Randomness -- Part 8

Are emotions still relevant today?

Continuing this essay series on randomness and its impact on our lives, this last essay will explore whether human emotions are still relevant today, using Dylan Evans’ book Emotion: A Very Short Introduction.

As Evans writes:

Emotions such as the taste for revenge may have been useful to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, whose vendettas were conducted with sticks and stones and led to far fewer fatalities, but they are surely counterproductive in a world in which guns are freely available. Perhaps all emotions are like this. Perhaps the Vulcan race [from the science-fiction series Start Trek] really is ahead of us in the evolutionary game. Spock and his fellow Vulcans may have done well to leave their emotions behind them when their world became high tech. This seems to have been Darwin’s view, whose book on the expression of the emotions gives the impression that these expressions, while useful in the past, are no longer of any value. In arguing, for example, that the tendency for humans to bare their teeth in anger was a leftover from primitive displays of aggression in our pre-human ancestors, Darwin seems to imply that it is rather like the appendix—a vestigial organ, derived from an earlier phase of our evolutionary history, which is no longer of any use. It is true that we live in a world that is very different, in many ways, from the world in which our ancestors lived. We no longer face the constant threat of being eaten by predators, for example, and the chance of being assaulted by other humans is surely much reduced. If the emotion of fear evolved to help us avoid these dangers, then it might seem that we would be better off without it today. Certainly, an excessive capacity for fear leads to all sorts of problems that many people would dearly love to be free of, such as phobias and panic attacks. One does not hear of many people who suffer from the opposite problem—that of having too little fear. The reason for this apparent imbalance, however, may well be that those with no capacity for fear end up in the morgue long before they are aware they have a problem. Fear does not merely protect us against predators. It also deters us from a whole host of reckless behaviours, many of which are potentially fatal. Fear will stop you from crossing a busy road without looking, or from dancing on the edge of a cliff. A life without fear might be less painful, but it would also be a lot shorter. The optimal state of an emotion involves having just the right amount of it, neither too little nor too much. Aristotle based his whole ethical system around this simple idea. The virtues, in his theory, are midpoints between the extremes of having too little or too much of a particular emotion. Courage is the midpoint between too much and too little fear. The virtue of amiability lies halfway between the extremes of cantankerousness and obsequiousness. And so on. 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.

Philosophers have had different views on the role emotion may or not play in formulating correct ethical views. As Evans writes:

Emotions seem to pervade much of our moral lives. A long line of thinkers, from Aristotle to Adam Smith, have emphasized the fundamental role of emotion in guiding ethical behaviour. I have already mentioned Aristotle’s concept of virtue as a midpoint between emotional extremes. Adam Smith also linked emotions to morality, though in a rather different way. He thought that some emotions were designed specifically for the purpose of helping us to behave morally, a view that now seems to be supported by evolutionary theory. Smith referred to these emotions as ‘the moral sentiments’. Other thinkers have taken a very different view of the relationship between emotion and morality. Hobbes thought that our natural emotional inclinations would almost always make us tend towards selfish behaviour and that the only way to behave in a moral fashion was to transcend our animal instincts and act in accordance with the law. A similar view was proposed by Kant. Kant did not deny that emotions could sometimes lead us to do the right thing, but he argued that such emotionally inspired actions were not truly virtuous. If a man obeyed the moral law out of fear, for example, he could not be called truly virtuous. The only way of behaving morally, according to Kant’s view, was to obey the moral law completely unemotionally, purely for the sake of obeying the law.

The emotion of happiness, of course, is not only good in itself, but it’s the emotion that keeps on giving. As Evans explains:

[P]sychologists have compiled a huge database on what makes people happy. 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. Conversely, someone in a sad mood is more likely to cry at bad news, while a person in a happy mood might laugh it off … Happiness is more important than joy because happiness lasts longer and makes joy more likely. The joy produced by witnessing a beautiful sunset is fleeting, but the experience may put us in a happy mood that stays with us for hours. When psychologists do research on general life satisfaction, they are investigating happiness, not joy.

As was explored in a previous essay series, much more money does not generally translate into happiness, at least not proportionately. And as Evans writes:

The World Database of Happiness combines the results of hundreds of surveys that have been carried out on life satisfaction. Combing through this database, the first thing that leaps out is that material wealth is not a surefire route to happiness. The old cliché about the impossibility of buying contentment seems to be borne out by the scientific research. Of course, a certain amount of money can help to protect you from some of the most common causes of unhappiness, such as starvation and lack of medical care, but there is more to a happy life than simply avoiding pain and hunger. Many people today, however, cling to the illusion that gaining material wealth will be the key to all their problems. Hence the common dream of winning the lottery. Such dreams might not be so common if people knew about the studies that have been done on people who really have won lots of money. These studies reveal that winning the lottery does not lead to lasting happiness. When people win a fortune on the lottery, a few find that their life satisfaction increases, but in most cases the euphoria quickly wears off and the winners feel exactly as they did before. Those who were happy beforehand return to their state of normal happiness. Those who were depressed go back to being depressed.

