HELP WITH PSYCHOLOGY CLASS

FOURTH EDITION

Dacher Keltner Keith Oatley Jennifer M. Jenkins

Understanding Emotions

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Veronica Visentin ASSISTANT EDITOR Ethan Lipson EDITORIAL MANAGER Judy Howarth CONTENT MANAGEMENT DIRECTOR Lisa Wojcik CONTENT MANAGER Nichole Urban SENIOR CONTENT SPECIALIST Nicole Repasky PRODUCTION EDITOR Meghana Antony PERMISSIONS SPECIALIST Preethi Devaraj COVER PHOTO CREDIT © Sergey Novikov/Shutterstock

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ISBN: 978-1-119-49256-6 (PBK) ISBN: 978-1-119-49257-3 (EVALC)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Keltner, Dacher, author. | Oatley, Keith, author. | Jenkins, Jennifer M., author.

Title: Understanding emotions / Dacher Keltner, Keith Oatley, Jennifer M. Jenkins. Description: Fourth edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2019]

| Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018032831 (print) | LCCN 2018034946 (ebook) | ISBN

9781119492535 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119492542 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119492566 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Emotions. Classification: LCC BF531 (ebook) | LCC BF531 .O19 2019 (print) | DDC

155.2/32–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032831

The inside back cover will contain printing identification and country of origin if omitted from this page. In addition, if the ISBN on the back cover differs from the ISBN on this page, the one on the back cover is correct.

To

Natalie, Serafina

Simon, Grant, and Hannah

Brief Contents

Figures xvii

Tables xxv

Preface xxvii

Acknowledgments xxxi

Part I Perspectives on Emotions 1

1 Approaches to Understanding Emotions 3

2 Evolution of Emotions 32

3 Cultural Understandings of Emotions 59

Part II Elements of Emotions 83

4 Communication of Emotions 85

5 Bodily Changes and Emotions 119

6 Appraisal, Experience, Regulation 143

7 Brain Mechanisms and Emotion 169

Part III Emotions and Social Life 197

8 Development of Emotions in Childhood 199

9 Emotions in Social Relationships 228

10 Emotions and Thinking 254

Part IV Emotions and the Individual 277

11 Individual Differences in Emotionality 279

12 Psychopathology of Emotions in Childhood 308

13 Emotional Disorders in Adulthood 337

14 A Meaningful Life 364

References 391

Author Index 485

Subject Index 501

v

Contents

Figures xvii Tables xxv Preface xxvii Acknowledgments xxxi

Part I Perspectives on Emotions 1

1 Approaches to Understanding Emotions 3 Introduction, 4 What Is an Emotion? First Ideas, 5 Nineteenth-Century Founders, 6

Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Approach, 6 William James: The Bodily Approach, 10 Sigmund Freud: The Psychoanalytic Approach, 10

Philosophical and Literary Approaches, 12 Aristotle and the Ethics of Emotions, 12 René Descartes: Philosophically Speaking, 15 George Eliot: The World of the Arts, 17

Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology, 18 John Harlow, Tania Singer: Toward a Brain Science of Emotion, 19 Magda Arnold, Sylvan Tomkins: New Psychological Theories, 22 Erving Goffman, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Lila Abu-Lughod: Emotions as Moral Dramas Involving Selves and Others, 24

Empirical Inspirations for a New Science of Emotion, 26 What Is an Emotion? A Framework, 28 The Emotional Realm: Emotions—Moods—Dispositions, 29

Episodes of Emotion, 30 Moods and Sentiments, 30 Emotional Disorders, 30 Personality and Temperament, 30

Summary 31 To Think About and Discuss, 31 Further Reading, 31

vii

CONTENTSviiiviii

2 Evolution of Emotions 32 Elements of an Evolutionary Approach, 33

Selection Pressures, 33 Adaptation, 35 Natural Design for Gene Replication, 37

An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions, 41 Insights from Modern Hunter-Gatherers, 41 Insights from Nonhuman Primates, 43 Human Ancestry, 47

Evolution of Symbolic Representation and Language, 49 Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships, 51

Emotions That Promote Attachment, 52 Emotions and Negotiation of Social Hierarchy, 54 Emotions, Affiliation, and Friendship, 54 Collective Emotion and Preference for In-Groups, 55

Summary, 57 To Think About and Discuss, 57 Further Reading, 58

3 Cultural Understandings of Emotions 59 An Island Society, 60

Two Emotional Events, 60 Three Principles: Emotions as Interpersonal, Active, and Value-based, 61

Cross-cultural Approaches to Emotion, 62 Identity, 62 Independent and Interdependent Selves, 63 Knowledge Structures, 65 Values, 67

The Construction of Emotions in the West, 69 The Coming of Civilization to Medieval Societies, 69 Has Violence Declined Over Time?, 71 The Romantic Era, 73

Sexual Love in the West, 75 Falling in Love: Emotion as a Role, 75 Women and Men: Different Cultures?, 78

Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches, 78 Summary, 80 To Think About and Discuss, 81 Further Reading, 81

PART II Elements of Emotions 83

4 Communication of Emotions 85 Five Kinds of Nonverbal Behavior, 88 Facial Expressions of Emotion, 91

Contents ix

Darwin’s Observations and Theoretical Analysis, 91 Early Evidence of the Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion, 93 Critiques of the Ekman and Friesen Studies, 95 Discovering New Facial Expressions of Emotion, 96 Inference and Context in Emotion Recognition, 99

Vocal Communication of Emotion, 102 The Communication of Emotions with the Voice, 104

Tactile Communication of Emotion, 107 Four Functions of Touch, 107 Communicating Emotions with Touch, 108

Emotional Expression and the Coordination of Social Interaction, 109 Cultural Variation in Emotional Expression, 111

Cultural Variation in Expressive Behavior, 111 Cultural Variation in the Interpretation of Emotional Expression, 112

Communication of Emotion in Art, 113 Four Hypotheses from the Idea of Romanticism, 114 Aesthetic Emotions in the Natyasastra, 115

Summary, 117 To Think About and Discuss, 118 Further Reading, 118

5 Bodily Changes and Emotions 119 Early Theorizing About Emotion and Bodily Changes, 120 Emotion and the Autonomic Nervous System, 122

Directed Facial Action and Physiological Differentiation of Negative Emotion, 123 Autonomic Response and Positive Emotion, 125 Vagal Tone and Compassion, 126 The Blush, 126 The Chills, 128

Emotion and the Neuroendocrine System, 130 The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis, 130

Emotion and the Immune System, 132 The Inflammation Response, 132

Bodily Changes and Emotional Experience, 134 Representations of Emotions in the Body, 135 Interoception, 137

Embodiment, Cognition, and Social Interaction, 138 Gut Feelings and Decision Making, 140 Embodied Empathy, 141

Summary, 142 To Think About and Discuss, 142 Further Reading, 142

CONTENTSx

6 Appraisal, Experience, Regulation 143 Appraisal and Emotion, 144

Historical Background and Concepts, 144 Primary Appraisals, Good and Bad, 145

Which Is Stronger, Good or Bad?, 147 Secondary Appraisals, 148

Discrete Approaches, 148 Dimensional Approaches, 149 Extending Appraisal Research: Tests of Theories and Patterns of Variation, 152

A Third Phase of Appraisal: Verbal Sharing, 154 Words and Concepts, 155

The Emotion Lexicon, 155 Conceptualization of Emotion, 156 Emotion Metaphors, 156 Prototypes, 157 Variations in Emotion Lexicon, 158

Emotional Experience, 160 The Perspective That Emotions Are Discrete, 161 The Perspective That Emotions Are Constructed, 162 Comparing Perspectives, 163

Regulation of Emotions, 164 Distraction, Reappraisal, Suppression, 165

Summary, 168 To Think About and Discuss, 168 Further Reading, 168

7 Brain Mechanisms and Emotion 169 Historical Approaches to the Neuroscience of Emotion, 170

Early Research on Brain Lesions and Stimulation, 174 The Limbic System, 174 Emotion Systems in the Mammalian Brain, 175 A Framework from Affective Neuroscience, 177

Emotion-Related Appraisals and Subcortical Processes in the Brain, 177 Appraisals of Novelty and Concern Relevance: The Amygdala, 178 Appraisals of Possible Rewards: The Nucleus Accumbens, 180 Appraisals of Pain, Threat, and Harm: The Periaqueductal Gray, 182

Bodily Awareness and Subjective Feeling: The Anterior Insular Cortex, 183 From Conceptualization to Empathic Understanding: Cortical Processes in the Brain, 184

Learning Associations Between Events and Rewards: The Orbitofrontal Cortex, 184 Emotion Conceptualization: The Prefrontal Cortex, 185 Emotion Regulation: Regions of the Prefrontal Cortex, 188 Empathy and the Cortex, 189

Contents xi

Social Pain and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Anterior Insular Cortex, 190

The Search for Emotion-Specific Patterns of Brain Activation, 192 Distinct Emotions Are Constructed in the Cortex, 192 Emotions Engage Discrete Patterns of Brain Activation, 192

Summary, 195 To Think About and Discuss, 195 Further Reading, 195

Part III Emotions and Social Life 197

8 Development of Emotions in Childhood 199 Theories of Emotional Development, 201 Emotional Expression, 202

The Developmental Emergence of Emotions, 202 Social Emotions: 18 Months and Beyond, 206 Developments in Language and the Understanding of Other Minds, 209

Recognition of Emotions, 210 Facial Expressions, 211 Vocal Expressions, 213 Postures and Gestures, 213 Multimodal Recognition of Emotions, 214 Brain Mechanisms in Infants’ Recognition of Emotions, 216 The Negativity Bias, 216

Regulation of Emotions, 218 Regulatory Processes, 219 Neurobiological Development of Emotion Regulation, 220 Temperament, 222

Biological Contributions to Temperament, 224 Summary, 227 To Think About and Discuss, 227 Further Reading, 227

9 Emotions in Social Relationships 228 Emotions Within Intimate Relationships, 230

Principles of Sexual Love, 231 Emotions in Marriage, 234

Emotions in Friendships, 237 Gratitude, 238 Emotional Mimicry, 239 Social Support, 240

Emotions in Hierarchical Relationships, 241 Emotional Displays and the Negotiation of Social Rank, 242

CONTENTSxii

Power and Emotion, 244 Social Class and Emotion, 245

Emotion and Group Dynamics, 247 Group and Collective Emotions, 248 Group and Collective Emotion and Between-Group Conflict, 250 Infrahumanization, 251 Emotional Processes That Improve Group Relations, 251

Emotional Intelligence, 252 Summary, 252 To Think About and Discuss, 253 Further Reading, 253

10 Emotions and Thinking 254 Passion and Reason, 255 Emotions Prioritize Thoughts, Goals, and Actions, 256 Emotion and Mood in Economic Behavior, 259

The Ultimatum Game, 259 Classical Economics, 259

Affect Infusion, and Affect as Information, 260 Styles of Processing, 263 Effects of Moods and Emotions on Cognitive Functioning, 264

Perceptual Effects, 264 Attentional Effects, 265 Effects on Remembering, 266 Emotion-Related Biases in Memory, 267 Eyewitness Testimony, 268 Persuasion, 269

Morality, 269 Intuitions and Principles, 269 Cooperation, 272

Emotions and the Law, 273 Obligations of Society, 273 Dispassionate Judgments?, 274

Summary, 275 To Think About and Discuss, 276 Further Reading, 276

Part IV Emotions and the Individual 277

11 Individual Differences in Emotionality 279 Emotionality Over the Life Span, 280

Continuities in Emotionality from Childhood to Adulthood, 280 From Temperament to Personality, 282 Individual Differences in Emotion Shape How We Construe the World, 283 Age-Related Changes in Temperament and Personality, 284

Contents xiii

Propensities in Emotionality That Shape the Relational Environment, 285 Emotionality Moderates Environmental Risk, 286

Attachment and Emotionality, 287 What Is Attachment?, 287 Attachment Status and Emotional Outcomes, 288 Parental Sensitivity and Shared Thinking, 289 From Parent Attachment to Child Attachment, 290 The Role of Environmental Risk in Children’s Attachment Relationships, 291 Genetic Influences on Attachment, 291

Parental Behaviors Beyond Attachment, 292 Biobehavioral Synchronization, 292 Parental Mentalization and Reflective Capacity, 292 Talk About Emotions, 293 Parental Socialization of Emotion, 295

Beyond Parenting: Influences of Siblings, Peers, and the Broader Social Context, 299

Siblings, 300 Peers, 301 Broader Social Context, 302

Programs That Optimize Emotional Development, 303 Summary, 306 To Think About and Discuss, 307 Further Reading, 307

12 Psychopathology of Emotions in Childhood 308 Emotions and Psychopathology, 309

The Case of Peter, 309 Conceptualizing Childhood Disorders: Categories versus Dimensions, 309 How Are Emotions Involved in Children’s Psychopathology?, 310 Are Emotions Abnormal in Psychopathology?, 311

Prevalence of Psychopathology in Childhood, 312 Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology, 312 Comorbidity, Heterogeneity, and the "p" Factor, 313

The Relationship Between Risk Factors and Psychopathology, 314 People, Contexts, and the Multilevel Environment, 314 Risk and Resilience: The Combination of Risk and Protective Factors, 315

Risk Factors, 318 Biological Risk Factors, 318 Proximal Risk Factors, 322 Distal Risk Factors, 326

Trajectories of Disorders, 328 Homotypic and Heterotypic Continuity, 329 Trajectories of Externalizing Problems, 329 Trajectories of Internalizing Disorders, 331

Interventions for Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, 332

CONTENTSxiv

Summary, 335 To Think About and Discuss, 335 Further Reading, 336

13 Emotional Disorders in Adulthood 337 Depression and Anxiety, 338 Psychiatric Disorders: Symptoms and Prevalence, 338

Psychiatric Epidemiology, 338 Kinds of Depression and Anxiety, 340

How Disorders Are Caused, 343 Genetics, 343 Environment, 344 Life Events and Difficulties, 346

Gene–Environment Interactions, 349 Emotional Predispositions and Emotional Disorders, 350 Vulnerability Factors, 353

Social Support, 353 Early Experience, 353

Recurrence, Recovery, and Prolongation of Disorders, 354 Recurrence, 355 Recovery and Fresh Starts, 356 Prolongation, 356 Cognitive Biases in Anxiety and Other Emotional Disorders, 357

Neurophysiology of Depression and Anxiety, 358 Antidepressant Drugs, 359

Beyond Depression and Anxiety, 360 Psychopathic People in Society, 360 Schizophrenia, Emotion, Expressed Emotion in Relatives, 361 Psychosomatic Effects, 362

Summary, 363 To Think About and Discuss, 363 Further Reading, 363

14 A Meaningful Life 364 A Significant Event, 365 Meaning in Life, 365

Cooperation, 366 Happiness, 366 Relatedness, 368 Satisfaction, 369 Well-Being, 370

Psychological Therapy with Others and by Oneself, 372 Psychoanalysis: Unconscious Schemas of Relating, 374 Rogerian Counseling: Empathetic Support, 376

Contents xv

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Changing Emotional Life by Thought, 376 Emotion-Focused Therapy: Changing Emotional Life by Emotions, 377 Outcomes of Psychotherapy, 378 Psychotherapy Without Therapists, 381

Mindfulness, Ancient and Modern, 382 Consciously Making Sense of Emotions, 384 Emotions in Literature, 386 Emotion and Free Will, 387 Emotion and Meaning in the Social World, 389 Summary, 390 To Think About and Discuss, 390 Further Reading, 390

References 391 Author Index 485 Subject Index 501 

Figures

1.0 Young girl in a hat, from Darwin (1872) 3 1.1 Characters from Inside Out. 4 1.2 Drawing of Charles Darwin. 7 1.3 Two of Charles Darwin’s photographs, sneering and crying: (a) Plate IV No. 1;

(b) Plate 1 No. 1. 8

1.4 Group photograph of the conference to mark Freud’s honorary degree at Clark University in 1909. In the front row Freud is fourth from the right, Jung third from the right, and William James is third from the left.

11

1.5 The theater in classical times was an important institution, constructed to portray action in the context of fellow citizens who sat there in full view.

13

1.6 A stoa that runs alongside the agora (marketplace) in Athens. It was in such a place that the Stoics taught the management of emotions. (The stoa in this picture is not the original but one constructed a century after the founding of Stoicism, and rebuilt in the 1930s).

14

1.7 Model of Phineas Gage’s head and his skull showing the exit hole made by the tamping rod.

19

1.8 Empathy (darker color labels) and compassion (lighter color labels) in networks in the brain.

21

1.9 Arlie Hochschild a pioneering scientist in the study of emotion. 25 1.10 A model of the unfolding processes of emotion. 28 1.11 A spectrum of emotional phenomena in terms of the time course of each. 30 2.0 About 10 minutes before this photograph was taken these two male chimpanzees

had a fight that ended in the trees. Now one extends a hand toward the other in reconciliation. Immediately after this, they embraced and climbed down to the ground together.

32

2.1 These two male elephant seals are in the midst of a struggle to determine their relative strength and standing within a social hierarchy, which will impact their mating opportunities.

34

2.2 Given their hypervulnerability, new babies rely on a variety of cues, evolutionary reasoning holds, such as smiles, coos, soft skin, and cute faces to draw parents into the provision of care, and this intensive caregiving continues for several years.

37

2.3 Greeting gestures around the world often involve smiles, eye contact, touch, and the raising of the eyebrows.

38

2.4 A DNA molecule. 39 2.5 A group of San people 42 2.6 Human relatedness to the apes. 43 2.7 An Orangutan mother and offspring in Borneo. 45 2.8 In chimpanzees, threat displays and chasing are part of the negotiation of rank within

hierarchies. 46

2.9 Two chimpanzees grooming. Dunbar’s hypothesis is that in humans this emotionally intimate activity has been replaced by conversation.

50

3.0 A bronze figurine from the Han dynasty in China, made more than 2,000 years ago, probably representing a person from an foreign northern tribe.

59

xvii

Figuresxviii

3.1 An Ifaluk woman smiles as she makes an impromptu head-dress for her small son. This kind of socially responsive smiling is of a lower intensity and signals something different from ker, meaning “excited happiness” ( from Lutz, 1988, p. 49).

61

3.2 Image used in research by Masuda and colleagues (2008b), in which the central figure is smiling and surrounding individuals are frowning.

66

3.3 European Americans experience and express greater anger in response to a frustrating experimenter (adapted from Mauss, Butler, Roberts, & Chu, 2010).

67

3.4 Calmness and serenity are at the heart of Buddhism, which has shaped the emotional lives of vast parts of East Asian cultures.

68

3.5 European Americans reveal a greater preference for exciting recreational activities (left-hand panel adapted from Tsai, Louie et al., 2007). Christian texts place a greater value on high-arousal, positive emotions (HAP), whereas Buddhist texts place a greater value on low-arousal, calm, positive emotions (LAP) (right-hand panel adapted from Tsai, Miao, & Seppala, 2007).

69

3.6 Homicide rates in England and in Europe as a whole from Eisner (2003). (The data point for England in the fifteenth century is an interpolation; Eisner did not have enough data for an estimate for this century.)

71

3.7 Title page of volume 1 of Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley but published anonymously in 1818.

74

3.8 The origin of the culturally distinctive version of romantic love that occurs in the West is traced from courtly love in medieval Europe. The most famous book depicting this was Roman de la Rose, for which this was an illuminated illustration from about 1500 depicting the garden of courtly love.

76

4.0 Most important social rituals, as at this wedding when the groom embraces a groomsman, involve emotional expression involving the face, the voice, touch, and different movements of the body. In fact, most social interactions, you shall learn, are rich with emotional expression.

85

4.1 “Flirtation,” by the Hungarian painter Miklós Barabás, showing characteristic elements: the man shows direct interest with body and head oriented toward the woman; the woman shows classic coyness, with head and gaze cast away.

89

4.2 A coarse gesture of contempt: seen in Britain, but not in southern Europe. Such gestures are based on learned conventions like words (from Morris et al., 1979).

90

4.3 Dr. Martin Luther King using the clenched fist, an inspiring illustrator, to add strength to his words in a speech in Philadelphia.

90

4.4 Six different emotions: (a) anger, (b) disgust, (c) fear, (d) happiness, (e) sadness, and (f) surprise. The expressions in these photos are similar to those described by Darwin, to those used by Ekman and Friesen in their universality studies, and to those used in many other studies of facial expression.

94

4.5 Paul Ekman in New Guinea. 95 4.6 Affiliation-related displays in chimpanzees captured by Frans de Waal. 97 4.7 Static photos of expressions of love, desire, and sympathy. 98 4.8 Static photos of expressions of embarrassment, shame, and pride. 98 4.9 Sighted (top panel) and blind (bottom panel) Olympic Athletes’ nonverbal displays to

winning and losing a competition (from Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008). 100

4.10 Static photos of expressions of amusement, interest, and contentment. 101 4.11 Accuracy rates across 10 cultures in judging emotions from static photos of facial/bodily

expressions. Chance guessing is represented in the dotted line (adapted from Keltner & Cordaro, 2016).

101

4.12 Anatomy of the vocal apparatus (from babelsdawn.com). 103 4.13 Observers in 10 cultures are able to identify several emotions from vocal bursts

(from Cordaro et al., 2016). 105

Figures xix

4.14 A Himba woman listening to vocal bursts, and Disa Sauter working with the Himba. 105 4.15 Three different kinds of fearful response by vervet monkeys to three kinds of predator. 106 4.16 Accuracy with which individuals can communicate emotion by touching a stranger

on the forearm (left bars in light gray) or anywhere on the body (dark gray to right). 109

5.0 Bernini: St. Teresa. Of this sculpture Gombrich (1972, p. 345) says that Bernini has “carried us to a pitch of emotion which artists had so far shunned.”

119

5.1 Anatomical diagram of the human autonomic nervous system. 123 5.2 In this setup in Robert Levenson’s laboratory, two participants’ autonomic physiology

is recorded as they talk with each other. Receptors help gather measures of participants’ activity, heart rate, pulse in the finger and ear, galvanic sweat response in the finger, skin temperature, and respiration

124

5.3 Participants who begin the study with elevated vagal tone (solid line) show greater increases over time in social connectedness and positive emotion, which in turn track increases in vagal tone (from Kok & Fredrickson, 2008).

127

5.4 The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis that releases cortisol into the blood stream. 131 5.5 Teenagers navigating white-water rapids on a river in the Sierra Nevada Mountains

(photo by Craig Anderson). 132

5.6 In situations of increased social evaluative threat, or SET (dotted line), one measure of cytokine release (TNF-alpha) increases when participants must give a speech about why they would be a good candidate for a job (from Dickerson et al., 2009).

134

5.7 Body maps of emotion-specific sensations. Brighter areas indicate where participants report increased physical sensation for the emotion.

136

5.8 Processing concepts related to specific emotions activates emotion-specific facial muscles for happiness, anger, and disgust (adapted from Niedenthal et al., 2009). Corrugator muscle movement furrows the eyebrows; Levator muscle movement raises the upper lip; Orbicularis muscle movement raises the cheek; and Zygomaticus muscle action pulls the lip corners up.

139

6.0 Diagram from Descartes’s book, Traite de l’homme, showing how the soul—which can be moved by emotions—can open valves to let vital fluids from the reservoir in the brain (labeled F) into the tubes to work the muscles and produce actions.

143

6.1 People liked Chinese ideographs more after they had first been subliminally presented with a smile, suggesting that the smile had activated positive feeling at an unconscious level. When presented with a smiling face long enough to be consciously aware of it, the smile did not lead participants to evaluate Chinese ideographs more positively (Source: Murphy & Zajonc, 1993).

146

6.2 Decision tree of appraisals based on three features (goal relevance, goal congruence, and ego involvement), plus the emotions that can occur with these appraisals (Lazarus, 1991). Further differentiation among emotions occurs in secondary appraisals.

148

6.3 A spatial arrangement of different emotional experiences triggered by 2185 different video clips.

164

6.4 Increases in blood pressure by partners of those instructed to reappraise or to suppress their emotions, and control participants, in the study by Butler et al. (2003).

166

7.0 Images from a study by Saarimäki and colleagues showing different patterns of brain activation for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and surprise elicited by movies, imagery, and both (Adapted from Saarimäki et al., 2016).

169

7.1 Early thinking some 100 years ago about the brain assumed that distinct functions were located in very specific regions of the brain, as portrayed in this drawing. Today, it is more widely believed that processes such as emotion are distributed across different regions of the brain.

171

7.2 An image of a neuron. Neurotransmitters are released from vesicles near the synapse, and then travel to nearby neurons, stimulating an electrical impulse up the axon of the neuron.

172

Figuresxx

7.3 Exploded view of the human brain. This slice of the brain brings into focus the areas involved in emotion. Subcortical regions of this kind include the amygdala (part of the limbic system) and hypothalamus, as well as the ventral striatum and periaqueductal gray (not pictured). Cortical regions clearly involved in emotion include the orbitofrontal, dorsolateral, midline, and anterior cingulate, all located in the frontal region of the cerebral cortex.

173

7.4 Subcortical regions involved in emotion, including the reward circuit (the nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area (VTA) and prefrontal cortex) and the amygdala.

179

7.5 The orbitofrontal cortex is highlighted in a monkey brain (left) and brain of a human (right).

185

7.6 Emotion labeling activates the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, pictured here, which is associated with reduced activation in the amygdala.

187

7.7 The Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (the darker, shaded area in the two images of the brain) is activated by different forms of social pain and separation.

191

7.8 Networks of activation associated with six different emotions and a neutral state (from Kragel & LaBar, 2016).

193

8.0 This picture of a four-year-old girl was taken after her father had photographed her sister in her confirmation dress: finally, this little girl jumped forward and shouted: “I want to have my picture taken too.” The picture shows a characteristic angry expression (eyebrows raised, square mouth) and posture.

199

8.1 Babies showing emotional expressions: (a) a positive or happy expression, (b) a negative expression.

203

8.2 Effects of crawling status on frequency of anger expressed during the Arm Restraint procedure in Roben et al.’s (2012) study.

204

8.3 The development of children’s distress responses when separated from their mothers in four different cultures. Copied from Kagan, Kearsley & Zelazo, 1978.

205

8.4 Observed trajectory groupings of children’s stranger fear from 6 to 36 months in the Brooker et al., 2013 study.

205

8.5 Proportion of children showing specific emotions as a function of elicitors in the Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis, 2002 study.

206

8.6 Mean percentage of 18-month-olds in Warneken and Tomasello’s (2006) study who tried to help the adult experimenter in experimental and control conditions.

207

8.7 Summary timelines for the developmental progression of emotional expression. The top line shows the age at which certain emotions are expressed, and the bottom line shows the cognitive milestones associated with the emergence of various expressions across time.

210

8.8 The visual cliff: visually the baby sees a steep drop—notice the finer grain of the checker-board pattern to the right of the baby’s right knee—but actually a plate of thick glass supports the infant safely.

212

8.9 Example still photos of (a) full light expression and (b) matching point-light expression of anger (from Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004).

214

8.10 Example of the stimuli and the design of the priming paradigm used in the Rakhans, Jessen, Missana, & Grossmann (2016) study.

215

8.11 ERP processing elicited in response to the angry and happy face conditions in a sample of maltreated and nonmaltreated 15-month-old infants (from Curtis & Cicchetti, 2013).

217

8.12 Summary timelines for the development of emotion regulation from infancy through mid-childhood. The top line represents approximate temporal onset of particular regulatory processes, and the lower line represents associated neurobiological underpinnings of those processes. Dashed arrows at age 3 to 5 indicate that these processes occur within this time frame, at roughly the same time.

221

Figures xxi

8.13 The brain circuitry includes the amygdala, several regions of the prefrontal cortex, and several regions of the basal ganglia. (Source: Copied from Clauss, Avery & Blackford, 2015.)

223

8.14 A sample of neutral and positive images from the Raila, Scholl, and Gruber 2015 study. 224 8.15 Correlations between monozygotic and dizygotic twins on temperament from the

Polderman et al., 2015 meta-analysis. The correlation is given for the whole sample, as well as males and females separately.

225

8.16 Percentage of correct answers of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) for participants under oxytocin or placebo. Oxytocin improved performance in the RMET in comparison with placebo (from Guastella et al., 2010)

226

9.0 Auguste Renoir, "Dance at Bougival," 1882–83. This painting was used to illustrate a story, by Lhote, about an artist seeking to persuade a young woman to model for him. In the painting, we see the man thrusting his face eagerly toward the young woman, and grasping her possessively. We also notice from her ring that she is married. Keeping her polite social smile, she turns away.

228

9.1 Colin Firth in his role as Mr Darcy in the 1995 television series of Pride and Prejudice. 233 9.2 This balcony in Verona Italy is where the courtship between Romeo and Juliet is alleged

to have taken place. Today when people visit, they write the name of their loved one on “Juliet’s Wall” nearby, and they leave love letters as well.

234

9.3 Anger may be an important part of intimate relationships. It is typically less destructive in relationships than is contempt.

236

9.4 Although Adam Smith is known for his enduring analysis of self-interest, trade, and capital, in his book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” he lays out how emotions are the source of moral judgment, a thesis we take up in next chapter. For Smith, gratitude may be the most important moral emotion and binder of social relations.

238

9.5 When feeling gratitude, people will give more of their time both to someone who’s helped them (benefactor) and to a stranger (from Condon & DeSteno, 2006).

239

9.6 Ceremonies and celebrations, as in this one in Taiwan, often evoke emotions such as awe and joy that solidify group identity.

249

10.0 Reason, advised by Divine Grace, holds the Passions, Feare, Despaire, Choler, and others in chains. The caption starts: “Passions araing’d by Reason here you see/As she’s Advis’d by Grace Divine. . . .” From Senault (1671).

254

10.1 Modules of the brain and different kinds of messages that pass among them (to illustrate Oatley & Johnson-Laird’s, 1987, theory). In (a) the signals are informational and travel along particular pathways. In (b) an emotion-control signal spreads diffusely from one module (2.3), turning some other modules on and some off, thereby setting the system into a distinctive mode. Normally, in (c) these two kinds of signals occur together.

258

10.2 People say they are more satisfied with their life on sunny than on overcast days, except when they are explicitly asked to think about the weather (adapted from Schwarz & Clore, 1983).

261

10.3 Capilano Suspension Bridge. Photo Markus Säynevirta; acknowledgment by e-mail would be greatly appreciated. Wikipedia, Creative Commons License.

262

10.4 The trolley problem for testing moral intuitions by means of vignettes, invented by Philippa Foot.

271

11.0 A mother picks up her child after an absence. Notice the child clasping the mother and pushing away the babysitter.

279

11.1 Outcome (means) of degree of inhibition, time until first relationship, and time until first full-time job of 23-year-olds who were inhibited or not inhibited at age four to six (Asendorpf et al., 2008).

280

11.2 Survival function over 13 years for participants who recorded a high number as compared with a low number of positive emotions when paged five times a day for a week (from Carstensen et al., 2011, Figure 2, p. 28).

282

Figuresxxii

11.3 Photos of a female and a male with, respectively, happy, angry, and neutral faces as used by Knyazev et al. (2008).

284

11.4 The relationship between father power assertion (harshness) and children’s oppositional behavior as a function of orchids and dandelions (Adapted from Kochanska, Aksan & Joy, 2007).

287

11.5 The effect sizes for cumulative risk and maltreatment in explaining insecure and disorganized attachment (based on Cyr et al., 2010).

291

11.6 The relationship between parental supportive emotion socialization and children’s regulatory balance varies as a function of children’s age (Source: Mirabile, Oertwig, and Halberstadt, 2016).

296

11.7 Following the emotion intervention parents showed improved skills in being less dismissive of children’s emotions, being more empathic, and showing less negative expressiveness. ** = difference in change from baseline to follow up between groups is significant at < .001; * = difference in change from baseline to follow up between groups shows a tendency.

298

11.8 The role of genes (A), shared environment (C), and nonshared environment (E) in mothers’ and fathers’ warmth and negativity to children (Klahr & Burt, 2014).

299

11.9 The effect of parenting education (classes on different aspects of raising children) to improve parenting and child outcomes. Figure derived from Pinquart and Teubert et al., 2010.

304

11.10 Taking the third-party perspective during an argument (labeled reappraisal intervention) improves marital satisfaction.

306

12.0 These boys are in a fight. Boys are more prone to these disruptive behavior disorders than girls.

308

12.1 The multilevel structure of children’s developmental contexts, based on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Bioecological Model.

315

12.2 Development of psychopathology over time, influenced both by the context and by factors inherent in the child.

316

12.3 Effects of cumulative risk on likelihood of developing psychopathology in children (Rutter, 1979). Children with one risk factor are no more likely to develop a disorder than those with none, but with each added risk factor the prevalence of psychopathology multiplies.

317

12.4 Children’s oppositional behavior as a function of differential parenting: whether the children have been treated favorably or unfavorably (from Meunier et al., 2012).

324

12.5 Positive versus threat attention bias in early-institutionalized children randomly assigned to a foster-care group (FCG) or who remained institutionalized (CAUG) at age 12 (Troller-Renfree et al., 2017).

326

12.6 Conduct problems across childhood and early adulthood. Approximately 10% of individuals have life-course persistent (LCP) conduct problems (taken from Odgers et al., 2008).

330

12.7 Trajectories of depression from age 12 to 16 as identified by Brière, Janosz, Fallu, and Morizot (2015). Trajectories of depressive symptoms closely mirrored the course of externalizing problems (delinquency, substance use) and academic adjustment (school liking, academic achievement).

332

12.8 Effect sizes for youth psychotherapy across disorder categories (from Weisz et al., 2017). The strongest effects are for anxiety disorders and the weakest for depression. Behavioral and caregiver/family treatments yield the most robust cross-informant effects.

334

13.0 A striking result in psychiatric epidemiology is that the prevalence of depression is 50% higher in women than in men.

337

13.1 Prevalence of mental illness in American adults as a function of gender, age, and ethnic background.

341

Figures xxiii

13.2 Rates of mental illness as percentages of the populations of four different nations as a function of income inequality (data from Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009, graph drawn by Keith Oatley).

345

13.3 Poverty is a fundamental cause of depression, which has hopeless despair at its core. 346 13.4 Differentiation of normal emotions from depressive breakdowns (Oatley, 1988). 351 13.5 Social support, the feeling of having people to turn to in difficult times, comes in many

forms, including family, friends, and close colleagues at work. 354

13.6 Standardized coefficients of factors that predicted relapse of depression in the study of Backs-Dermott et al. (2010).

355

13.7 A vicious circle: depression caused by a life event may elicit memories of previous losses and failures, which, in turn, tend to make the person more depressed, and so on.

356

13.8 Activation of the left amygdala of adolescents in a control group (CTL) and in those with a disorder at the major depressive level (MDL) who were shown fearful, angry, and happy faces (from Yang et al., 2010).

358

13.9 Percentages of schizophrenic patients who relapsed within nine months of leaving hospital as a function of high and low expressed emotion, the amount of time they spent with their family, and whether they took their medication (Vaughn & Leff, 1976).

362

14.1 Determinants of happiness and well-being (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). 370 14.2 Often people in traditional cultures with fewer possessions and material wealth,

as in these Massai men participating in a ritual, scored on well-being measures as high as or higher than people in cultures of greater wealth.

372

14.3 Almost all forms of psychological therapy involve a therapist listening and coming to understand a client, or in this picture a woman and a man who talk about their emotional life together.

373

14.4 Symptom levels, measured by the General Symptom Index (GSI), over different phases of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the study by Blomberg et al. (2001), as compared with norm for the case level (upper horizontal dotted line, labeled Normgroup 1 28 SD) and a normgroup who were without significant symptoms, lower horizontal dotted line (labeled Normgroup M). (Source: Blomberg et al., 2001).

380

14.5 Mindfulness is being taught and practiced in just about every setting, from schools to prisons to workplaces of different kinds, including in the military.

384

14.6 Stanley Milgram leaning on the apparatus by means of which participants in his experiments on obedience thought they were delivering painful electrical shocks to others.

388 

Tables

1.1 Emotional expressions discussed by Darwin (1872), the bodily systems used, and the type of emotion which was expressed.

8

2.1 Examples of adaptations. 35 2.2 Ainsworth’s (1967) list of attachment behaviors. 53 2.3 Relations, recurring situations, and emotions. 55 3.1 Two different self-construals. This table outlines contrasting elements of the independent

self, prominent in Northern Europe and North America, with the interdependent self, prominent in Asia, Africa, and South America.

64

3.2 Comparison of evolutionary and cultural approaches. 79 4.1 Drawings and “stickers” of 16 emotions. 86 4.2 Darwin’s descriptions of emotional expression from The Expression of the Emotions in

Man and Animals. 92

4.3 Accuracy rates for participants from New Guinea and the United States in judging expressions of six emotions.

95

4.4 Emotions as performed by actors, rasas, and English translations of them as aesthetic emotions that spectators may experience.

117

5.1 Emotion-related changes in autonomic physiology observed in the directed facial action task.

124

6.1 Modes of action readiness. 150 6.2 Dimensions of appraisal. 151 6.3 Prototype of sadness. 157 7.1 Jaak Panksepp’s ideas of systems of social–emotional systems of the brain. 176 8.1 Numbers of children who showed embarrassment as a function of whether they recognized

themselves from the rouge-on-the-nose test (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss,1989). 208

8.2 Mapping of dimensions of temperament onto aspects of emotions, for two well-known schemes of temperament: Buss and Plomin’s (1975) and Rothbart’s (1981).

223

9.1 Measure of social support. 241 9.2 In groups of four, high-power (HP) and low-power (LP) fraternity members teased

one another. During these interactions, high-power individuals were more likely to smile with delight and to show facial displays of anger and contempt, especially when being challenged by a low-power member. Low-power fraternity members, in contrast, were more likely to show displays of fear and pain.

244

10.1 Moral principles and characteristics. 271 11.1 Positive emotionality, as assessed in the magnitude of the smile shown in a photograph

at age 20, predicts adult personality, relationship satisfaction, and personal well-being over the next 30 years.

281

11.2 Number of individuals in three different categories for caregiver’s adult attachment status and their children’s attachment status, in 2,774 dyads.

290

12.1 Three-month prevalence rates of psychopathology among a representative sample of children and adolescents of different age groups.

313

12.2 Proportion of variance in childhood disorders attributable to additive genetic factors. 319

xxv

Tablesxxvi

13.1 Lifetime prevalence (in percentages) of psychiatric conditions in people aged 18 and over in the 48 contiguous United States, using the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey version of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview.

340

13.2 Adversities that cause depressive and anxiety disorders. 348 13.3 Plomin et al.’s (2016) top ten replicated findings in behavioral genetics. 350 13.4 Disorders as excesses, deficits, and dysfunctions of emotions. 352 14.1 Modes and characteristics of meaning in life. 366 14.2 Pretreatment and posttreatment means on two symptom measures for clients receiving

client-centered therapy or emotion-focused therapy. 380

xxvii

Preface

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to everyone for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

As we present the fourth edition of Understanding Emotions, we are struck by how much has been learned about emotion in the past six years since we published the third edition. We are also struck by how topical emotions are today. They are the inspiration for films, for alarming trends in politics in different countries, for lesson plans in the classroom, for new emotional intelligence programs at work, and for the time-honored contemplation of what it means to live a meaningful life. It is an honor to be part of the scientific effort at understanding emotions as we try, with our varying methods and notions, to chart the human passions.

According to written and oral traditions, people have been interested in emotions for thou- sands of years; in most societies, they are at the center of people’s understandings of themselves and others in their relationships, rituals, and public life. Great ethical, philosophical, and spir- itual traditions, from Aristotle to Lao Tzu, concern themselves with the emotions, as has been observed by the historian Karen Armstrong. So too do the great artists and writers of all eras, from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison. In the era of scientific research in psychol- ogy, we present here an approach to understanding that can enter ordinary conversation and that is based in the growing streams of scientific evidence.

In psychology, emotions have now moved into their proper place, at the center of our under- standings of the human mind and of relationships in the social world. Research on emotions is not just psychology. It extends into neuroscience, cognitive science, psychiatry, biology, genetics, anthropology, sociology, economics, literature, history, and philosophy. As has been true since the first edition of this book, and our own leanings, we do our best to offer insights about emo- tions from many disciplines, alongside those of psychology.

In this edition, we continue to build upon the growing realization that although emotions occur in individuals’ brains and bodies, they also mediate our relationships with each other, in both intimate and public ways. They support a grammar of social life. We focus on this idea even more explicitly in this edition: on the role of emotions in attachments, friendships, parent–child interactions, and intimate relationships, as well as in hierarchical and collective social structures.

Surveying the field as we have done for this edition, we note some other new trends in the field that have shaped the revision of this book. It is now quite clear that the field has moved well beyond a narrow focus on what might be called the “Basic Six”—anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness—which were so central to the study of emotions 40 years ago (for summary of that science, see Lench et al., 2011). In part, this is due to the study of emo- tions in relationships, which led researchers to emotions like compassion, love, and desire, as well as envy and jealousy. This includes the emergence of moral psychology, and the notion that emotions are involved in moral judgments, which leads to an interest in emotions such as gratitude, guilt, and shame. There is also an increasing interest in emotion and the arts, fiction, and our narrative and scientific understanding of the world, and emotions like awe, interest,

Prefacexxviii

and appreciation of beauty. We believe this interest in a broadening array of emotions, seen in studies of expression, the nervous system, development, relationships, and well-being shifts our understanding of who we are as a species, and we’ve done our best in this new edition to represent these changes.

In surveying the field for this edition, it is clear that the current generation of scholars has pushed the longstanding debate about how emotions might be discrete, and how they are con- structed with language, in new directions. Findings are emerging that suggest how emotions may be both discrete and constructed, a theme we take up in fresh ways in different chapters in the book.

We also note the greater interest in the meaningful life through the lens of the science of emotion. Happiness, after all, is in many ways at its heart about emotion. So too are the struggles of living—depression, anxiety, loneliness, illness, sleep disruption, drug addiction, and antisocial behavior. Well-being and health often involve practices that cultivate different emotions. And so throughout this book, culminating in our last chapter, we explore the new science of a meaningful life and focus on such themes as mindfulness, empathy, gratitude, compassion, kindness, immer- sion in nature, and even mystical states.

We hope you will like this fourth edition, which continues the traditions of the earlier editions, but with new features that we hope will make it easier and more pleasurable for both instruc- tors and students to use. In this edition, we have collaborated with people who are students or former students in particular chapters: Michelle Rodriguez and Sahar Borairi in Chapter 8, Heather Prime and Alessandra Schneider in Chapter 11, Mark Wade and Noam Binoon-Erez in Chapter 12. We are very grateful to these people; they have improved on what we would have been able to do on our own. We are also very grateful to colleagues who sent thoughts about advances in the field or read and sent us feedback and suggestions on chapters: Belinda Campos, Hugo Critchley, David DeSteno, Neha John-Anderson, Brian Knutson, Matthew Lieberman, Terry Maroney, Batja Mesquita, Randolph Nesse, Lauri Nummenmaa, Kevin Ochsner, Ira Rose- man, Ryan Smith, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Jessica Tracy, and Jeanne Tsai.

Exciting advances continue to be made in the field of emotions, and we have done our best to reflect the new currents, and we have also responded to colleagues’ suggestions for updating this book.

Changes in the fourth edition include the following:

• Updated references throughout, including recent research and evidence in psychology, psychiatry, the social sciences, and the humanities, as well as in neuroscience

• Deepened attention to interpersonal and social functions of emotions, with discussions of how emotions work between people in different relationships

• More treatment of positive emotions such as love, compassion, awe, interest, and gratitude and how they help shape our relationships and well-being

• A greater focus on mind–body relations in emotion through the lens of new studies of embodi- ment and interoception

• A more coherent focus on studies of how emotion-related language influences emotional experience, neurophysiology, and well-being

• New discussions of contemporary research on evolution, and on genes in interaction with the environment

• A deepened focus on emotion and moral judgment

• New sections on collective emotions, meaning and well-being, mindfulness, and a sharpened focus on personal and societal costs of poverty and economic inequality

Preface xxix

Science and the humanities both depend on entering the tradition of earlier writers. Bernard of Chartres, a scholar of the twelfth century, seems to have been the first to remark that if we can see further, now, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants: those who have come before us. Our job as writers is to present some of what can be seen from this position, and to evaluate theories and evidence. You as a reader can then evaluate what we say in relation to what else you know. You can take part in the debate that is the social process of science and discussion, means by which understanding is increased.

This book is intended for anyone with an interest in emotions to show how far conceptualization and research have progressed toward understanding. Although some have argued that emotions are too heterogeneous for systematic study, the fact that we can write a textbook shows—we believe—that from a complex field, order, insight, and intellectual progress can emerge.

Any discussion of human emotions without a point of view would be dull and largely incom- prehensible. The quantity of publications—numbering now in tens of tens of thousands—in the field makes it impossible to be exhaustive. We have therefore chosen studies that we believe are representative, hoping to convey material for you to think productively and critically about this field. As well as an overall narrative arc in the book, there is a story line for each chapter, including pivotal characters, foundational ideas, and intellectual controversies and tensions. Where there are debates we discuss them, so that you can look at the field from different points of view. But we have also worked to produce a coherent book. Although ours is not the only point of view, we think that by seeing that there is a coherent perspective in this area, you the reader will be able to agree, or to disagree, or to modify it. Knowing that any piece of evidence is not conclusive on its own but that each is a step in exploring an idea, we hope that an integrated picture will take shape for you the reader, with concepts and ideas you can modify and apply to your own interests.

We have done our best to be fair-minded in our treatment of evidence, but our knowledge is necessarily incomplete and our views are necessarily biased toward our own interests and con- ceptualizations. Our interests are in thinking of emotions in cognitive, evolutionary, social, and developmental terms, in understanding their role in mediating everyday social interaction, and in comprehending what goes wrong in emotional disorders. We see emotions as based on biological processes, elaborated in our close relationships, and shaped by culture. Like the skilled action when you write your signature, an emotion has a biological basis of components and constraints. It also has a history of individual development. It is only fully understandable within an interper- sonal and cultural context.

We write about emotions largely in the Western tradition. This does not imply universality of Euro-American assumptions; we present a lot of cross-cultural comparisons. At the same time, we imagine that most of our readers will be members of, or will be conversant with, the Western tradition. We believe that, by characterizing and identifying with this tradition, the ideas and findings about emotions that have substance within it can be seen clearly. We, and others, can then both form understandings based in that tradition and also understand better other culturally distinctive ways of thinking.

As well as a general introduction to the area, the book is designed for use as a textbook for a course on emotions for second- to fourth-year undergraduates, or for students at the MA/MSc or PhD level, and we hope, for interested readers more generally.

Most textbooks in psychology nowadays are compendia of many things to be remembered and a few to be conceptualized. By contrast, Richards (1925) said that a book is “a machine to think with” (p. 1). We have written our book to invite your thinking. Our conclusions make up a narrative thread. But by offering you sufficient evidence, from which we make suggestions, we hope to make it possible for you to draw your own conclusions.

The 14 chapters of this book can be covered in semester-long courses at the rate of one a week, perhaps with one or two chapters left out according to the judgment of the instructor. For full-year courses, each chapter can be divided. Throughout, we keep in mind both the issue of prompting

Prefacexxx

understandings of emotions and practical applications in clinical psychology, psychiatry, health care, education, and issues of organizations. We envisage that many instructors who use the book will supplement it with readings that they provide. At the end of each chapter, we offer some suggestions for further reading, typically reviews and books.

We have tested our ideas and coverage by going to conferences, and attending to the currents of publications in the field, which has its own journals, its international societies for research, its review volumes, its handbooks. One of us (DK) continues to keep the material of this book in register with students in his undergraduate course of emotions at the University of California, Berkeley. All three of us use the material presented here in our courses and lectures.

An Instructor’s Manual with lecture notes and teaching tips is available upon request.

xxxi

Acknowledgments

As with any book, we the authors are not the only ones who brought this object into being. This text is a reflection of the work of many people: researchers and thinkers, our teachers, our stu- dents, and our colleagues. We would like to thank once more those who assisted with the first, second, and third editions of this text.

In addition, the following have contributed to the fourth edition: We thank Veronica Viscentin, the Wiley Executive Editor, and Judy Howarth, the substantive

editor and Meghana Antony of Wiley. The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the

copyright material in this book:

R. L. Atkinson, R. C. Atkinson, E. E. Smith, & D. M. Bem, “Figs 2.6–7 Exploded view of human brain & human brain as if sliced in the midline,” pp. 42–3 from Introduction to Psychology, 10th edn. Wadsworth, 1989. Copyright © 1989. Reprinted with permission of Wadsworth, a division of Thomson Learning: www.thomsonrights.com. Fax 800 730 2215.

N. Carlson, “Fig 3.21: The autonomic nervous system and the target organs and functions served by the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches,” p. 90 from Foundations of Physiological Psychology, 6th edn. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Pearson Education. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

D. Morris, P. Collett, P. Marsh, & M. O’Shaughnessy, “Two coarse gestures of contempt,” p. 107 in 1st edn of Understanding Emotions from Gestures: Their origin and distribution. London: Cape, 1979 Copyright © 1979 by D. Morris, P. Collett, P. Marsh & M. O’Shaughnessy. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

K. Oatley, “Fig 30.1 The differentiation of normal emotions from depressive breakdowns” in “Life events, social cognition and depression,” p. 552 from S. Fisher & J. Reason, Handbook of Life Stress, Cognition and Health, John Wiley & Sons, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by John Wiley & Sons Limited. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

S. Scarr & P. Salapatek, “Fig 3.5 Fear of visual cliff, dogs, noises, and jack-in-the-box” in “Patterns of fear development during infancy,” pp. 64–5 from Merrill Palmer Quarterly 16. Wayne State University Press, 1970. Copyright © 1970 by Merrill Palmer Quarterly. Reprinted by permission of Wayne State University Press.

R. M. Seyfarth & D. L. Cheney, “Three different kinds of fearful response by vervet monkeys” in “Meaning and mind in monkeys,” p. 124 from Scientific American 267 (Dec.). Scientific American, Inc., 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Patricia J. Wynne. Reprinted by permission of the illustrator.

C. E. Vaughn & J. P. Leff, “Fig 1 Schizophrenic patients relapsing, as a function of High and Low Expressed Emotion of families” in “The influence of family and social factors on the course of

Acknowledgmentsxxxii

psychiatric illness: A comparison of schizophrenic and depressed patients,” p. 132 from British Journal of Psychiatry 129. Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by The British Journal of Psychiatry. Reprinted by permission of the journal.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

1

PART I Perspectives on Emotions

3

1Approaches to Understanding Emotions

Why is every critical moment in the fate of the adult or child so clearly colored by emotion?

(Vygotsky, 1987, p. 335)

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FIGURE 1.0 Young girl in a hat, from Darwin (1872)

CONTENTS Introduction

What Is an Emotion? First Ideas

Nineteenth-Century Founders Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Approach William James: The Bodily Approach Sigmund Freud: The Psychoanalytic Approach

Philosophical and Literary Approaches Aristotle and the Ethics of Emotions René Descartes: Philosophically Speaking George Eliot: The World of the Arts

Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology

John Harlow, Tania Singer: Toward a Brain Science of Emotion Magda Arnold, Sylvan Tomkins: New Psychological Theories Erving Goffman, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Lila Abu-Lughod: Emotions as Moral Dramas Involving Selves and Others

Empirical Inspirations for a New Science of Emotion

What Is an Emotion? A Framework

The Emotional Realm: Emotions— Moods—Dispositions

Episodes of Emotion Moods and Sentiments Emotional Disorders Personality and Temperament

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions4

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FIGURE 1.1 Characters from Inside Out.

Introduction After winning an Academy Award for his movie Up, Pixar director Pete Docter was searching for a fresh subject for his next film. What captured his imagination was something close to home: the emotional fluctuations that he saw in his 11-year-old daughter Elie, who was experiencing her transition to adolescence. Adolescence is a notoriously emotional time. The delights and joys of childhood come to be replaced by doubts, anxieties, and self-consciousness. It is not uncom- mon for preadolescent girls to experience such feelings. As Pete Docter watched his daughter go through emotional changes of this kind, he arrived at the subject of his next film—the emotions.

To understand his new subject more deeply, Docter immersed himself in the science of emo- tion you are about to study (and reached out to one of the authors of this book (D.K.), to serve as a scientific consultant for the film). He read the previous edition of the book you are just begin- ning to read. He pored over scientific articles. He asked questions such as: How many emotions are there? Why do we feel emotions such as sadness or anger? What are the subtle ways in which we express emotions? How do emotions shape how we perceive the world? When we remember an emotional event in the past, how much of that recollection is faithful to what happened? The scientific answers to the aforementioned questions became a foundation of his film, Inside Out.

Inside Out is about the emotional turmoil that Riley, an 11-year-old girl, experiences as she and her family move from Minnesota to San Francisco. It is a traumatic move, as so many are. Riley must leave behind her best friend, joyful times of ice-skating with her parents, and the passion of her childhood—her hockey team. She moves into a spooky Victorian house in San Francisco, that, without the family’s furniture, fills her dreams with ghosts. Alone, she must make her way at a new school and the navigate judgments of middle-school girls, who can be contemptuous critics of character. What is unique, though, about Inside Out is that alongside Riley and her parents, the central characters in the film are five emotions in Riley’s mind—Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, and Sadness (see Figure 1.1).

What Is an Emotion? First Ideas 5

Inside Out dramatizes two central insights about the emotions that are contained within its title. The “Inside” of Inside Out refers to how emotions shape the inner workings of our minds and identities. If you watch Inside Out you’ll notice how the five emotions vie for control over a console in Riley’s mind, and once in charge, if only for a second or two, they arrange how Riley perceives her present circumstances. For example, in one scene, when Riley’s dad offers to walk with her on her first day of school, Disgust, played by Mindy Kaling, rejects this mortifying pos- sibility, prompting Riley to politely decline her dad’s offer. Emotions also guide how Riley thinks about the past. In one of the more poignant scenes in the film, Sadness, played by Phyllis Smith, adds a blue tint to Riley’s joyous, yellow-hued memories of her idyllic childhood in Minnesota. Emotions shape the workings of our minds.

The “Out” of Inside Out refers to how emotions guide our behavior in the social environment. For example, Anger, played by Lewis Black, drives Riley to compete fiercely when playing hockey and to storm upstairs after a temper tantrum directed at her parents. Sadness prompts thoughtful, wise action, guiding Riley to comfort her imaginary friend Bing Bong when he has lost the wagon in which they had played during Riley’s childhood. At the end of the film, Riley reunites with her parents after a brief attempt at running away. If you watch this scene closely enough, you will see how emotional embraces and sighs are at the heart of their shared affection. Emotions shape our social lives.

Inside Out went on to win an Academy Award in 2016 and made it into most lists of best- films-of-the-year. But in important ways its influence is more enduring; it would offer a new view of what emotions are to a worldwide audience and one in keeping with the science of emotion that you will explore in this book. For over 2,000 years, some thinkers have argued that our emo- tions are irrational and destructive. The more noble reaches of human nature are attained, this reasoning continues, when we control our passions with our reason. In this book, as in Inside Out, we arrive at a different view. Emotions are vital to adapting to the social environment. They shape how we perceive the world and guide important courses of action, such as committing to a romantic partner, fighting for justice, or consoling a friend. Emotions are the very foundation of our sense of identity, our moral judgment, and our relationships. They are vital to our pursuit of the meaningful life. To lay a foundation for these ideas, let’s first look at how the study of emotion emerged. As we do, we will take on a particularly vexing question: what is an emotion?

What Is an Emotion? First Ideas We have all experienced emotions, and in this sense we know what they are. But emotions are difficult to define in precise terms. In fact, such difficulties are rather usual. We all know what a tree is, even though we don’t know its proper definition. We all have a sense of beauty or justice, but when pressed to define such concepts often fail to find the exact language. It’s one of the won- derful properties of language to be able to refer to things even when we don’t know exactly what we mean (Putnam, 1975). To arrive at a useful definition of something as complex as emotion, you need a good theory. With the help of this book, we hope you will formulate your own good theory of emotion.

Let’s begin to characterize emotion, so that we can agree upon roughly what we are talking about. An emotion is a psychological state that relates an event, usually out there in the world, but sometimes in the mind, to what Nico Frijda (e.g., 2007) called a concern. It prepares the per- son for action. What this makes clear is that one central component of an emotion is an internal experience, a state that reflects a present context relevant to the person’s goals (Lazarus, 1991). A result is that, as Sylvan Tomkins (whose work we discuss later in this chapter) has said: the emotion gives priority to one goal over others. It gives that goal, or concern, urgency. If you are crossing the road, and nearly get run over, your concern for self-preservation takes priority: you are motivated by fear. The urge is to jump back onto the curb. If you fare well on a test you’ve

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions6

studied hard for, your concern for being esteemed by others is made salient: you feel pride, and may be inclined to tell your parents, or, in worse moments, show off to your friends in hubris (Tracy, Weidman, Cheng, & Martens, 2014). As these examples illustrate, emotions relate events to our personal concerns, and prepare us, as Nico Frijda has argued, to act in response to events in the environment (Frijda, 1988, 2007; Scarantino, 2017a). Emotions, then, are states triggered by events related to our concerns and that motivate action. So, rather than thinking that emotions are irrational, psychologists now tend to think of emotions as being locally rational: they help us deal adaptively with concerns specific to our current social context, concerns, for example, over safety, fairness, agency, being esteemed and respected, moral virtue, and feeling connected to trustworthy others, that define our identities (Brosch & Sander, 2014; Solomon, 2007). An emo- tion gives urgency to a specific concern, and orients us to specific kinds of action.

Our characterization of emotion also highlights how social these states are; they mediate, or connect, the individual’s pressing concerns with potential courses of action within the social environment (Frijda, 2007; Keltner & Haidt, 1999; Scarantino, 2017a; van Kleef, 2016; van Kleef, Cheshin, Fischer, & Schneider, 2016). When we feel angered by a friend’s sarcastic com- ment, our concern over being valued is given urgency, and points to courses of action to undo the friend’s critique. Emotions are relational in many ways. Expressions of emotion guide specific interactions that make up your day (Keltner & Kring, 1998; Scarantino, 2017b). Think of the last time you flirted or soothed a struggling friend. What might come to mind as you do this are emotional expressions—a coy glance, laughter, a comforting embrace, or compassionate word accompanied by tender prosody. Emotions help us form and engage in our relationships. Who do we choose to spend our lives with? How do we feel about members of our family? Who are our friends? Why do we worry when separated from someone to whom we’re very close? Emotions connect our context-specific concerns with possible courses of action in the social environment.

What’s the interpersonal equivalent of an emotion giving priority to a concern? It’s that an emotion is a kind of commitment to another (Aubé, 2009; Frank, 1988). When we love someone, even if the love is brief, and even if it is not spoken about as love, we commit ourselves to that other, at least for a while. We make the other’s concerns our own, be it in sex, or in childrearing, or in cooperating as soldiers or nurses do in situations when life is in peril. When we are angry with someone, we commit ourselves to seeing the matter through, to a resolution, or to a parting.

Emotions, then, are subjective and intrapersonal, but also powerfully social and interpersonal. Let’s now examine how these ideas have precursors in thinkers of the past.

Nineteenth-Century Founders Modern ideas about emotions can be thought of as derived from Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud; here’s how their ideas have been influential.

Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Approach Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! – The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!

Charles Darwin, notebook (Gruber & Barrett, 1974, p. 289)

In 1872, Charles Darwin (see Figure 1.2), the central figure in modern biology, published the most important book on emotions yet written—The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani- mals (1872). Earlier, in On The Origin of Species (1859), he had described how all living things have evolved to be adapted to their environments. Knowing this you might imagine that Darwin

Nineteenth-Century Founders 7

would have proposed that emotions served functions in our survival. Indeed many psychologists and biologists assume that this is what he said. But he didn’t. His argument was both closer to common sense and more subtle than anything that we might commonsensically believe.

Darwin began writing notes on his observations of emotions in 1838. At that time, the accepted theory was that God had given humans special facial muscles that allowed them to express uniquely human sentiments. A central tenet of Darwin’s theory, however, was that humans are descended from other species: we are not only closer to animals than had been thought, but we ourselves are animals of a certain kind. Darwin gathered many observations, which would have enduring effects on the contemporary study of emotion (Darwin 1872/1998).

In his book on emotions, Darwin asked two broad questions that still guide emotion research- ers (Hess & Thibault, 2009; Shariff & Tracy, 2011). First, how are emotions expressed in humans and other animals? Table 1.1 is a taxonomy of some of the expressions Darwin described.

The second question Darwin asked is where do our emotions come from? He argued that emotional expressions derive largely from habits that in our evolutionary or individual past had once been useful (for criticism, see Fugate et al., 2014). Darwin proposed that emotional expres- sions are based on reflex-like mechanisms, and some of them occur whether they are useful or not. They can be triggered involuntarily in circumstances analogous to those that had triggered the original habits. His book brims with examples of such actions: of tears that do not function to lubricate the eyes, of hair standing on end in fear and anger to no apparent purpose, and so on (see Figure 1.3).

For Darwin, expressions showed the continuity of adult human emotions with those of lower animals and with those of infancy. Because these expressions occur in adults “though they may not  .  .  .  be of the least use,” they had for Darwin a significance for evolutionary thinking rather like that of fossils that allow us to trace the evolutionary ancestry of spe- cies. He thought emotional expressions were like the appendix, which is a small organ that is part of the gut but seemingly has no function. Darwin proposed that this is evidence that we

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FIGURE 1.2 Drawing of Charles Darwin.

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are descended from prehuman ancestors in whom this organ had a use. He argued that many emotional expressions have the same quality: for instance that sneering, in which we partially uncover the teeth on one side, is a behavioral vestige of snarling, and of preparing to bite. This preparation was functional in some distant ancestor, but is so no longer. Though we sometimes make mordant and cutting remarks, adult human beings do not now generally use the teeth to attack (although in the United States about a third to a half of preschool children have been bitten by fellow preschoolers!).

Darwin traced other expressions to infancy: crying, he argued, is the vestige of screaming in infancy, though in adulthood it is partly inhibited. He described screaming in young babies and gave an argument for the function of closing the eyes and the secretion of tears to help protect them when this occurred. When adults cry they still secrete tears, but adult tears no longer have a protective function. One of Darwin’s most interesting suggestions is that patterns of adult affec- tion, of taking those whom we love in our arms, are based on patterns of parents hugging young infants.

Table 1.1 Emotional expressions discussed by Darwin (1872), the bodily systems used, and the type of emotion which was expressed

Expression Bodily system Emotion example

Blushing Blood vessels Shame, modesty

Body contact Somatic muscles Affection

Clenching fists Somatic muscles Anger

Crying Tear ducts Sadness

Frowning Facial muscles Anger, frustration

Laughing Breathing apparatus Pleasure

Perspiration Sweat glands Pain

Hair standing on end Dermal apparatus Fear, anger

Screaming Vocal apparatus Pain

Shrugging Somatic muscles Resignation

Sneering Facial muscles Contempt

Trembling Somatic muscles Fear, anxiety

Source: Oatley (1992).

(a) (b)

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FIGURE 1.3 Two of Charles Darwin’s photographs, sneering and crying: (a) Plate IV No. 1; (b) Plate 1 No. 1.

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For Darwin, our emotions link us to our past: to the past of our species and to our own infancy. He provided descriptions of facial expressions, and he argued for the universality of such expres- sions, a claim we shall take up in Chapter  4. He gave a perspective on the question of how beneficial emotions are that is reflected in the quotation at the head of this section. Might we be better off if we could rise above bestial passions, which emerged in a prehuman phase of in our evolution? Only toward the end of his book does Darwin write:

The movements of expression in the face and body, whatever their origin might have been, are in themselves of much importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means of communication between the mother and her infant; she smiles approval, and thus encourages her child on the right path, or frowns disapproval. We readily perceive sympathy in others by their expression . . . The movements of expression give vividness and energy to our spoken words.

(Darwin, 1872/1998, p. 359)

So, despite his reservations and the pressing nature of his evolutionary argument, Darwin thought that emotions have useful functions, they help us navigate our social interactions. And that is a hypothesis we pursue in this book.

Significant Figure: Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin’s mother died when he was eight. At the age of 16, Charles was sent by his father to Edinburgh University to study medicine, but he would skip classes to collect specimens along the shores of the Firth of Forth, developing his strong interest in natural history. In despair about the failure of his son’s medical studies, his father next sent him to Cambridge to study theology. Again, young Darwin was not fully engaged with his courses: he was more interested in collecting beetles and in hunting. He obtained an ordinary BA in 1831, and seemed headed for a life as a country parson with the hobby of natural history. He had not been idle at Cambridge, however. He had won the esteem of a number of scientists, and, at the age of 22, through a fortuitous turn of events, he was appointed naturalist on the Beagle, a British Navy ship with a mis- sion to chart coastlines in South America. Two years after his return from his five-year voyage, Darwin proposed to a cousin, Emma Wedgewood and, a few months later, they started a long and generally happy marriage. Darwin was a bit of hypochondriac, and after he and his wife had settled in a house in a village outside London, he seldom went out, except to health spas to take cures.

The couple had 10 children, two of whom died in infancy. Charles and Emma were devoted parents, and the death of their daughter Annie at age 10 was devastating for both of them (and deepened Darwin’s thinking about the evolution

of sympathy). Although evolution is often seen as in conflict with religion, Charles did not see his discoveries and theory as incompatible with his Christian beliefs. But the death of Annie did make him doubt the existence of God.

From 1837, Charles’s notebooks show him struggling to understand the change of one species into another. He pro- ceeded slowly, and it wasn’t until 1859 that his book On the Origin of Species appeared.

From 1838 onward, Charles’s notebooks reflect a growing interest in emotional expressions in humans, as well as in nonhuman species, with many visits to the zoo. He enlisted others to make observations for him. He realized the importance of cross-cultural study. He was one of the first researchers to use questionnaires: he sent a set of printed questions to missionaries and others who could observe people all round the world, asking them to observe particu- lar expressions. He received 36 replies. He was one of the first to use photographs for research. He used both natu- ralistic and posed expressions of emotion (such as the one at the head of this chapter) to make scientific arguments. Darwin’s 1872 book on expression is the foundation of the study of emotions. His 1877 paper in the journal Mind, in which he describes observations of his infant son William’s emotional and cognitive development, is one of the first contributions to developmental psychology. (Biographical information from Bowlby, 1991; Gruber & Barrett, 1974).

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions10

William James: The Bodily Approach .  .  . bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact  .  .  . and feeling of the same changes as they occur, IS the emotion.

James, 1890, p. 449

In this well-known quotation from The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James argued against the common-sense idea that when we feel an emotion it impels us to act in a certain way, that if we were to meet a bear in the woods we would feel frightened and run. Instead, James proposed that when we see the bear, “the exciting fact” as he put it, the emotion, IS the perception of changes of our body as we react to that fact. When we feel frightened, James thought, what we feel is our heart beating, our skin cold, our posture frozen, or our legs carrying us away as fast as possible. (In 1855 Carl Lange independently published the same idea, which thus is sometimes known as the James-Lange theory.)

James’s theorizing focuses on the nature of emotional experience. He stressed the way in which emotions move us in bodily ways. We may tremble or perspire, our heart may thump in our chest, our breathing may be taken over as we weep or laugh helplessly, we may blush and feel the heat rise in our face in mortification, or feel tingles in our spine when moved by music or a piece of art. The core of an emotion, James contended, is the pattern of such bodily responses. This vital point about the embodied nature of emotion is captured in this observation of James: “If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind” (James, 1890, p. 451). This proposal has guided the study of emotion in two important ways.

First, James concentrated on experience, and proposed that our experience of many emotions, from fear to joy to reverence, involves changes of the autonomic nervous system, that part of the nervous system that affects systems in the body such as the heart, blood vessels, lungs, stomach, and sweat glands. He also argued that changes of muscles and joints and the sensory signals com- ing from them were involved. Physiological reactions in the body associated with the different emotions are our focus in Chapter 5.

Second, James proposed that emotions give “color and warmth” to experience. Without these effects, he said, everything would be pale. Colloquially we speak of “rose colored glasses” or a “jaundiced view of life” to indicate how our emotions affect our perceptions. In different parts of this book we will consider how deeply emotions shape our patterns of thought (Lerner, Li, Valdesolo, & Kassam, 2015). In Chapter 10 we will examine how emotions guide our judgments, from what is right and wrong to what is fair and just to what we remember about the past.

Sigmund Freud: The Psychoanalytic Approach I came away from the window at once, and leant up against the wall and couldn’t get my breath . . . (description given by Katharina, subject of one of Freud’s early case histories).

Freud & Breuer, 1895

One of Sigmund Freud’s most enduring ideas is that certain events can be so damaging that they leave emotional scars that can affect the rest of our lives (See Figure 1.4). His principal exposi- tion was in a series of case studies.

Freud was one of the first to argue that emotions are at the core of many mental illnesses. An early patient, Katharina—a quotation from whom is at the head of this section—described how she suffered from attacks in which she thought she would suffocate. Asked by Freud to give more details, she said: “I always see an awful face that looks at me in a dreadful way, so that I am frightened” (p. 192). She could not say whose face it was. Freud was clear that the attacks were of anxiety. Katharina would now be diagnosed as suffering from panic attacks, defined in

Nineteenth-Century Founders 11

the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, DSM-5 (2013).

Like Darwin, Freud thought that an emotion in the present could derive from one in the past, in the patient’s early life. His aim in therapy for Katharina was to discover how her attacks had started and who the feared person was. The method Freud developed was called psychoanalysis, and in Katharina’s case we see elements of how this kind of therapy developed: the telling by a patient of her or his life story, which is found to have gaps (in this case the gap of having no idea of whose the awful face was that appeared to her in her attacks), the filling of such gaps by interpretations of the therapist, and the insights of the person receiving the therapy who real- izes something that had been unconscious. Although in his case history of 1895, Freud was able to elicit from Katharina parts of her story, which involved sexual molestation, he disguised his account. In a footnote to his case, which he added in 1924, he wrote: “I venture after the lapse of so many years to lift the veil of discretion and reveal the fact that Katharina . . . fell ill, therefore, as a result of sexual attempts on the part of her own father” (p. 210).

Although psychoanalysis has been an influential psychological therapy, it is often criticized. Very vocal, recently, has been Frederic Crews (2017), a literary critic, who in the 1960s fell in love with Freud and his theories, and subsequently (perhaps like other lovers who have experi- enced disappointment) devoted himself to disparagement. Perhaps more cogently, Freud’s meth- ods of therapy have been criticized by those who developed newer methods such as behavior therapy and cognitive-behavior therapy (to which we come in Chapter 14).

Most importantly for our understanding of emotions, in ways that are generally not given proper consideration by Freud’s debunkers, the work of Freud suggests that the emotional life of adulthood is strongly influenced by relationships we had in childhood with parents or other car- egivers. This idea was the foundation of work of John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst who, from 1951 onward, developed the theory of attachment—the love between an infant and its mother or other caregiver—and his idea that all later social development derives from this emotional base. Argu- ably, this was the most important new element in twentieth-century psychological research on emotions. It was a huge step, an understanding of the emotional development of children would now be unthinkable without it. We discuss it in Chapter 11.

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FIGURE 1.4 Group photograph of the conference to mark Freud’s honorary degree at Clark University in 1909. In the front row Freud is fourth from the right, Jung third from the right, and William James is third from the left.

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Freud’s theories were also critical to the influential theorist Richard Lazarus (1991) who com- bined them with the Darwinian evolutionary idea of adaptation, to propose that emotions derive from how we appraise events in the environment in relation to our goals. We discuss this, and related theories, in Chapter 6.

Philosophical and Literary Approaches Darwin, James, and Freud laid important foundations in the study of emotion, turning our atten- tion to how expression, bodily response, and complex narratives are part of emotion. They were, however, not the first in the Western tradition to think about emotions. Philosophers have long grappled with the nature of emotion, as have writers of fiction (Scarantino, 2016). In this section, we focus on three thinkers who influenced important currents in the understanding of emotions and whose ideas are still alive.

Aristotle and the Ethics of Emotions . . . there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, 2, 1. 249–250

Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, offered some of the first systematic analyses of emo- tions. His most fundamental insight was that whereas many assume that emotions just happen to us, really they depend on what we believe; emotions, in this view, are evaluative judgments of events in the world (Clore & Ortony, 2013; Ellsworth, 2013). In this way, we are responsible for our emotions because we are responsible for our beliefs.

In his book Rhetoric, Aristotle discussed how different judgments give rise to different emo- tions (see Konstan, 2006). “Anger,” says Aristotle, “may be defined as an impulse, accompa- nied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends” (1378b, 1.32). The emo- tion occurs because of our belief that a slight has occurred. To be slighted is to be treated with contempt, or thwarted, or shamed.

In Aristotle’s discussion of the role of emotion in persuasion, we see the message, echoed in the quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the head of this section: our emotional experiences are shaped by our judgments and evaluations. Think of it like this. It’s a warm summer evening and you are lightly dressed, waiting in line at a cinema. A light touch on your arm by the person you invited to the movie might prompt a surge of affection. The very same pattern of touch from a stranger might make you feel anxious, angry, or even repelled. Our experience depends on our judgment.

In his book Poetics, which is about narrative writing, mainly about tragedy, Aristotle con- cerned himself with the central place of emotions in artistic expression, a theme we take up in different places in the book. Drama, said Aristotle, is about human action, and what can happen when human actions have effects that were unforeseen. We are humans, not gods. We simply do not know enough to predict the consequences of everything we do. Nonetheless, and this is the root of human tragedy, we remain responsible for our actions.

Aristotle noticed two important effects of tragic drama. First, at the theater, people are moved emotionally (See Figure 1.5). As the principal character grapples with consequences that were unforeseen and uninvited, we see the somber spectacle of a person who is good being tortured by circumstances to which he or she has contributed but cannot control. We are moved to feel sympathy (or pity) for this person—and to fear for ourselves, because in the universal appeal of these plays we know that the principal character is also ourself.

Philosophical and Literary Approaches 13

Second, we can experience what Aristotle called katharsis of our emotions. This term is widely mistranslated as purgation or purification, as if one goes to the theater to rid oneself of toxic emotions or to elevate them. But as Martha Nussbaum (1986) argues, for Aristotle katharsis meant neither purgation nor purification. It meant clarification—the clearing away of obstacles to understanding. By seeing predicaments of human action at the theater we may come to experi- ence emotions of sympathy and fear, and understand consciously for ourselves their relation to the consequences of human action in a world that can be known only imperfectly.

Not long after Aristotle’s death, two important schools of philosophy developed out of his argument that emotions are evaluations and depend upon beliefs. The first was Epicureanism, based on the teachings of Epicurus who lived near Athens, around 300 BCE, in a community of like-minded friends. The second was Stoicism. It got its name from the stoa, where the philoso- phers of this school taught; the stoa was a colonnade, a bit like a cloister, that ran alongside the marketplace in Athens (see Figure 1.6).

Though dictionaries tell us that epicurean now means “devoted to the pursuit of pleasure” and stoic means “indifferent to pleasure or pain,” these meanings are distant from their origins, but the fact that these words are in modern languages testifies to a continuing influence.

The Epicurean and Stoic philosophers can be thought of as the first thoroughgoing Western emotion researchers. The Epicureans developed ideas of natural human sociality that influenced both the American and French Revolutions. The idea that human beings have a right to the pursuit

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of happiness is distinctively Epicurean, as is the idea of living naturally, in harmony with an environment of which we are stewards. The Epicureans taught that one should live in a simple way, and enjoy simple pleasures, like wholesome food and the enjoyment of friendship, rather than chasing after things that make one anxious like wealth or are unnatural like luxuries, or are ephemeral like fame. Being guided by such desires can only lead to painful emotions: anger when someone frustrates one’s will, greed at wanting more and more, envy at someone having some- thing we do not. The Epicureans recommended shifts in attention, from such irrational desires to more worthwhile ones, a possibility that today is studied in the literatures on emotion regulation and mindfulness, which we consider later (Gross, 2015).

As to Stoicism, one of the most interesting Stoic philosophers was Chrysippus. He distin- guished between first movements of emotions, which are automatic, and second movements, which are mental and involve judgment and decision (Nussbaum, 2001). Chrysippus thought that one cannot avoid the first movements; they occur in the body and we can’t do anything about them. But since second movements involve thought, they are “up to us.” We get a glimpse of this in the movie Inside out, when Riley’s emotions Joy and Sadness, feeling lost, alight upon the train of thought.

For the most part, Stoics thought that emotions derive from desires. To free oneself from crippling and destructive emotions, therefore, one should extirpate most desires, such as those to be superior to others or yearning for fame or wealth. They advised that humans should pursue rationality and good character as the only values that are outside the vagaries of chance or the control of others and, therefore, are subject to one’s own will. The Stoic understanding was that most emotions, especially anger, anxiety, pride, and lust, are damaging to the self and to society, and so the desires that lead to them should be disciplined out of our daily lives.

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FIGURE 1.6 A stoa that runs alongside the agora (marketplace) in Athens. It was in such a place that the Stoics taught the management of emotions. (The stoa in this picture is not the original but one constructed a century after the founding of Stoicism, and rebuilt in the 1930s).

Philosophical and Literary Approaches 15

Stoic ideas are thought to have influenced the acceptance of Christianity by the Romans fol- lowing the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. As Christianity began to spread, the bad desires and bad thoughts, which the Stoics sought to extirpate, became the seven deadly sins of greed, gluttony, hubris, lust, vanity, laziness, and despondency. All of the sins have an emotional quality, which raises the intriguing question of when emotions benefit us and those around us and of when they disrupt our social lives (Sorabji, 2000; Oatley, 2011). One answer is found in this idea: Sin implies temptation, which, in turn, implies that we have choice. In the Stoics’ sec- ond stage of emotion, this possibility of choice is foremost. In Chapter 6, we come to it with the theories of appraisal and emotion regulation, which suggest that what we do with our emotions is as important to our well-being as whether or not we feel them. In Chapter 14, we come to the relation between emotions and free will.

Epicurean and Stoic philosophies have come to be parts of ethics, because the members of these schools pursued the goal of understanding how one could shape one’s emotions in pursuing the good life in what Martha Nussbaum calls, in the title of her book of 1994 Therapy of Desire. Ethics are not about knowing what others should do, or even what one should do oneself. They are about considerations we might have on how best to structure our own lives in relation to oth- ers. It’s been said that, when one gets down to it, there are only two real choices in life: Epicure- anism, living in a way that is pleasurable though moderate, and Stoicism, living so that rationality and the building of character are the highest virtues.

Just as medicine sought a cure for bodily ills, so the Epicureans and Stoics thought of philoso- phy as a cure for the soul; they focused on emotions as the chief sources of the soul’s diseases. One may achieve lovely insights into Stoic thinking from the Roman writers Marcus Aurelius (c. 170) and Epictetus (c. 100), one an emperor and the other a former slave.

Two thousand years after the Epicureans and Stoics, people who think about emotions and their contribution to our ethical behavior and pursuit of happiness tend to seek answers in psy- chology. Think of the earlier sections of this chapter: we’ve introduced emotions as being biolog- ical, as arising in the body, as driven by the unconscious. How—in the face of such forces—can we influence our emotions? How can we live a life that is satisfying and meaningful, and tip the balance toward enjoyable engagement in what we are doing, rather than toward resentment or alienation? Despite the fact that our emotions are strongly affected by our genes and upbringing, how might it be possible to use whatever free will we have to live in a way that is right for us and for those we love? How can we escape from disabling depression, anxiety, or addiction or destructive anger and disgust?

Should we make resolutions to use self-control to improve ourselves? The science of emo- tions has shown this often isn’t the best way forward. As David DeSteno (2018) has found, it’s too self-involved, and for the most part resolutions to use self-control don’t carry through. But if we cultivate our emotions toward others, such as gratitude and compassion—those that orient us toward benefitting others and folding into strong collaborative relations—we are more likely to become better in ways that we would like. Issues of this kind are a focus of our last chapter, Chapter 14.

René Descartes: Philosophically Speaking The Passions of the Soul

Book title of Descartes

René Descartes is generally regarded as the founder of modern philosophy and of the scien- tific view of the world. Descartes wrote in the seventeenth century in Holland, which had just emerged from being a Spanish colony to become a center of commercial and intellectual life, perhaps at that time one of the few places in Europe where bold thinkers could work and publish without persecution. It is on the emotions that Descartes directs his focus in The Passions of the

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions16

Soul (1649), which offered a detailed discussion of how mind and body work, which included sensory and motor nerves, reflexes, and memory.

As for the emotions (which in those days were called the passions) Descartes opens his book as follows: “There is nothing in which the defective nature of the sciences which we have received from the ancients appears more clearly than in what they have written on the passions” (p. 331).

What new insights does Descartes offer? He claimed that the six fundamental emotions— wonder, desire, joy, love, hatred, and sadness—occur in the thinking aspect of ourselves that he called the soul. Today we might call this the conscious sense of self or our sense of who we are. At the same time, emotions are closely connected to our bodies, for example, to our heart beat- ing rapidly, to blushing, or to tears. Descartes differentiated emotions from perceptions of events that happen in the outside world and perceptions of events that happen within the body, such as hunger and pain. Whereas outer perceptions tell us about the world, and bodily states like hunger and pain tell us about the body, emotions tell us what is important in our souls—as we might now say, in our real selves—in relation to our concerns and our identities.

Having identified the origins of the emotions in our souls, Descartes then describes how emo- tions cannot be entirely controlled by thinking, but they can be regulated by thoughts, especially thoughts which are true. So, he says:

. . . in order to excite courage in oneself and remove fear, it is not sufficient to have the will to do so, but we must also apply ourselves to consider the reasons, the objects or examples which persuade us that the peril is not great; that there is always more security in defense than flight; that . . . we could expect nothing but regret and shame for having fled, and so on.

(Descartes, 1649, p. 352)

Like Aristotle, Descartes suggests that the emotions depend on how we evaluate events. Descartes was also one of the first to argue that emotions serve important functions, a central

theme of this book:

. . . the utility of all the passions consists alone in their fortifying and perpetuating in the soul thoughts which it is good it should preserve, and which without that might easily be effaced from it. And again, all the harm which they can cause consists in the fact that they fortify and conserve those thoughts more than necessary, or that they fortify and conserve others on which it is not good to dwell.

(ibid, p. 364)

We might reflect on how, when we love someone our love perpetuates and extends our thoughts of this person, and when we are overanxious or depressed we dwell on issues we cannot affect. Descartes’s idea—a perceptive one—is that our emotions are usually functional, but can sometimes be dysfunctional (Keltner & Gross, 1999; Oatley & Jenkins, 1992).

Descartes wrote at the end of the Renaissance. He was a contemporary of William Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood, which formerly had been thought to be one of the four humors. Ideas of these humors derived from Greek doctors such as Hippocrates and Galen, who thought that disease was caused by imbalance among the humors, with an increase of each humor giving rise to a distinct emotional state. Blood gives rise to hope and vigor, from it comes the term “sanguine;” phlegm gives rise to placidity, from it comes the term “phlegmatic;” yellow bile gives rise to anger, from it comes the world “choleric,” black bile gives rise to despair, from

Philosophical and Literary Approaches 17

it comes the word “melancholy.” Before the mid-seventeenth century, it was thought that the very emanations of these humors were the experience of each kind of emotion, that we become melancholy (for instance) from an excess of black bile that gives off the experience of sadness as a stagnant pool gives off a stench (Paster, Rowe, & Floyd-Wilson, 2004). Among those making new efforts of imagination was Descartes. In the new physiology to which he contributed, emo- tions arise in the mind. Not only do they often affect our bodies, but functionally they enable our plans and actions (Scarantino, 2017a).

George Eliot: The World of the Arts No life would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled with emotion . . .

George Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 894

Many of the greatest insights into emotions come from novelists and poets—Virginia Woolf on the stream of consciousness, D.H. Lawrence on emotional dynamics between women and men, Emma Cline on the self-consciousness of adolescence. The writing of George Eliot (pen-name of Mary Ann Evans) offers impressive ideas regarding emotional experience and its place in inti- mate relationships (Davis, 2017; Haight, 1968; Oatley, 1992).

In 1856 George Eliot wrote an essay for the Westminster Review, entitled “The natural history of German life” (Pinney, 1963). In it she reviewed two books by von Riehl, a pioneer anthropolo- gist, who described the life of German peasants. Her essay was a kind of manifesto for her own novels. It includes the following:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the exten- sion of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sym- pathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that atten- tion to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment . . . Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

(George Eliot, 1856, reprinted in Pinney, 1963, p. 270)

Although the word “emotion” isn’t used here, this passage is about the importance of literary art for the emotions and has influenced our approach in this book: emotions are not just in individu- als but between people as well. So, Eliot says, sympathies—emotions that connect us to each other—can be extended by novelists and other kinds of artists, to people outside our usual circle of friends and acquaintances.

In the years 1871 to 1872, Eliot published Middlemarch, a novel about emotions, which portrays experience from inside the person’s own consciousness. Each character has aspira- tions and plans, but each is affected by the unforeseeable accidents of life. Eliot’s question is this: if we are unable to foresee the outcomes of all our actions, if there is no fate or divine force guiding us toward an inevitable destiny, how should we find our way in life? Her answer is that our emotion can act as a sort of compass. You might think of emotions as narratives, or stories, that move us forward in life in the pursuit of what we care about, our concerns as we said earlier.

In the book, Eliot contrasts Dorothea who longs to do some good in the world, with Edward Casaubon, an elderly scholar whom Dorothea admired and married in the hope of gaining entrance to the world of learning. Dorothea is responsive to the emotional currents of her own

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions18

and others’ lives, whereas for all his erudition Casaubon barely recognizes his emotions at all. About a third of the way through the book, Casaubon has a heart attack in suppressed anger fol- lowing an argument with Dorothea. Lydgate, the town doctor, attends and counsels Dorothea to avoid all occasions that might agitate her husband.

Some days later Lydgate makes another call and Casaubon asks him to be candid about his condition. Lydgate says that although prediction is difficult, he is at risk. Casaubon perceives that he might die, and sinks into bitterness. When Lydgate leaves, Dorothea goes into the garden with a sympathetic impulse to go at once to her husband.

But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for her ardour, continu- ally repulsed, served with her intense memory to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder, and she wandered slowly round the nearer clumps of trees until she saw him advancing. Then she went towards him, and might have represented a heaven-sent angel coming with a promise that the short hours remaining should yet be filled with that faithful love which clings the closer to a comprehended grief. His glance in reply to hers was so chill that she felt her timidity increased; yet turned and passed her hand through his arm.

Mr Casaubon kept his hands behind him, and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word, but not too strong; it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are for ever wasted.

(George Eliot, 1871–1872, p. 462)

In this passage we see many of Eliot’s ideas about how emotions arise and are commu- nicated. They are what relationships are made of. They have powerful effects upon how we perceive other people and situations in which we find ourselves. We come to understand that we experience our own emotions differently from how people see them. We readers are moved emotionally in ways that succeed in “extending our sympathies.” Later George Eliot wrote in a letter:

. .  . my writing is simply a set of experiments in life – an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of – what stores of motive, actual or hinted as pos- sible, give promise of a better after which we can strive.

(Haight, 1985, p. 466)

Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology Founding figures from Charles Darwin to George Eliot have grappled with the nature of emotion, relying on the tools of keen observation, thought experiments, and literary narrative. How would the scientific study of emotion emerge? During the first half of the twentieth century, there was resistance to the study of the emotions, most pronounced in behaviorism, a school of thought that saw only overt behavior as worthy of psychological inquiry. Within this tradition, the mind was a black box, inscrutable to the lens of science, and emotions disruptive forces within the human psyche. On this, one of the best-known behaviorists, B.F. Skinner, has a character in his 1948 novel, Walden Two, say: “We all know that emotions are useless and bad for our peace of mind and our blood pressure” (p. 92). In the last 50 years, however, at first gradually, and then

Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology 19

with gathering momentum, the scientific study of emotions has come into its own in the brain sciences, in psychology, and in other social sciences, most notably sociology and anthropology.

John Harlow, Tania Singer: Toward a Brain Science of Emotion Even though empathy has been extensively discussed and investigated by philosophers and social scientists, only recently has it become a focus for neuroscience.

Tania Singer et al. (2004), p. 1157

One of the earliest and most striking pieces of evidence about how the brain is involved in emo- tions came from a horrific accident, written up by a country doctor, John Harlow.

The case about which Harlow wrote was that of Phineas Gage a likeable foreman of a group of men working to construct a railroad in Vermont. On September 13, 1848, they were about to blast a rock, which had been drilled and the hole filled with gunpowder. Gage rammed the powder down with an iron rod, three- and- a- half feet long, an inch and a quarter in diameter. It weighed 13 pounds. This tamping rod must have struck up a spark, for there was an explosion. The rod entered Gage’s skull just beneath the left eyebrow, exited via a hole in the top of his head, and landed 50 feet away (See Figure 1.7). Gage bled terribly, suffered an infection of his wound, but recovered, in body though not in mind.

John Harlow, who attended Gage, wrote that the “balance, so to speak, between his intel- lectual faculties and his animal propensities seems to have been destroyed” (1868, p. 277). The effects were emotional. Although previously he was amiable, Gage was now impatient, irrever- ent, and easily moved to anger. His employers who had regarded him as their “most efficient and capable foreman” could not give him back his job.

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FIGURE 1.7 Model of Phineas Gage’s head and his skull showing the exit hole made by the tamping rod.

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions20

In the science of emotion dozens of people—“modern Phineas Gages”—have been studied. These are people who suffered damage to the frontal lobes (Damasio, 1994; Szczepanski & Knight, 2014). What is most striking and consistent in these studies is how disrupted are the emotions of such people and how detrimental are the effects on their judgment and relation- ships. They often show inappropriate judgments when it comes to risk, morality, money, pleas- ure, or the trustworthiness of other people (Bechara, 2004). As a result, they may find it hard to choose to make this appointment or make rash investments with fraudulent financial advisers. They struggle in friendships, and their marriages often end in divorce because of their outbursts, sexual improprieties, and unreliability. These observations speak to our definition of emotion earlier, that emotions link a person’s current concerns to suitable courses of action in the present situation. When emotions are disrupted through such brain damage, people can’t gauge which concerns matter, and their actions often can be inappropriate. We elaborate upon this and other insights that emerge in studies of patients like Gage in Chapter 7.

Before the age of electronics, and the finding that the brain works by sending electrical and chemical signals, the main evidence about emotions and human brain function came from accidental damage of the kind that happened to poor Phineas Gage and to modern Phineas Gages.

Among the pioneers of more modern brain research on the emotions was Walter Cannon, who argued for a different view of the emotions than the embodied perspective of his Harvard colleague, William James. He started a paper in 1927 by citing observations by commentators that James’s theory is “so strongly fortified by truth and so repeatedly confirmed by experience” (p. 106) that he felt trepidation at venturing to criticize it. Cannon uses the term “trepidation” rhetorically. He probably felt no such thing. His 1927 paper was one in a line of criticisms he published of the James-Lange theory. His principal evidence was that if James were right, then when the viscera (from which bodily feelings were supposed by James to arise) were severed from the brain of laboratory animals, one would expect a reduction in their emotions. With this operation, however, no such reduction occurred.

Instead, as Cannon found it was transection of neural pathways at a quite different level that had striking effects on emotions. Cannon showed that when, in a laboratory cat, the cerebral cortex was severed from the lower parts (subcortical regions) of the brain, or removed altogether, the result was an animal that showed very intense emotions, for instance, strong anger with no provocation. The phenomenon contributed to the idea that the higher region of the brain—the cortex—acts to inhibit the subcortical regions where emotions reside, an idea that continues to this day in some studies of emotion regulation and the brain (Braunstein, Gross, & Ochsner, 2017). Not everyone finds the idea helpful, that the main job of the cortex is to inhibit the lower regions; most functions of the cortex are more active and add meaning to subcortical beginnings of emotion, as we shall see in Chapter 7.

Today, although research on brain patients continues to yield insights, neuroscientists now study emotion-related brain activation with a number of techniques, particularly functional Mag- netic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which picks up changes of blood flow in regions of the brain when the neurons in those regions are active. Let’s consider a line of research that is growing. It’s on empathy—the state of feeling what another person is feeling. You will learn in this book about the centrality of empathy to parent–child attachments, romantic partnerships, friendships and interactions at work (Zaki & Ochsner, 2016). Frederique de Vignemont and Tania Singer (2006) defined empathy as follows:

a. having an emotion, which

b. is in some way similar to that of another person, which

Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology 21

c. is elicited by observation or imagination of the other’s emotion, and that involves

d. knowing that the other is the source of one’s own emotion.

Might empathy engage specific regions of the brain? To answer this question, Tania Singer and her collaborators (2004) assessed brain activity

with fMRI while volunteers experienced a painful electric shock and compared it to that elicited when these participants received a signal indicating that their loved one—present in the same room—was receiving a similar shock. Some areas of the brain (for instance, the somatosensory cortex) were activated only when the participants experienced pain through their own senses. What was striking, though, is that other regions of the brain were activated both when subjects received pain and when they were signaled that their loved one experienced pain. These regions included the anterior insula, which tracks physical sensations in the body and represents those sensations as conscious experiences of feeling (Craig, 2009), and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, which is engaged during experiences of negative emotion and conflict and motivates action (See Figure 1.8).

This study of Singer and colleagues tells us that the emotional aspect of pain was shared in the brain; it was affected by the participants’ own pain and imagination of pain in their loved one. You might be asking the following question. What about our empathic response to other emotions in other people? Singer and colleagues have found that similar components of this “empathy network” in the brain—the anterior insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex—are activated when participants respond empathically to other people’s experiences of fear, anxiety, disgust, and pleasure (Bernhardt & Singer, 2012).

A second question you might ask is about sympathy and compassion, which are closely related to empathy. In sympathy (or compassion), we respond to others’ suffering or pain with our own feelings of concern and the motivation to help that person (Goetz, Keltner, & Simon- Thomas, 2010). You might think of the empathic response to another’s suffering as a mirroring response, with sympathy and compassion additionally involving a concern for the other person’s welfare giving rise to an urge to help. Are empathy and sympathy registered in different regions of the brain? This appears to be the case. Recent studies find that sympathy (compassion) acti- vates different regions of the brain than empathy, including an old region of the brain—the peri- aqueductal gray—that enables nurturant behavior in mammals, and reward-related regions of the brain, including the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the orbitofrontal cortex (Ashar, Andrews-Hanna, Dimidjian, & Wager, 2017; Bernardt & Singer, 2012; Simon-Thomas et al., 2011). In Chapter 7, we continue this discussion of brain processes involved in different emotions.

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FIGURE 1.8 Empathy (darker color labels) and compassion (lighter color labels) in networks in the brain.

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions22

Magda Arnold, Sylvan Tomkins: New Psychological Theories . . . emotions involve a double reference, both to the object and to the self experiencing the object.

Magda Arnold and J. Gasson, 1954

It is my intention to reopen issues which have long remained in disrepute in American psychology. Sylvan Tomkins, 1962

In the second half of the twentieth century, faintly at first, voices were heard expressing concerns that emotions had been neglected in the academy. Among the voices were those of Magda Arnold and Sylvan Tomkins; in 1954 both started to speak in ways that guide people toward the present day scientific study of emotion. Arnold (with J. Gasson) proposed that emotions are based on appraisals of events. In the same year, at a meeting of the International Congress of Psychology, Tomkins offered a theory about the relation of emotion to facial expression.

Novels and Films: Avatar

James Cameron’s (2009) film Avatar was a big hit, and it con- tinues to be worth seeing. An avatar is a conceptual being that can represent us in a game. In this film, the avatar is a being from another planet, into which the human mind of Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) is inserted. Sully has been a marine. He was wounded in combat, and made paraplegic. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, he has special skills that qualify him to join a group of humans on a mission to Pandora, in the Alpha Centauri solar system, in the year 2154. The body that Jake’s mind enters is that of a Na’vi, a species of nine-foot tall, blue-skinned beings, who are lithe and elegant, who move gracefully through beauti- ful forests with which they live in harmony.

Humans have come to Pandora to obtain a valuable min- eral “unobtainium,” needed to solve the energy crisis that threatens Earth. The film’s plot parallels the plunder of the Americas by Europeans, with contempt for indigenous peo- ples. At one level, Avatar is a conventional film in which a likeable hero first suffers, then overcomes seemingly insur- mountable obstacles, and then gets the girl, the lovely Na’vi princess, Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldana), who inducts him into ways of living in the Pandoran forests.

But Cameron is a deeply psychological film maker (Oatley,  2009). Jake enters a series of empathetic identi- fications with people who first are like him, then progres- sively more different from him. His first identification is with Colonel Quaritch, military commander of the human mis- sion to Pandora. Having been in the military, Jake can easily

identify with him. Next, Jake identifies with a second human, a woman: Dr. Grace Augustine, an anthropologist who wants to understand the Na’vi because she is in charge of the mission to cajole them into disrupting their living place and giving up their valuable mineral deposits. It’s she who arranges for Jake to be inserted mentally into the body of a Na’vi, to infiltrate this group that seems to be obstruct- ing human purposes. Finally, Jake empathizes and identi- fies with a member of another species, Princess Neytiri, with whom he falls in love.

The most important psychological issue for Cameron concerns our human propensity to empathize with members of the group to which we feel we belong and our accompa- nying potential of contempt toward members of groups to which we feel we don’t belong. Such groups can be defined by nationality, by political ideas, by gender, by skin color, or, indeed, by anything. You might see something of this in yourself in your preferences for an athlete or sports team.

In a review of empathy and its opposite—schadenfreude (taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes)—Cikara, Bruneau, and Saxe (2011) argue that although our dispositions to care about and help each other are at the very foundation of human society, there are powerful motivations not to care about or help members of out-groups: sympathetic and empathic feelings toward such people are rare and fragile. Cikara et al. review studies in which participants have been led to increase empathy for members of out-groups. Argu- ably, films such as Avatar might contribute in this way.

Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology 23

Most researchers now assume that emotions derive from people’s appraisals of events. The typical emotion arises when a person perceives, or thinks about something, that is relevant to what Nico Frijda (e.g., 2007) calls a concern: something important to us. The idea that the core to an emotion is an appraisal of something that happens in the world was proposed in ancient times. It is similar to Aristotle’s idea of emotions as evaluations (Nussbaum, 2001). If we know what appraisals (or evaluations) are made of an event, we can predict what emotion is likely to occur (Roseman, 2013). If we know what emotion is currently being experienced, we can infer what appraisals are likely to have been made.

In their development of this idea that emotions involve appraisals or evaluations, Arnold and Gasson proposed that an emotion relates self to object. Unlike perception, which is about our knowledge of what is out there, or personality, which is about what each of us is like in ourselves, emotions are essentially relational; emotions mediate, or link, our interior concerns with events and objects in the world. Arnold and Gasson put it like this: “An emotion . . . can be considered as the felt tendency toward an object judged suitable, or away from an object judged unsuitable” (1954, p. 294).

So appraisals involve at first attraction to, or repulsion from, some object, and they deter- mine whether the emotion is positive or negative. Then come further distinctions, depending on whether the object of the emotion is present or not and whether there are difficulties in act- ing. “Impulsive” emotions arise if there is no difficulty in attaining or avoiding an object. The “emotions of contention” arise when there are difficulties in acting. Particular emotions, Arnold and Gasson argue, arise according to these appraisals. If an object is judged suitable and if it is present, then the impulsive emotion tends to be love; if an object is judged unsuitable and is not present, then the contending emotion is fear. These ideas would be widely influential, as we shall see in our discussion of emotion-related appraisals in Chapter 6.

In a series of books (e.g., 1962), Sylvan Tomkins developed a similar line of theorizing. His central claim was that affect is the primary motivational system. Emotions are amplifiers of drives. It had long been assumed that drives, such as hunger, thirst, and sex, are the primary determinants of behavior. Not so, argued Tomkins: “This is a radical error. The intensity, the urgency, the imperiousness, the ‘umph’ of drives is an illusion. The illusion is created by the misidentification of the drive ‘signal’ with its ‘amplifier.’ Its amplifier is its affective response” (1970, p. 101). What Tomkins meant by “drive signal” was a neural message about some event, for instance, a signal of a potential sexual partner. What he meant by “drive amplifier” was the “umph,” for instance, a strong attraction to this person.

In Tomkins’s account, human action and thought reflect the interplay of motivational systems, each capable of fulfilling a certain function (such as eating, breathing, sex), each potentially capable of taking over the whole person. What prioritizes these systems? It is emotion. It does so by amplifying one particular drive signal, just as loudness of sound on an audio system is ampli- fied by turning up a control to adjust its volume.

Here are two of Tomkins’s illustrations. First: when, for any reason, there is some sudden obstruction to breathing, as when drowning or choking, it is not the shortness of oxygen that is obvious, it is a panicky fear that amplifies the drive signal making us struggle to breathe again. Those pilots in World War II who refused to wear oxygen masks suffered lack of oxygen, said Tomkins. But the effect occurred slowly. It was not unpleasant. The signal was not amplified, and some of these pilots died with smiles on their lips. Second: when we are sexually excited, it is not the sexual organs that become emotionally excited. It is the person who is excited, and moves toward the other person and to fulfillment. The bodily changes, for instance, in the sex organs, amplify the sexual drive, making it urgent, and taking priority over other matters. These bold theoretical claims would inspire young scientists, who included Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard, to study emotion.

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions24

Erving Goffman, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Lila Abu-Lughod: Emotions as Moral Dramas Involving Selves and Others

Create alarm Slogan on an office wall of a debt-collecting agency

Sociologist Erving Goffman proposed that when William Shakespeare wrote “all the world’s a stage” (in As You Like It, 1623) this was not a metaphor: we literally give dramatic presentations of ourselves to each other and create the social reality in which we live. From such performances moral worlds are created. From them we derive our own selfhood and from them others derive their sense of who we are.

