. If you feel guilty whenever you cheat, this can lead you to behave honestly even when you know that you could get away with cheating. And if others know that you are this kind of person, they will seek you out as a partner in joint ventures that require trust. This depends, of course, on there being reliable cues that indicate the presence of guilt. Only if there is some reliable signal that you have a conscience, such as blushing when you feel guilty, will others be able to tell the difference between a trustworthy person and a scoundrel. These signals must be hard to fake, otherwise they would not be reliable. Frank argues that some emotional expressions, such as blushing, have been built into human physiology by natural selection precisely to serve as such reliable signals of trustworthiness. Likewise, argues Frank, romantic love solves another kind of commitment problem—that in which you have to make a credible promise to remain faithful to one other person. Jack and Jill may consider each other suitable mates, but they will be reluctant to commit themselves to each other unless each is sure that the other will not walk out as soon as someone more attractive comes along. The realization that the other person is in love can provide this assurance. 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 as a racing heart and difficulty in sleeping, 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,’ wrote Douglas Yates.

In the next and final essay in this series, we’ll explore whether emotions are still useful to humans today.