Evans then comes to the same conclusion described in that previous essay series:

If material wealth and sudden good fortune do not lead to happiness, what does? According to the happiness database, the things that are most likely to make you happy are good health, good friends, and, above all, good family relationships. Getting on well with parents, children, and partners is the key to a happy life.

Evans then mentions the possible evolutionary roots of emotions that draw on language:

People have used language in various ways to induce happiness artificially, ways that offer no obvious genetic benefits. I will mention three: consoling, entertaining, and ‘venting’. The first two methods benefit the hearer; the last is supposed to benefit the speaker. Our ancestors must have consoled each other with hugs and caresses long before they learned how to talk, but once language was invented they found a new way of providing consolation by offering words of sympathy and advice. In doing so, they discovered that words can be powerful antidepressants. This practice has been around for so long that it now appears almost instinctual. Faced with friends who are feeling down, we all naturally find ourselves trying to talk them out of it. We also naturally administer the same linguistic medicine to ourselves, whispering silent words of encouragement in our minds when we are low. Cognitive therapy, a form of psychotherapy pioneered by Aaron Beck in the 1960s, is based on just this kind of internal monologue. By teaching people to identify their negative thoughts and replace them with more positive ones, cognitive therapists hope to allow people to become the masters of their emotions rather than their slaves. The idea behind this is an old one, going at least as far back as the Stoics ... The Stoics observed that emotions both influence, and are influenced by, the thoughts we have … By training ourselves to eliminate thoughts that provoke bad moods and to encourage thoughts that foster pleasant emotions, we may be able to gain some measure of control over our emotional state and lift ourselves out of the blues by sheer will power … A third linguistic technology of emotion is venting. Venting means talking about unpleasant emotions in order to make them go away. Unlike consolation and entertainment, which may be as old as language itself, venting may be a relatively recent invention. People have probably used language to ‘get things off their chest’ for thousands of years, but venting is more than just unburdening yourself of a troublesome thought. It is the use of language for the explicit purpose of getting rid of unpleasant emotions.

But there are some downsides to talking too much about bad experiences:

Recent evidence has pointed to the possible dangers of talking about one’s emotions at the wrong time. The evidence concerns a kind of psychological therapy known as ‘debriefing’. Debriefing is given to victims of traumatic events in many Western countries. As soon as there is a major disaster, such as a rail crash or a hijacking, counsellors are flown out to the scene along with the emergency services. After being treated by doctors for physical injury, the victims are treated by the counsellors for ‘psychological injury’. The treatment involves going over the memories of the traumatic event and talking through all the feelings they inspire. Debriefing differs in many ways from classical Freudian psychoanalysis, but it is based on the same underlying idea—namely, the idea that talking about the negative emotions should allow them to dissipate harmlessly. If this were true, those who undergo debriefing immediately after a traumatic event should suffer fewer long-term symptoms than those who don’t. According to psychologist Jo Rick, however, things are the other way round: debriefing actually makes things worse. In one study of road-accident victims, she found that those who had undergone debriefing had more flashbacks and more fear a year after the accident than those who had not. In the light of the past few decades of brain research, it is now easy to see why talking about traumatic memories is likely to make things worse rather than better. When left unexamined, bad memories do not fester like some untreated wound, as Freud thought. Rather, they tend to fade away via a process known as ‘extinction’. By contrast, if the neural circuits encoding memories are continually reactivated by recounting the original experiences, extinction is prevented. Talking about old memories does not help them to go away. On the contrary, it keeps them alive, as Adam Smith recognized long before neuroscientists discovered the process of extinction. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he noted that, ‘by relating their misfortunes’, those who seek sympathy ‘awaken in their memory the remembrance of those circumstances that occasioned their affliction. Their tears accordingly flow faster than before, and they are apt to abandon themselves to all the weakness of sorrow.’