Goffman introduced into social science the method of careful observation through a theo- retical lens. His lens was his idea that life is a kind of drama, in which we take on roles. For understanding emotions, Goffman’s most instructive work is perhaps the essay “Fun in games,” published in Encounters (1961). In this essay, Goffman advances his general argument about life as drama, making the case that emotions are constructed within specific roles, such as being with your family, or with your boss, or out on a first date.

We can think of each kind of social interaction, at a café, in the workplace, in the family, out on a date, as like a game, says Goffman. When we enter it, we pass through an invisible membrane into a separate world with its own rules, its own traditions, its own history. We take on a social role that is afforded in that kind of interaction—when out on a date we may be the one who charms and flirts, in a school or university our role may be that of hard working, curi- ous student. Within the membrane, we give a certain performance to sustain our role, following the outline rules or scripts that are relevant within that world. So out on a date we tell jokes and disclose vulnerabilities, as a student we seek to find what ideas inspires us and give us purpose. These performances are viewed by ourselves and others as good or bad of their kind, as correct, incorrect, or partially correct. They invite commentary from others—including suggested modifi- cations, blame, and praise. The distinctive rules within each kind of membrane give rise to social and moral worlds that provide the subject for much of our conversation.

Now comes Goffman’s insight into emotions: as well as giving a more or less good perfor- mance we can ask how strongly engaged we are in a role. Games are fun because they invite wholehearted engagement. By extension, the roles that we play in social life have their emo- tional correlates. Certain roles center upon the experience of certain emotions: love and passion expected of new romantic partners; the sympathy and filial love expected of new parents. Our full engagement in roles is enabled by enthusiasm and produces emotional rewards, the feeling of pride or contentment, for example, in fulfilling the expectations of specific roles. In contrast, sometimes the performances in which we engage in our social lives can produce inner conflict: we can follow the rules, enact the script, take part in the interaction, but not be engaged. In this case, we can feel we are not enacting the role in all its details and expectations. Then occur vari- ous emotions—anxiety, sadness, anger, shame—that are upsetting and unsatisfying aspects of our lives.

Arlie Hochschild was influenced by Goffman (see Figure 1.9). In her work she explored the tension that so often occurs when the person is in conflict about the role he or she plays, when there are questions about who one is in oneself, and the performance one is giving.

Hochschild’s parents were in the US Foreign Service, and she describes how at the age of 12 she found herself passing round a dish of peanuts at a diplomatic party and wondering whether the smiles of those who accepted her offerings were real. Her parents often commented on ges- ture: the “tight smile of the Bulgarian emissary, the averted glance of the Chinese consul, and the prolonged handshake of the French economic officer” (Hochschild, 1983, p. ix). These ges- tures did not just convey meaning from one person to another—they were messages between

Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology 25

governments. Had the 12-year-old just passed peanuts to actors playing prescribed diplomatic roles? Where did the person end and the job begin? How much of emotion is not involuntary, but a dramatic performance guided by strategy and rules and even deception?

In her scientific research, Hochschild first sought answers to this problem: do sales people sell the product, or their personalities? She developed a theory of “feeling rules.” These rules specify what emotional feelings are appropriate to the specific context. They can be private and unconscious, or socially engineered in occupations that require us to influence other people’s emotions and judgments.

Hochschild observed the training of Delta Airlines cabin staff, which includes learning how to act in emergencies, how to serve food, and feeling rules that detailed emotional performances required of a Delta flight attendant. The trainee had to play a role, much as if she were an actor. The main aim is to induce a particular emotional tone in passengers: “Trainees were exhorted: to ‘Really work on your smiles . . . your smile is your biggest asset’ ” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 105). They “were asked to think of a passenger as if he were a ‘personal guest in your living room’. The workers’ emotional memories of offering personal hospitality were called up and put to use, as Stanislavski would recommend” in his well-known training of actors, known as method acting (p. 105). It is easier to give a convincing performance when one fully enters into the part.

Work that involves constructing emotions in oneself in order to induce them in others is widespread: Hochschild calls it emotional labor. When Hochschild was developing this idea, she estimated that 38 percent of paid jobs in the United States needed substantial emotional labor, and these burdens fell disproportionately upon women. For many jobs, from the airline flight attendants Hochschild studied to personal assistants of executives, the emotional labor required performances of joy and cheerfulness. Other jobs required threatening emotions: “Cre- ate alarm” was the motto of one debt-collecting agency boss (Hochschild, 1983, p. 146). Today, with the expansion of jobs in the service industry and in health care, even more people are required to engage in emotional labor in their careers. Zhan et al. (2016) distinguished between

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FIGURE 1.9 Arlie Hochschild is a pioneering scientist in the study of emotion.

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions26

surface acting and deep acting during emotional labor. They found that those who only man- aged to do surface acting were more likely to experience negative responses from customers and that they were more likely to suffer emotional exhaustion. In contrast, those who were able to do deep acting received more positive responses from customers and were able to feel more positive in themselves.

The central insight of Goffman and Hochschild, that emotions are kinds of social perfor- mances in which we embody specific roles and identities, dovetails with the theorizing of anthro- pologists, such as Lila Abu-Lughod. Abu-Lughod has devoted parts of her research career to living with and studying the Awlad’Ali, a nomadic Bedouin tribe in Egypt. In her book Veiled Sentiments, Abu-Lughod offers rich descriptions of how the women perform an emotion known as “Hasham,” which roughly translates to embarrassment, shyness, and modesty (Abu-Lughod, 1986). Women express this emotion in their gaze aversion, blushing, and veiling, and spatially, in terms of who they can be in the presence of. The central concern at the heart of the expressions of hasham is that women signal their place, and deference, to men, who tend to occupy more pow- erful positions in that society. In expressing hasham, however, women feel dignity and strength. In another essay with her colleague Catherine Lutz, Abu-Lughod would sum up the thinking of this section: “emotions are a primary medium for defining and negotiating social relations of the self in a moral order” (Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1986). In our performances of emotions, we situate our identities within the roles, values, and structures that make up culture. We will return to this idea about how emotions are constructed within specific roles and shaped by culturally specific values in Chapter 3.

Empirical Inspirations for a New Science of Emotion Emotions are the grammar of social living.

Iraneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989

New fields of inquiry in psychology, like the science of emotion, often find their inspiration in the thinking of influential philosophers, novelists, early psychologists, and pioneers in sociology and anthropology. We have just provided one account of how the enduring insights of thinkers from the past have shaped the science you are about to explore. New fields of inquiry are also inspired by timely empirical discoveries that direct scientists to study phenomena in new ways. Here we chart a few early empirical discoveries that inspired a new science of emotion.

One such inspiration came from the field of ethology: the study of animals and people as they live their own lives (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Ethologists don’t do controlled experiments in the laboratory; they seek to understand behavior in natural settings from an evolutionary perspective, considering the survival and reproduction-related goals that are served. In the 1960s, etholo- gists such as Iraneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt used special filming techniques to capture the daily lives of people in remote societies in Africa, New Guinea, and the Amazon. In a careful frame-by-frame analysis of the film they gathered, they detailed how parents attach to their children and soothe and comfort them, how siblings play and fight and reconcile, how adolescents flirt and form romantic attachments, how sexual partners relate, and how friends and rivals navigate social hier- archies. In this careful analysis, they arrived at a thesis captured in the quote at the beginning of this section: emotions are the grammar of social living. Emotional expressions and experiences are the basic elements of interactions such as flirting, parent–child attachments, status negotia- tions between rivals, fighting, and forgiveness. This theoretical insight, and the methods it was based on, would influence evolutionary approaches to emotion, which we consider next chapter, as well as studies of emotional expression, attachment, relationships, and even certain clinical discoveries you will learn of later.

Empirical Inspirations for a New Science of Emotion 27

A different kind of discovery that inspired the new science of emotion came from studies of treatments of patients with epilepsy—a kind of electrical storm in the brain. In the 1960s, patients with epilepsy often would undergo an operation in which the corpus callosum, a large bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right sides of the cortex, is severed. This split-brain operation separates the left side of the cortex from the right to stop the spread of epileptic dis- turbances. (No other treatment had been effective at the time.) Despite the two sides of the brain being no longer in communication, the patient’s IQ, personality, language, and ability to engage in meaningful interactions are not diminished. Twenty years after the first split-brain operation Roger Sperry was awarded a Nobel Prize for his research with these patients, which showed in a striking new way the different functions of the left and right hemispheres.

If a picture or text is presented to the right side of the visual field, because the information crosses over to the other side in the optic nerve, it is processed by the left hemisphere. When anything is shown in the left visual field, it is processed by the right hemisphere. But with a split brain the two hemispheres do not communicate. This neurological condition allowed scientists to begin to ask whether emotion seems to arise in specific regions of the brain.

Michael Gazzaniga worked with Sperry, and wrote books such as the Social Brain (1985), which would influence the neuroscientific study of emotion. In one of his studies, Gazzaniga showed a frightening film about fire safety to the left visual field of a woman split-brain patient. Because the images were not accessible to the left hemisphere of her brain, she was not conscious of having seen the film. Gazzaniga then interviewed the patient, as follows.

M.G. (Michael Gazzaniga): What did you see? V.P. (Patient): I don’t really know what I saw. I think just a white flash. M.G.: Were there people in it? V.P.: I don’t think so. Maybe just some trees, red trees like in the fall. M.G.: Did it make you feel any emotion? V.P.: I don’t really know why but I’m kind of scared. I feel jumpy. I think maybe I don’t like this

room, or maybe it’s you. You’re getting me nervous.

In this interaction, the patient saw the film presented to her left visual field, and this led to experiences of fear, generated in the right hemisphere, where nerve fibers from the left visual field go to. But the patient could not understand the source of her fear in her linguistically functioning left hemisphere. Her fear derived from the unsplit subcortical regions, and was communicated to the language-using right hemisphere, but without any indication of how it arose. The patient drew upon her fear, and her narrating left hemisphere offered a story about how Gazzaniga was making her feel nervous. This work suggests that there are regions of the brain that are engaged in emotional experiences. Other regions of the brain are engaged as people label, narrate, and make sense of their emotional experiences—an idea that we will return to time and again in this book.

A third discovery that shaped the new science of emotion came from a series of experiments by Alice Isen and her colleagues, which revealed that transient experiences of positive emotion had effects upon how we act in the world. In one experiment (1970) she gave a test of perceptual- motor skills. Some people, randomly selected, were told that they had succeeded in this test, and as a result were made mildly happy. As compared with other participants who had taken the same perceptual motor test but who were not told they had succeeded, the happier participants were more likely to help a stranger (an associate of the experimenter) who dropped her books.

Later, Isen and her colleagues (1978) induced a mildly positive emotion in people in a shop- ping mall by giving them a free gift. In an apparently unrelated consumer survey, these peo- ple said their cars and television sets performed better than those of control subjects who had received no gift. In subsequent research, Isen found that positive states can lead people to more creative thought, the recollection of more positive memories, more collaborative negotiations,

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions28

and to produce more unusual associations to words (Isen, Shalker, Clark, & Karp, 1978). Isen’s work provided some of the first evidence on how emotions shape our social behavior, judgment, and decision making, themes we take up in Chapters 9 and 10. Extending Isen’s findings, Elise Rice and Barbara Fredrickson (2017) found that people’s spontaneous positive thoughts made them more likely to approach, and to like things, they had been thinking about. In a different kind of extension, Hans Melo and Adam Anderson (2017) proposed that positive emotions encourage exploration and may facilitate flexibility and creativity. More generally, Isen’s results signaled a move away from assumptions that emotions are irrational and disruptive; instead, they have principled effects upon thought and action.

What Is an Emotion? A Framework In tracing the origins of the science of emotion, we have considered different approaches to the question: “What is an emotion?” Across different traditions, we have seen how early theorists centered on the idea that emotions are responsive to our important personal concerns. More recently, there’s been emphasis on how emotions are less usually individual, and more usually relational, they prepare us to act in the social environment. It’s also clear that the early theorists focused on different components of emotion, including evaluations or appraisals that give rise to emotions; emotional expressions and bodily responses; narrative and symbolic ways in which we regulate, make sense of, and express our emotions, sometimes in literary or artistic form.

In Figure 1.10, we bring these insights together, portraying how scientists today conceptualize emotion (Brosch, Pourtois, & Sander, 2010; Levenson, 1999). Following Aristotle and Arnold, today emotions are thought to arise as a result of how we appraise events in our environment. The most typical emotion-eliciting events are social, but emotions can also arise from events in our bodies, for example, when we feel anxiety and fear when thinking (often erroneously) that a heart palpitation is a sign of a heart attack, or when we interpret butterflies in our stomach as a sign that we are falling in love.

Emotions involve subjective feelings, patterns of expressive behavior that were the focus of Darwin, bodily responses that intrigued James, tendencies to act, and emotion-specific ways of perceiving the world, which Isen began to chart.

Culture

Family

Conceptualization

Regulation

Symbolic Expression

Experience

Expression

Bodily Response

Action Tendency

Perception

AppraisalEvent

FIGURE 1.10 A model of the unfolding processes of emotion.

The Emotional Realm: Emotions—Moods—Dispositions 29

As these patterns of emotion-related responses unfold, we label, explain, and narrate our emo- tions, which we characterize in the rightmost box of Figure 1.10. We conceptualize emotional experiences in a language of words, phrases, images, metaphors, and beliefs, making distinctions, for example, in whether we are experiencing “shame” or “embarrassment,” “awe” or “fear,” or “love” or “desire” (Lindquist, 2017). As the work of Hochschild revealed, we can act to modify, or regulate, our emotions; we might suppress anger or fear when it seems inappropriate to the context or for our identity; we might try to arrive at an alternative appraisal if it seems to be likely to trigger emotions we deem problematic (Gross, 2015). To carry forward a phrase from Shake- speare: emotions “come not single spies” (Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 4. Line 78). Often we experience more than one emotion in any social situation. The implication, as Mesquita and Frijda (2011) explained, is that among a set of emotions that we may feel, we can choose to concentrate on one—affection, perhaps, or embarrassment, or irritation—the one that is important for that situ- ation. Tomkins proposed that emotions create urgency. As a family friend of one of the writers of this book (K.O.) said: “one must distinguish the important from the merely urgent.” Also, in keeping with Aristotle’s analysis of theater, we can express our emotion in symbolic forms, such as journaling, fiction, poetry, music, visual art, and dance.

The wisdom of sociology and anthropology, and the observations of the ethologists, reveal how emotions are shaped profoundly by different social contexts. To capture this important idea, our figure places the elements of an individual’s emotion within two broader social contexts— represented as ovals in Figure 1.10. The first is your family, which influences how you evaluate events in your life (and the events you are exposed to), the specific language you develop to conceptualize your emotions, how you express your emotions, and how you label, regulate, and express symbolically your experiences. From your family, you inherit genetic tendencies that shape emotion as we shall see. Within your family, you develop and form attachments, and expe- rience different significant events, from the positive (warm family celebrations and reunions and traditions) to the traumatic (intense conflict, abuse), which we consider later in this book.

Culture—the focus of Chapter 3—is a second kind of social context that shapes emotion in myriad ways, as we chart throughout this book. The culture you grew up in (perhaps East Asian or Mexican-American), your social class, these influences on emotions can be far reaching. Our culture of origin and current living shape the language and concepts we rely on to interpret social contexts, how we appraise events, the intensity with which we express emotion, the words we use to categorize emotional experiences, and our tendency to suppress or amplify our emotional expression.

Summing up the processes portrayed in Figure 1.10, we arrive at this. Emotions occur usu- ally when some event occurs—in the world or in the mind—which, as Frijda (2007) explains, affects a concern, such as a goal or a value. It involves different aspects of ourselves: experiences, thoughts, changes within our bodies, expressions, perceptions, and actions. It creates an urge, a priority, to think and feel and do this, rather than that.

The Emotional Realm: Emotions—Moods—Dispositions The English language has many words that designate emotions: Johnson-Laird & Oatley (1989) identified 590 of them. We might say that our roommate is angry, or irritated, or hostile. We might say that we ourselves are feeling sad or blue or depressed.

Many scientists use the word affect for phenomena that have anything to do with emotions, moods, dispositions, and preferences, though some people refer to this whole realm as that of the emotions.

In Figure 1.11, we show a spectrum of emotional states in terms of duration, and in the follow- ing paragraphs we say something about each kind of state.

ApproAches to UnderstAnding emotions30

Episodes of Emotion The term “emotion” or “emotion episode” is generally used for a state that lasts for a limited time. As indicated in Figure 1.11, facial expressions and most bodily responses generally last for seconds, and in the case of some bodily responses, minutes. When researchers record states of which people are conscious and can report, by asking them to keep structured diaries of these episodes, or by getting people to remember episodes of emotions, people typically report experi- ences lasting between a few minutes and a few hours.

Moods and Sentiments The term mood refers to a state that may last for hours, days, or weeks, sometimes as a low- intensity background. When it starts or stops may be unclear. Whereas episodes of emotion typi- cally have an object, moods are often objectless, free-floating (Frijda, 1993a). We feel emotions about specific people and events. Philosophers call the focus of an emotional experience its “intentional object.” When you are angry, you usually have a very clear sense of what you are angry about (e.g., your roommate’s arrogance or your dad telling an embarrassing story about your first date). When you are in an irritable mood, in contrast, it may not be obvious why you feel as you do: the intentional object is less clear. The term “sentiment” is now used less than it once was. It is a prolonged emotional state, like a mood, but usually with an object: examples might be love or resentment.

Emotional Disorders The most common emotional disorders are depression and clinical anxiety states. These may last for weeks or months, sometimes for years. Such disorders are now routinely assessed by interviews from which people’s experience is categorized, for instance by means of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fifth edition, DSM-5, of 2013. Thus, major depression includes depressed mood, or loss of interest or pleasure in most activities, that lasts at least two weeks. It is a matter of considerable interest to find what relation episodes of depression have to normal episodes of sadness. We take up this issue in Chapters 12 and 13.

Personality and Temperament In a further step along the spectrum, there are terms used to describe emotional aspects of personality that can last a lifetime. We say that people are “warm” or “contemptuous.” Shyness implies a tendency to feel anxiety in social settings; agreeableness involves a tendency to feel

FIGURE 1.11 A spectrum of emotional phenomena in terms of the time course of each.

Further Reading 31

love and compassion for others. The term “trait” is used to designate such long-lasting aspects of personality. As we shall see in Chapters 8 and 11, significant aspects of personality are based on temperament, which can be thought of as the kind of personality we are born with. Personal- ity develops as we grow up, and most of its traits have emotions at their core. These emotional tendencies can shape peoples’ lives, often in profound ways.

S U M M A R Y

The new sciences that contribute most to this book have old and influential roots. In this chapter, we offer a sampling of insights into the nature of emotion. We began with Charles Darwin, who can be thought of as starting the scientific study of emotion. We then moved to William James, a founder of American psychol- ogy, and Sigmund Freud, a founder of the psychological therapies. We then reviewed formative ideas of philosophers Aristotle and René Descartes who identified some of the abiding questions of this book. What are emotions? How do we express them? Where do they come from? How do they shape our reasoning? What func- tions do they serve?

We then reviewed the approach of the novelist George Eliot. Her deep concern was the role of emotions in our relationships with oth- ers, an issue to which modern psychology of emotions is heading, and which is a central feature of this book.

Early on, brain science drew on the study of accidents and John Harlow’s account of the effects of the damage to Phineas Gage’s

brain. More recently, brain imaging has become important, as in the studies of Tania Singer and her colleagues on empathy. We described the influential theories of Magda Arnold and Sylvan Tomkins, and the effects of inducing emotions by Alice Isen. We saw how Erving Goffman, Arlie Russell-Hochschild, and Lila Abu- Lughod showed how emotions are constructed within the roles we adopt in our social life.

In putting these insights together, we offered an account of how an emotion unfolds, from initial appraisals to emotion-related responses to the ways in which we categorize, regulate, and nar- rate our emotions. Finally, we offered conceptions of emotion as functional processes that relate outer events to our inner goals and help us navigate our social world. This book is about the realm of the emotions. It covers emotional episodes, which are briefer and more specific than moods. By the second half of the book, we move to longer lasting states, which include traits of emotional disorders and traits of personality.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. Which of the approaches we’ve discussed in this chapter is most appealing in your own understanding of emotions? Why?

2. How can studies of the brain complement studies of a psycho- logical kind in understanding emotions?

3. How can a piece of art such as a novel or film enable us to think about our own emotions?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

Among the several good handbooks on emotions are the following: Sander, D., & Scherer, K. (Eds.). (2009). Oxford companion to emotion

and the affective sciences. New York: Oxford University Press.

Barrett, L. F., Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of emotions, 4th ed. New York: Guilford.

A useful book with distinguished contributors, the fourth volume in a series on Feelings and Emotions that started with the Wittenberg Sym- posium in 1927 is:

Manstead, A., Frijda, N., & Fischer, A. (2004). Feelings and emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

These books by philosophers range thoughtfully across diverse approaches: Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions.

New York: Cambridge University Press.

Solomon, R. (2007). True to our feelings: What our emotions are really telling us. New York: Oxford University Press.

A history of emotions and how they have been thought about: Oatley, K. (2004). Emotions: A brief history. Oxford: Blackwell.

32

2 Evolution of Emotions

Like all primates, humans are an intensely social species. Indeed we probably owe our success as a species to our sociality.

Robin Dunbar (2001), p. 175

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FIGURE 2.0 About 10 minutes before this photograph was taken these two male chimpanzees had a fight that ended in the trees. Now one extends a hand toward the other in reconcilia- tion. Immediately after this, they embraced and climbed down to the ground together.

CONTENTS Elements of an Evolutionary Approach

Selection Pressures Adaptation Natural Design for Gene Replication

An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions Insights from Modern Hunter-Gatherers Insights from Nonhuman Primates Human Ancestry

Evolution of Symbolic Representation and Language

Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships Emotions That Promote Attachment Emotions and Negotiation of Social Hierarchy Emotions, Affiliation, and Friendship Collective Emotion and Preference for In-Groups

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Elements of an Evolutionary Approach 33

In 1860, on hearing that humans are descended from apes, the wife of the Bishop of Worcester is said to have remarked: “My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it does not become generally known” (Leakey & Lewin, 1991, p. 16). Of course, it did become known: we share common ancestors with the apes. The line that led to modern humans diverged from that which led to chimpanzees about six million years ago. Evolution, the theory of how species developed, has become the central concept of biology. It also offers insights into the nature of emotions (Keltner, Haidt, & Shiota, 2006; Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, 2015).

Among the pieces of evidence that Darwin advanced for his theory of evolution was the simi- larity of patterns of human emotional expression to those of other mammals. In his book on emotions, Darwin (1872) argued that “some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except under the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal- like condition” (1872, p. 12).

Darwin’s analyses gave birth to the modern study of emotional expression, which we discuss in Chapter 4. His broader theory of evolution would change how we think about emotion. Under- standing the evolutionary approach to emotion is the task of this chapter.

Elements of an Evolutionary Approach In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859) described evolution in terms of three pro- cesses. The first he called superabundance: animals and plants produce more offspring than are necessary merely to reproduce themselves. The second he called variation: each offspring is somewhat different than others, and differences are passed on by heredity. The third he called selection: characteristics that allow better adaptation to the environment are more likely to sur- vive, and be passed on to offspring. The influential philosopher Daniel Dennett (1995) has pro- posed that Darwin’s theory of evolution is the single most important idea anyone has ever had in terms of shaping how we understand who we are.

In our first chapter, we were largely concerned with defining what emotions are. Scientists guided by an evolutionary approach to the emotions seek answers to related questions: Why do we experience emotions as we do? What functions might emotions serve in the immediate social context? And how might the functions that emotions serve today derive from our mammalian and human evolution? Three important evolutionary concepts bring into focus answers to these questions.

Selection Pressures At the core of natural selection are selection pressures. For humans, these are features of the physical and social environment in which humans evolved that determined whether or not indi- viduals survived and reproduced. Some selection pressures involve threats or opportunities directly related to physical survival. To survive, individuals need to find food and water, to stay at the right temperature, to avoid predation and disease. Many human systems such as our prefer- ences for sweet foods and aversion to bitter foods, our thermoregulatory systems, our fight and flight responses developed in response to these kinds of selection pressures.

Elements of evolution Darwin knew little or nothing, which we now know as genes, are passed during reproduction from one generation to the next. Two kinds of sexual selection pressure determine who reproduces and, by implication, what genes are passed on to the next generation (Griskevicius, Haselton, & Ackerman, 2015; Miller, 2000). Intersexual competition refers to the

Evolution of Emotions34

process by which members of one sex select specific kinds of traits in the other sex. For example, in nearly every part of the world, there is a tendency for women and men to prefer mates of good character (Buss, 1989), presumably because they will be generous, faithful partners, and com- mitted to rearing offspring, who require intensive care to reach the age of viability. Through this selection process, traits related to good character will prove to be advantageous in intersexual competition and be selected for and more likely to become part of the human design.

Intrasexual competition is competition for mates within a sex. In many species there are struggles of this kind, often among males. Stags lock horns, male hippos push one another with widely opened mouths, and elephant seals bellow and bite each other in violent confrontations (see Figure 2.1). These are efforts by males to find who is dominant and who therefore has access to mates. The status dynamics of young men—the teasing, aggressive encounters, derogation of rivals, and tests of strength—seem to be similar: means by which young men determine who rises in status and who will have preferential access to young women (Buss, 2009). Within intra- sexual competition, those traits, whether it be strength, beauty, cunning, emotional intelligence, or humor, which allow some to prevail, are more likely to be passed on to succeeding generations.

Alongside these sexual selection processes, evolutionary theorists have proposed that our capacity to enter cooperative social relationships has been critical to the survival of our species (Nowak & Highfield, 2011; Rand, 2016; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Tomasello, 2014). Nesse (2010) argued that fitness—the likelihood of surviving and reproducing successfully—is increased for those who are preferred by others as social partners and able to take part in strong social networks, in the same way that fitness is increased for those preferred as sexual partners (see also Flinn & Alexander, 2007). This claim is bolstered by findings in archeology and the study of hunter- gatherer societies showing that we accomplished many of the basic tasks of survival, including defense, the gathering and preparation of food, and the raising of offspring, in collaboration with

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FIGURE 2.1 These two male elephant seals are in the midst of a struggle to determine their relative strength and standing within a social hierarchy, which will impact their mating opportunities.

Elements of an Evolutionary Approach 35

others (Wilson, 2012). We are an ultra-social species, one whose chances of survival rest upon evolutionarily influenced capacities to form strong relationships and to fold into social collec- tives effectively.

Adaptation Another important concept is adaptation. Adaptations are genetically based traits that allow the individual to respond effectively and efficiently to specific selection pressures and to fare well in struggles to survive and reproduce. To see human behavior through this “adaptationist” lens, in Table 2.1 we list some adaptations that are relevant to human emotion (for other such adaptations, see Buss, 1999; Dunbar & Barrett, 2007; Sznycer, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2017).

To expand on Table 2.1, it is important to survive physically, and many preferences serve as adaptations that enable humans to eat the right foods and avoid predators. Consider our dietary likes and dislikes. Of the 10,000 taste buds on the human tongue, one set—those that give rise to sweet tastes—helps us identify foods of nutritional value. Our distaste for bitter foods—for example, triggered by toxic compounds in some foods—helps us avoid toxins (Rozin & Kalat, 1971). Some have argued that our aesthetic reactions to beautiful landscapes—with preferences for water, vegetation, flowering plants and trees—signal to the individual the presence of sources of food and shelter. As we will consider later, many fears and phobias—of insects, snakes, the dark—are, in the lens of evolutionary theory, adaptive in keeping humans away from such perils to survival.

Turning to problems of reproduction, our genes are more likely to be passed to subsequent generations when we mate with physically robust individuals, a selection pressure, the think- ing goes, that produced many adaptations. For example, people find facial symmetry beauti- ful (Rhodes & Simmons, 2007). Why? Because symmetry is thought to be a sign of physical robustness. Exposure to parasites early in development is associated with facial asymmetry and, in more extreme cases, disfiguration. Our preference for facial symmetry, then, may guide us toward potential mates who have stronger immune systems that make them resistant to parasites.

Table 2.1 Examples of adaptations

Problem/pressure Adaptation

Struggle for physical survival

Avoid eating toxins Distaste for bitter tasting food that may be rotting

Eat high-nutrition foods Pleasure in eating sweet-tasting foods

Feelings of beauty in resource-rich physical environments

Avoid predators Fear of spiders, snakes, the dark

Struggle to find and keep mate, reproduce

Find physically robust mate Attraction to symmetrical faces

Find fertile mate Attraction to mate with youthful appearance

Share costs of raising offspring Attraction by females to males with status, resources

Protect partner from leaving Jealousy felt toward rivals

Struggle to raise offspring to age of viability

Attach to vulnerable offspring Affection felt in response to baby-like facial cues

Pleasure felt when smelling infant scent

Protect vulnerable offspring Caregiving response to baby cries

Evolution of Emotions36

Recent evidence suggests that the faces we find beautiful may also seem inherently good to us, further amplifying our attraction to individuals who ultimately will help us produce healthier offspring. Tsukiura and Cabeza (2011) found that activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region involved in the processing of rewards, was increased both by attractiveness and by ratings of goodness of an action, whereas activity in the insular cortex decreased with both attractive- ness and ratings of the goodness. Our preferences for people who are physically attractive are bolstered by inferences that they are of good character—both tendencies leading us to attempt to reproduce with individuals with genes that make for greater physical robustness.

This kind of analysis has been applied, with controversial effect, to an analysis of gender differences in mate preferences (Buss, 1987; Gildersleeve, Haselton, & Fales, 2016). Given the costs that women incur during pregnancy and in raising infants, they should be more attracted to potential mates with status and resources, to assist in this resource-intensive work. Men, by con- trast, should seek to pair with women at their best reproductive age and feel attraction in response to cues of youth. Both partners should feel intense jealousy at the prospects of losing a partner. The extent to which these gender differences are deep human universals or swayed by culturally varying processes such as the economic power a culture presents to women is debated to this day (e.g., Wood, 2016).

Finally, let’s consider how the selection pressure of raising offspring to the age of viability produced several adaptations (Hrdy, 1999). Because of multiple factors in human evolution— the narrowing of the woman’s pelvis, the expanding size of the human head to accommodate the large human brain—human infants are born premature, and require years of intensive care, devotion, and resources from caregivers to survive. Table 2.1 highlights three adaptations that emerged in response to this selection pressure, with clear emotional associations. Humans have deep, positive emotional responses to baby-like facial cues such as those seen in Figures 2.2a and 2.2b—large forehead, big eyes, small chin—that enable their continuing devotion to infants despite the taxing costs of childrearing (sleep deprivation, changing diapers, having food spit up on a clean shirt, fore going other sexual opportunities). The scent of an infant has long been noted to have a special allure, perhaps one that promotes positive emotions in caregivers. And indeed one study found that women show activation in dopamine-rich reward regions in the brain when smelling the scent on the pajamas of a two-day-old (Lundström et  al., 2013). Young parents often feel powerful protective and caring feelings in hearing their infant’s vocalizations. On this observation one recent study found that within 50 milliseconds of hearing baby cries, babbling, or laughter (but not adult or nonhuman cries or other control sounds), human adults respond with activation in a region of the brain—the periaqueductal gray—that is known to enable caring, nurturant behavior (Parsons et al., 2017).

The analysis brings into focus the way in which emotions served important functions in the context of evolution; they enabled humans to meet survival and reproduction-related selection pressures. Emotions—the fear of the dark, jealousy or envy felt toward rivals, sexual desire felt for a romantic partner, the intense parental love felt for a child—may feel irrational in the moment, but cast within this evolutionary framework are important solutions to the problems of survival and reproduction (Tooby & Cosmides, 2015).

As we return to this approach at different places in the book, it’s important to note important qualifications to this line of thought. Not all human traits or behaviors are adaptations. Some human traits, from snoring to nervous leg jiggles, serve no apparent evolutionary function and are better thought of as byproducts. Moreover, you should not conclude that all, or even most, human traits emerged to meet survival- and reproduction-related problems and opportunities. Evolution is a tinkerer and often endows old anatomical and behavioral features with new functions. A trait that acquires a new function like this is called an exaptation. Andrew (1963, 1965) used this principle to propose how facial expressions in primates, including humans, were developed from reflexes. Many animals have a reflex in which they flatten their ears when startled, or when an

Elements of an Evolutionary Approach 37

animal approaches another member of its species. Its original function was to protect the ears. But as well as being protective, the pattern is easily recognized by others: if we think a dog looks friendly, part of this look may be due to the flattened ears. Humans are not able to retract their ears, but raising the eyebrows seems to derive from this same movement, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1970) showed, by inconspicuous filming in many different cultures, that a brief raising of the eyebrows, lasting a fraction of a second, occurs when people approach one another during greet- ing and in flirting (see Figure 2.3). It is probably a human universal.

Natural Design for Gene Replication In the nuclei of each of the 35 to 50 trillion cells that make up your body are 23 pairs of chro- mosomes that you inherited from your parents. Each chromosome contains genes composed of DNA. Sequences of DNA, or genes, are translated into mRNA, which, in turn, is translated into proteins (see Figure 2.4). Those proteins form the many structures—hands, hair, eyes, internal organs, bones—that make up your physical body, as well as the systems—facial muscle groups, the vocal apparatus, receptors in the skin, regions of the brain, branches of the peripheral nervous system, and neurotransmitters and hormones—that are part of your emotional responses.

Here is one counterintuitive notion of evolutionary theory as it has combined with modern genetic theory. Are you ready for it? We tend to think that our genes are in our service, that we have received them from parents and that we pass our own genes on to our children. No! That’s completely the wrong way around. Modern evolutionary genetics has taught us that our genes pass themselves on to the next generation. That’s their main property. Based on the DNA from which they are composed, genes replicate. They copy themselves, and the copies become the

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FIGURE 2.2a AND 2.2b. Given their hypervulnerability, new babies rely on a variety of cues, evolutionary reasoning holds, such as smiles, coos, soft skin, and cute faces to draw parents into the provision of care, and this intensive caregiving continues for several years.

Evolution of Emotions38

genetic code for making the structure of plants and animals they will inhabit in the next genera- tion. The genes are not ours. Our bodies are their means of passing themselves on. We are their vehicles, their robots. We are programmed with different genetically based adaptations to repro- duce, and so enable genes to replicate (Dawkins, 1976; Nesse, 2006; Stanovich, 2004).

How do human genes program us? You’ve guessed it. A principal way is by our emotions. We humans are very good vehicles. Equipped with the emotion of fear, we protect our bodies by avoiding dangers, so the genes we carry will be safe. By being emotionally drawn to food that is nutritious, attracted to sweetness and repelled by bitter-tasting toxins that that we reject in disgust, we build our bodies. By being interested in sex—in lust or in love—we enable our genes to pass themselves on to the next generation. By means of the emotion of love for our children, we are enabled to take good care of them. By being decent to each other, we create societies in which our children can grow up. Our emotions are means by which genes replicate. Evolution- ary theorists encapsulate this reasoning with the concept: natural design for gene replication. Reliable human tendencies, including the emotions, have emerged in human evolution to enable genes to replicate.

Let’s make this theorizing concrete with an empirical example. On your third chromosome is a variation of a gene, or SNIP, called OXTR, that regulates levels of oxytocin in the human body (Keltner, Kogan, Piff, & Saturn, 2014). Oxytocin, you will learn, facilitates uterine con- tractions and milk letdown at a time close to childbirth as well as social emotional processes that enable strong social bonds, including sharing, empathy, and sensitive parenting (Bartz, 2011). By enabling more effective childbirth and social emotional processes such as empathy, kindness, and cooperation, the genetic variant OXTR is increasing the chances the individual will survive, reproduce, and raise offspring to the age of viability and, in so doing, increases its chances for replication. Selfish genes can produce selfless tendencies in the humans they inhabit.

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FIGURE 2.3 Greeting gestures around the world often involve smiles, eye contact, touch, and the raising of the eyebrows.

Elements of an Evolutionary Approach 39

Given this line of theorizing, one might be inclined to believe that genes, or combinations of genes, determine our emotional tendencies. This indeed was the promise when the human genome—the 25,000 genes found in the cells of each human—was sequenced in 2000. At that time the world expected scientists to discover genes for depression, types of cancer, autism, and our emotions. The story, however, has turned out to be more complicated (Sapolsky, 2017). Instead, the field of epigenetics has revealed that there are important biochemical processes— the degree to which DNA is methylated and the degree to which it is attached to proteins called histones—that turn genes on or off, depending on characteristics of the individual’s environment (Carey, 2013). Genes on their own don’t determine your emotional tendencies; they have their effects only in particular social environments.

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FIGURE 2.4 A DNA molecule.

Evolution of Emotions40

What this means is that in some rare instances our genes program our emotions so closely that when certain events occur we respond in a reflex. In his book of 1872, Darwin described the fol- lowing experiment upon himself.

I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.

(Darwin, 1872/1965, p. 38)

In this reflex the programming of the genes was absolute. The avoidance of striking snakes has been so critical, it seems that everyone who was our ancestor had it wired in, and so do we, whether or not we ever confront a snake.

This kind of fear response, as shown in Darwin jumping back from the striking snake, may be the best example of his principle that modern human emotions derive from ancestors who lived in different ways than we do. And in fact, many of the simplest and most automatic elements of emotions might be thought in the same fashion—the soothing touch of parent in response to a child’s distress calls, the wince of disgust in response to a putrid smell, the fear of the dark a young child experiences, the visceral feeling of anger at receiving less than someone else for comparable work.

Of course, these reflexive elements of emotional reactions are situated within complex social relationships and are shaped by a particular culture as we shall see in the next chapter. As we shape our lives, our human purposes can become more important than the purposes of our genes (Stanovich, 2004).

So the programming of our emotions and desires by our genes has a range. At one end is the peremptory—the reflex—as with Darwin’s leap backward when the snake struck. At the

Individual Emotion: Disgust

In his voyage around the world on the ship Beagle, Charles Darwin took copious notes that would set the stage for his theory of evolution. One was about a native of Tierra del Fuego who, he wrote, touched some preserved meat that Darwin was about to eat. Finding the meat was soft, the man made a facial expression of disgust. This expression is now regarded as universal (see Chapter 4). It involves wrin- kling the nose and retracting the upper lip. Darwin said that although the man’s hands seemed clean, this quite put him off his lunch.

Disgust is an emotion of rejection, originally of some- thing bitter. In this sense, it can be seen as an evolved emo- tional reaction to potential toxins. But during the course of children’s development, it can extend to anything that has been, or may have been, contaminated (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2008). Disgust, the argument goes, comes to

signal to the person that something—a person, action, or idea—is impure and morally wrong.

A study using neuroimaging by Wicker et  al. (2003) showed that the same area of the brain—the anterior insula— is involved both in feeling and in recognizing disgust. The argument is that when we recognize disgust in others, we often do so by generating the experience of disgust in our- selves. Perhaps, for Darwin, it wasn’t just the fact that some- one he didn’t know touched his food, which put him off his lunch. It might have been his own feeling of disgust, which mirrored that of the man who touched his preserved meat.

Disgust at the sight of something one would refuse to eat has been found by Chapman, Kim, Susskind, and Ander- son (2009) to be exactly the same reaction as that of moral disgust, rejection of an unacceptable or unjust action by another.

An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions 41

other end are all those attractions and urges that our culture, or we ourselves, can modify. At the closely coupled end, the genes command us. In the middle are perhaps emotions like anger and some kinds of fear, which are sometimes compelling but which we can sometimes modify. At the loosely coupled end, genetically based emotions whisper suggestions about how to act, shaped and transformed by the social and cultural context.

An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions So far we have found one answer to the question of why we experience emotions as we do. Emo- tions can be thought of as adaptations that help humans meet the specific selection pressures of survival, reproduction, and getting along in the social contexts of daily living.

Another way to ask the question “Why” is this: What is it about our primate and mammalian evolution that laid the foundation for the emotions that we experience today? And what shifts emerged in our own hominid evolution, the six to seven million years we have been evolving after branching off from the common ancestor of the great apes that endow emotions with uniquely human qualities. In particular, what arose during the last 200,000 years, where our hominid pre- decessors began to look like modern humans, that explain how you experience love, or awe, rage, or compassion today?

Answering these questions requires that we tell the deep evolutionary history of the emo- tions. To do so, we need to understand the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the environment to which humans became adapted as our species evolved during the six million years since the human line branched off from the line that led to chimpanzees and bonobos (Nesse, 1990; Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990, 2015). It is within this environment of evolutionary adaptedness that humans evolved specific emotions that enabled individuals to meet the many selection pressures that determined who survived and reproduced and who did not.

The way we live now with cars, cell phones, and sharing photos and videos with friends on Snapchat and Instagram seems very different from the environments in which human emotions evolved. About 200,000 years ago was the time when the common forbears of all living human beings—our ancestral Eves—lived in Africa (Wilson & Cann, 1992). Our ancestors lived in small, seminomadic groups likely ranging in number from 30 to 75, hunting and foraging for food, and living in small camps. Processes that today are essential to life, such as deriving food from agriculture, began only some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago (Diamond, 1997; Marcus & Flannery, 2012). Not long afterward, came the invention of cities as centers of trade (Leick, 2001). In such movements, the evolution of human cultures overtook the evolution of species. If we take the 10,000 years of civilizations, this is just 5% of the period since the ancestral Eves lived, and a quarter of a percent of the period since our separation from chimpanzees. In other words, the majority of our differentiation from ape-like beings into humans took place in a world—our human environment of human adaptedness—that was very different from our world today. One constant over the period since human species began has been our intense sociality.

Insights from Modern Hunter-Gatherers How might we gain a picture of our earlier environment of human adaptedness? One way is to study contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, the groups of people who live in social conditions of the kind we humans began to develop some 200,000 years ago. By carefully observing such modern people and studying traces of hunter-gatherer societies in the archeological record, we find clues to understanding the social pressures and patterns that gave rise to human emotion.

Evolution of Emotions42

What we learn is that the environment of human adaptedness was highly social, of humans living in groups of the kind we now see as extended families, with patterns of attachment, hierarchy, affiliation, and tribalism shaping the emotions we experience today.

In Australia and in the savannas of southern Africa and rainforests of the Amazon, some people have continued the hunter-gatherer way of life into modern times. This was the way of life of the San of the Kalahari who include the !Kung and the G/wi (see Figure 2.5). (Their languages include clicks: “!” designates a click made by drawing the tongue sharply away from the roof of the mouth, and “/” is made by drawing the tongue away from the front teeth, like the “tsk” of scolding.) Lorna Marshall and her family lived among them in the 1950s (Marshall, 1976; Thomas, 1989). In the 1960s and 1970s, Lee (1984) and other American anthropolo- gists visited these peoples. The ethologists we wrote of in Chapter 1 did systematic studies of similar bands of hunter-gatherers in New Guinea, the Amazon, Indonesia, and elsewhere (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989).

The G/wi and !Kung lived in nomadic groups of 10 to 30 people, in extended families, meet- ing other family groups from time to time. Until its recent erosion by Western influences, !Kung and G/wi peoples lived in a semidesert land and traveled over a range of several hundred square miles that they know intimately, meeting other groups related by marriage or blood. Round a fire, the G/wi scoop out shallow impressions in the ground to sleep in. The women especially are expert botanists: they gather roots and other vegetable foods from the land, and obtain fluid from tsamma melons. The men hunt and shoot animals with bows and arrows tipped with a poison made from a grub. They may have to follow a shot antelope for a day before it dies. It is brought back to camp, and there are complex rules about how it is divided. Nothing is wasted. In this life, people would know about 150 others (Dunbar, 1993, 2004) to some of whom they would be related as kin.

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An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions 43

Insights from Nonhuman Primates A second source of evidence about our environment of human adaptedness is the study of lives of our closest primate relatives (see Figure 2.6), chimpanzees and their smaller, more coop- erative, less-aggressive relatives, the bonobos (Kano, 1992; De Waal, 1995). These two species share with humans a common primate ancestor, as well as 95 percent of our DNA (Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, 2005). They also share many social tendencies and basic behavioral and physiological responses with humans, as we shall see, ranging from threat dis- plays and patterns of reconciliation to basic systems in the nervous system and the facial muscu- lature. Studies of these primate relatives point to what you might think of as the deep structure of our environment of human adaptedness.

What do we learn about the emotions of our primate relatives? Answers first emerged from the work of primatologists such as Jane Goodall (1986) and her colleagues who spent many years observing chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, an area of rugged forest about the size and shape of Manhattan. Consider the following description by Goodall:

Melissa and her daughter Gremlin have made their nests [in the trees] some 10 meters apart. Melissa’s son Gimble still feeds on msongati pods . . . Gremlin’s infant, Getty,

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Orangutan Gorilla Chimpanzee Bonobo

Common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans

Common ancestor of gorilla, chimpanzees, and humans

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dangles above his mother, twirling, kicking his legs, and grabbing at his toes. From time to time Gremlin reaches up, idly, tickling his groin. After a few minutes he climbs away through the branches, a tiny figure outlined against the orange-red of the evening sky. When he reaches a small branch above Melissa’s nest, he suddenly drops down, plop, on her belly. With a soft laugh his grandmother holds him close and play-nibbles his neck . . . He goes back to his mother and lies beside her, suckling, one arm on her chest . . . Suddenly from the far side of the valley come the melodious pant-hoots of a single male: Evered, probably in his nest too. It is Gimble who starts the answering cho- rus, sitting up beside Melissa, his hand on her arm, gazing toward the adult male—one of his “heroes.”

(Goodall, 1986, p. 594)

With such observations, Goodall documented many chimpanzee emotion-like responses: apprehension at a stranger, fear at an aggressive interaction, distress when lost, annoyance at a bothersome juvenile, anger in a fight, mourning following the death of a parent, which could lead to immobility and death. Goodall also catalogued emotional displays, including threats made with bared teeth, hair standing on end during excitement (sexual or aggressive), a pant-grunt indicating social apprehension, squeaking and screaming indicating fear, angry barks, distressed whimpers, laughter and panting that accompany the enjoyment of play and body contact, and pant-hoots and roars that accompany social excitement.

These expressions are bases of distinctive patterns of interaction. So, when they find a tree with a lot of fruit on it, chimpanzees pant-hoot. Others come to the spot, and everyone eats together with infectious enjoyment. In maternal–infant interactions, in the play of juveniles, and in reconciliations, there is affectionate body contact, touching, stroking, and hugging. If an ani- mal is hurt, it screams a distinctive SOS call, which summons others to its aid. When patrolling their range, groups of males are tense and alert to sounds, and they become excited when they attack an animal from outside their community.

Significant Figure: Jane Goodall

Apart from Charles Darwin, no one has done more to explore the relatedness of humans to our primate relatives than Jane Goodall. Encouraged and mentored by the paleontologist Louis Leakey, Goodall studied chimpanzees in Gombe, Tan- zania. She did a PhD at Cambridge, based on her early obser- vations—one of a tiny number of people who have been allowed to do so without first having a bachelor’s degree

Goodall’s important work, published in her book of 1986, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, was to document the lives of chimpanzees as individuals, with distinctive personalities, distinctive emotions, and distinctive relationships with each other. First she realized that she had to gain their trust. This involved sitting for hours close to groups, until they became used to her and tolerated her presence. She realized that

she had to learn to identify each one as an individual and give each a name. She made observations on groups, as well as followed particular individuals for many days and recorded their activities.

As we describe in this chapter, it was Goodall who first identified chimpanzees’ abilities to hunt small monkeys, and share and eat them. It was she who saw that chimpanzee emotions were very much like human emotions, includ- ing the antisocial emotions involved in killing members of groups of their own species who had separated themselves from the main group.

Today Goodall is an advocate for chimpanzees as an endangered species, and an advocate, also, for looking after our Earth and its habitats.

An Evolutionary History of Human Emotions 45

Amid these observations, one finds social dimensions of the environment of human adaptedness in chimpanzee and bonobo life. A first is attachment between infants and their mothers, a process first theorized about by John Bowlby (1969), about which we will say more next. For example, chimpanzee mothers and infants stay close to each other (see Figure 2.7). The mothers feed and help their infants and show other evidence of concern, or as we might say, love (Hirata, 2009).

The reproductive relations that lead to offspring involve cooperation and competition, but differ from those of humans. Once they are sexually mature at age 15, female chimpanzees advertise their sexual receptiveness by a large pink patch of sexual skin (the labia). During the period of receptiveness, typically lasting 10 days out of the 36-day menstrual cycle, each female may copulate several dozen times a day, with all or most of the adult males in her social group. Alternatively she may go off with a single male consort, away from the rest of the community. Usually females choose whom they mate with and when. Mothers raise infants more or less on their own. Males make contributions to the community, but not to individual offspring.

Bonobo females are sexually active for about five years before they become fertile. They are receptive for more than half the time in each menstrual cycle. They copulate freely with the adult males in their social group. Female and male homosexual relations are also common. Younger males often engage in sexual activity with older females in what might be thought of as sexual ini- tiation play. Sexual contact among bonobos is the basis of friendships, conflict reduction, and play.

Observations of chimpanzee life reveal a second social feature of the environment of human adaptedness. Chimpanzees live in hierarchies, which provide heuristic solutions to problems of distributing resources, such as mating opportunities, food, and social attention, and the labor required of collective endeavors (Fiske, 2010; Keltner, 2016; de Waal, 2005). Among chimpan- zees the alpha male is the individual to whom others typically defer. He may win his position by defeating the previous holder and reinforce his position with intimidation displays that might involve charging, pulling branches, throwing stones, and making a great din, as you can see in Figure  2.8 (Goodall, 1992). Often alpha males are the most skilled at making alliances with others, through grooming, and generosity, in particular directed at females, the sharing of food, and breaking up conflicts that would tear the social fabric of the chimp community asunder (Boehm, 1999; de Waal, 1986). Females too have a parallel hierarchy. More subordinate chimps

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FIGURE 2.7 An Orangutan mother and offspring in Borneo.

Evolution of Emotions46

ritualistically and systematically will show gestures of appeasement and submission to alpha chimps—bows, fear grimaces, the averting of gaze—to maintain the peace (Eales, 1992).

A third social dimension of the environment of human adaptedness seen in chimpanzee and bonobo life is: patterns of affiliation. In the spirit of Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal has made a career of closely observing chimps and bonobos, making key discoveries about their patterns of affiliation (de Waal, 1996, 2008). Caregiving is central to the affiliative patterns among nonkin: chimpanzees, baboons, and macaques often become intensely distressed when they witness harm to other group members. Primates take care of vulnerable individuals, such as those who are born blind or crippled. Chimps and Bonobos are known to groom each other, in patterns of close social contact that produce what look to the human eye like alliances or friendships. Play is central to the bonds of chimps and bonobos (Goodall, 1986). Young chimpanzees play with each other in the rough and tumble theatrics that might remind you of your childhood with your siblings.

So precious are affiliative ties, that nonhuman primates, and, in fact, almost all mammals have evolved patterns of reconciliation to repair social bonds in the face of escalating conflict. Here is one illustration of this tendency to reconcile, to preserve affiliative ties. de Waal compared how pairs of chimpanzees or macaques behave after angry conflicts to the behaviors of the same pairs behaved during calmer, less strife-ridden times. He discovered that previous antagonists were actually more likely to remain in physical proximity with one another and reconcile (see the photo at the head of this chapter). Sometimes the aggressor initiates reconciliation, sometimes it’s the defeated animal. In the latter case, he or she would approach with trepidation and engage in submissive behaviors, like bare teeth displays, head bowing and bobbing, and submissive grunts. This eventually would lead to affectionate grooming, physical contact, and even embraces that would repair the social bond (de Waal, 2000).

Finally, one sees another dimension of the environment of human adaptedness: preference for one’s own group and hostility toward other groups. Our primate predecessors show an unnerving tendency to distinguish between the in-group and out-group and to direct violence toward the out-group, often over territorial matters. The evolutionary origin of this kind of moti- vation can be glimpsed from studies of chimpanzees, for instance by Goodall (1986). She records how among the chimpanzees she was studying in the wild, in Gombe, a small contingent formed a separate community. It was with profound shock that, in 1974, researchers saw gangs of the

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FIGURE 2.8 In chimpanzees, threat displays and chasing are part of the negotiation of rank within hierarchies.

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larger northern community start to patrol, attack, and kill members of the southern group if they came across them either alone or in numerically weaker groups in the forest.

The smaller contingent, which had tended to range south of Goodall’s camp, had six adult males. Though the two subcommunities met occasionally, for example, to get fruit at Goodall’s camp, and though some interindividual contacts were sometimes friendly, in general, the two groups were tense on meeting. They started to avoid each other. Finally, southern males stopped visiting the camp. Violent episodes began. Northern males, who would patrol their borders, started to make incursions into the southern range. On one occasion, a group of six adult males, an adolescent male, and a female came across a southern male on his own. He tried to flee but was caught by the northern males. While one held him, the other males beat him with fists for about 10 minutes, and one bit him several times. When they left him he was severely wounded, and although his body was never found, he was presumed to have died from his injuries. One by one all the other adult animals of the southern group, including a female, were killed in like manner. Adolescent females from the southern group joined the northern group. The attacks were clearly meant to kill: they lasted longer than fights within a community, and included biting and tearing flesh of the kind seen when eating animals of other species. Attacks were not caused by victims being strangers. Some had previously been friends of some of the attackers.

This was a form of tribalism that has been seen in other studies of nonhuman primates (Boesch et al., 2007). So, although chimpanzees can be, and often are, aggressive to their companions, it is an entirely different kind of motivation that occurs that leads chimpanzees to kill members of groups other than their own.

Human Ancestry What we learn about our human environment of human adaptedness is that patterns of attachment in humans diverge in important ways from those of our primate relatives, chimpanzees and bono- bos. A chimpanzee or bonobo family is a female and a small group of her offspring. The human family, by contrast, is a group that often includes both sexes and individuals of all ages, living with a female and her offspring. In the group there is usually at least one adult male, most often the wom- an’s sexual partner. The extended family group typically includes other relatives, such as siblings, older offspring, and their sexual partners who have joined the family from other groups. (A taboo on incest and social mechanisms for people to marry outside the family are other human universals.)

Several important forces shifted attachment processes and the care of offspring. Human off- spring, we have already noted, were very vulnerable, which led to the emergence of alloparent- ing—many different individuals in addition to the mother, fathers, cousins, and nonkin, shared in the care of infants, toddlers, and children (Hrdy, 2001; Konner, 1982; Parsons et al., 2017). This pressure for many individuals to attach to infants and children was augmented by other fac- tors—the uncertainty of food, the high probability by contemporary standards of mothers dying as the child developed. As a result, attachment was more than just a mother caring for an infant; it was shared by many in the group.

Reproductive relationships that led to children also diverged from our primate relatives. Although the proportion of societies (like Western ones) where monogamy is official policy is only 16% among a total of 853 societies sampled (Van den Berghe, 1979), and although extra- marital activities are not uncommon in most societies, in practice monogamy is a very common sexual pattern, and more typical of hunter-gatherer societies. The pattern of polygamy, of one male having several wives appears to have emerged later in our evolution, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago as the small bands of hunter-gatherers settled into larger settlements with stored grains and more vertical hierarchies governed by “big chiefs” (Flannery & Marcus, 2012). The emotional accompaniment of the adoption of monogamy is jealousy, which tends to occur when the pair bond is threatened by an interloper (Dunbar, 2004).

Evolution of Emotions48

Compared to our primate relatives, human hierarchies diverged in important ways as well, with profound implications for the evolution of human emotion. Hierarchies in chimps and bono- bos are quite vertical, with clear alpha males and females retaining their rank through threat dis- plays, occasional aggression, and grooming and sharing to preserve alliances with subordinates (de Waal, 1982). When we fast-forward seven million years of hominid evolution and turn to studies of hunter-gatherer societies, we encounter something dramatically different in the hier- archies. When anthropologist Christopher Boehm surveyed studies of the hierarchical dynamics of 48 preindustrial societies, representing cultures from every continent that has been populated by humans, the first thing of note is that alpha males and females were hard to identify; rank was more equal and deference and influence more dependent on the social context (Boehm, 1993). And hunter-gatherer hierarchies were less vertical; egalitarianism in the distribution of resources was the prevailing principle.

Early human hierarchies were shaped by leveling mechanisms, social-emotional processes that preserve more egalitarian relations. For example, should an individual boast, other people will mock, tease, or ridicule the person, to render the person more humble and preserve more egalitarian relations (now one sees why teasing and roasting are so common today in groups). When an individual is fortunate enough to make a big kill in the hunt, the successful hunter will often engage in self-deprecating acts, insulting the meat, and others will join in, to ensure the individual does not develop a sense of superiority. More generally, friendships are rich with laughter, play, and teasing, all means by which they remain humble and imbued with a sense of commonality and equality.

Patterns of affiliation in hunter-gatherers are defined by collaboration, for example, in defense, hunting animals, and, as we have already noted, the rearing of offspring. Individuals in hunter- gatherer social groups share instinctively due to the uncertainty of food sources and the col- laboration required to obtain food. For example, among the Netsilik Eskimos, each individual is assigned 12 food-sharing partners whom they keep through their lives (Flannery & Marcus, 2012). Anytime an individual within one of these networks kills a seal, that person carefully cuts it up into 14 parts and shares 12 with his or her partners, keeping two for him or herself. Through the sharing of food, social ties are solidified and maintained. In the highlands of New Guinea, neighboring social groups gather each year in celebration to ritualistically give away food they have cultivated—piles of yams, pig carcasses, and arrays of coconuts (Weissner & Schiefen- hövel, 1996). The more an individual gives away, the higher the status he or she will enjoy. This pattern of food sharing to solidify alliances is seen in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Inuit social groups of the Arctic, and the dwellers of the Amazon.

Finally, humans show a striking tendency toward instinctively favoring the in-group and hav- ing contempt for members of out-groups. There are clear limits to the affiliative and collaborative tendencies in the small groups that defined human evolution for 200,000 years. The last such species was of the Neanderthals, who became extinct some 28,000 years ago. Reviewing the paleontological evidence of contact between anatomically modern humans (our ancestors) and Neanderthals, Mellars (2004) concludes that there was:

Direct competition for space and resources between the two populations, in which the demonstrably more complex technology and apparently more complex organization of the anatomically modern populations would have given them a strong competitive advantage over the Neanderthals (p. 464).

Before their extinction, Neanderthals were the hominid inhabitants of Europe. Then there was an influx—should one say colonization?—by anatomically modern humans who, just before the extinction of Neanderthals, came to outnumber them by 10 to 1 (Mellars & French, 2011).

Evolution of Symbolic Representation and Language 49

Recent genetic evidence indicates that some Neanderthals interbred with humans, but the question remains as to whether the Neanderthals, in general, were driven to extinction by our ancestors.

There are strong beliefs in the inherent superiority of one’s own group over others, in the inherent morality of one’s own group, and in preferentially allocating resources to one’s own group (Brewer, 1979). Violent raids of other groups to gain resources, territory, or mates were common. Today, we see the vestiges of this tribalism. When people are presented with faces of people of different ethnic backgrounds than their own, a region of the brain, the amygdala, known to be involved in fear, lights up, whereas this response does not occur when viewing faces from one’s own group (Wheeler & Fiske, 2005). When people view images of suffering of people from their own group and other ethnic groups, they are less likely to show activation in regions of the brain—the medial prefrontal cortex—involved in the empathic response (Mathur, Harada, Lipke, & Chiao, 2011). We are by no means condemned to look upon other groups with derision and hostility. Former adversaries—the Germans and Japanese for the Americans in World War II—can quickly become allies. The ethicist Peter Singer has noted that in our history, humans consistently show the capacity to expand our circle of care, that is those individuals we deem as worthy of rights and care, from our own families to those in our communities to humans more generally, and even nonhuman species (Singer, 2011). This transformation of tribalism rests upon a critical shift in human evolution with profound implications for emotion—the emergence of language and symbolic representation.

Evolution of Symbolic Representation and Language Thus far our evolutionary story has focused on what we share in our emotional lives with our primate relatives—a deeply social environment of human adaptedness structured by attachments, hierarchies, alliances, and preference for in-group members. It is within this environment of human adaptedness that emotions enabled our hominid forebears to respond adaptively, with genetically based systems—regions of the brain, branches of the peripheral nervous system, facial and bodily musculature as we shall see—to form strong attachments, navigate social hier- archies, build strong affiliations, and protect the group.

The tale of human evolution also brings into focus new traits and characteristics that define who we are as a species and create new properties of human emotion. Flint tools have been found from two-and-a-half million years ago, and they imply an emotional engagement of acquiring and exercising the skills to make them. The use of fire started about 700,000 years ago, and one can imagine it was used not just for warmth, but also for preparing food to be stored, distributed, and shared. As we detail in Chapter 4, the oldest human art objects, shells drilled to make beads for necklaces, are from 82,000 years ago (Bouzouggar et al., 2007) and speak to an interest in aesthetics, beauty, and, perhaps, awe. The evidence of ritual burials from around the same period (Bowler et al., 2003) implies that by then emotionally moving stories were being told of people who were dead but alive again on another plane.

The most noticeable species-typical characteristic of humans, which distinguishes us from all our nonhuman relatives, is language, which is estimated to have emerged some 200,000 years ago (Henshilwood & Dubreuil, 2009). Language involves symbolic utterances—words— that are combined according to certain rules (syntax) to convey meaning (semantics). It is still unknown how language emerged in human evolution. One possibility is that our human prede- cessors combined a repertoire of nonverbal sounds—cries, growls, screams, sighs, oohs, and ahhs—and gestural actions such as pointing into more complex strings of sounds (Hauser, 2000; Jackendoff, 2002); nonverbal sounds transformed into proto-words to refer to people, actions,

Evolution of Emotions50

and objects in the environment. And gradually, our hominid predecessors began to pair these sounds into word strings, and, eventually, with the development of syntax into sentence-like utterances.

Whatever the process by which this occurred, today humans have hundreds, if not thousands, of words, metaphors, idiomatic expressions, and phrases that refer to emotional experiences (Russell, 1991). Adding this layer of language to the emotional response transformed emotion in fundamental ways (Barrett, 2017; Lindquist, 2013). With language we can talk about emotions in the abstract, about experiences that are not in the present, but in the past or future. It allows us to talk about hypothetical emotions (“If you date my best friend, I’ll be really angry”). Language allows us to characterize emotion in imaginative and artistic form, such as in poetry and novels, and complex legends about gods and mythical figures that were so important to the many cultures of several thousand years ago before monotheistic religions emerged. Language allows us speak of emotion metaphorically—my sadness is like the ocean at low tide—and to attribute emotions to things, most typically other natural objects or forces, other than people (Kovesces, 2012). Language transforms emotion.

More generally, our capacity to use language to represent emotional experience helps us build social bonds through emotion-based arts of conversation, disputation, gossip, and the making of joint plans, social processes animated by emotion. This is the argument of Robin Dunbar (1993, 2003, 2004).

Dunbar has proposed that chimpanzees and other primates use grooming, in which primates sit together, pick through each other’s fur to get rid of twigs and insects, stroke each other, to maintain social bonds; in humans this activity has been replaced by conversation (see Figure 2.9). Whereas manual grooming can only be performed with one other individual at a time, with lan- guage we can communicate with several others and do it while we are doing something else, like preparing food. And we can communicate about emotions of others who are not there, about emotions from the past or in the hypothetical future. This capacity was necessitated by the expanding group sizes of our hominid predecessors and laid a foundation for several critically human cognitive capacities we will speak of later—the ability to imagine others’ mental states

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FIGURE 2.9 Two chimpanzees grooming. Dunbar’s hypothesis is that in humans this emotionally intimate activity has been replaced by conversation.

Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships 51

and develop a theory of mind; the ability to take others’ perspectives; the ability to comment on others’ reputations and character and spread that information through social networks; the ability to share intentions and coordinate future behavior. These are abilities beyond anything chimpan- zees can manage (Tomasello, 1999, 2008).

Human brains became enlarged in part due to the growth of regions of the frontal cortex that allow us to have mental models of people in our social group, and, in addition, conversational language allowed us to discuss what these others might know, how they feel, and how to do things together. Language does not replace communication by glance, facial expression, vocalization, or gesture; it augments it. With language we can share aspects of emotions with others and under- stand their emotional minds in ways far beyond anything that occurs among our primate relatives. In the next chapter, we will discuss how language and culture work to shape the raw materials of biologically based emotions.

Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships We have said that the most noticeable difference between humans and apes is that we have lan- guage, whereas apes do not. More profound and more basic—also the means by which language with its shared meanings came into being—is our deepest characteristic as a species: our ability to cooperate. As Michael Tomasello (e.g., 2014, 2016) explains, this ability is at the center of being human. In a paper that may be more important than any other in the twenty-first-century psychology, Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, Maria Hernandez-Lloredo, Brian Hare, and Michael Tomasello (2007) report studies in which they compared 105 human infants aged two-and-a- half years with 106 chimpanzees aged 3 to 21 years, and 33 orangutans aged 3 to 10 years, on two sets of tasks. One set was physical; the tasks included finding rewards that had been hidden, using tools to retrieve rewards, and discrimination of quantity. The other set was social; the tasks included seeing a person solve a problem and then trying to solve it in the same way, following the gaze of a person, being able to make and receive communicative gestures, and understand- ing what a person was trying to do in a task in which that person was unsuccessful in complet- ing. For the physical tasks, the humans and chimpanzees were both about 69 percent correct. Orangutans were 59 percent correct. For the social tasks, the human infants were 74 percent correct. Chimpanzees and orangutans were, on the whole, not able to do these tasks; they were 33 percent and 36 percent correct, respectively, (with chance level well above zero). By the age of two-and-a-half, humans but not apes know that they can act in the world and that others can do so too. They can make and recognize communicative gestures. They can empathize with oth- ers, recognize others’ plans, and help them.

Although bees work together to make honeycombs, and wolves hunt in packs, only we humans are able to make new arrangements and carry them out, so that together people accomplish things that they cannot do alone. Tomasello puts it like this:

Although humans’ great ape ancestors were social beings, they lived mostly individual- istic and competitive lives, and so their thinking was geared toward achieving individual goals. But early humans were at some point forced by ecological circumstances into more cooperative lifeways, and so their thinking became more directed toward figuring out ways to coordinate with others to achieve joint goals or even collective group goals. And this changed everything (2014, pp. 4–5).

The stage of working for joint goals may have been reached during foraging, when humans started to help each other gather food, then prepare it, and eat it together. Chimpanzees do none of these things. They do travel in groups, and when they find a tree with fruit on it, they take enough

Evolution of Emotions52

for themselves, go off to one side, to eat it on their own. They also hunt small animals such as monkeys or piglets. When they catch one, there is often a squabble.

By contrast to these individual goals, humans started to develop joint goals, perhaps includ- ing this: “You hold this animal-skin bag, and I’ll pick up these roots and put them into it. Then we’ll take them back to our camp where we can cook them and everyone can have some.” Food sharing is a human universal. The cooperation and the friendly emotions that were involved emerged probably some thousands of years before language. One may imagine how language complemented them and supplemented them.

Then, sometime following the development of joint goals, we humans developed a second phase of cooperation, with what Tomasello calls “collective group goals,” which included cus- toms of belief and action that applied to whole social groups, customs we call morality and cul- ture, which we discuss in the next chapter.

In this book we will return to these collaborative principles over and over again. The implica- tion for emotions is that not only are most human emotions social, they are also most frequently about cooperation, in emotions of attachment, love, friendship, warmth, caring, empathy. In this family of emotions, too, we see not only emotions of failure to cooperate in shame and guilt, but also the inverse, emotions of competition when self-concern is more important, or when coopera- tion has failed, in anger and contempt.

In the process of our hominid evolution, emotions emerged to help us solve the problems and opportunities related to four social relationships that proved vital: attachments, hierarchies, affiliations or friendships, and in-group–out-group dynamics (e.g., Fiske, 1991; Keltner & Haidt, 1999). Emotions are catalysts of attachment with our offspring, falling in love, seeking to rise above a rival, becoming friends, and celebrating what is best about our social group. Emotions arise when these ties are threatened—when a parent seems too far away, when a rival threatens our romantic partnership or a friend leaves, or another group seeks to dominate our own.

Emotions That Promote Attachment Much as infants are nourished physiologically through the mother’s milk, they grow in strength psychologically through attachment processes between caregivers and offspring. The most systematic theoretical treatment of these ideas was offered by John Bowlby (1951, 1969). Bowlby suggested that human attachment processes function like imprinting of the kind Konrad Lorenz (1937) observed when, after hatching from their eggs, goslings learn to recognize and follow the first largish, moving, sound-making, object in their environment. Usually this is the mother goose, but if no real mother appears, characteristics of the first plausible moving object are learned instead, including, on occasion, Lorenz himself. (You may have seen pictures of Lorenz walking across a field followed by a gaggle of goslings who thought he was their mother.)

Attachment can be thought of as a form of imprinting. Its function is to protect and care for the vulnerable infant to thrive, in particular during early childhood, the most vulnerable period of life, by keeping the mother and other caregivers nearby. The mother, in Bowlby’s framework, is a secure base, a dynamic that continues into adolescence and beyond (Allen et  al., 2003). For Bowlby, emotions were central to the formation of attachments between children and their caregivers, most typically the mother (Shaver & Mikuliner, 2001). The love between mother and child forms the core of the attachment bonds and allows the develop- ing child to explore the environment with interest and wonder. Should the mother or other caregivers be too far away, feelings of distress and anxiety, both on the part of the child and caregiver, bring the two closer. When Mary Ainsworth (1967) carried out early naturalis- tic studies of babies and mothers in Uganda in the ethological tradition you learned of last chapter, she discerned a set of behavior patterns, many rich in emotion, that young children

Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships 53

showed when they were with their mothers, but did not show with anyone else. Her list of attachment behaviors is in Table 2.2.

When an infant’s mother is present, there is a sense of security. When the mother is absent, the sense is entirely different. Comparable attachment patterns can be seen in different societies, functioning to keep the child close to the mother, away from threats of different kinds (Bowlby, 1971).

Bowlby wrote of two other critical systems necessary for the attachment processes required to reproduce and raise vulnerable offspring to the age of viability. Our reproductive system enabled by the passions of sex, of desire and lust, moves people to sexual behavior (Diamond, 2003; Gonzaga, Keltner, Londahl, & Smith, 2001). For humans, though, sexual passion is just the beginning of the story of reproduction. Given the vulnerability of our offspring, long- lasting sexual relationships between specific human females and specific human males began: pair-bonding (Lovejoy, 1981), which is rare among other primates. Human sexual partners must often cooperate to raise children; collaborations are animated by love and desire (Djikic & Oatley, 2004).

Bowlby thought that love (by which he meant attachment) in the early years was as important for emotional development as proper nutrition is for physical development. Among his ideas was that the attachment relationship of infancy creates a template for all later intimate relationships, and he coined the term affectional bonds. Here’s what he said:

Affectional bonds and subjective states of strong emotion tend to go together, as every novelist and playwright knows. Thus, many of the most intense of all human emotions arise during the formation, the maintenance, the disruption, and the renewal of affec- tional bonds – which, for that reason, are sometimes called emotional bonds. In terms of subjective experience, the formation of a bond is described as falling in love, maintain- ing a bond as loving someone, and losing a partner as grieving over someone.

(Bowlby, 1979, p. 69)

Table 2.2 Ainsworth’s (1967) list of attachment behaviors

1. Differential crying (i.e., with mother as compared with others)

2. Differential smiling

3. Differential vocalization

4. Crying when the mother leaves

5. Following the mother

6. Visual motor orientation toward the mother

7. Greeting through smiling, crowing, and general excitement

8. Lifting arms in greeting the mother

9. Clapping hands in greeting the mother

10. Scrambling over the mother

11. Burying the face in the mother’s lap

12. Approach to the mother through locomotion

13. Embracing, hugging, kissing the mother (not seen in Ugandan infants but observed frequently by infants in Western societies)

14. Exploration away from the mother as a secure base

15. Flight to the mother as a haven of safety

16. Clinging to the mother

Evolution of Emotions54

Try this little experiment on yourself. Think about the 16 attachment-related behaviors listed by Mary Ainsworth in Table 2.2. Now imagine that instead of being patterns of infants with their mothers, these are descriptions of an interaction between two adult lovers. Do the patterns fit? Do lovers show differential smiling and vocalization with each other, do they follow each other, gaze at each other, do they show distress at separation? If so, might this support Bowlby’s hypothesis that adult love is formed on a template of the infant attachment relationship? Intimations of the idea were put forward by Darwin (1872), who supposed that the infant pattern of holding and being held is elaborated in adult caressing. Adult romantic love and sexuality, according to this idea, is an elaboration upon universal, evolved, behavioral patterns of earlier life.

There’ll be more discussion of human sexuality and love in Chapters 3 and 9.

Emotions and Negotiation of Social Hierarchy Human hierarchies, where some individuals enjoy elevated rank over others, emerge in almost every group imaginable, from two-year-olds in day care to strangers waiting for a bus, in which the first arrival will get on the bus first. Hierarchies can be based on many qualities, as we shall detail in Chapter 9, including power, status, authority, and social class (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). Much as you learned in the studies of chimpanzee power politics, in humans we negotiate social hierarchies through emotion.

One question of interest is how emotional displays and experiences give rise to the position you might enjoy in a hierarchy, for example in your living residence or at work (van Kleef, 2015). Do you gain power, or respect, with displays of anger or sympathy? How might the way in which you touch others or laugh signal your position in a hierarchy? Emotions like anger and pride are clear signals of elevated rank and power and enable people within hierarchies to negotiate their rank. Emotions like embarrassment and shame, we shall see, emerge from the submissive displays of our primate relatives and signal subordinate status. Still other emotions fuel behaviors that reduce status differences perceived to be unjust, emotions such as anger and envy.

Emotions, Affiliation, and Friendship In the human groups in which we evolved, the social fabric was shaped by attachment pat- terns and forms of hierarchy, but also by patterns of affiliation, which we might think of as friendship (Clark & Finkel, 2005; Fiske, 1992; Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins, 1999). We have already seen how affiliative ties, in particular between nonkin, were critical to allopar- enting—the sharing of rearing offspring. The capacity for humans to form friendships, so important in our social lives when compared to those of our primate relatives, proved to be a vital force that reshaped the nature of our hierarchies: in the small groups of hunter-gatherer societies, dense patterns of friendships countered the exercise of coercive power and led to the transformation of the vertical hierarchies in chimps to the more horizontal relationships of hunter-gatherers.

Affiliative relationships are defined by a variety of emotional processes: warmth, empathic understanding, shared laughter, expressions of appreciation and gratitude, emotional disclosures, and a sense of caring and commitment (Clark & Finkel, 2005; Kurtz & Algoe, 2015). They are critical to our health and well-being (Leary & Baumeister, 1995), so much so, that studies sug- gest that when you move from one context to another (say from high school to college, or—we hope not—life in society to life in prison), you will re-create old patterns of friendships with new individuals. We will have a lot more to say about the emotions of affiliation and friendship. For now, we’ll leave this topic with the words of the American poet Walt Whitman: “I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.”

Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships 55

Collective Emotion and Preference for In-Groups In her book, Dancing in the Streets, writer Barbara Ehrenreich details the cultural history of how important collective joy and the exuberance and rapturous delight we feel in group-based celebra- tions is to our sense of who we are (Ehrenreich, 2006). We find this emotion in dance, a human universal, in festivals, in song, in patterns of collective movement of our bodies, from marches at rallies, to waves and celebrations at sporting events to patterns of crossing ourselves in a Catholic service. Frans de Waal has observed that chimpanzees will show celebration responses when given an unexpected bunch of bananas—they embrace, groom, fall into a pile of affection—and then may share the resource (de Waal, 2006). This basic tendency to experience collective joy is deeply elaborated in humans in so many rituals where we share joy together, from the religious rituals observed in all cultures, birth and death rituals, and celebratory rituals such as Burning Man.

In Table 2.3, we outline some of the emotions that you might think of as collective emo- tions that fold us into social groups and give us a strong sense of our collective identity. Some

Table 2.3 Relations, recurring situations, and emotions

Relation Recurring situation Emotion

Attachment Maintain contact with caregivers Love

Protect vulnerable offspring Parental love, sympathy

Separation from caregiver Distress, sadness

Reproductive possibility Sexual desire

Long-term commitment, collaboration with reproductive partner

Romantic love

Threat of interloper Jealousy

Separation from romantic partner Distress, anxiety

Reunion Relief

Parting, death Sadness

Hierarchy Signal elevated rank vis-à-vis others Pride

Prevail in competition over others Triumph

Unfair rise in other’s status Anger, envy

Signal lower rank Shame, humiliation, embarrassment

Affiliation Cooperation, caring Affection, love

Parting, death Sadness

Receive generosity Gratitude

Harm other Guilt, forgiveness

In-group preference Collective, celebratory action Ecstasy, joy

Ritual that folds self into collective Awe

Group prevails over other group Collective pride

View group as superior to other group Contempt, hatred

Nonsocial goals Progress toward meeting goals Enthusiasm

Failure toward meeting goals Frustration, sadness

Seeking, finding Interest

Novelty Surprise

Threat to survival Fear

Toxicity Disgust

Evolution of Emotions56

strengthen our sense of our connection to social collectives. Experiences of awe, ecstasy, and collective joy, for example, at a political rally or music festival, exhilarate in how they give us the sense that we are part of something much larger than the self—a political movement, a new form of culture. When our group triumphs, on the football field or in Olympic competition or at war, we may feel triumph or collective pride. Underlying these emotions is the robust human ten- dency to define ourselves in terms of the groups to which we belong, and the related tendency of in-group favoritism, to favor our own group over others (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Even when our group is based on something meaningless, such as random assignment or whether we under- or overestimate the number of dots projected onto a screen, our sense of group identity drives many social processes that favor the in-group over other groups: we think of our group as more moral, civilized, human, and reasonable, and when given the chance, will allocate resources preferen- tially to our group over others.

This strong tendency in humans to fold into social collectives, and favor our own group over others, gives rise to the more disturbing emotional tendencies that fuel group conflicts, wars, and genocides. In times of conflict, social disgust at the out-group leads to the dehumanization of those we seek to vanquish. War-time propaganda so often treats opponents as rats, insects, vermin—objects of disgust. Rage and hatred can fuel violence and aggression. In more sub- tle ways, expressions of contempt toward the out-group, for example in stances of superiority toward other groups in terms of their manners, their food, their music, or religion, can be seen as a way of lifting up the in-group over the out-group. Moral philosophers warn us of these collective emotions. The ancient Stoics thought that the most dangerous emotion, the one most important to subdue, was anger, in particular rage. In his book Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene (2013) warns us that although we have evolved tendencies to care, to cooperate, and form strong ties, our tendency toward tribalism, to feel we are superior to other groups, poses the greatest threat to peace today. It’s an evolutionarily bequeathed tendency to genocidal aggression and uncaring contempt for others whom we see as different from ourselves, even though we are fundamentally the same.

Within the science of emotion, the thesis that emotions function to help humans form and maintain important social bonds has had many advocates (Bowlby, 1971; Ekman, 1992; Frank, 1988; Izard, 1971, 1977; Keltner & Haidt, 1999, 2001; Nesse, 1990; Oatley, 1992, 2004, 2018; Plutchik, 1991; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990; Trivers, 1971; van Kleef & Fischer, 2016). In Table 2.3, we summarize the various statements offered by these scientists about what emotions do in social relationships. In our analysis, we additionally build on Randoph Nesse’s idea (1990) that to understand the evolution of emotions we should concentrate not on particular emotions but on recurring situations. If we do so we find that although some emotions, like fear of a predator, may be distinctive, many emotions tend to overlap in particular situations.

Emotion provides the structure of human social life: outline patterns that enable people to relate to each other. In Table 2.3, you can see that emotions of attachment and affiliation help form and maintain cooperative bonds, the emotions of assertion (power) enable us to relate in the hierarchies of our lives, and the antisocially motivated emotions of hatred and cruelty are aspects of relations between groups. In addition, of course, there are emotions that need have no immedi- ate social component.

In the evolutionary approach to emotion, critical evidence concerns whether our emotions serve social or individual functions, the extent to which they are universal and have biological bases, and the extent to which they are culturally distinctive.

So far we have described some evolutionary bases of social life, but of course individual behav- ior and selfish behavior occur, too. Primatologists have indeed found that chimpanzees spend a good deal of the time acting selfishly, for instance, in disputes often violent over status, resources, and mates. Among the most interesting aspects of selfish behavior are acts of deception, which

To Think About and Discuss 57

involve understanding others, which we discuss in Chapter 8. Call and Tomasello (2008) con- cluded that chimpanzees don’t really understand their fellow chimpanzees as having beliefs, wants, and feelings, but they do understand that others have certain perceptions and goals, and this enables them to deceive others.

Do chimpanzees really have emotions? Or could it be that real emotions are entirely human? The argument might be that, because we can’t ask the animals, we will never know. But this is not the view of most biologists, starting with Darwin, who observed clear continuities between human emotions and those of other animals.

In an interview, de Waal (2011) said:

Animals probably have many of the same emotions that we have. This is assumed in many brain studies, in which rats or monkeys show expressions of fear of anger when parts of the brain are stimulated that also in humans are active when we feel fear or anger. So, neuroscientists generally have no trouble assuming similar emotions in humans and other mammals even though in the eyes of so-called behaviorists this is still very much taboo . . . If a baboon female returns a week after the disappearance of her offspring to the spot where it happened to climb high up into a tree and scan the environ- ment while uttering plaintive contact calls, repeating her agitation and calling for weeks every time her troop passes through this specific area, it is hard for the human observer not to assume a sense of loss or grieving.

Panksepp (2005) argued that that our emotions derive from the neurodynamics of brain sys- tems that generate instinctual emotional behavior in other mammals. As we have proposed in Chapter 1, emotions are based on action tendencies, urges to act in this way or that, and Panksepp identifies a set of these that are sufficiently important for him to name with capital letters. They include: SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY, and we will consider them in depth in Chapter 7. These systems have been elaborated as mammals evolved and have reached their most elaborate versions in the lives of social primates such as chimpanzees and ourselves.

S U M M A R Y

Our genes use us as vehicles to enable them to reproduce. In this chapter, we’ve discussed how they program us, partly by means of our emotions, to keep ourselves safe and to enable sexual activity to occur. Some of this programming is mandatory. With some of it, we can choose among options, at least to some extent. The evolutionary success of the human species derives from cooperation, from living

in groups, in which emotions help humans form attachments, build affiliative ties or friendships, negotiate status within hierarchies, and integrate into strong groups. Among the evidence for the sociality of our emotions are studies of chimpanzees and bonobos, the prehis- tory of the human species, and studies of modern societies living as hunter-gatherers.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. What are your reactions to the idea that we don’t pass on our genes, but that genes use us as vehicles to pass themselves on?

2. Think of an emotion you have experienced that concerns another person you know, such as love, or anger, or jealousy, or envy. How has your reflection on this emotion affected how you think of yourself? How has it affected how you think of the person who was the object of this emotion?

3. How far do you think we humans will be able to modify the emotions of hostility to members of out-groups? You might start thinking about this from your knowledge of terrorism, of wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and of the civil rights movement.

Evolution of Emotions58

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

An application of evolutionary theory to the emotions of compassion and pride and to facial expression:

Goetz, J., Simon-Thomas, E., & Keltner, D. (2010). Compassion: An evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 351–374.

Tracy, J.L., Shariff, A.F., & Cheng, J.T. (2010). A naturalist’s view of pride. Emotion Review 2(2): 163–177.

Hess, U., & Thibault, P. (2009). Darwin and emotion expression. American Psychologist, 64, 120–128.

The social and emotional lives of chimpanzees and ourselves:

de Waal, F. (2005). Our inner ape: The best and worst of human nature. London: Granta.

For readable discussions of human evolution:

Christian, D. (2004). Maps of time: An introduction to big history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Dunbar, R. (2004). The human story: A new history of mankind’s evolu- tion. London: Faber.

Hrdy, S. B. (1999) Mother nature. Maternal instincts and how they shape the human species. New York: Ballantine Books

E X T R A R E F E R E N C E S

Bouzouggar, A., Barton, N., Vanhaeren, M., et al. (2007). 82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of mod- ern human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 104, 9964–9969.

Hoffmann, D. L., Standish, C. D., Garcia-Diez, M., Petttitt, P. B., et  al. (2018). U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neanderthal origin of Iberian cave art. Science, 359, 912–-915.

59

3Cultural Understandings of Emotions

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or we find it not.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, xii, Art)

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FIGURE 3.0 A bronze figurine from the Han dynasty in China, made more than 2,000 years ago, probably representing a person from an foreign northern tribe.

CONTENTS An Island Society

Two Emotional Events Three Principles: Emotions as Interpersonal, Active, and Value-based

Cross-cultural Approaches to Emotion Identity Independent and Interdependent Selves Knowledge Structures Values

The Construction of Emotions in the West The Coming of Civilization to Medieval Societies Has Violence Declined Over Time? The Romantic Era

Sexual Love in the West Falling in Love: Emotion as a Role Women and Men: Different Cultures?

Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Cultural understandings of emotions60

An Island Society For nine months Catherine Lutz (1988) went to stay on a Pacific atoll called Ifaluk, the area of which is just over half a square mile. She went to study the emotions of the 430 people who lived there because, as she said, she wanted to see “if and how it was possible for people to organ- ize their lives in such a way as to avoid the problems that seemed to me to diminish American culture, in particular its pervasive inequality of both gender and class and its violence” (p. 17). People rely on each other, on this island, the highest point of which is just a few yards above sea level. It’s a place where typhoons sometimes sweep the huts away, destroy the taro gardens, and deplete the surrounding lagoon of fish.

Two Emotional Events One day, sitting with another woman, Lutz watched a five-year-old girl dancing and making silly faces, showing happiness, ker as it is known in the island’s language. Lutz responded warmly to the little girl, whom she thought was rather cute. “Don’t smile at her,” said her companion, “she’ll think that you’re not song,” meaning justifiably angry (p. 167). The woman was telling Lutz that the girl was approaching the age at which she should have social intelligence, concern for others that is valued on Ifaluk, and that she should not show inappropriate levels of happiness, disap- proved of on Ifaluk as showing off.

In this exchange, we can see how different are the emotional lives of people on Ifaluk from those of the industrial West. On Ifaluk, the little girl should not have displayed ker, with its risk of misbehavior. She should have been sitting quietly, as good socially intelligent people do. One also sees differences in the nature of anger. On Ifaluk, song, or justifiable anger, occurs with a public breach of social values. So song is not anger as people in the West tend to experience it, when it arises from another person’s hurtful action as it affects oneself. It is people’s social duty to express song if they notice anything that might disrupt social harmony. The proper response to song is metagu, which means anxious concern for others.

Differences between her own and Ifalukian culture caused Lutz to make other social mistakes. One night she was awakened by a man entering the small doorless hut that she had negotiated for herself. Her scream awakened the woman and girls of her adoptive family, who came to see what was wrong. They were asleep a few yards away in their communal hut, with each one’s sleeping mat touching others so that no one would be lonely. The man had fled, and the family laughed hilariously when they heard Lutz had been alarmed by the event. She said that she had been on the island long enough to know that men sometimes called on women at night for a sexual rendezvous. But she had imported the American idea that an uninvited visit from a man inevitably meant harm. On Ifaluk, Lutz says, although men may very occasionally seem frighten- ing in public if drunk, so that others may fear that a disagreement might break out between them, interpersonal violence is virtually nonexistent, and rape unknown. Hence, a night visitor means the very antithesis of fear.

The incident became a topic of conversation. Although people found it difficult to know why Lutz had been frightened, she sensed that her adoptive mother showed some satisfaction in the story of the event because, although the anxiety that Lutz displayed was inappropriate, it was anxiety: her adoptive mother thought this meant that at last Lutz was capable of showing this valued emotion!

The account that Lutz wrote about Ifaluk is a piece of ethnography: writing that offers a por- trait of a society, from the perspective of an anthropologist, to emphasize its distinctiveness. Clif- ford Geertz (1973) calls this kind of account a “thick description.” Because in its literary depth, it invites us to imagine being there, almost able to take part. In the case of emotions, such accounts don’t just say what emotions occur; they offer insights into their settings and cultural meanings.

An Island Society 61

Ethnographies often focus on discourse, the processes by which people use language in its many forms to make sense of emotional experience. So, ethnographers often study communications such as apologies, gossip, songs, poetry, and community meetings about disruptive people (see for example, Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990; Lutz & White, 1986).

Three Principles: Emotions as Interpersonal, Active, and Value-based A society is a group of people who live in a particular place at a particular time. Culture is a system of ideas and practices that are held in common in a society.

From the glimpse of the society of Ifaluk offered by Catherine Lutz, we can see not just dif- ferences from the practices of our own society but cultural principles of a kind on which we may reflect worldwide. Here are three principles, which we explore further in this chapter.

Rather better than people in the West, the people of Ifaluk recognize that most emotions are relational. Although some emotions, such as fear of the dark or enjoyment of a certain food, relate to circumstances that are physical, most human emotions, throughout the world, are

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FIGURE 3.1 An Ifaluk woman smiles as she makes an impromptu head-dress for her small son. This kind of socially responsive smiling is of a lower intensity and signals something different from ker, meaning “excited happiness” (from Lutz, 1988, p. 49).

Cultural understandings of emotions62

interpersonal. Lutz’s depiction, above, of a five-year-old Ifalukian girl showing off her happiness and of a young American woman, Lutz greeting the behavior with a smile are both interpersonal. For more than a century, psychology has tended to focus on the individual, and for a long time the psychology of emotions reflected this tendency. But the current trend, one we follow in this book, is to see the interpersonal aspects of emotions as primary (van Kleef, 2016).

In the West we tend to see emotions as happening to us: she fell in love, he felt a surge of anger, he was consumed by jealousy (e.g., Ekman, 1992). In these ways, people seem passive in relation to experience. In other cultures, people tend to think of emotions as active. A telling example was discussed by Anna Pavlenko (2005), whose first language was Russian. When she went to live in America, she discovered that in English “I am angry” is not only expressed verbally as an adjective and as something that happens to a person, it is also associated with blame of the other. She missed the Russian form, which is expressed as a verb, and is more active, something like “I contend,” with an expectation that the problem will be resolved. As Mesquita, De Leersnyder, and Boiger (2016) put it, emotions can be thought of as actions that we do. On Ifaluk, when a man came into her hut at night, although Catherine Lutz is American, she did “fear.” Might it be better to think more generally of emotions as active in this kind of way?

Emotions are means by which we take part in society, in ways that reflect its values (Mesquita et al., 2016; Tsai, 2017). Remember how, in the previous chapter, on evolution, we discussed how a human characteristic is to be able to cooperate in shared moralities of a social group. So on Ifa- luk, Lutz was told about how the little girl who had been showing off needed to behave as a person should in that society: be gentle, calm, and quiet. Following the incident of the man in the night- time, Lutz’s adoptive mother talked with others about the emotion-based incident in her adoptive daughter’s hut and about Lutz’s anxiety. She talked about it in a way that she and others could try to make sense of it. In all cultures, it seems emotions have a relation to the values of society.

When we talk in conversation about the emotions of ourselves and others, it has been found by Bernard Rimé (e.g., 2009) that we tend to compare our emotions with those of others and in relation to values that are shared in the particular society. One implication is that the cultural variations in which values are prominent should in turn predict cultural variations in patterns of emotional experience (e.g., Boiger, Mesquita, Uchida, & Barrett, 2013).

In the following sections, we explore different traditions in the cultural understanding of emo- tion. In this effort, we see that in coming to understand other societies we learn not only about how people from other cultures differ from us, but also we gain critical insights into our emo- tional lives. By making comparisons, we can reflect on the deeper issues.

Cross-cultural Approaches to Emotion Identity Two principal methods of understanding effects of culture on emotions are the writings of psy- chological anthropologists such as Catherine Lutz, as well as Lila Abu-Lughod (1986) who lived among the Bedouin and studied the oral poetry in which young people expressed their feelings, and Lorna Marshall (1976) who went to live in the Kalahari desert with the San, nomads who lived in a way that may have been that of all our ancestors, as we discussed in the previous chap- ter. A more recent approach, in multicultural societies, and in the global economy, is to compare how people with different cultural backgrounds experience their emotional lives (Mesquita et al., 2016). Each person’s cultural background has many elements: ethnicity, a country of origin, a geographical region, a social class, perhaps a religion. Such forms of culture affect our emotions, sometimes even create them. Throughout this book we shall see examples of how these forms of culture shape emotion.

Cross-cultural Approaches to Emotion 63

Our concepts and ideas about our identity are part of a cultural background, as expressed in art, in rituals, in social practices, and in institutions. They shape how members of societies expe- rience and express emotion in often strikingly different ways.

What does it mean to take a cultural approach to emotion? We explore how far emotions are constructed by the processes of culture. The experience of most emotions derives from human meanings, which are cultural. They are like languages or works of art. They are radically different across cultures. Your experience of love, for example, might be very different from the experi- ence of love of people from a different society.

Mesquita (2001) suggests that cultural approaches focus on the “practice” of emotion, in contrast to the “potential” for emotion. Potential means asking whether people of different cul- tures, if put in an appropriate situation, would be capable of showing certain universal emotional responses in terms of experience, expression, and physiology (for relevant studies, see Sznycer et al., 2016; Tsai, Chentsova-Dutton, Friere-Bebeau, & Przymus, 2002; Tsai & Levenson, 1997; Tsai, Levenson, & Carstensen, 2000). The answer is probably Yes, and this is in keeping with the evolutionary approach we detailed in the previous chapter. In contrast, practice refers to how people enact their emotions.

The day-to-day emotional experiences of people from different cultures can differ dramati- cally. In some societies, public expressions of anger are encouraged. These include Ilongot, a hunting society chronicled by Rosaldo (1980), and the Yanomamö, in which men in each village are constantly at war with men in neighboring villages of the same society (Chagnon, 1968). In others such as the Inuit people, described by Briggs (1970), anger seems barely to occur in adult- hood (see also Chapter 9). In some cultures, such as Western ones, shame is seen as damaging and to be avoided (Scheff & Retzinger, 2001); in more hierarchically structured societies shame seems more valued, in particular when displayed by the lower-status person in an interaction (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Doi, 1973; Menon & Shweder, 1994). In some cultures, excitement is privi- leged as a pathway to happiness; in other cultures it is calmness and serenity (Tsai, 2017).

As Mesquita, Frijda, and Scherer (1997) observed: “People from different cultures appear to be similar in their emotion potential, especially when this potential is described at a higher level of meaning. Yet, despite the similarities in basic elements of emotional life, concrete emotional realities in different cultures may widely vary.”

Independent and Interdependent Selves Consider the following quotations. The first is from the Declaration of Independence of the United States:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Now consider this, from The Analects, a book by the Chinese philosopher Confucius:

A person of humanity wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the char- acter of others.

The Declaration of Independence prioritized the rights and freedoms of the individual. It aimed to protect the individual from having those rights and liberties infringed upon by others. Confucius emphasized the importance of knowing one’s place in society, of honoring traditions and roles, and of thinking of others before the self. In Western societies, people are concerned about their individuality, about self-actualization, about freedom, and about self-expression.

Cultural understandings of emotions64

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” In Asian cultures, homilies and folk wisdom encourage a markedly different self: “The empty wagon makes the most noise.” “The nail that stands up is pounded down.”

In a way of thinking that has become influential Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama (1994), Harry Triandis (1995), and others have characterized two kinds of self-construal that affect emo- tions, the independent and interdependent; see Table 3.1.

Those with independent selves tend to assert their distinctiveness and to define themselves according to unique traits and preferences, with a focus on internal causes that are thought of as stable across time and social context.

People with interdependent construals tend to think of themselves as connected with other people. They take on and perform their roles within communities in which they take part. The emphasis is on the social context and situational influences. Such people tend to think of them- selves as ever-changing and shifting, shaped by different contexts and relationships.

Guided by this perspective, studies have found that cultural differences in self-construal influ- ence every element in the process of emotion that we detailed in Chapter 1, from the events that give rise to emotions to how people regulate their emotions (Mesquita et al., 2016). For example, Michael Boiger and colleagues asked Japanese and US participants to rate anger-inducing and shame-inducing situations in terms of how likely they were to experience them (Boiger et al., 2013). In keeping with a self-construal as independent and separate from others, US students rated anger-eliciting situations as more common in their daily lives; in keeping with an interde- pendent self-construal founded upon social harmony, duty, and adhering to others’ judgments, Japanese students rated the shame-eliciting situations as more likely. Culture shapes the emotion-eliciting events the person is likely to encounter.

Given the different ways of construing the self, one would expect differences in emotion- related appraisal, and in emotion-related responses and regulation. We will see evidence of this in ensuing chapters, but consider this finding on emotional experience. Kitayama, Mesquita, and Karasawa (2006) asked American and Japanese college students to report in a diary, over 14 days, their most intense emotional episode each day, and to say what emotions they felt during that episode. The independent-minded American students reported more intense experiences of posi- tive socially disengaging emotions (pride, high self-esteem) and negative socially disengaging emotions (anger, frustration). The interdependent Japanese students reported more intense expe- riences of positive socially engaging emotions (e.g., respect, sympathy) and negative socially engaging emotions (shame and guilt, which recognize others’ evaluations of the self and motivate behaviors that restore social relationships).

Cultural differences in self-construal also influence how people find happiness. Look again at Table 3.1 and generate your own hypotheses. Mark Suh and his colleagues found that people from independent cultures experienced greater happiness in their positive emotions, whereas

Table 3.1 Two different self-construals. This table outlines contrasting elements of the independent self, prominent in Northern Europe and North America, with the interdependent self, prominent in Asia, Africa, and South America

The independent self The interdependent self

I am autonomous, separate I am connected to others

I am the principal agent in my own life I fulfill roles and duties

My behavior derives from internal causes My behavior derives from society

Who I am is stable across contexts Who I am varies across contexts

Cross-cultural Approaches to Emotion 65

those from interdependent cultures find greater happiness in fulfilling duties and abiding by cul- tural norms (Suh, Diener, Oishi, & Triandis, 1998).

Yukiko Uchida et al. (2008) found that perceived emotional support in independent cultures of Americans of European descent had no effect on participants’ subjective sense of positive emo- tional states, whereas in interdependent cultures of Japan and the Philippines, emotional support of others positively predicted subjective positive emotional states, even when self-esteem was controlled for. More recently, Belinda Campos and Heejung Kim have made the case for different kinds of collectivism found in Latino and East Asian cultures and how these more specific kinds of self-construal influence emotion and social support (Campos & Kim, 2017).

You may have noticed a certain irony as you have read this. People in independent cultures, who think they are autonomous agents, are also those who tend to feel that their emotions just happen to them. By contrast, those who live in interdependent cultures are more likely to think their emotions are actions that they do.

Knowledge Structures How does what we know guide thought, emotion, and behavior? Kaiping Peng and Richard Nis- bett (1999) have characterized ways of knowing of East Asians and Western Europeans (see also Peng, Ames, & Knowles, 2001). East Asians are guided by a holistic, dialectical way of thought that has its roots in the intellectual traditions such as Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, from 2,500 years ago. This way is based on five principles: (1) change, so that nothing is static; (2) contradiction, that opposites often are consistent and both true; (3) covariation, so that events are interrelated in complex fields or systems; (4) compromise, so that truth may lie in the synthesis of opposites; and (5) context, so that events occur not alone but in contexts.

In light of principle 2, contradiction, one would expect that as compared with Americans, East Asians might experience greater emotional complexity: the simultaneous experience of contra- dictory emotions, such as happiness and sadness, compassion and contempt, or anger and love (Grossman & Ellsworth, 2017; see also Sundararajan, 2010). Perhaps East Asians would be more willing to endorse multiple, even contradictory, meanings for complex social situations and, as a result, experience contradictory emotions. By contrast, Westerners might focus more on singular meanings of a situation and experience simpler emotions.

Individual Emotion: Amae

In Japan there is an emotion amae, for which there is no simple translation in English (Ferrari & Koyama, 2002). It’s an attachment emotion, an emotion of interdependence, experienced as a merged togetherness, deriving from com- fort in the other person’s complete acceptance.

It is not that this emotion is unrecognizable in other cul- tures or that it lacks universal significance. Rather, it has no fully approved place in Western adult life. The original Chi- nese ideogram of amae was of a breast on which the baby suckled. As Westerners imagine this emotion, they may think they should have grown out of it because it seems a

bit regressed. In Japan this is not so. This can be an emotion of an accepting relationship within the family, or a mutual dependency between lovers. Lebra (1983) has said that it can be the dependence a less-powerful person feels in rela- tion to a more-powerful one, which allows the less-powerful person to be passive, with the satisfying knowledge of being accepted. In relation to attachment, which we discussed in the previous chapter, Marshall (2012) found that within Japanese couples, people who were anxiously attached improved their relationship quality with amae behavior, whereas those who were avoidantly attached did not.

Cultural understandings of emotions66

Recent findings are in keeping with this prediction and speak to how culture-related episte- mologies shape the complexity of emotional experience (Miyamoto, Uchida, & Ellsworth, 2010). Thus, in experience sampling studies, in which students were beeped electronically and asked to report on their current emotions, as well as in laboratory studies, Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean participants were more likely than Western European students to report feeling positive and negative emotion in any particular moment (Schimmack, Oishi, & Diener, 2002; see Kitay- ama, Markus, & Kurokawa, 2000, for similar results using a different methodology). Among Western Europeans, the more they reported of one kind of emotion, say happiness, the less they reported of its opposite, say sadness.

Now consider principle 5, context. People in East Asian cultures tend to pay greater attention to the context in giving meaning to social situations, whereas people in Western European cul- tures tend to focus more on the individual (Morris & Peng, 1994). One relevant analysis found that, several hundred paintings from East Asian galleries devote greater space to the background than paintings from Western European galleries, which devote greater space to people’s faces (Masuda et al., 2008a).

In related research Takahiko Masuda and colleagues showed Japanese and American partici- pants cartoon figures having various expressions on their faces (Masuda et al., 2008b). The cen- tral, target face was always surrounded by smaller, less-salient faces, with expressions that were similar or dissimilar to those of the target; see Figure 3.2. For example, the target might appear to be happy, whereas most of the surrounding faces might appear to be sad. The Japanese judg- ments about the facial expression of the target were influenced by the surrounding faces, whereas the judgments of the Americans were not. A happy face surrounded by sad faces was judged less happy by Japanese participants than by American participants, and a sad face surrounded by happy faces was judged less sad.

An important new movement in understanding how emotions are perceived and understood has been shaped by these cultural insights and seeks to understand how contextual factors shape the interpretation of others’ emotions and one’s own emotional experience, a theme we shall take up in subsequent chapters on expression and experience (Barrett, Mesquita, & Gendron, 2011; Hess & Hareli, 2017). How any emotion is expressed, how it is understood, and what its implica- tions are depend critically on the context, and this context differs depending on a range of factors

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FIGURE 3.2 Image used in research by Masuda and colleagues (2008b), in which the central figure is smiling and surrounding individuals are frowning.

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that include the gender of the people involved, their power relationships, and most fundamentally the practices of the culture in which it occurs. The context of a joke made by a British person will enable it to be understood as a token of affection by another British person, but it may be met with incomprehension by an American and be seen as rude by a person who is Japanese.

Values Members of cultures that differ in the importance of specific values experience different elicitors of emotions related to that value. Consider the finding that elicitors of jealousy that seem obvious in one culture seem not to work in another. In the West, jealousy tends to occur when the sexual attention of a primary partner turns toward someone else (Buss, Larsen, Westen, & Semmelroth, 1992; DeSteno & Salovey, 1996; Harris, 2003; Harris & Christenfeld, 1996; Salovey, 1991). As Hupka (1991) points out, in Western society, monogamy, which leads to the two-parent family, is a cherished value and a key to establishing one’s adult status, eco- nomic security, housing, rearing of children, adult companionship, and sex. A sexual interloper threatens this value and the accompanying social structure, so, in Western society such a person is jealously feared and hated.

In some other societies, the self is more interdependent, collective, and extended. Cooperative effort supports everyone, including the elderly. Child-rearing is distributed among several people; adult companionship derives from many relatives; monogamy is not so highly cherished. In some such societies, extramarital recreational sex is customary. At the beginning of this century, the Todas of India lived in a society of this kind (Hupka, 1991). They were not jealous when mar- riage partners had lovers from within their social group. Instead, Toda men did become jealous if their wives had intercourse with a non-Toda man, or if a second-born son got married before the firstborn—an unlikely elicitor of jealousy in the West.

Cultural differences in specific values influence spontaneous emotional response. Consider the work of Iris Mauss and her colleagues (2010) on emotional control in different cultures. They found that when a rude instructor commented upon mistakes made by European American and Asian American college students as they were doing a stressful task, although the physiological responses of the two groups were similar, the European American students expressed more vis- ible anger; see Figure 3.3. The likely explanation is that spontaneous emotional expression is more valued in Western European cultures because it is a means by which individuals express

FIGURE 3.3 European Americans experience and express greater anger in response to a frustrating experimenter (adapted from Mauss, Butler, Roberts, & Chu, 2010).

Cultural understandings of emotions68

their authentic selves. By contrast, the Asian American students were more likely to inhibit their expression of anger because expression of such an emotion risks disrupting social harmony.

Jeanne Tsai (2007) put forward affect evaluation theory, in which she proposed that emo- tions that promote cultural values are valued more and therefore play a more prominent role in people’s social lives. In the United States, excitement is valued; it enables individuals to pursue a cultural ideal of self-expression and achievement. In contrast, in many East Asian cultures greater value is attached to feelings of calmness and contentedness, because these emotions enable peo- ple to fold into harmonious relationships and groups.

Sims and Tsai (2015) found that people who like to feel excitement were more likely to fol- low recommendations of a physician who expressed excitement, and those who liked to feel calm were more like to follow recommendations of a calm physician. Tsai et al. (2016) studied the smiles of political leaders. In America, where excitement is valued, government leaders showed excited smiles. In Taiwan, leaders showed calm smiles. In a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Park et al. (2016) found that when European Americans looked at photos of people’s faces, they showed more activation in reward systems of the brain for faces that expressed excitement, whereas Chinese participants showed more activation in these brain areas for faces that expressed calm.

In a related way, Americans, as compared to East Asians, are more likely to participate in risky recreational practices (e.g., mountain biking), are more likely to advertise consumer products with intense smiles of excitement, are more likely to get addicted to excitement-enhancing drugs (cocaine), and express preferences for upbeat, exciting music rather than soothing, slower pieces. Starting early with this kind of socialization, children’s books in America are more likely to fea- ture highly excited protagonists (Tsai, 2007). These differences are observed in influential texts as well: in the Christian Gospels and popular books today about Christianity, high-arousal, posi- tive emotions (“pride,” “glory”) are valued more, whereas in classical Buddhist texts and popu- lar books about Buddhism, low-arousal, positive emotions (“serenity,” “contentment”) are valued more (Tsai, Miao, & Seppala, 2007). Look, for instance, at the statue of the Buddha in Figure 3.4. Have a look, also, at Figure 3.5, where results are shown of research by Jeanne Tsai and colleagues on arousal and calmness in Western and Eastern recreational activities and religious texts.

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FIGURE 3.4 Calmness and serenity are at the heart of Buddhism, which has shaped the emotional lives of vast parts of East Asian cultures.

The Construction of Emotions in the West 69

What might these cultural patterns of emotional experience mean for well-being? To answer this question, Jozefien De Leersnyder and her colleagues propose that to the extent that an indi- vidual’s emotional profile fits with the culture’s pattern of emotion, that person will find greater happiness. The more our emotional experiences resemble those of other people in our culture in contexts of relevance to central values, the happier we will be. In empirical tests of this intriguing hypothesis, people from Belgium, the United States, and Korea were asked to rate their emotions in situations that relate to the value of autonomy—a US and Belgian value—versus relatedness, of greater import in Korea. What they observed is that Korean participants’ well-being was more strongly predicted by his or her fit with the culture’s pattern of emotion associated with relatedness in the family, whereas US and Belgian participants’ well-being was predicted by the degree his or her emotion profile fit the culture’s profile in more autonomy-related contexts, at work and school (De Leersnyder, Mesquita, Kim, Eom, & Choi, 2014; De Leersnyder, Kim, & Mesquita, 2015).

The Construction of Emotions in the West The Coming of Civilization to Medieval Societies “The past is another country, they do things differently there.” So wrote L.P. Hartley (1953) as the opening sentence of his novel, The Go-Between. How far do people do things differently now than in the past? This kind of question is answered by use of the historical method (see Oatley, 2004c; Plamper, 2015). A hundred years from now scientists who employ it might study record- ings of talk shows and soap operas, pop songs, cell-phone text messages, Facebook, video games, Internet chat rooms, and tweets, to glean insights into the emotional lives of twenty-first-century members of industrial societies. But what if we look back from today? What were the implicit theories of emotions of Europe in the past, in societies from which present-day European and American societies have developed?

FIGURE 3.5 European Americans reveal a greater preference for exciting recreational activities (left-hand panel adapted from Tsai, Louie et al., 2007). Christian texts place a greater value on high-arousal, positive emotions (HAP), whereas Buddhist texts place a greater value on low-arousal, calm, positive emotions (LAP) (right-hand panel adapted from Tsai, Miao, & Seppala, 2007).

Cultural understandings of emotions70

First, we see a certain distrust of emotions. If you want to disparage what someone is saying, just say that person is being “emotional,” meaning “irrational.” The idea goes back at least to Plato (375 bce), who thought emotions arise from the lower part of the mind and pervert reason. David Konstan (e.g., 2006) notes that people in Europe and America think of their societies, including the practice of democracy, as descended from the ancient Greeks. He portrays the emo- tions of those people, as discussed by Aristotle. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers took up Plato’s misgivings and used Aristotle’s idea of emotions as evalua- tions of events in relation to concerns and desires, to make distrust of emotions central not just to their analyses but to their lives. Doubts about the value of emotions continue today, but we in the West are not very consistent, because we also think emotions are the very guarantee of authentic- ity, our best guide to our true selves. As Robert Solomon, an influential voice in the philosophy of emotion, has put it: “Emotions are the life force of the soul, the source of most of our values” (1977, p. 14). Emotions signal how events in our environment correspond to our core concerns and interests, and we will come to this in Chapters 6 and 10.

Second, we see that emotional life has changed substantially during the last seven centuries or so. To look back at medieval times in Europe, there is no better place than Johann Huizinger’s (1949) The Waning of the Middle Ages. He starts his book by saying that the contrasts between suffering and joy were more marked in medieval times and that:

. . . it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage, and death which, by the sacred- ness of the sacrament, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities; benedic- tions, ceremonies, formulae. (p. 9)

Huizinger’s title for the first chapter of his book is “The violent tenor of life.” Not only did people think nothing of behaving with cruelty, but illness and death were more prevalent. Calam- ity was more difficult to guard against. So, says Huizinger, each event, in its capacity to bring about happiness, relief, or suffering, was more strongly marked and accompanied by emotion- based means to help things to go well. Now, although birth, marriage, and death are still marked by religious rituals and ceremonies, with modern technologies of health and industry and com- munication, life is less precarious. Now we are informal in our journeys, tasks, and visits.

Norbert Elias (1939) argues that in the middle ages, in Europe, men in particular had a ten- dency to be wild, sometimes lustful, sometimes caught up in cruel outbreaks, at other times taking pleasure in the moment. We can see something of the situation in former times from hand- books of manners (e.g., Erasmus, 1530). Such handbooks tell people to stop doing one kind of thing and start doing another. So, from them we can know how the writers saw people generally behaving at the time. In medieval times, men tended to behave on impulse, would pee on any wall that was nearby, might take pleasure in the taste of some food and then grab some more off a communal plate, would at one moment laugh and in the next be involved in a violent dispute. These men then, as the Stoic Chrysippus, whom we introduced in Chapter 1, would say, were taken up in the first movements of emotions.

Elias describes how in aristocratic courts a process of civilization began. In the presence of ladies of high birth, warriors and knights started on a path of renunciation, and the transforma- tion of their impulses. They started to see themselves as these ladies saw them and behaved more politely. Elias goes on to write:

The moderation of spontaneous emotions, the tempering of affects, the extension of mental space beyond the moment into the past and future, the habit of connecting events in terms of cause and effect—all these are different aspects of the same transformation of conduct  . . .  it is a “civilizing” change of behaviour. (Vol. II, p. 236)

The Construction of Emotions in the West 71

Elias saw this movement as starting with the upper classes, then moving to the middle classes, and then to everyone. His analysis was striking in its time, and it remains important. It may, however, be that the movements of which he speaks occurred not just by influences from the aristocracy to ordinary people, but also in the other direction, from ordinary people, upward, for instance, from religious groups that based themselves on community, and for this reason elabo- rated means of meeting together in homes, in synagogues, in churches, and in mosques, in ways that enabled their concerns to be shared. Although, for instance, since the Catholic Church’s Council of Trent, in the middle of the sixteenth century, decreed that confession is a sacrament to be performed privately with a priest, in earlier times it was often communal. Communal sharing of inner concerns occurs today in places such as Quaker meeting houses and in groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

Has Violence Declined Over Time? As Steven Pinker (2011) explains in The Better Angels of Our Nature, since medieval times epi- sodes of violence have declined. The rates of people killing each other, in individual homicides, in group killings, and in wars, have reduced.

Pinker discusses the work of Elias and draws on data collected by Manuel Eisner on individual killings in Europe over the centuries. Eisner begins an article of 2003 with a record from an Eyre Court (a judge’s circuit court), in London, in 1278. The document for that year records that one Symonet Spinelli and his mistress, Agnes, were with Geoffrey Bereman at his house. A quarrel broke out. Symonet went to fetch his servant, Richard; they returned to find Geoffrey and killed him. In these court records most such killings were unpremeditated. Often they occurred while drinking or were done by men because of women. In the records of this same London court in the same year, two such killings occurred from playing chess. In England, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the rate of homicide was 23 per year, per 100,000 members of the popula- tion. In 1950 the rate was 0.7, a 33-times reduction over 700 years. You can see a graph of some of these rates in Figure 3.6.

0 13th–14th Century

15th Century

16th Century

17th Century

18th Century

19th Century

20th Century

12.5

25

37.5 Europe

Homicides per 100,000 members of the population per year

England

50

FIGURE 3.6 Homicide rates in England and in Europe as a whole from Eisner (2003). (The data point for England in the fifteenth century is an interpolation; Eisner did not have enough data for an estimate for this century.)

Cultural understandings of emotions72

Similar rates of decline of individual homicides have occurred in other societies. For example, in America, in the area of New England, Pinker shows a decline of individual homicides between 1625 and 1800, which is comparable to that of Europe.

Pinker goes on to discuss communal violence: mass killings, insurrections, genocides, and wars. It has been said that war is politics by other means, but the military historian John Keegan (1994) is more insightful. He writes that war is a very emotional matter. It arises from quarrels between in-groups and out-groups, from greed, from retribution and revenge for wrongs, for reli- gious sentiments, for ideological pride, and for other such reasons. Perhaps these events occur, as we discussed in the previous chapter, because of the propensity of our human species to try and do away with those who are different from ourselves, members of out-groups, as our hominid ancestors did away with other hominid species, most recently, the Neanderthals.

As with individual homicides, things are changing. In a thought-provoking table of worldwide figures (p. 195), Pinker shows estimates of people killed in events of societal violence, such as war, in relation to the world population at the time. In proportional terms, the largest such kill- ing occurred in the An Lushan revolt, in which the Chinese Tang Dynasty was overthrown in the eighth century. The second largest occurred with the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century, and the third largest with Mid-East slave trade from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries. In raw numbers, World War II has been the most destructive war in history, with 55 million deaths but, adjusted for population, in Pinker’s table, it comes ninth for people killed in proportion to world population, after the annihilation of indigenous peoples of the Americas, which comes seventh, and the slave trade from Africa to the Americas, which comes eighth. Pinker points out, too, that wars fought for gain of territory or of slaves were numerous in ancient times. They still occurred in large numbers in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries with European colonization, but in recent decades the numbers of such conflicts have fallen. You might be interested, too, to reflect on how, in the news, such events are often reported as actions of individual leaders. Steven Pinker does this too. As he describes this event, he writes: “Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait” (p. 260). Do we see such events more easily as emotional when reported as actions of individuals?

Films and Novels: The Great Train Robbery, Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart

Violent contempt for others is one of humankind’s most destructive tendencies, one that may end our species. In the previous chapter, we depicted violence against others as an antisocial motivation. It is one that seems to fascinate us. The earliest film to use modern editing techniques was The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903). The opening scene is of a train dispatcher in an office. Less than 10 seconds after the film’s beginning, two armed robbers enter the office and force the dispatcher to send a message to stop a train. In the second scene, the robbers are seen hiding behind a water tower as the train stops. In the third scene, the mail mes- senger on the train is killed by the robbers. Men with guns.

Perhaps the most famous film about the Vietnam War is Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, about how Captain Willard, on his second tour in Vietnam, is sent on

a mission up a long river to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, an American Colonel who has been remarkable but has gone berserk. The film is based on Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, narrated by Charles Marlow who went by boat upriver in the Belgian Congo, and met a man called Kurtz, who was in charge of a trading station and had written a report for the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs,” described as eloquent about the white people’s benevolence (p. 110).

Apocalypse Now is memorable for its 15-minute-long sequence in which, accompanied by the music of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” we first see a group of school children in a Vietnamese village being hurried away as the sound of a fleet of American helicopters is heard. Then, the helicopter gun-ships are seen flying over the village, shooting rockets,

The Construction of Emotions in the West 73

The Romantic Era Until about 200 years ago, in the English-speaking West, the term “emotion” had not yet come into use. Terms that were used included “passion,” “affection,” “sentiment” (Dixon, 2012). Emo- tions and their implications came into prominence in Europe and America during the Romantic era. The term given to this era must be distinguished from the term “romantic,” when used a synonym for “sexual” as in “romantic love.”

In the Romantic era, emotions came to be valued in personal life, in politics, in literature, and in philosophy. The previous era, in Europe, is called “The enlightenment,” a time in which it was thought that reason was the means for humans to understand the universe and themselves.

An example of the early use of the term “emotion” comes from the preface, written by William Wordsworth, of a text, Lyrical ballads, (second edition), that is thought to mark the beginning of the Romantic era in Britain. Wordsworth wrote that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (p. 611).

On the continent of Europe, Romanticism was brought in much earlier by Jean-Jacques Rous- seau (1755). He published a document in which he argued that religious sensibility should not be based on authority, or on scripture, or on arguments for the existence of God, but on how you feel within yourself. He critiqued some ways in which authorities told us to behave as artificial and corrupting. He proposed instead that education should be natural and that people’s natural feel- ings indicate what is right; people have merely to be alive to the feelings of their conscience. His ringing phrase from the beginning of The Social Contract (1762) “Man is born free, and is every- where in chains” became a rallying call in the French Revolution, and such thoughts crossed the Atlantic to help promote the American War of Independence.

and strafing its inhabitants. The helicopters are followed by sleek-looking planes, which set the remains of the village and surrounding countryside on fire with napalm. Scenes switch among weapons, destruction, Vietnamese people fleeing and being killed, the attacking solders looking anx- ious, exhilarated, triumphant. As Chinua Achebe put it in a lecture that became famous, in Heart of Darkness Conrad is racist. He depicts only the Europeans, with Africa being another world, with inhabitants who play no important role. In Apocalypse Now, Coppola continues in a similar tradition. The Vietnamese are there to be fought against, annihilated. It’s the opposite of anthropologists going to stay in a society with the people who live there, to respect and understand them.

Achebe’s moving novel, Things Fall Apart, is set in the 1890s. It was written in English about a man called Okonkwo, who is a strong and fearless leader in a Nigerian village where, in an accident, he is responsible for the death of the son of the village’s oldest man; this is one of the things that starts to fall apart for him. He feels guilty and, to appease the gods, he goes into exile for seven years. While he is away, white people come to the village, introduce the Christian religion, and impose colonial rule. Not long after Okonkwo

returns, a conflict breaks out, which leads to the burning of the church that has been built there. The District Commis- sioner invites Okonkwo and five other leaders to the Court House that has been built near the church. They go, and he tells them that he has brought peaceful administration. He then has all six arrested, handcuffed, taken to jail, where they are insulted and abused. The Commissioner demands a fine; it is paid and the men are released. Next day, the villagers hold a meeting, at which an orator speaks of how the clan is weeping, because of the abomination that has come. The meeting is interrupted by the arrival of five mes- sengers from the Court House, to say that the meeting must cease. Okonkwo becomes angry and, with his machete, kills the head messenger. Those at the meeting let the other messengers escape, and with this Okonkwo realizes that the village people will not resist. He hangs himself before he can be taken again to the Court and tried for murder. In this widely read novel, it’s the colonized, rather than the coloniz- ers, who are the book’s protagonist and characters.

Among novels about the experience of being in combat in a war, perhaps the best is All Quiet on the Western Front, by Remarque (1929) and to read about emotional effects of being in combat, look at Elder and Clipp (1989).

Cultural understandings of emotions74

To get a sense of the Romantic era, you might take a look at a novel published early in this period, which became famous: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, daughter of the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the social reformer William Godwin. You can see a copy of the book’s title page in Figure 3.7. At the age of 16, Mary Shelley eloped with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. When she was 18, Mary, her husband, her stepsister Claire, George Byron (also a Romantic poet), and another friend were on vacation during an “ungenial” summer in the Alps. They read a great deal and had long conversations on literature, philosophy, and biology. One day, Byron suggested that each person should write a ghost story. Retiring to bed, Mary Shelley could not sleep. Prompted by a conversation about experiments in which electricity was used to stimulate muscle movements in dead creatures, there rose to her mind an image of a scientist called Victor Frankenstein, with a powerful engine beside him, kneeling over a hideous phantasm of a man, an artificial creature, that he had put together. Her story became Frankenstein (1818), one of the world’s first science fiction novels.

We now think of Frankenstein as a horror story, but really it’s about the emotional themes of the Romantic era, about the artificial creature’s initial natural emotions of kindness, as he works secretly to help a family who live in a humble cottage, and then a further set of natural emotions, of humans becoming disgusted and attacking him for his unnatural ugliness. This is followed, in the story, by the creature’s anger at being treated in this way.

In Frankenstein are many of the themes of the Romantic era: emphasis on emotions, settings amid wild scenery, the emphasis on the natural, distrust of the artificial, apprehension of humans

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FIGURE 3.7 Title page of volume 1 of Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley but published anony- mously in 1818.

Sexual Love in the West 75

when they arrogantly overstep their boundaries. There are thought-provoking, prescient anxieties about our construction of clever but risky technological systems (Perrow, 1984).

More generally, we are probably still in the Romantic era: its watchwords are that whatever you do, you should do with heart and with style. In this era, in the West at least, core beliefs include those of emotions being authentic causes of behavior.

Sexual Love in the West Falling in Love: Emotion as a Role The contemptuous emotions of interpersonal violence as shown by humans in response to Frank- enstein’s creature, and by people in one society toward those of other societies in times of war, create in the people involved states of horrific destructiveness. So let us, in contrast, consider a positive interpersonal emotion, a constructive emotion: love. What do you think of this newspa- per story from the early 1950s?

On Monday Cpl. Floyd Johnson, 23, and the then Ellen Skinner, 19, total strangers, boarded a train at San Francisco and sat down across the aisle from each other. Johnson didn’t cross the aisle until Wednesday, but his bride said, “I’d already made up my mind to say yes if he asked me to marry him.” “We did most of the talking with our eyes,” Johnson explained. Thursday the couple got off the train in Omaha with plans to be married. Because they would need to have the consent of the bride’s parents if they were married in Nebraska, they crossed the river to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where they were married Friday.

(Cited in Burgess & Wallin, 1953)

Averill (1985) showed the story to a sample of US adults. Some 40 percent of them said they had had experiences conforming to the ideal embodied in the story, while another 40 percent said their experiences of love definitely did not conform to it. This second group based their responses on an unfavorable attitude to this ideal plus any single departure they had felt from it. In respond- ing in this way, they, too, indicated that they were influenced by this ideal.

Averill argues that love of this kind has features that are distinctive to Western culture. Certainly, passionate sexual love occurs worldwide. It is experienced as joyful and energizing. To investigate its universality, Jankowiak and Fischer (1992) surveyed ethnographies of 166 societies, asking whether the writer, typically an anthropologist, made a distinction between love and lust and noted the presence of at least one of the following attributes of love occurring within the first two years of a couple meeting, irrespective of whether they married or not: (a) personal anguish or longing, (b) love songs and the like, (c) elopement due to mutual affection, (d) indigenous accounts of passionate love, or (e) the anthropologist’s affirmation that love occurred. In 147 of the 166 cultures (88.5%), there was evidence of this kind of passionate, sexual love.

Averill (1985) proposes that the Western ideal of love, eagerly taken up by Hollywood, enacted 50 years ago by Floyd Johnson and Ellen Skinner, and still very much alive today, is not just the same old worldwide story. It has features that are distinctive to the West and that started their development in medieval Europe.

The germ of the idea was courtly love, created in Provence in the eleventh century and elabo- rated in many medieval documents. The word courtly originally meant occurring at a royal court; the later meaning of courtship is derived from it. The idea was that a nobleman might fall in love with a lady and become her knight. Courtly love had to occur outside marriage. The lady was at

Cultural understandings of emotions76

first seen at a distance and was unattainable. The knight had to offer his service, do whatever she might wish, however dangerous or however trifling, and worship her.

For several hundred years courtly love was the subject of some of Europe’s greatest poetry. Prototypical was the story of Lancelot and his love for Guinevere, the queen and wife of King Arthur at his court in Camelot, told by the French poet Chrétien De Troyes, in The Knight of the Cart (Chrétien De Troyes, 1180).

Later came the Romance of the Rose (De Lorris & De Meun, 1237–1277). The first part, written by Guillaume De Lorris, is an extraordinary psychological allegory, in which the lov- ers are represented as a set of emotions and psychological characteristics, each of which is a distinct actor in the drama. The poem begins with the lover, a young man, falling asleep and dreaming. As interpreted by C.S. Lewis (1936), the reader experiences the story through the young man’s eyes. He strolls by the river of life, then enters the beautiful garden of courtly love, see Figure 3.8, and sees a lady there. As the wooing proceeds, his consciousness is rep- resented by the appearance in turn of distinct characters, Hope, Sweet Thought, Reason, and so on. The lady also does not appear as a whole. She, too, is a cast of characters: Bielacoil (meaning “fair welcome” from the Provençal belh aculhir) is something like the lady’s con- versational self, pleasant and friendly, and it is, of course, via this aspect that the young man must first approach. Then there is Franchise (the lady’s sense of aristocratic status) and Pity. But then there are others: Danger, Fear, Shame. When the young man sounds a false note, Bielacoil disappears for hours, and only Fear or one of these others is present. Then, in addi- tion, there is Jealousy, and the god of Love, not permanent characteristics of either the young man or the lady but able, in a somewhat unpredictable way, to take over either of them. As the

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FIGURE 3.8 The origin of the culturally distinctive version of romantic love that occurs in the West is traced from courtly love in medieval Europe. The most famous book depicting this was Roman de la Rose, for which this was an illuminated illustration from about 1500 depicting the gar- den of courtly love.

Sexual Love in the West 77

young man reaches toward the Rose in the center of the garden, it is the god of Love who fires arrows at him and makes him Love’s servant.

One might argue that some elements in this pattern occur elsewhere. For instance, in the Bible, Jacob is devoted to Rachel for a long period before they can unite. Nonetheless, the Western idea of being in love involves elements that do seem distinctive. Falling in love (in the Western way) can happen suddenly and unexpectedly. In the full pattern, devotion becomes a kind of worship. It unfolds as a script (Schank & Abelson, 1977; see also Frijda, 1988). It was depicted by William Shakespeare (1623) in Romeo and Juliet.

Here is the script, in Schank and Abelson’s sense (Oatley, 2004b). To fall in love, two people must be open to the experience. Each sees the other, a stranger, and is attracted. Looks pass between them and are experienced as meaningful; words are not necessary. Then there is an interval of separation during which fantasies build. Then comes a meeting at which there is con- firmation that the fantasies are mutual. There! One is in love. Shakespeare has Romeo show his devotion by touching Juliet and saying in his very first words to her:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

(Romeo and Juliet, 1, 5, 90–4)

Here, Romeo speaks to Juliet as if she is a statue of a saint (“this holy shrine”), whom he comes to adore. What made the story of Floyd Johnson and Ellen Skinner noteworthy is that it fits this same kind pattern so perfectly.

As Averill (1985) points out, love becomes an interpersonal role that enables people to over- come difficulties and to relinquish previous commitments and relationships. Sometimes an emo- tion is a change of role; for instance, anger as entry to a conflict, sadness at a loss. Sometime as with love that leads to marriage, it can be long term. He argues that without such cultural elabo- ration, we would not experience love in the way of Floyd Johnson and Ellen Skinner or Romeo and Juliet. La Rochefoucauld (1665) said: “Some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love” (Maxim 136). Averill and Nunley (1992) go further: they doubt whether anyone would fall in love if they had not heard of it.

How do such modes get transmitted? A long-standing idea of how this occurs is that people learn rules about how to behave. The idea of rules was important in psychology, influenced by ideas of Chomsky (e.g., Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002) on generative and transformational rules of grammar, and by implementations in artificial intelligence of psychological theories based on rules of logic: if this, then the result is that, or if this, then do that. All this was seen as rationality. In 1969, Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen used this idea and proposed that for emotions there are display rules. This means that when a person experiences an emotion it is subject to cultural rules as to whether and how it should be expressed.

Recently, it has come to seem unlikely that rules generate emotions, thoughts, or actions, but that they are post hoc summaries of observed behavior. It is more likely that we generate our actions based on intuitions derived from generalizations of thousands of examples. We saw one example at the beginning of this chapter when Catherin Lutz was told that she should not smile at a little girl who was dancing and making funny faces. In this kind of way, children on Ifaluk would learn that they should be gentle, calm, and quiet. In artificial intelligence, now this process is called “deep learning” (LeCun, Bengio, & Hinton, 2015). The generalizations that are constructed become intuitions, often with an emotional basis of seeming right or wrong. They can then become generative for us in how we understand ourselves, and others, and in enabling us to feel and act as we do.

Cultural understandings of emotions78

Women and Men: Different Cultures? As we move to the more specific areas of research on emotion in the chapters that follow, we shall take stock of different cultural variations, for example, in a culture of origin or a social class. What about gender? Women and men live in every society, but do they live in different cultures? On Ifaluk, as Catherine Lutz observed, although some wives and husbands spent a good deal of time together, for the most part women slept in a group in the same hut, worked together on the taro gardens, preparing food, and tending infants. The houses where children were born were taboo for men. Men were to be found on the lagoon, or in their canoe houses, which were taboo to women. They spent their time napping, repairing their fishing gear, and looking after toddlers. Although private sexual trysts were arranged at night, in public for the most part women and men kept separate from each other.

What might we think about the idea of separate cultures for women and men in America, in Europe, in Japan? And how about Saudi Arabia, where women became able to vote in 2015, and in 2018 are allowed, for the first time, to drive cars?

In the United States, Deborah Tannen (1991) published You Just Don’t Understand. Chapter 1 of this book, entitled “Different words, different worlds,” starts with the man to whom she was once married shouting at Tannen: “I do not give you the right to raise your voice to me, because you are a woman and I am a man” (p. 23). He had grown up in a society in which few people thought woman and men had equal rights. By means of many examples of conversations, Tan- nen goes on to show how, in their culture, men tend to like to do things in the world and, in interactions, strive to be one-up rather than one-down. In their culture, women like connection and intimacy. In a later example, Tannen writes about Eve who had had a lump removed from her breast, so that a seam had been left that changed her breast’s contour. She told her sister that she found this upsetting. The sister replied that when she had had an operation, she felt the same way. When Eve told her husband, he said, “You can have plastic surgery to cover up the scar” (p. 49). Whereas her sister’s remark had comforted her, her husband’s remark upset her; she didn’t want more surgery. Eve’s sister spoke to let Eve know she understood. Her husband gave advice. Men, in general, suggests Tannen, like to be in charge of things. Women in general like to connect. Both Tannen and Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama in their paper on cross-cultural comparisons center their arguments on ideas of independence and interdependence. See how well these ideas we have explored here make sense of gender differences in emotion, from empathic accuracy to sexual desire, we consider in this book (Hess, 2015).

What about your life? Do you like to talk, to let people know what they should think or do? Or do you tend to listen and connect? With whom do you hang out?

Are you heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual? Although these terms are based on sexuality, none refers primarily to biological characteristics. The terms are cultural. If you think of yourself as female or male, what emotional–cultural aspects do you notice in yourself and other members of your gender?

Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches In exploring evolutionary and cultural approaches to emotion in this and the previous chapter, we have begun to see some answers to the question we raised in the first chapter: What is an emotion?

It is possible to emphasize differences between evolutionary and cultural approaches to emo- tion, but it is just as important to recognize their convergences (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2012). Both approaches start from the idea that emotions contribute solutions to basic problems of social living. Both assume that emotions help humans form attachments, take care of offspring, take

Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches 79

part in hierarchies, and maintain long-term friendships. These themes are at the heart of both approaches and are central to this book.

Perhaps the main principle that integrates evolutionary and cultural approaches is by way of the proposal by Tomasello (2014, 2016), discussed in the previous chapter, that the adaptation of our species, which enables us to be as we are, is that we cooperate with each other. We do this both by making arrangements with one or a few others and in whole societies in ways that come to be regarded as morality: ways of life that come to be cultures. Many of our emotions, then, in attachment, love, friendship, comradeship, courtesy, enable the cooperation to occur, while some others such as feelings of belonging or of shame occur as we do or do not manage to cooperate.

Evolutionary approaches focus on how emotions enable survival and gene replication. Cul- tural approaches focus on how emotions enable social life in particular societies. Gone is the view that emotions are dysfunctional, maladaptive, and pernicious to social life.

There are numerous differences, however, as one sees in Table 3.2. A first concerns the question: What is an emotion? For evolutionary theorists, emotions are universal programs derived from our genes that guard against recurrent threats to survival and enable responses to opportunity (Ekman, 1992; Plutchik, 1980; Tomkins, 1984; Tooby & Cosmides, 2008). From this perspective, emotions are species-characteristic patterns of response and action, derived from natural selection. For cultural theorists, the core of an emotional experience is the social unfolding of an emotion in a culture’s social life, often seen in acts of communica- tion (Averill, 1985; Lutz & White, 1986; Mesquita, 2003; Shweder & Haidt, 2000). From this perspective, emotions are roles, or changes of role, in relationships. For these theorists, what is most striking are cultural differences in emotion that are socially learned in social practices and rituals and relationships, according to culturally specific concerns about identity, social structure, and morality.

Evolutionary theorists tend to concentrate on how emotions serve functions for the species by way of species-characteristic mechanisms possessed by individuals. At this level of analy- sis, emotions prepare the individual for action in her or his best interest (e.g., Frijda, Kuipers, & ter Schure Levenson, 1999). At the dyadic level of analysis, the focus is on communication and coordination of emotion through facial, vocal, and postural channels (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003; Scherer, Johnstone, & Klasmeyer, 2003). At this level, emotions communicate information about current emotions, intentions, and dispositions, to help accomplish mutuality or conflict and coordinated responses to problems and opportunities in the environment.

Cultural theorists offer insights at the individual and dyadic levels of analysis, revealing how emotions are parts of the individual’s sense of self and relationships. At the same time, cultural theorists tend to focus on how emotions serve functions for groups and societies. They see emo- tions as helping define values and enabling group members to negotiate roles (e.g., Clark, 1990;

Table 3.2 Comparison of evolutionary and cultural approaches

Question of interest Evolutionary approach Cultural approach

What is an emotion? Biological processes Interpretations, language, beliefs, roles

Are emotions universal? Yes Possibly not

What are the origins of emotions? Environments of evolutionary adaptedness

Practices, institutions, values

Functions Individual: Action readiness Reify intentions and values

Dyadic: Social coordination Reify roles, identities, and ideologies

Cultural understandings of emotions80

Collins, 1990). The ritualized experience of shame, for example, signals the individual’s place within group hierarchies and reinforces certain roles and values. The emotions of a culture are also essential to defining that culture: so, for instance, people’s emotions within a culture tend to be similar. De Leersnyder, Mesquita, and Kim (2011) found that when people immigrated to another country, their emotions tended to become more similar to those of the host group, depending on their amount of exposure to, and engagement with, the host culture.

So how would researchers working within the evolutionary and cultural traditions approach the emotion of embarrassment?

Those guided by an evolutionary approach would document the biological bases of embar- rassment—the blush and other nonverbal displays—and how these are universal and can even be seen in appeasement displays of nonhuman primates and other species (Keltner & Buswell, 1997). From this approach, embarrassment informs the individual of transgressions to avoid. It signals to others a sense of remorse for the transgression, thus evoking forgiveness, and in these ways prompts reconciliation following conflict and social transgressions.

Researchers working from a cultural approach document how the meaning, value, and elici- tors of embarrassment vary across cultures. They might identify a culture’s specific version of embarrassment within its social history. In ancient Japan, for instance, embarrassment was an emotion that was focal and valued. In The Tale of Genji (Shikibu, c. 1000), which is thought to be the world’s first full-length novel, written 1,000 years ago by Murasaki Shikibu, for a lady in the Emperor’s court in what is now Kyoto, we see that embarrassment can occur by being in the presence of a higher ranking individual. (You might get a glimmer of this kind of emotion if you have ever felt shy in the presence of an important person.)

Here are some glimpses from that distant culture. When the youthful Prince Genji visits the house of his former nurse, who is ill, the nurse speaks to Genji fondly and tearfully. Her children are “acutely embarrassed . . . before so unbecoming a show of emotion in Genji’s presence” (p. 57). The children would not have been embarrassed if their mother had spoken to them in this way; it is Genji’s rank that causes their embarrassment. Later in the same chapter Genji stays the night with a lover, Yugao, who is of lower social status. She wakes in the morning, in her humble house, to the sound of neighbors calling out to each other. In the West one might be annoyed at such a din, or worried that it might wake the sleeping loved one. Not so for Yugao: she is “deeply embarrassed by this chatter and clatter all around them of people rising and preparing to go about their pitiful tasks” (p. 63). Had they awoken in a royal palace, all would have been appropriate to Genji’s high status. The morality here is of hierarchy and respect.

These examples show the importance of context in theorizing about emotions. We suggest that to understand emotions fully in social life, we need to approach by way of both evolution and culture.

S U M M A R Y

The chapter starts with two incidents from an island society whose culture differs from that of the industrial West. We suggest that in all societies, most human emotions are social with many of them based on our human ability to cooperate. Although we may think emotions just happen to us, they are also actions that we do, and that are related to the values of each particular society. Cross- cultural approaches enable us to see the relation of emotion to identity. In the West, people tend to think of themselves as inde- pendent, whereas in the East people are more interdependent. In the history of the West, interpersonal violence has declined since

medieval times, and worldwide the frequency of wars for territorial gain and the taking of slaves has declined. In Europe, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Romantic era began, in which emo- tions came to be valued in personal life and in politics. Analyses of sexual love suggest that an emotion is a kind of social role. Societal morality is based on emotional generalizations about right ways for others and ourselves to behave with each other. The chapter ends with an integration of evolutionary and cultural approaches and the principle that the human species is based on cooperation, between people and in cultures.

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T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. Think about how you have seen an individual from a differ- ent culture express emotion in a different way than you might. How would you explain this difference from a self-construal perspective, or a values perspective?

2. What emotions are most important to you? Are they of excite- ment, or of calmness? And are they largely individual, or inter- personal? Are they related to your gender or sexual preferences?

3. How do you weave evolutionary and cultural ways of theoriz- ing into your understanding of emotion? In what ways are emo- tions universal and in what ways do they vary across cultures? Are there general principles of emotions that can be discerned in all cultures?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

A famous European novella of the Romantic era is by Germany’s most famous author: the scientist-novelist-playwright, Goethe. It’s still a good read:

von Goethe, J. (1774). The sorrows of young Werther (translated by M. Hulse). Harmondsworth: Penguin (1989).

A book based on living on a tiny Pacific island. It’s a classic of emotional life and customs:

Lutz, C. (1988). Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Microne- sian atoll and their challenge to Western theory. Chicago, IL: Univer- sity of Chicago Press.

An excellent review is:

Mesquita, B., De Leersnyder, J., & Boiger, M. (2016). The cultural psy- chology of emotions. In L. F. Barrett, M. Lewis, & J. M. Haviland- Jones (Eds.), Handbook of Emotions, Fourth Edition (pp. 393–411). New York: Guilford.

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PART II Elements of Emotions

85

4Communication of Emotions

.  .  . there is a kind of universal language, consisting of expressions of the face and eyes, gestures and tones of voice, which can show whether a person means to ask for something and get it, or refuse it and have nothing to do with it.

Augustine, Confessions, 1–8

CONTENTS Five Kinds of Nonverbal Behavior

Facial Expressions of Emotion Darwin’s Observations and Theoretical Analysis Early Evidence of the Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion Critiques of the Ekman and Friesen Studies Discovering New Facial Expressions of Emotion Inference and Context in Emotion Recognition

Vocal Communication of Emotion The Communication of Emotions with the Voice

Tactile Communication of Emotion Four Functions of Touch Communicating Emotions with Touch

Emotional Expression and the Coordination of Social Interaction

Cultural Variation in Emotional Expression Cultural Variation in Expressive Behavior Cultural Variation in the Interpretation of Emotional Expression

Communication of Emotion in Art Four Hypotheses from the Idea of Romanticism Aesthetic Emotions in the Natyasastra

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

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FIGURE 4.0 Most important social rituals, as at this wedding when the groom embraces a groomsman, involve emotional expression involving the face, the voice, touch, and different movements of the body. In fact, most social interac- tions, you shall learn, are rich with emotional expression.

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Table 4.1 Drawings and “stickers” of 16 emotions

Emotion Illustrator’s drawing Finch sticker

Admiration

Amusement

Anger

Awe

Cheerful

Confusion

Coyness

Today about half the people in the world send an emoji each day to a friend, a romantic partner, a family member, or work colleague. They do so, in large part, to convey their feelings online, in the midst of texting, snap chatting, or sharing posts and links on Facebook.

Imagine that you were in charge of creating a set of emoji. What would you create? Which emotions would you design emoji for? What would the emoji look like? Would they have sound? The body and hands? Dynamic cues?

This request was actually made of one of your authors (D.K.), when a design team at Facebook asked him to assist in the design of a new set of emoji. As a first step in this process, D.K. gave Charles Darwin’s descriptions of over 40 emotional expressions to Matt Jones, an illustrator at Pixar at the time. Jones made emoji-like drawings for over 40 states. These emoji were then tested for how well they convey emotion (see Bai et al., 2018), and then passed on to a design team at Facebook. That team created the “Finch” sticker packet, named in honor of Charles Darwin. These stickers, as well as the drawings by Matt Jones that inspired them, are presented in Table 4.1.

87Communication of Emotions

Table 4.1 Drawings and “Stickers” of 16 Emotions (Continued)

Emotion Illustrator’s drawing Finch sticker

Deadpan

Disgust

Embarrassment

Gratitude

Joy

Romantic love

Sadness

Surprise

Sympathy

Source: ©Matt jones

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Take a moment to study the drawings and stickers. Where in each emoji is emotion conveyed? How is it that subtle movements in the eyes, or head, convey emotion? What do you make of the addition, in certain emoji, of shoulder shrugs (coyness), hand movements (confusion), and tear drops (sadness)? Can you rightfully call these movements part of the expression? And what emotions are missing?

These questions are part of the creative challenge often confronted by painters, cartoon- ists, novelists, playwrights, actors, directors, and musicians: how to portray the subtle ways in which humans express emotion in fleeting movements in the face, the head, the body, touch, the eyes, and the voice? Emotion scientists have also faced this challenge in their efforts to characterize how we communicate emotion. The science that we will review is a rich and storied one and meets head-on the issues that we addressed in the last two chapters: How are emotions part of our mammalian and primate evolutionary heritage? And how are they shaped by culture?

Five Kinds of Nonverbal Behavior Words such as “smile,” “laugh,” “gaze,” and “touch” seem simple enough, but each can refer to many kinds of nonverbal behavior, with often contrasting emotional meanings. Take the word “smile.” There have been debates about what smiles mean and the extent to which they accom- pany the experience of positive emotion (e.g., Fernandez-Dols & Ruiz-Belda, 1995, 1997; Frank, Ekman, & Friesen, 1993; Fridlund, 1992). The answer is that different smiles have different meanings (Martin, Rychlowska, Wood, & Niedenthal, 2017). Often we smile when feeling joy- ful, but we also smile to be polite, to hide feelings of disapproval, to express romantic attraction, to signal weakness, to flirt, to pretend that we are following what another person is saying, and so on (see Figure 4.1). New research findings suggest that smiles can relate to love, sympathy, and even aggression (Rychlowska et al., 2017). Often single words like “smile” fail to describe the rich and ancient language of nonverbal communication.

To help clarify the study of emotional expression, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (1969) organized nonverbal behavior into five categories. First are emblems: nonverbal gestures that directly translate to words (see Figure 4.2). For English speakers, these include the thumbs up, the peace sign, and in the late 1960s, the raised, clenched fist to indicate Black Power (used today in an ironic twist by US President Trump). Researchers have analyzed over 800 emblems throughout the world. No doubt there are many more. Emblems vary significantly in their meaning across cultures. For instance, an American who directs the thumbs up gesture to someone in Australia may think he’s saying “good job,” but unbeknownst to him he is actually telling that person “up yours.” That same American wishing a Vietnamese good luck with the crossed finger gesture used in the United States is making a really offensive sexual gesture to that person.

A second category of nonverbal behaviors is the illustrator, a nonverbal gesture that accom- panies our speech, to make it vivid, visual, or emphatic. We gesture with our hands in myriad ways when we speak—spend a few minutes observing (see Figure 4.3). McNeill (2005) showed that these gestures slightly precede the corresponding words we say. We also use facial gestures to illustrate and dramatize our speech. We raise our eyebrows when articulating the most impor- tant point in a phrase. We nod our heads to strengthen a point we are making with words.

Regulators are nonverbal behaviors that we use to coordinate conversation, behaviors such as head nods and eye brow flashes and encouraging vocalizations of interest. People look at and ori- ent their bodies toward people whom they want to start speaking. They look and turn their bodies away from those they wish would stop speaking. It is a remarkable feat of human social life that

Five Kinds of Nonverbal Behavior 89

people can carry on collaborative conversations in groups without explicitly designating who is to speak and who is not. They often do so by using regulators.

A fourth kind of nonverbal behavior is the self-adaptor: nervous behaviors that lack seeming intentions, as if simply to release nervous energy. People touch their faces, tug at their hair, jiggle their legs, bite their lips, and scratch their chins. We are often unaware of self-adaptors that are part of our self-presentation, and they can cost us: when you are showing self-adaptors, people are more likely to believe that you are lying.

Finally, there are emotional expressions: patterns of behavior in the face, voice, body, and touch that convey emotion. How do emotional expressions differ from other kinds of nonverbal behavior? How can you distinguish, for example, between the sincere facial expression of anger

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FIGURE 4.1 “Flirtation,” by the Hungarian painter Miklós Barabás, showing characteristic ele- ments: the man shows direct interest with body and head oriented toward the woman; the woman shows classic coyness, with head and gaze cast away.

CommuniCation of Emotions90

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FIGURE 4.2 A coarse gesture of contempt: seen in Britain, but not in southern Europe. Such ges- tures are based on learned conventions like words ( from Morris et al., 1979).

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FIGURE 4.3 Dr. Martin Luther King using the clenched fist, an inspiring illustrator, to add strength to his words in a speech in Philadelphia.

Facial Expressions of Emotion 91

from the mock expression, or the sincere vocalization of sympathy from a fake one? In three dif- ferent ways (Frank et al., 1993; Kappas et al., 2000). First, expressions of emotion tend to last just a few seconds, whereas other expressive behavior can be exceptionally brief or last for longer periods of time (Bachorowski & Owren, 2001; Ekman, 1993). A smile accompanying enjoy- ment will typically start and stop within a span of 1 to 10 seconds. A polite smile that does not accompany the experience of emotion might be exceptionally brief, lasting a quarter of a second, or it might endure for some time, for instance, when someone smiles politely through the entire course of an unpleasant dinner party. Second, emotional expressions involve involuntary muscle actions that people cannot deliberately produce and that are more difficult to suppress (Dim- berg, Thunberg, & Grunedal, 2002; Kappas, Bherer, & Thériault, 2000). The facial expression of anger, for example, involves the action of the muscle that tightens around the mouth, which most people cannot produce voluntarily. Feigned expressions of anger, therefore, would lack the muscle tightening around the mouth. Finally, the temporal unfolding of emotional expressions tends to differ from other kinds of expressions, with more fluid, gradual onset and offsets to the behaviors (Krumhuber, et al., 2013). With these distinctions in mind, let’s now look at three modalities of emotional expression—the face, the voice, and touch.

Facial Expressions of Emotion Darwin’s Observations and Theoretical Analysis You’ll recall from Chapter 1 that one of the challenges that Darwin faced after publishing On the Origin of Species was to make the case that humans evolved from some preexist- ing mammalian form. One focus in his argument was to draw comparisons between human emotional expression and that of other mammals and to chart the universality of human emo- tional expression. To do so, Darwin (1872) drew on observations of animals at the London zoo, of his dog Polly that sat at his feet as he wrote in his study, of peoples from remote, hunter-gatherer societies that he encountered in his voyages on the Beagle, and of his own young children.

From these observations, Darwin characterized the emotional expressions for over 40 differ- ent states. Look at some of these descriptions in Table 4.2, and see if they align with your own observations of emotional expressions.

We hope you are struck with the nuances of Darwin’s observations and how they characterize such a wide array of states and involve different modalities, including facial muscle movement, vocalization, gaze activity, body movements, and the like. To explain why we express emo- tions in these particular patterns of behavior, Darwin derived three principles (Hess & Thibault, 2009; Shariff & Tracy, 2011). First, according to the principle of serviceable habits, expressive behaviors that helped individuals respond adaptively to threats and opportunities in the evolu- tionary past will reoccur in the future. For example, the furrowed brow, which protects the eyes from blows, and exposed teeth, which in our ancestors signaled that they were about to attack, tend still to occur in modern humans when they are angry. Second, the principle of antithesis holds that opposing states will be associated with opposing expressions. For example, you will learn later that pride is signaled in dominant, size-expanding displays—chest expansion and tilting the head back—whereas shame is signaled in submissive behavior—drooping shoulders and downward movements of the head. Third, the principle of nervous discharge states that excess, undirected energy is released in random expressions, such as face touches, leg jiggles, and the like.

CommuniCation of Emotions92

Table 4.2 Darwin’s descriptions of emotional expression from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Negative Emotion

Anger Tremble, nostrils raised, mouth compressed, furrowed brow, head erect, chest expanded, arms rigid by sides, eyes wide open, stamp ground, body sways backward/forward

Confusion Stammer, grimaces, twitchings of facial muscles

Contempt Lip protrusion, nose wrinkle, expiration, partial closure of eyelids, turn away eyes and body, nose wrinkle, upper lip raised, snort

Disgust Lower lip turned down, upper lip raised, expiration, mouth open, spitting, blowing out, protruding lips, clear throat sound, lower lip and tongue protruded

Embarrassed Little cough

Fear Tremble, eyes open, mouth open, lips retracted, eye brows raised, crouch, pale, perspiration, hair stands on end, muscles shiver, yawn

Guilt Gaze aversion, shifty eyes, grimace

Pain Writhe about, piercing cries, groans, lips clenched and retracted, teeth clenched, wild stare, perspiration, furrowed brow, nostrils dilated, profuse sweating, pallor, utter prostration, eyes closed, square mouth (lips contracted), compression of eyeball, muscle around eyes contracted, pyramidal muscle contracts, upper lip raised, depressor muscles, nostril narrowed, scalp/face/eyes reddened, inspiration, sobbing, lachrymal gland squeezed, laughter, tears

Sadness Corner of mouth depressed, inner corner of eyebrows raised

Shame Blush, head averted, head down, eyes wavering, eyes down/away, turn body away, face away, blinking eyelids, tears

Positive Emotion

Admiration Eyes opened, eyebrows raised, eyes bright, smile

Astonishment Eyes open, mouth open, eyebrows raised, hands placed over mouth

Contemplation Frown, wrinkle skin under lower eyelids, eyes divergent, head droops, hands to forehead, mouth, or chin, thumb/index finger to lip

Devotion (reverence)

Face upward, eyelids upturned, fainting, pupils upward and inward, humbling kneeling posture, hands upturned

Happiness Eyes sparkle, skin under eyes wrinkled, mouth drawn back at corners

Joy Muscle tremble, purposeless movements, laughter, clapping hands, jumping, dancing about, stamping, chuckle/giggle, smile, muscle around eyes contracted, upper lip raised

Laughter Tears, deep inspiration, contraction of chest, shaking of body, head nods to and fro, lower jaw quivers up/down, lip corners drawn backward, head thrown backward, shakes, head and face red, muscle around eyes contracted, lip press/bite

Love Beaming eyes, smiling cheeks (when seeing old friend), touch, gentle smile, protruding lips (in chimps), kissing, nose rubs

Maternal love Touch, gentle smile, tender eyes

Pride Head, body erect, look down on others

Romantic love Breathing hurried, faces flush

Surprise Eyebrows raised, mouth open, eyes open, lips protruded, expiration, blowing/hissing, open hands high above head, palms toward person with straightened fingers, arms backwards

Tender (sympathy) Tears

Facial Expressions of Emotion 93

Early Evidence of the Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion Today, in hindsight, it is clear how Darwin’s analysis of the evolution of emotional expression was central to the unfolding of the science of emotion, with its focus on expressive behavior, universality, and similarities in human emotion with the expressive behavior of other species. Yet it was largely ignored for nearly 100 years after its publication. That would change in the early 1960s, when Sylvan Tomkins, Paul Ekman, and Carroll Izard carefully read Darwin’s book and distilled his observations into two hypotheses (Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971; Tomkins, 1962, 1963). First, the encoding hypothesis: the experience of different emo- tions should be associated with the same distinct expressions in every culture. Second, the decod- ing hypothesis: people of different cultures should interpret these expressions in similar ways.

To test these hypotheses, Ekman and Friesen took over 3,000 photos of different people as they expressed six emotions, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, according to Darwin’s descriptions (see Figure 4.4). Ekman then traveled to Papua, New Guinea, and for six months lived with a people of the Fore (pronounced “Foray”) language group who had seen no movies or magazines, who did not speak English or pidgin (a combination of English and a native language), and who had minimal exposure to Westerners (see Figure 4.5). This allowed for a strong test of the hypothesis that people, independent of modern culture, encode and decode emotions as people in industrialized cultures do.

Ekman and Friesen devised a brief story appropriate to each of the six emotions. For exam- ple, the sadness story was: “the person’s child had died, and he felt sad.” They then presented photos of three different expressions with a story that matched one of the expressions and asked

Significant Figures: Sylvan Tomkins, Carroll Izard, Paul Ekman

A seminal figure who shaped the resurgence of interest in emotion in the second half of the twentieth century was Sylvan Tomkins, who proposed what he called affect theory, in which emotions are thought to be hard wired, prepro- grammed responses that are genetically transmitted to all humans. Based on specific physiological mechanisms, Tom- kins argued, affect derives from a small set of nine basic emotions, each of which is displayed in a distinct facial expression. As in Darwin’s theorizing, Tomkins proposed that these distinct facial expressions are universal. What he needed was strong empirical data in support of his theory.

Toward this end, Tomkins inspired two young scientists he was mentoring—Carroll Izard and Paul Ekman—to go in search of evidence of the universality of facial expressions of emotion. Both would conduct groundbreaking studies in remote cultures of the universality of facial expression. Izard worked, at first, principally with children and developed a coding system based on which features of facial expres- sions enabled distinct basic emotions to be most clearly dif- ferentiated from each other. Recently, his work has tended

to focus on how understanding of emotions can be used to improve children’s and adults’ functioning and health. Ekman also developed, in collaboration with his long-time coauthor Wallace Friesen, a coding system for emotions of a kind that was different from Izard’s. Ekman and Friesen’s Facial Action Coding System is anatomically based and allows researchers to identify specific emotions according to the contraction of specific facial muscles and muscle con- figurations. Ekman’s work on expressions of emotion that are recognizable in different societies of the world has been a cornerstone, both for those who accept the proposal of a small number of basic emotions that these expressions imply and for those who question it. Recognized by the American Psychological Association as someone who has been one of the most influential psychologists of the twen- tieth century, he has also made his way into popular culture with his work on how microexpressions can indicate lying, which, as well as having been taken up by US border offi- cials, became the basis of a well-regarded television pro- gram, Lie to Me.

CommuniCation of Emotions94

participants to match the story to one of the three expressions (chance guessing would yield identification rates of 33%). In another task, the researchers videotaped Fore participants as they displayed facial expressions they would show in response to the emotion-specific story and then presented unedited clips of these expressions to college students in the United States, who selected from six emotion terms the one that best matched the Fore’s pose in each clip (chance guessing would yield identification rates of 16.6%).

As you can see in Table 4.3, the Fore participants, even children, were quite accurate in judg- ing emotions from facial expression. The American college students correctly interpreted the posed expressions of the Fore, with the exception of fear and surprise. In a synthesis of over 140 subsequent studies involving people from many different cultures, Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady found that on average people accurately label facial expressions of these six emotions 58 percent of the time (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002, 2003).

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FIGURE 4.4 Six different emotions: (a) anger, (b) disgust, (c) fear, (d) happiness, (e) sadness, and ( f) surprise. The expressions in these photos are similar to those described by Darwin, to those used by Ekman and Friesen in their universality studies, and to those used in many other studies of facial expression.

Facial Expressions of Emotion 95

Critiques of the Ekman and Friesen Studies Ekman and Friesen’s findings would prove to be some of the most generative in the field (Keltner et  al., 2017). Like all groundbreaking findings, these studies have been subjected to influen- tial critiques that have inspired subsequent studies we review below (e.g., Barrett, 2011; Frid- lund, 2015; Russell, 2015). First is the response format critique. In Ekman and Friesen’s study (and hundreds that followed), participants were required to label the facial expressions using terms the researchers provided, often in forced choice format. This method has many problems.

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Table 4.3 Accuracy rates for participants from New Guinea and the United States in judging expressions of six emotions

The Fore of New Guinea US college students

Judging Ekman and Friesen’s photos Judging emotional expressions

posed by the ForeAdults Children

Anger 84 90 51

Disgust 81 85 46

Fear 80 93 18

Happiness 92 92 73

Sadness 79 91 68

Surprise 68 98 27

Source: Adapted from Ekman (1972).

Note: For the Fore judges (the first two columns), chance guessing would yield accuracy rates of 33 percent. For the US college student judges, chance guessing would yield accuracy rates of 16.6 percent.

CommuniCation of Emotions96

It might inflate the accuracy with which people identify emotion through guessing strategies (Russell, 1994). It constrains how participants label expressions, requiring that they use research- ers’ emotion concepts rather than their own. As an example, one could easily imagine people from different cultural backgrounds labeling a smile with different concepts than “happiness,” such as “gratitude” or “reverence” or “amae/pleasurable dependence” (see Chapter 3). And criti- cally, Alan Fridlund has argued that when we perceive the expressive behavior of others, it is most advantageous to recognize what intentions the person has (rather than their feeling), an inferential process not captured in the forced choice format (Fridlund, 1992, 2015).

A second critique may be more damning and is in terms of ecological validity, or the ques- tion of whether the expressions in the Ekman and Friesen studies resemble those that people routinely produce or judge in their daily lives (Russell, 1994). Instead, the expressions portrayed in the photos are static, highly stylized and exaggerated, only involve select facial muscle move- ments and not other modalities (e.g., gaze, head movements), and do not involve dynamic cues over time. This raises the question of whether more subtle expressions of emotion, perhaps more typical of everyday emotional expression, would be so reliably judged (Wagner, MacDonald, & Manstead, 1986). For example, a number of studies are showing that people are better able to recognize emotion from dynamic displays than static photos (Ambadar, Schooler, & Cohn, 2005; Krumhuber, Kappas, & Manstead, 2013; van Der Schalk, Hawk, Fischer, & Doosje, 2011).

A third critique is offered by Rachael Jack and her colleagues and focuses on the narrow range of emotions that Ekman and Friesen chose to study—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise (Jack et al., 2016). Why only one positive emotion? Why no self-conscious emotions? Darwin himself offered descriptions of over 40 states, as you have learned. Is the realm of emo- tion we signal in the human face limited to just six emotions? Jack and colleagues suggested this narrow list may have been biased by the Western European orientation of the researchers and provided data, we review below, that suggests that the face can express upward of 40 to 50 emotional states, as Darwin himself long ago surmised (Jack et al., 2016). Let’s now turn to the empirical advances these critiques have inspired.

Discovering New Facial Expressions of Emotion Inspired by the Ekman and Friesen studies, a next generation of scientists has charted a much richer landscape of emotional expression (e.g., Jack et al., 2016; Keltner et al., 2016; Shiota et al., 2017). Consider this intriguing study by Rachael Jack and her colleagues (2016) who used com- puter morphing technologies to generate a wide array of facial expressions to present to observ- ers, in fact, the widest array of facial expressions ever to be studied. They did so in the following fashion. There are between 20 and 30 facial muscles underlying the surface of the skin, that, when moving, produce visible changes in the human face. These changes to the appearance to the face are known, thanks to the work of Ekman and Friesen, as Action Units. All told there are at least 42 action units (e.g., “furrowed brow”; “lip corner tighten”; “nose wrinkle”). Jack and col- leagues created over 2,500 facial expressions based on anywhere from 1 to 6 Action Units. Think of it as a possible universe of facial expressions. They then presented these 2500 facial expres- sions as animations in sequences of four separate photos unfolding over 1.25 seconds, which allowed them to show how combinations of Action Units change dynamically the appearance of the face. Participants from Scotland and China then rated each of these animations in terms of the emotion they perceived in the expression, from a list of over 50 emotion terms that other English and Chinese speakers had generated. What Jack and colleagues discovered is that UK observers reliably perceived 25 distinct facial expressions, and Chinese participants 37, many overlapping with Darwin’s observations.

Complementing this imaginative study, a new wave of studies has focused on multimodal emotional expressions (Keltner & Cordaro, 2015). These expressions involve not only facial

Facial Expressions of Emotion 97

muscle movements but also movements of the eyes, the hands, the head, and the body (e.g., Hess et al., 2015). In some studies, scientists have documented how distinct emotional experiences, such as love or desire, relate to distinct multimodal expressions. In other studies, as Ekman and Friesen did with the Fore, participants were asked to produce expressions of different emotions based on definitions or emotion-specific scenarios (e.g., Campos et al., 2012). These studies, like that of Jack and colleagues, point to a much richer landscape of emotional expression, which we review as they relate to the four kinds of relationships that make up human sociality.

One line of studies has documented facial expressions of the emotions that John Bowlby placed at the center of human attachment: desire, which motivates reproductive behavior; love, which motivates long-term warmth and devotion; and sympathy, which motivates care-giving to vulnerable others, in particular offspring (Bowlby, 1969).

The obvious place to capture the expressions of desire and love is to study romantic partners. This is what Gian Gonzaga and his colleagues did (Gonzaga et al., 2001, 2006). In this study, young romantic partners talked about their first date while being videotaped. Intensive, frame- by-frame coding of the nonverbal behaviors that made up these affectionate conversations found that when partners experienced intense love they showed the following brief dynamic patterns of behavior: smiling, mutual gaze, affiliative hand gestures, open posture, and forward leans. And when feeling intense desire, romantic partners displayed behaviors you might see in a pivotal moment in a romantic comedy: lip licks, lip wipes, and subtle, playful tongue protrusions (for replication, see Cordaro et al., 2017). It is noteworthy to observe that many nonhuman primates signal affiliation with open posture and open hands and even kissing (see Figure 4.6).

What about sympathy, Bowlby’s third emotion that enables attachment? In a series of stud- ies, Nancy Eisenberg and her colleagues coded the facial actions of people witnessing someone suffer, finding that the experience of sympathy is correlated with pulled in, oblique eyebrows and concerned gaze (Eisenberg et al., 1989). This finding replicates in studies in which partici- pants in different cultures are given a scenario that elicits sympathy—a description of witnessing someone in physical pain—and asked to express the emotion nonverbally (e.g., Campos et al., 2012; Cordaro et al., 2017). This subtle display is associated with increased helping behavior and changes in peripheral physiology—heart rate deceleration and activation of the vagus nerve, which you will learn about in the next chapter (Stellar et al., 2015). People are somewhat reli- able in judging this expression when portrayed in static photos as sympathy (Keltner & Cordaro, 2016). John Bowlby was indeed prescient in his thinking: the emotions of attachment—love, desire, and sympathy—are registered in subtle facial and bodily actions, which signal security and intimacy to the lucky targets of such displays (see Figure 4.7).

Hierarchies, we argued in Chapter 2, organize individuals in groups and solve problems related to decision making, resource allocation, and work. Three emotions that map onto the hierarchical dimension of social living are embarrassment, shame, and pride (see Figure 4.8).

Let’s begin with embarrassment, the emotion we feel when we have violated a social norm that governs public interaction. Researchers have produced this state in participants in the lab

Chimpanzee seeking contact with open handed display

Chimps reconcile following conflict with kissing

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FIGURE 4.6 Affiliation-related displays in chimpanzees captured by Frans de Waal.

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through rather mischievous means. For instance, students have been asked to suck on a pacifier in front of friends. Or they have been asked to model bathing suits for others. Or make funny- looking facial expressions while being videotaped. In perhaps the most mortifying test, partici- pants had to sing Barry Manilow’s song “Feelings” using dramatic hand gestures and then watch a videotape of their performance with a group of other students.

All of these elicitations of embarrassment produce negative attention and a diminishing of status (Miller, 1992; Miller & Tangney, 1994). Frame-by-frame analysis of the behavior peo- ple display in these kinds of situations has uncovered a fleeting but highly coordinated 2- to 3-second display (Edelmann & Hampson, 1979, 1981; Harris, 2001; Keltner, 1995). This display includes gaze movements down, head turns to the side, a compressed or inhibited (one might say self- conscious) smile, and furtive glances and on occasion, a face touch. When presented with dynamic videos of these displays, as well as still photographs, people from different cultures are able to reliably identify the display as embarrassment and not shame or amusement (Haidt & Keltner, 1999; Keltner, 1995; Keltner & Cordaro, 2016). When feeling shame, which concerns more serious transgressions and negative self-attention, people show a simpler but more poignant display of head movements down and gaze aversion (Harker & Keltner, 2001; Lewis et al., 1989).

This expression of embarrassment may bring to mind images of young women in Jane Aus- ten’s novels and their film adaptations and lead you to believe that embarrassment is uniquely human. But this would be mistaken. Instead, human embarrassment expressions have parallels in the appeasement displays of other species (Keltner & Buswell, 1997). In appeasement interac- tions, one individual, typically a subordinate, relies on certain signals to pacify and reduce the aggressive tendencies of another individual, often a dominant individual in the social hierarchy (de Waal, 1989). When appeasing, a wide range of species avert their gaze, as in human embar- rassment. Various species, including different primate species, pigs, rabbits, blue-footed boobies, pigeons, doves, and loons, use head movements down, head turns, and head bobs to appease. These head movements reduce the size of the body, signaling submissiveness. Certain primates

Emotion Romantic Love Sexual Desire Sympathy

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FIGURE 4.7 Static photos of expressions of love, desire, and sympathy.

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FIGURE 4.8 Static photos of expressions of embarrassment, shame, and pride.

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have a controlled smile to signal submissiveness. Several primates cover their faces when appeas- ing, as do rabbits. The elements of embarrassment, then, are routinely seen in the appeasement displays of other species.

If embarrassment and shame occupy the bottom of a hierarchical dimension of social living, at the other end is pride. Pride is rooted in elevated status brought about by socially valued actions (Shariff & Tracy, 2011; Tracy & Robins, 2004, 2007). Many nonhuman species, in particular primates, signal their rise in social status through enlarging their physical size—body expansion, the classic chest pounding you might see apes engage in at the zoo, the lifting of the head back, or signs of expanded physicality such as loud, deep calls. So too, it would seem, do humans, in their expressions of pride.

In an imaginative use of naturalistic data, Jessica Tracy and David Matsumoto (2008) ana- lyzed the emotional expressions of sighted and blind Olympic athletes from 20 different coun- tries just after they had either won or lost a judo competition. Darwin had suggested that the expressions of blind individuals are particularly germane to claims of evolutionary universal- ity because they will not have been copied from seen behavior of others. As you can see in Figure 4.9, after victory, both sighted (the top panel) and blind athletes (the bottom panel) alike threw their arms in the air with chest out as an expression of pride (and perhaps triumph). After losing, both groups of athletes dropped their heads and slumped their shoulders in a display of shame. In other research, Jessica Tracy and Richard Robins documented that displays of expansive posture, head movements up and back, and arm thrusts upward reliably signal pride to observers, both in industrialized cultures, and in a remote people in Burkina Faso, Africa (Tracy & Robin, 2004).

Still other studies that followed Ekman and Friesen’s studies have documented distinct expres- sions for emotions such as interest (the eyes widened and eyebrows raised), laughter and con- tentment, as portrayed in Figure 4.10 (Campos et al., 2012; Cordaro et al., 2016; Matsumoto & Ekman, 2004).

Based on the advances in understanding facial expression after the Ekman and Friesen stud- ies, Daniel Cordaro took photographs of facial/bodily expressions of 19 different emotions and then gathered data from 10 different cultures, ranging from Pakistan to New Zealand (Cordaro, 2013; Keltner & Cordaro, 2016). In this study, participants, as in the Ekman and Friesen work, were presented with emotion-specific scenarios for each of 19 different emotions (e.g., for pain it would be “this person just stubbed their toe on a rock”). For each scenario, they were required to choose from one of four static photos of facial/bodily expressions. Figure 4.11 presents the results of this study. As you can see from this emotion recognition study, the landscape of emo- tional expression in the face and body is increasingly rich.

Inference and Context in Emotion Recognition A second direction in which the field has moved since the Ekman and Friesen studies is to study more systematically the inferential processes that occur when we perceive emotionally expres- sive behavior. This development was inspired by Alan Fridlund’s behavioral ecology theory of emotional expression or, what he prefers to call, display behaviors (Fridlund, 1994; Scarantino, 2017). Fridlund argues that what is most critical for perceivers is to discern an individual’s inten- tions from expressive behavior. In Fridlund’s words, emotional expressions are: “declarations that signify our trajectory in a given social interaction, that is, what we will do in the current situ- ation, or what we would like the other to do” (Fridlund, 1994, p. 130). Expressions are designed to signal intentions, not necessarily feelings, and to prompt responses in others.

This theorizing has led the field to a broader consideration of the kinds of social information that are communicated by expressive behavior. Drawing upon philosophical studies of language, Andrea Scarantino has offered one such account, which he calls a theory of affective pragmatics

CommuniCation of Emotions100

(Scarantino, 2017; see also Ekman, 1997). He makes the case that emotional expressions—in the present case facial/bodily expressions—communicate four kinds of information: 1) the individ- ual’s current feeling (the expressive function of expression); 2) what is happening in the present context (the declarative function of expression); 3) desired courses of action from other people who perceive the expression (the imperative function of expression); and 4) intention and plans

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FIGURE 4.9 Sighted (top panel) and blind (bottom panel) Olympic Athletes’ nonverbal displays to winning and losing a competition ( from Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008).

Facial Expressions of Emotion 101

about what the person might do (the commissive function of expression). Emotional expressions are indeed a rich grammar of social interaction.

Consider one recent study that lends credence to this new view of emotion perception. Shu- man et al. (2015) presented observers with dynamic videotaped portrayals of five different emo- tions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. The expressions were dynamic, more realistic, and less exaggerated than those in the Ekman and Friesen photos, more like the expressions you might see in everyday social interactions. In different response formats, participants could choose from a variety of options the best that matched the emotion in the video. More specifi- cally, participants matched each expression to feelings (“fear”), appraisals (“that is dangerous”), social relational meanings (“you scare me”), and action tendencies (“I might run”). In this study, participants labeled the dynamic but subtle expressions with the expected label 62 percent of the time, which is comparable to accuracy rates in labeling static photos of more dramatic facial expressions. Action tendencies proved to be the most difficult to discern.

Still another line of research is examining how the inferences people draw from emotional expres- sion are shaped by the social context. Recall that in the studies of Ekman and Friesen, and many that followed, no information was provided about the social context. This stands in contrast to our eve- ryday life, where we encounter others’ emotional expressions in intimate relationships, with others nearby, and in different settings such as at work or with family. How do emotional expressions vary in their meaning from one context to another? A pattern of touch will vary in the inferences it evokes depending on whether the people are friends or strangers, at work, or on a date. A laugh can be perceived as an expression of affection or sarcastic critique depending on the context. A blush could be read as a sign of self-conscious inhibition or flirtatious interest, again depending on the context.

Amusement Interest ContentmentEmotion

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FIGURE 4.10 Static photos of expressions of amusement, interest, and contentment.

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FIGURE 4.11 Accuracy rates across 10 cultures in judging emotions from static photos of facial/bodily expressions. Chance guessing is represented in the dotted line (adapted from Keltner & Cordaro, 2016).

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Scholars such as Klaus Scherer, Ursula Hess, and Lisa Feldman-Barrett offered several sys- tematic ideas about how context shapes emotion perception (Barrett et al., 2011; Hess & Hareli, 2017; Scherer, 1986). A first source of the contextual shaping of emotion perception is culture. Because cultures vary in their emotion concepts, knowledge, and representations, it is clear that culture will influence the perception of emotion in expression.

A second source of variation is the situation—who is the person expressing emotion, and what context are they in? How might the gender, power, ethnicity, or social class of the individual express- ing emotion shape what emotion observers perceive? For example, we are more likely to detect anger in men’s expressions of emotion and sadness in women’s (Hess & Hareli, 2017; Niedenthal, Rychlowska, & Wood, 2017). US participants are more likely to perceive anger in the emotional expressions of African Americans, reflecting that regrettable feature of the history of so many situa- tions in the United States (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). What other behaviors is the expresser engaging in? For example, Aviezer and colleagues (2008) presented a classic facial expression of disgust in one of four contexts, in which the person expressing disgust was engaged in different actions. Participants labeled the expression as disgust 91 percent of the time when the individual was holding a soiled article of clothing, 59 percent of the time when the person displayed fearful hand and arm movements, 33 percent of the time when the same person was clasping his or her hands sadly to the chest, and 11 percent of the time when the person was poised with fist clenched to punch. Clearly, the many dimensions of the context—the nature of the expresser, the surrounding people, the formality or informality of the setting—all influence emotion perception.

A third kind of context is perceptual context (Barrett et al., 2011). Perceptual context refers to the mental states within the perceiver’s mind that shape his or her inferences upon observing expressive behavior. A person’s current feelings, goals, intentions, values, and physical state give rise to context-specific interpretations of social stimuli and, one would imagine, expressive behav- ior. Later we will talk about how touch is one medium in which we communicate some emotions. Paul Piff et al. (2012) found that people who are disposed to the experience of extreme positive emotion (or prone to mania) are better able to discern positive emotions—love, sympathy, gratitude, awe—in a stranger’s touch than other participants. The notion here is that current positive emotion felt by a perceiver sharpens their acuity in emotion perception. The opposite can be true as well, that is, people’s perceptual states can impede their recognition of emotion in expressive behavior. For example, recent studies find that the likelihood that participants will label an expression as disgust rises when an anger expression precedes the presentation of the disgust expression, but drops when no anger expression precedes the target disgust expression (Pochedly, Widen, & Russell, 2012).

Vocal Communication of Emotion When a young great ape dies, the mother of that ape will often carry the corpse around for several days and cuddle and hold the offspring, in what looks much like human grief. Just as striking is that other apes nearby will emit vocalizations known as “coos,” quiet vocalizations that would seem to convey sympathy for the bereft mother. Social emotions like sympathy do seem to run deep in mammalian evolution and are expressed with the voice.

The human voice is a source of varied emotional expression. As humans began to walk upright in our hominid evolution, our vocal chamber, or larynx, expanded in size and dropped down lower in the esophagus, allowing for the production of a much wider array of sounds than those heard in our primate relatives (see Figure 4.12). To produce sounds, including emotion- related vocalization, the brain sends signals to the muscles around the lungs, which contract, thus producing bursts of air particles that move up through the trachea. Those air particles cause the vocal folds to vibrate, thus producing sound waves. As the sound waves pass through the mouth, they are given additional layers of sound depending on many factors, such as the closing of the

Vocal Communication of Emotion 103

nasal passage, the position of tongue and teeth, and the amount of saliva in the mouth. Through this remarkable production of sound, we can speak, sing, be ironic or sarcastic, engage in baby talk, communicate with our pets (or at least think we do), and convey a rich array of emotions.

Consider laughter, which is likely to have been part of the human communicative repertoire for several million years (Dunbar, 2004; Panksepp, 2005; Provine, 1992, 1993; Provine & Fis- cher, 1989; Ruch, 1993). Laughter has a precursor in nonhuman primates—the pant-hoot vocali- zation that accompanies play. In humans, laughter is a language of emotional expression unto its own. Next time you’re in a conversation with a group of friends, listen carefully to the varieties of laughter. You might hear laughs that reflect tension, sarcasm, embarrassment, and desire. Many laughs seem to involve little emotion at all. People laugh to fill the empty gaps in conversations, to signal that they are tracking what the speaker is saying, or to encourage the speaker to continue.

Jo-Anne Bachorowski and her colleagues mapped acoustic characteristics of different laughs (Bachorowski & Owren, 2001; Bachorowski, Smoski, & Owren, 2001; Smoski & Bachorowski, 2003). They have analyzed thousands of laughs gathered as participants responded to amusing film clips or engaged in amusing tasks together. There are cackles, hisses, breathy pants, snorts, and grunts, and voiced or songlike laughs, which include vowel-like sounds and pitch modulation thanks to the involvement of the vocal folds. Women more frequently produce voiced laughs, whereas men often laugh with snorts and grunts (Bachorowski & Owren, 2001). In a similar spirit, Adrienne Wood and her colleagues have shown how laughs with different acoustic qualities relate to more rewarding or more dominant intentions (Wood, Martin, & Niedenthal, 2017). With a few bursts of sound in a couple of seconds, we can laugh in myriad ways and communicate many feel- ings and intentions, from those related to kindness and love to aggression and domination.

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FIGURE 4.12 Anatomy of the vocal apparatus ( from babelsdawn.com).

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The Communication of Emotions with the Voice Let us now think about how emotional states might alter vocalization patterns in ways that give rise to distinct vocalizations. Klaus Scherer argued that several emotion-related physiological changes alter acoustic properties, including pitch, tempo, pitch variability, variation, and loud- ness of speech (Scherer, 1986). For example, when in an anxious state, the muscles around the lungs are tense, thus restricting the air flow through the larynx. Our tense vocal chords produce less variability in pitch. We are likely to have less saliva in the mouth, and the shape of our lips will tighten. All of these changes will influence the sound of our speech. Through these and other emotion-related changes in physiology and the musculature of our vocal apparatus, emotions should be signaled in distinct vocalizations.

To study whether people can communicate emotions with the voice, researchers have relied on two methods. In one, people, often trained actors, attempt to express different emotions in prosody, the tone and rhythm of our speech, while reading nonsense syllables or neutral passages of text (Banse & Scherer, 1996; Juslin & Laukka, 2003; Laukka 2014; Klasmeyer & Sendlmeier, 1999; Wallbott & Scherer, 1986). These samples of emotion-related prosody are then presented to listeners, who select from a series of options to identify the term that best matches the emotion conveyed in the speech output. For example, Petri Laukka, Hillary Elfenbein, and colleagues had actors from five countries—India, the United States, Singapore, Australia, and Kenya—attempt to convey 11 different emotions, anger, contempt, fear, happiness, interest, neutral, sexual lust, pride, relief, sadness, and shame, while uttering sentences of relatively neutral content (e.g., “Let me tell you something”). They then presented these clips to people in different cultures and found that observers could recognize nine of these 11 states when asked to label the emotional content of the different audio clips (Laukka et al., 2016). These findings build upon a review of 60 earlier studies of this kind, which found that hearers can judge five different emotions in the prosody that accompanies speech—anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and tenderness—with accuracy rates that approach 70 percent (Juslin & Laukka, 2003; Scherer, Johnstone, & Klasmeyer, 2003). Judgments are best when hearers listen to members of their own culture.

In a second kind of study, participants communicate emotions through vocal bursts, which are brief, nonword utterances that arise between speech incidents. Vocal bursts most resemble the coo that great apes direct toward bereft mothers, with which we began this section. Think of how you might communicate fear or anger with a vocal burst. You’re likely to shriek or growl. Or how about compassion or the feeling of savoring a delicious bite of ice-cream? Here we suspect you might say “aww” or “mmm.” In studies of vocal bursts, people are given a situation that produces an emotion (e.g., for awe it would be “you are seeing a large waterfall for the first time”) and asked to communicate that emotion with a brief vocal burst, and to not use words (Laukka et al., 2014; Sauter & Scott, 2007; Simon-Thomas et al., 2009). These sounds are then played to listeners, who attempt to label the sound with one of many emotion terms, or to match the sound to the appropriate emotion eliciting situation. As with emotional prosody, people are quite adept at communicating emotions with vocal bursts. For example, Daniel Cordaro and his colleagues presented vocal bursts of 16 emotions to people from 10 different countries in Western Europe (Germany, Poland), East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea), and Southeast Asia (India, Pakistan), and Turkey, New Zealand, and the United States. In this study, participants were asked to match emotionally rich but simple situations (e.g., someone has insulted you; you hit your leg on a rock) to one of four vocal bursts. Overall, people were correct in matching stories to vocal bursts of 16 emotions 79 percent of the time. As you can see in Figure 4.13, people in these 10 countries were able to identify vocal bursts of eight positive emotions—amusement, awe, con- tentment, desire, interest, relief, sympathy, and triumph—and seven negative emotions—anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, fear, pain, and sadness—as well as surprise.

Are vocal bursts universal? Can people living in cultures untouched by Western culture reli- ably identify emotion from the human voice, as they did in Ekman and Friesen’s work on facial

Vocal Communication of Emotion 105

expression with the Fore? To answer this question, Disa Sauter traveled to a remote part of Namibia to gather evidence from the Himba people (see Figure 4.14), a group of 20,000 indi- viduals living with no electricity or formal education, and with little history of contact with people from the outside (Sauter et al., 2010). Sauter presented vocal bursts of emotion of Western European individuals to the Himba and found that they could reliably label vocal bursts of anger, disgust, amusement, fear, sadness, and surprise. She also gathered vocal bursts of the Himba and found that Western Europeans could reliably judge those vocal bursts. Quite intriguingly, the Himba could not reliably label the Western vocal bursts of pleasure, relief, and admiration. And in a similar spirit, Daniel Cordaro traveled to a village in Eastern Bhutan, made remote by its location in the Eastern Himalayas and Bhutan’s very recent opening to travelers and technologies from the West. He had participants match vocal bursts to emotionally rich stories and found that 13 emotions could be reliably identified in vocal bursts (Cordaro et al., 2016).

We have already seen that one of the emotions we can convey with the voice—sympathy—may have predecessors in the vocalizations of great apes. Is there evidence for continuity of human emo- tional vocalization with that of nonhuman species for other emotions? Cheyney and Seyfarth (1990)

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FIGURE 4.14 A Himba woman listening to vocal bursts, and Disa Sauter working with the Himba.

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described how vervet monkeys have three main predators, and an avoidant action appropriate to each kind (see Figure 4.15). When an eagle appears, a monkey hides in the undergrowth; when a leopard is seen the monkey climbs a tree; if there is a snake the monkey rears on its hind legs and looks downward. If any monkey sees a predator, he or she makes one of three species characteristic alarm calls appropriate to the predator. The acoustic signal is heard by monkeys nearby, evokes the specific kind of fear in them, and induces them to take the appropriate evasive action.

FIGURE 4.15 Three different kinds of fearful response by vervet monkeys to three kinds of predator.

Tactile Communication of Emotion 107

Disa Sauter (2010) and Charles Snowdon (2003) documented several nonhuman vocali- zations that resemble those of humans. Several species have high-pitched alarm calls with abrupt onset and offset times that resemble human fear vocalizations. Macaque infants will utter coos when separated from their mothers, sounds that resemble those that human infants make when separated from their mothers. Macaques also emit “girns,” which are purr-like vocalizations that occur in the context of affiliation, and these may have parallels in humans expressing affection. Macaques in Sri Lanka utter a food call when they discover a source of ripe fruit, which may resemble vocal bursts of pleasure. Dominant primates often emit threat vocalizations that resemble angry vocalizations in humans. And chimpanzees emit calls when copulating—the male soft, short panting calls, the female long, loud screams—that have par- allels in humans.

Tactile Communication of Emotion In hunter-gatherer societies, human infants are typically in constant contact with other humans for the first year or two of life. They are held, soothed, tickled, clasped, breast-fed, and carried, as their first means by which they relate to others. One could make the case that it is in the lan- guage of touch—the most developed sensory modality at birth—that the human infant comes to understand emotions within early attachments and friendships (Field, 2001; Hertenstein, 2002; Stack, 2001).

Although touch may seem astonishingly simple in its form—a hug, or clasp of the arm, or soothing hand placed on the back—those actions are supported by a complex system of com- munication shaped by human evolution. The hand is a five-digit wonder of dexterity, designed to do many specific things the great ape’s hands can’t do, such as make tools, symbol, gesture, and touch in nuanced and varied ways. The skin weighs six to eight pounds and has three layers of billions of cells, some of which function like the eye or taste buds, receiving the touch and processing information about its qualities. The skin sends signals to the somatosensory cortex, which begins to represent the meaning of the touch. Touch is a rich nonverbal language in which humans flirt, express power, soothe, play, and maintain proximity (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Hertenstein et al., 2005).

Four Functions of Touch As we explained in Chapter 2, nonhuman primate species spend a good deal of their time groom- ing, in which two individuals sit together, sorting through each other’s fur (Dunbar, 1996). Chimpanzees, for example, can devote upward of 20 percent of their waking hours to grooming, building affectionate relationships (de Waal, 1989). Studies of nonhuman primate grooming and human touch reveal four functions of this kind of contact.

The first is that the right kind of touch soothes. In one study, 30 human infants were observed during a procedure in which the infants’ heels were cut by doctors (Gray, Watt, & Blass, 2000). In one condition, infants were held by their mothers in whole body, skin-to-skin contact. In the other condition, infants received the procedure while being swaddled in a crib. The infants who were touched during the procedure cried 82 percent less than the comparison infants, they grimaced 65 percent less, and they had lower heart rate during the procedure. In nonhuman primates, grooming reduces heart rate and displacement activities related to stress, such as striking others (Aureli, Preston, & de Waal, 1999). Rat pups who are handled exten- sively by their mothers show reduced activity of the hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis, which is involved in stress responses, and reduced corticosterone, a stress-related hormone, both immediately and when they are mature (Francis & Meaney, 1999; Levine & Stanton, 1984; Meaney, 2001).

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A second function of touch is to signal safety. This insight emerged within the attachment literature, where researchers observed that infants need to know whether the environment is safe, and do so by gathering information from their parent’s touch (Main, 1990). In one study, Anisfeld and colleagues compared the attachment styles of infants who were carried in soft infant carri- ers that put them in close physical contact with their parents with infants who were more often carried in harder infant seats (Anisfeld et al., 1990; Weiss et al., 2000). Infants who were carried next to their parents’ bodies were more likely to be securely attached later and confident when exploring the environment.

A third function of touch is to increase cooperation. In one study, participants were asked to sign a petition in support of a particular issue of importance locally (Willis & Hamm, 1980). Those participants who were touched when asked to sign were much more likely to comply (81%) than participants who were not touched during the request (55%). In a recent study of touch among professional basketball players in the National Basketball Association, Michael Kraus and his colleagues coded all of the touch—the high fives, fist bumps, head slaps, and bear hugs so common on the basketball court—that each team showed during one game at the begin- ning of the 2008 season (Kraus, Huang, & Keltner, 2010). Even though each player on average touched his teammates about 2 seconds during the game, that touch proved critical to team func- tioning. The more players touched each other, the more the teams proved to be cooperative on the court (e.g., helping out in defending the other team, making good passes to each other), and the better the team played at the end of the season.

A final function of touch is to provide pleasure. The simple touch of the arm with a soft velvety cloth activates the region of the prefrontal cortex that is involved in the processing of pleasur- able tastes and smells (Berridge, 2003; Rolls, 2000, 2013). Touch provides revealing information about the more and less rewarding times of a marriage. Couples who have been married longer tend to touch each other less than those in the early stages of the relationship (Willis & Briggs, 1992), and more happily married partners touch each other more than less happily married part- ners (Beier & Sternberg, 1977). Anticipating these functions of touch, William James (1890) observed that “Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.”

Communicating Emotions with Touch In a paper of 1996, Frans de Waal argued that chimpanzees use touch as a way of expressing gratitude to each other. For de Waal, the origins of human morality run deep and are found in emotional exchanges, and in expressive behavior such as touch. The empirical basis of this observation concerned food sharing. Chimpanzees will share food preferentially with those who groomed them earlier in the day. And chimpanzees will actively groom others who are sharing food. Gratitude, the feeling of appreciation for things that are given, might have its mammalian roots, according to de Waal, in these exchanges of appreciative touch for food.

This observation raises the possibility that not only might humans be able to communicate specific emotions with touch but also moral emotions, such as gratitude and sympathy, so critical to collaborative and kind relationships. To explore this possibility, Matthew Herten- stein and his colleagues carried out the following unusual research (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006). In the first study, an encoder (or toucher) and decoder (or touchee) sat at a table, separated by an opaque black curtain, which prevented communication other than touch. The encoder was given a list of emotions and asked to make contact with the decoder on the arm to communicate each emotion, using any form of touch. After each touch, the decoder selected from 13 response options the term that best described what the person

Emotional Expression and the Coordination of Social Interaction 109

was communicating. As you can see in Figure 4.16, participants could reliably communicate anger, disgust, and fear with a brief one- or two-second touch of another’s forearm, as well as love, gratitude, and sympathy. As you can see in the rightmost columns of Figure 4.16, partici- pants were more accurate in communicating emotion with touch when they were free to touch other parts of the body than the forearm; then they could reliably communicate happiness and sadness (Hertenstein et al., 2009).

Emotional Expression and the Coordination of Social Interaction When the ethologists analyzed the basic patterns of social interaction in remote peoples, they arrived at a central thesis of this book—emotional expressions shape the interactions that are essential to social relationships. Here, we have begun to envision how facial expressions, vocalizations, movements of the body, and patterns of touch coordinate social interactions—the soothing of a distressed child, the flirtation between potential suitors, status conflicts in groups, exhilarating laughter among friends sharing stories. Let’s consider a more systematic treatment of this possibility offered by Paula Niedenthal, Ursula Hess, and their colleagues. They reason that within 500 milliseconds, people respond to the emotional expressions of others with mimetic behavior and physiological reactions, responses that trigger a cascade of neural processes and specific cognitive and social reactions (Niedenthal et al., 2010). For example, a warm, enjoy- ment smile so typical in affiliative relationships triggers neural processes that lead the individual to seek more information about the smile through eye contact, and then feelings of pleasure, mimetic behavior, and the experience of positive emotion and approach behavior. A proud, dominant smile, by contrast, triggers the same automatic search for information about the smile and neural activation that leads to a sense of threat and avoidant behavior and sense of lower social status. What’s true of smiling is most certainly true of emotional communication by voice and touch: they trigger systematic experiences and actions in the perceiver, setting the stage for unfolding interactions between people.

FIGURE 4.16 Accuracy with which individuals can communicate emotion by touching a stranger on the forearm (left bars in light gray) or anywhere on the body (dark gray to right).

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This kind of theorizing reveals that expressions of emotion coordinate social interactions in at least three general ways (Hess & Hareli, 2017; Keltner & Kring, 1998; van Kleef, 2015). First, through their informative function, emotional expressions provide rapid information not only about the sender’s current emotions but also about that individual’s intentions and relationship with the other person (Ekman, 1993; Fridlund, 1992, 2017). In this way, expressions of emo- tion situate people in specific relationships. For example, anger clearly communicates strength and dominance vis-à-vis others (Knutson, 1996). When individuals express anger in the face or voice, they are perceived to have more power and are more likely to get their way in negotiations (van Kleef et al., 2006). Emotional expressions also carry information about the sincerity of the sender’s intentions. For example, Eva Krumhuber and Tony Manstead and their colleagues have found that people trust interaction partners more and will give more resources to those partners who display authentic smiles (which have longer onset and offset times) than fake smiles, which have shorter onsets and offsets (Krumhuber et al., 2007). Finally, emotional expressions convey information about the environment, allowing individuals to coordinate their responses to outside opportunities or threats (e.g., Klinnert et al., 1986; Sorce et al., 1985). For example, parents use touch and voice to signal to their young children whether other people and objects in the environ- ment are safe or dangerous (Hertenstein & Campos, 2004).

Emotional expressions coordinate social interactions through their evocative function, trig- gering specific responses in perceivers. For example, consider the powerful reactions an infant’s cry produces in caregivers nearby, prompting protective actions that are a basis for enduring attachment. An infant’s cry includes a long, continuous sound accompanied by acoustic varia- tions that in one study were found to signal different states, including anger (when the infant’s hands were pinned down), pain (after getting a shot), or fear (upon hearing a loud sound) (Choliz et al., 2012). Within 49 milliseconds (1/20th of a second), adults will show activation in the peri- aqueductal gray region of the brain, a region you shall learn enables sympathy and caregiving behavior, in response to a baby’s cries, but not in response to animal cries, human adult sounds, and other control sounds (Parsons, Young, et  al., 2014). When specific genes are altered that render rat pups unable to cry, they evoke no caregiving from their mothers, and soon perish. Yes, hearing an infant’s cry, which caregivers of infants do on average for two hours a day, is har- rowing, but through the responses crying evokes, adults nearby are stirred to provide care and security to that most important carrier of their genes, their offspring.

Finally, emotional displays serve incentive functions, inviting desired social behavior. Warm smiles and touches are often used by parents to reward behaviors in children, thus increasing the probability of those behaviors in the future (e.g., Tronick, 1989). Laughter from interaction part- ners also rewards desirable social behavior in adults (Owren & Bachorowski, 2001). And through their informative, evocative, and incentive functions, emotional expressions give structure to our social interactions and relationships.

Given these three functions of emotional expression, Oatley (2009) proposed that emotional expressions provide outline structures for specific kinds of relationships: when we see a smile, we feel happy and smile back, disposed to affiliate. We see tears, we feel sad, and are prompted to help. We see a frown, begin to feel angry, and become prepared for the possibility of conflict and the negotiation about something that has gone wrong in a relationship. When we hear someone’s expression of alarm, we feel frightened ourselves. Each kind of pattern of emotional expression configures a particular kind of relationship. Think of it like this. On the stage, an actor learns a script, a set of words. The actor’s job is to use the words and depict character-emotions that support certain relationships with other characters. In ordinary life, there’s something like the inverse: emotions provide us with scripts not of words, but of relating—in happy cooperation, in sad disengagement, in angry conflict, in shared fear, and so on—and we supply fitting words in our interactions with each other.

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Cultural Variation in Emotional Expression If you have traveled abroad, you may have been struck by how similar emotional expression is in different cultures. Stroll in a zocolo (square) in rural Mexico or market place in Thailand or wait at a bus stop in Nigeria and you’re likely to be impressed by the many similarities in emotional expression across cultures. You’ll see children smiling and laughing as they play. Courting ado- lescents reveal their affections in coy expressions. People arguing furrow their brows or sneer in disdain in recognizable ways. In this chapter, we have seen evidence that speaks to the universal- ity of emotional expression.

At the same time, you will also see cultural variation in emotional expression. You might arrive at the notion, as did early cultural researchers, that cultures vary profoundly in which emo- tions they are more likely to express. For example, Briggs (1970) wrote that the Inuit who live in the Canadian Arctic (colloquially referred to as Eskimos) do not express anger. In a similar fash- ion, you might become convinced that people from a certain culture seems to be more emotion- ally expressive. Consider one such study: friends were observed conversing with one another for 15 minutes, and in Puerto Rico those friends touched each other 110 times, whereas in England the friends never touched! (Jourard, 1966).

Cultural Variation in Expressive Behavior Researchers have identified three ways that members of different cultures vary in their emotional expression. First, members of different cultures vary in the intensity of the emotional expression, in particular of those emotions that are more focal in the culture. For example, Tracy and Matsu- moto (2008) found, in their study of the emotional expressions of Olympic athletes, that competi- tors from more collectivist cultures expressed more intense shame displays (head droops, postural constrictions) upon losing, which is consistent with the more pronounced emphasis on modesty and not standing out in collectivist cultures. Guided by her thesis that cultures will express emo- tions they value more with more intense expressive behavior (see Chapter 3), Jeanne Tsai and her colleagues documented that US government officials, business executives, and university leaders smile with more intense and excited smiles than leaders in China (Tsai et al., 2016).

A second way in which members of different cultures vary in their expression is how they regulate their expressive behavior according to culture-specific display rules. Recall in Chap- ter 3 we learned that people are much more likely to suppress the expression of emotion in highly collectivist cultures like Japan (e.g., Matsumoto et al., 2009). This is in keeping with the notion, more pronounced in collectivist cultures, that emotional expression makes the individual stand out and potentially disrupts social harmony by imposing upon others.

Finally, recent studies reveal that cultures develop unique dialects in which they express emo- tions in culturally specific ways. To understand how this is so, Hillary Elfenbein and Ursula Hess have offered their emotion dialect theory (Elfenbein et al., 2007). They reason that emotional expression is likely to function much like language, such as English. Namely, languages have elements—select phonemes, words, forms of syntax—shared by its speakers, as well as dialects, or specific variations of the language, in sound and word use that are specific to a geographical region. For example, although standard English is common to the English people, speakers from different regions, for instance, London or the Midlands, speak their own dialects, with unique words, phrases, and accents and forms of prosody.

In extending this idea of dialect to emotional expression, Hess and Elfenbein predicted that people of different cultures will express emotions with prototypical elements of the expression, but develop shared and culturally specific ways of expressing each emotion. As one concrete

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example, whereas across different cultures people recognize embarrassment in its prototypical display—the downward gaze, inhibited smile, head turn, and face touch—throughout much of Southeast Asia, the tongue bite and shoulder shrug combine to form an emotional dialect that expresses embarrassment (Haidt & Keltner, 1999).

Several recent studies speak to the prevalence of cultural variations in dialects in emotional expression. In these studies, people from different cultures, including Canada, Africa, India, Japan, South Korea, China, and the United States, were given a definition of different emotions or a situation likely to produce the emotion, and then asked to express the emotion with any behavior that felt natural (e.g., Cordaro et al., 2017; Hess et al., 2007; Laukka et al., 2016). These patterns of expression were then analyzed for their specific facial and bodily move- ments, identifying what is universal and how prevalent culturally specific dialects are. A first generalization is just how pervasive emotion dialects are. In one study that looked at expres- sions of 22 emotions, every emotion was found to have a dialect specific to the culture, and about 25 percent of an individual’s expressive behavior across emotions was a dialect (whereas 50% of an individual’s expressive behavior adhered to the universal prototype) (Cordaro et al., 2017). Second, it looks as though dialects are more likely to emerge for emotions that are more directly involved in social interactions, such as anger, happiness, or shame, than emotions that are less directly involved in social interactions, such as disgust or fear (Elfenbein et al., 2007). It would seem that the emotions that are more highly social may vary more across cultures.

Cultural Variation in the Interpretation of Emotional Expression Emotional expressions signal information about the sender’s intention, their relationship to oth- ers, and their appraisals of people and objects in the environment. Given that cultures develop specific belief systems about emotion, intentions, traits, selves, and relationships, one is likely to observe considerable variation in the interpretation of the meaning of an emotional expression (Barrett et al., 2011). In keeping with this thinking, individuals from different cultures differ in the emotional intensity that they attribute to facial expressions of emotion (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1989). For example, Japanese participants tend to attribute less intense emotion than Americans to all facial expressions of emotion (Biehl et al., 1997; Matsumoto et al., 2002; Matsumoto et al., 1999). Why might these differences occur? Matsumoto et al. (1999) compared American and Japanese judgments of the intensity of the outward display and of the inner experience. Japanese people assumed that the display and inner experience of emotion were the same. Americans, in contrast, indicated that the external display of emotion was more intense than the inner experi- ence, consistent with the emphasis in the United States on expressing feelings (see also Matsu- moto et al., 2009, discussed in Chapter 3).

As we discussed in the previous chapter, members of collectivist cultures tend to rely on more contextual information in constructing the meaning of emotional expressions, a tendency in keeping with the more general tendency for people to look to the social context rather than inside the individual to make sense of behavior.

Culture shapes the brain’s responses people show to emotional expressions, in ways that are in keeping with cultural differences in the valuing of emotions. BoKyung Park and their col- leagues presented images of more intense, excited smiles and less intense, calm smiles to Chinese and European American students while their brains were being scanned (Park et al., 2016). In keeping with Jeanne Tsai’s theorizing about the cultural valuation of emotion, the Chinese stu- dents showed greater activation in reward-related circuits—the ventral striatum and caudate—in response to the calm smiles, whereas the US students showed more reward-related activation in response to the excited smiles.

Communication of Emotion in Art 113

Communication of Emotion in Art In the experience of some of your emotions, you may feel drawn to artistic expression. In a state of despair or longing, you might feel inclined to write a story, play the guitar, or paint abstract patterns. When euphoric about a new loved-one, you might write poetry or songs, or find cinematic images arising in your mind. Art is a kind of communication. Unlike a smile or a grumble, however, which are ephemeral, art persists in time and can travel beyond its place of inception (Oatley, 2003). Unlike flint tools, or saucepans, or computers, or bicycles, which are made to be useful, works of art are often thought of as expressions of emotion that attain cultural significance.

Art emerged in human evolution relatively recently, long after the emergence of language. A factory for making ochre, used for painting bodies or objects in the spirit of beautification, has been found that is 100,000 years old (Henshilwood et  al., 2011). The oldest human art objects, shells drilled to make beads for necklaces, are from 82,000 years ago (Bouzouggar et al., 2007). Neanderthals also made such necklaces; Hoffmann et al. (2018) found traces of these from even older times. Such ornaments speak, perhaps, to an emotional interest in aes- thetics and beauty.

The evidence of ritual burials from around 40,000 years ago (Bowler et al., 2003) implies that by then emotionally moving stories were being told of people who were dead but alive again on another plane of existence. The earliest known human cave paintings date back to 31,000 years. (Chauvet, Deschamps, & Hillaire, 1996). Attraction to paintings and other works of art is now thought to be subject to emotionally evolved preferences (Dutton, 2009; Kawabata & Zeki, 2004). The emotionally important communication of music is at least 43,000 years old as shown by the finding of a flute of that age (Huron, 2003).

As Mithen (1996, 2001) puts it, signs such as these indicate the cognitive ability for meta- phor. A metaphor often links something immediate and something imagined, so when Shake- speare’s Hamlet said, “Denmark’s a prison,” Denmark was present but the prison was that of his imagination. Unlike useful objects, which are what they are, objects of art are both what they are and are something else. A shell is both a shell and a bead for a necklace. A cave paint- ing is both a set of marks on a wall and a rhinoceros or an auroch (an extinct species of a type of wild cattle). Human burial indicates that someone is both dead and alive in some way or in one’s memory, and stories about this person may be told. Such artistic products have emotional significance.