Emotions can distract us, directing our attention to things we might be better off letting go:

Emotions are fairly transient states. For much of the time, we are not in the grip of fear, nor swooning with love. In this neutral frame of mind, we can often think quite rationally. We are clear-headed and can spot bad arguments quite easily. Things are quite different, however, when a strong emotion wells up in us, or a powerful mood takes us over. At these times the head becomes a slave to the heart. In recent years, a growing amount of experimental work has helped to pinpoint the nature of these effects … The mental spotlight Attention is the name that psychologists give to our capacity to focus on a particular thought or activity. It is like a spotlight that can be pointed at different mental activities. Even though there might be hundreds of things going on in our minds, we can train our mental spotlight on only one of them at a time. When we are concentrating hard on something like a crossword puzzle or a difficult sum, other thoughts fade away. Emotions can interrupt our thoughts and redirect our attention elsewhere. The sound of an explosion triggers a burst of fear, which makes us forget what we were doing before and focus on the source of the danger. When we are relaxed, and not in the grip of any particular emotion, our mental spotlight is relatively unfocused, and more thoughts may drift through our awareness. When an emotion occurs, however, our mental spotlight suddenly contracts, focusing on one small thought to the exclusion of all others … [E]motions distract us from one thought only in order to make us pay attention to another … Traumatic memories do not retreat into some dark recess of the mind, as Freud supposed. Rather, they obtrude persistently into consciousness, perturbing us when we would rather forget them, even disrupting our dreams. In severe cases, this is known as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, a syndrome characterized by vivid flashbacks in which the person relives the event in painful detail.

Evans writes that being in a good mood will bring to the fore good memories, and being in a bad mood will bring to the fore bad memories:

Besides affecting attention, emotions and moods also play an important part in memory. When something is stored in the memory, it is not recorded in all its finest detail, but rather filed away under a few keywords. When we come to recall something from memory, we extract some of these keywords, and fill in the rest by educated guesswork. Remembering is, therefore, never exact. It is more like reconstructing an antique pot from a few broken shards than replaying an old movie. Some memories seem so fresh and vivid when we recall them that we may have the impression of reliving the event exactly as it happened, but this is an illusion caused by the power of our imaginative reconstruction. When we compare such recollections with those of others who were in the same place at the same time, we may find that the accounts differ markedly, while the differing versions seem equally vivid and real to each person. The ease and accuracy with which we recall an event are affected by both the emotional state we were in when the event occurred and the mood we are in when we recall it … The ease and accuracy of recall are also influenced by the mood we are in when we remember something. Dozens of experiments conducted by the psychologist Gordon Bower show that, when we are in a happy mood, we tend to recall pleasant events more easily and more accurately than unpleasant ones. The opposite is true when we are in a sad mood. This phenomenon is known as ‘mood-congruent recall’. In one experiment, Bower asked people to recall incidents of any kind from their childhood, and to describe each one. The next day, when the same people were in a neutral mood, he asked them to label each incident as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The following day, a happy or a sad mood was artificially induced in each person by means of hypnotic suggestion, and they were then asked to recall as many of the incidents as they could. Bower found that those in a good mood remembered many of the incidents they had labelled as pleasant, but few of those they had labelled as unpleasant. Those in a bad mood, on the other hand, remembered more of the unpleasant incidents.

Our moods also affect how we see other people:

[T]he opinions we form of other people are often affected by the mood we happen to be in when we meet them. People in a good mood are likely to judge the same person more positively than people in a bad mood. In one experiment, good and bad moods were induced artificially by telling people that they had done very well or very badly in a mock test. They were then asked to interview someone by asking them a prearranged set of questions, such as ‘What are your most important traits’. What the students didn’t know was that the people they were interviewing were in league with the experimenters, and all gave exactly the same answers to the questions. The answers were deliberately ambiguous, revealing both positive things (‘I’m pretty friendly’) and negative things (‘I’m quite stubborn and impatient’) about the interviewee. Afterwards, the interviewers were asked to evaluate the interviewee on personal and professional grounds. Sure enough, the interviewers who had been put in a good mood tended to rate the interviewees more positively than those who had been put in a bad mood, even though the answers they received were the same. Those in a good mood were also more likely to say that they would hire the interviewee for a job.

Emotions also tend to interfere with logical decision-making:

The research of Mackie and Worth suggests that there are two ways of forming judgements 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 … [But] the impact of emotions on decision-making can be positively harmful, and we seek ways of diminishing their influence. It is widely supposed that one way to do this is to institutionalize the decision-making process, transforming it from an individual action into a collective one. The hope is that, in the communal debate, the emotional biases of individuals will cancel each other out, leaving pure reason to emerge as the exclusive basis for judgement. Two heads are supposed to be better than one, because they are supposed to be less emotional. In science, the peer review process is supposed to filter out the rival emotions of various disputants, so that they may reach agreement by purely rational means. In the legal system of most countries today, decisions about important cases are taken not by a single judge but by a jury of twelve. Once again, the hope is that twelve heads will be better than one, because their conflicting emotions will cancel each other out, leaving pure reason to be the final arbiter. Unfortunately, there are reasons to doubt this rosy view of institutional decision-making. Being in a group may amplify emotions rather than tempering them. Writing at the end of the 19th century, the French psychologist Gustave LeBon described in chilling terms how people can be swept away by the passions of the crowd, working themselves up into a frenzy more vicious than anything of which they would be capable on their own. Other research paints a more positive picture of group decision-making. James Surowiecki has marshalled evidence showing that, under certain circumstances, groups can make decisions that are better than could have been made by any single member of the group. However, this tends to be the case only when there is a diversity of opinion and when people make their judgements independently before pooling them. In other words, too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent. Emotional contagion can be seen as a kind of nonverbal communication which exacerbates the problem.