Reflection and Cultivation: Improving Your Emotional Intelligence

In this chapter, you have learned about the languages of the face, voice, and touch, through which we communicate emotion. Throughout this book, you will learn how central emotional communication is to social adjustment. People who have pronounced abilities to communicate emotion and perceive emotion, who have high levels of emotional intelli- gence, fare well in all manner of relationships (see Chapter 9). People who struggle to read the emotions of others, like chil- dren with Autism, have difficulties with social adjustment.

Given these findings, we suggest the following. Do you want to get a sense of how good you are at read- ing facial expression and vocalization? Go to the website greatergood.berekeley.edu and take the emotional intel- ligence quiz, as millions of others have. See how well you do. Which emotions proved hard to judge for you, if any? Why? What did you learn about how emotion is communi- cated in the face and voice?

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Art differs widely from society to society, from epics of ancient Babylon, to the legends of the Bhagavad Gita, to the bronzes of Benin, to the jazz of New Orleans. It has long been believed that in expressing our emotions in art, we come to understand them more deeply. As the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham put it: “The difference between the artist and the non-artist is not the greater capacity for feeling. The secret is that the artist can objectify, can make apparent the feelings we all have” (cit. Gardner, 1993, p. 298).

Four Hypotheses from the Idea of Romanticism This notion—that art is about the expression of feeling—was the central theme of the intel- lectual and historical movement of Romanticism (Oatley, 2003), which we discussed in the previous chapter, and which we will use to organize our treatment, here of emotional expression in art. The Romantic idea translates into four hypotheses about the communication of emotion in art.

As Collingwood (1938) argued in The Principles of Art, sometimes we experience emotions that we do not consciously understand, and this prompts us to explore them by expressing them in a language, for instance of words of poetry, prose, or screenplay, or in music, or in painting, or sculpture. In that way we can better understand these inchoate emotions, and those who engage in the art can do so in a kind of resonance with it. So this is the first hypothesis of the Romantic idea: sometimes the meanings of emotions are unclear, when we also know these emotions are important. Does this happen to you? Oatley and Duncan (1992) found that the proportion of eve- ryday emotion incidents recorded in structured diaries that had some aspect that participants did not understand varied between 5 and 25 percent in different samples.

A second claim of the Romantic idea is that this exploration involves creative expression. Emotions tend to occur when expectations are not met, or when plans meet vicissitudes, when we have no ready answer to some pressing concern. Thus, they often demand a creative response (Averill & Nunley, 1992). Art is a creative activity of expressing, and thereby understanding, such emotions. Djkic, Oatley, and Peterson (2006) found by comparing the words used in interviews by fiction writers and physicists that the writers were preoccupied by emotions, particularly negative emotions, in ways that the physicists were not. To investigate further the relation of emotions to creativity, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) and his students interviewed 91 exceptionally creative people, including many artists. One of the themes that emerged is indeed that creative expression arises out of emotional experience. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from Hilde Domin, a leading German poet, in her seventies at the time of the interview. In her poetry, she says:

[The emotion] gets fulfilled, I guess. You know what was in you, and you can look at it now. And it is a kind of catalyst . . . You are freed for a time from the emotion. And the next reader will take the place of the author, isn’t it so? If he identifies with the writing he will become, in his turn, the author.

(Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 245)

A third hypothesis that derives from the Romantic idea is that artistic expression often itself takes on themes and dynamic forms of emotions. For example, if you take to painting while enraged in the aftermath of a bitter breakup, your painting might have emotional tones of your rage and despair. Fiction that you write about a tragic childhood might center upon themes of loss and longing.

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Further evidence of this third proposition, not so much in terms of themes as of dynamics, has been offered for music by Gabrielsson and Juslin (2001) and Juslin and Laukka (2003). They observed that the voice and music share many emotionally expressive properties, with acoustic features that the performer enacts, such as tempo, loudness, timbre, and pitch. This may account for how instruments such as the violin, cello, organ, slide guitar, and saxophone can resemble the human voice. In the words of the famous composer Richard Wagner, “the old- est, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.” The philosopher Susan Langer arrived at a similar conclusion: “Because the forms of human feeling are much more congruent with musical forms than with forms of language, music can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach” (1957, p. 235).

In an analysis of the cues that people use to infer emotion from the voice and music, Juslin and Laukka (2003) found support for the claim that emotion is communicated in the voice and in music with similar acoustic parameters. They found that tempo, loudness, and pitch were used by listeners of vocal communication and music alike to infer that anger, sadness, happiness, and tenderness were being communicated. More recently, Talia Wheatley and her colleagues have found that people in dramatically different cultures, including a remote community in Cambodia, use the same dynamic qualities (direction, size, rate, smoothness) to create music and animated movements to express several emotions (Wheatley et al., 2013).

A fourth hypothesis inspired by Romanticism is that readers or spectators of art should experi- ence emotions that are communicated in art. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories (Oatley, 2012) is about how fiction embodies themes both of characters’ emotions and of the reader’s own emotions. It is a hybrid book: a seven-part novella written for the book, together with psychological discussions of the emotions of each part.

People respond emotionally to the emotional content of art (e.g., Lipps, 1962). We experi- ence the emotions of protagonists in novels or films based on human action (Tan, 1996). We soar toward the heavens in the vaulted space of a great cathedral. Kreitler and Kreitler (1972) have even found that 84 percent of the time visitors to museums will unwittingly imitate in their bodies the postures conveyed in sculptures.

How accurate are we in recognizing the emotion communicated in art? Within the domain of music, Gabrielsson and Juslin (2003) and Juslin and Laukka (2003) reviewed studies in which a performer was asked to sing a brief melody with no words and attempt to communicate anger, fear, happiness, sadness, joy, and, on occasion, tenderness or love. The listener was then asked, in a forced choice paradigm, to choose the word from a list of words that best matches the emo- tion conveyed in the performance. Across over a dozen studies of this kind, listeners on average achieved accuracy rates of about 70 percent, which is comparable to the accuracy with which we perceive emotion in the face and voice.

Aesthetic Emotions in the Natyasastra Are there benefits to understanding and feeling the emotions expressed in art? The possibility that our health and well-being are enhanced through emotional expression in art is supported by recent studies of how people benefit from arts therapy (Stuckey & Nobel, 2010). With increas- ing frequency, people suffering from depression, or at risk for dementia, or an abusive marriage, or who are grappling with cancer or other diseases, are given the opportunity for arts therapy. They can paint to represent their disease, such as a heart condition. Or they can listen to music in hospital or group therapy settings. Or they might write poetry to represent a trauma in the family. Or the elderly might be provided the opportunity to dance or practice Tai Chi in a nursing home.

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These therapies are now being studied systematically, and a review of this evidence suggests that expressing emotion through art reduces anxiety, increases calm, can lead to better physiological profiles (e.g., reduced blood pressure), and can bring enhanced community and a sense of well- being (for review, see Stuckey & Nobel, 2010).

As you will recall from Chapter 1, Aristotle offered one analysis of the healing benefits of expressing emotion through art in his formulation of katharsis, wherein he reasoned that drama expresses many of the universal predicaments and conditions of humanity, and these meanings could be clarified. In drama, people suffer, they face mortal danger, they fall in love, they encounter infidelity, they strive for difficult goals. In viewing dramatic expressions of emotion, the spectator arrives at a clearer understanding of his or her own emotions. Freud arrived at a similar view, arguing that art allows us to express aspects of inner emotional con- flicts in disguised forms that allow some satisfaction of expression while avoiding censure (1904/1985).

What about the everyday benefits of art, when we are not suffering from more acute physi- cal or psychological conditions? Juslin and his colleagues randomly beeped people on their cell phones during the day and found that about 40 percent of the time young adults were listening to music, and most typically felt contentment, perhaps due to insights they gained into their own emotions (Juslin et al., 2008). Mar, Oatley, and Peterson (2009) found that the more fiction (but not nonfiction) people read, the greater was their empathy for others; the effect was not due to empathetic people being more likely to read fiction. This effect has now been replicated many times (Oatley, 2016).

One of the most sophisticated treatments of emotional expression in art is found in a Hindu- Indian treatise, the Natyasastra, attributed to Bharata from around the second-century BC (Bharata Muni, 200 BC). In this text, there are specific descriptions of how actors and dancers are to express emotions in performance. Hejmadi, Davidson, and Rozin (2000) presented par- ticipants in India and the United States with videotapes of Hejmadi’s own renditions in dance of 10 different emotions (she performed as a dancer in India for 20 years). The performances largely involved face and hand movements for: anger, disgust, fear, heroism, humor, love, peace, sad- ness, lajya (embarrassment/shyness/ modesty), and wonder. Each video clip lasted between 4 and 10 seconds. Remarkably, in both forced choice and free response exercises, observers were well above chance, achieving accuracy rates between 61 and 69 percent, in judging the 10 emotions communicated with dance and gesture.

In the Natyasastra, Bharata also discusses the theory of rasas, which are distinct aesthetic emotions. They have recently been discussed in Western theories of emotions (Hogan, 1996; Oatley, 2004c; Shweder & Haidt, 2000). Each rasa corresponds to an everyday emotion. But the idea of the ancient theorists was that in a rasa one would be able to experience and under- stand more clearly, without—as they put it—being blinded by our usual thick crust of egotism that covers our eyes. In Indian texts on rasas, the usual mapping is between everyday emotions and rasas.

Pursuing our interest in communication in this chapter, we have taken a slight liberty with this tradition in Table 4.3, in which we list emotions as enacted by an actor, the Sanskrit name of the corresponding rasa, and its approximate translation to indicate what would be experienced by the spectator. Seeing an actor suffering and sorrowful, for example, produces an aesthetic emotion of compassion, though because it is an aesthetic emotion it also includes the pleasure of understanding and insight. Seeing a performer persevere against all odds—a frequent theme in stories—inspires a heroic feeling in the spectator. A recent movement in Western theater has been to train actors in the theory of rasas (Schechner, 2001). You may also like to observe that each emotional theme in Table 4.3 corresponds to a particular genre (love story, comedy, trag- edy, and so on).

Summary 117

Within the Natyasastra’s analysis of aesthetic emotion is the possibility that in viewing the artistic portrayal of emotion, we are free of the burdens of the ego and find aesthetic delight. This possibility has intrigued scientists working in a new discipline known as neuroaesthetics (e.g., Zeki, 2004). A recent review of how our brains respond to different forms of art, from paintings to sculpture to dance, highlights the prescient wisdom of the Natyasastra that there is something special in the appreciation of artistic portrayals of emotion (Kirsch, Urgesi, & Cross, 2015). Stud- ies within this tradition find that when viewing art our sensory and perceptual regions of the brain are activated, as one would expect, but so too are two areas. A first involves regions you will learn of later such as the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex, which are involved in our experiences of reward and delight. A second is the motor cortex area that enables specific physi- cal action. In viewing the artistic expression of emotion, then, we find delight and the impulse to our own action.

Emotions, then, are communicated in everyday life, but these communications are usually ephemeral. So important are emotions to us, however, that artists have devised many forms of expression that communicate emotions in longer-lasting ways that enable us to experience them in new ways and to reflect on them.

S U M M A R Y

In this chapter we examined the communication of emotion in the face, voice, and touch, as well as in art. We began by break- ing down the realm of nonverbal behavior into five categories: emblems, illustrators, regulators, adaptors, and emotion displays. We considered how emotion displays, such as smiles of enjoy- ment, differ from nonemotional expressions, like polite smiles, in terms of duration and incorporation of involuntary actions. We then considered the different ways that humans communicate emotion. We reviewed the studies of the universality of facial expression of emotion. We considered how vocal communication permeates communicative acts like laughter and how people communicate emotion in the voice. We then turned to a less well-studied channel of emotional communication: touch. From the first moments of life, touch functions to soothe, to signal safety, to gain compliance, and

as a reward, and recent evidence suggests that humans can com- municate several different emotions with brief touches to the arm, including love, gratitude, and sympathy. We next considered how emotional expression shapes social interactions and varies across cultures. Finally, we considered how emotion is communicated in art, exploring this question from the perspective of Romanticism. This perspective suggests four propositions: emotions that we don’t fully understand motivate us to explore their meaning, this explo- ration is creative, artistic expression often takes on themes and qualities of expressive channels such as the voice, and observers experience emotions in engaging with art. We concluded this chap- ter with a discussion of the ancient Indian text, the Natyasastra, and its portrayal of how emotion is expressed in dance and drama and the nature of aesthetic emotion.

Table 4.4 Emotions as performed by actors, rasas, and English translations of them as aesthetic emotions that spectators may experience

Performer’s emotion Rasa Spectator’s emotion

Sexual passion sringara Love

Amusement hasya Amusement

Sorrow karuna Compassion

Anger raudra Anger

Fear bhayanaka Terror

Perseverance vira Heroism

Disgust bibhatsa Loathing

Wonder adbhuta santa Awe

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T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. Spend 10 minutes observing interactions in a group of friends, and take note of the different emblems, illustrators, regulators, and adaptors that you observe. What did you see?

2. Think about Darwin’s principle of serviceable habits. How would you use this principle to explain why we express a

particular emotion as we do; try this for disgust, or embarrass- ment, or gratitude.

3. Consider a favorite piece of music. What insights has it given you into your emotions?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

For Ekman’s view of facial expression of emotion:

Ekman, P. (1993). Facial expression and emotion. American Psychologist, 48, 384–392.

For many recent approaches to facial expression:

Russell, J., & Fernandez Dols, J-M. (2017). Facial expression. New York: Oxford University Press.

For a more recent evolutionary perspective on emotional expression:

Shariff, A. F., & Tracy, J. L. (2011). What are emotion expressions for? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 395–399.

For an extensive review of facial expression:

Keltner, D., Sauter, D., Tracy, J., McNeil, G., & Cordaro, D.T. (2016). Expression. In L. F. Barrett (Ed.), Handbook of emotion. (pp. 467–482). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

For a review of how emotions are communicated in musical performance:

Juslin, P. N. (2010). Expression and communication of emotion in music performance. In P. N. Juslin & J. A. Sloboda (Eds.), Handbook of music and emotion (pp. 453–489). New York: Oxford University Press.

For a recent consideration of emotional expression in fiction:

Oatley, K. (2016). Fiction: Simulation of social worlds. Trends in Cogni- tive Sciences, 20, 618–628.

For a recent study on the vocal expression of emotion:

Laukka, P., Elfenbein, H. A., Thingujam, N. S., Rockstuhl, T., Iraki, F. K., Chui, W., & Althoff, J. (2016). The expression and recognition of emo- tions in the voice across five cultures: A lens model analysis based on acoustic features. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111, 686–705.

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5Bodily Changes and Emotions

A cold sweat covers me, and trembling seizes me all over.

Sappho (circa 580 BCE)

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FIGURE 5.0 Bernini: St. Teresa. Of this sculpture Gombrich (1972, p. 345) says that Bernini has “carried us to a pitch of emotion which artists had so far shunned.”

CONTENTS Early Theorizing About Emotion and Bodily Changes

Emotion and the Autonomic Nervous System

Directed Facial Action and Physiological Differentiation of Negative Emotion Autonomic Response and Positive Emotion Vagal Tone and Compassion The Blush The Chills

Emotion and the Neuroendocrine System The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis

Emotion and the Immune System The Inflammation Response

Bodily Changes and Emotional Experience Representations of Emotions in the Body Interoception

Embodiment, Cognition, and Social Interaction

Gut Feelings and Decision Making Embodied Empathy

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Bodily Changes and emotions120

In 1977 the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched into space from Cape Canaveral Florida, designed to fly by Jupiter and Saturn and eventually leave our solar system. Today, just over 40 years later, the spacecraft is over 13 billion miles from where you are sitting reading this book.

Contained within the Voyager 1 is the Golden Record. This album includes sounds and images selected by a committee led by renown astronomer Carl Sagan, whose charge was to represent life on Earth, in the event that the Voyager 1 ever cross paths with extraterrestrial life. On the Golden Record are explanations of DNA and sexual reproduction, the very foundation of life. The record has images of insects, plants, and animals, and sounds of different mam- mals, examples of the Earth’s biodiversity. In the spirit of human ethology, there are images of people doing everyday things, from eating to playing with children. To capture human culture, there are photographs of buildings, maps, and pages from important books, some mathematics, as well as a variety of musical selections, from the music of Mozart to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode.”

The Golden Record also includes an hour of recordings of the brain and heart rate activity of Ann Druyan, who helped design the record. More specifically, you can see images of the patterns of activation in her brain and heart as she experienced different emotions, including her love for Dr. Sagan, with whom she had joined during the making of the album. Should extraterrestrial life ever listen to the Golden Record, perhaps they would learn something about human emotion by looking at the recordings of the heart as one woman thought of her new love.

The idea that our emotions—in Druyan’s case love—are based in bodily changes is an old one. In many languages people speak of emotions as being located in the heart, or the liver, or the stomach. Metaphors for emotion—“butterflies in the stomach,” “broken heart”—are suggestive of this possibility as well, that emotions are represented in changes in the body.

As you will recall from Chapter 1, this idea received its most systematic early treatment by William James. His argument, that bodily changes make up the experience of emotion, yields three questions that are at the heart of this chapter. The first is simple conceptually, but difficult empirically. Is there emotion-specific activation in bodily systems? A second is: to what extent is the experience of emotion based on activation of different bodily systems? And, finally, to what extent do the bodily responses of emotion serve as guides to our social thought and behavior?

Early Theorizing About Emotion and Bodily Changes William James corresponded regularly with his brother, Henry, who became famous as a novelist. Their letters often refer to their physical ills and bodily sensations—vivid descriptions of back pains, upset stomachs, muscle tension, tingly veins, and bodily fatigue. The two brothers’ near obsession with physical sensations provides a personal clue to an idea that William James pro- posed, in 1884, that would turn the field of research on emotions on its head.

Most writers until that time had argued that the experience of an emotion is a response to an emotionally exciting event. Emotional experience, in turn, generates emotion-related bod- ily changes, including actions in the social context. James altered this sequence, and (as we described in Chapter 1) located the origins of emotional experience in the body. For him, the sequence was: (a) exciting event, (b) bodily responses to the event, and (c) perception of these bodily responses as the experience of emotion. This would prove to be a controversial thesis, the repercussions of which continue today.

Poets have known for more than 2,500 years that bodily changes such as heart palpitations, sweats, trembling, heart flutters, blushes and flushes, muscular tension, muscle movements, tears, and chills are involved in our experience of emotion. Yet James would take this idea further.

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He contended that every emotion, from anger to sympathy to the awe or ecstasy you might feel at a concert of your favorite band, involves a distinct “bodily reverberation.” The bodily responses James considered are myriad and include patterns of breathing, blood flow, heart palpitations, trembles, and goosebumps as well as activities of glands such as the lacrimal glands that produce tears. Muscle movements of different kinds, when we prepare for fleeing or to strike or crouch or embrace, are involved. So too, James posited, are organs such as the liver and stomach. Emotion is the perception of such reverberations in all the different systems of the body that lie below our brainstem (Price & Harmon-Jones, 2015).

How did James arrive at this view? Largely through thought experiments. He asked his reader: What would be left of fear or love or embarrassment, or any emotion if you took away the physiological sensations such as the heart palpitations, trembling, muscle tensions, sensations in the skin, and blush? A purely intellectual state, James reasoned. Emotion would be absent. As another kind of evidence, James noted that people in mental asylums suffer from “unmotived” emotions such as fear, anger, or sadness; their bodies produce responses that lead to intense emo- tions in the absence of any event in the environment. For James, “our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame.”

James’s theorizing was not without its early critics. Walter Cannon was first a student, then a colleague, of William James at Harvard University. He was unconvinced by James’s arguments about emotion (Cannon, 1927, 1929). He proposed that bodily changes are produced by the brain and that many different emotions involve exactly the same general activation of the sympathetic autonomic nervous system, an alternative hypothesis we shall soon consider.

Cannon offered several more specific critiques of James’s theorizing that are worth bearing in mind as we consider the evidence on emotion and bodily changes. Specifically, Cannon argued that bodily responses associated with emotion—shifts in heart rate, shallower breathing, sweaty palms, goosebumps—are too nonspecific to account for the many distinctions people make in their emotional experience, for instance, between gratitude, compassion, love, desire, triumph, and pride. Cannon questioned whether we are sensitive enough to the changes in our bodily systems to give rise to our experience of emotion. This question has spawned a literature we will consider that centers upon “interoception”—the sensitivity to internal events in the body, and how this sensitivity shapes emotional experience. The specificity and nuance of different emo- tions, Cannon contended, was to be found not in the body, but in the brain.

Now, over 130 years later, we know that emotional experience arises both in the body and in the brain. Understanding these mind–body connections is the focus of our next two chapters.

Significant Figure: William James

William James was born in 1842, eldest of five talented children. William’s father, a dreamer, a bit of a crank, a man of leisure with independent means, had inherited from his own Irish immigrant father a large house in New York, where William was born. William’s mother Mary was the practical one of the family. His brother Henry, born in 1843, became one of the world’s great novelists, while his only sister, Alice, as talented as her brothers, was not able to overcome the barriers to women in that period, and declined into chronic health ailments and invalidism. The family led an affectionate but chaotic life, with a potpourri of educational experiences

for the children, including a procession of governesses and tutors, long stays in Europe, and periods in private experi- mental schools. At the age of 18, William studied art for a year, and then took up chemistry. Two years later he changed to medicine, gaining an MD degree in 1869. He obtained an instructor’s post in physiology at Harvard in 1872.

In 1878, a turning point occurred: he met Alice Gibbens who introduced a degree of organization into his life, shared his interests, and helped him concentrate his energies. From then on, his hypochondria, which had been disabling, decreased. In 1885, James became Professor of Philosophy.

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Emotion and the Autonomic Nervous System When William James wrote of “bodily reverberations,” he was referring to what scientists call the autonomic nervous system, the neuroendocrine system, and the immune system. Here we first consider the autonomic nervous system and its role in human emotion.

As you can see in Figure 5.1, the autonomic nervous system consists of two branches that receive neural signals from regions of the cortex, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus, among other areas in the brain. Broadly speaking, the autonomic nervous system maintains conditions in the body through activities such as blood flow, glucose production, and digestion that ena- ble different kinds of action, from soothing to fight or flight to affiliation and sexual behavior (Mendes, 2016).

The parasympathetic autonomic nervous system consists of nerves that originate at the top and bottom of the spinal cord. The parasympathetic system decreases heart rate and blood pres- sure. It facilitates blood flow by dilating certain arteries. It increases blood flow to erectile tissue in the penis and clitoris, and thus is essential to the sexual response. It increases digestive pro- cesses by moving digested food through the gastrointestinal tract. The parasympathetic system also constricts the pupil and bronchioles. It stimulates the secretion of various fluids throughout the body, including those in the digestive glands, salivation, and tears. It is thought to play a role in digestion, relaxation, and social connection, as we shall see.

The sympathetic autonomic nervous system involves over a dozen neural pathways origi- nating in middle of the spinal cord. It increases heart rate, blood pressure, and cardiac output. It produces vasoconstriction in most arteries. It shuts down digestive processes and is associated with contractions in the reproductive organs that are part of orgasm. The sympathetic system leads to the contraction of the piloerector muscles that surround the hairs on the arms, neck and back, which helps with thermoregulation (and is involved in experiences of awe). And it increases many processes that provide energy for the body, including the freeing of fatty acids in the blood stream, and reduces activity of natural killer cells, which are involved in immune responses. Given these effects, many have argued that the sympathetic system helps prepare the body for fight or flight responses.

With ever-increasing precision, psychologists measure the autonomic nervous system in over 30 different ways, in setups such as that seen in Figure 5.2 (Kreibig, 2010; Mendes, 2016). Given that 20 different neural bundles of the ANS produce so many changes throughout the body, James thesis of emotion-specific physiology is plausible: perhaps emotions have distinct patterns in this complex system of the body (Janig, 2003). Let’s now turn to the evidence.

He was the founder of American Psychology, and influenced the philosophical school of Pragmatism, whose adherents included John Dewey. James was an amiable, tolerant, widely read man, with a gift for thoughtful literary expres- sion. His Principles of Psychology is regarded still as the best textbook that psychology has had.

Besides his Principles of Psychology, James’s theory of emotions as end-points, as experiences of bodily changes that occur as a result of actions, is the work for which he

is best known. It has continued to be influential, but not many Jamesians will tell you that James himself seemed to give up his own theory. In his only large-scale research pro- ject, which he published in 1902 as Varieties of Religious Experience, there is nothing of his theory of emotions as end-points. Instead, in this book, James found that in reli- gious conversions emotions are causes. They are prime- movers by which people could change their identities and their lives (Oatley & Djikic, 2002).

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Directed Facial Action and Physiological Differentiation of Negative Emotion In the 1970s, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen developed the Facial Action Coding System, an anatomically based coding system that identifies the activity of facial muscle movements based on changes in the visible appearance of the face. In doing this, they devoted thousands of hours to moving their facial muscles, noting how these movements created new creases, wrinkles, dim- ples, bulges, and changes to the appearance of the face. In the course of this detailed work, Ekman noticed the following: moving facial muscles changed how he felt. When he furrowed the brow, his heart rate seemed to increase and his blood pressure rose. When he wrinkled the nose

Dilates pupil, inhibits tears

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Stimulates secretion of epinephrine and norepinephrine by adrenal medulla

Inhibits digestive system

Constricts blood vessels in skin

Stimulates glucose release

Stimulates sweating

Speeds heartbeat

Slows heartbeat

Lungs

Constricts airways

Relaxes airways

Inhibits salivation Stimulates salivation

Constricts pupil, produces tears

Liver

Pancreas

Stimulates digestive systemStomach

Small intestine

Large intestine

Contracts bladder

Rectum

Relaxes bladder

Stimulates sexual arousalStimulates

orgasm

Parasympathetic: Preganglionic neuron Postganglionic neuron

Sympathetic: Preganglionic neuron Postganglionic neuron

FIGURE 5.1 Anatomical diagram of the human autonomic nervous system.

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and stuck out the tongue, his heart seemed to slow down. Might moving facial muscles into emo- tion configurations produce specific autonomic activity? Both Darwin and James had written of this possibility; now the field needed an empirical test.

To examine this possibility, Robert Levenson and his colleagues developed the directed facial action task (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983; Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990). They had participants follow muscle-by-muscle instructions to configure their faces into the six different expressions of the emotions that Ekman and Friesen had studied in New Guinea. For one expres- sion, participants were instructed to do the following (Try it yourself):

1. Wrinkle your nose.

2. Raise your upper lip.

3. Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.

Once participants had made the pose in a fashion that conformed to the emotional expression (which took some coaching), they held the expression for 10 seconds. As they did so, four meas- ures of autonomic activity were gathered and compared to a control condition. Table 5.1 presents results from one study using this task.

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FIGURE 5.2 In this setup in Robert Levenson’s laboratory, two participants’ autonomic physiology is recorded as they talk with each other. Receptors help gather measures of participants’ activity, heart rate, pulse in the finger and ear, galvanic sweat response in the finger, skin temperature, and respiration.

Table 5.1 Emotion-related changes in autonomic physiology observed in the directed facial action task

Anger Fear Sad Disgust Smile Surprise

Heart rate (BPM) 5.0 5.5 4.2 .70 2.4 .20

Finger temperature .20 −.05 .07 .07 .01 .01

Galvanic skin response .41 .58 .43 .52 .07 .07

Muscle activity –.01 .01 −.01 .01 .01 .00

Source: Adapted from Levenson et al. (1990).

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Let’s put these results in the context of competing hypotheses about physiological specificity. One hypothesis, in part inspired by Cannon, is that negative emotions—anger, disgust, fear, and sadness in this study—all involve increased arousal in the sympathetic autonomic nervous sys- tem. By contrast, three findings portrayed in Table 5.1 point to some physiological specificity for the negative emotions. First, increases in heart rate occurred for fear, anger, and sadness, but not for disgust. Second, galvanic skin response (the measure of sweat activity) was greater for fear and disgust than for anger and sadness. Third, finger temperature was greater for anger than fear, because in anger blood flows freely to the hands (perhaps to aid in combat), whereas during fear blood remains near the chest to support flight-related locomotion. These distinctions challenge a one-arousal-fits-all model of autonomic activity and negative emotion (although see Cacioppo, Klein, Berntson, & Hatfield, 1993 for critique).

Guided by an evolutionist perspective, Levenson and Ekman conducted a similar directed facial action study with the Minangkabau, a matrilineal people in West Sumatra, Indonesia (Levenson, Ekman, Heider, & Friesen, 1992). For the most part, they observed similar auto- nomic changes associated with four negative emotions. Subsequent studies have replicated these emotion-specific autonomic patterns in elderly adults, although interestingly, in general, elderly adults (aged 65 and above) showed attenuated autonomic responses (Levenson, Carstensen, Friesen, & Ekman, 1991). Perhaps the wisdom people achieve as they age and the greater happi- ness that they enjoy is in part the result of the quieting of emotion-related physiology.

The DFA is but one approach to studying autonomic specificity of negative emotion. Sylvia Kreibig has reviewed over 130 other relevant studies (Kreibig, 2010). In these studies, partici- pants were led to experience emotion through viewing short film clips, or slides, or by imagin- ing emotionally evocative situations, or engaging in an emotionally charged interaction with someone else, for example, being insulted or harassed. In her synthesis of these studies, Kreibig likewise concludes that there are differences in the autonomic patterns of anger, disgust, sadness, and fear (although see Siegel et al., 2018).

Autonomic Response and Positive Emotion What about positive emotions, such as amusement, contentment, or awe? In her review, Kreibig notes intriguing differences in the autonomic patterns of positive emotions (Kreibig, 2010). Con- sider a couple and see if they correspond to your own experience. Contentment is associated with reduced heart rate, drops in blood pressure, a slowing of breathing, and an absence of the sweaty palms produced by the electrodermal response—in sum, a state of bodily calm. Amusement shows a similar drop in heart rate but blood pressure is actually high—reflective of the tension at the heart of humor and play and the concomitant state of amusement.

In a more recent study, Michelle Shiota and her colleagues led participants to feel five positive emotions through viewing emotionally evocative slides and documented that still other positive emotions vary in their autonomic profiles (Shiota et al., 2011). For example, when viewing slides evocative of love, participants showed elevated cardiac activity but no vasoconstriction. By con- trast, when viewing slides evocative of awe (images of vast nature), participants showed evidence of reduced influence of sympathetic influences upon the heart, a sign of the stillness, and open- ness associated with awe (see also Gordon et al., 2017). Enthusiasm elicited by viewing slides that depicted opportunities for winning money led participants to show a sweat response in the hands, the only positive emotion to produce this electrodermal response typical of sympathetic activation.

In another research tradition, scientists have studied sexual desire, the intense feelings of attraction, and interest in sexual behavior. In several studies in which people are presented with images or films depicting sexual intercourse, people’s reports of sexual desire are correlated with sympathetic and parasympathetic activation and blood flow to the genital regions (Meston &

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Frolich, 2000). Taken together, positive emotions such as amusement, awe, contentment, sexual desire, enthusiasm, and love seem to differ subtly in their patterns of autonomic response (see Kreibig, 2010).

Vagal Tone and Compassion A defining feature of our evolution as a species is the vulnerability of our offspring, which gave rise to our capacity for compassion, sympathy, and tenderness (Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010). Might specific branches of the autonomic nervous system support compassion-related feelings and action? Physiologist Stephen Porges thinks so. In a series of provocative papers, Porges hypothesized that the ventral vagal branch of the parasympathetic ANS is involved in prosocial emotions such as compassion and love (1998). To make this argument, Porges draws upon cross-species comparisons to detail three stages in the evolution of the ANS. First to emerge was the dorsal vagal complex; it is present in reptiles, fish, and mammals and regulates digestive processes and the immobilization response seen in most species when an individual is attacked. Next came the sympathetic autonomic nervous system that controls fight and flight behavior. And last to emerge, and unique to mammals, is the ventral vagal complex. It is controlled by the vagus nerve and regulates facial muscle actions, head movements that enable gaze activity, and vocalizations, as well as heart rate deceleration and calm. All of these responses, Porges specu- lates, are involved in caregiving, a defining feature of mammals.

Researchers measure vagal tone (activation of the vagus nerve) by measuring the relationship between heart rate and respiration (Grossman & Taylor, 2007). Several lines of evidence suggest that caregiving-related states such as compassion are associated with elevated vagal tone. For example, in one series of studies, Jennifer Stellar and her colleagues presented participants with evocative images of suffering, such as children crying or suffering from malnutrition or cancer (Stellar et al., 2015). When feeling compassion, participants showed elevated vagal tone, whereas participants feeling other emotional states—pride or inspiration—did not.

Kok and Fredrickson (2010) assessed people’s vagal tone at the beginning and end of a nine- week study, and in between these two assessments they had participants report on their daily experience of positive emotions and the strength of their social connections. Over the nine-week period, people who at the start of the study had high levels of vagal tone experienced greater increases in positive emotion and social connection over the nine-week period of time. Just as importantly, increases in social connections over the nine weeks led to rises in vagal tone at the end of the study (see Figure 5.3). Not only does vagal tone predict more positive emotion and social connection over time, but the complement holds as well: increases in positive emotion and social connection will increase vagal tone. More recent studies have begun to explore whether vagal tone also predicts emotion regulation, prosocial tendencies, and even better sleep (Kogan et al., 2014; Mendes, 2016; Werner et al., 2015).

The Blush The blush is a paradox. Of the autonomic responses you will learn of, the blush is clearly the most visible. But it flares up most typically in situations when we least want to be noticed, often to our chagrin. To gain insight into this paradoxical bodily response, psychologist W. Ray Crozier ana- lyzed the contexts in which people blush in the novels of Jane Austen (Crozier, 2016). In Austen’s novels—Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility—the blush figures prominently, often accompanying critical turns in the plot. What Crozier found is that in Austen’s novels the blush is sometimes a sign of forbidden thought being made public. Other times it is a sign of desire that spreads from one young person to another and ends in feelings of mutual attraction. Or very

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simply, characters blush when feeling embarrassed and ashamed and sense the undesired regard of others nearby. The results of this literary analysis remind us of a complexity: the same bodily response, such as the blush, can accompany many mental states and social contexts.

Let’s turn from literary to scientific analysis. The blush involves the spontaneous reddening of the face, ears, neck, and upper chest produced by increases in blood volume in the subcutane- ous capillaries of the face (Cutlip & Leary, 1993). By contrast, the flush is a nonsocial response that often is associated with physical exertion, temperature changes, or alcohol consumption. In a chapter devoted to the blush in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin observed that the blush is associated with modesty, embarrassment, shyness, and shame. Darwin reasoned that when we direct our attention to any part of the body, physiological activity is stimu- lated in that region; in shyness or embarrassment we think of our face as an object of attention, and, in Darwin’s view, blood flows to that region.

Mark Leary and his colleagues analyzed studies of people’s reports of when they blush (Leary, Britt, Cutlip, & Templeton, 1992). The results are illuminating. We don’t necessarily blush when we receive any kind of attention from others, or when we think of what others think of us. Rather, we blush when we are the objects and recipients of undesirable social attention, that is, atten- tion that is potentially damaging to our self-concept, in particular in the eyes of others. This too, it would seem, was Jane Austen’s thesis—that we blush when others are attending to us in ways that jeopardize or directly harm our social reputation.

So how, then, is the blush related to emotion? When asked to describe a typical experience of embarrassment, people commonly mention that they blush (Edelmann, 1990; Miller & Tang- ney, 1994). Studies of the actual blush response converge with these narrative findings. In one such study, participants’ blush and anxiety-related autonomic responses were recorded in two conditions (Shearn, Bergman, Hill, Abel, & Hinds, 1990). In an embarrassment condition, the participant and four confederates of the experimenter watched a videotape of the participant pre- viously singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” In the fear condition, the participant and confeder- ates watched the classic shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho (which we will talk about some more in the next chapter). Participants’ cheek blood flow, cheek skin temperature,

FIGURE 5.3 Participants who begin the study with elevated vagal tone (solid line) show greater increases over time in social connectedness and positive emotion, which in turn track increases in vagal tone ( from Kok & Fredrickson, 2008).

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and finger skin conductance increased more while they and others watched themselves singing than while they watched the frightening film clip, and these responses correlated with people’s experiences of embarrassment (see also Shearn et  al., 1992). More recent work has shown that people from different cultures—Western Europeans and people from India—show a simi- lar blush response in terms of its physiology, but Western Europeans report they blushed more (Drummond & Lim, 2000).

In a different empirical approach, Aan het Rot and her collaborators had students at the Uni- versity of Groningen in the Netherlands report upon their social interactions every day for two weeks (het Rot, Moskowitz, & De Jong, 2013). In these daily reports, they detailed whether or not they had blushed and whether they felt ashamed and embarrassed, as well as other emotions. Participants blushed about once or twice a day (you are not the only one who finds blushing to be a regular occurrence!). People were more likely to blush around large groups of people and when interacting with romantic partners—yes blushing can lead to romantic attraction, as Jane Austen long ago revealed. And as one might expect, when people blushed (as opposed to not blushing), they reported higher levels of embarrassment, shame, feeling exposed, and submissiveness.

Let’s now consider one of the painful paradoxes of blushing: its irksome visibility. Often, when we least want others to attend to us, the blush draws their attention in. Why might that be? On this, the American satirist Mark Twain observed that “humans are the only species who blush, and the only one that needs to,” suggesting that we blush in times of need, likely to correct our tarnished reputation. Building upon this intuition, Corine van Dijk and her colleagues proposed that the blush is an involuntary, costly way in which people signal their awareness and regret for the mistake they have made (van Dijk, de Jong, & Peters, 2009). In keeping with this hypothesis, van Dijk and colleagues found that social observers responded more positively to individuals who blushed after they made mistakes than people not seen to blush.

How might this “remedial” property of the blush work? What changes when social perceivers observe another person blushing? Here, as before, we find insight in considering the signaling behavior of other species. Many primates (and bird species) show skin reddening as a signal of robust health; the opposite, pallor, signals illness and weakness. Given that we tend to want to affiliate with people who are healthier, these findings lead us to the notion that we blush when embarrassed to trigger the affiliation felt toward those who are healthier, to restore our reputation jeopardized by our untoward and embarrassing actions.

The Chills “The chills” is a phrase people use in many languages to refer to the contraction of small muscles surrounding hair follicles; it is a sympathetic autonomic nervous system response. In mammals, this response, known as piloerection, produces the fluffing up in the fur seen in the great apes, dogs, cats, and rodents. Humans often experience the chills in some of the loftiest moments of life, when graduating from college or getting married, at a concert or when hearing a speaker at a political rally, or when witnessing a morally inspiring act. Music is a common elicitor of the chills (Benedek & Kaernbach, 2011; Guhn, Hamm, & Zentner, 2007). So too is nature. For exam- ple, take a moment to read the two diary entries of naturalist John Muir, as he hiked alone in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Yosemite (based on these experiences, Muir would found Sierra magazine, and eventually the National Parks in the United States).

June 5, 1906 A magnificent section of the Merced Valley at what is called Horseshoe Bend came

full in sight—a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices. Bold, down-sweeping slopes, feathered with pines and clumps of manzanita

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with sunny open spaces between then, make up most of the foreground, the middle and background present fold beyond fold of finely modeled hills and ridges rising into mountain-like masses in the distance. . .The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awestricken, I might have left everything for it. Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.

June 6, 1906 We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every

nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams, and rocks, in the waves of the sun – a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.  .  . How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scarce a memory enough of the old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from.

These passages capture many of the features of awe-related experiences in nature—the sense of design, wonder at the beauty of things, and the sense of the breakdown of the boundaries between the self (Muir’s “Flesh and bone tabernacle”) and other things (e.g., Campos et  al., 2013). We suspect that Muir’s reference to “making every nerve quiver” is about the chills. From Muir’s writings one might hypothesize that “the chills” might accompany experiences of emo- tions such as awe.

At the same time, though, we often use the term “chills” to describe more menacing experi- ences of horror, terror, or dread. When people sense the presence of a person when no person is there, or see someone who reminds them of someone who’s recently passed away, or they see the carnage of war, they may report experiencing “the chills.” When contemplating the horrors of the Nazi holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, you may do the same—shudder at the horror of what humanity can do.

How is one to make sense of this, that is, “the chills” refers to such different kinds of emotional experience? To answer this question, Laura Maruskin, Todd Thrash, and Andrew Elliot have had people report on their experiences of chills in diaries and narratives as well as the emotions that occurred with these sensations (Maruskin, Thrash, & Elliot, 2012). What they discovered is that the word “chills” corresponds to two distinct bodily sensations: the first is a tingling, goosebumps sensation in the arms and back of the head (which they call goosetingles); the second is a cold shiver and shudder in the back (which they call cold shivers). Other work has found that these two sensations occur with different emotions. For example, Maruskin and colleagues had participants report on their experiences of the chills each day for two weeks and found that goosetingles most strongly correlated with surprise, awe, and intense positive affect, whereas cold shivers corre- lated with reports of fear and disgust. Belinda Campos and her colleagues found that awe more so than gratitude, compassion, love, and joy was associated with reports of goosebumps (Campos et al., 2013; Maruskin, Thrash, & Elliot, 2012).

Individual Emotion: Awe

Awe is the emotion that is felt when you are in the presence of something that is vast and transcends your understand- ing of the world (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). People experience awe in response to some of the most dramatic of life expe- riences—around spiritual and political leaders, in seeing

great cultural artifacts like the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris or the Taj Mahal in India, when encountering vast natural objects like the great Redwoods or the Grand Canyon, or in response to music and art. It was a sense of awe and wonder that Darwin experienced in his travels on the Beagle that

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Emotion and the Neuroendocrine System The neuroendocrine system involves a network of over different glands distributed throughout the body, including the pituitary and reproductive glands, that release hormones into the blood- stream. These hormones have effects upon different organs and muscle groups and serve many functions related to physical growth, homeostasis (the balance of the body’s systems), and repro- duction. These hormones are also linked to emotionally relevant behaviors, including defense, sex, and status-enhancing actions (Mehta & Prasad, 2015).

The Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Axis One well-studied branch of the neuroendocrine system is the Hypothalamic–Pituitary– Adrenal (HPA) axis, whose activation results in the release of the stress-related hormone cor- tisol into the bloodstream. As you can see in Figure 5.4, stressful events activate regions of the brain (e.g., the amygdala) that send signals to the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, which, in turn, sends electrochemical signals to the anterior pituitary, which produces Adreno- corticotropic Hormone (ACTH). ACTH stimulates the adrenal glands (which are on top of the kidneys) to release the stress hormone cortisol into the bloodstream (Rodrigues, Sapolsky, & LeDoux, 2009).

Cortisol has many effects upon the body. It activates glucose production needed for metaboli- cally demanding action. It increases heart rate and blood pressure, thus enabling the distribution of blood to appropriate muscle groups involved in fight-or-flight behavior. It suppresses our immune system. In the short run, activation of the HPA axis and the accompanying increase in cortisol enabled our ancestors to respond to threats to physical survival—for example, an approaching predator or an enraged rival. Today, this same stress response helps us respond to immediate threats and problems: enabling us to study late into the night for an exam, to avoid danger, or to devote ourselves to taking care of a sick friend or child.

In one line of research that employs the Trier Social Stress Task, participants are required to deliver an impromptu speech to an audience of evaluators, who are instructed to look criti- cal and frustrated. Needless to say, this task, perhaps inspired by those bad dreams we all have about public speaking, elicits elevated sympathetic autonomic nervous system activation as well as a cortisol response. In a review of relevant studies, Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny (2004) made the important point that the Trier Social Stress Task is most likely to trigger cortisol release when participants appraise their positive social identity as being threatened. Similarly, studies that have looked at how viewing slides and film clips produces a cortisol response find

stirred him to develop his theory of evolution. In many ways, awe defines what is most meaningful to us and what binds us to other members of our group.

Just in the past five years the science of emotion has seen considerable interest in this most transcendent of emotions, awe. The field has documented distinctions between awe and feelings of beauty (Cowen & Keltner, 2017), as well as the distinct facial displays and vocaliza- tions associated with awe (see Chapter  4). Here in this chapter you have learned about the physiology of awe. Still other studies are finding that brief experiences of awe, for example, when found walking amidst tall trees or looking

at expansive views, lead us to be more generous, humble, and happy, and, expand our sense of time (Rudd, Vohs, & Aaker, 2012).

There is also, as you might imagine, a dark side of awe, one that is imbued with the sense of threat and peril and alienation. You might experience this threat-based awe when thinking about the Nazi Holocaust or climate change or the brevity of life. Studies are finding that this threat- based awe comprises about 25 percent of experiences of awe and has a different physiological profile (more related to stress) and reduces happiness when felt (Gordon et al., 2017).

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that elevated cortisol tends to accompany appraisals of worry, threat, and uncertainty (Denson, Spanovic, & Miller, 2009).

More recent work outside of the lab is mapping cortisol levels to the emotion of fear. Craig Anderson and his colleagues studied teenagers’ and veterans’ emotional reactions to white- water rafting on a river in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California (Anderson,

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Monroy, & Keltner, 2017). They gathered measures of saliva before and after the rafting trip (to assess levels of cortisol), self-reported emotion during the trip, and vocal bursts and facial expres- sions of emotion as the participants actually navigated dangerous rapids (see Figure 5.5).

Individuals who showed cortisol rises over the course of the day reported greater fear during the trip (but not other emotions such as pride or awe). And, they emitted more vocal bursts of fear (screams) but not other emotions (pride). In yet another demonstration of how contagious emotions are, people who spent the day on the raft with really fearful, screaming participants ended up screaming more and having higher cortisol levels by the end of the day. Emotion-related hormonal responses are contagious (see also Akinola, Page-Gould, Mehta, & Jackson, 2016).

Alongside the HPA axis, a second branch of the neuroendocrine system releases sex-related hormones into the blood stream, including testosterone and estradiol. These sex hormones are produced in the ovaries in women and testes in men and regulate many of the astonishing physi- cal changes that humans go through during puberty. They also influence feelings of sexual desire, both in men and women (for review, see Meston & Frolich, 2000). When people are adminis- tered testosterone, their feelings of sexual desire rise, as does their sexual response and sexual behavior. When women view film clips depicting sexual intercourse, or even emotional intimacy between an adult and child, their estradiol rises (Edelstein, Kean, & Chopik, 2012). The romantic passions have hormonal correlates.

Emotion and the Immune System The immune system is a network of cells and glands distributed throughout the body that helps the body fight infections and heal in response to injury. Understanding how emotions influence the immune system will illuminate how emotional tendencies influence our physical health.

The Inflammation Response One branch of the immune system of increasing interest to scientists studying emotion is the cytokine system. Pro-inflammatory cytokines are released in immunological cells and help pro- duce an inflammation response that fights bacteria and viruses. Cytokines also send signals to

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FIGURE 5.5 Teenagers navigating white-water rapids on a river in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (photo by Craig Anderson).

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the brain to trigger “sickness behaviors” that include increased sleep and withdrawal as well as inhibited social, exploratory, and aggressive behaviors, all of which help the body recuper- ate from illness or injury (Kemeny, 2009). When you are in the midst of a flu, the effects of the cytokine system are strong.

In general, as with cortisol, elevated social and physical stress produce increased inflam- mation. For example, one review of 34 studies revealed that stress is associated with elevated inflammation in the body, as indexed in the elevated levels of a biomarker known as interleukin 6, or IL-6 (Marsland et  al., 2017). Quite worrisome is the literature showing that poverty, a powerful form of social and physical stress, predicts increased inflammation in young children, as do traumatic events, such as a parent’s job loss or divorce (John-Henderson et al., 2015; Miller et al., 2009). In adults, similar results hold. People who feel of lower status and rejected because of their social class or race tend to show elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines (John- Henderson, Stellar, Mendoza-Denton, & Francis, 2015). College students at UCLA who feel of lower social status within their social hierarchy and who are given negative feedback from a stranger respond with a stronger inflammation response (Muscatell et al., 2016). When people are given a toxin that produces an inflammation response, they report greater negative emotion, dejection and depression, and a sense of isolation (Muscatell et al., 2016).

These findings relating heightened inflammation to lower rank and dejection provide clues to how this response might relate to human emotion. One emotion that has these qualities of dejec- tion, isolation, and submissiveness is shame (Gilbert, 1998; Tangney, Miller, Flicker, & Barlow, 1996). In the English language, people often refer to submissive emotions with metaphors of disease—“I nearly died of shame,” or “I’m sick with envy.” Perhaps these metaphors capture a relationship between submissive emotions and the activation in the cytokine system.

Work by Sally Dickerson and her colleagues suggests that the relationship between submis- sive emotion and activation of the cytokine system is more than just poetic metaphor (Dickerson, Gruenewald, & Kemeny, 2004). In one illustrative study, participants had to deliver a speech about why they would be the perfect applicant for a job in a condition of high social evaluative threat (SET in Figure 5.6). More specifically, in this condition two audience members looked on as the participant gave the speech but reacted with common triggers of shame—critical, cold, rejecting facial expressions (Dickerson et al., 2004; Dickerson, Gable, Irwin, Aziz, & Kemeny, 2009). As you can see in Figure 5.6, being judged in a critical, rejecting fashion led to an increase in one marker of the cytokine system. These observations raise the intriguing possibility that submissive emotions like shame might actually relate to activation of the cytokine system.

Are there emotion-related processes that calm the inflammation response? This is increasingly a pressing question given fairly robust associations between elevated inflammation and depres- sion, cardiovascular problems, and autoimmune disease. In light of what you just learned about shame, one might expect emotions associated with an expansive self that is connected to others to reduce the inflammation response. And new studies are lending credence to this possibility. Experiencing a wider range of positive emotions on a daily basis—and not just intense episodes of a single positive emotion—predicts lower levels of inflammation (Ong et al., 2017). So too do experiences of awe. Awe involves a sense of self expansion and feelings of being integrated into social collectives (e.g., Bai et al., 2017). And indeed, one study by Jennifer Stellar, Neha John-Henderson, and their colleagues found that people who report feeling regularly elevated positive emotion showed lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and the strongest predic- tor of this healthy immune profile was the regular experience of awe and wonder (Stellar et al., 2015). It is perhaps because of awe that regular experiences in beautiful nature have been found to lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines as well.

As we transition to the study of bodily changes and emotional experience, it’s wise to take stock of what we have learned thus far and bear in mind important caveats that should caution our interpretation of these results. We have seen that anger, fear, sadness, and disgust differ in subtle ways in their patterns of autonomic activity, as do positive emotions such as contentment, desire,

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amusement, awe, enthusiasm, and love. Compassion seems to activate the ventral vagal complex. The blush occurs during experiences of embarrassment, and perhaps shame. “The chills” really refers to two sensations—goosetingles and cold shivers—that map onto different emotional pro- files most closely related to awe and fear (or horror). The release of cortisol accompanies the sense of social threat, worry, and perhaps fear. And the inflammation response appears to covary with feelings of dejection, lower rank, and shame, but is reduced by experiences of awe.

While these findings clearly refute a one arousal fits all account of negative and positive emotion, it’s important to bear in mind that these emotion-related differences are often subtle. We hope that it is also clear that there are not distinct regions of the autonomic nervous system devoted to one emotion; there is no love gland or organ of anger. Rather, emotions are associated with subtle differences in the patterning of activity across measures of the different branches of the peripheral nervous system.

Bodily Changes and Emotional Experience Alongside the thesis of physiological specificity, William James made a second argument we will now consider: emotion-specific activation in the bodily systems gives rise to experiences of distinct emotions (Price & Harmon-Jones, 2015). In James’s own words: the “arousal of the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself.”

Some 80 years after James, the influential theorist Sylvan Tomkins (1962), made a similar point, arguing that the experience of emotion closely tracks emotion-specific bodily responses:

Affects are sets of muscle and glandular responses located in the face and also widely distributed through the body, which generate sensory feedback which is either inherently

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“acceptable” or “unacceptable.” These organized sets of responses are triggered at sub- cortical centers where specific “programs” for each distinct affect are stored. These programs are innately endowed and have been genetically inherited. They are capa- ble of simultaneously capturing such widely distributed organs as the face, the heart, and the endocrines and imposing on them a specific pattern of correlated responses. (pp. 243–244).

In Chapter 7 we will examine studies of a special region of the brain—the anterior insular cortex—that integrates signals from the body and that figures in experiences of most emotions that have been studied. Here we will consider intriguing and early literatures on how bodily changes influence emotional experience.

Representations of Emotions in the Body To test this second thesis of James, scientists have taken one of two approaches. A first is to cap- ture the degree to which the bodily changes of spontaneous emotion relate to reports of emotional experiences. On this thesis, the evidence is mixed. In general, distinct facial muscle movements do predict emotional experience; for example, when people furrow their brow and tighten the lips, they are likely to report greater anger; the patterned movements of embarrassment predict the experience of that emotion (for review, see Duran, Reisenzein, & Fernandez-dols, 2017; Matsumoto et al., 2008). In turning to physiological response, in some studies self-reports of emotional experience do track bodily changes, for example in the links we have considered between the blush and embarrassment, elevated vagal tone and compassion, increased blood flow to the genitals and sexual desire, and goosebumps and awe. In other studies, though, bodily changes of emotion, such as heart rate or blood pressure, do not predict spontaneous experiences of distinct emotions (e.g., Mauss et al., 2005).

This ambiguity led Iris Mauss and her colleagues to propose that some measures of experience more so than others may better track emotion-related bodily changes. More specifically, we can report on our experience with explicit measures that directly refer to the emotion (“I feel sad” or “blue”). We can also report on emotional experience with what are known as implicit measures that indirectly refer to the emotion. Implicit, indirect measures of emotional experience include concepts that are associated with the emotion (as “loss” is related to sadness), memories, images, and patterns of thought (e.g., as pessimism about the future relates to sadness).

Many studies that have gathered direct, or explicit, measures that refer directly to the experi- ence of emotion (“I feel content right now”) yield weak relations between emotional experience and bodily changes, if any at all. This is because explicit, direct reports of emotional experience are shaped by many factors, including cultural norms, culturally imbued beliefs about emotions, and many features of the current social context (e.g., Barrett et al., 2007). As a result, explicit reports of emotion may be less likely to track the kinds of subtle, emotion-related bodily changes we have studied thus far. Jan Evers, Iris Mauss, and their colleagues reason that more implicit, indirect measures of emotional experience may be less biased by such factors and track more closely physiological changes produced in the body. In one experiment that illustrates this hypoth- esis, participants were caused to experience anger by the actions of an impertinent researcher who harshly corrected their efforts on a mental arithmetic task (Evers et al., 2014). In this study, participants’ more implicit anger—captured in how fast participants could identify anger-related words—was correlated with the rise in blood pressure produced by interacting with the aggressive researcher. Participants’ explicit, direct reports of anger were not. What we learn from this study is that indirect, implicit measures of emotional experience—images, metaphors, colors, patterns of thought, the likelihood one might detect emotionally relevant themes in other stimuli—may better track bodily changes of emotion than directly reporting on emotional experience.

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Building upon with this intriguing possibility, consider a fascinating line of research by Lauri Nummenmaa and his colleagues from Finland (Nummenmaa et al., 2014). Nummenmaa and his colleagues gave participants 13 emotion words—anger, anxiety, contempt, depression, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, love, pride, sadness, shame, surprise—and asked them to color in the areas of the body where they felt each emotion. You might think of this colored in bodies task as a kind of implicit measure of emotional experience. Figure 5.7 presents the results from this study. What is striking is how people’s experiences of emotion in the body track actual physiological changes we considered earlier in this chapter. Anger is sensed in the hands (and upper body and face), which corresponds to the blood flow and finger temperature rise documented in the DFA studies of that emotion. Participants’ sensations of fear portray cold hands, also in keeping with the findings from the DFA studies. It should not surprise that disgust is sensed in the stomach and mouth region and love in the heart and genital regions. Pride, given its pattern of upper body expansion and head lift, is sensed in the torso and head. And shame is acutely sensed in the face, no doubt a visualization of the blush.

In follow-up studies, participants’ spontaneous experiences of emotion produced similar representations of emotion in the body. And Finns, Swedes, and participants from Taiwan rep- resented their experiences of emotion with similar body maps, suggesting some degree of univer- sality in emotional experience.

James’s hypothesis that bodily changes give rise to emotional experiences has been tested in a second way: prompting people to produce body changes to ascertain whether such action leads to the experience of emotion. A study of this kind that became well known was one of the few direct tests of William James’s theory that bodily change can produce emotion. It was by Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988). They found that getting participants to hold a pen between their teeth, and in this way making muscle movements characteristic of a smile without the people realizing it, gave rise to judgments of cartoons that they looked at as being funnier than they were for participants who held a pen between their lips, and in this way inducing a pout. An important new movement in psychology has been on whether influential findings are replicable. In a meta- analysis of 17 direct replications of Strack et al.’s study by Wagenmakers et al. (2016), only a tiny and nonsignificant effect of the induced smile as compared with the pout was found (a mean

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difference between the conditions for funniness on a 10-point scale of 0.03 units, as compared with 0.86 units in Strack et al.’s original study). In another study, Ranehill et al. (2015) tried to replicate findings that adopting a pose to express power and dominance (power posing) increased people’s likelihood of taking financial risks, in tasks that invited them to do so, as well as chang- ing hormone levels. With a substantially increased number of participants, Ranehill et al. found that power posing did show a significant effect on people’s self-reports of feeling power, but they did not find any change in risk-taking or hormone levels.

In studies of this kind, participants move emotion-specific facial muscles, or shift their posture, for example in a slouch of shame, or in standing up to do a power pose, or they are led to breathe in deep patterns associated with contentment. Across studies of this kind, changes in facial mus- cles, posture, and patterns of breathing can lead to reports of changed emotional experience (Price & Harmon Jones, 2015; Winkielman, Niedenthal, Wielgosz, Eelen, & Kavanagh, 2015), but not all effects have been reliable.

Interoception Every bodily response we have spoken of thus far sends signals to regions of the brain. The brain tracks the functioning of the branches of the peripheral nervous system. For example, specific receptors near muscles send electrochemical signals to the brain. Baroreceptors in veins and arteries and near the heart stretch in response to changes in circulation and blood flow, sending signals about cardiovascular activity to the brain. The same is true of respiration, as the tissue of the lungs shifts with inhalation and exhalation. The body’s inflammation response is transmit- ted to the brain through the vagus nerve, as well as hormones in the blood. And large regions of the cortex, the somatosensory cortex, track where the body is being touched. As the brain tracks and represents these and other changes in the body, it gives rise to an awareness of the bodily responses known as interoception (Craig, 2009; Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017). Interoception is our awareness of the body’s internal responses.

Hugo Critchley and Sara Garfinkel break interoception down into three distinct processes (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017). A first is the objective awareness of bodily responses. To assess this, participants provide estimates of how fast their heart is beating or, less commonly, the rate of their respiration, which are then compared to actual heart rate or respiration rate to yield an index of objective interoception. A second dimension to interoception is the individual’s subjective awareness of their bodily sensations; that is, are they, like William James, often aware of possible changes in their body, heart palpitations, or shallow breathing, or movements in the intestines, for example. Or is their awareness of their body’s responses impoverished. A third dimension is what Critchley and Garfinkel call metacognitive interoception, or what you might think of as insight into the bodily changes of emotion. A measure of metacognitive interoception is found by comparing participants’ performance on the objective interoception task we just described and their subjective sense of how skilled they are at tracking their body’s sensations. Some people are good at tracking their body’s responses and aware of this fact, and have high metacognitive interoception; others less so.

In this line of research, a first finding of note is that people’s objective interoception accuracy correlates only modestly with their subjective awareness of different bodily sensations. As you might imagine, some people are quite accurate in their judgments of the body’s responses, and others are not. Still other findings suggest that these individual differences in interoception matter (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017). For example, people who are skilled at interoception experience more intense emotions. They are better able to reinterpret their emotions in ways that enable them to respond adaptively to their present circumstances. At the same time, they are a bit more vulner- able to anxiety, perhaps overly sensitive to shifts in heart rate, circulation, blood pressure, and sweaty palms that accompany anxious states. By contrast, people with autism are not as skilled

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at reading the cues in their body (they don’t do well in the heart beat detection paradigm), but think they do (Garfinkel et al., 2016). These authors reason that this lack of emotional informa- tion streaming in to conscious awareness from the body may in part account for the emotional difficulties individuals with autism sometimes encounter.

Embodiment, Cognition, and Social Interaction Emotions are more than just brief responses contained within the body; in fundamental ways, they shape how we interact with others and how we think about our social environment. Given this, perhaps we have been thinking about James’s thesis in an overly narrow fashion, focus- ing on how bodily responses give rise to emotional experiences. The broader possibility is that emotion-related bodily responses shape higher order patterns of thought and how we interact with others.

This possibility is at the center of theorizing about embodiment (Barsalou, 2008; Niedenthal, 2007; Papies & Barsalou, 2015; Winkielman et al., 2015). Embodiment is the idea that higher order thought processes—how we categorize objects, what we deem fair or risky, what we remember from the past, or how we understand other people’s intentions—are influenced by bodily processes of the kind we have studied thus far. Consider your judgment of what is fair and just. An embodiment perspective would suggest that this abstract judgment of fairness is rooted in bodily changes related to anger, for example, the rise in muscle tension in the face and body and shifts in blood flow and blood pressure.

One implication of this theorizing is that when the emotion-related bodily systems are acti- vated, higher order thought patterns will shift in systematic ways. Consider the following study that illustrates this thesis as it applies to how emotion-related facial muscle movements shape how we categorize stimuli. In the study, Paula Niedenthal and colleagues gave participants lists of words related to three emotions—anger, joy, and disgust—and asked them to determine whether the word was related to one of the three emotion categories (Niedenthal, Winkielman, Mondillon, & Vermeulen, 2009). For example, they would be presented with the word “vomit” or “sun” or “fight” and asked to judge which of the three emotion categories the word belonged to (i.e., “disgust” “anger” “joy”). This task of categorizing words led to the activation of emotion- specific facial muscle movements, as you can see in Figure 5.8. Categorizing words related to emotions engages aspects of the body related to those emotions.

Reflection and Cultivation: Developing Emotional Calmness

In this chapter you have learned about the profile of fear, anxiety, and stress: that it involves elevated activation of the sympathetic autonomic nervous system and the HPA axis. This study of emotion-related bodily responses just as readily reveals certain practical tips for finding emotional calm. Perhaps the most powerful is what you see on many bumper stickers: “Breathe.” Many of the contemplative practices found in meditation and yoga focus on patterns of deep breathing. In different meditation traditions, for example, people are encouraged to slow down their breath- ing through deep patterns of exhalation and inhalation.

One common technique, for example, is to breathe in for a count of six (while expanding the chest), and breathe out for a count of six (while pulling in the abdominal muscles), and to continue this for 10 or 20 times. A central focus in the different kinds of yoga is what is known as pranayama breath- ing, which emphasizes slower, deeper patterns of breathing, with a particular focus on deep exhalation. What you have learned in this chapter, and as anticipated by James’s sec- ond prediction, is that these patterns of breathing engage the vagus nerve, which quiets stress-related physiology, and opens up possibilities for greater calm and positive emotion.

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In a next study, Niedenthal and colleagues had participants hold a pen in their mouths while they made judgments about which of three emotion categories—disgust, joy, or anger—offered the best fit for emotion-related words. In holding the pen in their mouths, participants were pre- vented from moving facial muscles related to disgust (the upper lip raise) and joy (the smile). Without this embodied response, participants found it harder to categorize disgust-related and joy-related words. The lesson from this study is that emotion-specific bodily changes are involved in categorizing objects in the world.

In similar work, Joshua Davis and his colleagues had participants read sentences with positive and negative themes (Davis, Winkielman, & Coulson, 2015). As they did, they held a pencil in their mouths that blocked the activity of the zygomaticus major muscle that produces the smile. In this study, blocking facial muscle actions associated with positive emotion—the smile—reduced activation in regions of the cortex involved in conceptual processing. Absent the spontaneous activation of emotion-specific facial muscles involved in our understanding of words, sentences, or faces, we are less adept at categorizing emotionally relevant information (see also Oberman, Winkelmien, & Ramachandran, 2007).

Still other work has documented how emotion-related autonomic responses guide categoriza- tion and perception. On this intriguing possibility, Sarah Garfinkel, Hugo Critchley, and their colleagues have focused on the patterns of thought that occur during the brief period after the heart has contracted and pumped blood into the circulatory system (Garfinkel et al., 2016). As you might know, the strength of the contraction of your heart and circulation of blood through your body is manifest in your blood pressure. Systolic blood pressure captures the strength of the heart’s contraction and can be measured in the signal that baroreceptors near the heart send to the brain. Diastolic pressure is measured in the veins and arteries when the heart is at rest between beats. Garfinkel, Critchley, and colleagues found that during the fleeting phase of the rhythm of the heart that produces the measure of systolic blood pressure, more typically associated with fear, people show greater sensitivity to threat (Garfinkel et al., 2016). Specifically, during the systolic phase of the heart’s rhythm as compared to the diastolic phase, exposure to fear faces triggers greater activation in the amygdala, an old region of the brain engaged in the processing

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of threat. Additionally, during the systolic phase of the heart rhythm, when the body is alerting the mind to threat, people are more likely to perceive an association between the social category “African American” and guns (Garfinkel et al., 2016).

In a similar spirit, it appears that the body’s inflammation response, associated with the sense of social submissiveness, dejection, and shame, prompts higher order cognitive processes to be more attuned to social threat (Eisenberger et  al., 2016). For example, in one study Keely Muscatell and her colleagues gave participants an endotoxin that produced an inflammation response characteristic of dejection and shame. These participants, compared to appropriate con- trol participants, showed greater activation in the amygdala when they received negative feedback from another person, a sign of inflammation-related heightened sensitivity to socially demeaning information (Muscatell et al., 2016).

This new work on embodiment reveals how subtle bodily responses—facial muscle movements, shifts in systolic blood pressure, and immune system activity—influence how we categorize words, whether or not there is threat, people from different ethnic groups, and social communication. Our construal of the social world is indeed embodied, and guided by processes in the branches of the nerv- ous system that lie below the brainstem. Now we turn to a complementary literature on gut feelings.

Gut Feelings and Decision Making If emotion-related bodily responses guide categorization and perception, in keeping with an embodiment perspective, one would also expect bodily responses to be involved in important decisions and choices, for example, what we deem risky or fair or of value or what is sacred (e.g., Phelps, 2016). This notion was treated by Antonio Damasio (1994) in his somatic marker hypoth- esis. Remember Phineas Gage (discussed in Chapter 1), the railroad construction foreman whose frontal lobes were damaged when an iron bar was shot through them by an accidental explosion and who became unable to organize his life. Hanna Damasio and colleagues (1994), using com- puter methods with Gage’s skull, determined that the region of his brain that was destroyed was the lower middle part of the frontal lobes. Antonio Damasio (1994) and his colleagues have now studied many patients with this kind of brain damage and have noticed that, like Phineas Gage, their emotions seem blunted. These patients also make disastrous social decisions such as associat- ing with the wrong kinds of people, while dithering endlessly over issues that are inconsequential (see also Rolls, 2014). They showed many deficits in the moral realm, for instance, inappropriate manners and a lack of concern for the well-being of others (Stuss & Benson, 1984).

To explain this pattern of results, Damasio (1994) proposed the somatic marker hypothesis: For patients with damaged ventromedial prefrontal cortex, they lack access to emotion-related bodily responses or symbolic representations of such reactions—somatic markers—that guide judgments and decisions. In keeping with this thinking, compared to control participants, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex showed little galvanic skin response to emo- tionally evocative slides, such as nudes or scenes of mutilation (Tranel, 1994; Tranel & Damasio, 1994). In a paradigm known as the Iowa Gambling Task, patients with ventromedial prefrontal damage showed an inability to stay away from high-risk gambles (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997). In this task, participants must choose cards from four different decks. Some cards gave monetary rewards, other cards signaled losses. Two of the decks were risky: they offered a chance of a big win but when chosen repeatedly, they led to overall loss of money. The other decks represented safer routes: the chance of smaller wins, but when chosen repeatedly they led to small gains. Typical control participants develop a heightened galvanic skin response to the risky decks and typically avoid them. In contrast, the ventromedial patients show no such sympathetic system response to the risky decks and often chose them and lost money (see Ohira, 2010, for review).

Would the complement also prove to be true, that is, people who have more refined awareness of their body’s responses—somatic markers in Damasio’s terminology—make more effective

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decisions? In one intriguing test of this possibility, Kandasamy and colleagues assessed the interoception abilities of London stock traders by having them do heart detection tasks we described earlier (Kandasamy et  al., 2016). They then related it to their performance on the stock floor, in choosing stocks that gain and lose. Their finding: those traders with greater interoception abilities had better records of making money in their investments. An awareness of emotion-related bodily responses proves to be an effective guide in investing and decisions more generally (Rolls, 2014).

Embodied Empathy People show a profound tendency to spontaneously and often unconsciously mimic the emo- tional behavior of others (e.g., Hess & Fischer, 2014). In relevant empirical studies, people have been found to mimic others’ smiling behavior, laughter, and sadness, often outside of their aware- ness (Hess & Fischer, 2014). We mimic certain autonomic responses in others, such as the blush (Shearn et al., 1999). Recent evidence even shows that our cortisol profiles will tend to match the profiles of people we are with (Akinola et al., 2016; Anderson et al., 2017). Our body often mirrors the bodily changes of other people.

Why? Ursula Hess and Agneta Fischer offer two insights, very much in keeping with the central theme of this book—that emotions coordinate our social interactions and relationships. A first is that our bodily mimicry of the emotional behavior of others brings us closer to others; it builds affiliative relationships through the sense of similarity and collaboration such mimicry creates. This notion helps makes sense of studies showing when we mimic others and when we do not. Namely, we are more likely to mimic the expressive behavior of people we feel close to or who are part of our group; we are less likely to mimic the expressive behavior of adversar- ies or strangers (Hess & Fischer, 2014; Miller et al., 1994). We are also more likely to mimic the emotional expressions, such as smiling, that are affiliative and less so expressions that are adversarial, such as anger (Hess & Fischer, 2014). And for some emotions, we are more likely to mimic the expressive behavior of high-power individuals, perhaps as a way to affiliate with, and find similarity to, those with power and influence (Carr, Winkielman, & Oveis, 2014).

Hess and Fischer reasoned that a second reason why we mirror others’ emotion-related responses is to solve a deceptively complex social problem: to know the mental states of others. More specifically, guided by the insights of embodiment theorizing, Paula Niedenthal, Piotr Winkielman, and Ursula Hess all converged on the idea that when we mimic the expressive behav- ior of another person, we simulate that emotional experience in our own mind (e.g., Winkielman et al., 2015). When we see a friend laugh, we ourselves begin to laugh, a behavior that triggers a simulated experience of amusement, which helps us understand how our friend perceives the current context and what they are likely to do. When mimicry generates our own experience, we are better able to understand and feel the emotions of others (see also Gallese, Gernsbacher, Heyes, Hickok, & Iacoboni, 2011). As an example, when we blush at another person’s blush of embarrassment (e.g., Shearn et al., 1999), in our own simulated experience of embarrassment, we come to understand how the other person construes his or her present circumstances as warrant- ing embarrassment. When we smile at another’s smile, we experience our own joy and content- ment and quickly appreciate the other person’s mental state, and by implication the features of the situation that would give rise to such joy. When we mimic the anger expressions of others, we show greater sympathetic autonomic and brain-related responses to their emotional condition (e.g., Lee et al., 2013). A complementary line of studies has taken advantage of the botox craze, which reduces wrinkles in the upper face by disabling movements of muscles in the face. Botox tends to diminish the individual’s own experience of emotion (Davis et al., 2010). It also prevents people from mimicking the emotional expressions of others and renders people less able to judge the emotions of others (Neal & Chartrand, 2011).

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S U M M A R Y

William James argued that emotional experience is the percep- tion of emotion-specific bodily responses, especially those in the autonomic nervous system. We first reviewed what is known about emotion-specific bodily responses, looking at recent studies of the directed facial action task, the blush, the parasympathetic auto- nomic nervous system, the neuroendocrine system, and the immune

system. Grounded in this understanding of emotion-related bodily responses, we then looked at the contribution of bodily responses to emotional experience and interoception. We concluded with recent theorizing known as embodiment, which helps illuminate how emotion-related bodily responses help us categorize objects in the world, make decisions, and understand others.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. One bodily response related to emotion that has begun to be studied scientifically is the chills, or goosebumps. What emo- tions do you think are involved when you have goosebumps? How might you study the relationship between goosebumps and emotion? Can you come up with a Darwinian evolutionary account of the goosebumps?

2. Try to think of an occasion in a movie or novel in which a char- acter blushed. What happened in the aftermath of the blush?

How does it fit recent findings suggesting that the blush trig- gers increased trust and liking?

3. Try an experiment in embodiment and see how it influences your emotions. You might stand in the posture of pride with fists clenched and chest expanded. Or furrow your eyebrow and tighten your lips. What sensations and emotions seem to arise out of these postures for you?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

For a review of the autonomic nervous system, and emotion-relevant find- ings, read:

Mendes, W. (2016). Emotion and the autonomic nervous system. In L.F. Barrett, M. Lewis, & J. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of emotions, 4th ed. (pp. 166–181). New York: Guilford.

For the latest thinking on interoception:

Critchley, H.D., & Garfinkel, S.N. (2017). Interoception and emotion. Cur- rent Opinion in Psychology, 17, 7–14.

For an excellent treatment of embodiment and emotion, see:

Winkielman, P., Niedenthal, P., Wielgosz, J., Eelen, J., & Kavanagh, L.C. (2015). Embodiment of cognition and emotion. In M. Mikulincer, P. R. Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), APA handbook of per- sonality and social psychology, Vol. 1. Attitudes and social cognition (pp. 151–175). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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6Appraisal, Experience, Regulation

Herein too may be felt the powerlessness of mere Logic . . . to resolve these problems which lie nearer to our hearts.

(George Boole, 1854, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, p. 416)

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FIGURE 6.0 Diagram from Descartes’s book, Traite de l’homme, showing how the soul—which can be moved by emotions—can open valves to let vital fluids from the reservoir in the brain (labeled F) into the tubes to work the muscles and produce actions.

CONTENTS Appraisal and Emotion

Historical Background and Concepts

Primary Appraisals, Good and Bad Which Is Stronger, Good or Bad?

Secondary Appraisals Discrete Approaches Dimensional Approaches Extending Appraisal Research: Tests of Theories and Patterns of Variation

A Third Phase of Appraisal: Verbal Sharing

Words and Concepts The Emotion Lexicon Conceptualization of Emotion Emotion Metaphors Prototypes Variations in Emotion Lexicon

Emotional Experience The Perspective That Emotions Are Discrete The Perspective That Emotions Are Constructed Comparing Perspectives

Regulation of Emotions Distraction, Reappraisal, Suppression

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

ApprAisAl, ExpEriEncE, rEgulAtion144

Appraisal and Emotion In the previous chapter, we mentioned the scene of a woman taking a shower in Alfred Hitch- cock’s film Psycho. Have you seen the poster? It’s based on a still from this scene, which is said to be the most famous in film history. The poster shows the face of a woman with her mouth wide open as she screams, thinking she is about to be killed. The actor—Janet Leigh—has depicted an appraisal. She has evaluated an event and is terrified. You can see this image by going to Google and typing "Leigh Psycho shower." We review another Hitchcock film later in the chapter.

Appraisal is probably the most important concept in the science of emotions (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). An event occurs, usually in the outside world but sometimes within, most often something about another person, which affects something important for us: a concern. It’s a sig- nal that there is something to which we should attend.

Historical Background and Concepts Magda Arnold and J.A. Gasson (1954; whose analyses we described in Chapter 1) wrote a paper that is generally taken as the founding of the modern notion that emotions are based on apprais- als. An influential developer of the idea was Richard Lazarus, who studied challenges that people faced in their lives and their capacities to cope with them (Lazarus, 1991). Challenges invite attention and heightened activity in the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. But each kind of challenge promotes a different emotion, depending on how it is appraised. Here is how Lazarus describes these processes:

This approach to emotion contains two basic themes: First, emotion is a response to evaluative judgments or meaning; second, these judgments are about ongoing rela- tionships with the environment, namely how one is doing in the agenda of living and whether the encounter of the environment is one of harm or benefit.

Lazarus proposed that appraisals involve evaluative judgments of how good or bad an event is for the person. A second aspect is that appraisals concern the individual’s goals and aspirations, which Frijda (2007) calls “concerns.”

In 1948, Robert Leeper wrote an article in the influential journal, Psychological Review, in which he reviewed the idea, prevalent at that time, that emotion is "disorganized response." At that time, too, as seen by behaviorists who were becoming dominant in American Psychology, emotion was of no importance and ignored. Now we know that these attitudes were misleading. With the understanding of emotion as based on appraisal, linking events in the world to our inmost concerns, emotion became, as it ought to be, central to psychology, seen not as disorgan- ized, but as fundamental to the organization of our lives (Roseman, 2013).

Central to appraisal-related approaches is the idea that emotions help people meet their goals within the immediate social context. Agnes Moors (2009, 2014) has argued, for example, that the approach by way of appraisal is critical to the study of emotions as processes that articulate events with people’s goals (or concerns). Stein, Trabasso, and Liwag (1994) extended the idea of goals to plans that are generated from them and the beliefs on which they are based. They propose that aspects of emotion-related appraisal unfold as follows:

1. An event, usually unexpected, is perceived that changes the status of a valued goal.

2. Beliefs are often challenged. This can cause bodily changes and expressions to occur.

3. Plans are formed about what to do about the event to reinstate or modify the goal, and the likely results of the plans are considered.

145Primary Appraisals, Good and Bad

These stages lead to questions that correspond to them:

1. What happened?

2. What do I think about it?

3. What can I do about it, and what might then happen?

To illustrate this analysis, Stein and colleagues provide the example of a 5-year-old, Amy (Stein, Trabasso & Liwag, 1994). Her kindergarten teacher told the class that she had a paint set for each child, and that after painting pictures for Parents’ Night, the children could take their paint sets home. When the children had been given their paint sets, Stein et al.’s research assistant noticed Amy looking apprehensive. She asked why. Amy said: “I’m jittery. I’m not sure why she wants to give me the paints. So do I have to paint all of the time at home? I really don’t want to do this. I didn’t think teachers made you paint at home. I don’t like painting that much. Why does she want me to paint at home?”

Here we see that Amy has a goal that has been violated (1): she doesn’t want to paint. The idea of being given something to do at home violates a belief about what teachers do (2). The conversation continues with Amy’s plans (3):

Research assistant: What will you do, Amy? Amy: I don’t want to take the paints home. I want to know why I have to do this. Research assistant: Well Amy, what are you going to do about this? Amy: I’ll take the paints home, but when I get home, I’ll ask my mom why I have to do this.

Two weeks later, the research assistant talked casually to Amy, who was still worried about the paints. She said she had used them only once. But she had not told the teacher, fearing that the teacher might be mad at her.

Evident in this example is one of the central ideas in appraisal-related approaches to emotion (see Figure 1.7 in Chapter 1): how a person construes an event—which depends on the person’s goals and values—will determine how the event is perceived and what emotions are elicited (e.g., Lazarus, 1991). We return this idea throughout the remainder of the book to understand, for example, how the emotional lives of people from different cultures or from different class backgrounds differ, often in profound ways. Now let’s turn to a more systematic treatment of the processes involved in appraising events that give rise to different emotions.

Primary Appraisals, Good and Bad Into our lives come events that have repercussions. You arrive at your new college dorm and meet your roommate, who instantly fills you with a reassuring sense of comfort. In the following year, you have to search for an apartment to rent, but the places elicit feelings of unease and discom- fort. What appraisal processes give rise to these reactions?

First tends to come a primary appraisal, an automatic evaluation, usually of an event or per- son in terms of whether what you perceive seems threatening or rewarding (Ferguson & Zayas, 2009). Even amoeba appraise environments in these basic ways: they move away from bright lights, which are threatening to them. Primary appraisals are basic operations of the mind. They correspond to what Chrysippus (discussed in Chapter 1) called first movements of emotion. At the head of this chapter is a drawing from Descartes (1648), of how this kind of movement can be thought of as fundamental to how the brain works. Next come secondary appraisals, which Chrysippus called second movements. These provide more deliberative, conscious, complex

ApprAisAl, ExpEriEncE, rEgulAtion146

assessments to decide what to think and what to do about what has happened (e.g., Smith & Lane, 2017).

Two decades of research have documented that within milliseconds of encountering an event, our mind is appraising it in terms of whether it is bad—or threatening—or good—or rewarding. The mind is equipped to appraise as threatening, necessary to avoid, such events as the appear- ance of a snake or a menacing person. The mind also appraises as inviting approach smiles, food, babies, and even money (Pool, Brosch, Delplanque, & Sander, 2016). Primary appraisals prepare the individual to respond to threats and opportunities in the environment.

This idea of primary appraisal, sometimes called “automatic evaluation,” was explored by Robert Zajonc. Consider a study by Murphy and Zajonc (1993). They presented participants with photos of people smiling or displaying facial anger. In a “subliminal” condition, participants viewed these photos for 4 milliseconds and then looked at Chinese ideographs and rated how much they liked them. These participants had no idea whether they had seen a happy or angry face. In a second condition in which participants viewed the same faces for one second, they were aware of which faces they had viewed. Then they, too, looked at Chinese ideographs and rated how much they liked them.

As you can see in Figure 6.1, with subliminal presentation, smiling faces prompted partici- pants to feel good and express greater liking for the Chinese ideographs that followed them and angry faces prompted less liking for the ideographs that followed them (the participants could not read Chinese). No such priming effects emerged with the optimally presented faces. When we are consciously aware of emotionally charged stimuli, they are less likely to sway our judgments of other events that have nothing to do with them (Clore, Gasper, & Garvin, 2001; an effect that we discuss further in Chapter 10).

Do automatic appraisals generate emotion-related responses other than more general prefer- ences? Piotr Winkielman and his colleagues suggest that they do (see also Dimberg & Öhman, 1996; Winkielman, Berridge, & Sher, 2011). This literature has relied on the evocative power of facial expressions of emotion and in particular, smiling and facial expressions of anger. In these studies, scientists present images of smiling or threatening expressions of anger either so quickly,

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FIGURE 6.1 People liked Chinese ideographs more after they had first been subliminally presented with a smile, suggesting that the smile had activated positive feeling at an unconscious level. When presented with a smiling face long enough to be consciously aware of it, the smile did not lead partici- pants to evaluate Chinese ideographs more positively (Source: Murphy & Zajonc, 1993).

147Primary Appraisals, Good and Bad

or immediately blocked by the presentation of another picture, that participants can’t consciously report what they have seen. Being exposed to smiling faces triggers the primary appraisal that things are good and worthy of approach. It triggers smiling behavior, a willingness to consume a drink when thirsty, a willingness to look favorably upon a bet. By contrast, exposure to angry faces leads people to furrow the brow in worry, and not consume a drink or look favorably upon a bet (see also Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000; Whalen et al., 1998). In other work, Öhman and Soares (1994) presented people who had snake phobias with photos below their awareness and found that these photos of snakes generated a galvanic skin response and negative emotion. In further studies that used the technique of priming by subthreshold stimuli, Moors, De Hou- wer, and Eelen (2004) also found a phase of primary automatic appraisal about whether an event was good or bad. Their subthreshold (priming) images were words in semantic categories such as profession or animal, which had been rewarded and therefore had become good, or had been nonrewarded and therefore had become bad.

Priming studies have come into question with concerns that replication is important in psy- chology. In the previous chapter, we discussed this in relation to studies of whether making facial expressions and postures could affect emotional experience. The issue of replication in psychological studies made it into the New York Times (van Bavel, 2016). In their explanation of why some studies fail to replicate, Van Bavel, Mende-Siedlecki, Brady, and Reinero (2016) have shown that effects such as priming are sensitive to contexts, which include participants’ cultural backgrounds. As Locke (2015) argues, priming is only a technique, and what is really needed is more development of theory. The theory we suggest is that in the process of relating an event to a concern about whether something is good or bad, there is a primary appraisal process that is fast and automatic so that when this occurs, outside conscious awareness, it can produce an immediate feeling of good or bad; our understanding of circumstances in which this can occur does indeed need more development.

Which Is Stronger, Good or Bad? Research on automatic appraisals of good and bad qualities of an event raises another question: which is stronger, good or bad? Reviews by Cacioppo and Gardner (1999), Baumeister et al. (2001), and Rozin and Royzman (2001) offer a perhaps unsettling answer: negative evaluations are more potent than positive evaluations. The bad is stronger than the good. This bias to be more responsive to danger rather than to satisfaction makes evolutionary sense. Without it, our chances of survival would be diminished; we only die once.

Negative events, such as the occurrence of frightening sounds or disgusting smells, trigger more rapid, stronger physiological responses than positive events, such as pleasing sounds or delicious tastes. In various experiments, it has been shown that losing $10 is experienced as more painful than the pleasure of gaining $10. Negative trauma, such as the death of a loved one or sexual abuse, can change a person for a lifetime. It is hard to think of analogous positive life events that alter life in such profound and enduring ways. Or consider contamination, the process by which a disgusting object endows another object with its vile essence through simple contact (Rozin & Fallon, 1987). Brief contact with a cockroach will spoil a delicious meal (the negative contaminates the positive). The inverse—trying to make cockroaches delicious by touching them with a favorite food—just does not work (Rozin & Royzman, 2001).

To address whether negative evaluations are more potent than positive evaluations, Ito et al. (1998) presented participants with positively valenced photographs (e.g., of pizza or ice cream) and negatively valenced photographs (e.g., of a mutilated face or of a dead cat). They recorded participants’ electrocortical activity focusing on a region of brain activity associated with evalu- ative responses. They discovered a clear negativity bias in evaluation: negative slides prompted greater brain activity than positive or neutral slides.

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Secondary Appraisals What happens when we move beyond automatic primary appraisals to secondary appraisals? Modern research on appraisal has tended to be in two families: discrete approaches, which propose that appraisals give rise directly to distinct emotions, and dimensional approaches, for which an initial primary appraisal is simply of whether what has happened is good or bad. Then secondary appraisals are socially constructed, but can have several dimensions and give rise to ranges of emotions.

Discrete Approaches In his theory of discrete emotions, Lazarus (1991) proposes a primary appraisal stage, which we show in Figure 6.2. A person appraises the event in terms of its relevance to goals. An early evaluation is of whether an event is relevant to a personal goal. If it is, an emotion is elicited; if not, there is no emotion. If an event is relevant, it is appraised as to whether it is congruent or incongruent with a goal. Goal-congruent events elicit positive emotions, and goal-incongruent events produce negative emotions. These stages together make up a primary appraisal. Then secondary appraisals of the event occur in relation to specific goals, or issues for the ego. Events can concern moral values, for example, to be kind, or to avoid doing to others what one would not want done to oneself. Events might bear upon issues of the self and identity, for example, whether one is excelling in areas that are central to self-definition, such as one’s academic work,

FIGURE 6.2 Decision tree of appraisals based on three features (goal relevance, goal congruence, and ego involvement), plus the emotions that can occur with these appraisals (Lazarus, 1991). Further differentiation among emotions occurs in secondary appraisals.

149Secondary Appraisals

or performance in the arts or sport, or work for charities. Events can pertain to important ideals, for example, that societies should be fair and just. In light of emotions that occur to other people about whom we care, the goals and well-being of these people are also our concerns, and such events thus give rise to emotions in us also.

An approach to discrete emotions that is related to Lazarus’s is that of Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987; 2011; 2014), who postulate appraisals with two components, as we have been discussing. A primary appraisal of an event occurs in relation to goals. It is automatic and unconscious. It occurs in terms of distinct emotions (such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, love, and contempt), each of which sets the brain into a mode adapted to deal with a recurring situation (progress toward a goal, loss, frustration by another, threat, and so on). Each mode is a set of states of action-readiness (Frijda, 1987, 2016), which we discuss further, below.

The effect is a bit like having several sound devices in your house: a smoke detector, a door- bell, a telephone bell, and a burglar alarm. If one goes off, you are alerted to something poten- tially important and your readiness changes accordingly—to escape from the house, or go to the door in a friendly way to meet a caller, but initially you do not know what the event was. You need to investigate. Similarly, an emotion can start, but its meaning in mental and verbal terms is supplied by a secondary process that occurs in awareness, in which you make a mental model of the event, of what caused it, and how to act in relation to it.

In the second stage of appraisal, the individual considers a causal attribution for the event, how to respond to the event or person in question, and future consequences of action. At this level, Lazarus calls the process the core relational theme of the emotion: its essential meaning, so on this scheme anger is caused by a demeaning offence against me or mine, anxiety is caused by an existential threat, sadness is experience of a loss, and so on. You can think of emotions in relation to these themes as summaries of the different classes of events that elicit them. In evolutionary terms, these themes map onto the problems and opportunities to which people respond with emotions—the slights (anger), dangers (fear), moral transgressions (guilt), losses (sadness), and sufferings of others (compassion), for example, that have been critical to human survival, repro- duction, and cooperative group living. You can also think about these themes as the language of our emotional experience: they indicate issues that organize our emotional experience.

Nico Frijda (1987; 2016) is responsible for suggesting that when an appraisal is made, we are prompted to readiness for a certain mode of action or interaction, appropriate to what has hap- pened. As he explains, when an appraisal happens, priority is given to a certain concern or goal, and sets up one, or perhaps more, of these modes of action readiness. Frijda and Parrott (2011) have called these modes ur-emotions (meaning primitive emotions), which have some but not all the attributes of full emotions.

Fridja’s scheme is, perhaps, currently among emotion researchers, the most widely accepted account of the nature of emotions. As Andrea Scarantino remarked at the International Sum- mer School in Affective Sciences, in July 2014 in Geneva: “We are all neo-Frijdians now” (see Frijda, 2016). Why? Because central to analyses of emotion-related experience and physiology is the idea that emotions enable actions within specific contexts that are attuned to our specific concerns. This idea has animated the study of emotion-specific bodily changes, which are often thought to support specific kinds of action. It will reappear in the next chapter when we think of the mammalian patterns of brain activation related to emotion and specific action. We present this scheme in Table 6.1.

Dimensional Approaches Can you think of aspects of emotional experience that are not well explained in terms of discrete emotions, or distinct modes of action readiness? Are there aspects of your emotional life that don’t seem readily to follow from this approach? Phoebe Ellsworth (e.g., 1991) has suggested

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that we need to think about emotion-related appraisal in a way that’s different from that of dis- crete emotions: the dimensional approach (Ellsworth, 2013).

Approaches to emotions as discrete highlight differences between emotions in terms of their eliciting appraisals. Yet many emotions are similar in fundamental ways. Anger and fear, for example, at their core, feel similar: they feel unpleasant and arousing. The same could be said about gratitude and love, which both feel quite pleasant and are marked by a feeling of devotion for others. An appraisal theory, Ellsworth contends, needs to account for the interesting similari- ties across emotions, as well as for their differences.

A second gap in approaches to emotions as discrete, according to Ellsworth, is their inability to account for transitions between emotions. Very often in our emotional experience, we move from one emotion to another; we shift from anger to guilt quite rapidly, or from sadness to hope, or (hopefully not often) from love to anger.

In light of such issues, Phoebe Ellsworth and Craig Smith (1985, 1988) developed a theory of appraisal that can account for interesting similarities among the emotions, as well as the many differences (for comparable accounts see Frijda, 1986; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988; Roseman, 1984, 2013; Sander, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2005; Scherer, 1988; Weiner, 1986). Smith and Ells- worth reviewed numerous studies of the semantic content of emotions and derived eight different dimensions of meaning that capture the appraisal processes that lead to various emotions. These dimensions are presented in Table 6.2. Think of these dimensions as units of meaning ascribed to events in your life: how positive or negative the event is, who is responsible for it, whether it is fair, how much energy is required, to what extent the event requires intense attention, how certain things seem, and so on.

To document the patterns of appraisal associated with the different emotions, Smith and Ellsworth had 16 participants imagine experiencing 15 different emotions. The participants then rated the original emotional experience on the eight dimensions presented in Table 6.2. Each was

Table 6.1 Modes of action readiness

1. ACCEPTANCE accepting presence or interaction

2. NONACCEPTANCE not accepting presence or interaction

3. ATTENDING acquiring information

4. DISINTEREST not acquiring information

5. APPROACH facilitating interaction

6. AFFILIATE achieving close personal interaction

7. AVOID decreasing interaction

8. REJECT refusing interaction

9. HOSTILITY modifying unwanted target action

10. REACTANCE increasing effort and persistence

11. DESIRE achieving positive hedonic outcome

12. CARING FOR improving dependents’ well-being

13. EXUBERANCE achieving gratuitous interactions

14. DOMINATION controlling others’ actions

15. SUBMISSION following someone else’s wishes

16. INTIMACY seeking intimate interaction

17. HELPLESSNESS desiring to act but not knowing how

18. APATHY no readiness for action

Source: Frijda (2016)

151Secondary Appraisals

defined by a pattern of appraisal. For example, interest was associated with appraisals of elevated pleasantness, the desire to attend, the sense that situational factors are producing events, the per- ceived need to expend effort, moderate certainty about future outcomes, together with little sense of perceived obstacle or illegitimacy of events. Hope was associated with appraisals of elevated attention and effort and situational agency, moderate pleasantness, and little certainty or sense of perceived obstacle or illegitimacy. Happiness was the emotion that was pleasant, associated with low effort, high certainty, and high attention.

A second result found by Smith and Ellsworth was that certain dimensions stood out in their ability to differentiate among related emotions. They found that a combination of control and responsibility were at issue. Important was agency, a critical dimension identified by Roseman (1984), which, for instance, differentiates three negative emotions: anger, sadness, and guilt. When we blame others, we become angry; when we attribute negative events to circumstances, we become sad; when we attribute negative events to ourselves, we become guilty. Agency also differentiates certain positive emotions. The same positive event attributed to the self is a source of pride, but when attributed to others, it’s a source of gratitude.

This importance of causality in emotion-related appraisal is likewise seen in the work of Weiner and Graham (1989). They found that some distinct emotions depend on attributions, the explana- tions of the causes of events that people give. They describe how children between the ages of 5 and 11 were given vignettes and asked to decide what emotion would occur. One was this:

This is a story about a boy named Chris. Chris’s teacher gave a spelling test and he got all the words right. Chris received an “A” on the test

(Weiner & Graham, 1989, p. 407).

If the children were told that Chris had studied all the words the night before (implying that the cause of his success was his own action), they tended to say that he would feel pride; but if the cause was that the teacher gave an easy test (a cause external to Chris), then the children, especially the older ones, thought Chris would not feel pride. Comparable results were found with guilt: if an event that caused damage could have been controlled, the children thought the person causing it would feel guilt, but if it was an accident, the older children thought the person would not feel guilt.

The finding that causal attributions differentiate among emotions has an important implica- tion: a particular negative event may happen to you (perhaps you don’t do as well on an exam as you had hoped), but which emotion you experience will depend on how you appraise the causes. Attribute the event to yourself and you’re likely to feel guilt. Attribute it to others and you’ll feel anger. Attribute it to circumstantial factors and you’ll be more likely to experience sadness.

Table 6.2 Dimensions of appraisal

1. Attention: Degree to which you focus on and think about the event

2. Certainty: Degree to which you are certain about what is going to happen

3. Control/coping: Extent to which you have control over outcomes in the environment

4. Pleasantness: Degree to which the event is positive or negative

5. Perceived obstacle: Extent to which the pursuit of your goals is blocked

6. Responsibility: Extent to which others, you, and situational factors are responsible for events

7. Legitimacy: Extent to which the event is fair and deserved or unfair and undeserved

8. Anticipated effort: Extent to which you must expend energy to respond to the event

Source: Adapted from Smith & Ellsworth (1985)

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Extending Appraisal Research: Tests of Theories and Patterns of Variation Tests of the discrete and dimensional theories of appraisal are surprisingly difficult. Most criti- cally, these theories propose that appraisals cause distinct emotions, but evidence, such as that generated in the study by Smith and Ellsworth, is not direct evidence of causality; rather, when researchers ask participants to report on appraisals that gave rise to past emotions, that evidence is retrospective, and could reflect lay theories about the causes of emotion rather than actual causes of experience (Parkinson, Fischer, & Manstead, 2004).

Reflection and Cultivation: Prejudice

When we make a negative primary appraisal without thinking—"I don’t know about that person, who is different from me"—there’s a word for it: “prejudice,” the making of a judgment before anything else, "prejudice" = "pre- judgment." It can happen with skin color, or gender, or age. Here is an experiment. Kerry Kawakami et al. (2009) asked self-identified white and Asian people to complete a survey that included asking whether they would be upset by a racist act. They predicted they would be. Not long afterward, with the experimenter out of the room, they saw a black man (an experimenter’s confederate) say he had to go and get his cell phone and, as he left the room, gently bump the knee of a white man (another confederate). In different experimental conditions, and with the black man now out of the room, the white man either made no comment, or made a moder- ately racist remark, “Typical, I hate it when black people do that,” or an extreme racist remark, “Clumsy n-----!” Within minutes, the experimenter and the black man returned to the room and participants were asked to rate the intensity of a list of emotions. Those who had heard either of the rac- ist remarks were no more upset than those in the condition in which no comment had been made. When later asked whom they would choose to collaborate with, participants were found also to have overestimated the degree to which they would reject the man who made the racist remark.

A recent study has shown that the way primates, includ- ing ourselves, identify individual faces is in terms of spatial separations of salient points, for example, tip of the nose, corners of the eyes and lips, from average (Chang & Tsao, 2017). What individuals take as average is of the faces they are used to seeing. The mechanism is one by which humans come to recognize people whom they know. Kang Lee and his colleagues (e.g. Quinn et al., 2015) have found that

children as young as six months distinguish between faces of their own ethnic group and those of other ethnic groups. Even such young children can see as individuals, people in the group with which they are familiar. By contrast, people from groups that diverge from the average of faces they have often seen are perceived just in terms of categories. They become people from other groups: stereotypes.

In a study of a different kind, Corado Guillietti et al. (2017) sent some 20,000 e-mails to government officials in nearly every county in the United States: to sheriff’s offices, to school district offices, to librarians. The e-mails asked sim- ple questions such as "Could you please tell me when your opening hours are?" The e-mails were identical except that half of them had been addressed as coming from some- one called DeShawn Jackson or Tyrone Washington, names associated with black men, and half were from Greg Walsh or Jake Mueller, names associated with white men. Though most of the e-mails received polite and timely responses, those that could be interpreted as coming from black peo- ple were less likely to be answered by sheriff’s offices, and a smaller deficit of this kind occurred also with librarians. Overall the e-mails interpretable as coming from black peo- ple were 13 percent less likely to be answered and were 8 percent less likely to include friendly or polite words like "Hi," or "Dear," or "Thanks."

Part of the problem with prejudice is that not only does it occur without thinking, but we may not be aware of it in our- selves. One way to deal with this has been suggested by Jo Altilia (see e.g. 2017, founder of a program called Literature for Life, in which young women who had become pregnant while still at school join reading circles). "When I am enter- ing a new situation, or meeting new people," she says, "I ask myself: ’What prejudices am I having right now?’"

153Secondary Appraisals

There is evidence that manipulating appraisals can cause distinct emotions. In one study, Ira Roseman and Andreas Evdokas (2004) recruited people for an experiment on substances with pleasant and unpleasant tastes. People were assigned to different groups; some were told they would definitely experience a taste, others that they would probably experience a taste. The researchers found that when people appraised the situation as one in which they would definitely avoid an unpleasant taste, relief was caused. When they appraised the situation as one in which they would probably experience a pleasant taste, hope was caused.

Other work has ascertained whether emotion-specific appraisals relate to other measures of emo- tional response. For example, in a study guided by Lazarus’s framework, Bonanno and Keltner (2004) coded the narratives of people who, six months previously, had experienced the death of their romantic partner. These narratives were complex, moving accounts of participants’ lives with their partners, how they had met and fallen in love, how they had raised families, and ultimately how their partner had died. When people referred to core relational themes of loss, they showed greater sadness in the face and reported more intense feelings of sadness; when people referred to appraisals of injustice, by contrast, they showed more anger in the face and reported greater feelings of anger.

Kornelia Gentsch, David Grandjean, Klaus Scherer and their colleagues have tested predic- tions relating appraisals and facial muscle movements as detailed in Scherer’s Component Process Model (Scherer, 2001). This model of appraisal suggests that we evaluate events in a sequence of appraisals. We first assess whether it is novel and relevant to us, then appraise it in terms of how certain we are, then assess whether its conducive to our goals, and then assess the agency or cause of the event, our degree of control, and whether we have power in the situation. In a final stage of appraisal, we assess the event for how normative or societally appropriate it is. In this model, there is an unfolding of emotion as a function of specific appraisal components and emotion-related responses. To test this model, these researchers have exposed participants to evocative stimuli such as odors, faces, pictures, or opportunities to win money and then var- ied whether the stimulus was novel or not, or whether it was pleasant and conducive to goals, or whether participants felt as though they had power in the situation (Gentsch, Grandjean & Scherer 2015). Across modalities (e.g., odors, pictures), the novelty appraisal triggers the raising of the eyebrows, and pleasantness and unpleasantness trigger the smile or frown, respectively.

One truth that comes through strongly in understanding emotion is that people vary in their emotional appraisals and responses. Depending on a person’s gender, or social class, or personal- ity, or culture of origin, the same event—say going on a date or getting a good grade—can elicit different emotions. One way to understand such variation is found in how people appraise events. For example, people clearly vary in their primary appraisals, in terms of whether the environment is threatening or rewarding, worthy of approach or avoidance (Carver & White, 1994). People who appraise environments in terms of threat, for example, tend to experience more negative affect and fear. You may see that occurs for people who feel less powerful in a social context, who may include those who come from less-advantageous class backgrounds, or who have more neurotic or anxious traits of personality. You may also be surprised to discover that the appraisal tendency to see threat and negativity in the environment is more characteristic of political con- servatives than liberals (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2014).

Variations in secondary appraisals also help explain how people’s emotions can vary. For example, when asked to think about a successful event, US students reported greater pride than Japanese students, who reported feeling more lucky. These differences could be attributed to differences in appraisals: US students explained their personal successes in terms of their own personal agency (which triggered pride), and Japanese students appraised their successes more in terms of situational agency (Imada & Ellsworth, 2011).

Kuppens, van Mechelen, Smits, de Boeck, and Ceulemans (2007) found that appraisals can have different meanings for different people: although for some people, anger is caused by frus- tration, for others, it is usually caused by a sense of deliberate unfairness. For yet others, it is

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caused by a threat to one’s selfhood. Such meaningful appraisals can become habitual styles and hence aspects of personality (Power & Hill, 2010), and we discuss this further in Chapter 11.

We analyze discrete and dimensional perspectives more deeply later in this chapter.

A Third Phase of Appraisal: Verbal Sharing So far, we have spoken of appraisal as something that is inside the individual’s head. Yet much of how we make sense of our emotions occurs in our conversations with others. Earlier in the chapter, we described two phases of emotion: a brief initial phase that is automatic and then an extended second phase that can be reflective. Sharing emotions is a third phase, a tertiary appraisal carried out with other people.

Novels and films: Vertigo

Detective stories (mysteries) are based on an appraisal, not just of an event but of a whole situation. A crime has been committed, then a detective works on events to reappraise them and ends by showing that beneath the surface there has been a very different world. Before we’ve finished the story, we will have undertaken a large reappraisal.

In the 1958 film, Vertigo, the director, Alfred Hitchcock, prepared not just one change of appraisal for the characters and audience members, but several.

In the surface layer, the film’s protagonist, Scottie (played by James Stewart) was a San Francisco police detective. Chasing a suspect across rooftops, he was left hanging from a roof. A colleague who tried to save him fell to his death. Scottie takes early retirement, suffering from guilt, vertigo, and a phobia for heights. An old college friend gives him something on which he can employ his detective skills. It’s to follow his wife, Madeleine (played by Kim Novak), who seems to have become mentally possessed by a dead per- son. Scottie starts to follow Madeleine and he sees her sit- ting for hours in an art gallery, gazing at a portrait of this dead person, her great-grandmother, Carlotta.

Now comes the second layer: a reappraisal by Scottie. His principal concern becomes no longer his friend’s com- mission. It’s the cool, blonde, sophisticated, Madeleine. He falls in love with her. When she makes a suicide jump into San Francisco Bay, he rescues her and takes her to his apart- ment. When this film was made, sex could not be depicted on the screen. But we see Madeline in Scottie’s bed, waking up and asking how she got there while every bit of her cloth- ing is hanging up to dry.

Next there is another layer: Scottie comes to be not just in love but obsessed. Madeline tells him of a dream of Car- lotta at a place with a tower, south of San Francisco. Scottie drives her there because he thinks a visit might free her from her states of possession. When they arrive, they declare their love for each other. But she breaks from him and runs up the steps of the tower. As Scottie follows her, he is over- come by his phobia for heights. A scream is heard. Through a window, we see her body hurtle downward. Then there is a shot of the dead Madeleine face-down on a rooftop.

Next comes yet another appraisal: Scottie in a state of depression and redoubled guilt wanders the city and sees a woman who reminds him of Madeleine: a brash redhead, Judy (also played by Kim Novak). They start going out. He coerces her to have her hair dyed blonde. He takes her to a shop and buys her a gray suit of the kind Madeleine used to wear. Then, in one of the film’s memorable scenes, Judy walks toward him through a luminous mist. She is Made- leine—as Scottie remembers her. Now he can love her.

We won’t give the ending away but, in the next appraisal, we in the audience realize that Judy was indeed Madeleine and was hired by Scottie’s college friend to impersonate his wife. As Goffman (1959) has said: “It is always possible to manipulate the impression the observer uses as a substitute for reality because a sign for the presence of a thing, not being that thing, can be employed in the absence of it” (p. 251).

An accomplishment of this film is its central question: “How far does that all-consuming emotion of sexual love depend on an appraisal based on projection, and how far does it derive from perceiving who the person actually is?”

155Words and concepts

Using diary methods, Bernard Rimé and his colleagues have found that people have a strong tendency to confide their emotional experiences to others, which Rimé et al. (1991) call social sharing. In this research, people were found to share with others, verbally, between 88 percent and 96 percent of emotions remembered at the end of the day. The rates were similar across the age range, for males and females, and for the interdependent Surinamese population living in the Netherlands as well as the individualistic Dutch. Sharing occurred even for emotions such as guilt and shame. Our capacity to represent our emotions with language and to share these representa- tions with others is a deep human tendency and may be what is most unique about human emotion.

When we share our emotions with others, we necessarily rely upon our knowledge of emo- tions, and we use specific words, concepts, categories, and narratives to convey our experiences to others.

Words and concepts The Emotion Lexicon The English language has many words that name or refer to emotion, in what is known as the emotion lexicon, which can be organized into categories at different levels. In one important study, Shaver et al. (1987) gave participants 135 emotion terms written on cards and asked them to sort those words into as many or few categories as they thought appropriate. Based on this sorting, Shaver et al. captured English speakers’ organization of emotion lexicon, finding three levels to our emotion knowledge.

At the superordinate level, there is a distinction between positive and negative emotions. This seems to fit well with how people appraise the goodness and badness of events immediately and automatically. At the next level, known as the basic level of knowledge, are six emotion concepts: love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear. One might expect these terms to be those that people most frequently use to describe their emotional experience. This same list of emotions replicates (with slight variations) in analyses of other languages (Romney, Moore, & Rusch, 1997). Below each of the basic emotion terms are many more specific states. This is known as the subordinate level of emotion knowledge. These are likely to be states that share properties of the basic emo- tion concept above them, and that are in important ways similar to one another. For example, below the basic emotion concept love is: love, compassion, lust, and longing. Below the concept happiness is: amusement, enthusiasm, pleasure, pride, hope, enthrallment, and relief. Below sad- ness is: agony, depression, disappointment, guilt, embarrassment, and pity.

Johnson-Laird and Oatley (1989) offered a semantic analysis of the English lexicon with pri- mary emotion terms for emotions which cannot be analyzed into anything more basic, and com- plex emotions, which derive from them, which combine a basic emotion with some propositional content; so jealousy (in Britain and the United States) is an emotion of anger and/or fear toward a person who has intruded on a relationship of love or attachment.

To explore how cultures vary in their language of emotion, Russell (1991) read hundreds of ethnographies written by anthropologists who had lived in different cultures and were familiar with the language and life of that culture. After observing that almost all languages have terms for anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and disgust, Russell paints a fascinating picture of how cultures differ in their language of emotion. Cultures vary in the number of words that represent emo- tions. Researchers have identified 2,000 emotion-related words in English, 750 in Taiwanese, 58 in Ifaluk in Polynesia, and 8 in the Chewong of Malaysia.

Cultures vary in which states they represent with emotion terms. In the Gifjingali language of the Aborigines of Australia, fear and shame are captured by the same word, gurakadj. The dis- tinction between shame and embarrassment is not made by the Japanese, Tahitians, Indonesians, or Newars of Nepal. There are states represented by a single word in other languages that are not

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represented by single English terms. For example, in Czech, one finds litost, which means the sudden realization of life’s tragic circumstances. In German, there is the word schadenfreude, pleasure at the failure or suffering of another person. In a related way, some cultures represent kinds of experience with numerous words and concepts. For example, in Tahiti, there are 46 separate terms that refer to anger. When this kind of effect occurs, people may be more likely to experience many shades of meaning for certain kinds of emotion.

Clearly, emotion words vary extensively across cultures. Given such variation, Anna Wierz- bicka (1999), a linguist who is fluent in many languages, has been critical of attempts to infer universal categories of emotion from intuitions by members of English-speaking cultures. She proposes, instead, universal concepts of emotions based on the following kind of (somewhat abbreviated) analysis that focuses on universal semantic elements. Happiness: (a) X was happy because X thought something, (b) X thought: “Some good things happened to me,” (c) X thought: “I wanted things like this to happen,” (d) X thought: “I don’t want anything else now.”

Conceptualization of Emotion When we use words to describe emotion experiences, we engage in an act of conceptualization; we interpret the experience with our ideas and notions, for example, about what caused the emo- tion, do we have control over it, is it appropriate, is it inherently a good or bad experience, and how does it express our relationship to others (Ford et al., 2018; Ford & Gross, 2018).

Studies of emotion words reveal several different conceptual properties of the language of emotions. One of these is that applying a word to an emotional experience helps identify its intentional object: what the emotion is specifically about (Ben Ze’ev & Oatley, 1996). (The philosophical term intention means “aboutness”: thinking, knowing, and usually feeling are intentional in this sense because they are about something.) Emotion words direct us to the focus of the experience, some event relevant to our concerns, and likely courses of action (Ben Ze’ev, 2000). As you stand at the edge of a room at a party you might suddenly realize: “I’m feeling jealous.” This word is likely to sharpen the focus of your experience and guide you to attend to specific events: perhaps your partner is smiling flirtatiously at your best friend. The experience, the word, and the concept may evoke past experiences of a similar theme, perhaps with this cur- rent partner. Emotion words, then, appear to shape diffuse states into more specific emotional experiences. A study by Anderson et al. (2011) showed how verbal emotional information can affect perception. When a piece of negative verbal emotional gossip was paired with a face, this face was recognized more easily in confusing circumstances than were faces that had been paired with neutral or positive gossip.

Emotion Metaphors Many emotion words are metaphorical. A metaphor is a concept that points to something other than itself. We might say, “This party is a blast.” The image, the blast of a bomb, can characterize complex features of a party. Or we might say “Justice is blind” to characterize a hoped-for prop- erty of the process of justice: to indicate it should be applied similarly to everyone, independently of who they are.

We often use metaphors to describe experience, and these metaphors reveal how we concep- tualize emotion within a particular culture. In their study of metaphor, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Zoltán Kövesces have argued that there are five types of metaphor that speakers of English use frequently for emotional experience (Kövesces, 2003; Lakoff, 2016; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). First, emotions can be natural forces. We speak of being swept away by our emotions as if they were waves. Second, emotions can be opponents. We may struggle with grief

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or frustration. Third, emotions can be diseases. We say that we are sick with love or envy. Fourth, we can think of emotions as fluids in containers. We simmer with rage or burst with joy. Fifth, we can think of emotions as animals. People who kiss a lot in public are “lovey-dovey.” Citron et al. (2016) found sentences based on metaphor, such as "She’s a sweet child," are associated with more activation of the brain region of the amygdala, than those that do not, such as "She’s a kind child" because, they say, such metaphors induce more emotional salience. What is clear is that in English, metaphors often conceptualize emotions as unbidden, unwieldy, and disruptive forces in our social lives.

Prototypes Russell (1991) suggested that although in science we need to understand defining characteristics of terms that are used, in ordinary life we think in terms of prototypical examples with no sharp boundaries to separate good from less good examples.

Are there necessary and sufficient features of the concept of emotion, or of specific emotions? For some concepts, we can give a definition with necessary and sufficient features—so a grand- mother is “the mother of a person who is a parent.” For most concepts, exact definition is difficult or impossible because the natural world is not so neatly divided into categories, and for many objects we just do not know enough. So, when you say “tree,” you mean that kind of thing called “tree” of which we all know typical examples but about which, if need be, those scientists in the Botany Department could tell us more. In this kind of way, language and thought have the won- derful property of allowing us to talk and be understood even when we do not know very much. To do this, we rely on kinds of thinking that the hearer can summon into mind (Putnam, 1975).

For Russell, then, rather than emotions being able to be analyzed, semantically, in the manner suggested by Johnson-Laird and Oatley (1989), emotions are based on prototypes. A prototype can be thought of as an example of an object in a category that exhibits typical features of the category, so a prototypical bird is a robin. It flies, is of medium size, sings, builds nests, and so on. When invoking prototypes to explain things, we can also specify modifications. Although our prototype for "tree" might include the concept "large," we can modify it and say, of a bonsai: “It’s a tiny tree that has been grown in a pot and pruned to keep it small.” (We showed some prototypi- cal emotional expressions in the previous chapter.)

In several studies, Fehr and Russell (1984) present evidence that suggests that people think about emotions in terms of prototypes. People’s everyday prototype of an emotion is something like a script, which refers to a characteristic outline of a sequence of events. In a systematic exploration of prototypical scripts for different emotions, Shaver et al. (1987) had participants write about the causes, thoughts, feelings, actions, and physical signs of different emotions. They coded these writings and identified features of the emotion prototypes as features that occurred in at least 20 percent of either the person’s descriptions or the emotion’s descriptions. The prototype for sadness is shown in Table 6.3.

Table 6.3 Prototype of sadness

Causes: Death, loss, not getting what one wants

Feelings: Helpless, tired, run-down, slow

Expressions: Drooping posture, saying sad things, crying, tears

Thoughts: Blaming, criticizing self, reflection on past actions

Actions: Negative talk to others, withdrawal from what was lost

Source: Adapted from Shaver et al. (1987)

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By this narrative methodology, participants offer scripts, or as De Sousa (1987) calls them, paradigm scenarios, of different emotions (see also De Sousa, 2004). The idea has been use- ful for researchers in differentiating various emotions. Researchers using these methods have sought to identify the distinct prototypes of the self-conscious emotions, including embarrass- ment, shame, and guilt (Keltner & Buswell, 1996; Miller & Tangney, 1994; Parrott & Smith, 1991). Embarrassment most typically follows violations of conventions that increase social expo- sure (e.g., after pratfalls or a loss of body control). Shame tends to arise from failure to live up to expectations, either one’s own or those of significant others, that define the “core self,” “ego ideal,” or character. Guilt appears to follow transgressions of moral rules that govern behavior toward others. The common antecedents of guilt, therefore, include lying, cheating, stealing, infidelity, and neglecting personal duties (Tangney, 1992; Tangney et al., 1996).

The prototype perspective is consistent with the idea of emotions based on core affect (Rus- sell, 2003). This perspective helps account for the varieties of experiences that are represented by one category of emotion. For example, there are numerous varieties of anger: some involving blame, others being accidental; some directed at others, others directed at the self; some experi- ences of high intensity (like rage), others more modest (like irritation). A prototype perspective suggests that within each emotion category, there are better examples of an emotion that possess the prototypical features of an emotion, such as those that we presented for sadness. Then there will be many variations of that emotion that have fewer of those features, or other features as well.

Variations in Emotion Lexicon It is clear that people vary dramatically in terms of the words they use to describe their emotional lives. For some, the realm of emotion is captured in a rich array of words, metaphors, concepts, and narratives. For others, such as the character Heath Ledger plays in Ang Lee’s film, Brokeback Mountain, emotional life is registered in a few simple words that are expressed in the simplest of terms.

Todd Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Jordi Quoidbach and their colleagues refer to such variation in the language of emotion as emotional complexity (Kashdan, McKnight, & Barrett, 2015; Quoidbach et  al., 2014). Some people differentiate emotion into a wide variety of cat- egories and distinctions; they lead emotionally complex lives, of experiences of many kinds of emotion, both negative and positive. For others, the emotion realm has fewer varieties of experi- ence. With self-report methods, and daily diary reports, scientists can discover whether people differentiate between many negative and positive emotions, or whether their emotion knowledge is less differentiated. In general, a more complex emotional life has many benefits, including reduced use of alcohol, better health as indexed in fewer visits to a doctor, reduced depression, and healthier romantic relationships.

For those who have a narrower language of emotion, one finds a different pattern of outcomes. This is known as alexithymia (Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997), which means having few words for emotions; it’s a difficulty in being able to identify or express emotions verbally. It is associated with being less aware of emotions, a paucity of fantasies, and a cognitive style oriented to outside events rather than to the inner world. Research on alexithymia is now extensive, with implications for social interaction and mental health. David Preece et al. (2017) review this field and propose a model in which alexithymic people have a difficulty in appraisal, which leads to problems in iden- tifying and describing their emotions, and then combines with problems in attending to emotions. These researchers found evidence for this model in a community sample. In a study that used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), van der Velde et al. (2015) studied viewing and reappraising pictures designed to induce negative emotions. When participants first looked at the pictures, those who had higher scores on an alexithymia scale had lower activation brain regions

159Words and concepts

associated with recognition and attention than did those who were less alexithymic. But when people were asked to reappraise, no comparable differences in activation were found between the more and less alexithymic participants. In a study of brain volumes, Grabe et al. (2014) found that alexithymic people had less grey matter, or neuronal cells, than comparison participants in areas of their anterior cingulate cortex that are associated with language processing.

As our experience of emotions is translated into verbal forms, we are enabled to extend the meanings and uses of our primary experiences. In this act something extraordinary occurs, which is available only to humans. Emotions and thoughts can themselves become objects of emotion and thought. We can turn them over in our minds, reflect on them, and share them with others. Rimé (2009) argues that in sharing emotions verbally, relationships are extended, social support is enabled, and experience is compared with the experiences and intuitions of other members of our community.

The question of what emotions are really about, and how situations are appraised at the deepest level, may need to be coaxed out in verbal terms. James Pennebaker et al. (1988) had 50 students write either about emotionally significant issues or about superficial topics for 20 minutes on four consecutive days. Those who wrote about the deeper emotional issues showed improvements in immune function in the form of higher lymphocyte responses to an antigen challenge and fewer medical consultations at the University Health Center. Although participants who wrote about emotionally important issues found the actual writing more distressing than did control partici- pants, three months later they were significantly happier than the controls and, looking back, they viewed the experience of confronting the emotional issues about which they wrote as a positive experience. These effects have been replicated many times, both in Pennebaker’s laboratory and by other research groups. Pennebaker has found therapeutic effects of confronting traumatic experiences by writing or by talking. He understands the process in terms of alleviating a debili- tation caused by suppressing traumatic experiences. He has concluded that the debilitation is relieved by confiding, turning the emotions over in consciousness, and by coming to understand the emotions and their implications (Pennebaker, 2012; Pennebaker & Chung, 2011; Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999).

Novels and films: Welcome to the Sticks

A wonderfully funny film that illustrates appraisal processes is Welcome to the Sticks. It was said to be the most popular film of all time in France. If you are French, you will know about it: Bienvenue chez les Cht’is.

The film is about a post-office manager, Philippe (Kad Merad). His wife, Julie (Zoé Félix), is grumpy and difficult. She wants Philippe to get a transfer to the French Riviera. To move to such a favorable spot is difficult, so, to help his chances Philippe decides that he needs to be disabled. He buys a wheelchair. When an inspector arrives, his ruse is discovered and, perhaps as a punishment, the Post Office Human Relations Department transfers him, instead, to Ber- gues at the opposite end of France, which people who live in the south of France appraise as being the North Pole. Philippe sets out for his new job in his car. He goes alone

because Julie won’t accompany him. He’s stopped by the police for driving too slowly on the highway. He explains to the cop that he has been transferred to the North. “Be brave,” says the cop, and lets him go without a fine.

The staff of the Bergues Post Office are so warm and kind to Philippe that he becomes happy in his new position but, as this occurs, almost unintentionally, in phone calls to his wife, he finds himself saying the place is terrible; he pre- tends his appraisal is far worse than it is. Where Julie had been demanding, she becomes understanding; where she had been cold, she becomes affectionate. Every two weeks, Philippe goes south for the weekend, to see her. Just as his job is appraised as better than it’s ever been, so, now, is his marriage—so much better that, after a few weeks, Julie decides to move to Bergues, too. Philippe confides to his

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Emotional Experience For many, the defining feature of an emotion is its subjective experience, how the unfolding process of emotion feels to the individual. Most typically, we represent our emotional experience with words, in ways that capture what is happening in the social context, and what is happening in our bodies (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007).

Emotion scientists take many approaches to measure emotional experience. The most direct is simply to ask people to report on how they currently feel with self-report measures, ideally tailored to the specific context and administered as close to the emotion-eliciting stimulus as possible. In this spirit, people can complete adjective checklists, such as the following (Green, Goldman, & Salovey, 1993; Mauss & Robinson, 2009):

Positive Negative

cheerful blue

contented depressed

happy downhearted

pleased gloomy

satisfied sad

warmhearted unhappy

Sets of adjectives that are synonyms of emotions and moods (as above) are offered to partici- pants in a scrambled order. Participants are asked to check any adjective that applies to them. Points are given separately for positive and negative adjectives.

post-office staff that he has told his wife that the people of Bergues are coarse and his situation is miserable. So, when Julie arrives, they put on a show of making everything seem far more awful than anyone could possibly imagine.

As we appraise these events we join together and laugh with the actors in the film, as if we in the audience are taking part. The idea of living in the north of France was appraised by Philippe as too awful, but when he arrives he appraises his job as much better than it’s ever been. These simulta- neous and opposite appraisals seem to audiences rather funny. Philippe tells Julie that Bergues is a terrible place, and when she arrives, people there have made it more awful than Philippe said. Again, there are two different appraisals, the initial one of Julie and that which is put on for her by Philippe’s workmates.

The question of why we laugh was asked by Henri Berg- son (1900/1911). First, he thought laughter is solely human. We don’t laugh at landscapes, and we laugh at animals only when they seem human. Bergson wrote about how we may laugh when we see a human behaving in a machine-like way.

He didn’t use the term "appraisal," but to see someone as machine-like is to appraise that person as both human and not-quite-human. Bergson suggests this is odd, and funny, because being human is such a fragile state. Second, Berg- son said, we need to be a bit detached to laugh. We don’t laugh when we feel sympathy for a person. Third, said Berg- son, laughter needs a social echo. We laugh usually only when we are in touch with others.

We started our discussion of laugher in the previous chapter, where we saw that laughter is both a bodily activity and, as Jaak Panksepp (2005) proposes, typically social. It begins in infancy and continues in children’s play. In chase games, the child being chased laughs more than the one who is chasing. Panksepp has found that rats make chirping sounds when they play with each other: animal precursors of laughter. When we humans tickle them, we are doing some- thing odd, so that they make these sounds, the rats become bonded to these particular humans. In some human cul- tures, such as that of England, people cultivate bonding by making jokes with each other and even at each other.

161Emotional Experience

A second method is to offer statements like: “I am feeling sad and dispirited.” Then ask people to indicate agreement on a scale—a common five-point scale is “strongly agree, agree, not sure, disagree, strongly disagree.” Alternatively, you can make up a scale indicating the extent to which each statement “Describes me.”

A third method is to use a scale like the following:

Circle a number on the scale below to indicate how sad you feel: Not at all 0–1–2–3–4–5–6–7–8–9–10. The most intense I have felt in my life.

The ends of this kind of scale are marked with verbal expressions called anchor points, with which the participant can compare his or her current experience.

There are several established self-report scales that measure tendencies toward global positive and negative moods (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), distinct positive emotions like awe, love, and compassion (Shiota, Keltner, & John, 2006), the tendency to express specific emotions like anger (Spielberger, 1996), shame and guilt (Tangney, 1990), embarrassment (Miller, 1995), and fear (Spielberger, 1983), as well as emotions in relation to others such as gratitude (McCullough, Tsang, & Emmons, 2004) and empathy (Davis, 1983). In a useful development of emotion dia- ries is called experience sampling: participants are beeped on a mobile phone or other device at random times during the day, and at that instant, they provide information about their current feelings (Barrett & Barrett, 2001; Bolger, Davis, & Refaeli, 2003).

In many ways, the question of what gives rise to our emotional experience is a pressing ques- tion of the field and still remains a scientific puzzle. Two theoretical perspectives have emerged (Reizensein, 1992a). In one form, the very experience of emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, is basic, so that it cannot be reduced to lower-level components. Fridja and Par- rott’s (2011) idea of ur-emotions is also a version of this idea. In the second form, the experi- ence of emotions derives from elements that are not themselves emotions. This is the position of those who think of emotions as socially constructed. For instance, Russell (2003) and Barrett (2017) think of an initial positivity or negativity, followed by a phase in which the experience is constructed from what is perceived in the context, elements in upbringing, and culture. A lively debate is taking place in emotion research in which these two perspectives are explored.

The Perspective That Emotions Are Discrete Earlier in the chapter we discussed how emotions have often been taken as discrete (Frijda, 1987; Ekman, 1992; Keltner & Lerner, 2010; Panksepp, 1992; Roseman, 2011; Oatley & Johnson- Laird, 2014). With these ways of measuring emotional experience, we need to say some more about it and the alternative approach here.

From the discrete perspective, our experiences of emotions such as sadness, embarrassment, awe, or amusement are fairly distinct from one another. Our conscious experience of differ- ent emotions integrates emotion-related responses in the body and represents courses of action (Winkielman, et al., 2011). From this perspective, our emotions are discrete, because this is how we can see their functions in our individual and social lives, love to form relationships with oth- ers, sadness to deal with loss, anger when another has done something to demean us, and so on.

In important ways, the idea of discrete emotions can be taken as starting with Charles Dar- win’s book of 1872, and his analysis of the universal patterns of expressive behavior. Emotions originate in human evolution as a primate species and can be recognized by their expressions: a smile for happiness, a frown and clenched fists for anger, tears and a downcast look for sadness, and so on. According to this view, an appraisal immediately produces an emotion of a particular

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kind. Although each kind can be further elaborated, the basic emotions can, in general, be identi- fied by words that occur in human languages; they correspond to distinct kinds of emotions as they are experienced.

In different chapters, we have encountered studies that were motivated by a discrete approach to emotion and emotional experience. Distinct patterns of expressive behavior—the warm smile or embarrassment display or lip puckers and lip licks of desire—correlate with self-reports of distinct experiences of emotions. When asked to represent the bodily sensations of different emo- tions, people refer to different parts of the body as locations of those emotions. Still other evidence comes from feelings that occur without any appraisal, for instance, in the auras that precede sei- zures caused by temporal-lobe epilepsy. MacLean (1993) reports that these are strong feelings of six kinds: desire, fear, anger, dejection, self-congratulation, and affection, and that they are free- floating "completely unattached to anything, situation, or event" (p. 79). In a study of emotions of these kinds in presurgical investigations in 74 patients with epilepsy, Melitti et al. (2006) electri- cally stimulated the temporal lobes of the patients and found that emotions of this free-floating kind were caused: most frequently fear, also happiness and sadness, but not anger or disgust.

In a diary study, Oatley and Duncan (1994) found in 175 episodes of emotion recorded by 47 employed people that 6 percent of the emotions were not caused by an appraisal. Emotions that arose in this free-floating way were of happiness, anger, fear, and sadness. If distinct basic emo- tions are primitives of experience (as argued by Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987), an emotion or mood is a basic state and a complex emotion derives from it by adding secondary appraisals about the emotion’s cause, its object, and plans in relation to it. So envy is anger at a specific person who is envied, embarrassment is fear for oneself at a specific action, thought, or event. Oatley and Duncan found no free-floating emotions that were of this complex kind. They did, however, find that whereas most theories of basic emotions assume that emotions occur one at a time, 31 percent of emotional episodes recorded by their participants occurred as mixtures, with anger plus fear being the most common, and that 32 percent of the emotions changed as they proceeded, so that although happiness was usually stable, it was not uncommon for anger to change to sadness.

Psychoactive drugs can cause emotions without any appraisal. Especially striking is the drug cholecystokinin, which, in healthy humans, reliably produces a state of panicky fear (Eser, et al. 2005).

The Perspective That Emotions Are Constructed The alternative perspective on emotional experience is known as constructivist (Russell, 2003; Barrett, 2017; Clore & Ortony, 2008; Lindquist, 2013). This approach can be traced back to William James (1884), who thought that emotions are perceptions of inner physiological pro- cesses so that, like perceptions of the outer world, there are many ways of experiencing and talking about them. Development of this position, away from James’s theory, has been strongly influenced by insights from anthropology and sociology. (We reviewed findings of this kind in Chapter 3). On this view, the emotion we feel and the language we use to talk about it don’t fall into discrete categories; rather, our experience of emotion is constructed as we go along, based on our individuality, our gender, our class, our upbringing, and the culture in which we live.

Contemporary, constructivist approaches to emotional experience are founded on a few core assumptions. A first is an assessment of the empirical literature on emotion-related response, and the critique that emotions are not natural kinds, in the way that pigeons, robins, and seagulls are naturally occurring kinds of birds (Barrett, 2007, 2017). Within any emotion category, such as anger, fear, or love, there is too much variation in emotion-related response, the critique goes. And very often our experiences of emotion don’t robustly track emotion-related responses, as assumed by a discrete perspective. For example, in a review of studies of this kind, Reisenzein, Studtmann, and Horstmann (2013) found that coherence between the expression of smiling and

163Emotional Experience

the joyful experience of amusement was high, but for other emotions, coherence between expres- sion and experience was lower (see also Matsumoto et al., 2008). There is no essence to emotion and no clear boundaries between the different emotions. A central truth of emotion is variation within categories of emotion, according to your genetics, your background, your culture of ori- gin, your family life.

A second core assumption of constructivist approaches, first articulated by James Russell, is that emotions are based on core affect, based on a primary appraisal dimension of goodness or badness, with an orthogonal dimension of energization or lassitude (Russell, 2003). The thinking, here, is that we are continually appraising the workings of our bodies and what is happening in the social context in terms of how good or bad it is; this is the foundational layer of emotional life. Core affect, the reasoning goes, reflects the most fundamental and continuing assessment of how one is doing in the world. When experienced in more global terms, it is felt as more diffuse moods (“I feel warm and energetic" or “I feel unenthusiastic”).

Finally, common to constructivist approaches is the idea that specific emotions arise out of conceptual acts with attributions that arise from the situation, which can then be grounded in language (e.g., Barrett, 2006; 2017; Russell, 2003). In this sense, the language we use to rep- resent and report on our emotional experience is not a reflection or reaction; rather it creates or constitutes our emotional experience (Lindquist, 2013). Within constructivist approaches, it is more generally assumed that the language we rely on to represent emotion shapes every facet of emotion; it is not just a passive reflection of emotion-related responses. As examples, the specific language we use, shaped by our culture, our gender, our social class, our individuality, shapes our perception of eliciting causes of emotion (Bai et al., 2017), how we interpret others’ emotional expressions (Doyle & Lindquist, 2015), bodily sensations, and what emotional expressions we remember (Doyle & Lindquist, 2018). Language constitutes all facets of emotion.

Comparing Perspectives Often in our daily lives, our emotional experiences will feel quite distinct and map onto emotion-related facial expressions, or bodily responses, or dynamics in the social context. This may be especially true for certain individuals, and for certain emotional episodes, such as those that are more intense (e.g., Mauss et al., 2009). Just as powerfully, how we conceptualize emotion is deeply shaped by culture, which will shape every facet of emotion, as well.

As one example of how discrete and constructivist approaches influence emotional experi- ence, consider a recent study by Cowen and Keltner (2017). In this study, participants watched a subset of emotionally evocative video clips, from a library of 2185 video clips that Cowen had culled from the Internet that could potentially elicit different emotions. After viewing each clip, people reported on the discrete emotions that they felt, and they appraised each clip in terms of different primary (good, bad) and secondary (fairness, agency) dimensions. Figure 6.3 is a map of emotional experience that the clips produced. In this map, the proximity of one clip to another is determined by the similarity of the emotional experience it generated.

A new statistical technique revealed that people reported 27 distinct types of emotion. They included emotions usually included as basic such as joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust, but also admiration, amusement, awe, boredom, calmness, desire, disappointment, embarrassment, empathetic pain, and sympathy. This is in keeping with a discrete approach to emotion. A sec- ond finding, though, is not, and jumps out: there are not clear boundaries between experiences of emotion; our emotional life is filled with mixed, complex emotions, even in response to short video clips (Grossman & Ellsworth, 2017; Larsen & McGraw, 2014). Finally, the authors looked at what accounted for participants’ experiences of 27 emotions, the use of more discrete emotion words, such as “anger”, or the dimension of good–bad. They found that discrete cat- egories were more effective at structuring the results than were dimensions of good–bad and

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excitement–enervation. It would appear from this study that when people report on their experi- ences, it is discrete emotion terms—“love”, “awe,” “anger”—that drive emotional experiences more so than general appraisals of goodness/badness, arousal, dominance, and so on.

Regulation of Emotions Intense thought about regulation of emotions goes back to ancient times. In the East, the ques- tion of how to live without being affected by suffering was the problem that practices of medita- tion were developed to solve (and we discuss these in the final chapter). In the West, regulation of emotions was the problem on which Epicureans and Stoics worked, more than 2,000 years ago. In this section, we aim to show how regulation can work in adulthood, and in the chapter after next (Chapter 8), how it develops in childhood.

At the beginning of this section, here, we should point out something curious. An appraisal that elicits an emotion tells us that something has happened to affect a concern: it’s important! So why would we want to regulate it, to turn this signal down, or turn it off?

For some emotions, such as anxieties when there is nothing to be done about a situation, we can see why we might want to turn off the signal: to stop unnecessary worry. For depression, too, when there seem no possibilities for moving forward, reappraisal of despair to get going again

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FIGURE 6.3 A spatial arrangement of different emotional experiences triggered by 2185 different video clips.

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can be important (Oatley & Perring, 1991). But what about other emotions? The question of whether and how to try and regulate will be treated in this section. The question of whether and how to work through the implications of emotions themselves will be treated in the final chapter, in our discussion of the psychological therapies, including self-therapies.

Distraction, Reappraisal, Suppression Most often the term “emotion regulation” refers to changing an emotion’s intensity and/or its duration. If you are in a traffic jam on the way to an appointment, you might try to feel less anxious: listen to music, think how to take care of being late, take deep breaths. If you work at a customer interface, you can increase your enjoyment of your job by being friendly to customers or clients.

One approach to regulation is to think of emotions as having a dimension of pleasantness. Regulation can be the attempt to move from the unpleasant toward the pleasant.

Nico Frijda (1986) and James Gross (1998) have argued that regulatory processes affect every stage of the emotion process (Gross, 2015). Gross, Sheppes, and Urry (2011) propose five stages at which regulation can work, for self or others: selection of situations, modification of situations, direction of attention, cognitive change, and modulation of responses. Selecting and modifying situations in childhood are discussed in Chapter 8.

Among regulatory interventions at the attentional stage is distraction, getting oneself caught up in something else, like binging on Netflix, or fiddling with one’s phone, or chatting with a friend. As to cognitive change, the appraisal one makes of an event affects both the type of emo- tion and its intensity, so reappraisal can make for transformation. Further along comes response modulation: people can seek to suppress or emphasize expression of an emotion, usually by behaving or not behaving in particular ways. When one seeks to enhance an emotion, one can take William James’s advice and explicitly enact what one wants to feel so that, by means of the inner feedback from expressive processes, one might feel it more strongly.

Among attempts to reduce emotions, as suggested by Gross (2014), are trying to calm down when angry and trying to stop young children from giggling when they should be going to sleep. Among attempts to increase emotions are firing oneself up before a big game and sharing good news with friends or relatives. In this field, researchers tend to talk about strategies of regulation; Webb, Miles, and Sheerhan (2012) have reviewed their different effects. So, for instance, distrac- tion can work, and reappraisal (cognitive change) can be effective in reducing the experience of negative emotions. Suppression of certain emotional expressions can be effective in interpersonal behavior, but attempts to suppress experience or thoughts of an emotion tend not to work.

Different kinds of regulation can have different repercussions. Butler et al. (2003) had women view an unpleasant film clip. Then each woman met with another woman she did not know. Some women who had viewed the clip were asked to suppress their emotions by not expressing them. Others were asked simply to respond naturally. Yet others were asked to reappraise the experi- ence by thinking of their current situation. Women who were asked to suppress, and the women they met, were found to have increased blood pressure as compared with those who responded naturally and those who reappraised (see Figure 6.4).

Suppression also reduced rapport, probably because emotional responsiveness is important for communication. It made the people to whom the women spoke less willing to take part in a friendship. Instructions to suppress an emotion in experiments have generally been found to be ineffective in decreasing the intensity of emotions that are experienced in the experiments (Ehring et al., 2010).

In another study of reappraisal and suppression, van’t Wout, Chang, and Sanfey (2010) looked at regulation of emotional reactions to unfairness in the Ultimatum Game (to be discussed in

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Chapter  10, in which a responder decides whether to accept a proposer’s suggested division of a sum of money). Participants worked through 24 trials of the game. Some people received no instructions as to regulating their emotions. Some received instructions to suppress, which included the phrase: “It is very important to us that you try your best not to show any signs of emotional feelings and suppress any emotional feelings as you watch the offers” (p. 817). Others were given instructions to reappraise: “It is very important to us that you try your best to adopt a neutral attitude as you watch the offers. To do this, we would like for you to view the offers with detached interest or try to come up with possible reasons why someone might give you a certain offer” (p. 817). As compared with those who were asked to suppress their emotional reactions, those asked to reappraise were less likely to reject unfair offers. So, van’t Wout et al. argue that their results extend previous findings: “Emotional reappraisal as compared to expressive suppres- sion, is a powerful regulation strategy that influences and changes how we interact with others even in the face of inequity” (p. 815).

Several studies have been performed to examine the effects of different kinds of emotion regulation. Thus in an electroencephalographic (EEG) study, Thiruchselvam et al. (2011) found that distraction operates early in the emotion process. In an fMRI study, Goldin et al. (2008) found that next in the chain of events is appraisal, or reappraisal, which affects the prefrontal cortex. Suppression, for instance, by not expressing an emotion, although it, too, can affect the prefrontal cortex, tends to come later in the process and affects the insula and amygdala. Bigman et al. (2016) found that people who were led to believe that they could be successful in regulating their emotions were indeed more successful in doing so when negative emotions were induced, whereas people in a control condition, who were not given this belief, were less successful.

Laboratory studies of regulation have been informative, but how do people regulate emotions in their day-to-day lives. Some people distract themselves, when something upsetting occurs. Some people tend to reappraise, and have developed the habit of making the best of things.

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167Regulation of Emotions

Others tend to suppress. Effects depend on context and social goals (English et al., 2017; Haines et al., 2016). Here, too, there can be repercussions. It has often been suspected that people who habitually try to suppress their emotions make themselves vulnerable to depression. In a study in which suppression was compared with reappraisal in people who had a history of depres- sive episodes as compared with people who had not, Ehring et al. (2010) studied recovered- depressed and never-depressed people and found that those who had experienced depression tended to suppress their emotions. In a meta-analysis, Visted et al. (2018) found that people who were depressed or who had experienced a period of depression had difficulties in emotion regulation.

There are, however, differences of culture: Soto, Perez, Kim, Lee, and Minnick (2011) asked European Americans in the United States and Chinese people in Hong Kong about their use of expressive suppression, their life satisfaction, and their depressed mood. They found that expres- sive suppression was associated with poorer psychological outcomes for European Americans but not for Chinese participants. Politeness in Chinese society involves different procedures from those in America. Chinese people seem to have become more skilled at suppression in ways that are not at odds with how one lives in that society.

In a study of twins, Kateri McRae et al. (2017) found that people’s successful use of reap- praisal to regulate emotions is less due to genetics than are such personality traits as neuroticism, the tendency to experience heightened negative emotion, which we shall consider in other chap- ters. They suggest that an importance of environmental "influences specific to reappraisal and adaptive emotional functioning speaks to the potential impact of social context, social partners, and psychosocial interventions on reappraisal habits" (p. 772).

So far we have concentrated on individuals, but there are political implications; might our understanding of these issues help make the world a better place? Eran Halperin et al. (2011) did a laboratory study in which Israeli participants were assigned to be trained in reappraisal or to be in a control condition, and were then presented with anger-inducing information about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Those in the reappraisal condition were more likely to favor concil- iatory practices, and to be less likely to stereotype those in positions other than their own. Then the researchers ran a similar study in the field, with a real political event, the Palestinian bid for recognition by the United Nations. Here again, Israelis trained in reappraisal showed more support for conciliatory policies and less for aggressive policies toward Palestinians (see also Halperin, 2014).

In this section on regulation, we have left to the last an idea about the relation of emotions to each other. It is by Batja Mesquita and Nico Frijda (2011), who pick up on the finding, mentioned earlier in this chapter, that about a third of emotion episodes recorded in diaries involve mixed emotions and that emotions often change as they proceed. Here is what Mesquita and Frijda say:

Emotional events in real life have the potential of eliciting several emotions—that is, several modes of action readiness—at the same time. We are happy as well as embar- rassed when our guests sing the “Happy Birthday” song at our birthday party. The same event is relevant to multiple concerns, and evokes multiple modes of action readiness— happiness and embarrassment—simultaneously (pp. 782–783).

At the birthday party, we can choose to be happy or embarrassed. In more serious situations, as with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and in conflictual situations in our daily lives, we might choose to prioritize our anger, to be aggressive and vindictive, or to prioritize empathy, or even affection. In general, then, to regulate an emotion, the issue is often, by reappraisal perhaps, to concentrate on an emotion we choose. This same principle is one we will revisit in our final chapter, when we discuss psychological therapies.

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S U M M A R Y

Appraisals are evaluations of events in relation to an individual’s goals or concerns. We started this chapter by thinking about how primary automatic appraisals occur unconsciously, when objects or events are evaluated in terms of the appropriateness of an event to a goal. Secondary appraisals then occur when we identify what caused an emotion and when we think what we might do about it. We showed how there are arguments for both discrete and dimen- sional approaches. Some aspects of emotions are best seen as pro- totypes or scripts, but at the same time there seem to be boundaries in people’s representations of emotions. The important social

process of tertiary appraisal starts when we turn our emotions into verbal forms and share them with others. Putting emotions into words helps focus emotional experience and enables us to explore implications, for instance, in metaphorical ways and in relation to others. Regulation has become important in the psychology of emotion. Five kinds of process can be recognized: choice of situ- ations, modification of situations, direction of attention, cognitive change, and suppression. Regulation is important not just for indi- viduals, but in social situations, and in political and international events.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. Think about a happy emotion that you are interested in, per- haps love or enjoyment of what you are doing, and reflect on what generally causes it for you. What concerns are at issue? Do the same for a negative emotion such as anger or sadness.

2. What functions for you have the expression of emotions in ver- bal forms, in thinking or talking with others, or writing?

3. There are three systems of emotion: experiential (what you are conscious of), behavioral (as in facial expressions and gestures), and physiological (e.g., heart rate and skin conduct- ance). Why do you think these systems are not always closely coordinated?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

For a cognitive account of emotions and their nature:

Frijda, N. (2007). The laws of emotion. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

An excellent review of appraisal is:

Moors, A. (2009). Theories of emotion causation: A review. Cognition and Emotion, 23, 625–662.

For a discussion of emotion in relation to language and metaphor:

Kövesces, Z. (2003). Metaphor and emotion. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

For a dimensional account of emotions:

Russell, J. (2003). Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological Review, 110, 145–172.

A useful discussion of emotion regulation and how to think about it is here:

Gross, J. (2014). Emotion regulation: Conceptual and empirical founda- tions. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation, second edition (pp. 3–20). New York: Guilford Press.

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7Brain Mechanisms and Emotion

Herein too may be felt the powerlessness of mere Logic . . . to resolve these problems which lie nearer to our hearts.

George Boole, 1854, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, p. 416

CONTENTS Historical Approaches to the Neuroscience of Emotion

Early Research on Brain Lesions and Stimulation The Limbic System Emotion Systems in the Mammalian Brain A Framework from Affective Neuroscience

Emotion-Related Appraisals and Subcortical Processes in the Brain

Appraisals of Novelty and Concern Relevance: The Amygdala Appraisals of Possible Rewards: The Nucleus Accumbens Appraisals of Pain, Threat, and Harm: The Periaqueductal Gray

Bodily Awareness and Subjective Feeling: The Anterior Insular Cortex

From Conceptualization to Empathic Understanding: Cortical Processes in the Brain

Learning Associations Between Events and Rewards: The Orbitofrontal Cortex Emotion Conceptualization: The Prefrontal Cortex Emotion Regulation: Regions of the Prefrontal Cortex Empathy and the Cortex Social Pain and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Anterior Insular Cortex

The Search for Emotion-Specific Patterns of Brain Activation

Distinct Emotions Are Constructed in the Cortex Emotions Engage Discrete Patterns of Brain Activation

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

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Black Mirror is a dystopian television series that portrays the perils of new technologies, from augmented reality to online platforms resembling Facebook. At the center of one unsettling epi- sode, Arkangel, are familiar tensions between a nervous, single mother and her daughter. Early in the episode, during a visit to their neighborhood park, the mother loses track of her three-year-old daughter who has wandered after a cat and disappeared. This leads to a frantic search for the young girl, who eventually is found. In the aftermath of this harrowing experience, the mother pays a visit to a new biotech firm, Arkangel. In its spotlessly clean, high-tech offices, the mother chooses to have an implant placed in her daughter’s brain, neatly and painlessly inserted near her temple.

The neural implant sends signals to a tablet that the mother keeps with her. It allows her to keep track of where the young girl is—no more fear of losing her. Through transmission from the girl’s optic nerve, the mother can tap a button and see on the tablet what the young girl sees in the world. This becomes a source of conflict later in the show when the prying mother spies on her adolescent daughter’s sexual escapades.

The implant also notifies the mother that her daughter is experiencing fear. It does so by track- ing cortisol levels and then sending a signal to the mother when the girl’s cortisol has spiked. The mother can then apply a filtering device to what the young girl perceives, rendering the source of stress hard to see and hear. A ferocious barking dog becomes pixilated and mute. Aggression on her middle-school playground becomes blurry.

At the center of this drama is a familiar theme: parents want to protect their children from sources of stress. The story also is built upon a common intuition about emotion and the brain— that there are specific areas of the brain where emotions such as fear are generated. If emotions are located in such regions, it follows that people can alter their emotional tendencies with neural implants and pharmaceuticals. Shut down the brain region that produces fear, and childhood becomes calm and beatific.

It is tempting to think that there are distinct regions, or modules, of the brain where specific emotions reside —sympathy neurons, perhaps, or an anger center, or a love neurotransmitter. Perhaps this is a by-product of the language of emotion, which provides us with terms such as “fear” or “awe” to describe distinct emotions, thereby leading to the assumption that specific regions of the brain map onto these states (LeDoux, 2018). But the neuroscience of emotion has arrived at a more complex and nuanced view.

A consensus is emerging in the field that emotions engage multiple regions of the brain in complex, unfolding processes (e.g., Brosch & Sander, 2013; Kragel & LaBar, 2017; Nummen- maa et al., 2018; Satpute & Barrett, 2017; Smith & Lane, 2017). An experience of disgust, awe, or sympathy, for example, will not activate just one region of the brain; instead a network of regions shows patterns of activation that unfold over time. This insight follows from the framework we presented six chapters ago in Figure 1.7: that emotions are complex, unfolding processes involv- ing appraisals, bodily changes that we feel, expressive behavior, and acts of language-based con- ceptualization and regulation. The task of this chapter is to understand how these emotion-related processes engage patterns of activation in the brain. Before setting off on this journey through the emotional brain, let’s first briefly cover some neuroanatomy and trace the history of the study of emotion and the brain.

Historical Approaches to the Neuroscience of Emotion The human brain has about 86 billion neurons (Azevedo et al. 2009; Herculano-Houzel, 2016); typically each may have perhaps 10,000 synapses, some as many as 150,000 (Presti, 2017). Neu- roanatomists have mapped the brain into dozens of regions (e.g., the cortex has been mapped into over 50 distinct regions known as Brodmann areas) and begun to trace pathways through which the different regions connect.

Historical Approaches to the Neuroscience of Emotion 171

The different regions of the brain connect via different kinds of neurochemicals. A first is neurotransmitters, of which there are over 100 kinds in the brain. Neurotransmitters are released from the synapses of neurons and diffuse in milliseconds across the tiny synaptic gaps between cells to activate or inhibit receiving neurons (see Figure 7.2). As well as acetylcholine,

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FIGURE 7.1 Early thinking some 100 years ago about the brain assumed that distinct functions were located in very specific regions of the brain, as portrayed in this drawing. Today, it is more widely believed that processes such as emotion are distributed across different regions of the brain.

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they include norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA). A second family of neurochemicals in the brain are the neuromodulators, many of which are peptides, or sequences of amino acids, which influence the activation of neurotransmit- ters. Endogenous opiates (chemically similar to drugs such as opium and heroin), for example, modulate the pain system, and other peptides (such as cholecystokinin) have important emotional effects. Some peptides are transmitters, but when they act as neuromodulators, they are released by some neurons and diffuse some distance to affect many thousands of nearby neurons.

The challenge for the science of emotion is to map different emotion-related processes to these interacting regions of the brain. Scientists do this with neuroimaging techniques. In these, a machine monitors biochemical events in a series of digitally animated slices through a per- son’s brain, while a computer takes this information and constructs visual images to show which regions have been metabolically most active. These methods are noninvasive. They include Posi- tron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), in which pictures are constructed to show brain activity changing over time in the course, for instance, of different emotional states. Alongside these imaging methods, neuroscientists can study how accidental or disease-related damage to brain tissue influences emotional processes, while others have made localized lesions in the brains of animals for experimental purposes. Neuroscientists who use electrophysiological methods have stimulated parts of the brain with electric currents or with magnetic fields (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, TMS), and measured electric signals (electroencephalography, EEG) or magnetic signals (magnetoencephalography, MEG) generated by populations of neurons. Pharmacological neuroscientists deliver neurotransmitters or neuro- modulators to small regions of the brain to examine their effects on emotion-related processes. That is it: anatomy, lesions, stimulation, electrical and magnetic recording, pharmacology.

With these methods, researchers have begun to discover the functions of regions of the brain, which we portray in Figure 7.3. The hindbrain includes regions that control basic physiological processes: the medulla regulates cardiovascular activity, the pons controls sleep and breathing; the cerebellum is involved in motor coordination and automatic movements, such as blocking an incoming ball to the face. The so-called forebrain includes the thalamus, which is involved in integrating sensory information and memory and decision-making, the hippocampus, which is critical for memory processes, and the hypothalamus, which is involved with biological functions such as eating, sexual behavior, aggression, sleep and the sleep/wake cycle, and bodily tempera- ture. The forebrain also includes the amygdala—and the system of the cerebral cortex, which, because it is so large in humans, distinguishes our brains from those of other species. The large

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FIGURE 7.2 An image of a neuron. Neurotransmitters are released from vesicles near the synapse, and then they travel to nearby neurons, stimulating an electrical impulse up the axon of the neuron.

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size of our brains is probably due to our profoundly social lives (Dunbar, 2003; Lieberman, 2013). It is thought, too, that the frontal lobes of the cortex are involved in planning, decision-making, and intentional action, as well as in emotion regulation.

Over 350 years ago, Descartes (1649) proposed that sensory stimuli pulled little strings that ran inside the sensory nerves to open the valves that would let fluids from a central reservoir in the brain run down tubes (the motor nerves) to inflate muscles (Figure 6.0). This, he thought, was the mechanism underlying the human reflex. We now know that nerve messages are carried not by strings and hydraulics but by neurons that conduct electrical signals and between neurons by means of neurotransmitters at the synapses. Nevertheless, Descartes’ analysis of the reflex—as involving stimuli that excite sensory receptors, which send messages along the sensory nerves to the brain, which in turn send signals to motor nerves to work the muscles and organs of the body—remains a principal framework today.

Emotions, however, are more than reflexes. We need additional concepts to understand brain mechanisms of emotion, concepts such as the individual’s concerns and appraisals of the social context.

PARIETAL LOBE (movement)

BACKFRONT

CORTEX

OCCIPITAL LOBE (vision)

Corpus callosum

Hippocampus (memory)

LIMBIC SYSTEM

Entorhinal cortex (memory)

Olfactory bulb

Dorsolateral prefrontal (executive & logical)

Anterior cingulate (motivation)

FRONTAL LOBE (planning)

MOTOR SENSORY

Amygdala (basic emotions)

Hypothalamus

Lateral orbitofrontal (appropriate social/

emotional response)

TEMPORAL LOBE (language)

CEREBELLUM (coordinate movement)

BRAIN STEM (body basics)

FIGURE 7.3 Exploded view of the human brain. This slice of the brain brings into focus the areas involved in emotion. Subcortical regions of this kind include the amygdala (part of the limbic system) and hypothalamus, as well as the ventral striatum and periaqueductal gray (not pictured). Cortical regions clearly involved in emotion include the orbitofrontal, dorsolateral, midline, and anterior cingulate, all located in the frontal region of the cerebral cortex.

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Early Research on Brain Lesions and Stimulation One of the first theories of the brain mechanisms of emotion was proposed by Walter Cannon (whom we discussed in Chapter 1). Work in Cannon’s laboratory, particularly by his student Bard (1928), indicated that cats deprived of their cerebral cortex were liable to make sudden, inappropri- ate, and ill-directed attacks, which came to be called “sham rage” (Cannon, 1931). If fed artificially and carefully tended, these cats could live for a long time, but would show few spontaneous move- ments except this angry sham rage (Bard & Rioch, 1937). Such observations prompted Cannon to propose that the cortex usually inhibits emotional expression, a theme we will revisit shortly in our discussion of emotion regulation.

Cannon and Bard’s formulation was really the continuation of the nineteenth-century hypoth- esis of the nervous system proposed by Hughlings-Jackson (1959). In this view, lower levels of the brain (the hindbrain) are reflex pathways related to simple functions such as posture and movement. At the next level are more recently evolved structures, including those that support the emotions. At the highest and most recently evolved level, the cerebral cortex controls all levels below it. According to this argument, children are abound with uncontrolled emotion until their cortex develops sufficiently to inhibit their lower functions. Similarly, it was thought that brain trauma (as with poor Phineas Gage, the railroad construction foreman whose accident you may remember from Chapter 1) leads to the diminished activity of the higher regions of the brain, thus releasing the lower ones from inhibition. This idea that the function of the cortex, in life, is to inhibit the lower parts of the brain is now seen as not very helpful.

The Limbic System The neuroscience of emotion gained momentum with a theory offered by MacLean (1990, 1993), who proposed that the human forebrain includes three distinct systems, each of which devel- oped in a distinct phase of vertebrate evolution to fulfill new functions related to its species- characteristic repertoire. Apart from the hypothalamus, the earliest and most basic part of the forebrain is called the striatal region (which includes the caudate, putamen, and striatum nuclei). This area became enlarged with the evolution of reptiles, argues MacLean, and it is devoted to scheduling and generating basic behaviors, including: preparation and establishment of a home site, marking and patrolling of territory, formalized fighting in defense of territory, foraging, hunt- ing, hoarding, forming social groups including hierarchies, greeting, grooming, mating, flocking, and migration. When striatal areas are damaged in humans, for example, in the early stages of a hereditary disease called Huntington’s chorea, patients become unable to organize daily activities and carry out goal-directed behavior, though they happily partake in activities planned for them.

MacLean (1993) next asked: “What do mammals do that reptiles do not?” His answer: mater- nal caregiving with infant attachment, vocal signaling, and play, all of which were served by a second subcortical region of the forebrain, the limbic system, which includes the thalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala, which have close connections with the hypothalamus, and influ- ence the autonomic nervous system and the cortisol response. In contrast to reptiles, which hatch from eggs and start life on their own, every mammal is born in close association with another. As mammals diverged from reptiles in the course of evolution, the limbic system developed, according to MacLean (1993), to support emotions that allow for mammals’ increasing sociality.

This insight derived from several early discoveries. When large parts of the limbic system in wild monkeys housed in a laboratory were removed, the wild monkeys, normally aggressive, would become docile, hypersexual, disinhibited and approach everything without fear (Klüver & Bucy, 1937). When Olds and Milner (1954) implanted electrodes into septal regions of the limbic system in rats who were neither hungry nor thirsty, they would press a lever repeatedly for up to four hours a day to deliver stimulation to themselves in these regions.

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Early analyses of temporal lobe epilepsy, caused by viruses or brain disease (Gibbs, Gibbs, & Fuster, 1948), found that the neural discharges contained within the limbic region triggered attacks defined by auras and suffused with strong emotions. The Russian novelist Dostoevsky, who suffered from epilepsy, wrote of the aura of his attacks: “a feeling of happiness such as it is quite impossible to imagine in a normal state and which other people have no idea of . . . entirely in harmony with myself and with the whole world” (Dostoevsky, 1955, p. 8; see also Hughes, 2005). About these feelings, MacLean says: “Significantly, these feelings are free-floating, being completely unattached to any particular thing, situation, or idea” (p. 79, emphasis in original). These observations led MacLean to orient the field to the limbic system as a brain region likely to be centrally involved in emotion—a hypothesis that would eventually be abandoned for claims about more specific anatomical regions and their role in emotion.

Emotion Systems in the Mammalian Brain MacLean’s theorizing directed the early study of emotion to the limbic system and regions such as the amygdala, thalamus, and hypothalamus. Jaak Panksepp, a founding figure in the study of the emotional brain, added precision and complexity to this thinking in his research, which spanned 40 years. He and his colleagues would make the case that seven basic emotion systems can be found in the limbic system and other regions of the mammalian brain (Panksepp & Biven, 2013; Panksepp et al., 2016).

Panksepp primarily studied rodents —rats, mice, guinea pigs. In some of his experiments, he would stimulate specific regions of the brain electrically with implants. In other studies, he would inject certain neurochemicals, such as oxytocin or opioids, into the brain. In the spirit of Darwin, Panksepp then would look for shifts in specific emotional behaviors—exploration of the environ- ment, physical attack, freezing and flight, copulatory behavior, distress calls, protective behavior of offspring, and even the rat equivalent of laughter (subsonic vocalizations).

Through studies such as these, Panksepp arrived at the view that the mammalian brain has seven basic emotion systems that guide adaptive behaviors in response to significant threats and opportunities, largely of a social nature. He calls these systems: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. In Table 7.1, we outline Panksepp’s framework. Consider a few supportive findings. When the regions of the brain of the SEEKING system are electrically stimulated, a rat will explore the environment, sniffing, perhaps in search of food. When opioids are injected into the brain of rodents (opioids reduce the pain response), distress vocalizations associated with mammalian separation and grief are dramatically reduced.

Panksepp’s theorizing had a large influence on the study of oxytocin, involved in the CARE and LUST systems, as you can see in Table 7.1. Oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus and released into both the brain and blood stream. Receptors for this peptide are found in the olfactory system, limbic–hypothalamic system, the periaqueductal gray, and regions of the spinal cord that regulate the autonomic nervous system, especially the parasympathetic branch (Uvnas-Moberg, 1994). Oxytocin is involved in lactation, maternal bonding, and sexual interaction (Carter, 1992). Oxytocin is involved in CARE. Blocking oxytocin prevents maternal behavior (Pederson, 1997; Insel & Harbaugh, 1989). In primates, injections of oxytocin have led to increases in the fre- quency of touching and watching infants and decreases in aggressive yawns and facial threats (Holman & Goy, 1995). Oxytocin injections have caused ewes to become attached to unfamiliar lambs (Keverne et  al., 1997). Rat pups show preferences for odors of mothers, except when pretreated with oxytocin antagonists (Nelson & Panksepp, 1996). It also is involved in LUST. Comparisons between prairie voles who display pair-bonding, and the closely related montane voles, who do not pair-bond, have revealed differences in the location of oxytocin receptors in the brains of each species (Carter, 1998; Insel et al., 1997). Moreover, in the prairie vole, injections of oxytocin directly into specific areas of the brain have been found to increase preferences for a

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single partner over other partners, while injections of oxytocin antagonists depress single partner preference (Williams, Insel, Harbaugh, & Carter, 1994).

We hope that you are noting how social Panksepp’s theorizing is: the seven emotion brain systems support social behavior—fighting, copulation, caregiving, seeking comfort when dis- tressed. Make note of certain brain regions that are important as we continue our tour of the emotional brain: the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, the periaqueductal gray, the anterior cingulate. Panksepp also makes important theoretical points in detailing how these seven sys- tems are involved in our emotional lives. Often the systems interact with each other as emotions unfold. For example, the SEEKING system supported by dopamine release —which leads to goal-directed behavior—is involved in many emotion systems, such as the RAGE and LUST systems. One could imagine how our experience of romantic love might involve the interac- tion between the LUST and CARE systems. Or perhaps jealousy is the interaction between the RAGE, LUST, and PANIC systems.

Panksepp also notes that there are certain neurochemicals that are widely distributed through- out the brain and affect all emotions. Glutamate is likely involved in increased activation in each emotion system, whereas GABA and serotonin inhibit the activation of the seven emotion sys- tems (see also Carver et al., 2008). It is perhaps for the calming effects of serotonin that people take serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Prozac, which increase levels of serotonin, whose efficacy we consider in Chapter 13.

In an extension of Panksepp’s theorizing to humans, Shiota and colleagues have made the case that distinct positive emotions are supported by different neurotransmitters (Shiota et al., 2017). Shiota and colleagues argue that dopamine is the foundation of positive emotions, but that other

Table 7.1 Jaak Panksepp’s ideas of social–emotional systems of the brain.

System Behaviors Emotions Brain Regions Neurochemicals

SEEKING Exploration Enthusiasm, Euphoria, Excitement

Ventral Tegmental Area, Nucleus Accumbens, Caudate, Amygdala, Periaqueductal Gray

Dopamine

RAGE Attack, biting Anger, Rage Hypothalamus, Amygdala, Periaqueductal Gray

Testosterone, Noerepinephrine, GABA (reduces)

FEAR Freezing, flight Fear, Anxiety Amygdala, Anterior and Medial Hypothalamus, Periaqueductal Gray

Benzodiazapene (reduces), Serotonin (reduces)

LUST Copulation Sexual Desire, Romantic Love, Excitement

Preoptic Area, Ventromedial Hypothalamus, Periaqueductal Gray, Amygdala, Ventral Tegmental Area

Testosterone, Estrogen, Oxytocin

CARE Nurturance, protection

Sympathy, Filial Love

Periaqueductal Gray, Ventromedial Hypothalamus, Ventrotegmental Area

Oxytocin, Estrogen, Progesterone

PANIC Distress vocalizations

Sadness, Distress, Grief, Depression

Anterior Cingulate, Dorsomedial Thalamus, Periaqueductal Gray, Cerebellum

Opioids (reduce), Oxytocin, Corticotropin Releasing Factor, Glutamate

PLAY Rough and tumble, laughter, ticklish stimulation

Amusement SEEKING system Dopamine, Cannaboids

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neurotransmitters map onto experiences of distinct emotions. Oxytocin is engaged during expe- riences of love, for example (Gonzaga et al., 2006), testosterone during experiences of sexual desire, and the opioids during experiences of savoring and liking things.

Finally, Panksepp’s theorizing helps us think about clinical issues, drug addictions, and prob- lems in society. For example, note how the opioids reduce PANIC and associated feelings of sadness, distress, and loneliness. Perhaps it is for this reason that people are drawn to opiates in the United States right now, to combat loneliness, which is of epidemic levels (30% of Americans report feeling lonely on a regular basis). Panksepp’s theorizing is a source of hypotheses and understandings of the emotional brain.

A Framework from Affective Neuroscience Building upon early observations, emotion scientists have carried out hundreds of studies of people experiencing emotion while patterns of brain activation are recorded, most typically with fMRI methodologies (e.g., Kober et al., 2008; Kragel & LaBar, 2018; Lindquist et  al., 2012; Numennmaa et  al., 2018; Rolls, 2013; Smith & Lane, 2015, 2017). The movement of which these studies are part goes by the name of affective neuroscience. In many such studies, people watch emotionally evocative film clips. Or they recall emotional experiences. Or they might be led through controlled and scripted emotional imagery (e.g., imagining interacting with someone they have just fallen in love with or being humiliated by someone). Or on occasion, they engage in carefully crafted social interactions, for example, in hearing kind words from a friend or being rejected by others while playing a game.

Syntheses of these literatures reveal two important themes. A first is that the elicitation of emotion consistently produces activation systematically in cer-

tain regions of the brain (Kober et al., 2008). This is seen in both subcortical regions of particular interest to Panksepp—the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the periaqueductal gray – as well as several cortical regions, including the visual cortex (the studies used visual means of eliciting emotion), regions to the back of the brain involved in understanding others and in bodily aware- ness, and regions in the frontal cortex (Kober et al., 2008). This synthesis provides a map, if you will, for us to understand how these regions are involved in the unfolding process of emotion.

A second theme helps answer the question: how are specific regions of the brain involved in different emotion-related processes, such as appraisal, bodily feeling, facial expression, con- ceptualization, or regulation (e.g., Brosch & Sander, 2013; Ochsner, 2008; Rolls, 2013; Smith & Lane, 2015, 2017)? In broad strokes, studies have illuminated how the brain is engaged in basic appraisal processes by which an event (internal or external) is novel, relevant to personal concerns, potentially rewarding, or signaling harm. We shall see how the brain tracks emotion- related responses in the body. And we shall consider what brain regions are involved in the con- ceptualization and regulation of emotion and the empathic response to others’ emotions. In our review, we will focus on relatively specific regions of the brain, recognizing that as this science evolves, it is increasingly showing how connected networks of regions of the brain are engaged in different emotion-related processes (Kragel & LaBar, 2017; Satpute & Barrett, 2017).

Emotion-Related Appraisals and Subcortical Processes in the Brain Emotions begin with appraisals, interpretations of sensory information through the filter of our present concerns (Ellsworth, 2013). This complex process begins in fast, even unconscious appraisals—the first movements of emotion as described by Chrysippus—of how unfolding

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events are relevant to our basic concerns, for example, over a sense of security, fairness, or acceptance. These basic appraisals arise within 100–350 milliseconds of first perceiving an event; more complex appraisal processes add layers of meaning to the event, interpreting the context in terms of agency (who caused the event), social norms, certainty, power, responsi- bility, and possible courses of action (Brosch & Sander, 2013; Smith & Lane, 2015). In this first section, we shall see how subcortical processes (see Figure 7.4) support fast appraisals of events, providing information about: the novelty and concern relevance of the event (in the amygdala), potential sources of rewards (in the nucleus accumbens), and whether there is harm (in the periaqueductal gray).

Appraisals of Novelty and Concern Relevance: The Amygdala In one of the most important developments in the science of emotion, Joseph LeDoux (1993, 1996; Rodriques, Sapolsky, & LeDoux, 2009) argued that the claims about the limbic system were imprecise because some of its functions can be more specifically localized to the amyg- dala. LeDoux has argued that the amygdala is the central emotional computer for the brain: it evaluates sensory input for its emotional significance (LeDoux & Pine, 2016). LeDoux’s thesis derives from neuroanatomical analysis. The amygdala receives inputs from regions of the cortex that support visual perception of objects and auditory perception of sounds. The amygdala also has rich interconnections with the hypothalamus, which regulates emotion-laden behaviors such as sex, eating, and aggression. Rewarding self-stimulation can be demonstrated in the amygdala (Kane, Coulombe, & Miliaressis, 1991), and components of emotional behavior and autonomic responses can be elicited by electrical stimulation in this region (Hilton & Zbrozyna, 1963).

As well as inputs from the visual and auditory cortex, the amygdala receives visual and audi- tory inputs directly via the thalamus—not via routes that result in the recognition of objects or events. Experiments by LeDoux and his colleagues (e.g., LeDoux, 1990; LaBar & LeDoux, 2003; LeDoux & Pine, 2016) use Pavlovian conditioning (also called classical conditioning), which is considered a basic mechanism of learning about the emotional significance of events that signal something pleasant or unpleasant. The standard arrangement involves two stimuli. One is called the conditioned stimulus, perhaps a flashing light or an auditory tone. Before the experiment, it has no significance other than being noticeable; its significance in signaling a reward or punish- ment is what will be learned. The so-called unconditioned stimulus is the event that has biologi- cal significance; in Pavlov’s original experiments, it was delivery of meat powder into the mouth of a hungry dog (Pavlov, 1927). What is learned in Pavlovian conditioning is an emotion about the biologically significant event: readiness for something pleasant (happy anticipation), or for something unpleasant (fear or anxiety). Such emotional effects are expressed as species-typical actions, for example, a dog wagging its tail and salivating when it sees its meal being prepared, or the same dog freezing, slinking, cringing, struggling to escape, when threatened. Emotional conditioning for negative stimuli is quickly learned and slow to extinguish—one of the reasons why anxiety can be such a severe and long-lasting clinical disorder.

LeDoux and his collaborators have found that with conditioned stimuli of simple auditory tones or flashing lights, and with an unconditioned stimulus of an electric shock to the feet, rats will learn an association so long as the amygdala and the thalamus are present. This learning occurs even if the cortex has been removed. LeDoux interprets this as meaning that the amygdala can receive sensory information that has not been processed by the cortex. Based on the simplest features of stimuli, emotional learning can occur; the amygdala is a core of a central network of emotional processing. Very much in keeping with this thesis, Elizabeth Phelps and her collabora- tors have documented that in humans, as in nonhuman species, the amygdala is centrally involved in learning about fearful stimuli and remembering them (Hartley & Phelps, 2011). For example, highly anxious people show greater amygdala responses to fearful stimuli (Hartley & Phelps,

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2011). Sonia Bishop and her colleagues have documented that the left amygdala is activated when people detect changes in facial expression from a neutral expression to a fear expression, but it is not activated with other kinds of changes to facial appearance (Achaibou, Loth, & Bishop, 2015).

One might conclude that the amygdala is something like a fear module in the brain, but that would be misleading. In different meta-analyses of emotion-related brain activation, it is not always the case that fear activates the amygdala (Kober et  al., 2008; Lindquist et  al., 2012). Instead, it looks as though the amygdala is involved in appraisals of novelty and the concern relevance of objects and events; it would appear to support appraisals of what is new in the envi- ronment and relevant to your current goals and concerns.

Septum

Prefrontal cortex

Nucleus accumbens

Amygdala

VTA

MFB

FIGURE 7.4 Subcortical regions involved in emotion, including the reward circuit (the nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area (VTA) and prefrontal cortex) and the amygdala.

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Two kinds of neuroimaging studies support such a thesis (Baxter & Murray, 2002; Brosch & Sander, 2013; Gottfried, O’Doherty, & Dolan, 2003). A first is that the amygdala is often activated during momentary emotional reactions of different kinds to evocative stimuli and not just fear- eliciting stimuli. The amygdala (along with other brain regions) has been found to increase activa- tion in response to: sad film clips (Levesque, Eugene, et al., 2003), erotic film clips (Beauregard, Levesque, & Bourgoin, 2001), disturbing slides (Lane et al., 1997; Phan, Taylor, et al., 2004), unpleasant tastes and odors (Zald, et al., 1998), and the perception of fear and sad faces (Whalen et al., 1998; Blair et al., 1999). The amygdala is activated by positive stimuli as well (Liberzon, Phan, Decker, & Taylor, 2003; see Zald, 2003, for a review). In making judgments of positively and negatively valenced concepts such as “murder,” “love,” “gun control,” and “abortion,” partici- pants’ amygdala activation was predicted by their reports of the intensity, but not the valence, of the word (Cunningham et al., 2004).

Second, objects and events are more likely to elicit activation when they are relevant to a present concern of the participant. For example, people who look at life in terms of the poten- tial rewards that situations offer showed greater amygdala activation to intense, positive stimuli, whereas people who look at life in terms of its costs and threats show greater amygdala activa- tion in response to negative concepts (Cunningham et al., 2005; for similar work, see Canli et al., 2001; Canli, Sivers, Whitfield, Gotlib, & Gabrieli, 2002). Pictures of food elicit larger amygdala responses in hungry people as compared to satiated individuals (LaBar et al., 2001). People who are more selfishly oriented show bigger amygdala responses to the prospect of winning money than do more altruistic people (Brosch et al., 2011). The amygdala is activated by objects and events, both good and bad, when they are relevant to our current concerns.

Given this pattern of findings, Brosch and Sander reason that the amygdala responds to the novelty of a stimulus and the degree to which it is relevant to your present concerns (Brosch & Sander, 2013). It gets the process of an emotion underway.

Appraisals of Possible Rewards: The Nucleus Accumbens Almost all living organisms find rewarding objects in their environment—in humans, sources of food, comfort, security, esteem, status, and beauty—and act in ways that maximize those rewards. Positive emotions are essential to this most basic task of evolution, helping us approach and enjoy the rewards of life (Fredrickson, 1998; Ruff & Fehr, 2014; Shiota et al., 2017). The feeling of enthusiasm propels us toward what we find rewarding. The beauty of a potential suit- or’s face propels us forward in the euphoria of desire toward acts of affection. The feeling of contentment enables us to savor what is good (Cordaro et al., 2016). Feelings of pride or love signal more specific social rewards—the esteem of a valued friend, the affection of someone we cherish, the favorable regard of individuals in groups to which we belong (Tracy, et al., 2014).

In recent summaries of the neuroscience of reward, Suzanne Haber and Brian Knutson (2010), Christian Ruff and Ernst Fehr (2014), and Michelle Shiota et  al (2017) detail what might be thought of as a reward network in the brain, likely involved in many positive emotions, such as enthusiasm, awe, and joy. One part of this reward circuit that is engaged by pleasing stimuli— nice tastes, pleasant touches, pleasing sounds, and the like—is the ventral medial prefrontal cor- tex. A second is an older region of the subcortex known as the ventral striatum, and in particular, dopamine-rich networks in the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental areas (which produce dopamine). Importantly, the ventral striatum receives neural input from the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the hippocampus and sends signals to the prefrontal cortex as well as regions such as the hypothalamus, which controls more basic bodily processes related to eating, sleep, and sex.

With this neuroanatomy as a basis, let’s look more carefully at some empirical studies of this reward network, focusing our efforts on the nucleus accumbens. It is rich in dopamine

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and opioid neurotransmitter pathways and has long been thought central to the experience of positive affect (Panksepp, 1998; Rolls, 2013). For example, dopamine release and activation in the nucleus accumbens increase in response to pleasurable food (Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997), the opportunity for sex (Fiorino, Coury, & Phillips, 1997), and conditioned neutral stimuli that have been repeatedly paired with food, sex, or rewarding drugs (Di Ciano, Blaha, & Phillips, 1998). The duration of response in this reward circuitry predicts a person’s well-being (Heller et al., 2013). As you might imagine, people suffering from depression, when asked to maintain their positive emotion in response to positive slides, do not show sustained activation in the nucleus accumbens as nondepressives do; they have to struggle to keep the neural underpinnings of positive emotion active (Heller et al., 2009).

In light of this evidence, you might conclude that the nucleus accumbens and dopamine are central to the experience of pleasure. Work by Kent Berridge and colleagues offers a more finely detailed picture of the neural underpinnings of positive emotion. They have found that activation of opioid receptors, but not dopamine receptors, enhances the value of the taste of sucrose, as measured by behavioral reactions in rats to sweet tastes (Berridge, 2000; Berridge & Kringle- bach, 2013; Kringelbach & Berridge, 2009; Pecina & Berridge, 2000). This work has led Ber- ridge to distinguish between wanting and liking.

Dopamine and activation in the nucleus accumbens are central to wanting; they motivate a variety of approach-related, goal-oriented behaviors, including exploration, affiliation, aggres- sion, sexual behavior, food hoarding, and nursing, SEEKING in Panksepp’s framework (Depue & Collins, 1999; Panksepp, 1986). Lesions to the nucleus accumbens reduce the motivation to work for reward (Caine & Koop, 1993). Studies by Brian Knutson and his colleagues have documented how the nucleus accumbens is involved in the anticipation of pleasure (see also Bowman et al., 1996; Schultz et al., 1997; Ruff & Fehr, 2014). In a gambling paradigm, Knutson and colleagues give participants the opportunity to win money. They consistently find that it is the anticipation of rewards that activates regions of the brain such as the nucleus accumbens and the medial prefrontal cortex (Knutson & Greer, 2008). This research clearly suggests that activa- tion of networks of dopamine neurons signals potential rewards in the environment and is likely involved in such emotions as enthusiasm and desire.

In contrast, the opiates are central to our experience of liking stimuli. Liking is involved in the enjoyment of rewards registered in feelings of contentment and sensory pleasure (e.g., Cordaro et al., 2016). The opiates are released by lactation, nursing, sexual activity, maternal social inter- action, and touch, social interactions in which the savoring of close contact is pronounced (Insel, 1992; Keverne, 1996; Matheson & Bernstein, 2000; Nelson & Panksepp, 1998; Silk et al., 2003). The release of opiates makes consumption pleasurable and rewarding. In contrast to dopamine, it produces a state of pleasant calmness and quiescence, the kind of emotional experience you might enjoy after a great meal, a soothing massage, or a sunny and relaxing picnic with friends in a park.

What about rewards other than money or good tastes, social rewards such as favorable atten- tion, affectionate contact, or play, which are so important to human emotional life? There are several new theoretical accounts of this idea (see Ruff & Fehr, 2014). Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger reason that the reward circuits we have been considering are also engaged when we enjoy the social rewards of life, the esteem of a friend, affection from a loved one, or praise from a superior or group member (Eisenberger, 2016; Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2009). In keeping with this line of reasoning, studies find that when people think about being in love, the nucleus accumbens is activated (Aron et al., 2005). When people cooperate in an economic game or give money to a charity, they show activation in parts of a reward circuit (Harbaugh, et al., 2007). You may be intrigued to learn that practicing gratitude enhances activation of the reward circuit, as does witnessing charitable acts (Karns et al., 2017). So, the reward circuit is activated by more complex social rewards alongside pleasing tastes and money.

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Given these results, several theorists have offered the following analysis of affiliative bonding, which prioritizes the roles of dopamine and the opiates (DePue & Morrone-Strupinsky, 2004; Panksepp & Biven, 2013). They propose that distal affiliative cues such as smiles and gestures serve as incentive stimuli, they motivate approach-related tendencies served by dopamine release. These cues trigger dopamine, which promotes actions that bring individuals into close proximity with one another. As one illustration, the nucleus accumbens is activated in heterosexual males by viewing attractive female faces (Aharon et al., 2001). Once in proximity, affiliative behaviors such as touch and soothing vocalizations elicit the release of opiates. The opiates, in turn, bring about powerful feelings of warmth, calmness, intimacy, and connection (e.g., Shiota et al., 2017). Recent work, for example, by Lauri Nummenmaa, Sandra Manninen and their colleagues, has found that laughing with friends and touch lead to the release of opiates in specific regions of the brain (e.g., Manninen et al., 2017). When the opiates are blocked in juvenile rats, they spend less time with their mothers after separation (Agmo et al., 1997). Human females given naltrexone, which blocks opiate release, spend more time alone, less time with friends, and enjoy social interactions less (Jamner et al., 1998). Tristen Inagaki, Naomi Eisenberger and their colleagues have found that when people take naltrexone, they report reduced feelings of social connection on a daily basis and less social connection when reading kind words written to them by a friend (Inagaki et al., 2016). Feelings of support, connection, and attachment have deep roots in regions of the brain where dopamine and opioid networks are present.

Appraisals of Pain, Threat, and Harm: The Periaqueductal Gray A final subcortical region known to be implicated in emotion is the midbrain periaqueductal gray, which is situated above the hindbrain and below the forebrain (Kober et al., 2008). This region appears to be involved in three different processes related to emotion that collectively sug- gest that it is involved in appraisals of pain, threat, and harm.

First, this region is involved in the release of opioids, which inhibit ascending pain signals before they reach the cortex. This may allow an individual to escape threat before attending to bod- ily harm, which will be signaled by pain (Heinricher et al., 2009; Lovick & Adamec, 2009). The periaqueductal gray, then, helps in the avoidance of pain when something more important occurs.

Second, the periaqueductal gray is activated by threatening images that evoke negative emo- tions, more broadly defined, along with pain (Satpute et al., 2013). In one recent investigation, participants showed increased activation in the periaqueductal gray in response to thermal pain as well as when viewing distressing slides (Buhle et al., 2012). The periaqueductal gray, then, is activated by negatively valenced images of a distressing and threatening nature.

Third, emerging evidence suggests that the periaqueductal gray may be part of a caregiv- ing system in the mammalian brain that is responsive to harm (for reviews, see Panskepp & Biven, 2013; Swain, 2010). In Chapter 2, we noted how this region is activated within 40 or 50 milliseconds upon hearing an infant’s distressing vocalizations. Studies of nonhuman mammals find that care-giving behaviors such as crouching over pups, retrieval of pups and bringing them back to the nest, licking, and prolonged nursing engage the periaqueductal gray (e.g., Stack et al., 2002). In humans, alongside other regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex and thalamus, the periaqueductal gray has been found to be activated in studies of mothers viewing images of their own versus acquainted or unknown infants, or viewing video clips of their own infants exhibiting attachment-figure soliciting behaviors such as smiling and crying (Noriuchi et al., 2008). Peri- aqueductal gray activation was also observed, along with activation in other empathy network regions, in participants instructed to generate unconditional love toward images of disabled peo- ple (Beauregard et al., 2009), while participants viewed sad facial expressions with instructions to extend a “compassionate attitude” toward them (Kim et  al., 2009), and when participants

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viewed prototypical images of suffering and need (Simon-Thomas et al., 2011). These studies begin to paint a picture: the periaqueductal gray attenuates the pain response, it is activated by signs of distress and negative emotion, and it engages caregiving tendencies.

In our tour of the emotional brain thus far, we have learned about subcortical regions concerned with three kinds of signals. The amygdala processes sensory information quickly in terms of its novelty and relevance. The nucleus accumbens tracks the possibility of rewards. Periaqueductal gray activation relates to pain, negative affect, and caregiving. Now we shall consider how these subcortical neurochemical signals are transformed by different cortical regions of the brain into more complex experiences as the process of emotion unfolds.

Bodily Awareness and Subjective Feeling: The Anterior Insular Cortex If there is a defining element of an emotion it is that it is felt in the body and experienced in the mind—the pangs of sympathy, the heat of embarrassment in sensations in the face, the tense body, arms, and hands of anger, the bodily surge of desire, the goosebumps of awe when moved by a piece of music. Is there a region of the brain that is involved in the feeling of these bodily sensations and awareness? Bud Craig has devoted his career to answering this question. His theorizing and hundreds of empirical studies suggest that the anterior insular cortex is cen- trally involved in the experience of emotion; it receives incoming neural signals from the organs, muscle groups, and veins and arteries distributed throughout the body (Craig, 2002, 2016). The anterior insular cortex appears to be where emotional experience begins to take shape.

Craig makes the case for this idea with several streams of evidence (see also Smith & Lane, 2015). A first is found in considering the anatomy of the anterior insular cortex. Through various neural pathways in the spinal cord that connect regions of the body to the brain, the anterior insular cortex tracks information about breathing, cardiovascular activity such as the contraction of the heart and blood flow, the arousal of the sexual organs, digestive processes, as well as skeletal muscle actions involved in bodily movements. Many of the emotion-specific bodily changes that we considered in Chapter 5 send neurochemical signals that converge upon the anterior insular cortex. It is where bodily changes appear to be transformed into physical sen- sations that enter our conscious awareness. This region also registers information about others’ emotions —it is activated by emotional touch and, in some studies, by perceiving facial expres- sions in others. This region, in Craig’s thinking, tracks the changes in the systems of the body.

Second, the anterior insular cortex is involved in several processes that enable the conscious awareness of bodily sensation. Most notably, it is engaged by self-awareness. For example, when we look at images of our face, this region is activated; it is not necessarily activated by the faces of others. The anterior insular cortex is involved in our awareness of the present moment and context. Finally, this region is engaged when we think about making choices of different courses of action, for example, whether to remain silent or express frustration to a coworker. Awareness of self, the present context, and deliberating over possible courses of action—processes sup- ported by the anterior insular cortex—are central to the subjective experience of emotion. Craig’s argument is this: as neurochemical signals from the body arrive at the anterior insular cortex, it engages self-awareness, awareness of the context, and thoughts of what to do, the beginnings of the experience of an emotion.

Craig’s thesis that the anterior insular cortex is central to the awareness of bodily changes and the emergence of emotional experience is bolstered by hundreds of studies (Kober et al., 2008; Lindquist et al., 2012). One of the most reliable effects in the study of emotion and the brain is that when people report on their experience of emotion, the anterior insular cortex is activated.

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In fact, this has been shown to be true for just about every emotion studied, including: maternal and romantic love, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, sexual arousal, disgust, feelings of unfair- ness, inequity, indignation, uncertainty, disbelief, social exclusion, trust, empathy, sculptural beauty, a “state of union with God,” and a hallucinogenic state (induced by ayahuasca). When we are aware of bodily sensations and begin to feel an emotion, the anterior insular cortex is engaged.

From Conceptualization to Empathic Understanding: Cortical Processes in the Brain The amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and the anterior insular cortex send electrochemical sig- nals via neural pathways to different regions of cortex. The cortex (meaning “outer layer”) of the human brain is between 0.06 and 0.12 inches thick, but it is deeply folded and makes up about 80 percent of the brain. If spread out flat, it would have an area of about 310 square inches. What emotion processes are supported by this part of the human brain?

One source of insight is found in the study of specific patients with damage to cortical regions of the brain, such as Phineas Gage. One such patient goes by the name of J.S. and has been stud- ied by James Blair (Blair & Cippoloti, 2000). One day in his mid-50s, J.S. collapsed and lost consciousness. He suffered damage to particular regions of the prefrontal cortex. Although he retained his abilities to speak and reason, he became a textbook example of acquired sociopathy (see Chapter 1). During his recovery in a hospital, he threw furniture at other patients. He groped female nurses. On another occasion, he body-surfed on a gurney through the hallways of the hospital. In Blair’s research, J.S. demonstrated normal capacities to learn, to recognize faces, and to identify whether faces are male or female. But he showed specific deficits in knowing what emotions are appropriate in specific contexts, in recognizing certain emotions, in regulating his emotional impulses, and in understanding the emotions of others.

The frontal lobes that J.S. damaged are seen as centers of regulation or executive control (Gaz- zaniga, Ivry, & Mangun, 2002). The thinking is that regions of the frontal lobes receive signals from regions such as the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and the anterior insular cortex. In the prefrontal cortex, representations of such feelings can be held in short-term memory and used to form plans tailored to the social context (e.g., Beer, Knight, & D’Esposito, 2006; Smith & Lane, 2015; Smith et al., 2017; Wallis, 2007).

In this section, we will consider how regions of the cortex are involved in emotion-related processes. We shall focus on: associating emotional rewards to specific contexts; how we con- ceptualize emotion with words and concepts; how we regulate emotions; and how we understand the emotions of others.

Learning Associations Between Events and Rewards: The Orbitofrontal Cortex Edmund Rolls has studied people who have damaged their orbitofrontal cortex (See Figure 7.5) and found that they have difficulty tracking how rewards are associated with context- specific objects and events (Rolls, 2013; Ruff & Fehr, 2014). As a result, people with dam- age to the orbitofrontal cortex will often show emotion that is inappropriate to the context, disinhibited behavior, or oddly flat affect. This region of the brain enables the tracking of context-specific sources of rewards (and positive emotion) and acting in accordance with that knowledge.

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Here is the evidence that Rolls considered. First, in both nonhuman primates and humans, rewards with evolutionary significance that are not learned through conditioning processes acti- vate certain regions of the orbitofrontal cortex, for instance, pleasant tastes, nice odors, soft touch to the skin, and smiling faces (Rolls, 2013). The orbitofrontal cortex generates a neurochemical signal in the brain when we encounter such basic pleasures. It is engaged, too, by the experience of social pleasure (Ruff & Fehr, 2014).

It also tracks changes in events that yield these rewards, or what are called stimulus rein- forcement contingencies. If one kind of action leads to pleasing food in one context but not another, the orbitofrontal cortex tracks that change. If one kind of action leads to affection in one context but not another, the orbitofrontal cortex tracks these associations. It is no wonder that when people experience damage to this region, they have trouble tracking changing elici- tors of rewards. They are less sensitive to different types of punishment and reward. As a result, their social behavior is often inappropriate and lacking in positive emotion. If your life involves learning what elements of your environment provide you with delight, the orbitofrontal cortex is engaged in this process.

Emotion Conceptualization: The Prefrontal Cortex Unique for human emotion, as compared to emotion in nonhuman species, is the possibility of conceptualization: our use of words, phrases, metaphors, and concepts to attend to, represent, make sense of, and share our emotional experiences in communicative acts of different kinds. Emotion conceptualization is at the heart of the socialization of emotion in families and how children learn to talk about their feelings—central to healthy adjustment (see Chapters 8 and 12). Acts of emotion conceptualization are part of therapy, and art, and the identities we assume. They are imbued with the values and ideas of culture.

When people report on their current feeling (e.g., “I am really mad” or “I’m slightly amused”), they are engaging in the simplest act of conceptualizing emotion—using language to represent feelings (Smith, Alkozei et al., 2017). Ajay Satpute, Kevin Ochsner et al. (2016) have documented that reporting on emotional experiences with words actually involves two

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FIGURE 7.5 The orbitofrontal cortex is highlighted in a monkey brain (left) and brain of a human (right).

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distinct processes: attending to the state and categorizing it. They have found that when peo- ple attend to emotional states in themselves or others, one region of the prefrontal cortex is activated: the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. By contrast, when people categorize emo- tional states, a different region of the prefrontal cortex is activated: the ventrolateral prefron- tal cortex.

These findings raise the possibility that when we conceptualize our emotional experience with words, the patterns of brain activation change. This possibility is in keeping with a constructivist

Box Individual Emotion: The Feeling of Beauty

Understanding our experience of beauty has long inspired poets, artists, and philosophers. We experience feelings of beauty in response to a wide array of events and objects. Scientists are actively engaged in examining which faces we find beautiful, how music elicits the chills associated with aesthetic appreciation, how different kinds of natural scenes seem beautiful to people around the world, and how paint- ing, architecture, and dance move us, sometimes literally. A small group of neuroscientists have taken up the call to understand beauty in a new field known as neuroaesthet- ics. A review of this field by Nadal and Pearce points to the promise of this inquiry (Nadal & Pearce, 2011). These neu- roscientists first offer an important theoretical point: rather than finding the “beauty center” of the brain, it is much more likely that various regions in the brain will be found to contribute to the experience of beauty. Very basic per- ceptual processes—related to perceiving faces or sounds, for example —will be involved. So too will more integrative processes, such as signals sent by the amygdala or nucleus accumbens, that give the perception of the stimulus an affective quality. Cortical processes will be involved in giv- ing the experience conceptual meaning, for example, how what is experienced relates to the individual’s self or identity. Here is a small sampling of Nadal and Pearce’s review. Both beautiful paintings and pretty faces activate the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex, regions of the brain involved in basic reward processing and attaching social significance to the reward signal. Watching an inspir- ing dance performance activates parts of the visual cortex as well as the premotor cortex, as if the body is getting ready to dance. And music activates parts of the auditory cortex and either the amygdala or nucleus accumbens depending on the emotional content of the music, as well as the orbito- frontal cortex. These preliminary discoveries on the feeling of beauty make contact with much that has been learned

thus far in the neuroscience of emotion and shed light on the neural underpinnings of one of the most mysterious sen- timents, the feeling of beauty.

Gabrielle Starr is a professor of English, but in her research group, she uses neuroimaging to understand the experience of beauty (Starr, 2015), as something valued in an emotional sense. Ed Vessel, with Starr and Nava Rubin (2012; 2013), asked people to look at paintings from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, Eastern and Western, represen- tational and abstract, which would be unfamiliar because they were often reproduced in art books. Participants were told: “The paintings may cover the entire range from ‘beauti- ful’ to ‘strange’ or even ‘ugly.’ Respond on the basis of how much this image moves you.” Participants gave the high- est rating, of most moving, to 16.7 percent of the paintings. They did not, however, agree among themselves as to which these were; their judgments were personal and idiosyncratic. The researchers found that for paintings each person found most moving, first as she or he was asked to look, there was deactivation of a region known as the default mode network (particularly the medial prefrontal cortex), which we will con- sider at the end of this chapter, and that is involved in self- referential processing. This is what happens, in this network, when someone is given a task. Then there was activation in the network, as the person felt moved by the beauty of the picture. We say more about this network at the end of this chapter. It is activated when a person thinks spontaneously, or reflects on matters that concern the self. When this net- work is activated by a painting the participant finds beautiful, it’s an indication that the piece of art has reached within.

In their 2013 paper, Vessel, Starr, and Rubin say “cer- tain artworks can “resonate” with an individual’s sense of self . . . “the neural representations of those external stimuli obtain access to the neural substrates and processes con- cerned with the self.”

From Conceptualization to Empathic Understanding: Cortical Processes in the Brain 187

account of emotion, that language shapes emotional response (Barrett, 2017; Lindquist et al., 2015). Two kinds of evidence lend credence to this possibility. A first emerges in a synthesis of 386 studies by Jeffrey Brooks, Kristin Lindquist et al. (2017), studies in which investigators sought to understand the patterns of brain activation for anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and hap- piness. In these studies, researchers generally had participants label their emotional reactions to evocative stimuli (e.g., pictures of gore or delicious looking food) with emotion words. In other studies, although the eliciting stimuli were the same, the study did not engage participants in the conceptualization of their emotions with words. Across these studies, labeling emotions with words activates what Brooks, Lindquist, and colleagues call a semantic association network that includes several regions of the cortex.

A second kind of study has explored how conceptualizing emotion with words alters activa- tion in other regions of the brain. A widespread intuition is that when we use words to conceptu- alize emotion, we gain perspective upon our passions, and perhaps act a bit more wisely. Parents teach children the language of emotion—“to use their words”—on the assumption that they may gain more control over their bursts of anger or inappropriate and out-of-control laughter. Insights achieved in therapy, gained through acts of conceptualization, would seem to pave the way for less stress and greater acceptance and understanding. Might a region of the prefrontal cortex be involved in these striking shifts in emotion? Indeed this appears to be the case. Matthew Lieber- man and his colleagues have found that when we label negative emotional experiences with emotion words, it activates the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (see Figure 7.6). Action in this region of the cortex, in turn, leads to decreased activation in the amygdala (Lieberman et al., 2007; Lieberman et al., 2011; Satpute et al., 2017; Torre & Lieberman, 2018).

Grounded in this understanding of the effects of conceptualizing emotion, it is interesting to consider the influences of mindfulness meditation upon patterns of brain activation (We con- sider in greater detail this kind of contemplative practice in Chapter 14). In some ways, these mindful practices are a sophisticated form of emotion conceptualization, in which in a physically calm state the individual directs attention and categorizes transient emotional states or the stresses and difficulties of social living. Scientists such as Richard Davidson, Tania Singer, and Philippe Goldin have studied what happens in the brain during states of mindfulness, and it very much is in keeping with what you have learned about with respect to the interplay between the prefrontal cortex and subcortical regions of the brain, in particular the amygdala (Davidson & Goleman, 2017; Klimecki et al., 2013). Namely, practicing different kinds of mindfulness—focusing on

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FIGURE 7.6 Emotion labeling activates the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, pictured here, which is associated with reduced activation in the amygdala.

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the breath, or bodily sensations, or the suffering of others, or warm feelings we feel toward those individuals we care about—increases activation in regions of the prefrontal cortex, it lessens activation in the amygdala, and in some studies activates reward-related regions of the brain, such as the ventral striatum.

Emotion Regulation: Regions of the Prefrontal Cortex Early studies in cognitive science identified different regions of the prefrontal cortex that would likely be involved in emotion regulation, given their functions in more general cognitive pro- cesses (Buhle et al., 2014). Namely, different regions of the prefrontal cortex, which we shall soon consider, support cognitive processes, such as directing attention, choosing among response options, and reflecting upon current experience, that are central to emotion regulation—the dif- ferent ways in which we modify our emotional responses once they are underway, and in ways that fit the demands of the current social context (see chapters 8 and 14 for fuller discussions). Two kinds of evidence suggest that the prefrontal cortex is important to the regulation of emotion.

First, patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex—the J.S.s and Gages of the world—have problems regulating their emotional behavior; their emotional reactions are often wildly inap- propriate to the social context. Orbitofrontal patients like J.S. we described above have been observed to greet strangers by kissing on the cheek and hugging (e.g., Rolls, Hornak, Wade, & McGrath, 1994), to engage in tasteless joking and teasing (Stuss & Benson, 1984), and to disclose to a stranger in an inappropriately intimate fashion (Beer, 2002). They often experience and express emotions that are inappropriate to the context, for example, showing a great deal of pride after teasing a stranger, when most people feel embarrassment, even mortification, at such an awkward social encounter (Beer et al., 2003).

Neuroimaging studies offer a second kind of evidence that speaks to how the prefrontal cortex is activated when people try to regulate their emotional responses (e.g. Buhle et al., 2014). In one of the first of such studies in this literature, Kevin Ochsner and his colleagues had 15 females view 114 photos, two-thirds of which were evocative of negative emotion, and one-third of which were relatively neutral in content (Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002). For the negative photos, one half of the trial’s participants were asked to reappraise the photo so that it would “no longer elicit a negative response.” This reappraisal condition led to greater activation in the dorsal and ventral regions of the left lateral prefrontal cortex and the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex.

That study inspired dozens of similar studies. In reviews of over 50 studies of this kind, Jason Buhle, Kevin Ochsner, James Gross and their colleagues summarize the evidence as follows (Buhle et al., 2014; Ochsner & Gross, 2008). Simply labeling emotions with words can activate regions of the prefrontal cortex we have been considering, and it tends to deactivate amygdala response as well as the anterior insular cortex (Burkland et al., 2014).

When people engage in a reappraisal of their emotional response, in a fashion described above, there tends to be activation in the dorsal prefrontal cortex, a region known to be involved in selecting what to attend to and where to focus attention. Reappraisal also activates left lateral- ized regions of the frontal cortex. Clearly this is in keeping with the core of reappraisal, which involves shifting attention away from one appraised meaning of a stimulus or event (e.g., how I do on this standardized test will determine which college I get into!) to another (this test is just one test of many, and my future will be based on many of my talents and efforts).

A third kind of emotion regulation that has been studied with neuroimaging techniques is taking a third person perspective upon current emotions. For example, in the heat of an emo- tional episode, you might look upon yourself from a third person perspective, or as if you were an actor in a play or character in a novel, or from a distant point of view. This kind of regulation engages the medial prefrontal cortex, known to be involved in self-representation (Kross & Ayduk, 2017).

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Empathy and the Cortex In Chapter 1, we introduced Tania Singer, who has devoted her career to understanding the net- works of the brain that support empathy and compassion. In this chapter, we have encountered other efforts to understand the neural underpinnings of compassion: the CARE system that Jaak Panksepp studied, the role of the periaqueductal gray in nurturant and compassionate behavior. Let’s consider empathy in a bit more depth.

Our ability to mimic others, to read others’ mental states, and ultimately to feel what others feel, is central to social relationships (See Chapter 9). Recent neuroscientific studies are start- ing to chart how different empathic processes engage different regions of the cortex. Studies reviewed by Jean Decety and Claus Lamm (2006) and Kevin Ochsner and Jamil Zaki (2016) reveal that certain regions of the medial prefrontal cortex, in particular regions of the anterior insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, are engaged when people respond empathically to the emotions of others. For example, when we feel a painful prick on the finger, the anterior insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex are activated. And hearing that someone else is expe- riencing this same kind of pain activates those regions as well; our own experience of pain and our appraisal of another’s pain can activate the same regions of the brain. This basic empathic process extends to other emotions: when we feel disgust, the anterior insular cortex is activated; when we see other individuals feel disgust, the anterior insula cortex is activated. These regions of the cortex are helping humans cross the gulf between self and other, ensuring we know what others feel.

A different form of empathy—the cognitive understanding of others’ mental states, or what has been called theory of mind—engages different regions of the cortex. Singer refers to these regions of the brain as the empathy network; Rebecca Saxe calls them the theory-of-mind net- work (Bruneau et al., 2012; Jacoby et al, 2015). This cognitive empathy network includes the medial prefontal cortex, the precuneus, and the temporal parietal junction, an associative region of the cortex that receives input from the prefrontal cortex. These cortical regions are more likely

Box Focus on film

John Huston’s Treasure of Sierra Madre from 1948 is a classic in American cinema and speaks to the importance of the frontal lobes in emotion and emotion regulation. Humphrey Bogart plays expatriate Fred Dobbs, who is tired of bumming smokes and meals off expatriate Ameri- cans in Tampico Mexico. He decides to encamp with two other down-on-their-luck prospectors in the arid moun- tains of Mexico’s Sierra Madre. They are in search of gold. Initially they find success, and the social complexities of accumulating wealth. As their bags of gold dust mount in weight and number, the three men do their best to trust each other, in spite of the opportunities for exploitation. Still the band of desperate prospectors holds tight, bound together in cooperative spirit by the enthusiasm of their quest, the camaraderie of their work, the reverie of the meals and clothes and farms and white picket fences they envision with their newfound fortunes, and the laughter,

banter, back slapping, and firm hand-shakes of strangers trying to get along.

When a mine shaft collapses on Bogart, he suffers a blow to his head, in particular his frontal lobes. He loses his social emotional talents, and the story takes a dramatic turn. He misreads the intentions of his comrades and assumes erro- neously that they are hiding gold from him. He comes to view his comrades as being guided by malicious intent. He becomes more remote and cold: the language of friend- ship— “buddy,” “friend,” and nicknames—shifts to the sharp, impersonal tones of last names. He becomes disin- hibited in his emotions and is prone to name calling and gun pointing confrontations. Even before the neuroscience of the frontal cortex really got off the ground, we see evi- dence of the importance of these regions of the brain to emotional functioning in classic tales such as the Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

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to be involved when we understand cognitively, in the abstract, what others are feeling, and that they feel different states than we do.