It's bad enough when one person in a group is unhelpfully overcome with emotion, and worse when that emotion spreads throughout the group:

The discovery of mirror neurons provides intriguing clues about the neural mechanisms involved in emotional contagion. Mirror neurons are activated in the same way regardless of whether an animal performs a given action or whether the animal observes the same action performed by another. In the 1980s and 1990s, neurophysiologists at the University of Parma placed electrodes in the brains of macaque monkeys to study neurons specialized in the control of hand and mouth actions. During each experiment, the researchers allowed the monkey to reach for pieces of food and measured the response to certain movements. They found that some neurons responded both when the monkey observed a person picking up a piece of food, and also when the monkey itself picked up the food. It is not ethical to do the same experiments with humans, so the evidence for mirror neurons in humans is indirect. This evidence is derived mainly from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, For example, one study found that the same brain regions were activated when people smelled disgusting odours and when they saw expressions of disgust on the faces of other people inhaling the same odours. Mirror neurons may therefore act like a kind of reflex mechanism: first you see an expression of disgust on someone else’s face, and this automatically triggers feelings of disgust in you yourself … This is what I mean by emotional contagion.

Evans then speculates on the future of artificial intelligence’s ability to read human emotions:

In addition to visual image processing [regarding facial emotional cues], computers can also extract emotional information from other kinds of input such as audio and physiological data. Humans express emotions in a variety of ways, including tone of voice and subtle cues such as sweating and heart rate, so when computers have access to sensors that can detect this information, such as microphones and heart rate monitors, they can combine all the data from these various inputs to build up a more complex picture of a person’s emotional state … Computers that can recognize and identify human emotions in this way can be used for a wide variety of purposes. For example, virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa can understand the words we speak, but they often lack an ability to tell how annoyed or happy or depressed we are. A variety of companies are now working to remedy this. If a virtual assistant in an intelligent vehicle could recognize the emotional state of the driver, it might notice that she looks tired and offer to take the wheel. Your bathroom mirror might detect that you’re feeling stressed and adjust the lighting while playing a soothing piece of music. An online learning environment could sense when a student is frustrated and slow down or tell a joke. Autistic people might use machines that can recognize emotional expressions to navigate social situations more effectively.

Just as an earlier entry in this series concluded that, even in the face of randomness, effort and persistence is the best way forward, Evans concludes that good moods favor the entrepreneurial risk-taker, and favor all of us as well through the benefits gained by those who take risks:

If the heart has its reasons, this is because natural selection designed our emotions just as it designed our other mental faculties: to help us survive and reproduce as best we could in a dangerous and exciting world … [J]ust because the heart works independently of reason does not mean it lacks reasons. On the contrary, as I have tried to show in this book, 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 judgements, all have their reasons, and sometimes these reasons are very good ones. Not only are there passions within reason, but there are reasons within passion. Take the well-known relationship between good mood and overconfidence, for example. 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 their predictions (a phenomenon known as ‘depressive realism’). You might think that those in a bad mood would be better off, since, other things being equal, accurate predictions are better than inaccurate ones. The problem is that other things are not equal. If your chances of succeeding are quite low, and you are in a bad mood, then your accurate estimation of these chances may put you off even trying. If, however, you are in a good mood, your inflated hopes of success may encourage you to have a go, and you may end up being one of the lucky ones. If the costs of wasted effort are low, and the rewards for success are high, then it will pay to be over-optimistic. Any attempt on our part to bring our expectations more into line with the objective chances of success may drive those levels down further still. And, even when overconfidence does not actually increase your chances of success, it may bring other benefits of a more social nature, such as attracting partners or inspiring trust. This seems paradoxical. 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.

Of course, as Evans writes:

This is not true of emotions all the time. If it were, the negative view of emotion would never have got off the ground, let alone achieved the influence it has achieved. The fact that emotions have got such a bad press in the writings of many Western thinkers is testimony to the fact that they do not always trump reason for good. Sometimes their effects on our reasoning are positively harmful. Our preference for the familiar may lead us to spend our money on familiar brand names rather than on cheaper products that are just as good but manufactured by lesser-known companies. The effects of mood on judgement mean that we may be taken in by a con artist simply because his friendly face produces a good gut feeling that blinds us to the holes in his arguments. And so on.

That concludes this essay series on randomness.