When the frontal lobes are damaged, then, as in the case of the patient J.S., abilities to feel empathically and to understand what other people feel may be lost, and social relationships can suffer profoundly (Beer, Shimamura, & Knight, 2004; Blair & Cipolotti, 2000; Hornak, Rolls, & Wade, 1996). For example, in one recent line of research, Howard Rosen and Rob- ert Levenson (2009) have begun to characterize the emotional deficits that accompany one kind of dementia known as frontal temporal lobar dementia: it’s an organic brain disease that strikes in the middle of life and devastates specific regions of the prefrontal cortex as well as the temporal lobes—regions involved in empathic processes as we have been discussing. In keeping with a theme of this section, frontal temporal lobar dementia patients, compared with matched control samples, show deficits in empathic behaviors: they are less accurate in reading the emotions of others, they engage in less mutual gaze with their romantic partners, and they don’t show the usual levels of embarrassment—an emotion that is rooted in the understanding of others’ judgments—when being put through the embarrassment of watching themselves sing on videotape.

Social Pain and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Anterior Insular Cortex Thus far, we have seen how cortical processes enable the social aspects of emotion, from empathic responses to others to regulating our emotions according to the demands of the current social context. What about other social dimensions of emotions and their representation in cortical process? One recent focus is the social pain of separation (Panksepp & Given, 2013). Separation from close others manifests in the feeling of distress and sadness, for example, when separated from a romantic partner, the grief we feel when a loved one passes away, and even the feeling of shame at being socially rejected and excluded. John Bowlby, whom we introduced in Chapter 1, proposed in his attachment theory that the social pain of separation helps us stay close to attach- ment figures, so vital to our survival.

How might such social pain engage cortical processes? To answer this question, Naomi Eisen- berger suggests an important role for the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (Eisenberger, 2015; Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004, Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2017). Eisenberger proposes that a specific region of the anterior cingulate cortex, its dorsal region, might be thought of metaphori- cally as the mind’s alarm system that is attuned to social pain and separation. This thesis draws upon several findings: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is thought of by cognitive scientists as a discrepancy detector, detecting conflicts between stimuli or the individual’s goals and inten- tions. The dorsal region of the anterior cingulate cortex is also active during the experience of physical pain, or noxious physical sensations, and in particular seems to track the felt unpleas- antness of such pain. It is for this reason that surgeons at times may resort to ablating part of the anterior cingulate cortex when someone suffers from intractable pain. And you just learned that regions of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex are activated (along with other regions such as the insula) when we respond empathically to the pain of others.

Given these findings, Eisenberger suggests that our experiences of social pain likewise engage the anterior cingulate cortex, in particular its dorsal region (Eisenberger, 2015). Here are some relevant findings that support this claim (see Figure 7.7). In mammalian species, ablating the dorsal region of the anterior cingulate cortex leads to a decline in distress calls when separated from kin, and reductions in affiliative behavior—classic attachment behaviors. It also impairs the mothering behavior of rat moms, who no longer retrieve rat pups in distress when their dorsal

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anterior cingulate cortex is impaired. Opiates can be used not only to reduce physical pain, but social pain as well. Building upon this evidence and reasoning, Eisenberger posits that the dorsal region of the anterior cingulate cortex also helps humans detect and respond to nonverbal and verbal cues of rejection, separation, and exclusion.

In an early demonstration of this social rejection thesis, Eisenberger and her colleagues had participants play a ball toss game on a computer with two other participants (Eisenberger et al., 2003). In this game, the participant tossed a virtual ball back and forth to the other participants. At a preset point in this playful exchange, the computer was programmed so that the two other players stopped tossing the ball to the participant, thus placing the participant in a situation of social rejection reminiscent of being ignored on the school playground. This act of social rejec- tion triggered activation in the dorsal region of the anterior cingulate cortex, and participants’ reported experiences of distress correlated with activation in this region.

Since that study, several other studies have shown that this region of the cortex is responsive to different forms of separation and social rejection (Eisenberger et al., 2015). Namely, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is activated by the threat of negative social evaluation, viewing rejection- related images, reliving a romantic rejection, or being reminded of a lost loved one (Kross & Ayduk, 2017). Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues have further shown that the dorsal ante- rior cingulate cortex initiates the body’s inflammation response, which can have costly effects on health, as you learned in Chapter 5 (Eisenberger et al., 2017). More recently, Eisenberger and her colleagues have begun to make the case that feeling socially supported by friends and loved ones acts as a buffer against these effects in the brain of social rejection and separation (Hornstein, Fanselow, & Eisenberger, 2016).

It would seem that in the course of human evolution, social connection became so important that social rejection and social separation recruited the use of ancient pain regions of the cortex for more social purposes.

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FIGURE 7.7 The Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (the darker, shaded area in the two images of the brain) is activated by different forms of social pain and separation.

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The Search for Emotion-Specific Patterns of Brain Activation Thus far, we have seen how different emotion-related processes —simple and complex apprais- als, bodily awareness, conceptualization, regulation, and social understanding— engage different subcortical and cortical networks of regions of the brain. This tour through the emotional brain may have left you wondering the following questions: How should we think about the brain mechanisms for specific emotions? What are the patterns of activation for negative emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, and sadness? What about the self-conscious emotions, embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride? Or the various positive emotions such as amusement, awe, contentment, desire, and love? Our tour through the emotional brain, you will recall, began in important ways with the influential work of Jaak Panksepp, who argued for seven distinct emotion systems in the brain in different mammals. In closing this chapter, we shall consider two different perspectives on the question of how and where distinct emotions arise in the brain.

Distinct Emotions Are Constructed in the Cortex One answer to the question of how distinct emotions arise in the brain is found in the writings of Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kristin Lindquist, and Ajay Satpute, and their theorizing about how emotions are constructed in the brain (Barrett, 2017; Lindquist, 2016). They propose that broad networks in the brain are activated by appraisals of valence (goodness/badness) and arousal of events in the environment. These basic appraisals give rise to core affect, the feeling of how good or bad and how arousing things are. What, then, produces our experiences of more specific emotions? Within constructivist theorizing, more specific emotions—anger versus disgust, for example, or love versus pride—arise in language-based acts of conceptualization that are shaped by individual experience, culture, the present context, and the language we use to conceptualize emotion. Emotions are constructed as acts of meaning.

Some of the findings that we have reviewed align with this theory of emotions as constructed in the brain. Namely, we have seen how broad networks in the subcortex and cortex do provide a general appraisal of the salience and concern relevance of the event. We have seen how different linguistic acts—attending, labeling, categorizing, and regulating—produce specific patterns of activation in cortical regions. Acts of conceptualization prompt specific brain activation.

Emotions Engage Discrete Patterns of Brain Activation A different account of the neural processes of different emotions is offered by a new genera- tion of neuroscientists who include Philip Kragel, Kevin LaBar, and Lauri Nummenmaa and their collaborators (Nummenmaa et  al., 2018; Kragel & LaBar, 2016; see also Wager et  al., 2015). These researchers have looked beyond emotions such as anger and fear to more specific comparisons, for example, between amusement and contentment, or embarrassment, shame, and guilt. These more specific comparisons have been enabled by advances in studying more specific regions of the brain (called voxels) and new statistical techniques that identify emotion- specific patterns of activation. These studies are revealing distinct, and different, patterns of activation throughout the brain for a number of different emotions (Nummenmaa & Saarimäki, 2018; Saarimäki et al., 2016).

For example, in one study, Kragel and LaBar had participants watch evocative film clips and listen to emotionally moving pieces of music. The clips and music pieces were selected to evoke three negative emotions—anger, fear, sadness—in participants, as well as two posi- tive emotions—amusement and contentment—as well as surprise and a neutral state (Kragel &

The Search for Emotion-Specific Patterns of Brain Activation 193

LaBar, 2015). Across the two modalities, the six emotions elicited distinct patterns of activation in the brain, as you can see in Figure 7.8 (see Kragel & LaBar, 2016).

In a similar spirit, researchers have been actively asking whether embarrassment, shame, and guilt are associated with distinct networks of activation in the brain. These three self-conscious emotions are elicited by different events and produce different subjective experiences (Tangney et al., 1996). We feel embarrassment when we have violated a social convention (e.g., of how to address someone or use the butter knife), shame when we fail to live up to the aspirations of others, and guilt when we have harmed someone. Might these states be associated with distinct patterns of activation in the brain?

Indeed, this appears to be the case. Coralie Bastin, Sarah Whittle and their colleagues reviewed 21 studies in which people were led to feel embarrassment, shame, and guilt (Bastin et al., 2016). In some studies, people recalled an experience of one of these emotions while their brains were scanned. Or they posed their face and head and gaze in the configuration of the expression typi- cal of embarrassment or shame (Morita et al., 2013). Or they imagined experiencing one of these three emotions in a hypothetical situation. Across these studies, the three self-conscious emotions were associated with different patterns of brain activation. Shame was associated with increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the sensorimo- tor cortex. Embarrassment was associated with increased activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. And guilt was associated with activation in the ventral anterior cingu- late cortex, posterior temporal regions, and the precuneus.

Still other studies have begun to map distinct patterns of brain activation for other emotions. For example, the elicitation of pride has been found to activate the posterior medial cortex, a region known to be associated with self-referential processing (Simon-Thomas et  al., 2012). Experiences of sexual desire are associated with activation in the hypothalamus, a finding very much in keeping with discoveries about the mammalian brain (Brunetti, et al., 2008). Feelings of gratitude when watching stories of holocaust survivors led to activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex (Fox et al., 2015). Romantic partners asked to imagine scenes that prompt romantic jealousy showed activation in the basal ganglia (Sun et al., 2016). People prone to experience envy showed activation in the inferior/middle frontal gyrus and the dorsome- dial prefrontal cortex (Xiang et al., 2016).

Toward the end of this chapter, now, let’s consider a new branch of affective neuroscience that would have intrigued William James, given his lifelong interest in religious experiences. Led by

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neuroscientists such as Roland Griffiths and Robin Carhart-Harris, there has been a concerted attempt to understand the patterns of brain activation that accompany mystical experiences, for example, of the kind that people encounter in meditation, yoga, prayer, ritual, and—in certain tra- ditions—through hallucinogens such as psilocybin, which are now being tested for their potential therapeutic benefits for people suffering from drug addiction, depression, and trauma (Barrett & Griffiths, 2017). The philosopher Walter Stace, in part inspired by William James, argued that there is a core to mystical experiences: a sense of unity with other living beings, the dissolution of the self, a sense of things being sacred, the conviction that one is encountering ultimate truths about reality, paradoxicality, and transcending space and time (Stace, 1960). Also at the heart of mystical experiences are self-transcendent emotions such as awe, joy, ecstasy, and a love of humanity (Stellar et al., 2017).

Neuroscientists have examined people during religious prayer, they have looked at the brains of deeply committed practitioners of meditation, such as Tibetan Buddhist Monks, or they have looked at the changes in patterns of brain activation brought about by a controlled, and blind (unaware to the participant) experience of psilocybin (see Barrett and Griffiths, 2017). What patterns of activation might support mystical experiences? In this research, we learn that what is deactivated is also central to emotional experience.

The brain focus in this research is on the default mode network, which, as Jessica Andrews- Hanna, Jonathan Smallwood & Nathan Spreng (2014) explain, includes the medial prefrontal cortex, several other prefrontal and temporal cortical regions, subcortical areas that include parts of the hippocampus, as well as parts of the cerebellum and striatum. It is activated when the person engages in spontaneous self-generated thought, which can be musing, reflective, or creative. The network has been found to be activated when people engage in self-directed, goal- centered activity, in activities that involve autobiographical memory, in thoughts about the self in relation to other people, in imagination of novel scenes or narratives, and in thinking about moral dilemmas or personal futures. The network comes alive in spontaneous processes that involve the self, and they often involve emotions. The research of Li, Mai, & Liu (2014) was on the role of this network in social understanding of others (theory-of-mind), while Xie et al. (2016) found evidence that social regulation of people’s emotional states by a therapist, includ- ing reduction of aversive emotions, was associated with activations of parts of the network. This network is deactivated when people engage in externally based activities, for instance, doing tasks they are required to do, which depend on perceptual input from the outside world (see also Andrews-Hannah et al., 2018).

So what might we make of the default mode network? Is it, as Gabrielle Starr and her coau- thors suggest (as we discussed earlier in this chapter, in the Box on the Feeling of Beauty), involved in inner emotional meaning and value? Or is it a network that, given Stace’s analysis that we offered above, is something that in mystical experience—with its loss of the sense of self, and its sense that one is transcending time and space—might be switched off?

Barrett and Griffiths find that intense experiences of meditation and experiences with psilocy- bin, consistent sources of enduring joy, ecstasy and awe that can last for weeks, reduce activation in the default mode network (Bruer et al., 2016; Cathart-Harris, et al., 2014). When regions of the default mode network are surgically altered, there is an increase in self-transcendent emo- tions, such as joy and awe (Urgesi et al., 2010). In Japan, there is a sense of wonder, awe, joy, and ecstasy that accompanies a state called Kando—the vanishing of the self. Could it be, in such cases, that what vanishes in the brain are activations of the default mode network?

We started this chapter with an episode of a television story in which a mother is worrying about her daughter. Like most stories, this one is based in emotion, in this case on attachment and, in the brain, on Jaak Panksepp’s CARE system. As we have gone on in this book, we have empha- sized how most human emotions are not about the individual. Our most important emotions are about our relationships with others. They depend on understanding these others: described in

195Further Reading

psychology in terms of mentalizing, theory-of mind, empathy and sympathy. These issues have been given primacy in the work of Tania Singer, discussed above. Let’s end this chapter, then, with a quantitative integration of neuroimaging studies by Raymond Mar (2011). He found a brain network that jointly supports the functions of understanding stories and theory-of-mind: the core-mentalizing network. It includes the medial prefrontal cortex, which is also part of the default mode network. The function of the mentalizing network, in understanding others, may be at the center of the emotions of our relationships.

S U M M A R Y

In this chapter, we turned to the human brain to explore what regions might be involved in emotion and in what ways. We reviewed current understandings of how the brain works and how different regions of the brain serve different functions. We considered different methods for the study of the brain, ranging from studies of patients with brain damage to the imaging of brain regional activity as humans respond to different stimuli and the effects of psychoactive drugs. We then focused our attention on subcortical processes involved in emotion-related appraisals. In this section, we saw that a small portion of the forebrain, the amyg- dala, is involved in appraisals of novelty and concern relevance,

the nucleus accumbens signals the potential rewards of different stimuli, and the periaqueductal gray in the midbrain is related to appraisals of threat, pain, and caregiving. We then considered the role of the anterior insular cortex in the awareness of body sensa- tions and the experience of emotion. We then turned to different regions of the cortex and how they are involved in emotion con- ceptualization, regulation, empathy, and social pain and separa- tion. We considered two different approaches to the question of how distinct emotions arise in the brain and ended by discussing networks that are involved in our conceptualizations of ourselves and others.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. To what extent does Jaak Panksepp’s model of mammalian emotion systems in the brain map onto human emotion? What emotions are not well accounted for by his seven systems?

2. What are some specific emotions that map onto wanting versus liking, or anticipating pleasure versus consuming pleasurable things?

3. Is it fair to say that the cortical regions are primarily involved in emotion regulation, once emotions are underway?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

For excellent and wide-ranging introductions to the neuroscience of emotion:

Panksepp, J. & Given, L. (2013). The Archeology of the Mind: Neuroevolu- tionary Origins of Human Emotion. New York: Norton.

Rolls, E.T. (2014). Emotion and Decision-making Explained. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

LeDoux, J. (2015): Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. New York: Penguin.

Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

For an understanding of the social brain:

Lieberman, M. (2013). Social. New York, NY: Crown Publishing.

For a discussion of how human emotions, and their brain functions, are involved in the appreciation of beauty:

Starr, G. (2015). Feeling beauty: The neuroscience of aesthetic experience. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

For recent syntheses of the mechanisms of the brain involved in different emotion-related processes:

Panksepp, J., Lane, R.D., Solms, M., & Smith, R. (2016). Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews.

Smith, R., & Lane, R.D., (2015). The neural basis of one’s own conscious and unconscious emotional states. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 57, 1–29.

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PART III Emotions and Social Life

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8Development of Emotions in Childhood

This chapter was written with Michelle Rodrigues and Sahar Borairi

.  .  . for all the time of our infancy and child-hood, our senses were joint-friends in such sort with our Passions, that whatsoever was hurtfull to the one was enemy to the other. . .

Thomas Wright The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604).

CONTENTS Theories of Emotional Development

Emotional Expression The Developmental Emergence of Emotions Social Emotions: 18 Months and Beyond Developments in Language and the Understanding of Other Minds

Recognition of Emotions Facial Expressions Vocal Expressions Postures and Gestures Multimodal Recognition of Emotions Brain Mechanisms in Infants’ Recognition of Emotions The Negativity Bias

Regulation of Emotions Regulatory Processes Neurobiological Development of Emotion Regulation Temperament

Biological Contributions to Temperament

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

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FIGURE 8.0 This picture of a four-year-old girl was taken after her father had photographed her sister in her confirmation dress: finally, this little girl jumped forward and shouted: “I want to have my picture taken too.” The picture shows a characteristic angry expression (eyebrows raised, square mouth) and posture.

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The story of emotional development is about how children come to participate in the social world (e.g., Denham et al., 2003; Jones, Greenberg, & Crowley, 2015; Camras, Fatani, Frau- meni, & Shuster, 2016). From infancy to childhood, we see a growth in children’s abilities to perceive and signal emotions. As their brains develop, so too does their ability to express and understand their own and others’ emotions. They become social partners so skilled in signal- ing and responding to emotion that complex interactions can take place, forming the basis of different relationships that are central to human social living. Think of a newborn. She or he can cry and all those around try to figure out what the baby needs. Contrast this with a six- year-old boy, playing a game with his older siblings. He gets mad at them because he feels left out. He can modulate his upset enough to talk. He can elaborate the reasons for his upset. He can make them feel sufficiently guilty that they include him in their next game. These changing patterns of emotional behavior indicate major developments in the recognition, expression, and regulation of emotion. This chapter is about how emotional development from early infancy into childhood allows children to become skilled social partners who are able to take part in complex social exchanges.

Emotion is the first language of us all. Within seconds of birth, the human baby makes its first communication: it starts crying. According to Paul MacLean, such sounds during evolution were momentous. Reptiles are largely silent. With the emergence of mammals, emotional sounds, which you learned about in Chapter 4, marked the beginnings of a new kind of adaptation in which social communication and cooperation within tight knit relationships began to emerge and define our evolution (see Lambert, 2003 for review).

In a recent statement about emotion and our sociality, Michael Tomasello (2016) has argued that what is unique to humans is that they are “group-minded creatures whose collective inten- tionality includes all kinds of things not just in their personal common ground with other individuals, but in their cultural common ground with the group…” (p. 63). According to Tomasello, this collective intentionality is the basis of society and culture, including cul- tural conventions, norms, and institutions. It is based on shared gestures, joint attention and language, emotional mimicry, as well as an interest and motivation to share thoughts and act cooperatively with one another. Tomasello’s research has focused on when (both phylogeneti- cally and ontogenetically) the neural architecture becomes available for shared thinking and cooperation. John Bowlby (1969) worked on a similar idea that he referred to as the “goal- corrected partnership.” He viewed the goal-corrected partnership as a neural structure (both cognitive and emotional) that developed in the context of the parent–child relationship as each lets the other into their mind where the goals, desires, and beliefs of each are represented. The goal-corrected partnership is how people share thinking and joint actions, starting from approximately 18 months of age.

What do these human goals of shared thinking and cooperation have to do with emotions? In this chapter, we argue that a wide range of emotions have developed precisely to enable and foster the goals of shared thinking and cooperation. In exploring this thesis, we will focus on two emotion-related responses that humans have developed. The first is the multiple ways that people express emotion, which provides a window for social partners into understanding each other’s goals and desires. When a friend becomes angry with you, and after you have finished being angry back, you will be likely to think about the event from both of your points of view; you will arrive at a shared perspective upon the event. This kind of experience will enable the opportunity to rebalance your individual goals within the context of shared lives with others. The second dimension of emotional life we will consider involves a basic motivation toward others: a positive and prosocial orientation of folding into collective living rather than the individual life. In this chapter, we consider the age-related changes to emotional expression and shared thinking that facilitate our interactions with others.

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Theories of Emotional Development A central theoretical question for emotion research is this: to what extent are our emotion-related responses present from the start of life and then simply unfold with time and to what extent are our emotional tendencies shaped by the context around us: our family, culture, and neighbor- hood? As adults, our lives are filled with experiences of joy, sympathy, anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment, and so on. We identify the causes of our emotions, we have a rich language to categorize them, and we express our emotions in patterns of facial, vocal, and bodily behavior. In many ways, our emotions are discrete, and Carroll Izard has theorized that these discrete emo- tions are present early in development (Izard, 1991; 2007; 2011). With development, changes in basic processes such as the emergence of locomotion, self-awareness, face processing, and the ability to think about others’ mental states influence the development of emotion (e.g. Cassidy & Krendl, 2016; Harris, 2008). The emotions also are shaped by culture and context (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett, 2012; Vytal & Hamann, 2010). These influences on the developmental unfolding of emotion will be of interest as well.

To account for how emotions develop, Saarni, Campos, Camras, & Witherington (2006) think of emotions as relational processes in which children establish, alter, and maintain their rela- tionships with the environment, especially the environment of caregivers, siblings, and peers. With this theory, emotions are more than simply intrapersonal feelings: they shape interactions and relationships and have interpersonal meanings. For example, a child’s joy does track the child’s success in reaching a particular goal, but often those goals are shared, for example, with parents, and pursued socially. Cries of sadness express feelings of loss and a desire for comfort. Look at Figure  8.1 and assess the impact on yourself of a baby’s smile versus a baby’s cry. Expressions of anger signal to others nearby that their actions are interfering with a child’s goal- directed action. Within this theorizing, emotional experience and expression are communicative, and shape interactions. More generally, emotional development takes place as children estab- lish new goals, often social, new ways of evaluating emotional events, and as the relationships with others change over time (Witherington & Crighton, 2007). Emotions unfold in bidirectional interactions between individuals. For example, comforting a person feeling sad depends on the relationship with that individual (e.g., friend versus stranger), context (e.g., physically present versus phone conversation), and prior experiences with the person (e.g. their personality) (Walle & Campos, 2012).

We see discrete emotions present in the lives of infants, both in terms of expression and recog- nition. We also see cultural and family influences (discussed in Chapter 11) such that emotional experience is constructed within a relational and cultural context. We see too that emotions set up, maintain, and change relationships: to help us understand the thoughts and goals of those with whom we interact and through the negotiation of emotion events to achieve better understandings of those close to us. Physiological systems involved in emotion unfold as the brain develops, but these responses are sufficiently malleable that they take direction from the contexts in which we live. This fine dance between the biological basis of emotion and our attunement to the environ- mental contexts in which we grow up is the story of emotion development.

In the sections that follow, we will track emotional development in “typically developing chil- dren.” We will also look at the emotional lives of children with autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder. Children with autism have a difficult time with certain elements of communication and understanding others’ intentions and feelings. They also have core deficits in their ability to form social relationships and communicate with language. Much of this is because of the challenge of shared thinking. It is difficult for a person with autism to read someone else’s mind, to understand what an emotion means, and what caused it. This also translates into deficits in many aspects of emotion recognition (Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013) and expression (Brewer et al., 2016). The study

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of these children reveals deep insights into the complex mixture of biological and contextual influ- ences that are at the core of emotional development.

Emotional Expression The Developmental Emergence of Emotions Watch a group of children playing in a park, and you cannot help but be struck by the seemingly chaotic nature of emotion during childhood. But in fact, we can think about the developmental emergence of emotions as a sequence of steps in building an emotional repertoire that will sup- port a child’s functioning in a complex social world. The scientific evidence that supports this thinking is based on studies of children’s facial expressions of emotion. Coding systems devel- oped in adults and adapted for infants and children are used to ask the question, “Do infants express anger, sadness, etc?” (Izard 1983/1995; Oster, 2006). First let’s consider when expres- sions of emotion are seen. Later we will consider whether the emotions have the same meaning in childhood that they have in adulthood.

Crying occurs in very young infants, really from the first moment of life in response to a wide range of elicitors. Likewise, satiation, attention, and interest in the environment represent a state of general pleasure (see Lewis, 1993). As far as expressions of distinct emotions go, the earliest seems to be disgust, which can be seen in newborns in response to sour tastes. Steiner, Glaser, Hawilo, and Berridge (2001) have shown that the expressions that human infants make to sour tastes—the wince and upper lip raise of disgust—are similar to those of other primates. This early emergence of disgust makes sense evolutionarily; this emotion enables successful adaptation to one’s environment by reducing exposure to potentially life-threatening pathogens (Tybur, Lieber- man, Kurzban, & DeScioli, 2013).

At about two months of age, babies begin to smile (Lavelli & Fogel, 2005). Although babies occasionally smile in their first month, these early smiles are not considered social, as they are often made during sleep (Cecchini et al., 2013). Actual social smiles emerge after the first month (Messinger & Fogel, 2007). In the second month, smiles occur with gentle stroking, and by the third month, they occur frequently in interaction with caregivers (Striano, Henning, & Stahl, 2005; Ikeda & Itakura, 2013). Three-month-olds also smile in response to the same kinds of events that make older children smile: attention from others, invitations to play, and even mastery of goals, (e.g., learning how to pull on a string to get a light to go on, Lewis & Ramsay, 2005).

Infant smiles are a source of interest and delight for parents. Those early social smiles signal the dawning of visible mutuality in the relationship. The baby smiles and the parent responds with talk, play, and interaction (Thompson-Booth et al., 2014). As we will see in Chapter 11, the responsivity of caregivers and siblings (the “serve and return” involved in interaction) is central to early brain development as well as children’s understanding of other minds (Browne, Wade, Prime, & Jenkins, 2018). It is quite striking, upon reflection, that by six weeks, the infant has a behavior (the smile) that serves to elicit the engagement and responsivity in caregivers that cata- lyzes brain development. The importance of children developing emotional expression is bidi- rectional; children’s emotional displays shape their parents’ emotions more so than the reverse (Beebe et al., 2007; Chow, Haltigan, & Messinger, 2010).

The frequency of smiling in babies, as with other emotional responses, is influenced not only by features of the social context, but also by genetically based factors. Consider the genetic influences upon autism, which profoundly shapes a child’s emotional tendencies. About 19 percent of younger siblings with an older sibling with autism develop autism themselves (because the disorder shows substantial genetic influence, Ozonoff et al., 2011). For this reason, the infant siblings of children with autism have been studied to understand the unfolding of biological risk. Well before autism

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can be diagnosed, the younger siblings of children with autism show lower levels of social smil- ing than typically developing children. Thus, these children are disadvantaged in their emotional expressions even when they are 15 months old (Nichols, Ibanez, Foss-Feig, & Stone, 2014; Filliter et al., 2015).

Anger appears after smiling, between four and seven months of age (Stenberg, Campos, & Emde, 1983; Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis, 2002b; 2005). It is linked to children’s ability for means-end thinking (Sullivan & Lewis, 2012; Lewis, Sullivan, & Kim, 2015) and requires that a baby has knowledge of a goal and that the goal is being blocked. In keeping with this idea, anger expressions increase as the child increases his or her autonomous crawling. Crawling elicits increased limit setting from parents and thus, more experience of goal blocks for infants; the end result is that the infant expresses more anger after the onset of crawling. In Figure 8.2, we see infant anger to arm restraint before they started crawling compared to two and six weeks after crawling began. As you can see, anger increases with arm restraint in proportion to the amount of time the baby has been crawling (Roben et al., 2012). In other research, we see increased anger and frustration when mothers withhold responses that had previously resulted in reward (Lewis, Sullivan, & Kim, 2015). Brain studies show significant developments in the processing of anger between seven and twelve months (Grossman, Striano & Friederici, 2007), although the neural correlates between infants and adults are different (Missana, Grigutsch & Grossman, 2014). We can conclude that anger is elicited by similar events and that facial expressions of anger are simi- lar in infants and adults. Neural correlates show differences between infants and adults, however.

Regarding the expression of sadness and fear, infants begin to make both sad (Lewis, 1983) and fearful (Braungart-Rieker, Hill-Soderlund, and Karrass, 2010) expressions at around four months. At this age, infants expect caregivers to respond to their overtures (Van Egeren,

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FIGURE 8.1 Babies showing emotional expressions: (a) a positive or happy expression, (b) a negative expression.

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Barratt, & Roach, 2001), and when this does not happen, sadness tends to occur. We see a marked increase in fear between 4 and 12 months (Braungart-Rieker, Hill-Soderlund, and Kar- rass, 2010). This is linked to increased capacities to attend to facial expressions in others that signal potential danger (Peltola, Hietanen, Forssman, & Leppanen, 2013; Leppanen & Nelson, 2012). With increasing mobility, infants also tend to express more fear, as they encounter more novelty and potential peril in the environment (Burnay & Cordovil, 2016).

Fear in response to separation from parents shows a universal pattern as can be seen in Figure 8.3. Across cultures, separation-related fear begins toward the end of the first year, peaks around 15 months, and then decreases after that. The developmental emergence of this response, and its apparent universality, makes evolutionary sense; such an emotional response was selected, during our evolutionary history, to increase the likelihood that the developing child avoids harm from predators.

Alongside the regularity of this response across cultures, studies also show reliable individ- ual differences in separation-related anxiety and the fear of strangers. For example, one study assessed 1285 children at four different times between 6 and 36 months, documenting four groups of children who differed on the persistence and severity of stranger fear (Brooker et al., 2013). We present these results in Figure 8.4.

As with anger, fear in young children has been shown to have specific neural correlates. Thus, Diaz and Bell (2012) exposed 10-month-old infants to three types of fear elicitor (stranger approach, exposure to masks, and toy spiders) and found that all the fear elicitors were associ- ated with increased right frontal EEG asymmetry. Fear responses are also reliably correlated with a specific cardiovascular response in infants (respiratory sinus arrhythmia; Buss, Davis, Ram, & Coccia, 2017). At the same time, culture shapes the emergence of separation and stranger- related fear as we saw in Figure 8.3; the timing and length of the fear response to separation vary across cultures, and caregiver responses to expressions of fear contribute to individual differences (Braungart-Rieker, Hill-Soderlund, & Karrass, 2010).

What about the emotion of surprise? Although there has been some controversy over how surprise is expressed in young infants, for instance, by facial expression, gesture, or freezing (Camras et al., 2002; Scherer, Zentner, and Stern, 2004), that it occurs is not in question. As you

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FIGURE 8.2 Effects of crawling status on frequency of anger expressed during the Arm Restraint procedure in Roben et al.’s (2012) study.

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might expect in light of appraisal-based analyses of emotion, surprise in young infants occurs in response to a violation of expectancy. Experiences of surprise during infancy contribute to learning. Stahl & Feigenson (2015) exposed 11-month-old infants to events that violated their expectations and events that did not. In the violation of expectation condition compared to the nonviolation condition, babies did more exploration with objects, and they learned more about them (as assessed by infants learning something about an object that they could not have known before). Surprise, as a critical mechanism in learning, has also been demonstrated for toddlers and preschool children (Stahl & Feigenson, 2017).

Before we leave our discussion of infancy and the emergence of different emotions, consider an important finding that holds across emotions. Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis (2002) examined four-month-olds’ facial expressions in response to situations that are expected to produce certain

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emotions (jack-in-the-box to produce surprise, arm restraint to produce anger, masked stranger to produce fear). Children showed more anger expressions during arm restraint, than during any other situation (tickling, jack-in-the-box, and appearance of a masked stranger). However, during arm restraint, more children demonstrated surprise than anger (see Figure 8.5). What this tells us is that the same event can elicit different emotions, with considerable variability across children. This variability depends on culture and the stable individual differences of children. The rela- tionship between elicitors and their expected emotions become less variable with age (Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis, 2005), but the finding that temperament plays an important role in under- standing variation in elicitor–response relationships continues across the lifespan. One child will react to an arm restraint as if it is a game, while another will experience it as a parent blocking his or her goal, and interfering with personal autonomy. Clearly, though, it is important to remember that in children and adults, there is no one-to-one correspondence between events and emotional reactions, although this relationship does seem to be better for positive than negative emotions (Castro, Camras, Halberstadt, & Shuster, 2017).

As in so many places in this book, the study of emotion during the first year of life in the developing child reveals evidence of both how evolution has endowed us with certain emotional tendencies and how those tendencies are shaped by the context of development. We see that within the first year, infants do show similar expressions, for example, of fear, anger, or cries of distress, to adults, they show these expressions in familiar circumstances, and there is some evidence for distinct patterns of brain activation that differ across various emotions. At the same time, one cannot help but be struck by how much infants vary in their emotional expression, and in their response to emotional elicitors. In Chapter 11, we will consider how such emotional vari- ations are shaped by the caregiving and cultural context in which a child is raised.

Social Emotions: 18 Months and Beyond As the child moves from infancy to preschool and school age, we see the development of more complex emotions that allow for increasingly complex social interactions (Boiger & Mesquita, 2012). The child’s emotional life becomes more social and other focused and includes the emer- gence of the self-conscious emotions beginning at around 18 months, including embarrassment and envy, as well as more prosocial emotional tendencies such as empathy and sympathy-based altruism (Brownell, 2013; Warneken & Tomasello, 2006; Eggum-Wilkens, Lemery-Chalfant, Aksan, & Goldsmith, 2015; Steinbeis & Singer, 2013).

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FIGURE 8.5 Proportion of children showing specific emotions as a function of elicitors in the Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis, 2002 study.

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Within the prosocial emotions, we see significant developments in emotion expression that are a consequence of children’s growing abilities to understand others (Reschke, Walle & Dukes, 2017). Between 12 and 24 months, children respond to another’s distress by comforting, bringing a parent, or offering an object (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992). At this age, children tend to offer comfort in ways that reflect their own preferences for being comforted. By three years of age, however, children offer comfort in a manner tailored to the individual needs of others. For instance, children comfort a child in distress by fetching the child’s mother.

During this period of development, three types of prosocial behavior are reliably observed: offering instrumental help, offering comfort, and sharing resources. Children provide instrumen- tal help by 18 months. Warneken and Tomasello (2006) have shown that at this age toddlers offer spontaneous instrumental help even when they gain nothing from the action (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006; Warneken, Chen, & Tomasello, 2006). In Figure 8.6, we portray these devel- opmental changes in prosocial behavior. Dunfield and Kuhlmeier (2013) suggested that offering comfort appears after the offering of instrumental help. Of interest is the finding by Hepach, Vaish, and Tomasello (2012) that children react similarly when either they do the helping or when they see someone else help. This suggests a primary motivation for others being helped rather than wanting credit for the helping. Sharing is complex. It can occur prior to one year of age, as children offer objects to play partners (Hay, 1979), but it has developmental progression in the preschool years related to a variety of factors including emotional reward (Paulus & Moore, 2017), perceived distribution of resources (Dunfield, Kuhlmeier, O’Connell & Kelley, 2011), competition (e.g., in a coloring contest children are less likely to share crayons, Pappert, Williams & Moore, 2017), and so on. Supporting the idea that there are different kinds of helping, Paulus, Kuhn-Popp, Licata, Sodian, & Meinhardt (2013) found that there were different neural correlates for instrumental helping (right temporal activation) and comfort to distress (left frontal cortical activation).

Within the next couple of years, children build toward enacting well-timed complementary behaviors in which they collaborate to achieve joint goals with others (Ashley & Tomasello, 1998; Prime, Plamondon, & Jenkins, 2017). By four years of age, they carry out role assignments during pretend play. Observe young children engaging in such pretend play, and you come to appreciate how complicated these social behaviors are. Pretend play is based on abstraction as it

FIGURE 8.6 Mean percentage of 18-month-olds in Warneken and Tomasello’s (2006) study who tried to help the adult experimenter in experimental and control conditions.

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occurs in the imagination of two play partners. Role assignments such as “I’m the fireman, you’re the mother and I save you,” involve adopting a role and enacting a series of behaviors within it, which are coordinated with the play partner (Lillard et al., 2013). These remarkable develop- ments in thinking about the other and being motivated to coordinate with the thoughts of the other are supported by emotional tendencies. Empathy, sharing, and comfort (as well as other emotions such as sadness and anger) ensure the building and enactment of complex plans involv- ing individuals with different perspectives. Through these emotions, children signal to their play partner what helps and what hinders in their goals, joint plans, and coordinated actions, and when they are not understood.

As with other early emerging emotional tendencies, we need to consider the role of genetic influence in prosocial emotions. Toddler-aged siblings of children with autism who later receive the same diagnosis themselves show less-empathic responsiveness to a distressed infant and an adult partner expressing physical pain (Campbell, Leezenbaum, Schmidt, Day, & Brownell, 2015) than children with no genetic vulnerability for this condition. Thus, for empathy, caring, and helping, like other emotions, whether we have a lot or a little of such prosociality is, in part, related to a roll of the genetic dice. Remembering the genetic dice may help during those periods of intense irritation with another person when we feel them to be un-empathic!

The development of consciousness and mentalizing abilities in the second year (Lewis, 1992) allows for experience of embarrassment, as well as the beginning of empathy that we consid- ered above. These emotional changes are founded upon two complementary processes. First, children must understand the subjectivity of others’ experiences and know that these experiences are different from their own. Second, and particularly for embarrassment, shame, and other self- conscious emotions, there must be an awareness of the self as it might be seen by other people (Muris & Meesters, 2014). The ability to self-recognize is typically assessed in the mirror rouge paradigm (Amsterdam, 1972). In this task, children are marked with a spot of rouge and then look at a mirror. Children who detect the mark and know how to touch it are said to recognize the objectivity of their own body. This ability emerges around 18 months both in Western and non-Western countries (Brownell, Zerwas, & Ramani, 2007; Ross et al., 2017). This cognitive ability is what Lewis argues allows for embarrassment (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss,1989). We see this in Table 8.1.

Between the second and third year of life, a more complex set of emotions is expressed, including pride, shame, guilt, and regret. These have been referred to as the self-conscious evalu- ative emotions (Lewis, 2010). They involve children’s beliefs and reactions to their own selves. For instance, when something good happens, a child may experience pride if the occurrence of the event is ascribed to his/her own attributes or behavior. In contrast, feelings of shame may arise when a child attributes a negative event to his/her own negative characteristics or actions (Muris & Meesters, 2014). We see the first signs of guilt and shame in two-year-old children, as evident in gaze aversion and bodily tension upon breaking a social partner’s toy. By this age, children will also try to make amends, a common action involved in guilt (Drummond, Hammond, Satlof- Bedrick, Waugh, & Brownell, 2017; Bafunno & Camodeca, 2013).

Table 8.1 Numbers of children who showed embarrassment as a function of whether they recognized themselves from the rouge-on-the-nose test (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989).

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Developments in Language and the Understanding of Other Minds The acquisition of language during a child’s development, and how it shapes the child’s expres- sion and knowledge of emotion, is one of the most important influences in emotional develop- ment (Beck, Kumschick, Eid, & Klann-Delius, 2012). Children start talking about emotions and desires at around 18 months, and the proportion of time they spend doing this gradually increases with age. By two years, children use the emotion words “happy”, “sad,” “mad,” and “scared” (Wellman, Harris, Banerjee, & Sinclair, 1995). Although they mainly talk about their own feelings at this age, they also attribute emotions to other people. Therefore, children as young as two years of age have the beginning of mentalistic conceptions: they know that emo- tions are about certain kinds of events and that consequences of emotions are different from the emotion itself (Widen & Russell, 2010). They also understand that fulfillment of a desire will lead to positive emotions and a desire unfulfilled will give rise to negative emotions (Wellman & Woolley, 1990). These changes in the language of emotion are an important step in understanding the experiences of others and why people behave the way they do. With such knowledge about others’ minds, children become more capable of engaging in social activities such as cooperation.

It is not until the age of three or four that children begin to attribute representational states—that is, mental states that refer to beliefs, thoughts, and knowledge (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). For instance, they may reason that: “John cheated because he believed the teacher was not in the room.” According to Widen & Russell (2010), this conceptual shift in children’s understanding of others’ minds “complements and perhaps underlies their fuller understanding of emotion concepts they already have in elementary form and their division of emotion into ever finer discrete catego- ries” (p.356). Indeed, a significant characteristic of the social emotions we observe in three- and four-year-olds is that they involve beliefs about eliciting situations. Pride, for example, is a feel- ing of accomplishment that is based on the belief that one has successfully reached a goal. Shame involves feeling bad about something based on the belief that one has let down or disgraced others. Thus, the capacity to attribute beliefs to oneself or others between the third and fourth year of life closely parallels the development of these social emotions (Ball, Smetana, Sturge-Apple, 2017).

In general, the ability to understand oneself and others in terms of mental states (emotions, desires, and beliefs)—termed theory of mind—is critically important for children’s socioemo- tional development. As this ability becomes more sophisticated, we see an increase in the proso- cial emotions and other oriented behaviors of children. As you might expect, the emergence of theory of mind and prosocial emotions such as empathy and sympathy result in better peer rela- tionships. Thus, Caputi, Lecce, Pagnin, and Banerjee (2012) found that five-year-olds’ theory of mind predicted seven-year-olds’ peer relationships, with this operating through improved proso- cial skills at six years of age. Thus, the ability to represent the internal states of others, including their beliefs, paves the way to children showing more caring and empathy toward others, which in turn improves their peer interactions.

As children’s theory of mind is developing, so are their language skills. By the time children are three, Judy Dunn and her colleagues (1991) have shown that half of the conversations they have about emotions are related to the causes of feelings. Between the ages of three and seven, children become more competent in talking about negative emotions, such as sadness in relation to loss and anger in relation to control (Hughes & Dunn, 2002). By learning to talk about emotions and their causes, children move well beyond simply expressing their emotions in facial, vocal, and bodily behavior. Here, language about emotions becomes part of the negotiation of relationships and ena- bles the development of shared meanings about internal states (Stern, 1985). The child can talk about a feeling, give their version of its cause, refer back to emotions, and alter their understanding of them.

We offer a summary timeline for this developmental progression of emotional expressions in Figure 8.7.

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As we think about the developmental emergence of the self-conscious and prosocial emotions, let us return to pillars of human social life—shared thinking and cooperation. As Tomasello and colleagues have argued, a primary direction of social development is the ability to engage in shared thinking and perspective taking. Across minds and history, with individuals being moti- vated to cooperate and build on one another’s thinking and achievements, cultures and societies themselves develop and thrive (Tomasello, 2010; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Children enter into these dimensions of social life early in their lives (Browne, Leckie, Prime, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2016), and they could not do it without emotions. In their first year, they can signal basic emotions to caregivers to let them know what is working well for them and what is not. Then the self-conscious and evaluative emotions develop, enabling the child to develop a sense of self in relation to others within joint endeavors and to signal when things have gone awry. Prosocial emotions such as empathy and sympathy pave the way for mutual understanding. Cooperative endeavors with family members and playmates are well underway.

Recognition of Emotions For children to cooperate with others and engage in shared thinking, they must be able to rec- ognize emotions in social partners and keep track of how the interaction is proceeding (Rus- sell, Bachorowski, & Fernández-Dols, 2003). Cultural experience also shapes this capacity (Xiao et al., 2017). To this end, it has been suggested that emotional expression and recognition coevolved (Izard, 2007).

A range of methods have been used to understand the development of emotion recognition in early childhood, all of which must work around the fact that infants do not use words. A widely used method has been the habituation paradigm, which is based on the finding that infants look at patterns that are new to them for longer periods of time than patterns that are familiar. For instance, infants can be presented with a picture of a facial expression (e.g. a smiling face) until they no longer look at it. They are then presented with another smiling face along with a new facial expression (e.g. a sad face). If they look at the new face more than the old face, this indicates that they can discriminate between the expressions. More recently, noninvasive

FIGURE 8.7 Summary timelines for the developmental progression of emotional expression. The top line shows the age at which certain emotions are expressed, and the bottom line shows the cognitive milestones associated with the emergence of various expressions across time.

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neuroimaging techniques such as the Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS, which uses blood flow in the brain to assess brain activity), the electroencephalogram (EEG), and event- related potentials (ERPs: a brain response that is the direct result of a specific event) have become popular in emotion research (Nishiyori, 2016; Saby & Marshall, 2012; Luck, 2014).

Soon after birth, children begin to pick up information from others’ faces, voices, and ges- tures. This ability is rooted in newborns’ preference for faces (Di Giorgio, Leo, Pascalis, & Simion, 2012) and voices (Grossman, Oberecker, Koch, & Friederici, 2010). This preference is essential for newborns’ ability to discriminate among people and to derive information about oth- ers’ emotional states. According to Grossman, Oberecker, Koch, and Friederici, (2010) emotion recognition relies on the interaction between the maturing perceptual system and the capacity to discriminate emotional information. Newborns do not have the visual acuity to discriminate subtle differentiations in facial expression that are needed to recognize expressions of emotion but over the first year, these skills develop (Leppanen & Nelson, 2009).

Facial Expressions Using variations of the habituation method, two- to three-month-old infants have been shown to discriminate happy, sad, and surprise facial expressions (Barrera & Mauer, 1981; Young-Browne, Rosenfeld, & Horowitz, 1977). Four- to six-month-olds can recognize anger expressions (Mon- tague & Walker-Andrews, 2001; Striano, Brennan, & Vanman, 2002). Using an electrocardio- gram methodology, it has been demonstrated that five- to seven-month-olds can discriminate fear, as evidenced by more pronounced and longer lasting heart rate deceleration in response to fearful faces (Peltola, Hietanen, Forssman, & Leppänen, 2013). Notice that this pattern of devel- opment closely matches infants’ own expression of emotions, where we learned that starting at age four months or so, infants start showing facial expressions of fear.

In typically developing infants, emotion face processing has been found to be dominant in the right hemisphere and orbitofrontal cortex regions (Fox, Wagner, Shrock, Tager-Flusberg, & Nelson, 2013). In contrast, infants at risk for autism spectrum disorder show a different pattern of brain activation when viewing facial expressions (greater activation in the left orbitofron- tal cortex). A meta-analysis shows that children on the autism spectrum show deficits in facial expression recognition, which vary depending on the emotion and also increase with age (Lozier, Vanmeter, & Marsh, 2014).

How do infants use the information communicated in facial expression in the first year? Social referencing is the ability to use the emotional displays of others to guide one’s own behavior. The visual cliff provides an example (see Figure 8.8). In a classic experiment, Sorce, Emde, Campos, and Klinnert (1985) showed that 12-month-olds were likely to cross the visual cliff—a not dangerous but fear-provoking situation—when their mother looked happy (74% crossed), but were unlikely to cross when their mother looked fearful (none crossed). The same pattern is seen for fathers. When fathers expressed anxiety (e.g., wide eyes, muscle tension, and verbal messages such as “be careful”), 11-month-old infants showed anxiety and avoidance (e.g., wide eyes, muscle tension, and verbal messages such as crying (Moller, Majdandzic, & Bogels, 2014).

Vaish and Striano (2004) took the examination of social referencing one step further. They were interested in whether babies used facial, vocal, or combined facial and vocal expressions in social referencing. They found that infants were more likely to cross the visual cliff in response to maternal vocalization, or a combination of maternal vocalization and facial expressions, than they were to mothers’ facial expressions alone. Thus, attending to and acting on emotions occurs earlier when the emotions are vocally versus facially presented, an issue we consider further below. The use of emotional information from parents to guide action in dangerous or novel circumstances is not a behavior shown by all children. Genetically at risk 18-month-old infants, who were later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, show less social referencing than their normally developing counterparts (Cornew, Dobkins, Akshoomoff, McCleery, & Carver, 2012).

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By preschool age, children have a modest ability to offer emotional labels for photographs of facial expressions, with happy, angry, and sad emerging first, followed by scared, surprised and dis- gusted (Widen & Russell, 2010). By school age (around five years of age), children are quite good at recognizing emotions in other people. Battaglia and colleagues (2004) documented a 72 percent correct identification rate of pictures of emotional expressions—joy, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, and a neutral expression—by children in Grades 2 and 3. In general, recognition of facial emotions improves across the childhood years (Durand, Gallay, Seigneuric, Robichon, & Bau- douin, 2007; Widen & Russell, 2008; Widen, 2013), but this does depend on the emotion studied. Rodger, Vizioli, Ouyang, & Caldara (2015) used a threshold-seeking algorithm to manipulate the number of signals shown in a study of anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness. Indi- viduals from five years old to adulthood participated in the study. Emotion recognition varied for different emotions, with happiness needing the fewest signals for accurate identification and fear needing the most. Change in emotion recognition by age was steepest for disgust and anger, less marked for sadness and surprise, and not age related for happiness and fear. Widen and Russell (2013) also showed that the ability to recognize disgust is strongly age related even into adulthood.

We talked earlier about the importance of developing a theory of mind to understand emotional development. Although there is a milestone around age 4 in children’s theory of mind understand- ing as Harris (2008) points out, there are multiple stages in the unfolding of the understanding of others’ minds beyond this point that influence children’s recognition of emotion. More specifically, Harris details developments in theory of mind understanding: the link between belief and emotion, the potential discrepancy between felt and expressed emotion, guilt, emotion regulation, and mixed or ambivalent feelings. Pons, Harris, and de Rosnay (2004) demonstrate changes in nine different components of emotion recognition, over half of which are still developing at nine years of age.

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Before we leave the subject of emotion recognition, we have to think about the complexity of emotion recognition outside of laboratory tasks. Sometimes the experimental paradigms we use oversimplify the task and assume that recognition of emotion, and indeed the relationship between internal experience and facial expression, is more straightforward than it might be. Castro, Camras, Halberstadt, and Shuster (2017) showed children film clips of a conflict discussion that they had had with their mothers. Seven to nine-year-old children were asked to choose the emotion that cap- tured what they were feeling. Facial expressions of emotion were rated by observers for the same clips in which the children identified specific emotions. Although when children reported joy, raters recorded joy, this was not the case for any of the negative emotions. When children said they experi- enced anger, emotions coded by observers included surprise, joy, anger, fear, in that order. This may reflect the lack of clear relationship between elicitor and emotion, discussed above. Another expla- nation, however, is that emotions are complex and often involve blends in unfolding interpersonal events. To make sense of emotions expressed dynamically, children are thinking about appraisals, their emotions, their interpersonal partner’s intentions, appraisals and emotions, the social context, and so on. Thus, the task of emotion recognition runs the gamut from perceptually decoding facial expressions to making sense of highly complex emotional exchanges in daily life. We will see in Chapter 11 that the development of these skills does matter in people’s lives: those who are more skilled at reading the emotions of others do have better quality relationships.

Vocal Expressions From the moment newborns enter the world, their brain is equipped to process emotional informa- tion from human vocal expressions. Cheng, Lee, Chen, Wang, and Decety (2012) using EEG found that newborns (1–5 days old) were able to differentiate between fearful, happy, and neutral voices. This ability to discriminate emotions from voice is even evident during sleep. Zhang and colleagues (2014) exposed newborn sleeping infants to human voices saying the same words using a fearful tone and an angry tone. The patterns of neural activation were different for angry versus fearful voices (i.e., a female saying “dada” using stress and intonation patterns indicative of extreme fear and anger, and rated as such by independent coders). Such discriminations are not only evident for adult voices. When babies are presented with infant laughter or cries, they also show different patterns of neural activation (Missana, Altvater-Mackensen, & Grossmann, 2017). Even more remarkable is the degree to which 12-month-old babies can make distinctions between different vocal expressions of positiv- ity (e.g., funny, exciting, delicious) and tie these vocalizations to the likely eliciting circumstance (Wu, Muentener & Schulz, 2017). Thus, by 12 months, infants have some capacity to think about the causes of emotion in another person! These are remarkable building blocks for being able to engage in the shared thinking and joint plans that we described at the beginning of the chapter.

Interestingly, infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (between 4 and 7 months old) showed less ability, even in infancy, to discriminate a sad voice from a neutral voice. Unlike typically developing children, those at increased genetic risk for autism also failed to show a consistent preference for speech compared to nonspeech, suggesting that the social and communicative deficits are broader than emotion (Blasi et al., 2015). Thus, as we saw when we looked at emotion expression among children at risk of autism, we see the same pattern of com- promised development with respect to attending to vocal signals of emotion.

Postures and Gestures Children’s recognition of emotions from postures and gestures has been less studied than that of facial or vocal cues, but we do know a bit about this from studies of infants watching point light body (PLB) displays of adults in motion, displaying certain emotions (Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004; See Figure 8.9 for an example of the technique). Infants’ responses

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to these PLB clips are captured through event-related brain potential (a measured electrophysi- ological response to a stimulus). Four-month-olds are not able to perceive the difference between fear and happiness on the basis of body posture, but eight-month-olds can make this discrimina- tion (Missana, Atkinson, & Grossmann, 2015). Thus, there is a developmental transition that occurs between four and eight months of age in neural processing of emotional body expressions (Missana, Rajhans, Atkinson, & Grossmann, 2014). Infants as young as six-and-a-half months have been found to discriminate happy from neutral bodily gestures and prefer the happy actions (Zieber, Kangas, Hock, & Bhatt, 2014).

Multimodal Recognition of Emotions Thus, we see that in the first year, babies are using vocalizations, facial expressions, and body postures to discriminate between different emotions within the first year of life. These cross- modal abilities raise an interesting issue about how infants and children combine the different modalities of communication in emotion recognition. In everyday life, we can be exposed to facial, bodily, and vocal anger, or even combinations of emotions as their expressions unfold (e.g., a sibling might speak in a pleading tone of voice, show a puzzled facial expression, and angrily grab a toy). What do we know about how infants and children integrate information from sounds and sights?

Multimodal recognition of emotions is present early in life. Six-month-olds have been shown to be able to match happy and angry bodily expressions to corresponding vocalizations of happiness and anger (Zieber, Kangas, Hock, & Bhatt, 2014). When the modalities of communi- cation are in conflict, as you might imagine, infants have greater trouble in emotion recognition. Rajhans, Jessen, Missana, and Grossmann (2016) presented infants with emotional body expres- sions using point-light displays (fearful and happy) that were followed by matching (congruent) or mismatching (incongruent) facial expressions (see Figure 8.10). Of course, in ordinary life, expressions of fearfulness and happiness are not likely to occur together, but by studying how babies react to incongruent information, we can understand the value of multimodal displays. Using event-related potential, the investigators found that viewing incongruent body and facial information for fearful and happiness reduced the ability of infants to discriminate facial expres- sions of these emotions. This suggests that multiple modalities are used to enhance infants’ abili- ties to discriminate between different types of emotion.

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FIGURE 8.9 Example still photos of (a) full light expression and (b) matching point-light expression of anger ( from Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004).

Recognition of Emotions 215

It may be, however, that multiple modalities enhance emotion recognition when children are very young but that the multimodal advantage diminishes with development. Nelson and Russell (2011) examined three- to five-year-olds’ ability to recognize emotions in a face- only, a voice-only, a posture-only, and a multi-cue (face, body and voice) condition. Children of this age were most successful at recognizing emotions in the facial condition. The multi- cue condition enjoyed an advantage over the voice-only and body posture-only conditions, but not over the face-only condition. Perhaps, then, as children get older, they pick up cues from several sources, but concentrate on the faces of others whose emotions they want to understand.

What we have learned thus far is that infants can discriminate between different emotions. Next we might ask to what extent do they develop an understanding of what these emotions mean? Can they make links between emotional expression and the appraisals, goals, and inten- tions of the expresser? As we reported above, by 12 months of age, infants show the ability to do this for vocal displays of positivity (Wu et al., 2017). Reschke, Walle, and Dukes (2017) provide other evidence that the understanding of the interconnection between emotion displays and a person’s goals does develop over the first 18 months of a child’s life. For instance, Chiarella and Poulin-Dubois, (2013) examined whether infants of 15 and 18 months react differently to an emotionally unjustified versus an emotionally justified event. An unjustified event involved a mismatch between the emotion expression and event (e.g., negative emotion in response to a

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Development of emotions in ChilDhooD216

positive event) or a match between emotion and event (e.g., positive event, positive emotion). The 18-month-olds were more perplexed by the mismatch condition, but this was not evident for the 15-month-olds. This shows that by 18 months, infants are beginning to understand the relationship between a person’s goals and their emotional expressions. This suggests a growing specificity in babies’ relying on the expression of emotion of others to understand the goal states of others.

Brain Mechanisms in Infants’ Recognition of Emotions The amygdala (a brain structure discussed in Chapter 7) is consistently engaged in detecting emotionally significant events relevant to personal concerns and is fully developed in new- borns. It appears to have a role in directing infants’ attention toward faces (see Johnson, 2005). The orbitofrontal cortex also has a role in the recognition of emotions, as seen by its activation in response to happy versus neutral faces in both children and adults (Fox, Wagner, Shrock, Tager-Flusberg, & Nelson, 2013; Goodkind et  al., 2012; Tsuchida & Fellows, 2012). Find- ings of this kind point to certain early developing brain mechanisms for recognition of facial expressions.

Humans have an evolved bias to attend to facial cues. The preparedness to process facial expressions may be specified by early emerging neural circuits, but maturation of these circuits requires actual exposure to human facial expressions (Leppänen & Nelson, 2009). As a result, the context in which the child develops—patterns of communication of caregivers, the pres- ence of trauma or comfort, the norms of the culture—are likely to influence the development of facial recognition. Curtis and Cicchetti (2013) examined facial affect perception in a sample of 15-month-old maltreated and nonmaltreated infants using event-related brain potential (ERP), which captures the magnitude of the brain’s response to an object or event with EEG. Guided by the habituation framework that we discussed above, one would expect infants to show higher ERPs to facial expressions for which they have less familiarity. What Curtis and Cicchetti showed is quite dramatic: Maltreated infants showed greater ERP amplitude to happy expressions, while nonmaltreated infants showed greater amplitude to angry expressions (see Figure 8.11). Other studies have also documented how traumatic events in the social environment (e.g., abuse, mari- tal conflict) do alter our processing of anger expressions (Curtis & Cicchetti, 2011; Pollak & Sinha, 2002; Pollak & Tolley-Schell, 2003). Effects of abuse on emotion processing have been found to extend into adulthood. Van Harmelen et  al. (2012) examined amygdala reactivity in adults who had experienced maltreatment as children. They found enhanced amygdala reactivity to a range of both negative and positive emotion expressions. This suggests hypervigilance of the amygdala toward emotional facial expressions. Thus, infants and children do develop brain cir- cuitry as a means of understanding their own emotional environment. These are issues to which we return in Chapters 11 and 12.

The Negativity Bias The negativity bias, which we discuss in Chapter 6, in which the bad affects us more strongly than the good, develops early in life. The study described earlier by Cheng, Lee, Chen, Wang, and Decety (2012) provides neural evidence that the negativity bias emerges early in the neonatal period. Infants showed a stronger neural response when hearing fearful and angry voices com- pared to happy voices.

From an evolutionary perspective, the negativity bias enables children to learn quickly about threatening situations. Children also show heightened memory for details of negative

Recognition of Emotions 217

compared to positive social actions (Baltazar, Shutts, & Kinzler, 2012). This may help chil- dren navigate the social world and avoid situations in which future threatening events may take place.

Let us come back to the ideas of shared thinking and cooperation so central to the develop- ment of emotion. Think about the basic building blocks of understanding social partners. Within the first moments of life, the infant is discriminating different emotions from the voice. Within the next few months as visual acuity improves, they are also able to do this for facial expressions. By eight months, developing infants are able to understand emotions through posture and ges- ture and to use multimodal information to make even more reliable and fine-grained distinctions between different emotions. For these developing capacities in emotion recognition to shape shared thinking and cooperation, though, the developing child needs to make inferences from emotional expression about internal states and goals. We saw that between 12 and 18 months, babies are starting to reason about the causes of emotion. Their rapidly developing competencies in language have them talking about emotions from 18 months resulting in half of their conver- sations being about the causes of emotion by the time that they are three years old (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982; Jenkins, Turrell, Kogushi, Lollis, & Ross, 2003; Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991). By the age of 4, their theory of mind takes a further leap forward. Thus, by the time that children go to school, many, if not most, have become wonderfully competent social partners, being able to discriminate others’ emotions, read others’ goals, and thereby navigate the ever- changing social interactions that make up human social life. Of course, even though these skills of emotion recognition and understanding the internal states of others are in place for most chil- dren, their utilization at any given moment is unsure. One of the things that this relies on is the development of emotion regulation.

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Development of emotions in ChilDhooD218

Regulation of Emotions The concept of emotion regulation refers to the set of processes that modulate the onset, inten- sity, duration, physiology, and expression of emotional experience (Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2004; Thompson, 2007; Gross, 2015). These processes may be automatic or voluntary. For example, a fearful experience may give rise automatically to physiological changes such as increased heart rate, yet a child may voluntarily avoid making any expression that would indicate fear to others.

People often think of emotion regulation in individual terms: for instance, an individual might worry about how to control their anxiety or struggle to tamp down an urge to laugh in class. But emotion regulation is in many ways interpersonal. In childhood, caregivers are very concerned to modulate the emotions of their children: to soothe them when they are distressed, to encourage

Box Novels and films: “My Oedipus complex”

Although it’s not a novel or a film, we’re putting the short story “My Oedipus complex,” by Frank O’Connor, in as a box because, better than any other piece of fiction we know, it depicts the emotions of a young child. It’s also one of the world’s best short stories.

The story depicts the feelings and thoughts of a five- year-old, Larry, and his relationship with his parents. Larry recounts how his father would appear mysteriously from time to time, like Santa Claus, but mostly he was away dur- ing the war, so Larry has his mother to himself. He would get up in the morning, look from his window, then go to snug- gle in his mother’s bed and tell her his schemes for the day, which they would spend together. One day, father returns, and it’s the end of the war, which the boy and his mother have been praying for. Out of uniform Larry’s father seems altogether less interesting. During the day, Mother is look- ing anxious as Father talks to her. Naturally, Larry doesn’t like his mother looking anxious, so he interrupts.

“’Do be quiet, Larry!’ she said impatiently. “Don’t you hear me talking to Daddy?”

That was the first time I heard those ominous words, ‘talk- ing to Daddy.’”

Larry’s mother gets his father to take the boy for a walk, but Larry finds this man is not good company. At tea-time, “talking to Daddy” begins again, but Larry’s father has an advantage. He reads pieces of the evening newspaper to Larry’s mother.

“I felt this was foul play,” thinks Larry. Next morning when Larry gets into his mother’s bed, she

reprimands him. “Don’t wake Daddy.” Another new devel- opment! He asks why.

“’Because poor Daddy is tired.’ This seemed to me a quite inadequate reason, and I was sickened by the senti- mentality of ‘poor Daddy.’ I never liked that sort of gush; it always struck me as insincere.”

That night Larry’s mother gets the boy to promise not to come into the bed in the morning and wake his father. He promises. But, he can’t keep the promise. Next morning he gets into bed beside his mother. His mother says he can stay if he doesn’t talk.

“But I want to talk,” I wailed. “That has nothing to do with it,’ she said with a firmness

that was new to me … full of spite I gave father a kick.” Father wakes: “’That damn child! Doesn’t he ever

sleep?’” Larry thinks the man looks very wicked, so he gets out of

bed and dashes for the furthest corner, screeching. “Father sat bolt upright in bed. ‘Shut up you little puppy!’ he said in a choking voice. “’Shut up you!’ I bawled, beside myself.” Mother tries to intervene, and his father says: “’He wants

his bottom smacked.’” “All his previous shouting was as nothing to these

obscene words referring to my person. They really made my blood boil.

‘Smack your own!’ I cried hysterically. ‘Smack your own! Shut up! Shut up!’”

Life for Larry only gets worse when a new baby arrives. But there is a resolution in the end. Read this story; it’s wonderful.

Regulation of Emotions 219

them when they are joyful, to prevent them from having angry tantrums, to avoid occasions when fights might break out, and so on.

In Chapter 14, we will discuss emotion regulation in adulthood, and it will be evident that an interpersonal framework continues to be the best one in which to conceptualize emotion regula- tion across the lifespan.

Regulatory Processes A rich literature in developmental psychology has focused on interpersonal factors associated with emotion regulation (see Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). For instance, as James Gross and Ross Thompson (2007) explain, regulation of emotions is often accomplished by means of changing the situation. The child’s parents are usually responsible for managing a child’s emo- tions by selecting play environments, creating predictable schedules, creating opportunities for social interaction, and offering a supportive emotional climate at home. A related process is try- ing to alter situations. A mother may help her child retrieve an out-of-reach toy, and thus, avoid an outburst. Children may prompt modifications by words and expressions. Indeed, when parents respond appropriately to their children’s emotional displays, children can cope with their emo- tions more adaptively (Ispa, Su-Russell, Palermo, & Carlo, 2017).

The growth in children’s language starting from 18 months plays an important role in emotion regulation (Cole, Armstrong, & Pemberton, 2010). The explosion of language that happens over the next few years introduces many new ways in which the developing child can regulate his or her emo- tions: through requests, conversations about emotional distress, and various acts of emotion labeling.

As children mature and experience different opportunities to learn to regulate their emotions, their abilities of executive function improve (Chevalier, 2015; Kharitonova, Martin, Gabrieli, & Sheri- dan, 2013). Executive function is an umbrella term that includes processes such as inhibitory control, working memory, and attentional flexibility, which enable individuals to complete goals and adapt to novel situations. When there are problems with executive functioning, emotional and behavioral problems can be marked (Schoemaker, Mudler, Dekovic, & Matthys, 2013). An early emerging example is managing attention. Rothbart, Ziaie, and O’Boyle (1992) found that children aged from 3 to 6 months pay attention to particular visual locations. Their ability to reorient is associated with less negative emotion and more soothability (see Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner, 2011). Being able to disengage from an emotionally upsetting event by shifting attention elsewhere is an effective way for infants to regulate their social and emotional experience. Executive functioning continues to develop well into adulthood. Children who are on the autism spectrum commonly experience dif- ficulties with executive functioning, which may underlie difficulties in regulating emotions, monitor- ing their behavior and responding appropriately within social settings (Pellicano, 2012).

Another method of regulating emotions is by cognitive change, which refers to altering the way an emotionally charged situation is appraised (Gross & Thompson, 2007). For example, a child may interpret an event as: “Billy pushed me” or interpret it as “Billy bumped into me because the hallway was so crowded.” Changing the meaning changes the emotional impact. A more tolerant reappraisal (Gross, 2002) can be fostered by parents’ explanations of emotional situations (Root & Jenkins, 2005). However, the ability to appraise requires an understanding that events can be interpreted in different ways. This involves both beliefs and the ability to change one’s beliefs. Children’s ability to make reappraisals and mental transformations depends on their cognitive maturation. In investigating the neural underpinning of reappraisal abilities, an fMRI study found a strong increase in cognitive reappraisal ability with age and this was coupled with increases in the activation of the left prefrontal cortex, a region associated with reappraisal abilities in adults (McRae et al., 2012). Samson and colleagues (2015) found that children and adolescents with autism exhibited fewer instances of cognitive reappraisal during an emotion

Development of emotions in ChilDhooD220

reactivity and regulation situation task compared to typically developing children. Children were presented with negative scenarios, asked to imagine themselves in the scenario and then to gener- ate different ways of thinking about it so that it appeared less worrisome. Individuals with autism had greater difficulty generating such cognitive reappraisals. Impairments in language, executive functions, and theory of mind may underlie the difficulties of reappraisal.

Recent research has moved beyond cognitive flexibility to examine flexible control of emo- tional material, referred to as affective flexibility (Malooly, Genet, & Siemer, 2013). This kind of flexibility requires an individual to process the meaning of a situation by shifting between emo- tional and nonemotional aspects of a situation. Early evidence of this skill may be demonstrated in emotion masking. The disappointing gift paradigm was developed to see how children may mask their emotional response in order not to upset a social partner (Cole, 1986). Kromm, Farber and Holodynski (2014) showed that in children between four and eight years of age, this ability improves markedly, with evidence of emotion masking by age 6. Emotion masking can be seen as “prosocial lying,” or lying to protect another person’s feelings. This has been shown to depend on developments in theory of mind understanding (Ding, Wellman, Wang, Fu, & Lee, 2015).

Whereas a young child may only be able to look away from an upsetting event or close their eyes, a school-aged child may be able to think about the consequences of their emotional expression on someone else. A teenager may be able to select and modify the situation, distract themselves, and cognitively reappraise the situation. Using multiple forms of regulation simulta- neously may prove most effective at controlling one’s emotions and engaging in effective social interactions (Chevalier, 2015).

Neurobiological Development of Emotion Regulation In life, the diffuse excitatory processes that underlie arousal become more ordered. This includes changes in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical axis in response to stressful events (Gun- nar & Quevedo, 2007; Apter-Levi et al., 2016), as well as maturational changes in the autonomic nervous system. These result in less marked changes of arousal, which allows other child- and parent-initiated regulatory processes to operate effectively. As mentioned above, one rudimen- tary strategy that infants use to regulate emotional experience is attentional control, which ena- bles them to disengage from emotionally arousing situations (see Posner & Rothbart, 2000). The parasympathetic nervous system—which undergoes rapid development in the first year of life—is particularly important in this regard (Porges, 2003; Feldman, 2015). As we discussed in Chapter 5, activity in the vagus nerve lowers heart rate, and enables, later in adulthood, the focus- ing on others and prosocial behavior. During an emotionally arousing event, elevated vagal tone is involved in successful regulation of negative emotions (Porges, 2003). Differences in vagal tone contribute to differences in emotion regulation in infants (Jones, 2012) and preschoolers (Perry et al., 2013; Perry et al., 2014).

Response inhibition affords children the ability to regulate overt expressions of emotions and tol- erate arousing situations. In the second year of life, language becomes important in moderating emo- tions both through talk with others about the meaning and consequences of emotional experiences and, later in development, through self-directed calming (see Thompson, Lewis, & Calkins, 2008).

It has been shown that there is not much functional connectivity between brain structures dur- ing infancy, but that these connections become stronger by two years of age (Gao et al., 2009). By two years, the default brain network (regions of the brain that show high levels of correlated activity with one another) resembles the adult network, including the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. Whereas brain networks in infants are characterized by local ana- tomical connections, later in development, these networks show longer range connectivity, with separate regions of the brain being able to communicate with one another (Fair et al., 2009). For example, by age 2, the anterior cingulate cortex—which is critical for executive function (a theorized cognitive system that controls and manages other cognitive processes)—shows strong

Regulation of Emotions 221

connectivity to the frontal and parietal areas, and this connectivity continues to increase through- out childhood (Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner, 2011).

By three to five years, development of the executive functioning system further contributes to emotion regulation through psychological processes such as inhibitory control, conscious self- reflection, reappraisal, and self-monitoring (Zelazo & Müller, 2010). A concept called effortful control—the ability to regulate attention and behavior deliberately and voluntarily—develops strongly during the preschool period (Nigg, 2017). Good effortful control is related to less nega- tivity in children’s emotional lives and to better attentional control, processes that are supported by neural development in prefrontal brain regions (Bridgett, Oddi, Laake, Murdock, & Bach- mann, 2013; Rothbart & Rueda, 2005). Both attentional control and effortful control have been found to be strongly heritable, with heritability estimates of over 40 percent (Yamagata et al., 2005). Effortful control can be thought of as the emotional aspect of executive functioning. It is associated with activity of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (MacDonald, 2008) and involves a dif- ferent brain mechanism than another stream of executive functioning that is less concerned with emotions, which is more deliberative and involves the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These brain areas develop progressively from infancy through adolescence into the early twenties (Giedd, 2004; Nie, Li, & Shen, 2013; Lenroot & Giedd, 2006; Nigg 2017; Shaw et al., 2008). We sum- marize the developmental timeline of emotional regulation in Figure 8.12.

Children with autism spectrum disorder have been found to have lower levels of effortful con- trol (the ability to inhibit a dominant response) and are less able to delay gratification independ- ent of intelligence (Faja & Dawson, 2015). These differences may underlie difficulties in social and emotional functioning.

Overall, there appears to be a developmental shift from simple orienting networks early in life to more sophisticated executive networks later in life (see Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner, 2011). Children and adolescents become progressively more capable of using several means that are crucial for the establishment and maintenance of social relationships and regulation of

FIGURE 8.12 Summary timelines for the development of emotion regulation from infancy through mid-childhood. The top line represents approximate temporal onset of particular regulatory processes, and the lower line represents associated neurobiological underpinnings of those processes. Dashed arrows at age 3 to 5 indicate that these processes occur within this time frame, at roughly the same time.

Development of emotions in ChilDhooD222

themselves in the social world (Nigg, 2017). Children with poor regulatory skills experience more psychosocial difficulties, including more aggression (Halligan et  al., 2013), more peer rejection (Kim & Cicchetti, 2010), and lower school readiness (Ursache, Blair, & Raver, 2012). Without an ability to regulate emotions of the interpersonal kind, socioemotional well-being is compromised, an issue that we return to in Chapter 12.

Temperament Although children develop regulatory skills through socialization and cognitive maturation, dispositions also contribute to development. One such set of characteristics is a child’s tem- perament, defined as a genetically based, emotional pattern to the individual’s personality: for instance, to be generally shy, generally cheerful, generally negative, and so on, across situations. Izard (1971) referred to these as affective-cognitive structures. Temperament has been shown to have a neurobiological basis, it is evident early in development, and it shows stability over time (discussed in Chapter 11).

Many conceptual models of children’s temperament have been proposed, and they converge upon important themes. Emotions are always a core feature of temperament, as we show in Table 8.2 (Campos et al., 1983). Both temperament in babies (Campos, Barrett, Lamb, Gold- smith, & Stenberg, 1983) and personality in adulthood (Magai, 2008) can be thought of as affec- tive biases that shape how people tend to feel, how they are likely to construe life events, and how they will usually act in the environment across the lifespan. Aspects of functioning such as sociability, negative and positive affect, activity levels, and impulsivity/constraint are included in all temperament systems. Temperament is certainly moderated by our experience, but funda- mentally, it reflects the individual differences among people that have neurobiological bases: a tendency to feel fearful or a tendency to feel happy while interacting with others. These emotion- based tendencies are most frequently assessed by people who know us well: for children that is most often their parents. Because parents bring their own perspectives (we can even think of these as biases) to how they see their children, investigators have also developed measures based on observational techniques to assess children’s temperaments (Dyson, Olino, Durbin, Goldsmith, & Klein, 2012; Gagne, Van Hulle, Aksan, Essex, & Goldsmith, 2011; Binnoon-Erez, Rodrigues, Tackett, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2018).

How does temperament relate to the age-related changes that we have covered in the rest of the chapter? Temperament refers to the individual differences that characterize people’s emo- tional styles. We can think of it as an underlying pattern of tendencies toward emotion expression, emotion recognition, and emotion regulation. Some children experience fear more readily and show it earlier than others. Some children have a temperament that allows them to change their attentional focus and thus, regulate their emotions more than other children.

One of the features of temperament that has received attention in children’s emotional devel- opment is the tendency to avoid new people, objects, and experiences—called behavioral inhi- bition (Fox, Henderson, Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera, 2005; Clauss, Avery, & Blackford, 2015). This can be assessed in toddlers and preschoolers. A range of behaviors contribute to the con- struct and examples include: children clinging fearfully to their mothers, crying when unfamil- iar people are present, being very slow to approach others, and being shy with peers. Individuals with high levels of inhibition, who tend to avoid novelty, are at risk for anxiety. There is now a well-articulated account of the neurobiology involved in this temperamental pattern and the individual differences in neurobiology that differ for children who are behaviorally inhibited and those that are not. The brain circuitry includes the amygdala, several regions of the prefron- tal cortex, and several regions of the basal ganglia as shown in Figure 8.13. This temperamental style, involving emotional reactivity in novel circumstances and the appraisal biases that we discussed here, is evident during infancy and early childhood, which can influence behavior over the life course.

Regulation of Emotions 223

These biases in temperament are also associated with how children construe the world. Chil- dren with behavioral inhibition are more likely to pay attention to threat-related stimuli (Fox, Henderson, Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera, 2005), and this is a pattern of appraisal that has been noted for other kinds of anxiety too (Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007). When behavioral inhibition is accompanied by a strong appraisal bias that favors threat, it is more persistent across childhood (White et al, 2017). It is interesting to note that some children with behavioral inhibition disattend to threatening stimuli. Remember how earlier in this chapter we talked about how attention shifting is one method that children use to regulate their emotions? Morales and colleagues (2017) demonstrated that behaviorally inhibited children were more likely across tasks to either persistently attend to or persistently avoid threat- related stimuli. Perhaps persistently disattending to threat develops in behaviorally inhibited chil- dren as a means of handling high and discomforting levels of arousal.

Table 8.2 Mapping of dimensions of temperament onto aspects of emotions, for two well-known schemes of temperament: Buss and Plomin’s (1975) and Rothbart’s (1981).

Dimensions of temperament Aspects of emotion into which each dimension maps

Buss & Plomin (1975)

Emotionality Fear, anger, and distress

Activity General arousal of the motor system

Sociability Interest and positive emotions expressed toward people

Impulsivity Time taken to express emotion or activity

Rothbart (1981)

Activity General arousal of the motor system

Smiling and laughter Happiness or pleasure

Fear Fear

Distress to limitations Anger

Soothability Recovery time from negative emotions when soothed

Persistence Duration of interest

Source: adapted from Campos et al. (1983)

Medial prefrontal cortex Automatic regulatory control

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex Motivated regulatory control Basal ganglia

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Novelty, threat, and salience detection

Orbitofrontal cortex Fear reactivity and

avoidance behaviors

FIGURE 8.13 The brain circuitry includes the amygdala, several regions of the prefrontal cortex, and several regions of the basal ganglia. (Source: Copied from Clauss, Avery & Blackford, 2015.)

Development of emotions in ChilDhooD224

Another pattern of early temperament that has consequences for long-term adaptation relates to disinhibition. There are a group of children who boldly approach novelty, who are more likely to be impulsive, inattentive, and aggressive (referred to as externalizers), and this is another aspect of early temperament thought to be important over the life course (Caspi et al., 2003., Hirshfeld-Becker et al., 2007, Zastrow, Martel & Widiger, 2016).

Appraisal biases are also seen in the children with the more disinhibited/externalizing aspect of temperament too. Such children attribute more hostile intent to others and react with higher levels of anger to perceived slights (Hazebroek, Howells & Day, 2001). We return to the way in which these neurobiologically-based patterns of emotionality are associated with life course trajectories in Chapters 11 and 12.

Positivity is associated with its own biases to how the world is construed. Raila, Scholl, and Gruber (2015) looked at how long people looked at positive and neutral stimuli using eye track- ing methods. They found that individuals who showed higher levels of trait happiness paid more attention to positive stimuli. We have shown the stimuli in Figure 8.14 so that you can test your- selves on whether you are drawn to the positive or neutral stimuli!

Biological Contributions to Temperament We started this section by saying that temperament has a neurobiological basis. What evidence do we have for this proposition?

Most of what we know about the biological origins of temperament comes from research on genetics, but there are also prenatal influences on the child’s developing brain that affect the child’s temperament. Thus, influences such as maternal weight gain and obesity, infection, stress,

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Biological Contributions to Temperament 225

and toxicity in utero have been found to be associated with elevations and intensity of children’s negative affect (including anger, sadness and fearfulness), as well as emotion regulatory behav- iors such as inattention and activity (Gartstein & Skinner, 2017). While some prenatal influences directly affect the developing brain, others operate on gene expression or in combination with genes (Gartstein & Skinner, 2017), an issue that we return to in Chapter 12. Thus, a propensity to negative emotionality and inattention is influenced both by a child’s DNA and by nonoptimal exposures in the uterine environment.

Heritability plays a large role in all human traits (Plomin, DeFries, Knopik, Neiderheiser, 2016). By examining differences between monozygotic twins (who share 100% of their genetic information) and dizygotic twins (who share 50% of their genetic information), we get a good overall indication of the extent to which traits are heritable. If monozygotic twins show approxi- mately twice the similarity to one another on a particular trait, than the similarity shown by dizygotic twins, then we know that a substantial amount of that trait is due to genetics. When twins show a high degree of similarity to one another, after similarity due to genetic influence is accounted for, then this is referred to as the “shared” environment (and all the rest of the variation on the child outcome is attributed to the nonshared environment). There have been hundreds of twin studies that have examined the heritability of psychological traits and a statistical technique has been developed that allows for the aggregation across all of these studies to determine on average the extent to which the outcome in question is influenced by genetics, shared or non- shared environments. In a recent meta-analysis that included all the twin studies published in the last 50 years, including 14 million twin pairs, across 39 countries, and covering many psy- chological traits including temperament in children, heritability has been found to play a very significant role in every trait studied (Polderman at al., 2015). In Figure 8.15, we present correla- tions between monozygotic (rMZ in Figure 8.15, for the total sample, Males and Females sepa- rately) and dizygotic twins (rDZ in Figure 8.15) on temperament from the Polderman et al., 2015 meta-analysis. You will see that the temperaments of monozygotic twins are much more similar than the temperaments of dizygotic twins, suggesting substantial heritability. Across many stud- ies, heritability has been found to account for between 30 and 50 percent of the variance in temperament and personality and including traits such as empathy (Knafo & Plomin, 2006) and aggression (Lahey, Van Hulle, Singh, Waldman, & Rathouz, 2011). It is important to keep in mind that this conclusion is based on sibling similarity involving siblings of different degrees of genetic relatedness; the twin design does not involve the measurement of specific gene variants.

There are also studies that involve the direct measurement of gene variants. These are referred to as molecular genetic studies, and they are of three types: candidate gene studies, genome- wide association studies, and polygenic risk studies. In studies of temperament and personality, the variance accounted for by any single gene is usually less than 1 percent. Thus, effects of individual genes are extremely small and replication has proven challenging (Plomin, DeFries, Knopik, & Neiderhiser, 2016; Vinkhuyzen et al., 2012). Candidate gene studies concentrate on

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FIGURE 8.15 Correlations between monozygotic and dizygotic twins on temperament from the Polderman et al., 2015 meta-analysis. The correlation is given for the whole sample, as well as males and females separately.

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specific neurobiological systems in which pathways of influence have been identified. They are still carried out but, arguably, more attention is generated by molecular findings based on sequencing of the whole genome (genome-wide association; polygenic risk). Here we mention a few genetic variants consistently found to be associated with temperament.

One of the most widely studied genes in the area of temperament is the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene. It has been found to be involved in emotional processing, mood regulation, social interaction, and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis regulation (Booij, Tremblay, Szyf, & Ben- kelfat, 2015). The 5-HTT polymorphism has two common alleles, the short and the long. The short allele has been linked to reduced serotonin reuptake. The presence of the short allele has been found to be associated with increased emotional reactivity. A meta-analysis involving 10 studies found that short-allele carriers exhibit increased attentional vigilance toward negatively valenced events (Pergamin-Hight, Bakermans-Kranenburg, van Ijzendoorn, & Bar-Haim, 2012).

The catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene, which is associated with degradation of dopamine, has also been found to be associated with emotion regulation and temperament. Vari- ants (specifically low-active allele, which results in higher concentrations of dopamine) have been associated with seven-month-old children’s brain responsiveness to facial expressions of emotion (Grossman et al.,2011). It was also linked to infant’s recovery from distressing events. In addition, there is evidence that this gene is also implicated in emotion regulation (Barzman, Geise & Lin, 2015).

Oxytocin has been found to be associated with prosocial behavior, altruism, and facial expres- sion recognition. A study by Melchers, Montag, Markett, and Reuter (2013) examined the link between a variant of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and ability to recognize emotions in faces. As hypothesized, a variant of the OXTR gene, the TT-genotype, was associated with greater accuracy in facial recognition. Administration of oxytocin is associated with increased emotion recognition abilities (Van Ijzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2012). Facial emotion recogni- tion abilities are important for accurate perception and response to others’ emotional states and experiences (Skuse et al., 2014). Interestingly, adolescents with autism spectrum disorder who were administered intranasal oxytocin showed improved emotion recognition abilities (Guastella et al., 2010; Domes, Kumbier, Heinrichs, & Herpertz, 2014; see Figure 8.16).

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FIGURE 8.16 Percentage of correct answers of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) for participants under oxytocin or placebo. Oxytocin improved performance in the RMET in comparison with placebo ( from Guastella et al., 2010).

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S U M M A R Y

While some accounts stress how emotions emerge in development as a result of maturation, others emphasize variations in emotions as a function of circumstance, family, and culture. Our emphasis in this chapter, and in this book in general, is the importance of emotions in social interaction. Expression and recognition of emo- tions are discussed in three domains: facial, vocal, and gestural. These expressions are made at first in relation to caregivers. As children develop beyond 18 months, they include emotions that depend on achieving a sense of self, on recognizing emotions of other people, and of being able to make comparisons with these

others. By 18 months old, children are starting to talk about their own and others’ emotions. Regulation of emotions is an important topic in development, as children’s emotions tend to be thought of at first as insistent and unsocialized. Regulation is first man- aged by parents, but within the preschool years, children are able to regulate their emotions in relation to their goals and relation- ships. In a final section, we discussed the genetic contributions to emotional development. Throughout the chapter, key differences in emotional development in children with autism spectrum disor- ders were highlighted.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. Arm restraint is sometimes used by psychologists to provoke anger in young children, and jack-in-the-boxes are used to pro- voke surprise. Why don’t these always have the expected effects?

2. What aspects of emotional functioning develop so that by the time they attend school children can remain, on the whole, fairly even tempered even when things don’t go their way?

3. Given that both genes and environment affect the development of emotions, which do you think has the stronger effect? Inborn genes and temperament? Or the environmental influences of parents, family, and school?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

A developmental psychologist writes about his daughter’s growing capacities in the emotion and social worlds.

Fernyhough, C. (2008). A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of His Daughter’s Developing Mind. Penguin.

On what children understand about emotion and when they understand it.

Harris, P. L. (2008). Children’s understanding of emotion. Handbook of emotions, 3, 320–331.

On the relationship between emotion understanding and social cognition.

Reschke, P. J., Walle, E. A., & Dukes, D. (2017). Interpersonal develop- ment in infancy: The interconnectedness of emotion understanding and social cognition. Child Development Perspectives, 11(3), 178–183.

On the significance of children’s emotions in social interaction:

Judy Dunn (2003). Emotional development in early childhood: A social relationship perspective. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences (pp. 332–346). New York: Oxford University Press.

A review of the processes in temperament that lead to emotion regulation:

Rothbart, M. K., Sheese, B. E., Ruedo, M. R., & Posner, M. I. (2011). Devel- oping mechanisms of self-regulation in early life. Emotion Review, 3(2), 207–213.

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9 Emotions in Social Relationships

To be means to be for another, and through the other, for one- self. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

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FIGURE 9.0 Auguste Renoir, “Dance at Bougival,” 1882–83. This painting was used to illustrate a story, by Lhote, about an artist seeking to persuade a young woman to model for him. In the painting, we see the man thrusting his face eagerly toward the young woman, and grasping her possessively. We also notice from her ring that she is married. Keep- ing her polite social smile, she turns away.

CONTENTS Emotions Within Intimate Relationships

Principles of Sexual Love Emotions in Marriage

Emotions in Friendships Gratitude Emotional Mimicry Social Support

Emotions in Hierarchical Relationships Emotional Displays and the Negotiation of Social Rank Power and Emotion Social Class and Emotion

Emotion and Group Dynamics Group and Collective Emotions Group and Collective Emotion and Between-Group Conflict Infrahumanization Emotional Processes That Improve Group Relations

Emotional Intelligence

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

229Emotions in Social Relationships

After hearing composer Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Tim Page immersed himself in the study of a kind of contemporary music known as minimalism, which burst upon the music scene in the 1960s. Minimalism features repetition and simplicity in composition; often entire songs are based on iterative, slight variations on simple patterns of notes. In conceptualizing this movement in music, Page observed that Reich’s music had achieved the equivalent of imposing a frame upon a moving river—a striking characterization. Today, Tim Page is one of the most important music critics working in the United States and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Tim Page has also lived his life with high functioning autism—a condition characterized by relative difficulties in understanding the thoughts and feelings of other people. We have discussed this condition in the previous chapter on emotional development; here we take the discussion further. People with high functioning autism often reason like other people, their language is largely unaffected by their condition, and they can demonstrate prodigious talents. In the words of Hans Aspergers, the Viennese pediatrician who first characterized the condition: “For success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.”

Where people with high functioning autism struggle is in the realm of emotion. Studies show, for example, that they often struggle to judge emotion, in particular more complex emotions like embarrassment, in facial expressions, or in subtle movements in the eyes (Heerey et al., 2003). They tend to avoid looking into the eyes of others (Madipakkam et al., 2017) and, as a result, have greater difficulty in judging the gaze of other people (Panelis & Kennedy, 2017). When looking at faces or scenes, they orient their gaze to specific features rather than taking in the gist of a face or scene (Wang, Jiang, et al., 2015). They likewise appear to have difficulties in the realm of interoception, which we considered in Chapter 5, and don’t appear to be as guided as other people are by emotion-related bodily sensations in their judgment or behavior (Garfinkel et al., 2016).

Given these emotional variations, people with high functioning autism often struggle in their relationships. As a child, Page did not throw himself into the social activities that connect chil- dren to one another—playdates, soccer teams, friendships on the playground, and for today’s youth, Snapchat and Instagram. Instead, he followed his personal interests in the quiet of soli- tude: he was obsessed with maps of towns in Massachusetts, obituaries, memorizing the 1961 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, and the music of a Scottish comedian named Harry Lauder. In high school, Page publicly declared his contempt for the Beatles in his school newspa- per, a sure sign that he cared more about staying true to his convictions than in fitting in or being popular. Sexual relations were often a mystery for Page. As a teenager, while many boys become romantically interested in young women, Page would avoid making eye contact with them. Later he confessed that as a young adult making love felt like being the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.

In summing up his social life in his book Parallel Play, Page writes: “I am left with the mel- ancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.” The clear implication is that when we struggle to track others’ emotions, or to express our emotions, or to be guided by emotion-related sensations in the body, our relationships are disrupted and more complicated. Tim Page’s life reveals the central theme of this chapter: emotions are vital to our social relationships (Butler, 2015; Tiedens & Leach, 2004; Tibbett & Lench, 2015; van Kleef, Cheshin, Fischer, & Schneider, 2016).

We can think about how emotions shape our social relationships in two different ways (Keltner & Haidt, 1999; Lench et al., 2015). The first is to think about how emotions create specific social relationships. For example, Stephanie Shields has made the point that as new parents navigate the stressful complexities in assuming the role of parent, feelings of sympathy and filial love enable individuals to transition to the role of care-provider (Shields, 1991). As you learned in Chapter 4, emotional expressions help us establish specific relationships: a smile is an invitation to a coop- erative relationship; an angry expression a declaration of conflict or a statement of power; a vocalization of fear prompts everyone to join together in feeling wary and orient to shared peril (e.g., Anderson et  al., 2017; Aubé & Senteni, 1996; Oatley, 2004c). As we also discussed in Chapter 4, emotions can be thought of as scripts for distinctive kinds of relationships; they help

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us establish and maintain relationships of different kinds. William Shakespeare depicted this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If the juice of “a little western flower” (Act 2, Scene 1, line 166) is dropped into the eyes of a sleeping person, on opening their eyes this person falls in love with the one they first see. The script of love, however strange it may seem, is enacted.

The mutual influence of emotions upon social relationships can be thought about in a second way: the relationships that characterize different social contexts shape emotion-related appraisal, experience, expression, and physiology (Roseman, 2013). As you move through the day, you will find yourself shifting from one context to another, and these varying contexts are defined by different relationships—with friends or romantic partners or stern bosses at work or critical or caring parents (Fiske, 1991; Moskowitz, 1994). Within these different relationships, our sense of self shifts, for example, in whether you feel care-free or the burden of duties and ideals placed upon you (Anderson & Chen, 2002). Our sense of attachment, warmth, and power likewise shifts from one relationship to another (Anderson et al., 2012; Moskowitz, 1994). The sight of your new romantic partner might trigger a rush of desire and thoughts of infatuation. Hearing the laughter of a group of friends approaching may trigger feelings of mirth and gratitude. Your boss may trigger feelings of anxiety and modesty or inspiration. Your parents may trigger feelings of guilt, contentedness, or family pride. Different relationships give rise to different patterns of emotional response.

To consider how emotions create specific relationships, and how relationships, in turn, shape our emotional lives, we will rely on a framework that we introduced in Chapter 2. More specially, we will consider what has been learned about emotions in four kinds of social relationships: intimate ties to romantic partners; friendships; hierarchical relationships; and dynamics between groups.

Emotions Within Intimate Relationships In her book, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz details the remarkable changes that the institution of marriage has undergone (Coontz, 2005). Early in its history, marriage was arranged by families to secure economic ties. It often was between cous- ins. Polygamy was common, and monogamy not expected, particularly for men. These kinds of arranged marriages are common in the great dramas of Shakespeare, or what you might see on “Game of Thrones.”

Marriage changed as a result of the shift from an agricultural economy to a market economy and movement of the population from small rural villages to a more mobile existence in urban centers. Most notably, people could choose whom they marry. And starting around 250 years ago, it was increasingly assumed that marriage should be based upon emotion, and not on economics and strategic alliances between families. Marriage should be about love. In the last 100 years, we have seen yet more changes to love-based marriage—the emergence of equal rights within marriages for women and more recently, the increasing acceptance of gay marriage in many countries.

Reasons for marriage arise in our deep evolutionary history: the hyper vulnerability of human offspring call on the care of more than one individual. Thus, Owen Lovejoy (1981) proposed that, long ago, our ancestors gave up the promiscuity that characterizes chimpanzees, who therefore never know who their fathers are, in favor of one woman being with one man. In this way, she gives him exclusive sexual attention (more or less) and he gives his resources to the raising of their offspring. And so arises a linkage of mothers to fathers in enduring bonds (Hrdy, 2001) and the coming of family. In John Bowlby’s (1969) writing about attachment, one finds a theory about how emotions are a core of intimate relationships, from cradle to grave. In this section, we focus on romantic partnerships. From the sparks of initial sexual attraction to the passions

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that enable enduring romantic love, emotions are central to intimate life (Fisher, 1992; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2002; Shaver, 2006).

Principles of Sexual Love The experiences of loving and of being loved give life meaning. Healthy relationships with loved ones—romantic partners, children, and dear friends—are one of the strongest determinants of happiness and robust physical health (Lyubomirsky, 2007).

Love is celebrated in the arts. Here, for instance, is Laura Esquivel in the novel Like Water for Chocolate:

My Grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves . . . the oxygen would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by the intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us . . . Each person has to discover what will set off these explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul.

(Esquivel, 1992, Chapter 6)

Turning from literary narrative to marriage statistics, we encounter an intriguing mystery. On the one hand, almost all of us will eventually have relationships centered upon sexual love; only about 1 percent of adults in the United States and United Kingdom are asexual. Most humans will have sex, form long-term intimate relationships, and at some time live with a romantic part- ner. But here’s the puzzle (or perhaps it’s not a puzzle to you!): sexual love leads us to intimate relationships, but they are so often hard to maintain. For example, while upwards of 80 percent of young people in the United States will get married, only 50 percent or so of those marriages will last. We suggest that different emotions hold the key to this mystery about sexual love.

What emotions bring individuals together into romantic partnerships? John Bowlby’s theo- rizing about attachment points to two candidates: sexual desire and romantic love (Diamond, 2003; Djikic & Oatley, 2004; Gonzaga et al., 2006; Hatfield & Rapson, 2002). Sexual desire is a motivational state defined by sexual interest and ideation that prompts people to seek to engage in sexual behavior (Impett, Muise, & Peragine, 2014). Initial feelings of sexual desire are respon- sive to specific cues of physical attractiveness: beautiful skin, full lips, and warm, glistening eyes; physical signs of youth and strength; facial symmetry (Miller, 2000). Nonverbal signals of elevated rank and power—the open, expansive body posture—also trigger feelings of desire in potential suitors (e.g., Vacharkulksemsuk, et al., 2014). From an evolutionary perspective, these signs of physical beauty and strength are thought to reveal the person to be a physically robust person, one with good genes, so to speak, and a good partner to reproduce with (e.g., Buss, 1992; Miller, 2001). A recent review of dozens of studies of sexual attraction found that physical attrac- tiveness proved to be the strongest basis of initial desire, much stronger than a person’s wealth or earning potential (Eastwick et al., 2014). We are moved emotionally by physical beauty.

We describe our feelings of sexual desire in metaphors: young lovers can feel “knocked off their feet,” “hungry” for each other, “mad” with desire, “swept away” by passion (Lakoff & John- son, 1980). These metaphors speak to the single-mindedness and loss of control characteristic of early sexual desire. Sexual desire is registered in specific patterns of touch, cuddling, and sexual signaling. For example, romantic partners who cuddle, touch, and kiss in the context of sex feel closer and happier (Muise, Giang, & Impett, 2013). They may idealize their loved ones, attribut- ing rare virtues to them that set them apart from others (Murray & Holmes, 1993, 1997).

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One argument from an evolutionary perspective is that sexual desire motivates reproductive behavior. If so, then one would expect women to feel more sexual desire during ovulation, when their sexual behavior is most likely to yield conception. A host of findings support this predic- tion. During ovulation, women report higher levels of desire, they show increased blood flow to the genital region when viewing erotic films, they prefer more erotic art and films, they are more likely to walk with swaying hips, and they are more likely to masturbate (Bullivant et al., 2004; Provost et al., 2008). Around the time of ovulation, women are more likely to initiate sex, have affairs, and be accompanied by their husband. Ovulating pole dancers in bars even earn bigger tips (Miller, 2001; Miller et al., 2007).

Thus far, we have described the nature of sexual desire within the individual. How do such intense emotional experiences give rise to romantic relationships, the complex dynamic involv- ing two separate people, and often a host of rivals and alternatives looming nearby? In a syn- thetic review of decades of research on romantic attraction, Eli Finkel, Jeffry Simpson, and Paul Eastwick identify a core principle of early sexual desire: uniqueness. When our sexual desire is unique to one person, the stage is set for long-term romantic bonds. Consider this illustration that emerged in a speed-dating approach to the empirical study of sexual desire (Finkel & Eastwick, 2008). In this research, much as would happen at a weekend social gathering, a dozen or so young heterosexual women and a dozen or so young heterosexual men arrived at the lab and engaged in a series of two-minute conversations with all the other members of the other sex. After each brief interaction, participants rated their sexual desire and felt chemistry for one another. Attesting to the principle of uniqueness, when one individual felt unique desire and chemistry for another, those feelings were reciprocated by the person (Eastwick, Finkel, Mochon, & Ariely, 2007). By contrast, those speed daters who felt sexual desire for many other people actually evoked little desire or chemistry in others. Uniqueness of sexual desire matters in helping create more endur- ing relationships.

As romantic partners spend more time together, their intense feelings of sexual desire for one another will often give way to the experience of a second emotion—romantic love—defined by feelings of deep intimacy, devotion, and commitment (Acevedo & Aron, 2009). Recall the nonver- bal display of love —its inviting smile and relaxed and open bodily posture and gesture. Patterns of mutual gaze, so typical of love, are thought to activate oxytocin release, involved in feelings of trust and commitment (Gonzaga et al., 2006; Keltner et al., 2014). In experiences of mutual roman- tic love, the couple will feel comfort and security in being close, in knowing each other, in the feeling of their identities coming to merge. As part of increasing intimacy, romantic partners come to include their partner’s perspectives, experiences, and characteristics in their own self-concept (Aron & Aron, 1997; Aron, Aron, & Allen, 1989; Aron & Fraley, 1999). Experiences of romantic love are organized by a second relationship principle: integration, or merging (Finkel et al., 2014). Feelings of love lead partners to merge their interests, goals, daily lives, and identities.

One of the great writers of the Romantic period (whose novels are also romances in the day- to-day sense) was Jane Austen. In an accompanying box, you can see a brief description of her most famous novel Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813. If you read the book or see television series or film versions of the book (see Figure 9.1), you encounter a challenging account of the transition between sexual desire and romantic love: you are asked to consider the idea that you can’t love someone just by projecting your desire onto them, as a kind of hallucination. You can only love by getting to know who the person is, though this knowledge by no means precludes trying to change the person into whom you would like them to be.

Very often, sexual desire and romantic love co-occur, or are intertwined in unfolding experi- ences of romantic partners (see Figure 9.2). But they can be differentiated in systematic ways, revealing them to be distinct emotional states, as Bowlby theorized (e.g., see Diamond, 2003; Panksepp & Biven, 2012). They have distinct patterns of expressive behavior and peripheral and central nervous physiology, as we saw in previous chapters (see also Chojnacki & Walsh, 1990; Panksepp & Biven, 2012; Sternberg, 1997; Whitley, 1993). Turning to the realm of conceptual

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knowledge, people often nominate love as a prototypical emotion and express the belief that sexual desire overlaps only modestly with the content of love (Fehr & Russell, 1984; 1991; Shaver et al., 1987). In one study where participants were asked to exclude emotion terms that did not belong in the category of love few participants excluded the words caring (8%), and

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FIGURE 9.1 Colin Firth in his role as Mr Darcy in the 1995 television series of Pride and Prejudice.

Box Novels and films: Pride and prejudice

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice may still be the West’s best love story. It’s about Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of an affectionate but silly mother and a clever but sardonic father. At a dance she is slighted by the rich, proud, and eligible Mr Darcy. Speaking to a friend he says of Eliza- beth, loudly enough for her to overhear: “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” In conversation with her sister (a few chapters after Darcy’s snub), Elizabeth says: “I could easily forgive his pride if he had not morti- fied mine.” Her love for Darcy has first to surmount this obstacle.

An important premise of any love story is that, to start with, neither of the lovers-to-be knows much about the other. Part of the beauty of Jane Austen’s story is that Eliza- beth’s love for Darcy is not of the kind that is usual in the Western cultural script of falling in love, in which love comes into being in almost complete form with a meeting of the eyes between two strangers across a room. Rather, in this story, love grows only gradually as Elizabeth starts to know Darcy, at exactly the same time as we readers also come to know both him and Elizabeth (see Oatley, 2016b).

Laura Vivanco and Kyra Kramer (2010) have noticed that a recurring theme in love stories is transformation, with Pride and Prejudice being an early example. The theme continues in romantic stories of today, for instance, those marketed by the publisher Harlequin. Although Jane Austen writes of Darcy’s “utmost force of passion,” he is not complete as a person. His pride prevents him from being a fully formed man. The story is about how Elizabeth, with her intelligence and determination, accomplishes his transformation. As she comes to know Darcy, he becomes able to know himself, becomes thereby able to admit his shortcomings, becomes more aware of others and, in the end, becomes able to love. Only when Darcy’s pride is transformed in this way, does Eliz- abeth consent to marry him. At the same time, Elizabeth has to come to terms with and change her own prejudices. Viv- anco and Kramer see this theme of transformation as a ver- sion of the ancient idea of alchemy in which, by means of the philosopher’s stone, an alchemist would transform a base metal into gold. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth becomes the alchemist who transforms the base metal of the imper- fect Darcy into the gold of a man who is able to love her.

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affection (27%), but many participants excluded the words desire (59%), infatuation (82%), and lust (87%), suggesting that in how people think about desire and love, they are often separate (Fehr & Russell, 1991). Those people whom participants say they love overlap only partially with those for whom they say they feel sexual desire (Myers & Berscheid, 1997).

How might sexual desire and romantic love vary across cultures (See Figure 9.2)? Studies yield intriguing differences. For example, studies find that people in collectivist cultures—Rus- sia and Lithuania—fall in love faster than in the United States, often within a couple of weeks (Munck, Koratayev, de Munch, & Khaltourina, 2011). Once married, deep romantic love occurs later in the relationships of the Japanese than between partners in the United States (Ingersoll- Dayton, Campbell, Kurokawa, & Saito, 1996).

Scientists have also documented fairly robust gender differences in sexual desire, likely shaped by culture and evolution (Baumeister, 2001; Impett et al., 2014). First, women and men view the purpose of desire differently: for women, desire is more often about intimacy, and for men, sexual intercourse. Second, women report more varying and lower levels of desire than men. In fact, in one study of 48 nations, men consistently reported higher levels of desire for sex in the absence of commitment and intimacy (Schmitt, 2005). And finally, desire is more fluid for women, in terms of who they feel it for, and what its aims are.

Emotions in Marriage One of the most systematic emotional changes in the trajectory of romantic relationships is the diminishing of sexual desire (Impett et al., 2014). Nationally representative surveys of adults in the United States indicate that married people are having sex with each other 10 times a month in

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FIGURE 9.2 This balcony in Verona Italy is where the courtship between Romeo and Juliet is alleged to have taken place. Today when people visit, they write the name of their loved one on “Juliet’s Wall” nearby, and they leave love letters as well.

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their 30s, five times in their 40s, and two times in their 50s and 60s (Delamater & Sill, 2005). It’s not all dispiriting news though. Studies find that many old couples in their 70s and 80s are feeling intense desire and still have sex. People who remarry later in life often feel youthful surges of intense sexual desire. Within these emotional patterns in intimate relationships, as sexual desire declines, feelings of intimacy and romantic love often rise as relationships progress (Impett et al., 2014).

As partners persist in their relationships, new principles hold the relationship together (Finkel et al., 2014). First, couples can be responsive to one another; be timely and attentive to the emo- tions of their partner. A second principle is resolution; partners can reconcile and collaborate in meeting the stresses and conflicts that become more prominent as lives progress. And finally, the principle of maintenance: partners can find ways to continue to build their affection and com- mitment. Finding how to enact these principles in romantic relationships matters a great deal. Divorce rates in many industrialized nations hover near 50 percent, and marital dissatisfaction is high (Myers, 2000). Conflictual marriages diminish personal well-being and take their toll on children in terms of stress and anxiety and even difficulties at school (Lyubomirsky, 2007).

John Gottman and Robert Levenson were pioneers in documenting how specific emotional processes predict when marriages will fail. In the spirit of the ethological approach we covered in Chapter 1, they turned to naturalistic methods and studied the emotional dynamics of married partners as they engaged in a 15-minute conversation about a conflict in their relationship. For 15 minutes, the couple might have haggled over unsatisfying sex, or the husband’s inability to get better-paying work, or a child’s struggles with drugs. These interactions were then carefully coded in frame-by-frame fashion for several emotional behaviors.

In one study that started in 1983, Gottman and Levenson followed the marriages of 79 couples from Bloomington, Indiana, documenting what they call “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”—toxic emotional behaviors that are most damaging and most likely to predict divorce. First of these kinds of behavior is criticism. Partners who are more critical, who continu- ally express their irritation and frustration by finding fault with their partners, have less satisfying marriages. The next two toxic emotional behaviors concern partners’ tendencies to engage in emotionally open conversations. These two tendencies are defensiveness and stonewalling (the latter being defined as shutting down conversation about stresses and conflicts). When romantic partners counterattack in response to comments made by their partners with defensive comments, dismissive laughs, and sarcasm, they are in trouble. The same is true when they shut down, or stonewall, any open emotional communication about the relationship. It is better to express and share emotion. Finally, a fourth horseman of the apocalypse is contempt—the feeling of superior rejection of the partner expressed in sneers and eye-rolls and disparaging, condescending com- ments (see Figure 9.3). Contempt is a particularly humiliating and toxic behavior to direct at oth- ers and may be the most toxic emotion in romantic relationships and other relationships as well (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016; Roseman et al., 2017). This first influential study of Gottman and Levenson (2000) found that some 93 percent of couples who showed evidence of the four toxic behaviors were divorced 14 years later.

More recent studies have identified several emotional patterns that help romantic partners stay committed and close. One is to share what is good in life with your partner, which Shelly Gable and her colleagues refer to as capitalizing upon the good (Gable, Gonzaga, & Strachman, 2006; Gable, Reis, Impett, & Asher, 2004). When romantic partners share their joys and respond to each other’s good news with engaged enthusiasm, they are more likely to feel committed to one another (Gable et al., 2006). The same is true nonverbally: when partners share affection through cuddling, encouraging touches, holding hands, and kissing, ancient ways of capitalizing upon the good, they report greater commitment and closeness (Muise et al., 2013). Thus, instead of stone- walling or criticizing, it is wiser to express appreciation and encouragement for good things that happen in your partner’s life and in your relationship (e.g., Gordon et al., 2012).

Intimate relations also fare well when partners cultivate humor, amusement, and play. The middle phases of romantic partnerships often involve a great deal of drudgery and stress: paying

Emotions in social RElationships236

bills and doing housework, and should you choose to have children, diaper changing, sibling squabbles, helping children with stomach aches, coping with adolescence and raising teens in a historical period where they feel greater stress than in the past. Not surprisingly, intimate rela- tionships are least satisfied at this stage of the relationship (Myers, 2000).

Amusement, mirth, and play are emotional antidotes to the stresses and quotidian conflicts of intimate relationships. In one sense, they are the alternative to criticism and defensiveness. For example, happier romantic partners often possess many playful nicknames for each other, and more readily playfully tease one another during conflict instead of directly criticizing (Keltner et al, 1998). Humor and laughter during negotiations between romantic partners can de-escalate intense conflicts to more peaceful exchanges (Gottman, 1993). In studies of couples engaged in conversa- tions, couples who share laughter report greater closeness and satisfaction (Kurtz & Algoe, 2015, 2017; see also Randall et al., 2015). In one experiment, spouses who had been married several years who played silly games actually reported significant boosts in their satisfaction (Aron, Nor- man, Aron, McKenna, & Heyman, 2000). Shared laughter and play help couples maintain their satisfaction by increasing positive emotions, reducing stress, and heightening the sense of similar- ity between partners (Kurtz & Algoe, 2017). The moral for a happier intimate life: stay playful.

Another emotional tendency to cultivate is compassionate love: such a sentiment involves a positive regard for the partner, and appreciation of the partner’s foibles and weaknesses, and the sense of sharing a common humanity with the partner. In longitudinal research, partners who reported high levels of compassionate love for one another early in the relationship were less likely to divorce four years later (Neff & Karney, 2009). When partners are linked by mutual feel- ings of caring and commonality, they feel more intimate on a daily basis and enjoy more sex (Le et al., 2018). When individuals make a regular practice of cultivating compassion and kindness, their relationships fare better. Compassion and kindness catalyze romantic love.

Alongside compassionate love, it is also important to forgive. Forgiveness involves a shift in feeling toward someone who has done you harm; it is defined by a shift away from ideas about revenge and avoidance toward a more positive understanding of the humanity of the person (McCullough, 2000; McCullough, Sandage, & Worthington, 1997; Worthington, 1998). Forgive- ness isn’t a mindless glossing over the harm a partner has done; it involves recognizing that to err

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Emotions in Friendships 237

is human. Forgiving someone who has caused harm has been found to reduce blood pressure and anger (Snyder & Heinze, 2005; Witvliet, Ludwig, & Vander Laan, 2001).

Michael McCullough and his colleagues have studied how forgiveness influences the level of satisfaction in romantic partnerships and families (Hoyt, Fincham, McCullough, Maio, & Davila, 2005). They measured three dimensions related to forgiveness: the urge for revenge, the desire to avoid the partner, and a more compassionate view of the partner’s mistake. They found that forgiveness promotes relationship satisfaction. For example, in one 9-week study (Tsang, McCullough, & Fincham, 2006), students who had suffered a recent transgression in a relation- ship reported classic kinds of harm: being cheated on, insulted, rejected, or left out of a social activity. Partners who were earlier to forgive reported greater closeness and commitment to their partner weeks later.

Emotions in Friendships Friendships are often the source of what is most meaningful in life. Important social movements such as the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement have emerged out of friendships. Out of great friendships come world-changing innovations, as when Steve Jobs and David Wozniak invented the computer in a garage in Job’s childhood house in Los Altos California. Out of great friendships often emerges romantic love. In Jane Austen’s novel Emma, Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley are first admiring and at times prickly friends before they fall in love. In friendships, children learn their generation’s morals and values (often to their parents’ chagrin).

Most humans have a tight network of close friends, say six or seven, and a broader network of people they feel supported by (Leary & Baumeister, 1998). From an evolutionary perspective, friendships were initially something of a mystery: why cooperate and sacrifice for non-kin? As an answer to this puzzle, Trivers (1971) proposed that friendships emerged in human evolution to enable the cooperation so essential to reproduction, survival, and the raising of vulnerable off- spring (see also Hrdy, 2001). Building upon this analysis, Randolph Nesse and Phoebe Ellsworth

Box Individual Emotion: Compassion

Is there a master social emotion, an emotion that helps you form stronger social relations of all kinds? The religious his- torian Karen Armstrong thinks so (2006). In her survey of the great traditions of religious and ethical thought that emerged some 2500 years ago—Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and early Greek and Judeo-Christian thought—she argues that compassion emerged as the cardinal emotion of virtue. Compassion is the feeling of concern for another, accompanied by a desire to enhance that person’s welfare (Goetz et al., 2010). All of these great traditions center upon compassion, Armstrong argues, in their sayings and aphorisms and practices that encourage a concern for others, an interest in enhancing the welfare of others, of not causing harm, and a devotion to treat- ing others as you would have them treat you. Compassion

is a pillar of the great ethical traditions. Its conception is similar to sympathy, which Adam Smith (1759) in Theory of Moral Sentiments proposed is the glue that holds society together.

The evidence seen in scientific studies supports this wis- dom of the ages. People feeling compassion see greater common humanity with strangers (Oveis et al., 2010), they punish others less (Condon & DeSteno, 2011), and they are more generous and cooperative and willing to sacrifice for others (Eisenberg et  al., 1989). As you are learning in this chapter, compassion is a vital element of good relationships, from romantic bonds to nations with competing interests. It is perhaps for this reason that many meditation practices and prayers focus on instilling compassion, and it is consid- ered by many the most social emotion.

Emotions in social RElationships238

(1990; 2008) argued that emotions such as love and gratitude help build cooperative, affectionate alliances between friends (see also Smith, McCullough et al., 2017). The studies guided by this theorizing have focused on gratitude, empathy, laughter and mimicry, and the broader emotional benefits of feeling embedded in a network of friends who provide social support.

Gratitude In Chapter  2, we introduced the idea, proposed by Michael Tomasello (2014; 2016), that cooperation emerged in evolution as the means by which we human beings became human. When Adam Smith (1959) surveyed the new industries that were emerging in the British indus- trial revolution, he was struck by the cooperation that emerged within networks of people striving to maximize their own self-interest (see Figure 9.4). He argued that gratitude was the sentiment that held people together in the spirit of common cause. For Adam Smith, gratitude is a “sacred” part of the fabric of human society.

In fleshing out this idea, Michael McCullough, Robert Emmons, and Joanne Tsang (2001) reason that gratitude is a moral emotion, one that provides glue to cooperative social living in three different ways. First, gratitude serves as a barometer; it helps us keep track of which friends are generous and which are not. It is much like the grooming between nonhuman primates; our feelings of gratitude track who is cooperative with us, and who is not.

Second, gratitude motivates altruistic behavior. It produces the generosity, the favors, the expres- sions of appreciation, which are critical to long-term commitments among friends (Algoe, 2012). As an illustration, David DeSteno and his colleagues had participants engage in a study in which, out of the blue, they were helped by a confederate to fix a computer problem (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006; Condon & DeSteno, 2006; Desteno et al., 2010). Being the recipient of generosity led partici- pants to feel gratitude, and in this state they then proved to be more generous in allocating their time and resources to other strangers (see Figure 9.5). Experiences and expressions of gratitude promote prosocial behavior, the very fabric of cooperative social networks (see also Smith et al., 2017).

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FIGURE 9.4 Although Adam Smith is known for his enduring analysis of self-interest, trade, and capital, in his book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” he lays out how emotions are the source of moral judgment, a thesis we take up in next chapter. For Smith, gratitude may be the most important moral emotion and binder of social relations.

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Finally, McCullough and Emmons posit that the expression of gratitude, either verbally or nonverbally, acts as a reward; it reinforces cooperative behavior. The gifts that we give gratefully, the simple statements of “thank you,” the more elaborate ways in which we appreciate others, all serve to reward their generosity and increase the chances of further cooperative behavior. One might think of the kind of touching of another person to express gratitude (see Chapter 4) as inherently rewarding in this fashion, and a way to increase cooperative behavior among non- kin. In one relevant study, participants helped an experimenter edit a letter online (Grant & Gino, 2010). In the gratitude condition, participants were thanked via e-mail. In the control condition, participants received a polite message of equal length, but without a note of thanks. When asked if they would help the experimenter edit a second letter, those who were thanked responded affirmatively 66 percent of the time compared to 32 percent in the control condition.

Given these benefits of gratitude, one would expect the experience and expression of gratitude to benefit friendships, and other relationships as well. In keeping with this claim, Sara Algoe and her colleagues have documented that verbal expressions of gratitude predict increased closeness in the friendships that form in groups over time (Algoe, Haidt, & Gable, 2008). More generally, Alex Wood and colleagues find that a more general grateful orientation predicts various processes that are vital to healthy friendships, including increased helping, trust, praise, forgiveness, and a positive view of others (Wood et al., 2010). Good friendships are rooted in the experience and expression of gratitude.

Emotional Mimicry Take a look at any social gathering, and you’ll discover interesting forms of mirroring, or mim- icry (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). People imitate each other’s facial expressions, postural movements, tones of voice, and styles of gait. In experiments, participants will unconsciously imi- tate smiles presented in photos so fast they do not know what they have seen (Dimberg & Ohman, 1996). We are especially likely to imitate the positive emotions of others (Hess & Fischer, 2014). Simply hearing another person laugh can trigger laughter (Provine, 1992). If a friend blushes in an embarrassing situation, our cheeks will redden too (Shearn, Bergman, Hill, Abel, & Hinds, 1992).

Emotional mimicry is a central ingredient of friendship, because it heightens feelings of simi- larity, so central to the formation of friendships. We feel closer to other people who share our atti- tudes, our preferences, our beliefs (Montoya et al., 2017). Our interactions with similar others are often more gratifying, and they are more likely to develop into enduring friendships. Emotional mimicry is a basic way in which friends build common ground and become closer.

FIGURE 9.5 When feeling gratitude, people will give more of their time both to someone who’s helped them (benefactor) and to a stranger ( from Condon & DeSteno, 2006).

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Consider laughter. As we noted in Chapter 4, Jo-Anne Bachorowski has analyzed the acous- tic profiles—the rhythm, pitch, and variability—of different laughs (Bachorowski & Owren, 2001). In a study of friendships, within milliseconds of participating in amusing tasks, the laughs of friends but not strangers began to mimic each other (Smoski & Bachorowski, 2003). The implication is that friends quickly imitate one another’s signs of amusement and thereby enjoy the lighthearted pleasure of humor and play.

Does emotional mimicry actually increase people’s liking for potential friends? People engage in all sorts of rituals to increase their mimicry—from dance to clapping to marching in unison. The end result is likely to be greater friendship and cooperation among those who might other- wise become adversaries. In an ingenious test of this hypothesis, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno (2011) had participants and confederates sit across from one another and tap their finger to patterns of tones they heard over the headphone. The participant and confederate either lis- tened to the same patterns of tones, and therefore mimicked one another in their synchronous tap- ping, or they listened to different patterns of tones, and therefore tapped their fingers at different times. Participants whose tapping was mimicked by the confederate looked upon this confederate as more like a friend: they felt more similar to the confederate, had higher levels of compassion, and were more likely to help that person complete a long and uninteresting task later in the study. Physical mimicry is a basis of increased closeness among potential friends.

Complementing this experimental work, Cameron Anderson and his colleagues have found that emotional mimicry builds close friendships (Anderson, Keltner, & John, 2003). In one study, new roommates came to the laboratory in the fall and spring and at each visit reported their emotional reactions to different evocative stimuli, such as humorous or disturbing film clips. As a demonstration of the tendency for friends to mimic one another, the roommates’ emotions became increasingly similar (compared to two randomly selected individuals) over the course of the year. This emotional mimicry, furthermore, predicted increased closeness in friendships.

Social Support Friendships are built up through our human capacity to cooperate, based on emotions such as friendly warmth, happiness, gratitude, mimicry and, laughter. Once established, they are an essen- tial part of our sense that we are supported within social networks of friends and acquaintances. In Table 9.1, we present a widely used measure of social support, which captures this sense of being socially connected to others. As evident in this measure, friends give the individual a sense that there are people to turn to in times of need, people with whom to share complex emotions.

Strong social support reduces feelings of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty during challeng- ing times. People with high social support show lower baseline levels of cortisol, suggesting that having many good friends calms the hypothalamic–pituitary-adrenal axis (Kiecolt-Glaser & Glaser, 1999). Shelley Taylor and her colleagues have found that social support reduces the cortisol response to one of the most powerful triggers of anxiety: giving a public speech (Taylor et al., 2008). Having friends present in stressful contexts likewise reduces stress-related physiol- ogy. In one illustrative study, women had to perform challenging tasks either in the presence of a friend or alone. Those with a friend showed less stress-related cardiovascular responding to the challenging tasks (Kamarack, Manuch, & Jennings, 1990). Hearing the supportive comments of friends can activate dopamine rich areas of the brain, such as the ventral striatum (Inagaki & Eisenberger, 2013). Other studies find that if you are in networks of good friends, as assessed with scales like that presented in Table 9.1, you benefit in many ways. In one study in Alameda County, California, people who had fewer meaningful connections to others were 1.9 to 3.1 times more likely to have died nine years later (Berkman & Syme, 1979).

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Emotions in Hierarchical Relationships In 1938 and with fascism on the rise in Europe, the philosopher Bertrand Russell offered the following observation about power:

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense that Energy is the fundamental concept in physics . . . The laws of social dynamics are laws which can only be stated in terms of power (p. 10)

For Russell, power—the capacity to influence others—is the basic medium in which we relate to each other. Power shapes the moment-by-moment interactions between children and parents, older and younger siblings, school children on the playground, friends, colleagues at work, and romantic partners (e.g., Guinote & Chen, 2017; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003; Keltner, 2016). The implication of Russell’s quote is that power influences our emotional lives in funda- mental ways.

How so? Within the field of emotion, two animating ideas have emerged as answers to this question (e.g., Shields, 2005). A first is that our experience and expression of emotion enable us to negotiate our rank, or status, or relative power vis-à-vis others, within social hierarchies. As one example, recall Abu-Lughod’s analysis of “Hasham” in the Bedouin community she lived with and studied: the experience and expression of this mixture of embarrassment, modesty, and shyness situate women in subordinate roles vis-à-vis men (Abu-Lughod, 1986). Within this per- spective, our emotional experience and expression help us assume power-related roles in social structures, roles as parent, manager, or woman.

A second idea in effect reverses the causal order of the previous formulation and is this: power-related dynamics within social hierarchies influence emotion-related appraisal, experi- ence, expression, and physiology (Cowen & Keltner, 2017; Moors, Ellsworth, Scherer, & Frijda, 2013; Roseman, 2013). Here the thinking is that the power we feel in a particular context shapes how we appraise events, which in turn gives rise to power-related patterns of emotional response. Let’s now look at more specific empirical studies that bear upon these ideas.

Table 9.1 Measure of social support

1. There is a special person who is around when I am in need.

2. There is a special person with whom I can share my joys and sorrows.

3. My family really tries to help me.

4. I get the emotional help and support I need from my family.

5. I have a special person who is a real source of comfort for me.

6. My friends really try to help me.

7. I can count on my friends when things go wrong.

8. I can talk about my problems with my family.

9. I have friends with whom I can share my joys and sorrows.

10. There is a special person in my life who cares about my feelings.

11. My family is willing to help me make decisions.

12. I can talk about my problems with my friends.

Source: From Zimet, Dalhem, Zimet, & Farley (1988).

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Emotional Displays and the Negotiation of Social Rank The desire to enjoy greater power and status, or what we will call rank within a hierarchy, is a universal motive (Anderson et al., 2015). So deep is this motive to enjoy influence, esteem, and what William James called our deepest craving—to be appreciated—that one hormone, testos- terone, when combined with low levels of cortisol, motivates power-enhancing behavior (Mehta & Prasad, 2015). In his work, Pranj Mehta and his colleagues have found that high levels of tes- tosterone combined with low levels of cortisol drive status-seeking behavior such as risky action, assertive leadership, a lack of empathy for others, and even aggression, which can lead to the acquisition of power at the expense of others (Mehta & Prasad, 2015). For those lucky enough to enjoy greater rank, the benefits are many, and include: greater physical health, the reduced likeli- hood of depression and anxiety, increased opportunities for reproduction, and greater physical and psychological health for offspring (e.g., Gilbert, 2016; Keltner, 2016).

It should not surprise, then, that people are continually jockeying to rise in their rank within social hierarchies. Negotiations about social rank—status conflicts—can be costly and even deadly affairs. In many species, from chimpanzees to Narwals out at sea, combatants in status conflicts can incur enormous physical costs. The same is true in humans. For example, in his fieldwork with the Yanomamö, a group who live in the forests of southern Venezuela and north- ern Brazil, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon observed how young men fought in duels, where adversaries would take turns striking each other over the head, to assess their relative toughness, and negotiate their rank within social hierarchies (Chagnon, 1968). Chris Oveis and Joey Cheng and their colleagues have recently found that people signal their social rank with more subtle vocal behavior, such as laughter (Cheng et al., 2016; Oveis et al., 2015).

Given the costs of status contests, many nonhuman species rely on nonverbal displays to negotiate their rank within hierarchies. Apes pound their chests, frogs croak, stags roar for hours, chimps flash their fangs, and deer lock up in their horns. Humans, too, negotiate their places in hierarchies, through the experience and expression of certain emotions.

In his Social Rank Theory of emotion, Paul Gilbert argues that power (or powerlessness) is layered into our experience and expression of certain emotions (e.g., Gilbert, 2005, 2016). Gilbert’s theorizing is rooted in evolutionary claims about how human emotions such as shame resemble in their outward expression, the submissive tendencies of nonhuman primates; in both, one sees patterned behaviors including gaze aversion, constricted posture, and head movements down (Harker & Keltner, 1998). The implication is that certain emotions—shame, embarrass- ment, and pride in particular—are related to feelings of rank. Relevant empirical evidence does indeed find that our experience of select emotions tracks our rank within hierarchies. For exam- ple, in one study, Gilbert found that UK college students’ and adults’ self-reports of the experi- ence of shame and social anxiety (the fear of being evaluated negatively by others) correlated highly with the sense that one is less powerful, or inferior, to others (e.g., Gilbert et al., 2007; see also Öhman, 1986).

Pride, by contrast, is the quintessential emotion of elevated rank, as Jessica Tracy (2016) argues. In the study we just described, individuals’ feelings of pride correlated highly with the sense of elevated rank vis-à-vis others (Gilbert, 2000). More recent work finds that across cul- tures pride is elicited by actions that are socially valued and associated with elevated power. On this, Daniel Sznycer and his colleagues presented 25 scenarios to participants in 16 countries, from the Netherlands to the Philippines to India and Japan (Sznycer et al., 2016). The scenarios included: being judged trustworthy by others, being able to support children, being educated, winning a marathon, and taking on a bully—all actions what would lead to the esteem of others and elevated rank. In each of the 16 countries, one group of participants rated how socially valued the action in the scenario is, and another group rated how much pride they personally would feel in each scenario. The critical finding was that across cultures there was strong agreement in what

Emotions in Hierarchical Relationships 243

actions would be socially valued and what actions are evocative of the experience of pride. It would seem to be a human universal that the experience of pride occurs when we do things that are valued by others and worthy of elevated rank.

Other emotions drive rank behaviors that enable individuals to negotiate their position and that of others within social hierarchies. One clear example is envy. Envy is the feeling of pain that is associated with wanting what someone in the group has (Cherish & Larson, 2017; van de Ven, 2017). Jealousy, a close relative, is fearing the loss of something of value—in particular a romantic partner—to a rival. Feelings of envy triggered by thoughts of the success of others lead to activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain, as you learned in Chapter 7, that is involved in feelings of social rejection (Takehashi et al., 2009). This is the neural underpin- ning of the motivating pain of envy.

Niels van de Ven has further distinguished between two kinds of envy that produce different patterns of rank-related behavior. A first, malicious envy, arises when others within a social group have something of value but obtained it in an undeserved fashion; it motivates us to act in ways that undermine the individual we envy (van de Ven, 2017). Should a work colleague be promoted before you because his father is the boss, you would likely feel malicious envy, and do things to undermine that individual’s position in the organization. Benign envy, by contrast, is felt toward individuals who rise in the ranks through their own hard work, and motivates the individual to work harder at tasks and pursue self-improvement that will lead to rises in status (van de Ven, 2016). Our fear of others’ envy also motivates us to act in ways that will preserve our high stand- ing in social groups. For example, when we enjoy elevated rank, but fear others’ malicious envy, studies show that we will engage in more prosocial behaviors toward others, offering helpful advice and even sacrificing, to preserve our rank (van de Ven, Zeelenberg, & Pieters, 2010). When we respond to our own successes and elevated rank with arrogant, hubristic pride, we trig- ger more malicious envy in others (Lange & Crucius, 2015). Envy motivates actions that enable individuals to negotiate their positions within social hierarchies.

If experiences of certain emotions, such as shame, pride, and envy, motivate actions that sit- uate the individual in positions within social hierarchies, our expression of certain emotions signals our rank to others (e.g., Gilbert, 2000). Our displays of shame—the head droop, gaze aversion, and constricted posture—signal submissive rank (Harker & Keltner, 1998). By contrast, Jessica Tracy and her colleagues have found that displays of pride—the expanded chest and head tilt back—signal elevated power within social hierarchies in different cultures (Tracy & Robins, 2004). Quite remarkably, when we convey our elevated rank through nonverbal displays of pride, people believe we are more powerful, and are more likely to follow our actions (Martens & Tracy, 2013; Williams & De Steno, 2009).

Expressions of anger, as well, convey power, and elevated rank (Knutson, 1996; Tiedens, 2000; Tiedens, Ellsworth, & Mesquita, 2000). When political and business leaders express anger in certain situations, rather than other emotions, people attribute greater power to them (Tiedens, 2001). In our experience and expression of emotions such as envy, pride, anger, and embarrass- ment, we find our place within social hierarchies.

Social rituals are sequenced patterns of actions involving gestures, words, and ceremonial acts, which occur in designated or sequestered locations and that allow us to express specific emotions. We grieve at funerals, express joy at weddings, find pride and allegiance in group initiation rituals, express our rage in mosh pits, and navigate the passions of young adulthood at Quinceañeras, Bar Mitzvahs, and graduations.

Many rituals center upon the expression of emotions that solidify group members’ rank within social hierarchies. Consider food sharing rituals observed in most hunter-gatherer societies (Weissner & Schiefenhövel, 1996). For example, in the highlands of New Guinea neighboring tribes gather each year in celebration and ritualistically give away food they have cultivated— piles of yams, pig carcasses, and arrays of coconuts. In these generous actions, the more an

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individual gives away, the greater the gratitude and admiration the people express toward that person, and the higher the rank that person will enjoy.

More informal social rituals—sequenced patterns of interactions—fill our daily lives, and also allow us to express emotions that enable the negotiation of social rank. One such ritualized social interaction is teasing, a common means by which people playfully, and at times destructively, use emotion to negotiate social status. Teasing involves a playful provocation in which we most typi- cally, with words, comment on another individual’s counter-normative behavior (Keltner et al., 2001). We tease for many reasons, playfully to express affection, sexual interest, criticism, and to negotiate rank within social hierarchies. For example, in one study, US fraternity members teased each other by making up nicknames and embarrassing stories about each other in foursomes comprised of two low- and two high-power members (Keltner et  al., 1998). The individual’s power was defined according to his position in the fraternity. As you can see in Table 9.2, high- power members tended to display smiles of pleasure, anger, and contempt, emotions associated with high power. In contrast, the low-power members were more likely to show submissive emo- tions such as fear and pain (see also Öhman, 1986). In their subtle emotional displays embedded within their banter and teasing, the group members were signaling their elevated or lower rank relative to one another.

Power and Emotion Thus far, we have seen how through our emotional experience and expression, we navigate our rank within social hierarchies. Let’s now ask how the power we experience within a social con- text influences our emotional tendencies. If Bertrand Russell is right, and power imbues social interactions of all kinds, then the study of power’s shaping of emotion should reveal a great deal about our emotional lives.

We know from studies of humans and nonhumans alike that individuals who occupy positions of lower rank within a hierarchy face greater threats of most kinds. As a result, they tend to be attuned to threat, on guard, and vigilant to the actions of others (de Waal, 1996; Keltner, Gruen- feld, & Anderson, 2003). Individuals who enjoy elevated power, by contrast, enjoy greater access to resources and freedom and are less dependent upon others. These power-related differences in appraising social contexts should have profound effects upon the emotional lives of individuals.

Table 9.2 In groups of four, high-power (HP) and low-power (LP) fraternity members teased one another. During these interactions, high-power individuals were more likely to smile with delight and to show facial displays of anger and contempt, especially when being challenged by a low-power member. Low-power fraternity members, in contrast, were more likely to show displays of fear and pain.

High power (HP) Low power (LP)

Teasing LP Teased by LP Teasing HP Teased by HP

Duchenne smiles 83.3 95.8 56.5 95.8

Facial anger 8.3 25.0 0.0 0.0

Facial contempt 4.2 16.7 0.0 0.0

Facial fear 0.0 0.0 16.7 8.3

Facial pain 4.2 4.2 12.3 25.0

Note: Duchenne smiles involve the action of the zygomatic major muscle, which pulls the lip corners up, and the orbicularis oculi muscle surrounding the eye, and are closely tied to the experience of positive emotion.

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In keeping with this analysis, power influences the emotions people feel moment-by-moment. Because power is associated with increased rewards and freedoms, those who enjoy positions of elevated power tend to experience greater positive emotion, elevated enthusiasm, joy, and excitement, in different situations than low-power people (Anderson & Berdahl, 2003; Hecht & LaFrance, 1998). In interactions with friends and strangers, for example, it is the person who feels more powerful who tends to report higher levels of positive emotion (Gonzaga, Ward, & Keltner, 2008; Langner & Keltner, 2008). Not surprisingly, people who feel that they enjoy power and influence tend to report greater well-being (Anderson, John, & Keltner, 2012). It isn’t really lonely at the top: it’s quite enjoyable.

Continually appraising the environment in terms of threats, people feeling less powerful, by contrast, are more likely to experience negative emotions such as sadness, shame, guilt, and anxi- ety (Hecht, Inderbitzen, & Bukowski, 1998; Tiedens et al., 2000). They show higher baseline levels of the stress hormone cortisol (e.g., Kraus et al., 2012). They are more vulnerable to endur- ing anxiety and depression.

Power also influences how individuals respond to the emotions of others, often in ways that are in keeping with Lord Acton’s well-traveled phrase that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In general, people feeling elevated power are worse judges of other people’s emotions (Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, & Gruenfeld, 2006; Galinsky et al., 2016). When power is illegitimately attained, though, and high-power individuals feel a sense of uncertainty about their rank, they prove to be more accurate in judging subordinates’ anger, likely looking for signs that they may be seeking to take their power (Stamkou, van Kleef, Fischer, & Kret, 2016).

Given these empathy deficits, it should not surprise that high-power individuals are less responsive to the emotions of people around them, a theme that Gerben van Kleef has docu- mented in different ways (van Kleef, De Dreu, & Manstead, 2006). In one notable study, high- power individuals responded with less compassion than people feeling less power when listening to another person describe an experience of suffering (van Kleef et al., 2008). In another study, pairs of strangers told stories about what inspired them in life, and reported on their feelings of interest and inspiration (van Kleef et al., 2015). Low-power individuals reported greater inspira- tion in listening to the stranger recount what had inspired them. High-power people, showing a dash of narcissism, felt more inspired by their own stories of inspiration. In keeping with these findings, friends who feel less powerful vis-à-vis other friends are more likely to mimic their emotions (Anderson et al., 2003).

These basic influences of power upon emotion—the excitement and enthusiasm felt by high- power individuals, and their accompanying problems in astutely discerning how others feel—can give rise to social problems. One social problem relevant to these findings is sexual harassment, when powerful individuals, most typically men, advance upon low-power individuals sexually, or make unwanted sexual overtures or comments that create a hostile climate. What psychologists have documented is that high-power men tend to feel greater excitement and low-power women greater anxiety, but high-power men erroneously assume that women feel the excitement they themselves feel, ignoring their signs of anxiety (Gonzaga et al., 2008; Kuntsman & Maner, 2011).

Social Class and Emotion In what many believe to be an apocryphal exchange, the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald observed to Ernest Hemingway that, “The rich are different from you and me.” Hemingway’s response: “Yes, they have more money.” The lives of the rich and poor are depicted in literature, and stereotypes abound about how our emotional lives are shaped in immutable ways by our status in society. We colloquially speak of life being nasty, short, and brutish in the bottom rungs of society, the despair of the poor, and the blasé lives of the well-to-do. Scientific study reveals a much more complex and nuanced influence of class upon emotion.

Emotions in social RElationships246

Intuitively, we think of our own social class and that of other people in terms of categories such as rich and poor, or working class and bourgeoisie, or the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Social scientists define social class in terms of the combination of wealth, education, and pres- tige of work that the individual enjoys within a particular society (Adler et  al., 1994; Kraus et al., 2012).

How might your social class influence your emotional life? One answer comes from theoriz- ing about how upper- and lower-class individuals appraise their environments differently as a function of possessing different resources (e.g., income) and inhabiting quite different social and physical environments (e.g., Piff, Kraus, & Keltner, 2018). The increased material resources that upper-class individuals enjoy grant them greater autonomy and reduced exposure to social and environmental threat, which gives rise to an internal, self-oriented focus. This is evident, for example, in the how upper-class individuals show greater attention to personal goals, more self- interested behavior, and increased independence from others. By contrast, lower-class individu- als are exposed to more threats to their well-being (e.g., increased crime, poorly funded schools), and they possess fewer resources to cope with these threats. As a result, lower-class individuals develop an external, other-oriented focus––greater vigilance to the social context and interde- pendence with others, as demonstrated, for example, by more affiliative and prosocial behavior (Kraus et al., 2012; Piff et al., 2010, 2018).

Given this analysis, it should not surprise that a number of studies find that as one rises in the class ladder, one is likely to experience more general happiness. For example, surveys of large samples of individuals from different countries find that upper-class individuals tend to report greater overall happiness with their life (Diener et al., 2010; Kahneman & Deaton, 2010). Hailing from an upper-class background does not guarantee reports of greater positive emotion, though (e.g., Lucas et al., 2015). In some studies, upper-class individuals report more happiness in the present moment or from the past day, and in other studies this influence of class upon positive emotion is not observed.

One solution to this puzzle is to look at more distinct positive emotions. Toward this end, Paul Piff and Jake Moskowitz gathered participants’ reports of their regular experiences of different positive emotions in a nationally representative sample in the United States (Piff & Moskowitz, 2018). Upper-class individuals reported feeling higher levels of more self-focused emotions, most notably pride and contentment. Lower-class individuals, by contrast, reported higher levels of other-focused emotions that bind individuals into collaborative relationships—love, awe, and compassion.

Turning to the emotional lives of lower-class individuals, given that lower-class individuals live in more uncertain, resource-scarce, and threatening environments, it should not surprise that they experience higher levels of anxiety. For example, in studies of children and adults, lower- class people tend to report greater anxiety, to respond with increased heart rate and blood pres- sure when reading ambiguous, social threatening scenarios, and they show diminished reduction in daily cortisol levels over the course of the day, relative to their upper-class counterparts (e.g., Chen & Mathews, 2001; Hajat et al., 2010). In more recent work by Neha John-Anderson, Edith Chen, Greg Miller and their colleagues, it has consistently been found that starting as early as the age of 5, lower-class individuals show elevated levels of the proinflammatory bio marker IL-6, which you will recall indicates elevated activation in the cytokine system and is associ- ated with shame, social threat, and anxiety (Miller & Chen, 2009; Neha-Anderson, et al., 2017). Regrettably, occupying a lower-class position in society is accompanied by more frequent and intense experiences of threat, anxiety, and stress-related physiology and elevated inflammation response. As we will see in Chapter 13, an accompaniment of this is that countries which have steep hierarchies and great disparities of income—the United States is an example—are also those with the highest rates of emotional disorder, poorer physical health, higher rates of crime, more distrust, and many other ills (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). For most of us, we’re better off

Emotion and Group Dynamics 247

in terms of quality of life—with the same money and income—if we live in a more equal rather than a less equal society.

Another focus in the literature on social class and emotion is how class influences the indi- vidual’s emotional responses to other people. Vigilant to the emotions of others, lower-class people should prove to be better judges of others’ emotions, much as we saw in the tendencies of low-power individuals. This hypothesis has received support in several studies. For example, people from lower-class backgrounds, or individuals experimentally prompted to think of how they are less well off than others, proved to be better judges of emotion from photographs of facial expressions (Kraus, Côté, & Keltner, 2010). Lower-class people tend to be better judges than upper-class people of their own friends’ negative emotions (Kraus et al., 2011).

As with power, these class-related differences give rise to the tendency for lower-class people, as compared with upper-class individuals, to respond to others’ emotions empathically. In a study of friendship, Michael Kraus and his colleagues found that over the course of several interactions, the emotions of the lower-class friend came to resemble those of the upper-class friend, but this pattern of empathic response was not observed in how the upper-class friend responded to the emo- tions of the lower-class friend (Kraus et al., 2011). Lower-class people also respond with greater compassion in terms of self-report and autonomic physiology (heart rate deceleration), to the suf- fering of others (Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, & Keltner, 2012). The emotional lives of the rich and poor do differ, in many different ways, from differences in positive emotion to empathetic tendencies.

Emotion and Group Dynamics On the evening of April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda, a Hutu, was shot down near Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The incident would fuel anti-Tutsi sentiment among the majority Hutus. Shortly thereafter, in newspapers and on local radio stations, rumors were spread about the disgusting habits of the Tutsis, whom they called cockroaches and insects. Crowds of Hutus began congregating in the streets, dancing, chanting, and calling for the death of Tutsi living in the country. In 100 days of genocidal rage that followed, one group of Hutus would massacre approximately 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The study of this alarming event, and so many others in history, reveals how much of our emotional life is attached to the groups we belong to, and how so often what is disturbing about human groups and what is inspiring has to do with emotion (van Kleef & Fischer, 2016). One of the first social scientists to make sense of our group-based sentiments was Emile Durkheim (1972). He, like other sociologists who followed him (Collins, 2004), argued that much of our sense of collective identity is found in our experience of collective emotions—“collective effer- vescence” in Durkheim’s phrasing—in which our shared emotional experiences, in particular during rituals oriented toward symbols and ideas associated with the group, lead to greater soli- darity and cohesiveness in the group.

Grounded in these early arguments, emotion scientists differentiate between two classes of emotions that are part of collective life. Group-based emotions are emotions we feel that are related to actions of the groups that matter to us and are part of our group identity (Doojse et al., 1998; Halperin et al., 2016; van Kleef & Fischer, 2016). Individuals will feel pride when their country’s football team wins the world cup, joy at a political party’s election victory, and guilt and shame at the moral transgressions of their country or group (Gavin, 2016). Guided by this notion, political scientists have recently shown how group-based anxiety—for example, that felt by working class Whites in the United States—drives political attitudes toward issues of immi- gration, taxation, and government policy (Albertson & Gardarian, 2015).

A second kind of emotion related to our group life is collective emotions, emotional experi- ences in group contexts. Whereas group-based emotions can be felt alone by the individual,

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collective emotions are the emotions we feel when around other group members; Alone while listening to your favorite musical artist you might feel joy; in a group at a concert appreciat- ing the same music the emotion transforms, and you collectively feel a different kind of joy, or perhaps what you might call ecstasy. In silent contemplation in meditation or prayer, you might feel a quiet contentment; meditating together with people, the emotion again transforms into a collective emotion, perhaps best described as collective joy, or ecstasy. Individual emo- tions become collective emotions through emotion-related contagion, our capacity to mimic the behavior nearby, and a cognitive process by which we infer that there is something that unites the people present – a “we-ness”— that is part of the emotion. Guided by this distinction between group-based and collective emotion, let’s look at how emotions are integral to our group identity and social life.

Group and Collective Emotions A central notion in the analysis of group-based emotions is that they are felt during rituals and strengthen group solidarity. One emotion common to many collective rituals—religious ceremonies, doing the wave at a sporting event, singing in unison at a concert— is awe (see

Box Novels and films: Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, we meet Harry, a young wizard. His parents were killed by the wicked Lord Voldemort, who vanished after trying to kill Harry, with the attack leaving a distinctive scar on his fore- head. Now Harry has been placed for safe-keeping with relatives who are muggles (nonwizards), who neglect and mistreat him. At the age of 11, he discovers he is famous among wizards for having escaped Voldemort and that he has been accepted at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, a boarding school, which is its own enclosed world, with friends and adversaries.

As to emotions: under cover of a cloak of invisibility, Harry is able to search the school library, where he finds the Mirror of Erised. When Harry looks into it, he sees his parents. He becomes addicted to this sight until he is rescued by the school’s headmaster, Dumbledore, who explains that one sees in the mirror whatever one most desires. Readers of Understanding Emotions will know that this is Harry’s attach- ment desire for his lost parents.

Emotional themes continue: so when Voldemort feels emotions, Harry’s scar itches. Finally there is a confrontation with Voldemort. Harry ends up in a hospital, where Dumb- ledore tells him he survived Voldemort’s attack because his mother sacrificed her life for him, and Voldemort could not understand such love.

How do we explain the emotional power of the Harry Potter books? As well as the attachment theme, part of the answer is that it’s about identification with groups: wizards as compared with muggles, good people such as ourselves as compared with bad people, and as compared with outright wicked people such as Voldemort (in stories outgroups are often depicted as wicked). Gabriel and Young (2011) inves- tigated this idea by asking people to read an extract either from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, or Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (which is about vampires). Readers were given a test of implicit associations to “wizard” and “vam- pire” words and were also asked explicit questions such as “Do you think, if you tried really hard, you might be able to make an object move just using the power of your mind?” and “How sharp are your teeth?”

Gabriel and Young found that people who read the Harry Potter excerpt took on characteristics of a wizard, and those who read an excerpt from Twilight took on characteristics of a vampire. Readers’ identification with wizards or vampires put them in a good mood, and it prompted higher scores on a life satisfaction scale. Such identification demonstrates a basic need for connection. It can alleviate loneliness by attaching people to a social group and can offer a rewarding psychological identity.

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Figure 9.6). Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of vast things that you don’t immediately understand (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). Empirical studies find that people in different cultures, such as China and the United States, report that awe is most commonly triggered by other people who represent the best qualities of their group and are admired and during collective action, such as being at a political protest, being in the crowd at a rock concert, or cheering euphorically at a sporting event (Bai et al., 2017; Gordon et al., 2016). The experience of awe is intertwined with your group identity.

Relevant empirical studies find that awe triggers of awe trigger patterns of thought and social behavior that make for more cohesive, strong groups. For example, studies show that brief experiences of awe, triggered by watching awe-inspiring videos, lead people to be hum- bler, to define the self in terms of group identities (e.g., I’m a student at this university; I am a social activist) more so than individual preferences and to think of the self as smaller and embedded in strong social networks (Bai et al., 2017; Darbor et al., 2016; Stellar et al., 2017; Shiota et al., 2007). Awe leads the individual to be more aware of how he or she is integrated into social collectives.

Not only does awe lead people to shift their attention from self-interest to the concerns of the group, it also leads people to rely on collective belief systems to make sense of events in the world. Humans have long created collective belief systems, most notably found in different religions, that help explain what feels like the unexplainable—death, birth, random twists of fate; in religious systems of thought, people make sense of these events by attributing them to a God, or supernatural force that is an all knowing, or perhaps benevolent force (Mercier, Kramer, & Shariff, 2017; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007). And awe tends to promote the endorsement of these collective belief systems (e.g., van Cappallen & Sargalou, 2014). For, example, Piercarlo Valdesolo and Jesse Graham led people to experience awe by viewing expansive and awesome nature scenery (e.g., from the BBC’s Planet Earth) (Valdesolo & Graham, 2014). While experi- encing awe, participants were more likely to endorse the belief that supernatural forces, such as god, have a causal impact on the events in their lives. In this line of research, brief experiences of awe led people to believe that some kind of human agency was involved in the production of a

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FIGURE 9.6 Ceremonies and celebrations, as in this one in Taiwan, often evoke emotions such as awe and joy that solidify group identity.

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string of random numbers. Awe leads us to adopt collectively shared beliefs that explain the more challenging events in life.

Group and Collective Emotion and Between-Group Conflict The horror of the Rwandan genocide brings into sharp relief how readily group-based and col- lective emotions can escalate group conflict. Historical analysis of many ethnically motivated genocides of the twentieth century, including the Nazi Holocaust, killings of individuals for being minorities by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 (Kiernan, 2008), and the 1995 massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica, Bosnia, by the Army of the Serbian Republic (Leyesdorff, 2011), likewise find a prominent role of group and collective emotion as catalysts of genocide. Positive emotional appeals to national pride are common in the propaganda and mass communication that precede genocidal behavior. Within the group fears of being denounced by acquaintances and terror of imprisonment and death for nonconformity set the stage for conform- ing to violent actions against the outgroup (Evans, 2005; 2008; Larson, 2011).

Two emotions that have been a particular focus in analyses of conflict and violence between groups are anger and disgust. What factors increase the likelihood of one group feeling rage and anger toward another and thus being more likely to act aggressively? Diane Mackie and Eliot Smith and their colleagues have offered an answer (Mackie et al., 2000; Mackie, Devos, & E. R. Smith, 2000; Mackie & Smith, 2002; E. R. Smith, 1993; see also Dumont et al., 2003; Yzerbyt et al., 2003). They have found that anger directed at the outgroup is more likely when group mem- bers individually feel that their own group is strong as compared with the outgroup and when the members are very identified with the group. And regrettably, incidental feelings of anger, once set in motion, will increase prejudice and hatred toward outgroups (DeSteno et al., 2004).

Disgust is a clearly toxic emotion between groups and can fuel violence. Here, for instance, is a description of the result of the Aztecs under Montezuma offering a gift of precious works of art in gold and other materials, hoping to buy off the aggression of Cortez and the Spaniard invaders:

The Spaniards faces grinned: they were delighted, they were overjoyed. They snatched up the gold like monkeys . . . They were swollen with greed; they were ravenous; they hungered for that gold like wild pigs . . . They babbled in a barbarous language; every- thing they said was in a savage tongue.

(Wright, 1992, p. 26)

While the Spaniards treated the Aztecs with contempt, the Aztecs, from whose eye-witness reports this is taken, observed the Spaniards’ behavior with disgust. They viewed those alien others as behaving not as people but as animals. This tendency to respond to other groups with disgust is common during periods of rising violence between groups. Groups in conflict will dehumanize one another with references to each other as disgusting rats or vermin. These feel- ings of disgust set the stage for laws—such as the anti-Semitic laws of the Nazis—that limit contact across group boundaries and set the stage for violence.

Early in the study of disgust, Paul Rozin and his colleagues proposed that disgust, though origi- nally derived from taste, often extends from protecting the body from disease, to protection against contamination of all kinds, to anything that might harm our soul, or the social order (Rozin, Haidt, McCauley, 1993). This extends to others groups: people can feel disgusted with other groups and be guided by the irrational belief that contact renders one’s own group contaminated and less pure.

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Guided by these claims, recent work has documented that disgust is a powerful engine of prejudices toward outgroups. For example, people who report a trait-like tendency to experience high levels of disgust also report high levels of dislike for groups and in particular homosexuals (Inbar et al., 2009, 2016; Tapias et al., 2007). Yoel Inbar and his colleagues have led people to experience disgust by spraying nearby trash cans with a foul odor. Smelling a disgusting scent led participants to express negative attitudes toward gays (Inbar et al., 2012). Disgust can amplify prejudicial feelings: us-versus-them propensities.

Infrahumanization The tendency to think of one’s own group as superior compared to other groups is what many believe to be a human universal (Brewer, 1984; Brown, 1991). Moral philosopher Joshua Greene argues that this kind of in-group versus out-group sentiment is one of the greatest challenges to peace and stability that the human species faces. This us-versus-them thinking extends to the realm of emotion, as evident in studies of infrahumanization (Cortes, Demou- lin, Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Leyens, 2005). Infrahumanization is the tendency for ingroup members to attribute animal-like qualities to outgroup members—that is, to deny them full human attributes. Emotions play a critical role in infrahumanization. In many different parts of the world, group members assume that their own group is more likely than outgroup mem- bers to experience more complex, sophisticated emotions such as pride or sympathy (Cortes et al., 2005). These more complex emotions involve more uniquely human cognitive capac- ities—a sense of self, taking others’ perspectives, empathy—and are especially important in the value group members attach to their own identity (and by implication, how they might devalue other identities). By contrast, group members attribute similar levels of more basic emotions, such as anger or disgust, to their own group and different outgroups. For example, as one recent example, Agneta Fischer and her colleagues presented European participants with photos of Europeans and Arabs displaying embarrassment (Fischer et al, 2017). In keep- ing with the idea of infrahumanization, European participants attributed embarrassment to the expressions of fellow Europeans, but disinterest to the same emotional behavior expressed by Arab individuals.

Emotional Processes That Improve Group Relations Much as emotions can readily accelerate divisions and violence between groups, emotional pro- cesses can also improve relations between groups. For example, friendships across group bound- aries have been found to reduce the negative emotions that escalate tensions between people from different groups (Page-Gould & Mendoza-Denton, 2011).

Another solution to conflict between groups is one that we have seen is powerful in intimate relations and families: forgiveness, which has its roots in the reconciliation processes nonhuman primates so routinely engage in to maintain peaceful communities. We saw earlier that forgive- ness is important to marriages and family intimacy. Forgiveness has been a central process to repairing relations between groups in conflict. In South Africa, after the end of apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set out to bring white perpetrators of violence face to face with their black victims, with the intention of promoting forgiveness. In informal “truth and reconciliation” gatherings in Rwandan villages, Hutu perpetrators apologized to relatives of their victims, who were given a public arena to air their rage and sense of injustice. Today, although tensions persist, levels of aggression between the Hutus and Tutsis are low.

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Emotional Intelligence We began this chapter with the story of Tim Page, the music critic who has struggled in personal relationships because of living with high functioning autism. We have seen through this chapter how important the expression and experience of different emotions are to intimate relations, friendships, hierarchical relationships, and even dynamics between groups. Emotions are a gram- mar of human relationships.

Is there a general concept that might capture the importance of emotion in relationships? Peter Salovey, John Mayer, and Marc Brackett think so, and in an important development, they have outlined the concept of emotional intelligence (Brackett et al., 2008; Mayer, Caruso & Salovey, 2016; Salovey & Mayer, 1990). Their argument is that just as people vary in terms of the verbal, quantitative, analytic, or artistic intelligence, they likewise vary in terms of their emotional intelligence.

Salovey and Mayer (1990) and Salovey, Caruso, and Mayer (2016) proposed that emotional intelligence involves four different skills. First, it involves an ability to be accurate in perceiving others’ emotions, through the careful reading of others’ facial expressions, vocalizations, and posture and gesture. One way to think about the effects of power on emotion, then, is that in peo- ple who occupy positions of high power, this first component of emotional intelligence is com- promised. Second, emotional intelligence involves an ability to understand one’s own emotions, a skill that is compromised, for example, by particular kinds of brain damage (see Chapter 7). Third, emotional intelligence involves an ability to use current emotions to help thinking, for instance in making decisions, which we describe in Chapter 10. Fourth, emotional intelligence includes the ability to manage one’s emotions in ways that are fitting to the current situation: emotion regulation (discussed in Chapter 7).

Given the arguments of this section, one would expect those who score high on emotional intelligence to fare better in their relationships. Several studies show this to be true (Brackett et al., 2008). For example, five-year-old children who scored higher on emotional intelligence were better adjusted socially three years later. Adolescents who scored higher on emotional intel- ligence reported having more friends and better social support. Young adults who scored higher on emotional intelligence had more constructive and cooperative interactions with their romantic partners. Later in life, adults who scored higher on emotional intelligence enjoyed greater respect and rank at work and were perceived to be better workplace citizens. Emotional intelligence, then, benefits the four kinds of relationships we have considered in this chapter: intimate bonds, friendships, hierarchical relations, and relations with other group members.

S U M M A R Y

This chapter concentrated on a central theme in this book: that emotions are social. We began by suggesting that there are two ways to think about the social nature of emotions: Emotions can structure social relationships; and emotional responses are shaped by relationships we are in. Within intimate relationships shaped by attachment goals, we looked at how desire and love help create inti- mate bonds and how negative emotional processes (e.g., contempt) and positive emotional processes (e.g., forgiveness) contribute to the quality of the marital bond. In friendships defined by the goal of affiliation, gratitude, mimicry, and social support are ingredi- ents for good friendships and the broader sense of being socially

connected. In hierarchical relationships, emotional displays are one means by which we negotiate positions of rank, and our posi- tion of power and social class influences the emotions we feel and our capacity to empathize with others. Finally, we discussed how emotional processes bind us to groups, and how ingroup–outgroup dynamics are shaped by emotion, by feelings of rage and disgust and infrahumanization, but also how these can be moderated by the tendency to forgive. Putting these findings together, Emotional Intelligence, defined by four skills, proves to enhance many kinds of relationships.

253Further Reading

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. Consider yourself and someone you know well. How do you and this other person negotiate emotional transitions between sexual attraction and commitment?

2. Think of the different social hierarchies among people you know: perhaps of intelligence, fashion sense, sporting abil- ity, money, success with romantic partners, confidence when speaking. Which hierarchies are important to you? How do

your emotions affect and respond to your movements up and down these hierarchies?

3. With what social group or groups are you most identified? Per- haps you are a feminist, a keen member of your university or college, a supporter of a sports team? What feelings do you have of belonging, and what feelings do you have toward peo- ple who are not members of your group?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

Inbar, Y., Westgate, E. C., Pizarro D. A., & Nosek, B. A. (2016). Can a naturally occurring pathogen threat change social attitudes? Evalua- tions of gay men and lesbians during the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7, 420–427.

Crawford, J., Inbar, Y., & Maloney, V. (2014). Disgust sensitivity selectively predicts attitudes toward groups that threaten (or uphold) traditional sexual morality. Personality and Individual Differences, 70, 218–223.

For an excellent review of research on emotions in social life:

Tiedens L. and Leach C. (Eds.) (2004). The social life of emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Among the best single-authored works on love is a book by an anthropologist:

Fisher H. (1992). Anatomy of love. New York: Norton.

For an overview of how emotions are social:

Van Kleef, G. A. (2016). The interpersonal dynamics of emotion: Toward an integrative theory of emotions as social information. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A fascinating account of an American family witnessing the changes that took place in Germany after the Nazis had come to power.

Larson E. (2011). In the garden of the beasts: Love, terror, and an American family in Hitler’s Berlin. New York: Crown.

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10 Emotions and Thinking

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

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FIGURE 10.0 Reason, advised by Divine Grace, holds the Passions, Feare, Despaire, Choler, and others in chains. The caption starts: “Passions araing’d by Reason here you see/As she’s Advis’d by Grace Divine. . . .” From Senault (1671).

CONTENTS Passion and Reason

Emotions Prioritize Thoughts, Goals, and Actions

Emotion and Mood in Economic Behavior The Ultimatum Game Classical Economics

Affect Infusion, and Affect as Information

Styles of Processing

Effects of Moods and Emotions on Cognitive Functioning Perceptual Effects Attentional Effects Effects on Remembering Emotion-Related Biases in Memory Eyewitness Testimony Persuasion

Morality Intuitions and Principles Cooperation

Emotions and the Law Obligations of Society Dispassionate Judgments?

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Passion and Reason 255

On July 2, 1860, Eadweard Muybridge, a founding figure in photography, boarded a stagecoach for St. Louis, where he was to catch a train and make his way to Europe to buy rare books for his San Francisco bookstore. In northeastern Texas, the driver of the stagecoach lost control of the horses, and the coach careened down a mountainside. In the crash, Muybridge was thrown headfirst into a tree. Miraculously, he survived and, although he suffered serious brain damage, he made the trip to England, where he spent six vague years recuperating.

Muybridge returned to California in 1866, but he was not the same. His photography had an eerily risky and often obsessive quality. He would take thousands of photographs of animals in motion. He took hundreds of photos of himself, often naked, with his characteristic furrowed brow glaring into the camera.

In 1872, Muybridge married Flora Shallcross Stone, 21 years his junior. Not long after the wedding, while Muybridge was away on assignment, Flora had an affair with a dashing young man, Harry Larkyns, with whom she had a baby. At an acquaintance’s house, Muybridge saw a photo of the baby he thought was his, and casually looked at the back of the photo. On it were written the words “Little Harry.” The acquaintance confirmed Muybridge’s suspicion that the baby was not his.

Muybridge went to the ranch in Calistoga, California, where Larkyns worked. He greeted the man by saying: “I am Muybridge, and this is a message from my wife.” He raised a Smith & Wesson six-shooter and killed Larkyns.

At Muybridge’s highly publicized trial, witnesses spoke of how different he seemed upon his return from England. Silas Selleck, a friend and fellow photographer, observed: “After his return from Europe he was very eccentric, and so very unlike his way before going.” M. Gray noted that before the accident Muybridge was “much less irritable than after his return; was much more careless in dress after his return.”

Passion and Reason Eadweard Muybridge’s orbitofrontal cortex had been damaged. In Chapters 1 and 5, we referred to Antonio Damasio’s (1994) work with people who suffered a similar damage, with effects on their emotions and social lives. Here we extend that line of thought. Without a functioning orbito- frontal cortex and the social emotions that this brain area is involved in processing, people lack social judgment; their decision-making is askew. It isn’t that on the one hand there is rationality and on the other hand there is emotion. Without social emotions, these brain-damaged people become no longer rational. We see Muybridge’s shooting of Larkyns as driven by jealousy.

We can understand jealousy and may have suffered it ourselves. In Muybridge’s case, how- ever, the jealousy was so magnified, so unaffected by other emotions—love for the child he had thought was his son, who was innocent of the events that upset Muybridge, compassion for his victim, fear of consequences for himself—that the jealousy seemed to have grown larger than the man himself. For us to be functioning members of society, our emotions need to be in working order in relation to each other so that they may guide our reasoning and action wisely.

A striking quality of emotions is how they influence reasoning. Jean-Paul Sartre (1962) referred to this as magical transformation. This is reflected in aphorisms about effects of emo- tion upon how we may see the world through “jaundiced eyes” or “rose-colored glasses.” When angry, afraid, euphoric, or in love, each emotion invokes its own world though seldom, perhaps, as completely as jealousy did for Eadweard Muybridge. Usually, it’s more temporary, but con- vincing at the time. Each emotion is its own lens through which we view the world. We are aware of particular themes or events. We recall particular experiences from our past. We envision a certain future.

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In the Western philosophical tradition, emotions have often been regarded with suspicion. The position taken by the ethical philosophers of the third century bce, the Epicureans and Stoics, was that to lead a good life, emotions should be extirpated (Nussbaum, 1994). If Epicureans or Stoics heard about Muybridge’s jealousy, they would say: “There, you see!” Drawing on this skepticism, many philosophers have assumed that the emotions are unsophisticated, primitive ways of perceiving the world. The implication is that human society is better off when the more primitive passions are reined in by rational thought. Have a look, for instance, at Figure 10.0 at the head of this chapter. A rare exception was the eighteenth-century philosopher, David Hume (1749–1740/1972), who contended in a famous statement that, “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

What do we mean when we ask whether emotions can be rational? A first meaning has to do with whether beliefs and appraisals that support our emotions correspond to events in the world? Most often our emotions meet this criterion of rationality. The literature on appraisal (see Chapter 6) suggests that emotions are often products of complex beliefs about events in the world. A good way of thinking about this is that emotions are locally rational (Levy, 1985); they are rational in relation to certain concerns, but they are not globally rational because they may exclude consideration of other concerns.

A second meaning of rationality concerns whether emotions help individuals function in the social world. We think of rational human beings as those who navigate their environment effec- tively. Delusional beliefs of grandiosity (overweening pride) or paranoia (pervasive fear) are irrational in this sense. They make it difficult for a person to be reliable in society. A central assumption of this book is that emotions in many contexts are rational in that they help people respond adaptively to the environment. This is certainly not true all the time, as we shall see in Chapters 12 and 13, but many, if not most, occurrences of emotion help people act adaptively.

A third meaning is relevant to this chapter. Do emotions guide perception, thinking, attention, memory, and judgment, in organized and constructive ways? Or do they interfere with these processes? Certain extreme levels of emotion can get the better of us. Extreme anger may pre- vent us from perceiving cooperative gestures of an ideological opponent or romantic partner. Yet research over the last 50 years indicates that emotions give us information, structure perception, direct attention, give preferential access to certain memories, and bias judgment in ways that generally help people and are valuable to our humanity (Huntinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2014; Forgas, 2014; Keltner & Horberg, 2015; Lerner et al., 2015).

Emotions Prioritize Thoughts, Goals, and Actions The notion that emotions guide cognitive processes in an adaptive fashion emerged within a movement known as cognitive science, which matured in the 1960s and included among its methods the construction of mind-like processes in computers. The question is this: If you had to design a mind, what problems would you have to consider and what principles would you need to embody?

Nobel Prize Laureate Herbert Simon (1967) argued that emotions would be necessary in any intelligent being; a human, a Martian, or an intelligent computer. Emotions, Simon continues, are a solution to a general problem: they set priorities among the many different goals and concerns that individuals have at any moment.

This need for some sort of interrupt and prioritization process emerges in complex organisms like humans (De Sousa, 1987; Oatley, 1992). In very simple animals, behavior is controlled by reflexes. Consider the female tick (Von Uexküll, 1934). After mating, she climbs a tree and hangs at the end of a lower twig. When she detects the chemical, butyric acid, she lets go. Because tiny quantities of butyric acid are released into the air by mammals, this gives a fair

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probability of falling onto the back of an animal such as a browsing deer. If the tick lands on a mammal’s back, warm temperature causes the tick to burrow through the fur toward the warmth. When she reaches the mammal’s skin, another stimulus triggers burrowing into it, to suck the mammal’s blood, which will be necessary for laying her eggs. In the simple world of the female tick, the perceptual system is tuned to just a few events. In the tick’s world, there is no need for emotions.

Now imagine a being at the other end of the scale of complexity, one vastly more intelligent than ourselves, perhaps a god. A god is often conceived of as omniscient and omnipotent or, as a cognitive scientist might say, having a perfect model of the universe and no limitations of resources. Such a being could predict the results of its every action. Again there is no need for emotions. Everything would be known, everything anticipated.

We humans are somewhere in between ticks and gods. Our world is complex and we act with purposes. But our actions sometimes produce effects we don’t anticipate. We have limitations of knowledge and resources. Sometimes we need encouragement to continue what we are doing. Sometimes events occur—small successes, losses, frustrations, threats—for which we have no ready-prepared response and which may make it better to switch goals or change plans. Such events occur when we don’t know enough to be certain what to do next. They are signaled by emotion, which don’t tell us exactly what to do next, but they do prompt us. Each one creates an urge, a readiness to act in a certain direction or in a range of ways that, on average during the course of evolution and our own development, have been better either than acting randomly or than becoming lost in thought trying to calculate the best possible action.

The notion that emotions occur because we can’t ever know enough was a focus of classical Greek dramas, of some of Aristotle’s work, and of much of Freud’s. What became new in the era of cognitive science was the idea of just how important emotions (or something like them) are for any complex being that has several motives and that operates in a complex world. Emotions help guide action in a world that is always imperfectly known and that can never be fully controlled. It is not so much that emotions are irrational, but rather that individuals cannot have fully rational solutions to many of the problems of life. Emotions are bridges toward rationality.

In elaborating this view, Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987, 2011) proposed that emotions involve two different kinds of signaling in the nervous system. One kind occurs automatically and derives from primary appraisal. In evolutionary terms, it is simple and carries no specific information about objects in the environment. It sets the brain into a particular mode of organi- zation, or readiness. It gives a priority, and urge to act, prompted by an emotion such as joy, anger, sadness, or fear. It has the phenomenological feeling tone of an emotion but no other con- tent. It is an urge toward the kind of thing to do next, joy to continue what we are doing, anger to contend with another, and so on. It is significant that phenomena of emotional priming, in which stimuli are shown subliminally to participants in experiments, operate at this automatic, uncon- scious level (Schooler et al., 2015; Winkielman, Zajonc, & Schwarz, 1997), and are resistant to attributional interventions.

The second kind of signal derives from secondary appraisal. It is informational. The infor- mation it carries enables us to make mental models of the events, their possible causes and their implications for future action. On the basis of these two kinds of signal, we act in accordance both with how we feel and with what we know.

Normally, the organizational and informational signals occur together to produce an emo- tional feeling with a consciously known cause and object. But the two kinds of signal can be dissociated. According to Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1996), the dissociation accounts for why we can sometimes have emotions that are free-floating, and how psychoactive drugs such as tranquillizers can change our emotional state without doing anything to events of the world. It is also how we can know about some events in the world without caring about them. Figure 10.1 is a diagram of the two kinds of signal.

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To illustrate the organizational and informational aspects of an emotion, consider fear. In humans, the organizational part interrupts ongoing action. It makes ready physiological mecha- nisms and actions for freezing, flight, or for defensive fight, and urges us toward action of one of these kinds. It directs attention to the environment for any sign of danger or safety, and it induces checking on the results of actions just completed. In this mode, we can think of the brain’s resources as marshaled into a combination of forms of action readiness to respond to danger. The emotion is a turning-on of this mode of organization. Moods are based on the same organi- zational signals, but they maintain the brain in a certain mode despite events that might tend to switch it into some other mode. The informational part of fear is about what we are frightened of. Sometimes this can be insubstantial.

FIGURE 10.1 Modules of the brain and different kinds of messages that pass among them (to illustrate Oatley & Johnson-Laird’s, 1987, theory). In (a) the signals are informational and travel along particular pathways. In (b) an emotion-control signal spreads diffusely from one module (2.3), turning some other modules on and some off, thereby setting the system into a distinctive mode. Normally, in (c), these two kinds of signals occur together.

Emotion and Mood in Economic Behavior 259

Emotion and Mood in Economic Behavior In this section, we look at the role of emotions and moods in activities that are thought to be entirely rational: economic decision-making. We do this at the individual level and then at the group level of economic policies in communities and nations.

The Ultimatum Game In the Ultimatum Game, there are two players: a proposer who offers to share a sum of money (provided by the experimenter) in a certain proportion, and a responder who decides to accept or reject the offer. If the responder decides to accept, the money is shared in the proportion proposed. If the responder rejects the offer, neither proposer nor responder gets anything. When proposers offer to share the money equally, such offers are typically seen as fair and are accepted. But contrary to conventional economic theory, when shares of money offered are in the propor- tions 7 to 3, 8 to 2, or 9 to 1 in the proposer’s favor, responders are usually upset at their unfair- ness and they reject them.

This behavior is often labeled irrational, because the responder fails to get any money. It is thought that this occurs for emotional reasons. Osmi and Ohira (2009) found that, in comparison with effects of offers that would be accepted, offers that would be rejected slowed down the responders’ heart rate: the more unfair the offer, the more the heart slowed. Gospic et al. (2011) monitored responders’ brains in an fMRI machine as they played this game. They found that unfair offers that were rejected activated the amygdala, suggesting that such behavior triggered a basic concern over fairness, and which the researchers labeled as aggressive. They found, too, that giving responders a benzodiazepine drug, which has a calming effect of the neurotransmitter GABA, decreased their rejection rate of unfair offers from 37.6 to 19; this decrease was associ- ated with decreased amygdala activation.

Harlé and Sanfey (2010) found that rejections of unfair offers in this game were usually prompted by emotions of withdrawal such as disgust, more so than by emotions of approach such as anger. The idea of deservingness (Feather, 2007) has become important; emotions affect our sense of who deserves what. In five experiments, Forgas (2016) found that in the Ultima- tum Game and similar games, when positive emotions such as happiness were induced, selfish decisions were more likely to be made, whereas when negative emotions such as sadness were induced, these were more likely to result in unselfish decisions.

Classical Economics An interesting conjunction of an academic discipline with an emotion term is that of economics as the “dismal science.” As Thompson (2013) explains, the term was coined by the philosopher Thomas Carlyle, and is widely thought to derive from the proposal of Thomas Malthus that popu- lation growth always outstrips provision of resources and thereby sentences humanity to misery. (Malthus was a major influence on Darwin in his thinking about evolution.) But as Thompson points out, really Carlyle was writing about slavery: to dismiss its economics as “dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject … a dismal science.”

Economics is the science of how to provide means for us human beings to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves, and enable us to do other things that we find important. Is there reason to think of it, generally, as dismal? There may be. Frank, Gilovich, and Regan (1973) looked at how economics starts by assuming that we human beings act in narrow self-interest (see also Frank, 1988). Frank et al. found that people who took a degree in economics became more likely to act in self-interested ways. Dismal?

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In the opening chapter of the book you are reading, we introduced Tania Singer, with her finding that certain brain areas that are activated when we feel pain are also activated when we know a loved one is in pain (Singer et al., 2004). In a paper that extended Singer et al.’s result, Beckes et al. (2013) reported on a study of people in an fMRI machine when they, or a friend, or a stranger, were threatened with an electric shock. Areas of the brain that were activated when participants were threatened were almost identical to areas that were activated when the friend was threatened, but not when the stranger was threatened. Beckes et al. write that, “from the per- spective of the brain, our friends and loved ones are indeed part of who we are.”

From results of this kind Singer (2015) has argued that “Research in the fields of psychology and neuroscience shows beyond doubt that the assumptions about human nature that underpin mainstream economic models are simply wrong.” Of course, says Singer, we humans are self- ish. Sometimes we can be very selfish. But to say that economic activity is guided only by self-interest is to mistake the part for the whole (see also Tamarit & Sanchez, 2016). Research in psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that other people are important to us, parts of our very being. Recall what you learned in Chapter 7, that dopamine-rich centers of the ventral striatum are activated not only when we experience pleasure, but when we cooperate and share resources with others. With more empathy and compassion for others, we humans could become more cooperative, more responsible, and reduce forms of social harm, such as poverty (1 in 5 children in the United States live in poverty). “If we are to address some of our most pressing global problems, such as climate change and inequality,” says Singer, “we need to devise new economic models that accommodate the real complexity of human nature.”

Affect Infusion, and Affect as Information How do emotions guide thought processes, perception, remembering, attention, and so on? How, for example, does fear shift your judgment, for example, of what risks you are vulnerable to in the course of life? And how do we think when we are feeling joyful or proud?

Eich and Macaulay (2000) have concluded that effects which can be influenced by particular moods such as happiness, sadness, or anxiety, are salient in memory and perception, but these effects also depend on the tasks, and on who the participants are. So as Eich, Macaulay, and Ryan (1994) put it:

Two individuals—one happy, the other sad—are shown say, a rose and asked to identify and describe what they see. Both individuals are apt to say much the same thing and to encode the rose event in the same manner. After all, and with all due respect to Gertrude Stein, a rose, is a rose is a rose … memory for the rose event will probably not appear to be mood dependent under these circumstances. Now imagine a different situation. Instead of identifying and describing the rose the subjects are asked to recall a specific episode, from any time in their personal past, that the object calls to mind (p. 213).

When people recall an autobiographical event, Eich and his colleagues found that mood effects occur, but they vary because people’s experiences are different (Miranda & Kihlstrom, 2005).

In Joseph Forgas’s Affect Infusion model (Forgas, 1995; 2014), emotions or extended moods infuse into a cognitive task, to influence judgment, particularly if the task is complex. In a study of reasoning from syllogisms, Goel and Vartanian (2011) found that negative emotions could induce people to pay more attention to the problem as stated and draw conclusions in a way that their prior beliefs did not affect their reasoning. In an extension of the affect infusion model, Lowry et al. (2014) found that when people visit a new website, if the site works well for them, a positive mood occurs, and this enhances trust in the vendor whose site is visited.

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A related approach, proposed by Gerald Clore, is of affect as information (Clore & Palmer, 2009; Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2014). In this perspective, emotions themselves can be inform- ative. The account rests on two assumptions. The first is that emotions provide us with a signal. For example, anger can signal that an injustice has occurred and something needs to be changed. A second assumption is that many of our judgments are too complex to enable us to review all the relevant evidence (see the point raised by Simon, 1967, discussed earlier in this chapter). For instance, to say how satisfied you are with your political leader you might think about environ- mental policy, the state of health care, inequality of income, global warming, and whether the leader is living up to her or his campaign promises. It is almost impossible to know enough to provide a thorough judgment. Given the complexity of so many judgments, we often rely on a simpler assessment based on our current feelings. In evaluating a leader, we might just think: “How do I feel about this person?” Only seldom can human beings act with full rationality, and think through all the relevant evidence. Emotions are heuristics, guesses that often work better than chance (Polya, 1957): shortcuts to making judgments or taking action.

One test of this affect-as-information perspective was by Schwarz and Clore (1983), who studied effects of bright sunny days and gloomy overcast days on people’s emotional lives. They telephoned people in Illinois either on a cloudy or on a sunny day and asked them: “All things considered, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” In one condition, participants were simply asked this question. In a second condition, participants were first asked: “How’s the weather down there?” and only then asked the question about life satisfac- tion. Schwarz and Clore predicted that only those participants who had not been asked about the weather would use their current feelings as heuristics. As you can see from Figure 10.2, people tended to use their emotions as heuristics in making judgments, but not when they attributed those feelings to another source.

In 1992, Clore wrote: “The most reliable phenomenon in the cognition-emotion domain is the effect of mood on evaluative judgment” (p. 134); a mood acquired in one situation can affect a judgment made about something entirely different.

A striking study of this effect was by Dutton & Aron (1974): one of the most imaginative studies in psychology. The researchers recruited young male passers-by who were not accompanied by a female, who crossed the Capilano suspension bridge (near Vancouver, Canada). This bridge is 450 feet long and has cables that act as handrails. One walks alone on boards suspended from the cables, see Figure 10.3. The whole bridge rocks and sways alarmingly, so one fears one will fall 200 feet

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to the rocks and rapids of the Capilano River below. The comparison group was of young men who crossed a fixed cedar bridge further upstream that is firm, wide, and only 10 feet above the river. At the other side of each bridge, each man was met either by a young woman or by a young man, who asked them to take part in a study she or he was conducting for a psychology class on the subject of scenic attractions. Participants were asked to fill out a short questionnaire and look at an ambiguous picture of a young woman covering her face with one hand and reaching out with the other. After the man had completed the questions, the interviewer wrote her or his phone number on a piece of paper, gave it to the participant, and asked him to phone if he wanted to talk further.

Sexual imagery in response to the ambiguous picture shown to the men who had crossed the high suspension bridge and were met by the female interviewer was significantly higher than that of men who crossed the low bridge or who were met at either bridge by the male interviewer. Not only that, but many more phone calls to the female interviewer were made by men who crossed the high bridge than by those who crossed the low bridge. Dutton and Aron also reported a sec- ond field study and a laboratory experiment to show that the correct explanation of the effect was that anxious excitement had transformed to sexual attraction.

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When in a positive or negative emotional state, feelings are likely to affect judgments, even when the objects being judged have no relation to the cause of the emotion. Positive and negative moods have been shown to influence a wide array of judgments, which include evaluations of consumer items (Isen, Shalker, Clark, & Karp, 1978), political leaders (Forgas & Moylan, 1987; Keltner, Locke, & Audrain, 1993), and evaluations of losses and gains (Ketelaar, 2004, 2005). In more recent work in keeping with this theme, Elizabeth Phelps and her colleagues exposed some people to a physiological stressor—they had to keep their arm submerged in freezing water for three minutes (Kubota et al., 2014). These participants showed a subsequent spike in the stress hormone cortisol, and evaluated other people portrayed in written scenarios more negatively, and were less aware of how situational factors might shape their behavior. Negative emotions lead us to look upon others through a more cynical lens.

Do current moods and emotions affect judgments of the future? Indeed they do. Negative moods lead people to view the future pessimistically, whereas positive moods lead people to look at the future optimistically. Johnson and Tversky (1983) had participants read newspaper accounts about the death of a young man, which induced a negative mood. People in a negative mood (for instance, sad) judged negative life events in the future, like contracting a disease, to be more likely than people feeling a positive mood (such as feeling happy).

Different emotions are associated with more specific strains of pessimism or optimism. For example, Keltner, Ellsworth, and Edwards (1993) asked whether people feeling angry or sad would judge different events to be more likely in their future. They reasoned that angry people, attuned to the blameworthy actions of others, would judge unfair acts caused by others to be frequent in the future. In contrast, sad people, attuned to situational causes of negative outcomes, should judge negative life events caused by situational factors as more likely.

To test this hypothesis, they asked angry or sad participants to estimate the likelihood of dif- ferent events, some of which were caused by other people (a pilot’s error causes a friend to die in a plane crash) and some caused by situational factors (icy roads cause a car accident). Consistent with expectation, angry people judged the negative life events caused by other people to be more likely than sad people, who judged the events caused by situational factors to be more likely.

In similar work, DeSteno and colleagues (2000) asked people feeling anger or sadness to esti- mate the likelihood of “sad” events (of 60,000 orphans in Romania, how many will be malnour- ished) and “angry” or unfair events (of 20,000 violent criminals put on trial in the upcoming year, how many will be acquitted because of legal technicalities). Whereas sad participants judged the sadness-inducing events to be more likely, angry participants judged the anger-inducing events to be more likely. In similar work, fearful individuals have been shown to have heightened estimates that risky, dangerous events will be part of their future (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). For similar rea- sons, guilt amplifies the personal sense of control, and can lead to more risky action (Kouchaki, Oveis, & Gino, 2014).

The theory of affect as information helps us understand social interactions (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007; Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2014). With others, we carefully choose our actions and what we say to maintain a tone that is compatible with our identity and our role; our emotion supplies information that enables us to act in this identity-supporting fashion.

Styles of Processing An emotion or mood can promote a style of processing. When you feel guilty or angry, grateful or enthusiastic, you engage in a different form of reasoning, of weighing evidence, and of draw- ing conclusions than you might when you are feeling something different.

A prominent theme to emerge in cognitive psychology in the last 20 years is that when it comes to thinking, reasoning, and making decisions, two types of system are at work: System 1

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and System 2. This idea was developed by Keith Stanovich (2004) and Daniel Kahneman (2011). System 1 is fast, involuntary, and based on heuristics. Here is a question. Please answer it as fast as you can: “What do cows drink?” For most of us the answer that comes to mind is “milk.” It’s triggered by the association of the words “cows” and “drink.” This is System 1 at work. But if we go at it more slowly and deliberatively, System 2 starts up and we may think something like: “Milk, perhaps. Well ... some cows—calves actually—drink milk, but in the ordinary way I sup- pose cows must drink water.” Both systems are good for particular kinds of problem.

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman (2011) describes research with his longtime friend and collaborator Amos Tversky in which they showed that when people are asked to do problems that require deliberative thinking, the heuristic response often gets in first. Although the deliberative System 2 is capable of overriding System 1, it is often effortful, and even a bit lazy. Our prefer- ence is often for System 1 to make decisions.

Given these distinctions, we might ask: Which emotions are associated with heuristic thought based on System 1, and which are more likely to engage the deliberative System 2? The answer is that that positive moods tend to facilitate use of heuristic rather than deliberative thinking. Anxious moods facilitate deliberative thought and careful attention to details (Bless, Schwarz, & Wieland, 1996; Lambert et al., 1997). It’s probably a good idea to be anxious when doing one’s income taxes!

But there are differences among negative emotions. If people feel sad, they are less likely to rely on stereotypes than if they feel angry when they make social judgments of others (Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994; see also Forgas, 2013).

Positive moods can, however, prompt us to think in more flexible ways (Isen et al., 1987). In an important theory, Barbara Fredrickson (e.g., Fredrickson, 1998, 2003; Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005) has argued that the function of positive emotions is to broaden and build our resources. Positive emotions enable more creative thought and aid formation of important bonds. The creativity associated with positive emotion that Isen found builds schemas and intellectual resources by enhancing our perspective taking, our novel ideas, and our learning. Positive emo- tions also help us build interpersonal resources by motivating us to approach others, to cooperate, and to express affection. Research carried out by Fredrickson and her colleagues has found that when we experience positive emotions like joy, amusement, contentment, and relief we are more likely to see global patterns in stimuli rather than focus on specific details, we are more likely to see connections between our group and other groups, and within our close relationships, we are more likely to see similarities between ourselves and our relationship partners (Fredrickson, 2001; Johnson & Fredrickson, 2005; Waugh & Fredrickson, 2006). Moreover, Catalino, Algoe, and Fredrickson (2014) have found that people who prioritize positivity do have more resources.

Effects of Moods and Emotions on Cognitive Functioning Let’s now review the influence of emotions and moods on perception, attention, memory, and persuasion. As we do this, we ask you to consider whether emotions are rational, and how the findings conform to the claims of the accounts just given: feelings-as-information, and styles of processing.

Perceptual Effects Do moods and emotions influence our perceptions? Do they shape the categories or kinds of information that we perceive in any situation? Experience suggests so. You may have gone to a family gathering and had your perception of the event shaped by your feelings. When feel- ing blue, you might have been more attuned to what has been lost, or the unfulfilled hopes that

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perhaps hover behind many such gatherings. In an exhilarated mood, the same event might strike you entirely differently, as full of conviviality and promise.

Are we attuned to perceiving things that are congruent with our mood? Niedenthal and Setterlund (1994) induced happy and sad moods by playing music throughout an experimental session. To put people in a happy mood they played pieces such as the allegro from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nacht Musik. To induce sadness they played pieces such as Adagietto by Mahler. Participants performed a standard psychological task, called a lexical decision task, in which strings of letters were flashed on a screen: some were words and some were nonwords that can be pronounced in English, like “blatkin.” Participants were asked to press one button if the letters formed a word, another if it was a nonword. Words were from five categories: happy words such as “delight,” positive words unrelated to happiness such as “calm,” sad words such as “weep,” negative words unrelated to sadness such as “injury,” and neutral words such as “habit.” Consist- ent with the hypothesis of emotion congruence, when participants were in a happy mood, they identified happy words more quickly than sad words. When sad, they were quicker at identifying sad as compared with happy words. But the effects of happy and sad moods did not extend to the positive or negative words that were unrelated to the specific emotions of happiness or sadness.

Baumann and DeSteno (2010) started their report of how emotions can affect perception with this:

The death of 23-year-old Amadou Diallo, who was shot and killed on February 4, 1999 by New York City Police officers, stands in most people’s memories as a tragic example of rapid threat detection gone wrong. When the young African American man reached into his jacket to produce his wallet and identification, police officers—believing that he was in fact reaching for a gun—opened fire, shooting Diallo 19 times (p. 595).

This case is discussed, as well, in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), by Malcolm Gladwell, a psychologically knowledgeable writer who works for the New Yorker, and who produces wonderfully thoughtful books.

In their follow-up of this case, Baumann and DeSteno conducted experiments in which par- ticipants first wrote about an emotional memory so that they came to feel the corresponding emo- tion, and then made a judgment. Under the influence of a specific emotion, participants judged whether a man, shown in a photograph for three-quarters of a second, was holding a gun or a neutral object. Anger increased the probability that neutral objects were misidentified as guns. It did not increase the probability that guns were seen as neutral objects. The effect was not one of negative emotions in general, but stemmed from cues of threat evoked by anger.

Our current moods and feelings lead us selectively to perceive emotion-congruent objects and events. This in part helps explain why emotions and moods can persist: because built into our experi- ence is a tendency to perceive emotion-congruent objects and events, thus prolonging our experience.

Niedenthal (2007) explains that when one embodies a particular emotion in oneself, for instance, by making a facial expression or gesture appropriate to happiness or disgust, for exam- ple, one is more likely to make judgments appropriate to that emotion (for other evidence, see Chapter 5). The findings reviewed in this section suggest that moods and emotions can redirect perception to objects and events that are relevant to current feelings; often this occurs in ways that are likely to guide action according to current goals and concerns (Zadra & Clore, 2011).

Attentional Effects In his textbook of psychology (1890, vol. 1, p. 402), William James wrote: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” It is also what we attend to even when we do not consciously agree to it. Emotions affect attention. The effects range from largely unconscious processes of filtering incoming information to conscious preoccupation of the kind that we have when we worry.

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Among the most studied effects of emotions on attention are those that concern anxiety. Anxi- ety narrows attention (Mineka, Rafaeli, & Yovel, 2003). When we are anxious, we focus on what we are anxious about. If we are doing a task that involves arithmetic and it’s important not to make a mistake, a focusing anxiety can be useful. But if people persistently focus on feared events, or on keeping safe from them, they can come to disregard many, or even most, other issues (Eysenck, Derekshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007). Anxiety can come to monopolize process- ing capacities and even whole lives. People for whom this is the case suffer from an anxiety disorder, which we discuss in Chapter 13.

In another kind of study, Calvo and Avero (2005) presented pictures of scenes that were either neutral or emotional (positive, harm related, or threat related). In each trial, a neutral and an emotional picture were presented side by side for three seconds and participants’ eye move- ments were measured. As compared with non-anxious people, anxious participants more often looked first at the emotional picture than at the neutral one in a pair; then they looked longer at emotional pictures during the first half-second of viewing. In the later phase of viewing, they tended to avoid looking at the emotional pictures. In a review of studies like these, Hartley and Phelps identified two effects of fear and anxiety on attention (Hartley & Phelps, 2012). First, anxiety and fear lead people systematically to attend to threats in their environment. And second, anxiety and fear lead people to make more negative interpretations of ambiguous stimuli. When feeling fearful you might be more likely to attend to the negative possibilities of a friend’s joke.

An important implication of attention is that its effects of emotional prioritization enable us to concentrate on just those events and objects that are relevant to what we are doing. Fenske and Raymond (2006) review these effects, based on fMRI studies, and offer evidence for a reciprocal influence in which, when we concentrate on a task, patterns, objects, and even perhaps people irrelevant to that task, that previously were neutral, become less emotionally attractive. Sharot, Korn, and Dolan (2011) have found that optimistic people (about 80% of us, although we wouldn’t necessarily label ourselves in this way) maintain our optimism by being biased to focus on positive rather than negative events in the future.

Effects on Remembering To understand the effect of emotions on how we remember, we need first to explain how remem- bering works. This is best seen in the work of Frederic Bartlett (1932). He asked people first to read a story and then to reproduce it as exactly as possible, both immediately after reading and at intervals up to several years later. In one famous experiment, Bartlett had people read a Native American folk story called “The War of the Ghosts” twice, at their normal reading speed. It starts like this:

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries, and they thought: “Maybe this is a war party.” They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:

“What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.”

One of the young men said: “I have no arrows.” “Arrows are in the canoe,” they said. “I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone.

But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.” So one of the young men went ...

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Then follow 11 lines about how the young man who went with the men in the canoe took part in a fight in which he was shot but did not feel sick, and thought, “Oh, they are ghosts.” The story ends with his return home. Here are the story’s last lines:

He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.

He was dead.

One of Bartlett’s participants had been asked to reproduce the story several times in the first months after reading it, but had then not thought of it for two-and-a-half years. Here is what this person wrote:

Some warriors went to wage war against the ghosts. They fought all day and one of their number was wounded.

They returned home in the evening, bearing their sick comrade. As the day drew to a close, he became rapidly worse and the villagers came round him. At sunset he sighed: something black came out of his mouth. He was dead.

Much has been lost and much has changed. In the remembered story the man dies at sunset rather than sunrise. But the emotionally charged detail “something black came out of his mouth” was preserved, as it was in most of the reproductions that Bartlett reported.

Bartlett concluded that when we remember a verbal account, our words are never exact. What we perceive is assimilated to our own structure of meaning, which Bartlett called a schema, which includes a great deal of our own general and personal knowledge. On recall, a participant takes a few significant remembered details and a general emotional attitude to the story. Then, by means of the schema, undertakes a construction (see also, Wagoner, 2017) of what the story must have been. So style becomes the participant’s style. Events are recounted in the way they would be in the culture and individuality of the person who is doing the remembering. It’s in this way, that dying, in the story, is remembered as happening in the evening rather than at sunrise.

As Bartlett said, remembering:

is an imaginative reconstruction, built out of the relation of our [emotional] attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail ... It is thus hardly ever really exact ... and it is not at all important that it should be (1932, p. 213).

This idea holds not just for remembering, but for our whole way of understanding ourselves, each other, and the world more generally. The process is highly influenced by emotion. In one group of 20 participants, Bartlett reported that in their early reproductions only 10 remembered the excuse of the young man saying he had no arrows, but 18 remembered the excuse that the man’s relatives would not know where he had gone. Bartlett ran this study toward the end of World War I, and he wrote that anxieties about separation from relatives were salient at this time. Was this, perhaps, why the idea of making an excuse about relatives could easily enter partici- pants’ minds, and why they remembered it?

It’s with Bartlett’s theory of construction that emotional effects on remembering and under- standing make sense.

Emotion-Related Biases in Memory Much of our emotional life involves representations of past emotional episodes (Levine & Pizzarro, 2004; Levine et al., in press). Our memories of childhood guide how we feel about our family. Our recollections of the early days of being in love shape how we feel about our current relationship.

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An intriguing implication of the notion that our memories are reconstructed is that emotions should shape how we reconstruct the past.

In an important line of work, Linda Levine has documented several biases in how we remem- ber the past. First, we tend to underestimate the intensity of our emotions in the past. For exam- ple, in one study, Kaplan, Levine, and colleagues gathered people’s reports of emotions after the 2008 and 2012 U.S. Presidential elections and then, a month later, had these participants estimate what those emotions had been (Kaplan et al., 2016). Although people were fairly accurate in recalling what emotions they had, they tended to underestimate how intense these emotions were after the election. Our emotions that relate to important events tend to get fainter; perhaps as we go along in life, new things come to be more important.

Levine and colleagues have also found that our present emotions bias our memory of emo- tions from the past (Levine & Pizarro, 2004; Levine, Lench, Karnaze, & Carlson, in press). For example, bereaved individuals’ reports of past grief were more highly correlated with their cur- rent grief than with actual levels of past grief (Safer, Bonanno, & Field, 2001). Romantic partners who had become more attached to their partner over time recalled having more positive initial feelings about their partner than was actually the case; those who became less attached to their partner over time recalled initial feelings that were more negative than they actually experienced (McFarland & Ross, 1987). Our present emotions about the loss of a favorite sports team bias our memory of how we would expect to feel about that loss (Meyvis, Ratner, & Levav, 2010).

Eyewitness Testimony What if you witnessed a crime, or were affected by one? Psychologists know from Bartlett’s (1932) principles, and from more recent research (Loftus, 1996; 2013; Kaplan et al., 2016) that eyewitness testimony is sometimes mistaken. A sense of certainty does not mean a memory is correct. In Britain, the Devlin Report (of an official committee set up to examine cases of wrong- ful conviction for crimes) recommended that it is not reliable to convict someone on the basis of eyewitness testimony unless the circumstances are exceptional or the testimony is corroborated by evidence of some other kind.

There has now been much research on memory for stressful events (Phelps, 2012; Kaplan et al., 2016). Such events are subject to reconstruction of the kind that Bartlett (1932) discussed. Pynoos and Nader (1989), for instance, interviewed children who attended a school where a sniper had “shot repeated rounds of ammunition at children on an elementary school playground” (p. 236) from an apartment opposite the school in Los Angeles on February 24, 1984. One passer- by and one child were killed, while 13 other children and a playground attendant were wounded. In the accounts of 113 children who were interviewed between 6 and 16 weeks afterward, characteristic distortions occurred. Children who were wounded tended to distance themselves emotionally from the event, and five did not even mention their minor gunshot injuries when interviewed. By contrast, children who were not at school that day, or who were on their way home, tended to place themselves nearer to the events (see also McNally & Robinaugh, 2015).

A conclusion from research in day-to-day life as well as in the laboratory (Levine & Edelstein, 2009; Levine & Pizarro, 2004; Phelps, 2012) is that we are better able to recall events that were emotionally intense for us. If an event is important and unusual, the condition is set both for an emotion to occur and for remembering it. If an event is thought about often, or if flashbacks occur as they can do with traumas, then the event becomes salient in memory.

The question of whether there is some special form of repressed memory of especially intense and emotionally traumatic incidents, for instance, of childhood sexual abuse, which can be recov- ered in therapy, has induced widespread controversy. Many researchers do not discount this pos- sibility but are also skeptical on the grounds that it is relatively easy to suggest, advertently or inadvertently, that certain events occurred in the past, and then, because of the constructive nature

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of remembering, the person involved can then come to believe they really happened (Hardt & Rutter, 2004; Kaplan, Van Damme, Levine, & Loftus, 2014; Loftus & Davis, 2006).

Persuasion In Chapter 1, we described how Aristotle wrote that emotions are important in persuasion. The relevant research offers a more complex message about emotion and persuasion, but in keeping with Aristotle’s treatment of emotion.

Factors that affect persuasive messages include congruence of emotions in the receiver of the message with those of the message itself. If, for instance, a politician is running for office and trying to mobilize an angry group of supporters, it is most effective to frame the communication in anger-related terms, centering upon injustice and blame.

DeSteno, Petty, Rucker, Wegener, and Braverman (2004) induced participants to feel either sad or angry by reading hypothetical newspaper stories that elicited one of these emotions. Par- ticipants were then presented with one of two messages about raising taxes (not a popular mes- sage for many Americans). One message was sadness-framed, and emphasized how increasing taxes would help special-needs infants and the elderly. The other message was anger-framed, and emphasized how increasing taxes would keep criminals from getting off on legal technicalities and would prevent aggravating traffic jams. Sad people changed their attitudes more toward rais- ing taxes when presented with the sadness-framed message, whereas angry people changed their attitudes toward increasing taxes more in response to the anger-framed message.

Briñol, Petty, and Barden (2007) found that emotion can affect persuasion in a different way by influencing the confidence people have in their thoughts. Participants first read a strong or weak persuasive message. After listing their thoughts about it, they were induced to feel happy or sad. People who became happy reported more confidence in their thoughts than those who became sad. As compared with those who were made sad, for happy participants, the quality of the argument in the message had a greater effect on changes of attitudes.

Morality We began this chapter with Eadweard Muybridge, and how the damage to his orbitofrontal cortex altered his emotions and his ability to live a decent life. Emotions, when they function properly, act as guides to morality: to judgments about right and wrong, about character and virtue, which are bases of social life.

More prevalent in the past has been the view that moral judgment is guided by deliberative processes like cost–benefit analyses and considerations of rights and duties. Within this tradi- tion, moral philosophers have been skeptical about the place of emotion in moral judgment. For example, intuitively you might think that feelings of sympathy and compassion are important to moral judgment, but not in the eyes of the influential Immanuel Kant (1784), who argued that sympathy should not be relied on in judgments of right and wrong because it is subjective, blind, and unreliable as a guide to moral judgment across contexts.

Intuitions and Principles In 2001, Jonathan Haidt made a splash in psychology with an article entitled: “The emotional dog and its rational tail.” In it he argued that although morality is usually thought to derive from reasoning, really it derives from emotion-based intuitions. It occurs first by means of quick heuristic-appraisal processes, operations of what Stanovich (2004) and Kahneman (2011) call

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System 1 (a term we introduced earlier in this chapter). Only later are these followed by slower, deliberative secondary appraisals, of System 2, which (as we discussed in Chapter 6) may be fol- lowed by tertiary appraisal of discussion with others.

Haidt does not mention that a comparable proposal was made 500 years ago by Erasmus (1508), in his book Praise of Folly, in which we read how Folly stands up and gives a speech in praise of herself. It’s a foolish thing to do, particularly, as she points out, because she as a woman is already at a disadvantage. She says it’s common to see people in public speak from the pride of being superior, when everyone else is wrong, or from the emotional desire to be the center of attention. But, of course, these people don’t own up to such emotions. They think themselves to be guided only by reason, without any emotions. Folly suggests that they do this because “It’s confessed on all sides that the emotions are the province of folly. Indeed, this is the way we distinguish the wise man from the fool, that the one is governed by his reason, the other by his emotions.” She goes on to say that, really, “emotions not only serve as guides to those who press towards the gates of wisdom, they also act as spurs and incitements to the practice of every virtue.”

Novels and films: Decalogue 8

The Decalogue, written by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz and directed by Kieslowski, is a set of 10 films inspired by the Ten Commandments. The films are about the effects of human actions on other people. The filmmak- ers said they wanted to make films about situations that could be recognized universally but at the same time were out of the ordinary, in which the characters would face dif- ficult choices that could not be taken lightly.

In psychology, the dilemmas of ethical decision-making were studied by Kohlberg (1969). He constructed vignettes about which people could be asked questions. The most famous is about Heinz, whose wife is dying. A drug that might save her is being sold by the town druggist for 10 times its cost. Heinz has no money and cannot bor- row any. Kohlberg’s question was, “Should Heinz steal the drug?” He then traced, in the course of child and adolescent development, the choices people would make and the rea- sons they gave these choices to try and solve this problem.

Such vignettes have been convenient to study the devel- opment of ethical thinking, but enormously better for under- standing the emotions of ethical choice are novels, short stories, plays, and films. The Decalogue films were designed to put problems to us so that we could imagine ourselves into situations of ethical choice, and experience the social world in relation to our fears and our yearnings to do the right thing. One could imagine a psychology course on the emotions of morals and social actions in which, instead of using vignettes, each week, in class, students would watch one of these films and discuss it to understand themselves better in their doing of good and doing of harm to others.

Decalogue 8 is based on the Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” It’s about a professor of ethics who uses pieces of biography in exactly this way. It’s about Zofia (played by Maria Koscialkowska), a senior professor of ethics at Warsaw University. A researcher from New York, Elzbieta (Teresa Marczewska), comes to visit and is invited to sit in on one of Zofia’s classes. A class discussion begins and Elzbieta takes an opportunity to pose a problem, as follows. The time is 1943. The place is Warsaw, occupied by the Nazis. A fam- ily has said they will be godparents to a 6-year-old Jewish girl, so that she can be christened and adopted rather than sent to a Nazi concentration camp. But the woman who had volunteered to be the godmother said she had changed her mind. She said that her religion forbade the bearing of false witness.

It looks as if, in this decision, the woman condemned the 6-year-old to death. Was it right for her to change her mind after having made an undertaking? Did she refuse for the reason she gave?

In the story that Elzbieta tells, another family saved the 6-year-old, who grew up and moved to America. The young girl was Elzbieta, who became the researcher, from New York. Zofia, the professor, is the woman who had been expected to be her godmother. Why did Zofia refuse to adopt Elzbieta? Is there anything Zofia could now say that would satisfy Elzbieta, in this dramatic confrontation in the middle of a university class on ethics? The film is beautiful and emotionally moving. It puts the question in a way that engages us completely.

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It seems likely that it was Shakespeare’s reading of Praise of Folly which, in or about 1594, gave him the idea for his next two plays: A Midsummer-night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, whose emotional connection became the very emblem of Western love.

Haidt (2007) has suggested five emotion-based moral intuitions, or principles, which you can see in Table 10.1

These principles are based on social–moral intuitions (Haidt, 2001; McCullough et al., 2001) that prompt judgments (Horberg, Oveis, & Keltner, 2011). From this perspective, fast, automatic experiences of specific emotions provide intuitions of right and wrong, virtue, and punishment without elaborate calculation at the conscious level (Graham et al., 2013; Greene, 2015; Greene & Haidt, 2002; Haidt, 2003).

For the first principle of Table 10.1, emotions relate to harm and care. They include empa- thy, sympathy, and compassion, which derive from vulnerability. They motivate prosocial actions (Goetz, Simon-Thomas, & Keltner, 2010). These emotions likely arose during our evolution because of our mammalian heritage of taking care of offspring, and extending this care to others in families. Recent studies find that feelings of compassion lead people to see their common human- ity with others, and this encourages more prosocial behavior (Oveis, Horberg, & Keltner, 2010). People feeling compassion also are less punitive (Condon & DeSteno, 2011). Scientists such as Tania Singer and Mary Immordino-Yang are charting the regions of the brain that are activated by our response to harm and feelings of compassion (e.g., Immordino-Yang et al., 2009), which suggests, in keeping with Haidt’s thinking, that this intuition has neural correlates in the brain, likely shaped by evolution. Even infants have been found to have moral intuitions. Warneken and Tomasello (2009) observed 12-month-old children begin to comfort victims in distress, and 14-to-18-month-olds begin to help others in ways that were spontaneous and unrewarded.

Table 10.1 Moral principles and characteristics

Moral principle Characteristics

1. Harm and care People are vulnerable, and often need to be looked after

2. Fairness and justice People have rights to resources and fair treatment

3. Loyalty and patriotism People belong to an in-group, opposed to out-groups

4. Obedience and hierarchy People should behave as required by leaders or the law

5. Spiritual and bodily purity People should live in a sanctified rather than carnal way

FIGURE 10.4 The trolley problem for testing moral intuitions by means of vignettes, invented by Philippa Foot.

Among methods on harm and care is “trolleyology,” a paradigm invented by Philippa Foot (1967/1978) that involves giving people a vignette in which a trolley rolls out of control toward five people on the line who would be killed if the trolley were to hit them, see Figure 10.4. Par- ticipants are asked whether they would switch some points and divert the trolley onto another line so that it would hit only one person.

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Waldemann and Dieterich (2007) compared results using a vignette describing this scenario with one in which participants had to decide whether to push a very large person from a bridge onto the trolley line so that this person would be killed but would halt the trolley before it could kill five people on the line. Although they were willing to switch the points so that the trolley, an inanimate object, would be affected, participants’ intuitions made them reluctant to act directly on a person, by pushing in a way that condemned her or him to death, even if it were to result in saving the larger number of people. Greene et al. (2001) had people engage in moral dilem- mas, including trolley problems, while undergoing brain scanning using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They found that moral dilemmas varied systematically in the extent to which they engaged brain areas involved in emotional processing, and that these variations in emotional engagement were associated with moral judgments, a finding in keeping with Haidt’s formulation of the emotional nature of moral judgment.

For the second principle in Table 10.1, emotions relate to fairness and justice. We are exqui- sitely sensitive to who deserves what and to cheaters. Many emotions here involve condemnation of others in anger, disgust, and contempt, when they are seen to do immoral actions that lead to unfairness or harm to others (Lerner, Goldberg, & Tetlock, 1998; Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011). When we receive fair offers in the ultimatum game described earlier, brain regions involved in the processing of rewards are activated (Tabibnia, Satpute, & Lieberman, 2008). Buckholz et al. (2008) found in fMRI scans that activity in brain regions that included the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex predicted the size of punishment that participants deemed appropriate for vari- ous crimes.

For the third principle, moral intuitions engage emotions of the dynamics of in-groups and out-groups, such as group pride, which we discussed in Chapter 9 (see also Fourie et al., 2017).

The fourth principle is of status in hierarchies. It involves obedience, deference to leaders, and loyalty. It reaches back into our primate ancestry, where, as researchers like Goodall (1986) have shown, each community of chimpanzees is arranged in hierarchies, in which there is an alpha individual to whom others defer, and in which others know their places (see also Lindebaum et al., 2017). As you learned in Chapter 9, several emotions, such as admiration, contempt, envy, and anger, serve to situate individuals within different positions of rank within hierarchies (Park et al., 2013).

The fifth principle, spiritual and bodily purity, often involves the emotion of disgust. The principle is important in many societies and involves moral judgments of the purity or impurity of others’ actions (Horberg, Oveis, & Keltner, 2009; Schnall, 2011).

In some societies, just one of these may predominate. In others, there are several. In political parties of Europe and North America that are liberal, Principles 1 and 2 predominate, whereas in some conservative political parties all five are important. If you enter the medical profession, you may be drawn to the first principle. If you are a lawyer or civil servant, you may be drawn to the second. If you join the military or the police, Principles 3 and 4 may feel right for you. If you enter a convent or monastery, Principles 4 and 5 are likely to be important. As Haidt (2013) says, moral intuitions bind people together emotionally, but they can also blind people in their understanding of others.

Cooperation As we explained in Chapter 2, on evolution, members of Michael Tomasello’s research group compared human infants aged two-and-a-half years with chimpanzees and baboons of any age (Herrmann et al., 2007). They found that although humans and chimpanzees were about equal in doing physical tasks such as seeing where a reward was hidden or using tools to retrieve rewards, in social tasks such as seeing that a person was trying to perform a task that couldn’t be

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completed and, then, empathetically helping the person complete the task, the human children were far better. They were generally able to do such tasks, whereas chimpanzees and baboons could not really do them at all.

As we explained, too, Tomasello (2014, 2016) has gone on to show that what is perhaps the most distinctive and deepest trait of humans as a species is our ability to cooperate, and that it arose in two stages: shared intentionality and collective intentionality. In shared intentionality, people construct and enact plans with “we” goals rather than just “I” goals. In collective inten- tionality, people act together in groups, and this is how cultures and morality are formed. In this mode, each person must do what is right, avoid doing what is wrong, play her or his part, take no more than a fair share, not cheat, and so on.

In shared intentionality, emotions of love and friendliness are critical, with anger tending to occur when we think someone did not do what they promised, or what was expected in a plan that had been jointly arranged (Larocque & Oatley, 2006). In collective intentionality, the moral emo- tions arise. These can be directed against oneself in a critical way: shame, embarrassment, and guilt, when we have violated moral codes (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 1994; Keltner & Anderson, 2000; Keltner & Buswell, 1997; Tangney et al., 1996). They can be directed at others, in anger and contempt when others don’t do what they are supposed to. Haidt has described, too, a set of other-praising emotions: gratitude and “elevation” or awe that signal our approval of others’ moral virtues (Haidt, 2003; Keltner & Haidt, 2003).

Emotions and the Law Emotions and the law is a newly emerging field to which philosophers (Nussbaum, 2004), psy- chologists (Finkel & Parrott, 2006), and lawyers (Maroney, 2006, 2016) have contributed.

Obligations of Society Terry Maroney’s (2006) thoughtful article is a good place to start because, as she points out, dif- ferent emotions are closely linked to different kinds of law.

Criminal law reflects theories of fear, grief, and remorse; family law seeks (ideally) to facilitate love and attachment; tort law measures emotional suffering; litigants seek emotional satisfaction by invoking legal mechanisms; legal decision makers may have strong feelings about parties in their cases (p. 120).

Some laws decree that we should do actions like stopping at a red light. Others decree that we should not do actions like assaulting people who have not harmed us. We generally regard such laws as good for most people. But there is another side to the law: coercion by fear of punish- ment, which can involve police, courts, fines, and imprisonment.

Laws are distillations of moral attitudes and emotions. Based on the emotional–moral intuition of avoiding harm to others, discussed in the previous section, people feel it’s right for those who behave badly to be punished. In some societies, impulses to harm others are regulated by fear of revenge. This kind of regulation is seen in ancient literatures, for instance, in medieval Icelandic sagas (Miller, 2006). From Germanic and English law comes the tradi- tion that angry vengeance should not be enacted by individuals because feuds are destructive to society and can continue indefinitely, so special officers of the state should take over the function of apprehending and punishing criminals. In societies of this kind, as H.L.A. Hart

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(1961) has explained, law takes place in two phases. In the first, legislators work together to distill emotion-based attitudes about morality (typically one of the principles of morality seen in Table 10.1) in their society, and enact them into law. In the second, an elaborate and expensive apparatus of police, courts, and lawyers is put in place to discover law-breakers and punish them.

Both these phases draw on emotion-based intuitions. For instance, people tend to like and approve those who behave well and to dislike and feel anger, disgust, or contempt toward those who behave badly. One may see this in fiction. Zillmann (2000) has proposed disposition theory, according to which we are disposed to like fictional characters who behave well and to dislike those who behave badly (see also Weber, Tamborini, Lee, & Stipp, 2008). Zillmann says that each person who engages with fiction is “a moral monitor who applauds or condemns the inten- tions and actions of characters” (p. 38). When a good character achieves retribution for a wrong, or when a bad character is punished, people are sensitive to the level of revenge or punishment that occurs. We enjoy stories more when this seems appropriate. There is even a name for this: poetic justice.

Watch a television show that includes courtroom scenes, like Law and Order, and reflect on your likes, dislikes, and emotions in relation to criminals and their apprehension. Watch how the detectives in the show use a method used by actual police in the United States, called the Reid technique: first they assume guilt and verbally attack a suspect based on this assumption, then they detain the suspect to increase anxiety, then they confront the suspect with evidence of guilt (which may be fabricated), and finally they try to gain the suspect’s trust by saying they understand (Gudjonsson & Pearce, 2011). How would you fare if subjected to this? It’s a technique with a rate of false confessions that is higher than had been thought.

Politicians often say they will be tough on crime. This means that they will increase punish- ments, and they do. This can resonate with voters because our emotional-intuitive sense is that punishments should be visited on people who do immoral things. Although being tough is sup- posed to decrease crime, what politicians don’t tell us is that the strong weight of evidence is that harsher judicial penalties do not diminish crime (Webster & Doob, 2011). A likelier route to decreasing crime would be to increase the certainty that crimes will be detected (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011), but this is more difficult to arrange.

The basic appeal of fictional mysteries and detective stories isn’t so much in following a trail of clues, although this is enjoyable. It’s the sense that seriously bad behavior, like murder or rape, causes a breach in the fabric of society, and that identification and punishment of criminals might repair the breach so that we can all go on living with each other. Similar emotions are projected into the larger world when international crimes are committed, as occurred, for instance, in the angry American response to the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 (Hogan, 2009).

And what about newspapers? Open any one and stories you see are likely to include: “Here’s what a certain person did. It’s criminal.” And, “See how those people live, over there, in that other country? It’s terrible.” And, “Look at this leader or that one. See what they say and what they do. It’s appalling.” And, of course, the writer of the article, and its readers, know better.

Dispassionate Judgments? Here’s a paradox. Although the roots of law and its enforcement could scarcely be more emo- tional, the traditional attitude in law is that apprehension and punishment of perpetrators should be “dispassionate,” that prosecutors and defending lawyers should set aside their feelings, but also that emotionally they should defer to judges (Bergman Blix & Wettergren, 2016).

Maroney (2011) has described how, in nominating a new member of the U.S. Supreme Court, President Obama said he wanted to nominate someone with empathy, and listed among the

275Summary

qualifications of his nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a sense of compassion. But Sotomayor knew the right thing to say at her hearings:

“Judges can’t rely on what’s in their heart[s],” she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, because “[i]t’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it’s the law”

(Maroney, p. 639).

Maroney discusses how Obama’s proposal that empathy and compassion are important for a Supreme Court Judge was criticized by some, with sneers such as “touchy-feely.” If people under- stood how emotions can inform judgment and mediate relationships, such sneering might decrease.

A further area in which emotions enter processes of law is in the deliberations of jurors. Reid Hastie (2001) has written that emotional reactions of jurors in criminal trials include:

... reactions to events that led to the trial, primarily anger; reactions to participants involved in the trial, primarily anger, sympathy and fear; and reactions to evidentiary exhibits, primarily disgust and horror (p. 1007).

A cogent account of the psychology of jurors as they listen to cases in criminal courts is by Pennington and Hastie (1988), who observe that, in each case, jurors construct a story as a causal explanation of what happened and that, rather than basing their reasoning on some form of logic (such as Bayesian logic, as an alternative theory holds), they decide on the basis of this emotion- based story. In fact, two stories are typically offered in court, one by the prosecution and one by the defense. As Hastie (2008) has argued, jurors are generally willing to convict if the prosecu- tion’s story has no large holes and no large pieces of counterevidence. But in the end, jurors have to construct their own version of the story. This version allows some inferences and prevents other inferences. Unlike the stories offered by prosecution and defense, which both end with a question mark, the story offered by the jury reaches a conclusion: guilty or not guilty.

Emotions that jurors feel as they listen to evidence change priorities because, as with any story, people have their own feelings as they construct their version (Oatley, 2011). Anger tends to make the constructed story aggressive and end in punishment. Anger has been found to lead people to blame others for actions, whereas sadness leads people to attribute events to imper- sonal, situational causes (Feigeson, Park, & Salovey, 2001; Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993; Lerner, Goldberg, & Tetlock, 1998; Quigley & Tedeschi, 1996). Empathy and compassion are likely to make the constructed story protective and to focus on restitution.

Among jurors, Hastie describes emotions of feeling satisfied after a trial that one has played one’s part in punishing someone who was guilty or in freeing someone wrongly accused. There may also be feelings of regret and sadness at rendering a guilty verdict against a sympathetic person. We don’t suggest that jurors should engage in some activity other than story-construction, but rather that justice may be better served by understanding more deeply how we make judg- ments that can convict people of crimes, or free them.

S U M M A R Y

Emotions are usually rational in relation to particular concerns. This is called local rationality. We’ve described how emotions can guide thinking to enable people to respond to immediacies of the environment when perfect, global, rationality is impossible, for instance, because of insufficient knowledge. This view is in keep- ing with a central premise of this book: that although emotions are by no means infallible, they generally serve important social functions. Theoretical perspectives offer explanations of how emo- tions can affect cognition: they can infuse into thinking, they can

be informative, and they can lead to different styles of reasoning. Evidence was offered that emotions affect people’s perceptions of events and also affect attention. In terms of memory, people tend to recall emotionally salient events and current emotions can bias what is recalled from the past. Moral intuitions are now understood as being affected by emotions, which can guide judgments of right and wrong in the social world, and we discuss how this connection between emotions and morality extends to the law and administra- tion of justice.

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T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. When does an emotion or mood affect your decision-making? Does this effect make sense to you, or are there aspects you would like to change? Consider the same questions in relation someone close to you: a parent or sibling or a boyfriend or girlfriend.

2. Think about how anxiety, or anger, or happiness affects your recall of past memories. What, for you, is the principal effect here? How does it work for you?

3. Think about some social arrangement with which you are familiar, perhaps the family, perhaps a work setting. How is emotion related to what gets said and decided in this setting?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

Perhaps the most important philosopher of emotions in recent times, and an engaging teacher, has been Robert Solomon. He died in 2007, but the book he wrote before that is a fine introduction to his work and to the relation of emotions and thinking:

Solomon, R. C. (2007). True to our feelings: What our emotions are really telling us. New York: Oxford University Press.

A useful introduction to the way in which emotions affect thinking:

Clore, G. L., & Huntsinger, J. R. (2007). How emotions inform judgments and regulate thought. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 393–399.

A good review of the relation of emotion to memory:

Kensinger, E., & Schachter, D. (2016). Memory and emotion. In L. F. Barrett, M. Lewis & J. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of emotions, fourth edition (pp. 564–598). New York: Guilford.

A provocative statement of the role of emotion in moral judgment:

Jonathan Haidt (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814–34.

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PART IV Emotions and the Individual

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11Individual Differences in Emotionality

A child forsaken, waking suddenly, Whose gaze afeared on all things round doth rove And seeth only that it cannot see The meeting eyes of love.

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CONTENTS Emotionality Over the Life Span

Continuities in Emotionality from Childhood to Adulthood From Temperament to Personality Individual Differences in Emotion Shape How We Construe the World Age-Related Changes in Temperament and Personality Propensities in Emotionality That Shape the Relational Environment Emotionality Moderates Environmental Risk

Attachment and Emotionality What Is Attachment? Attachment Status and Emotional Outcomes Parental Sensitivity and Shared Thinking From Parent Attachment to Child Attachment The Role of Environmental Risk in Children’s Attachment Relationships Genetic Influences on Attachment

Parental Behaviors Beyond Attachment Biobehavioral Synchronization Parental Mentalization and Reflective Capacity Talk About Emotions Parental Socialization of Emotion

Beyond Parenting: Influences of Siblings, Peers, and the Broader Social Context

Siblings Peers Broader Social Context

Programs That Optimize Emotional Development Summary To Think About and Discuss Further Reading

This chapter was written with Heather Prime and Alessandra Schneider.

IndIvIdual dIfferences In emotIonalIty280

In this chapter, we think about the propensities of emotion that are at the core of personality. Some of us are easily angered while others remain calm; some are excitable and enthusiastic while others are shy. Elements of personality start in childhood, when they are referred to as temperament (see Chapter 8) and carry on into old age, influencing how our lives are lived. How do these styles of personality develop? In Chapter 8, we considered the biological influences on temperament and personality. There are also influences on temperament and personality from the contexts in which we live, our relationships, opportunities, communities, and schools. This chapter deals with how individual differences in emotionality come to be and how they affect us over the life course.

FIGURE 11.1 Outcome (means) of degree of inhibition, time until first relationship, and time until first full-time job of 23-year-olds who were inhibited or not inhibited at age four to six (Asendorpf et al., 2008).

Emotionality Over the Life Span Continuities in Emotionality from Childhood to Adulthood In Chapter 8, we talked about the neurobiologically based individual differences that were evi- dent very early in childhood. What happens to these individual differences as children mature? Are children who are angry and impulsive in childhood more likely to show emotional difficulties as adults? Are inhibited, fearful children likely to develop into deferential, timid adults? A sample of over 1,000 children in New Zealand was originally tested at three years old and the children were then followed into their mid-twenties (Caspi et al., 2003). Caspi and colleagues found that the temperament of children at three years old did explain personality traits over 20 years later. Children who were impulsive, restless, and easily distracted grew up to score the highest on the trait of negative emotionality and were described by their informants as disagreeable, tense, and anxious. Inhibited children (those who were socially reticent and fearful), on the other hand, showed the highest levels of constraint as adults and demonstrated low levels of a positive emo- tionality. Confident children grew up to be the most disinhibited (low constraint), had the highest scores on the Positive Emotionality factor (e.g., emotions such as happy, joyful, excitable), and had other people describe them as extraverted.

Emotionality Over the Life Span 281

Emotionally rich personality traits then show continuities over time; who we are as children remains with us as we age. Personality traits also affect how our lives play out, which one would expect given how immediately our emotional tendencies influence our patterns of thought and social interactions. Asendorpf and colleagues (Asendorpf, Denissen, & van Aken, 2008) fol- lowed German children from ages four to six years old until they were 23 (see Figure 11.1). They compared the 15% most inhibited children with controls who were below average in preschool inhibition. Their results demonstrated that the inhibited children were more likely to be rated by their parents as inhibited as young adults, to be delayed in entering their first stable relationship and finding their first full-time job. They also looked at the 15% most aggressive children and how they fared into early adulthood. As young adults they continued to be aggressive and showed low levels of agreeableness, conscientious, and openness. They were also likely to be educational and occupational underachievers. It is clear from these studies that the temperaments of shy- inhibited and aggressive children do play out in different ways over the life course.

The personality traits that are associated with successful trajectories, even in the presence of significant adversities in life, are captured by some of the so-called Big Five model of personality traits: high Openness to experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, along with low Neu- roticism (Shiner & Masten, 2012). High Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and low Neuroticism have been described as an overarching meta-trait of Stability, which has been found to be important for adaptive functioning across social, emotional, and motivational domains (DeYoung, 2006).

Positive emotionality has a long and significant reach across our lives. Harker and Keltner (2001) rated the intensity of women’s smiles in their college yearbook photos and looked at how these ratings related to their well-being over the next 30 years. The intensity of the yearbook smile was related positively to well-being and competence and negatively to negative emotionality in middle age (see Table 11.1).

Table 11.1 Positive emotionality, as assessed in the magnitude of the smile shown in a photograph at age 20, predicts adult personality, relationship satisfaction, and personal well-being over the next 30 years

Measure Positive emotionality

Negative emotionality Age 52 −.27**

Affiliation Age 52 .14

Competence Age 52 .29**

Well-being Age 52 .28**

Marital well-being Age 52 .20*

Note: **= p < .01, *= p < .05.

Source: Harker & Keltner, 2001.

Interestingly, yearbook smiles also related to relationships. Women who displayed more positive emotion in their yearbook pictures were more likely to have satisfying marriages 30 years later. In the same way that we saw that emotional characteristics from early in childhood, such as shyness and anger, predicted ways of being in adult life, we see the same from late adolescence to middle age. Emotions matter to the ways that we construct our lives. Positive emotionality is not only a trait that influences life satisfaction. It is also associated with mortality rates. Carstensen et al. (2011) studied the emotions of participants between 20 and 90 years old (mean age around 55 years old), asking participants to report on their positive emotions five separate times per day for one week. Participants were then followed for 13 years to understand the role of emotions in life expectancy. The more posi- tive emotions a person reported, the better their survival 13 years later (see Figure 11.2).

IndIvIdual dIfferences In emotIonalIty282

Let us take a moment to reflect on the degree of continuity that we see from childhood to adulthood in these longitudinal studies. The degree of prediction is significant but not strong. (Remember that a correlation of 0.3 explains 9% of the variance in adult personality.) This means that a lot changes from childhood to adulthood, in our experiences, or circumstances, and, ulti- mately, in our personalities. Lives are filled with so many dynamic and changing relationships, experiences, chance encounters, unexpected opportunities, disappointments, and tragedies that one might assume that our emotional tendencies would not show any continuity whatsoever. But as we have seen, this is not the case. There are core aspects of ourselves that persist. We can think about these early emotional styles as forming a kind of outline of who we might become.

From Temperament to Personality How do we translate conceptions of childhood temperament (e.g., shyness, confidence) to measurements of personality for adults? In adulthood, the Big Five model of personality (John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008; McCrae & Costa, 2008) has come to be a widely used framework for this kind of conceptual endeavor. Let’s explain these traits a bit more. Neuroticism involves the emotional tendencies of anxiety, hostility, and depression. Extraversion is defined by warmth, gregariousness, tendencies to experience and express positive emotions, such as joy, enthusi- asm, and excitement (Shiota, Keltner, & John, 2006). Agreeableness includes trust, altruism, and compliance and is associated with emotions such as sympathy, love, and gratitude (Shiota et al., 2006). Conscientiousness includes achievement striving, self-discipline, and dutifulness. Openness is attraction to fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, ideas and is uniquely associated with awe (Shiota et al., 2006). Among these, Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness are all straight- forwardly emotional. Conscientiousness and Openness also involve emotions, but perhaps less obviously.

There is much overlap between the Big Five and those dimensions of temperament assessed in children. Soto and John (2014) proposed a model of personality applicable to children and youth, which derives from the advances that led to the Big Five. This has been called the Little Six. They proposed six dimensions that lie at the heart of childhood and adolescent personality: extraver- sion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and activity (Soto & Tackett, 2015). The idea is that activity in childhood is characterized by physical energy and motor activity, which shifts to include psychological aspects (e.g., motivation, competition) in adolescence, and disintegrates by late adolescence/early adulthood as a result of being captured by other dimensions (i.e., extraversion and conscientiousness; Soto & Tackett, 2015).

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Emotionality Over the Life Span 283

Thus far, we have considered how childhood temperament and personality are stable, or similar over time. Let’s now consider the complementary possibility—Does personality change and what are the events that might precipitate changes in personality? Positive turning points, that change expected trajectories, have been described. These are of several kinds. Macro social changes in context have been shown to change trajectories of antisocial behavior and socioeconomic sta- tus. Thus, Sampson and Laub (1996) studied the impact of military service in World War II for disadvantaged men, some of whom were delinquent prior to the war and some of whom were not. Military service varied in terms of the extent to which the men experienced overseas duty, in-service training, and G.I. Bill training. Exposure to these opportunities was associated with positive socioemotional outcomes and also good economic outcomes. This was especially true for men who were delinquent before military service. Their experiences in the military helped to turn their lives around, with more economic opportunity and more positive emotional function- ing. Glenn Elder (1986) showed a very similar effect for military service in World War I. For many men, their service was positively transformational. Part of the transformation related to the strength of the friendships that they formed with other people in the military, alongside negative effects of combat exposure (Soloman, 2013).

Negative life events also change personality. Shiner, Allen, and Masten (2017) followed indi- viduals from 10 to 30 years old. A distinction was made between independent and dependent negative life events (the extent to which individuals might have influenced the occurrence of the event). Independent events included occurrences such as the death of a close other or physical health problems; dependent events included school suspensions, break ups, and grade failure. They found that both dependent and independent events predicted an increase in neuroticism from age 10 to age 30. Conscientiousness and agreeableness decreased as a function of depend- ent events. It may be that those negative events, to which we contribute, with the accompanying emotions of shame and guilt, fundamentally change how we experience ourselves.

Individual Differences in Emotion Shape How We Construe the World In Chapter 8, we considered how certain temperamental characteristics such as behavioral inhibi- tion and disinhibition are associated with specific appraisal biases. We see the same pattern for adult personality.

Neuroticism is associated with a negative bias in perceiving, processing, and recalling infor- mation (Ormel et al., 2013). In contrast, Extraversion involves a bias toward making positive appraisals (Lucas & Baird, 2004). Individuals who score higher in Neuroticism also react more strongly to negative events, whereas individuals high in Extraversion react more strongly to posi- tive events (Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991). Personality is also associated with emotion regulation (Gross, 2008). Individuals high in Neuroticism demonstrate relatively poor coping strategies, which is associated with neuroimaging findings indicating dysregulated amygdala functioning during emotion regulation (Ormel et al., 2013).

An empirical example will highlight how this plays out. When 152 undergraduates were given a stressor task (i.e., a vocal mental mathematical task), individuals who were high in Neu- roticism interpreted the task as more threatening and were less emotionally stable. In contrast, individuals who were high in Extraversion and Openness responded to the task with more posi- tive affect and less negative affect. In turn, individuals characterized as higher in Neuroticism had weaker performance on the task as a result of their threat appraisals (Schneider, Rench, Lyons, & Riffle, 2012).

The relationship between Extraversion and positive affect is so strong that some research- ers claim that positive emotionality forms the core of the personality dimension of Extraver- sion (Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, & Shao, 2000). Interestingly, when you tease apart positive

IndIvIdual dIfferences In emotIonalIty284

emotionality into components such as joy, contentment, pride, love, compassion, amusement, and awe, it’s the components of joy, pride, and contentment that are most strongly related to Extraversion (Shiota et al., 2006). In a more recent study, Extraversion was associated with feel- ings that were both positively valenced and positively activated (i.e., energetic), rather than sim- ply pleasant feelings regardless of activation (Smillie, DeYoung, & Hall, 2015)

Several studies have shown that emotional dispositions to anxiety and to aggression shape how adults perceive emotional facial expressions (Dimberg & Thunberg, 2007; Hall, 2006; Rubino et al., 2007; Van Honk, Tuiten, de Haan, vann de Hout, & Stam, 2001). Biases in percep- tion of emotional faces were demonstrated in adolescents and young adults not only for anxiety and aggressiveness but also for other personality traits (Knyazev, Bocharov, Slobodskaya, & Ryabichenko, 2008). Specifically, when asked to rate “happy,” “neutral,” or “angry” faces in terms of their friendliness or hostility, Knyazev et al. (2008) found that anxious adults showed a tendency to perceive facial expressions as more hostile (see Figure 11.3).

In this same study, high Agreeableness and high Conscientiousness predisposed individuals to perceiving all faces as friendlier, while extraverts were sensitive to positive facial expressions only and rated “happy” faces as friendlier. Speed et  al. (2015) also showed that extraversion was linked to the processing of positive emotions. Using event-related potential (see Chapter 8) analysis, they showed that extraverts show high levels of sustained attention to positive stimuli. Thus, extraverts pay particular attention to positive emotional stimuli.

Age-Related Changes in Temperament and Personality What do we know about how emotions change over development? The intensity of both positive and negative emotions, based on parent and teacher ratings, as well as the degree of emotional expressivity in general, decreases across the elementary school years (Sallquist et al., 2009).

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Emotionality Over the Life Span 285

As children enter adolescence, their positive mood drops (Larson, Moneta, Richards, & Wilson, 2002), and this reduction in positive emotional experience continues through adolescence, to the chagrin of adolescents and their parents. As one illustration of this trend, Weinstein and colleagues (Weinstein, Mermelstein, Hankin, Hedeker, & Flay, 2007) used the experience sam- pling method to examine changes in adolescent mood between Grade 8 to Grade 11. At each wave, adolescents carried a computer for seven days and were prompted five to seven times per day to report on their positive and negative mood. Overall, positive mood was found to decrease over time; the normative decline in adolescent mood was attributable to declines in positive mood as opposed to increases in negative mood.

As youth shift from adolescence to early adulthood, studies find changes in personality traits: females tend to become more conscientious, males become more open, and members of both genders tend to show more agreeableness, which is in line with the maturity principle (Borghuis et  al., 2017). Adolescence, though, is also marked by dips in personality maturity, deemed the disruption hypothesis (Soto & Tackett, 2015), wherein adolescents show dips in conscien- tiousness, openness, and emotional stability (Denissen, Aken, Penke, & Wood, 2013). As people mature into adulthood and beyond, people tend to decrease in Neuroticism and increase in Con- scientiousness over time, a pattern of change that is most strongly the case in young adulthood— age 20 to 40—but can continue into middle and old age (Roberts & Mroczek, 2008).

As people undergo the transition through their early adulthood to old age, they tend to become less sociable (particularly in young adulthood and again in old age) and imagina- tive, more responsible and orderly, more fair and less self-entitled, more comfortable with themselves (with a decline in old age), and less inclined to moodiness and negative emotions (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005; Milojez & Sibley, 2017; Orth, Trzesniewski, & Robins, 2010). Further, individual differences in personality become increasingly stable from infancy until about age 30, which is primarily associated with the increasing stability of life experiences such as employment and partner relationships (Briley & Tucker-Drob, 2014). Of course, these are simply normative trajectories in life-span development. Variations in the rates and amounts of change people undergo still occur (Borghuis et  al., 2017; Mroczek, Almeida, Spiro, & Pafford, 2006).

Propensities in Emotionality That Shape the Relational Environment We have seen how early styles of emotionality, whether a child is tense and shy or hostile, predict a similar emotional style when that child is much older. There is another way, however, in which our earlier emotionality influences our later personality, and this relates to how we choose con- texts for ourselves and what we elicit from the people in our contexts. This has been called gene– environment correlation (rGE) (Knafo & Jaffee, 2013; Plomin, DeFries, & Loehlin, 1977). There are two types of gene–environment correlations relevant to how our emotions shape our environments. The first is active rGE. This refers to how our genetically influenced traits lead us actively to create environments for ourselves. Thus, our emotional style may lead us to befriend particular peers (e.g., peers who are introspective and shy or outgoing and excitement-seeking). For instance, Van Ryzin and Dishion (2013) found that adolescents who are oppositional and delinquent are likely to befriend oppositional, deviant friends and partners on Facebook, whereas individuals who are high in Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Extraversion are more likely to have friends of the same characteristics (Noë, Whitaker, & Allen, 2016).

The second kind of gene–environment correlation is evocative rGE, in which partially herit- able traits evoke unique responses from social partners. To take one example, within families, parents can be differentially irritated or delighted by their different children, and this differential

IndIvIdual dIfferences In emotIonalIty286

parenting is explained, in part, by emotional differences between children (Avinun & Knafo, 2014; Jenkins, McGowan, & Knafo-Noam, 2016). Both types of gene–environment correlations influence later personality development. Thus, choosing to hang out with deviant peers increases the child’s own deviance (Lansford, Dodge, Fontaine, Bates, & Pettit, 2014;). When parents respond with anger to this temperamental characteristic in their children, they increase the like- lihood that their children will become even more oppositional and angry (Hayden et al., 2013; Plamondon, Browne, Madigan, & Jenkins, 2017; Tuvblad, Bezdjian, Raine, & Baker, 2013). Thus, our genetically based emotional propensities actively influence the relational environ- ments that shape our lives and the reactions that we elicit from our family and friends.

Does angry and oppositional behavior elicit negative reactions from everyone in the fam- ily, not just parents? The social relations model developed by David Kenny and colleagues (Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006) provides a conceptual framework for answering this important question. This model requires that researches observe an individual interacting with several other people, thus allowing the determination of the extent to which the emotions that they direct to others (called actor effects) and the emotions that they receive or elicit from others (called part- ner effects) show characteristic patterns for the individual. In a study of 680 families, Rasbash, Jenkins, O’Connor, Tackett, and Reiss (2011) observed the emotionally based interactions of all dyads in the family. They found that certain individuals (both children and parents) did evoke negativity (anger, irritation, opposition) from everyone and that this partner effect accounted for 9% of the overall variance in negativity. At least within families, and we would suggest in friend- ship groups, neighborhoods, and at work, some people are emotionally challenging for those with whom they interact, consistently eliciting negative reactions from others.

In summary, not only do our personalities influence whom we befriend, but they also influ- ence the ways that people react to us, thus setting in motion patterns of development and change. Thus, for each of us, emotion-based aspects of our personality build a path from childhood to adulthood (Caspi et al., 2005; Roberts, Wood, & Caspi, 2008), shaping all manner of relation- ships, from the romantic to those at work (Li, Fay, Frese, Harms, & Gao, 2014; Mund, Finn, Hagemeyer, & Neyer, 2016).

Emotionality Moderates Environmental Risk Temperament shapes development in another profound way: it shapes our reactions to events in our lives. Thus, our temperament influences how we respond to the problematic test at school, dealing with the difficult colleague at work, or a romantic breakup. Early in development some children are more susceptible to challenging or bad things that happen to them because of their temperaments (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van Ijzendoorn, 2015; Belsky & Pluess, 2009). These emotionally/physiologically reactive children have been referred to as “orchids”; (orchids are hard to grow, requiring just the right amount of water to thrive), while children who are less reactive have been referred to as “dandelions” (dandelions can grow in any environment). We illustrate this idea with a finding from a study by Kochanska, Aksan, and Joy (2007).

Figure 11.4 shows the effect of fathers’ power assertion (harsh caregiving) on children’s com- pliance among two groups of children: those with low fear (dandelions) and those with high fear (orchids). For the dandelions, the level of their fathers’ power assertion was irrelevant to their compliance. For the orchids, however, the more the fathers showed power assertion, the more the children were noncompliant; they reacted with resistance. It is important to notice how well the orchids did when the dad’s power assertion was low. The observation that orchids do bet- ter than dandelions in optimal environments is an important aspect of differential susceptibility theory (Roisman et al., 2012).

Negative emotionality and emotion dysregulation do make it harder for individuals to deal with less-than-optimal environments. In a meta-analysis of longitudinal and experimental data,

Attachment and Emotionality 287

it has been found that infants scoring high on negative emotionality (i.e., a tendency to be eas- ily distressed) were more vulnerable to parental hostility and negative control (Slagt, Dubas, Dekovic, & van Aken, 2016). Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) has also been found to be a physiological marker of emotion regulation (Scrimgeour, Davis, & Buss, 2016) and to indicate differential vulnerability to environmental stresses (El-Sheikh & Hinnant, 2011).

It is, of course, not only the temperament that we are born with that influences personality development. Next, we outline the ways in which many different experiences with caregivers, friends, and teachers shape our personalities.

Attachment and Emotionality What Is Attachment? In keeping with the central focus on the social context of emotion, as we turn to thinking about the impact of relationships on children’s developing emotionality, we begin with the notion of attachment. In Chapters 8 and 9, we talked about the centrality of emotion for the forma- tion and negotiation of relationships, including different attachments within families. Through shared thinking and cooperation, humans accomplish collectively what could not be accom- plished individually (Tomasello, 2009, 2014). This entry into the community of shared thought is achieved through attachment relationships. In Chapter 8 we showed, as well, how maturation in emotion expression, recognition, and regulation provide the building blocks for shared thinking and cooperation. Now we consider the relational experiences that children need to effectively operate in this space between people. Attachment relationships are central.

John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory (1969/1982), detailed how attachment is a biobehavioral system that evolved for the protection of the young, a defining challenge in the evolution of our species. He argued for an evolutionarily-based, safety-regulating system in which the parent is the child’s haven of safety. Attachment behaviors are activated in the pres- ence of threats to the child, which, in turn, keep the child in close proximity to caregivers in the first few years. Through experiences with the caregiver in moments of danger, illness, and distress, infants construct a model of the caregiver as a protector and buffer, allowing them to

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FIGURE 11.4 The relationship between father power assertion (harshness) and children’s opposi- tional behavior as a function of orchids and dandelions (Adapted from Kochanska, Aksan & Joy, 2007).

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use the protector as a secure base and explore the world. Mary Ainsworth worked with Bowlby and made further observations in Uganda and in the United States (Ainsworth, 1967; Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978).

A sensitive mother was described by Ainsworth as “alert to perceive her baby’s signals, inter- prets them accurately, and responds appropriately and promptly . . . temporally contingent upon the baby’s signals” (Ainsworth et al., 1978, p. 142). With her colleagues, Ainsworth developed the Strange Situation Test, in which an infant is first with her or his mother in a room that is strange to the child. Also in the room is someone the infant doesn’t know. At a set point the mother leaves the room and later returns. Ainsworth and Bell (1970) found that in this situation babies in their second year respond to the mother’s absence, in the presence of a stranger, in different ways. Three different styles of attachment were found in these observations: Secure, Anxious, and Resistant (Ainsworth et al., 1978).

Securely attached infants have experienced sensitive and consistent caregiving, which allows them to learn to expect parental availability in the face of stress. Avoidant attachment, in con- trast, is associated with a consistently insensitive caregiving style. Infants adaptively respond to this environment by minimizing signs of distress in the face of stress, as they have learned their emotions will be ignored or rejected. Resistant (sometimes called Ambivalent) attachment is thought to develop in the context of inconsistent caregiver sensitivity, wherein infants maximize their expression of distress in order to obtain a response from their parents. A fourth pattern of responding was subsequently added, called the Disorganized style (Main & Solomon, 1986), which is thought to develop in the context of a chaotic and/or frightening caregiving environ- ment. Such children lack a developed means to regulate painful emotions in the face of attach- ment distress. These attachment styles and their relationship to parenting vary across cultures, suggesting that although attachment is a human universal, the relation of styles to parenting pat- terns falls short of a human universal (Cheung & Elliott, 2016; Mesman et al., 2017; Mesman, van IJzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2012).

Attachment Status and Emotional Outcomes Why is attachment security important? A series of recent meta-analytic studies yielded find- ings of significant associations between early attachment security and children’s socioemo- tional development (Groh, Fearon, van IJzendoorn, Bakermans-Franenburg, & Roisman, 2017). Attachment security is most strongly associated with social competence and externalizing behav- iors (anger, aggression, hyperactivity) in children. It is less strongly associated with children’s internalizing problems (depression and anxiety) and their temperaments. There is evidence that such effects can be cascading. For instance, Simpson and colleagues (2007) found attachment security in infancy was related to peer competence in early elementary school, which, in turn, influenced friendship security in adolescence, and ultimately collaboration in romantic relation- ships in adulthood. These findings reflect the importance of early attachment to interpersonal relations across the life course.

Further, secure attachment relationships are important for children’s understanding, regu- lation, and expression of emotions (Cassidy, 1994; Cooke, Stuart-Parrigon, Movahed-Abtahi, Koehn, & Kerns, 2016). In a seminal study, Spangler and Grossmann (1993) found that Avoidant babies showed fewer facial and vocal displays of emotion in the Strange Situation Test than did Secure babies. During this test, though, the Avoidant babies had similar heart rates as the Secure babies and had higher cortisol levels after. This suggests that despite less overt, visible distress, Avoidant children may nevertheless experience physiological arousal. In essence, their Avoidant behavior is not completely effective as a coping strategy (Spangler & Grossmann, 1993).

Indeed, the impact of early attachment experience on children’s emotional development may be, in part, due to changes in physiological systems related to stress. As you learned in Chapter 5,

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cortisol is a hormone that tracks responses to stress. Infants categorized as Insecure and/or Dis- organized, as compared to Secure, have been shown to have larger cortisol stress responses in distressing attachment contexts (Bernard & Dozier, 2010; Luijk et al., 2010) as well as dampened diurnal cortisol (Luijk et al., 2010; Oskis, Loveday, Hucklebridge, Thorn, & Clow, 2011). Thus, particular adaptations to caregiving environments, as indicated by styles of attachment, may alter stress-related physiological systems.

Such physiological changes may have implications for brain development, particularly in areas with a high density of cortisol receptors, such as the amygdala. Longitudinal stud- ies have documented morphological differences in brain structure, with larger amygdala volumes in adults previously categorized as Insecure and/or Disorganized, which, in turn, are functionally related to emotionality (Lyons-Ruth, Pechtel, Yoon, Anderson, & Teicher, 2016; Moutsiana et  al., 2015). Further, early attachment experiences have been shown to persistently alter neural substrates associated with emotion regulation. Moutsiana and her colleagues (2014) carried out a 22-year follow-up of individuals whose attachment status was assessed in infancy. Individuals were exposed to negative and positive pictures while brain activation was being measured and they were asked to increase or decrease their emotional response to the picture. Effects of attachment status were most marked as individuals tried to increase positive affect. Individuals categorized as Insecure in infancy (compared to secure in infancy) showed a relatively inefficient neural processing system (involving the left and right anterior prefrontal cortex, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, and the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex) as they tried to increase their positive responses to pictures. This suggests that such individuals require greater cognitive effort, at a neurobiological level, to experience positive emotions. Thus, early patterns of attachment organization, which develop in response to caregiving environments, have lasting implications for the neurobiological systems that involve emotion and stress regulation.

Parental Sensitivity and Shared Thinking The relationship between parental sensitivity and infant attachment is well established both in correlational studies and intervention studies that seek to alter parenting styles (Bakermans- Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, Juffer, 2003; Lucassen et al., 2011; Mountain, Cahill & Thorpe, 2017). Let us think about parental sensitivity and children’s attachment in the context of prepar- ing children for shared thinking and cooperation over the life course. Kochanska (2002) argues that a “mutually rewarding orientation” is the basis for cooperation between parents and chil- dren. More specifically, her argument is that children develop an openness to their caregiver’s direction even in discipline contexts, such that children will regulate their emotions and listen to their parents’ demands. This willing stance develops in the context of sensitive parent–child relationships, and it shows stability over time. It has been shown to predict positive socialization in the form of reduced children’s externalizing behavior, internal sense of obligation to follow the parent’s requests (in the absence of parental monitoring), and perception of parental trustworthi- ness at age 10. We can think of these influences as reciprocal: when parents are positive with the children, the children are positive with their parents and this reciprocal process goes on through development (Kochanska, Kim, & Boldt, 2015).

The process of a mutually rewarding orientation starts in infancy and toddlerhood. Secure par- ents, (called Autonomous on the Adult Attachment Interview, which we describe below), evalu- ate their own infants’ pictures more positively, rate infant crying as less aversive, and process infant cries in an infant-oriented, as opposed to mother-oriented, manner (Ablow, Marks, Shirley Feldman, & Huffman, 2013; Leerkes et al., 2015; Spangler, Maier, Geserick, & von Wahlert, 2010). Secure parents are more able to read and respond appropriately to the range and fluctua- tion of emotions that their infants show.

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Consider now the mutually rewarding orientation in adolescence. Remember when you were allowed to spend more time away from home during this period? Did you tell your parents about your friends and activities? Parental monitoring of adolescent activity has been found to decrease risky adolescent behaviors (Stattin & Kerr, 2000). But parents knowing what their adolescents are doing is partly dependent on adolescents being prepared to confide in their parents. They do this more when earlier trust has been built up (Fletcher, Steinberg & Williams-Wheeler (2004). A positive parent–child relationship provides the basis for the shared thinking and willingness toward others that is needed over the course of a lifetime.

From Parent Attachment to Child Attachment A central idea in attachment theory is that parents can behave in sensitive and responsive ways when they themselves were the recipients of responsive parenting in their own childhoods: thus, attachment begets attachment in the next generation. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985) was developed to examine this intriguing possibility by captur- ing adult narratives on their relationships with their parents, and in these narratives classifying adults into three different adult styles: Autonomous (cf. Secure), Dismissing (cf. Avoidant), or Preoccupied (cf. Resistant). Recent meta-analytic evidence, based on over 2,000 parent– child dyads (Verhage et al., 2016), has summarized the degree of the relationship between the parents’ attachment status as an adult and their children’s attachment status. This can be seen in Table 11.2. The strongest concordance is between Secure parents and their children (54%), the next for Dismissing parents and children (28%), and the lowest for Preoccupied parents and children (17.8%).

Another method of investigating links between parent and child attachment is to examine the attachment of the offspring of adults, whose attachment status was examined in their infancy. One study that involved a high-risk sample reported something striking for disorganized attach- ment. Among mothers who themselves had disorganized attachment patterns as children, 50% of their infants also showed disorganization (Raby, Steele, Carlson, & Sroufe, 2015). Thus, across these studies we see some expected parent–child concordances that appear to be strongest for secure and disorganized attachment. Lack of concordance is also seen. Explanations for disconti- nuity in attachment styles focus on changes in life circumstances, both good and bad, that might alter how individuals relate to their children (Barbaro, Boutwell, Barnes, & Shackelford, 2017).

Are parental attachment styles (measured through behavior) correlated with parental brain activity? Riem and colleagues (2012) used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to

Table 11.2 Number of individuals in three different categories for caregiver’s adult attachment status and their children’s attachment status, in 2,774 dyads

Child attachment

Caregiver’s

Adult attachment Secure Avoidant Resistant Total Percent

Autonomous 1079 191 166 1436 53.9

Dismissing 314 309 133 756 28.4

Preoccupied 216 100 158 474 17.8

Total 1609 600 457 2666

Predicted transmission patterns are in bold font.

Source: Verhage et al., 2016, table 4, p. 77.

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examine whether activity in the amygdala (which is activated during exposure to infant crying) varied by adult attachment status. They found that, when exposed to infant crying, Insecure (as compared to Secure) adult attachment was associated with more irritation, use of excessive force, and heightened amygdala activation. This suggests that early relational emotion patterns are rep- resented at the neurobiological as well as behavioral levels.

The Role of Environmental Risk in Children’s Attachment Relationships You may be wondering about the role of environmental factors in children’s attachment status. And on this question, we arrive at a challenging conclusion: The more compromised the caregiv- ing environment, the more problematic the child’s attachment status. Thus, children in economi- cally disadvantaged homes, those who have experienced abuse, and those who have been raised in institutional care (see Chapter 12) show high rates of disorganized or insecure attachment. In a meta-analytic review that included 4,792 children, Cyr, Euser, Bakermans–Kranenburg, and Van IJzendoorn (2010) found that maltreatment was a particularly potent risk factor for the development of insecure and disorganized attachment styles, as shown in Figure 11.5. These researchers also looked at the role of being exposed to multiple environmental risks simultane- ously (poverty, low education, single parenthood, ethnic minority, teen parenting). The children experiencing multiple risks in their environment showed a similar degree of risk of disorganized attachment to the maltreated children. Thus, the extent to which parents can provide a sensitive and responsive environment for their children is in part related to their own social disadvantages.

Genetic Influences on Attachment In Chapter 8 you learned that a child’s individual temperament is influenced by her or his genetic profile, inherited from his or her parents. Given this, you might expect strong relations between genetics, childhood temperament, and early attachment patterns. This proves to not be the case. Early attachment patterns are not strongly related to child temperament (Groh et al., 2017). Nor do studies find that infant attachment patterns (particularly secure and insecure attachment) have

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

5 Risks High-risk non-maltreatment Maltreatment

Disorganization Insecurity

FIGURE 11.5 The effect sizes for cumulative risk and maltreatment in explaining insecure and disorganized attachment (based on Cyr et al., 2010).

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a strong genetic basis (Bokhorst, Bakermans-Kranenburg, Fonagy, & Schuengel, 2003; O’Connor & Croft, 2001). Furthermore, although many parental behaviors (such as negativity and control, Avinun & Knafo, 2014) are strongly influenced by children themselves, the evidence suggests that this is less so for parental attachment behavior. Fearon and colleagues studying twins (2006) found that parental responsivity across children was very similar. The likely explanation is that as these parental behaviors are so important for the species-specific goals of shared thinking and cooperation, they do not vary across siblings but instead show a trait-like presentation (i.e., the parent treats all siblings similarly).

Although there has been minimal support for genetic contributions to attachment differences in early childhood, this is not the case in adolescence. Based on a twin study of 551 adolescent twin pairs, Fearon and colleagues (2014) found 40% heritability for security of attachment. In accounting for the discrepancy between early childhood and adolescent heritability estimates, the authors suggest that children’s genetic predispositions may evoke changes in the behavior of caregivers over the course of childhood, which, in turn, feeds back to affect children’s attachment styles (evocative gene–environment correlation, see above).

Although genetic influences on attachment categories in general appear to be low, it may be that some categories are more genetically influenced than others. For instance, the largest genome-wide association study of 657 14-month-old infants has identified a number of genes associated with disorganization (Pappa et al., 2015). Furthermore, infant subcortical structures at six weeks of age, using ultrasound imaging, have been found to predict attachment disorganiza- tion at 14 months (Tharner et al., 2011), suggesting that there are very early vulnerabilities in brain development evident for at least this one category of attachment.

Parental Behaviors Beyond Attachment Of course, there are other aspects of close relationships that influence the development of differ- ences in personality that are not related to attachment processes. We consider some of these now.

Biobehavioral Synchronization The concept of biobehavioral synchronization takes the behavioral reciprocity that we see in the mutually responsive orientation (described above) to the physiological level. Feldman (2012) has shown that brains of parents and infants transform to integrate the other as an interaction partner. The process of interactional synchrony starts during pregnancy. Interactional synchrony is the dance of mutually rewarding, turn-taking interaction. Over the course of the first year of life, as parent–infant synchrony gets established, such synchrony becomes more closely inter- connected with physiological and behavioral stress regulation systems. For instance, parent– infant emotional synchronization promotes the coordination of heart rhythms between the parent and infant (Feldman, Magori-Cohen, Galili, Singer, & Louzoun, 2011) and affiliative hormones such as oxytocin (Feldman, Gordon, & Zagoory-Sharon, 2011), demonstrating important links between the neurobiological underpinnings of bonding and parent–infant synchrony. Parental contingent coordination serves as an external regulator for infants’ developing regulatory capaci- ties, which, over time, transforms into child self-regulation.

Parental Mentalization and Reflective Capacity Parental mentalization refers to parents’ abilities to represent and hold in mind the internal states, such as emotions, thoughts, desires, and intentions, of their children. It involves the awareness and accuracy of parental interpretations of children’s mental worlds. Several

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constructs have been studied under this umbrella—parental mind-mindedness (Meins, 1997; Zeegers et  al., 2017), parental insightfulness (Oppenheim & Koren-Karie, 2002), parental reflective functioning (Slade et al., 2005; Wade et al., 2018), and parental cognitive sensitivity (Prime et al., 2015).

Mothers’ tendencies to comment appropriately on their infants’ inferred internal states are related to enhanced mentalizing and language abilities (Laranjo, Bernier, Meins, & Carlson, 2014; Meins, Fernyhough, Arnott, Leekam, & Rosnay, 2013), emotion understanding (Centifanti, Meins, & Fernyhough, 2016), and behavioral adjustment (Meins, Centifanti, Fernyhough, & Fishburn, 2013). In contrast, Meins et  al., (2013) demonstrated that maternal inappropriate mind-related comments were associated with weaker understanding of perspective differences in children at age 2, which, in turn, predicted weaker mentalizing abilities in children at age 4.

Previously, we discussed parental sensitivity in the context of children’s emotions. Now, we turn to the way in which it contributes to multiple aspects of children’s cognitive development. In a longitudinal birth-cohort study, Browne et al. (2018) found that maternal sensitivity when children are 18 months old explained a variety of cognitive outcomes when the children were five and just entering school (reading, math, language, theory of mind). So why is the influ- ence of maternal sensitivity upon cognitive function so important to emotional development? It is because of the role of maternal sensitivity in building the neural architecture that promotes social interaction. Language and being able to represent and understand others’ mental states are the cognitive skills that allow children to interact successfully with others (Fernyhough, 2008; Tomasello, 2009; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behn, & Moll, 2005). The mutually responsive orientation is not only an emotional stance of one person toward the other. It is also a cognitive stance in which the neural architecture has developed to support thinking about other people.

This idea led Jenkins, Perlman, and colleagues (Prime et al., 2015; Browne, Leckie, Prime, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2016) to broaden the concept of parental sensitivity to cognitive sensitivity. Cognitive sensitivity is defined as the extent to which any social partner considers the knowl- edge and abilities of their partner during an interaction that involves the achievement of a joint goal. Cognitive sensitivity, then, is not just applicable to caregivers and children, but includes all those relationships in which a child takes part. Theoretically, instead of sensitive responding operating in the service of the protection of young (Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins, 1999), it oper- ates in the service of shared thinking and its neural architecture. Browne et al. (2016) showed a “climate” effect in the family for this skill: the more that everyone behaved with cognitive sensi- tivity (including behaviors such as mind-reading, rephrasing ideas to improve understanding), the more the child was able to engage in shared thinking and cooperation (Browne et al., 2016). Over and above parental inputs, cognitive sensitivity of older siblings has also been found to predict the younger siblings’ language and theory of mind (Prime, Pauker, Plamondon, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2014; Prime, Plamondon, Pauker, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2016).

Talk About Emotions Through the learning of emotion language, parents and other caregivers structure a world that will shape the emotional experience of children. Parents do this in several ways. One way is to talk with children about the kinds of events that evoke emotions. For instance, a father says to his son who is recoiling at the sight of a big dog: “You don’t need to be scared of him.” On another occasion he wanders into the cycle path, and a bicyclist narrowly misses him. His father rushes to him and says, “That’s dangerous! You really frightened me.” Such emotional communications teach children about what events appropriately elicit emotions in their community, inducting the child into the cultural rules of emotion. This type of talk structures the child’s own internal experience and lets the child know about the internal experience of others. This talk is referred to as mental state talk and includes talk about emotions, desires, and thoughts.

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As you might imagine, parents tailor the complexity of their mental state talk to children’s age. Taumoepeau and Ruffman (2006) found that maternal use of desire language (e.g., love, want, hope, wish, dream) with 15-month-old children predicted children’s mental state language and emotion task performance (i.e., their ability to discern how a person felt) at 24 months. When children were 24 months of age, mothers’ reference to others’ thoughts and knowledge, a more advanced form of mental state talk, was the most consistent predictor of children’s later mental state language at 33 months (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008). Maternal talk was adjusted according to their child’s developmental stage; mothers’ talk about more sophisticated mental states (i.e., thoughts and knowledge) increased significantly between 15 and 33 months and 24 and 33 months, while less-sophisticated talk (i.e., about desires and emotions) remained rela- tively stable. van der Pol et al. (2015) found that not only does emotion talk vary as a function of age, there are subtle differences in the type of talk parents direct toward boys versus girls. For instance, when referring to gender-neutral characters in a shared reading task, parents were more likely to use female gender labels when describing pictures of more submissive or collaborative emotions (i.e., sadness, happiness) and male gender labels when describing pictures of competi- tive or adversarial emotions (i.e., anger). This study also found that mothers elaborated more on emotions during shared booking reading than did fathers.

In summary, parental talk about emotion, geared to the child’s developmental level, is impor- tant for building children’s cognitive structures. Interestingly, when these conversations are more attuned, with ideas going back and forth, it enhances children’s neural architecture in the lan- guage areas of the brain (Romeo et al., 2018).

So do parents who talk more about emotions promote children’s socioemotional develop- ment? The answer appears to be yes. Parental talk about emotions is positively related to differ- ences in children’s own emotion talk, their emotion understanding, and their prosocial behavior. During a child’s toddler years, Brownell and colleagues (2013) showed that parents’ encourage- ment of their children’s participation in discussing others’ emotions, rather than the amount of emotion talk parents used themselves, was particularly important to children’s observed sharing and helping behavior.

Emotion talk is important beyond toddlerhood, too. One study found, for example, that in middle childhood, children who engaged in complex emotion discourse with their parents (e.g., promoting thinking about self and others’ internal perspectives, and causal reasoning/problem solving) were more effective when it came to prosocial problem solving, which, in turn, was related to teacher-reported social skills in middle childhood (Fenning, Baker, & Juvonen, 2011).

Together, these studies highlight a process that is part of healthy emotional development: when parents engage their children in talk about emotions, they help their children understand their own emotions and those of others, which, in turn, supports socially adaptive action in dif- ferent contexts. This may be especially true when it comes to stressful and traumatic events. Conversations about emotion in the context of reminiscing about negative events (once the emo- tional heat has subsided) might be especially influential in promoting children’s emotional and relational understanding (Coppola, Ponzetti, & Vaughn, 2014; Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996; Laible, 2004; Laible & Panfile, 2009; Ramsden & Hubbard, 2002). Laible (2011) found that in negative event conversations, as opposed to positive event conversations, mothers were more likely to discuss the causes of emotions with children, had in-depth discussions, and were also more likely to confirm the child’s emotional experiences (“yes, I remember you were sad”). A longitudinal study (Laible, Murphy, & Augustine, 2013) identified two important aspects of this discourse that were correlated with children’s socioemotional functioning: (i) children’s active participation in reminiscing and (ii) parents and children collaborating to construct a shared narrative about the negative event. Such effects are not just correlational. In a training study in which mother–child dyads were randomly assigned to an emotion-rich and elaborative reminiscing condition, children talked more about emotions and their causes than children in the

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control condition (Bergen, Salmon, Dadds, & Allen, 2009). It is important to note that it is not just parents who influence children’s talk about emotions; Older siblings are also a critical influ- ence (Jenkins, Turrell, Kogushi, Lollis, & Ross, 2003).

We can see that emotion talk, like mentalization, allows for the construction of shared mean- ings and provides a communicative basis for shared thinking. Such foundational skills help chil- dren negotiate and manage their relationships with others.

Parental Socialization of Emotion In the emotional exchanges that make up so much of family life, parents not only teach their chil- dren a way of talking about emotion, but they also socialize their children into specific familial and societal norms about emotional experience and expression. This socialization of emotions occurs in the emotions parents show to children, in how they respond to children’s emotions, and in how they discuss and make sense of emotional exchanges (Eisenberg et al., 1996). It is impor- tant to recognize that these socialization of emotion processes are bidirectional: parents socialize their children, and children socialize their parents (Grusec, 2011; Kuzynski, 2003). Children are active agents in this process, with some being temperamentally responsive to parental efforts and others are not.

Emotions to Which Children Are Exposed As great writers and artists have long known, families differ with respect to what emotions seem prominent: one family may be full of laughter, joy, and affection, another full of fiery displays of anger, and another still committed to the avoidance of any emotional display. This family climate (which can only be estimated when everyone in the family interacts with everyone else) accounts for about 15–20% of the variability in emotionally based interactions (Browne, Leckie, Prime, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2016; Eichelsheim, Deković, Buist, & Cook, 2009; Rasbash, Jenkins, O’Connor, Tackett, & Reiss, 2011). Thus, after we account for what individuals contribute to the family (e.g., one child being very angry and hostile to everyone) and the role of specific dyads (e.g., the mother and child clash with one another), there is still a large family climate influence. We think of this as a process of emotion contagion or spillover: watching parents fight with one another makes it more likely that sibling dyads (Margolin, Christensen, John, 1996) and parent–child dyads will fight with one another (Stover et al., 2012; Stroud, Meyers, Wilson, & Durbin 2015). Young children may be particularly influenced by the emotion contagion that occurs in their families. For example, Browne and colleagues (2016) found that for young children, the emotional climate of the whole family played a much larger role in their mental attunement to others than the role it played for older children and mothers. Although some of this contagion of emotion in families is likely to be genetically mediated (Ganiban et al., 2009), negativity in the marital dyad is associated with parent–child negativity in adoptive families in which no genetic relationship occurs (Stover et al., 2012). These findings highlight how dys- function in one family dyad can erode the functioning in other family dyads and, as a result, shape a child’s emotionality.

“Positive contagion” can also occur, too. Children raised in families with greater positive emo- tionality show higher levels of empathy and affection (Eisenberg, 1992; Jenkins et al., 2012). In a longitudinal study that gathered measurements at three time points, constructive marital conflict (characterized by cooperation and resolution) predicted better peer relationships in children as well as higher levels of prosocial behavior (McCoy, Cummings, & Davies 2009; McCoy, George, Cummings, & Davies, 2013).

A number of accounts of this process of contagion, particularly related to prosociality, have been proposed (Paulus, 2014). One focuses on the intriguing possibility that family members

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share emotion-related autonomic reactions. Ebisch and colleagues (2012) observed mothers reacting empathically to their preschool children inadvertently breaking an examiner’s toy. Moth- ers and children’s facial temperature variations were found to change together, suggesting affect sharing and sharing of autonomic arousal.

Parental Reactions to Children’s Emotions and Emotion Coaching As babies develop language, they learn ways to communicate about internal states. As parents see their infants having more flexible ways of expressing their needs, they change how they respond to their children’s emotions. They may pay attention to what they consider acceptable forms of emotional expression and ignore others. For example, Brooks-Gunn and Lewis (1982) found that mothers responded more to crying in their babies’ first six months than in their second year. As their children reached a year and then two years, they increased their responding to their child’s efforts to speak. Such behavior says: “I’ll pay attention to you when you talk to me, but not just when you cry.” They also found that mothers responded less to the crying of boys than to the crying of girls. Similarly, Dunn, Bretherton, and Munn (1987) found that mothers’ references to feeling states following a child’s distress decreased as the child aged from 18 to 24 months, presumably to deemphasize negative emotions (see also Kochanska & Aksan, 2004). By the time children are age two, parents are decreasing their response to negative emotions, thereby induct- ing their children into a culture in which it is less acceptable to cry to achieve goals. As children age, we see that the effect of parental behavior on children’s emotions change. In a study of three-to-six–year-old children, the balance between children’s positive and negative expressions of emotion (called regulatory balance) was found to be differentially associated with parents’ emotional support as a function of children’s age. It is possible to see that while parental sup- portiveness is associated with higher regulatory balance in young children, this is not the case for older children (see Figure 11.6).

We might think from our discussion about attachment and parental responsiveness that the best thing for parents to do as soon as a child is distressed is to respond immediately and sympa- thetically. But parents’ goals are more complex than simply protecting or comforting children, particularly as children get older. As infants become toddlers, parents make complex evaluations

–2.7

–0.10

–0.01

0.09

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R eg

u la

to ry

B al

an ce

0.28

0.37

0.47

–2.0 –1.4 –0.7

Supportive Emotion Socialization (centered)

Younger

Child Age (centered)

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Mean Age Older

FIGURE 11.6 The relationship between parental supportive emotion socialization and children’s regulatory balance varies as a function of children’s age. (Source: Mirabile, Oertwig, and Halberstadt, 2016).

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about how distressed their child is, what the context is, how important the situation is to building autonomy, and so forth (Dix, 1991; Mesman, Oster, & Camras, 2012).

In light of the developmental changes in the emotional dynamics between parents and chil- dren, it is clear that parents develop beliefs about their own and their children’s emotions, which are known as Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy (PMEP) (Gottman et  al., 1996). An emotion coaching philosophy is characterized by parents’ awareness and acceptance of their own emotions and those of their children and a perception of negative emotion as an opportunity for growth and/or connection. In contrast, emotion-dismissing philosophies tend to minimize the importance and expression of emotion and focus on ridding children of nega- tive emotions.

These emotion philosophies are important determinants of parental behaviors. For instance, during emotion-eliciting conversations with their children, parents who value negative emotions encourage their expression (Lozada et al., 2016). Parents who have more of an emotion coach- ing philosophy are also more accurate in labeling a range of emotions including anger, sadness, fear, and happiness (Morey & Gentzler, 2017). In turn, parental beliefs about emotion have been associated with children’s emotional development and subsequent adjustment (Katz, Maliken, & Stettler, 2012). For instance, mothers with stronger beliefs that emotions are dangerous (assessed by a questionnaire that asks them to rate how problematic or dangerous it is to express both posi- tive and negative emotions) raised children with poorer emotion understanding. In turn, children with poorer emotion understanding were rated by teachers as less well-adjusted in the classroom (Garrett-Peters, Castro, & Halberstadt, 2017).

How do parents’ beliefs, or philosophies about emotion, shape their children’s emotional and social tendencies? When mothers respond to children’s negative emotions so that the child is encouraged to, or helped to, deal with the source of a problem, children’s constructive coping is enhanced (Eisenberg et al., 1996). Other parental reactions such as minimization of children’s emotions, negative and dismissing responses have been linked to a different style: that of avoid- ant emotion regulation and more displays of anger in parent–child interactions (Eisenberg, Fabes, Carlo, & Karbon, 1992; Eisenberg et al., 1996; Snyder, Stoolmiller, & Wilson, 2003). Moreover, punitive reactions in parents are associated with escape and revenge-seeking behaviors in chil- dren (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1994; Eisenberg et al., 1992). Being negatively reactive to children’s anger and sadness is the response most strongly associated with poor outcomes in children. Indeed, in families with a conduct-disordered child (which is a mental health problem character- ized by aggression that we discuss more in Chapter 12), parents have been found to respond to their children’s aggression and negativity with increased aggression and negativity. This pattern of escalating reciprocal negativity plays a causal role in the development of conduct disorder (Patterson 1986; Plamondon et al., 2017).

Before we leave our discussion of parental response to children’s emotions, let us remember that much of what we know of children’s emotion socialization comes from research in Western European countries. It will be important for research to extend the findings we have been consid- ering to other cultures, for as we saw in Chapter 3, culture influences every aspect of emotion. For instance, Caucasian mothers living in the United States reported more sympathy and showed high rates of encouragement toward their children’s expression of sadness and anger as compared to mothers in old city and suburban India (Raval, Raval, Salvina, Wilson, & Writer, 2013). We should also bear in mind that these differences in the parents’ emotional response may be due to differences in how the children respond. For example, one study found that, as compared to American infants, Chinese infants were less expressive overall, showed less distress responses, and produced fewer smiles (Camras, Oster, Campos, & Bakeman, 2003). In this same study, Japanese infants were more similar to American than to Chinese infants in their expressiveness. Given these differences in the infants’ emotionality, it is easy to imagine how parents might, in turn, respond differently.

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The studies described above were correlational, limiting the conclusions that we can draw about causality. Recent studies have shown, though, that teaching parents in a six-session par- enting group about the value of emotions, how to respond to children’s emotions, and how to regulate their own emotions results in enhanced emotion coaching and empathy among parents, as well as a significant increase in children’s emotion knowledge, and social and behavioral adjustment (Havighurst et al., 2013, 2015). The results from this study can be seen in Figure 11.7.

Intergenerational Transmission and Genetics in Parenting Above, we learned about the intergenerational transmission of attachment styles. Do other aspects of parenting also show intergenerational transmission, passing from parents to children, and then to the next generation? Do succeeding generations in a family show consistency in warm or hostile parenting tendencies, for example?

Indeed, evidence suggests this is the case. For example, children who have been parented with positivity and warmth in their childhoods grow up more likely to be warm parents with their own children (Belsky, Jaffee, Sligo, Woodward, & Silva, 2005; Kovan, Chung, & Sroufe, 2009). The same kind of intergenerational transmission has been shown for hostility. Individuals who have received harsh parenting in their own childhoods are more likely to parent their own children more harshly (Kovan et al., 2009; Neppl, Conger, Scaramella, & Ontai, 2009).

These intergenerational continuities are also affected by individuals’ choices of marital part- ners. For example, in one study that followed children into adulthood, children who had been parented harshly proved to be more likely to choose partners who parent harshly (Conger et al., 2012). It would appear that early experiences in childhood of being parented harshly lead to preferences for partners who parent harshly, only increasing the likelihood those individuals will

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Beyond Parenting: Influences of Siblings, Peers, and the Broader Social Context 299

themselves parent in harsh ways. However, in circumstances wherein children who were treated harshly by their parents partnered with a person with a warm parenting style, the transmission of harsh parenting did not occur (Conger, Schofield, & Neppl, 2012). This has also been found in a meta-analytic study: having a good and caring relationship with a caregiver in childhood, or a spouse in adulthood, results in a lower intergenerational transmission of maltreatment (Schofield, Lee, & Merrick, 2013). We discuss the “protective effects” topic at more length in Chapter 12.

Earlier in this chapter we discussed the role of children’s genetically driven characteris- tics, and the way in which they elicited different kinds of parenting behaviors (the evocative gene–environment correlation). Twin studies have shown that parenting is substantially herit- able; between 30 and 50% of the variance in parenting is explained by genetic influence, as can be seen in Figures 11.8a (parental warmth) and 11.8b (parental negativity) (Klahr & Burt, 2014). In these figures, “A” refers to the percentage of variance attributable to genetic influence, “C” refers to the shared environment (the similarity between siblings once genetic effects have been accounted for), and “E” refers to the nonshared environment (differences between sib- lings attributable to the environment). Notice how genetically driven characteristics of children (A) shape parental negativity more than these genetically driven characteristics shape parental warmth. Note also that the negativity of mothers is more influenced by genetically based child characteristics than the negativity of fathers. Mothers may be more driven by challenging child behavior because of the greater time that they spend with children or because of their perceived roles as disciplinarians.

These findings are a reminder that children are not passive in the parent–child relationship; rather, as we have considered in different places in this chapter, it is a mutually reciprocal process between parents and children.

Beyond Parenting: Influences of Siblings, Peers, and the Broader Social Context A multilevel perspective is important for understanding the development of children’s emo- tionality (Bronfenbrenner, 1992; Jenkins, Madigan, & Arsenault, 2015; Lerner, 2006). Parents— largely our focus thus far—are just one influence upon a child’s developing emotion. There are many other influences, including macro influences such as socioeconomic influences, neighbor- hoods, and schools (distal factors), and those that are spatially and temporally closer to the child, such as their relationships with family and friends (proximal factors).

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Siblings Psychologist Laurie Kramer describes the contexts in which siblings influence one another’s emotional development (Kramer, 2014):

Social learning appears to be a most important process by which siblings acquire knowledge about emotions—what specific emotions look like when enacted by others, how to identify and label them, the markers that distinguish one emotion from one another, ways to respond in the face of confusing mixed or blended emotions, the dis- play rules that govern the socially appropriate expressions of emotions with respect to context, as well as how to form realistic expectancies about the consequences of emo- tional expression—and what they can expect to happen when emotions are expressed in particular ways in particular contexts.

Sibling relationships are one of our earliest and longest lasting relationships, characterized by a range of intense emotions and opportunities for learning, for better and for worse (Dunn, 1983; Kramer & Conger, 2009). What do emotionally based sibling interactions look like? Perlman and colleagues (2015) looked at the moment-to-moment interactions of siblings during a 10-minute free play observation when younger children were 18 months and older siblings were around 4 years. From these interactions, children were classified according to how their interactions unfolded over time. Older siblings showed a wider range of interaction patterns. Twenty-five percent were harmonious, showing stable or increased positivity over the course of the interac- tion. Another 25 percent played positively but also showed a bit of disengagement from their younger siblings (called the casual group). Another group deteriorated across the interaction becoming increasingly negative (31%). Then, there was an interesting group of older siblings that were referred to as the recovery group (22%). Their negativity rose early in the interaction, but then they recovered with an increase in positivity and decrease in negativity. These patterns were related to some of the family processes that we have already described. Mothers of children in the recovery group were more sensitive and warmer than those in the deteriorating group; mothers of children in the casual group showed less reflectiveness (mentalization) than mothers in the deteriorating group. Perhaps in those families, disengagement, or a kind of avoidance, is an implicit strategy for managing conflict.

Beyond positivity and negativity, broader measures of sibling relationships focus on reciproc- ity and positive affection, use of mental state talk, and sensitivity toward one another’s cognitive needs and abilities (Hughes, Fujisawa, Ensor, Lecce, & Marfleet, 2006; Jenkins et  al., 2003; Prime, Perlman, Tackett, & Jenkins 2014; Recchia, Howe, & Alexander, 2009). A close and con- fiding relationship with a sibling is associated with better adjustment, especially for girls (Buist, Dekovic, & Prinzie, 2013; Kim, McHale, & Crouter, 2007), and it enhances resilience among children exposed to stressful circumstances (Gass, Jenkins, & Dunn, 2007).

One of the issues that siblings struggle with is the extent to which they are parented differ- ently from each other (called differential parenting). Differential parenting has been found to be an important predictor of the quality of the sibling relationship (Richmond, Stocker, & Rienks, 2005). In one study on this theme, change over time in sibling relationship quality was predicted by the extent of the differential parenting that children received, with sibling relationship quality decreasing as differential parenting grew (Jenkins et al., 2012). The experience of differential parenting and its effect on the sibling relationship can last a lifetime. Even in old age, memories of differential parenting still continue to wrangle—having a negative effect on the relationship (Suitor et al., 2008).

Siblings show marked similarities to one another on emotional characteristics (Ma et  al., 2015), with strong ties between sibling relationship quality and children’s adjustment (Buist

Beyond Parenting: Influences of Siblings, Peers, and the Broader Social Context 301

et al., 2013), leading investigators to attempt to differentiate behavioral influences in which sib- lings learn behavior from one another (called sibling training) from genetic influences. What emotions might be learned from a sibling and how might this occur?

Siblings have been found to influence one another’s empathy development (Jambon, Madigan, Plamondon, Daniel, & Jenkins, 2018). In one study, younger and older siblings’ empa- thy in response to an experimenter being hurt or needing help was assessed separately for each child on two occasions, 18 months apart. Empathic younger siblings predicted increases in their older siblings’ empathy, and older siblings’ earlier empathy did the same for the younger sib- lings. In their interactions, siblings teach one another in the ways of empathy, a foundation of shared thinking and cooperation. Sibling interactions, beyond parental inputs, matter for these skills (Prime, Plamondon, & Jenkins, 2017).

Do siblings train one another on aggression or are siblings similar on aggression because of their genes? To tease apart these influences, Daniel and colleagues (2018) assessed 916 chil- dren in the preschool and early school age years over a four-year period. They found that once genetic influences upon aggression were controlled, younger siblings’ oppositional behavior operated to lessen the oppositional behavior of their older siblings. This suggested that older siblings learn from their younger siblings what not to do! Experiencing the aggressive ten- dencies of their younger siblings was sufficiently noxious that they started to behave better themselves.

Given that emotions and dynamics between siblings matter, is there any way to improve these relationships? Kramer and colleagues (Kennedy & Kramer, 2008; Kramer & Radey, 1997) worked with sibling pairs aged four to eight years old to promote prosociality in sibling relationships. After five 1-hour training sessions, positive intervention effects were observed for children’s emotion regulation. With older children between Grade 2 and Grade 5, Feinberg et al., (2013) evaluated a 12-session group program that involved siblings attend- ing to one another’s feelings, learning to cooperate and engaging in fair treatment. Children showed improved sibling relationships as well as increased socioemotional functioning and self-control.

Peers Over 60 years ago, Sullivan (1953) suggested that peer interactions in childhood and early ado- lescence provide opportunities for learning important social skills, such as cooperation, altruism, and empathy. This socialization starts early. Denham (1986) when she observed two-to-three- year-old children in group play found that children were more responsive to other children’s anger than they were to their sadness. A few years later, children respond more to children’s expressions of sadness than anger. They give more empathic responses to happy expressions than to all other emotions combined, and fewer in response to anger than to all other emotions combined. This is the socialization of emotion. Even very young children train their peers on the emotions to which they will attend and those they’ll ignore.

Peer relationships, influence, and are influenced by, children’s understanding of other people. As we saw in Chapter 8, there is a profound growth in social cognition (thinking about others) that occurs around age four leading to important developments in pretend play, responsive com- munication, use of mental state talk, and emotion understanding (Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996; Cutting & Dunn, 2006; Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991). But it is also the case that peer interactions influence children’s understanding of mind. Maguire and Dunn (1997) showed that earlier friendship interactions influence children’s emotion understanding; children who had higher levels of play complexity at age six (including concessions and reassurances reflecting an appreciation of the other’s interests) were more adept seven months later at understanding that

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people experienced ambivalent or mixed emotions. The reciprocal effect of peer relationships and understanding of minds was confirmed in a longitudinal study that examined change in both of these processes simultaneously (Banerjee, Watling, & Caputi (2011). Children’s experience of peer rejection was found to influence their acquisition of social understanding and difficulties in understanding social concepts were found to predict increased peer rejection (particularly in older children). The results of meta-analyses support the same conclusion: these processes are intertwined (Slaughter et al., 2015).

The emotions children evoke in their peers are in part genetically influenced. Remember back to our discussion of the “gene–environment correlation” as you think about this study. Using a twin and sibling sample of five-year-old children, DiLalla, Bersted, and John (2015) explored genetic and environmental contributors to children’s positive behaviors (i.e., prosocial and easy- going) during peer interactions. Children were matched with unfamiliar peers and asked to play for 20 minutes. Play behaviors were subsequently rated by objective coders. They found that par- ticular temperamental traits (i.e., less withdrawn) and genetic propensities toward acting proso- cially evoked positive play behaviors from unfamiliar peers. Thus, the positive behaviors that our peers direct toward us are, in part, in response to our own emotionality.

Layous and colleagues (2012) tested this experimentally in the preadolescent, or “tween”, age group. They randomly assigned classrooms of 9-to-11-year-olds to either (i) perform three acts of kindness or (ii) visit different locations (places control group). Then they looked at the effect of the experiment on (i) students’ ratings of their own well-being (i.e., life satisfaction, happiness, and positive affect), and (ii) classmate ratings of individuals’ peer acceptance (assessed by deter- mining with whom they would like to spend time). They found that although both groups showed enhanced well-being after the experiment, students in the “kindness” group had a larger number of peer nominations as compared to classmates in the “places” group. Shifts in well-being in these children brought about more positive interactions. Why do we need to pay attention to the quality of children’s social relationships? It is because healthy friendships matter for the life course. Individuals who have close friends in childhood are more likely to have close friends in adulthood (Lansford, Yu, Pettit, Bates, & Dodge, 2014).

To conclude, we see similar mechanisms of emotionality for peer, sibling, and parent–child relationships and two points are central to remember. First, our temperaments have a bearing on the relational experiences that we have. If we are joyful, easy to laugh, and calm, people engage with us in more positive ways. More good things happen to us. If we are generally negative with more anger, irritability, and distress, we elicit more of the same from others. Our emotional propensities shape our relationships, which, in turn, influence how we develop. Second, the qual- ity of relationships that we have with peers, siblings, and parents are critically influenced by our capacity for shared thinking and cooperation. The cognitive skills in understanding others provide the tools for healthy relationships (Fink, Begeer, Peterson, Slaughter, & Rosnay, 2015).

Broader Social Context As we considered in Chapter 9, societies are hierarchically organized along economic and social factors. The amount of money and opportunities that families have profoundly shape the well- being of family members and the emotional dynamics in families (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Conger & Donnellan, 2007). So how can socioeconomic status influence the emotions of chil- dren and families? The answer to this lies in the relationship between compromised brain devel- opment and negative emotionality. Socioeconomic influences on child development operate through three pathways: (a) inequitable allocation of resources like nutrition, health care, hous- ing, and education; (b) stress reactions caused by parenting, environmental hazards, adverse life events, violence, and neighborhood problems; and (c) health behaviors such as tobacco,

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alcohol, and illicit substance use (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). We consider these issues at length in Chapter 12.

In part, the pernicious effects of low socioeconomic status on children’s emotions come about through children’s compromised cognitive development. Consider the findings by Hart and Risley (1995), who observed talk between parents and children in low-, middle-, and high- income homes from infancy to preschool. They found that children in low-income homes heard 616 words per hour compared to 2,153 in the high-income families. They estimated that by three years old, there was a gap of 30 million words between children in low- and high-income families. This difference in exposure will also be the case for emotion talk, with children from high-income families experiencing much greater opportunities to talk about their feelings and conceptualize and regulate them with language. Furthermore, socioeconomic deprivation results in decreased responsivity (both cognitive and affective) within parent–child and sibling relation- ships (Browne, Leckie, Prime, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2016; Browne, Wade, Prime, & Jenkins, 2018; Prime et al., 2015; Vernon-Feagans, et al. 2013). Given that responsivity is so crucial for providing the neural architecture for shared thinking, the lack of this experience has long-term consequences.

An important part of a child’s social context is his or her neighborhood and school. When children are in classrooms with a high proportion of aggressive children, even after controlling for their own earlier aggression, they show an increase in aggression over time. This contagion of aggression has been documented in childcare centers and schools (Howes, 2000; Kellam, Ling, Merisca, Brown, & Ialongo, 1998) and for children and adolescents (Dishion, Ha, & Véron- neau, 2012; Faris & Ennett, 2012; Molano, Jones, Brown, & Aber, 2013). There are both selec- tion effects (i.e., choosing friends with similar aggressive behavior) and socialization effects (increasing one’s own aggression as a function of the aggression of the social group; Fortuin, Van Geel, & Vedder, 2015). In a similar fashion, other kinds of emotional difficulties appear to spread through social groups, including depression (e.g., Giletta et al., 2011; Kiuru et al., 2012), anxiety (Van Zalk et al., 2011), and disordered eating (Rayner et al., 2013).

There is also evidence for the intergenerational continuity of economic hardship, wherein children who come from families with economic hardship go on to themselves experience eco- nomic hardship as adults (Conger et al., 2012; Jeon & Neppl, 2016). The impacts of childhood poverty have far-reaching effects into adulthood and across generations. Such effects are not set in stone; rather, positive changes to children’s family socioeconomic situation can shift their trajectories for the better. For these reasons, researchers have suggested that policies that aim to reduce family poverty may be important for children’s brain functioning and well-being (Noble et al., 2015).

Programs That Optimize Emotional Development Some individual differences can be thought of as simply interesting: this person is an extravert, that one is conscientious. But some differences take the form of disabilities to some, but not others. How might we think of these? By looking at the continuities in negative emotionality across the life course, we know that people would have better individual lives if we could lower the occurrence of negative emotionality, in particular when it comes to anxiety, sadness, and hostility. Let’s assemble what we know about the causes of negative emotionality from the find- ings that we have reviewed above. Can societies provide people with tools to lessen the risks of negative emotionality? The causes include genetic and prenatal influences, parenting that is unresponsive to child emotion and stimulation, family climates involving exposures to high lev- els of negative emotion with low levels of reflection, talk and negotiation about these emotions.

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Finally, we have to think about the distal contexts that make the emotional lives of families harder: do parents have enough money for basic needs, such as food?; do they have the opportu- nity for a good education?; do they live in neighborhoods that support rather than threaten chil- dren? We have examples of prevention in all of these areas that give us real hope that the burdens of negative emotionality can be lessened.

Take genetic risk for negative temperament which we reviewed in Chapter 8. We might think there is little possibility of influencing this without drugs or gene therapy, but this is likely to be incorrect. Although we do not have direct evidence that we can prevent the devel- opment of negative temperament, we do have evidence that we can prevent compromising, genetically influenced neural development. By targeting for prevention, the younger siblings of children already diagnosed with autism, investigators were able to reduce the develop- ment of autistic symptoms (Green et al., 2015). They did this by teaching parents enhanced skills in sensitivity and stimulation. Thus, even in the presence of a biological program that directs neural development (given that the heritability of autism is high; Tick, Bolton, Happé, Rutter, & Rijsdijk, 2016), the likelihood of autism can be reduced by parental behav- iors that push neural development toward shared understanding, empathy, and cooperation. No one has yet done such an intervention for the younger siblings of children with nega- tive emotionality, but parental interventions for negative emotionality have been successful (Boom, 1994).

With respect to the prenatal exposures that contribute to negative emotionality, intervening during the prenatal period improves the pregnancy outcomes (e.g., birth weight, prematurity) that cascade into less-optimal parent–child relationships (Browne et al., in press) and children’s negative emotionality (Abu-Saad & Fraser, 2010; Aarnoudse-Moens, Weisglas-Kuperus, van Goudoever, & Oosterlaan, 2009; Kramer, 1987). In meta-analyses, preventions targeting maternal diet have been shown to improve obstetric outcomes (Thangaratinam et al., 2012) and targeting parenting has been shown to improve a range of parent and child outcomes as shown in Figure 11.9 (Pinquart & Teubert, 2010).

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Olds and colleagues developed a program for home visiting by nurses for the prenatal and infancy periods for socioeconomically disadvantaged families. These visits involved educating mothers on the health and well-being of babies, as well as supporting mothers whose lives were very challenging. This program has been shown to improve child emotional and educational out- comes into late adolescence (Kitzman et al., 2010; Olds, Henderson, Tatelbaum, & Chamberlin, 1986, 1997, 2007).

Another form of prevention effort involves the identification of high-risk babies and their mothers (e.g., low birthweight, prematurity) and enhancing maternal levels of responsivity and stimulation once their babies are born in order to avert poor brain development. For instance, in a meta-analysis of early interventions to improve neurodevelopment of babies born pre- maturely, Vanderveen et al., (2009) found that parent-based interventions (e.g., parent educa- tion, infant stimulation, home visits, individualized developmental care) had positive effects on developmental outcomes, particularly mental performance up until two years old. Kangaroo Care, which involves skin-to-skin contact between a mother and baby, frequent breastfeeding, and early discharge from hospital, has shown some benefits to neurodevelopmental outcomes such as alertness, responsivity, and fussiness (Feldman et  al., 2002; Ohgi et  al., 2002). To support the most vulnerable infants, enhancing parental responsivity and stimulation both in infancy and the toddler/preschool period are needed (Landry et  al., 2008). Positive parent- ing programs have been developed for preschool to school age children to help parents man- age negative affect and discipline. They teach parents to notice and praise positive behavior and to ignore and remain unreactive to children’s negative emotions and behavior (Leijten et al., 2017). These programs function to reduce the negative emotional exchanges that occur between parents and children.

You will read more about parenting programs that improve children’s emotions in Chapter 12, but here we want to highlight a particularly relevant but very short program that helps with shared thinking between marital partners (and may be useful for parents and children). Finkel and colleagues (Finkel, Slotter, Luchies, Walton, & Gross, 2013) carried out a prevention to pre- serve marital quality (known to decline over time normatively) in an ongoing longitudinal study. Couples were randomly assigned to an intervention group, in which they wrote about a conflict that they had had with their partner “from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved” or the control condition that did not involve thinking from a third-party perspective. Those in the intervention were asked to take the third-party perspective during the next argument and anticipate the difficulties in doing this. The intervention took 7 minutes once per month for a total of 21 minutes. The difference in marital satisfaction between the interven- tion and control groups was startling. Figure 11.10 shows the results. The intervention begins 12 months after study entry. For those in the intervention, they show significantly less of a drop in their marital satisfaction than the control group. This intervention works because it reminds couples to think about the issue from the other person’s perspective. It works to build shared thinking. If you are in a relationship, try doing this the next time you argue with your partner. We think that you will find this helpful!

Moving beyond the family, how can we support the healthy development of children’s emo- tion regulation and associated skills? One way is through schools. Durlak and colleagues (2011) presented findings from 213 school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. The programs target emotion regulation, positive goal-directed behavior, perspective taking, relation- ship building, decision making, and interpersonal relations. Findings indicated positive effects on children’s emotions and well-being. These findings are particularly promising given that class- room teachers and other school staff effectively implemented the SEL programs, showing the potential for such programs to be integrated into normal educational practices. Including a mind- fulness component to such programs may also increase cognitive control and perspective taking (Felver et al., 2016; Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015; Zenner Hernleben-Jurz, & Walach, 2014).

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The last type of prevention area to think about is socioeconomic disadvantage. Improving the economic circumstances in which families live has an impact on children’s well-being (Duncan, Morris, & Rodrigues, 2011). In the New Hope project in Milwaukee, working parents who lived in very poor neighborhoods were eligible to enroll in the study. They were then ran- domly assigned to an intervention group or the control group. The intervention group was given a wage supplement and a child-care subsidy for any child under age 13, which could be used for childcare and subsidized health insurance. Two, five, and eight years after random assignment, families were followed up. There were positive effects, more for boys, on children’s achievement and socioemotional development (Huston et al., 2001, 2005, 2011). It is also notable that there were positive effects on parents. As they became less preoccupied with the economic support of their children, their own well-being showed improvement.

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S U M M A R Y

Early on in the lives of children emotionally based ways of being are evident, and they are different for different people. These oper- ate as propensities influencing our adult personality. Influences on these emotionally based styles of temperament and personality are both biological and relational. We saw that genetic and prenatal influences are important in understanding emotionality, but so too are the relational influences that begin with attachment in infancy. Attachment can be understood as the child’s template for whether others can be trusted and it does play out in relationships over the life course. From infancy onward, parents, siblings, the family cli- mate, and peers socialize our expressions of emotion. They do this through talk, responses to specific emotions, and the clustering and modeling of emotion. The broader socioeconomic context matters too, directly and indirectly influencing brain development and emo- tional well-being.

As a society there is a lot that we can do to support positive emo- tional development across the life span. We have very-high-quality studies telling us what we could put in place to enhance emotional development. These include programs to improve brain functioning in children pre- and postnatally, as well as parenting and marital interventions that allow people to understand one another better and consequently to engage in shared thinking and cooperation. Pro- grams in schools help children to develop healthier patterns of emo- tionality. Why are these not yet standard curricula? And we should not forget what we do to family life by allowing families to live in poverty. As a society, we make our choices about what to support. Knowing what we know about emotional development and its long reach into adulthood, we should be optimizing the family and school environments of young children.

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T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. What biases of appraisal do you have in yourself, and how do these affect your relationships with others? Ask the same ques- tion for someone you know well.

2. Which of the relational influences on emotion do you think operated most strongly in your own childhood: parents, sib- lings, peers?

3. Think about your emotional experiences in your family as you were growing up. How do you think these experiences will affect your own parenting?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

A classic that is still stimulating in its thoughtful and wide-ranging treatment of fundamental issues of emotions in our human condition:

John Bowlby (1971). Attachment and loss, volume 1. Attachment. London: Hogarth Press (reprinted by Penguin, 1978)

The beginnings of social understanding is a wonderful book about the emotional and interpersonal life of preschool children.

Dunn, J. (1988). The beginnings of social understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

On the mechanisms of intergenerational patterns of emotionality across generations:

Bridgett, D. J., Burt, N. M., Edwards, E. S., & Deater-Deckard, K. (2015). Intergenerational transmission of self-regulation: A multidisciplinary review and integrative conceptual framework. Psychological Bulletin, 141(3), 602–654.

A very good summary of the relation of emotion to personality:

Reisenzein, R., & Weber, H. (2009). Personality and emotion. In P. J. Corr & G. Matthews (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of personality psychol- ogy (pp. 54–71). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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12 Psychopathology of Emotions in Childhood

... we are obliged to pay as much attention in our case histories to the purely human and social circumstances of our patients as to the somatic data and symptoms of the disorder. Above all, our interest will be directed towards their family circumstances.

Sigmund Freud (1905, p. 47)

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This chapter was written with Mark Wade and Noam Binnoon-Erez

CONTENTS Emotions and Psychopathology

The Case of Peter Conceptualizing Childhood Disorders: Categories versus Dimensions How Are Emotions Involved in Children’s Psychopathology? Are Emotions Abnormal in Psychopathology?

Prevalence of Psychopathology in Childhood Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology Comorbidity, Heterogeneity, and the p Factor

The Relationship Between Risk Factors and Psychopathology

People, Contexts, and the Multilevel Environment Risk and Resilience: The Combination of Risk and Protective Factors

Risk Factors Biological Risk Factors Proximal Risk Factors Distal Risk Factors

Trajectories of Disorders Homotypic and Heterotypic Continuity Trajectories of Externalizing Problems Trajectories of Internalizing Disorders

Interventions for Child and Adolescent Psychopathology

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Emotions and Psychopathology 309

Emotions and Psychopathology Most psychopathology of childhood and adolescence involves impairments in emotional func- tioning. Extremes of anxiety, anger, shame, or sadness may occur, making it hard for children to get along with friends and family or to learn at school. Disorders in childhood are distinct from those in adulthood, as there are “changes in both magnitude and character as development progresses” (Hudziak, Achenbach, Althoff, & Pine, 2008, p. 102). As we show in this chapter, disorders of childhood and adolescence are more than just extreme expressions of emotion, but also entail difficulties in recognizing and regulating emotion.

The Case of Peter To get a sense of how emotions and emotion-based disorders overlap, we describe a boy with conduct disorder (an externalizing disorder), and depression (an internalizing disorder). He is a composite of several boys that have been seen in the course of clinical work by the authors. We have developed this composite to maintain anonymity and to illustrate the range of issues present in the child, family, and broader context that are discussed in the rest of the chapter.

Peter, age 14, lives in an apartment with one older sister and his parents. He is fre- quently in trouble at school and was recently suspended for several days after fighting with another child. When a teacher intervened, he picked up a chair and threw it at her. He screamed and swore at her, and only stopped the aggressive outburst when he was restrained by two adults. In the last two years, Peter’s school principal has complained about his quick temper, defiance, bullying, and truancy. His parents have worried about his behavior at home since he was a toddler. Peter was born prematurely, and as a baby, cried frequently and was hard to console. As a toddler, his language was slow to develop. He was difficult for his parents to control as a preschooler and this worsened as he got older. As an adolescent, he shows a lot of aggression but he also suffers from intense low moods. He cries often, complains that he has no friends and that he is useless. More recently, he has talked about killing himself. He is frequently bullied at school. His parents are often angry and harsh with him, but also capitulate to his demands. They get tired of arguing and feel sorry for him because he is so miser- able. His parents frequently fight with one another over how to manage him. Although he was close to his older sister when he was younger, this is no longer the case. When Peter is seen at the clinic, he cries throughout his visit, describes intense feelings of frustration, sadness and loneliness, and denies that his aggression occurs.

Conceptualizing Childhood Disorders: Categories versus Dimensions Many children show problems that are similar to Peter. A term that you will see used for disor- ders in general is psychopathology. Two broad approaches have been used to assess and classify disorders. The first involves categorical diagnosis. To make a diagnosis, a child’s behavior is evaluated by a trained clinician. The main scheme used to classify psychopathology in adults and children in North America is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). In other parts of the world, the International Clas- sification of Diseases is more commonly used (World Health Organization, 2017). These clas- sifications generally assume that: (1) disorders are discrete, separate from one another and well differentiated from normal functioning; (2) there is a specific etiology or cause and corresponding

PsychoPathology of Emotions in childhood310

treatment for particular disorders; and (3) the course of illness is similar across children who suf- fer from it.

For most common disorders in childhood, these assumptions are not well met. The idea that disorders represent distinct entities and are qualitatively separate from one another (and from normal functioning) has been questioned by leading clinical scientists (Carragher, Krueger, Eaton, & Slade, 2015; Jablensky, 2016). Why? Most notably, there are difficulties of classifi- cation that relate to high comorbidities across disorders (overlap of diagnoses). There is also significant variability within disorders (heterogeneity), suggesting that a classification—for example, “autism”—means different things to different children. And treating disorders as distinct entities can lead to an insensitivity to subclinical emotional disturbance (Haslam, Holland, & Kuppens, 2012). All of these issues are present for Peter. The value of categorical systems is conceptual and communicative. Clinicians find it helpful to classify children and communicate with parents using categories. Further, policymakers and funders utilize prevalence data to plan for services.

Given these difficulties with categorical approaches to childhood disorders, another way of conceptualizing childhood disorders is to view symptoms as varying along a dimension, such as the tendency to express anger, where there is a quantitative rather than qualitative distinction between disorder and normal functioning (Carragher et al., 2015). For this approach, informa- tion is usually gathered via psychometric assessment, where checklists and questionnaires are completed by clinicians, teachers, parents, and/or the children. Such measures provide a continu- ous range of symptom scores, permitting the identification of clusters of behavior that overlap with the categorical diagnoses described above. Critically, meta-analyses suggest that use of dimensional measures as opposed to categorical measures yields a 15 percent improvement on a measure’s consistency (reliability) and 37 percent increase on its ability to measure the true con- struct (validity) (Markon, Chmielewski, & Miller, 2011). Modifications to traditional categorical systems (such as DSM-5) have undergone changes to account for the empirical findings that underscore the dimensionality of psychopathology (Regier, Kuhl, & Kupfer, 2013).

How Are Emotions Involved in Children’s Psychopathology? Most common psychopathologies of childhood are described along two broad dimensions, which are known as externalizing and internalizing (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000, 2001). The exter- nalizing dimension is characterized by hostility and disruptive behavior (i.e., “acting out”); the internalizing dimension is characterized primarily by depressed mood and anxiety (i.e., “acting in”) (Kovacs & Devlin, 1998; Lahey et al., 2008). Peter showed both externalizing and internal- izing problems, and although he had only recently received diagnoses of conduct disorder and depression, he had been suffering with his emotions for years. Also included in the external- izing cluster is oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, but attention and hyperactivity/impulsivity problems frequently co-occur with anger and aggression.

Internalizing disorders include many problems related to anxiety and depression. Anxiety disorders are characterized by fears that are abnormal in intensity, duration, and elicitation. For example, when children have separation anxiety disorder, they are fearful that harm will befall their parents and they will lose them. Consequently, they avoid school and activities that take them away from their parents. A depressive disorder is characterized by a marked shift in mood, whereby children feel deeply despondent and lacking in interest. Sometimes, rather than being despondent, the child could be very irritable. Aside from mood disturbance, other symp- toms include weight changes, sleep disturbance, fatigue, feelings of guilt or worthlessness, and an inability to concentrate. As we can see, these disorders involve a disturbance of emotion. For instance, in ODD the presence of temper outbursts, argumentativeness, or resentfulness is

Emotions and Psychopathology 311

underpinned by anger and irritability. Other common psychopathologies are related to fearful- ness and disgust, such as the fear of becoming fat or having low self-worth related to body weight, size, and shape in the case of anorexia nervosa. Still, other disorders such as substance abuse disorders may emerge because of an individual’s feeling of discontent (Allen, Chango, Szwedo, Schad, & Marston, 2012) or shame (e.g., for those with a history of trauma, see Holl et al., 2017). In this chapter, we consider disorders that are influenced by a disturbance of emo- tion, with respect to how emotions are expressed, recognized, and regulated. In Chapter 1, we described a continuum of emotional experience and expression. At one end are emotional expres- sions lasting for seconds, and emotional episodes lasting for minutes or hours. Near the other end are disorders like depression or conduct disorder, in which prolonged emotional states drastically affect life over long periods, and even further along the continuum we can think about personal- ity disorders that may involve emotions that last a lifetime (e.g., the emotion dysregulation that characterizes borderline personality disorder).

Are Emotions Abnormal in Psychopathology? There are several theories about how emotional functioning contributes to psychopathology. The first is predominance of one emotion system, articulated by Tomkins (1978) and Jenkins and Oatley (1996), which proposes that one particular emotion or family of emotions becomes promi- nent and dominates other possible experiences and guides subsequent appraisals and expressive behavior in a biased fashion. Within this framework, disorders represent an imbalance among emotions: a person might largely feel and express anger, or sadness, no matter what the con- text. These emotional tendencies become incongruent with what actually happens in the outside world. For examples, children like Peter with conduct disorder are more likely to interpret neu- tral incidents as intentionally hostile (hostile attribution bias), which predicts later aggressive behavior (De Castro, Veerman, Koops, Bosch, & Monshouwer, 2002; Yeager, Miu, Powers, & Dweck, 2013). An equivalent for internalizing problems is a depressogenic style of appraisal. Children who are vulnerable to depression and anxiety show biases toward perceiving threat or misfortune (Liu, Choi, Boland, Mastin, & Alloy, 2013). When combined with stressful environ- mental circumstances, such styles may put children at risk for internalizing disorders (Abela, McGirr, & Skitch, 2007; Mills et al., 2015).

A second theory is inappropriate emotional responses, wherein children with disorders react to events with atypical emotional responses: crying when nothing has happened or being con- temptuous when someone makes a friendly gesture (Jenkins & Oatley, 2000). In this view, it is not that children necessarily show more of one emotion than another, but that certain emotions seem unusual for the present context and the child’s stage of development. For instance, it is unusual for an 11-year-old child to be shy of strangers, but not for a 2-year-old child. Another child may be callous or unemotional, a trait that sometimes accompanies conduct disorder and is related to a lack of empathy that most children demonstrate (Frick, Ray, Thornton, & Kahn, 2014; Lockwood et  al., 2013). For instance, in response to another’s distress, some children show active disregard, accompanied by a low heart rate (Van Hulle et al., 2013). Consistent with the atypical response hypothesis, research has shown that children with both internalizing and externalizing problems show a degree of incoherence between physiologic indices of emotional reactivity and their self-reported experience of emotion (Hastings et al., 2009).

A third theory is poor emotion regulation, which focuses on how children with psychopa- thology have significant challenges managing their emotions to meet situational demands. This theory refers to an integrated network of cognitive, attentional, and affective processes that shape how children regulate their emotions (Bridgett, Burt, Edwards, & Deater-Deckard, 2015; Cole & Deater-Deckard, 2009). This builds on the idea of temperament as a neurobiologically based propensity, as we discussed in Chapters 8 and 11; but in this chapter, we consider more extreme

PsychoPathology of Emotions in childhood312

expressions of these propensities. For depressed children, it is a struggle to reappraise difficult situations in a positive light, which further contributes to depression and anxiety (Ball, Ramsawh, Campbell-Sills, Paulus, & Stein, 2013; Hofman, Sawyer, Fang, & Asnaani, 2012). Similarly, children who develop externalizing problems find it hard to shift their focus to anything positive when they are frustrated, and so they remain angry and hostile (Donahue, Goranson, McClure, & Van Male, 2014). This concept of emotion dysregulation has now been demonstrated in a host of childhood psychopathologies, including generalized anxiety and panic disorders (Ball et al., 2013), behavioral disorders (Halligan et al., 2013), eating disorders (Brockmeyer et al., 2014; Svaldi, Griepenstroh, Tuschen-Caffier, & Ehring, 2012), and autism (Mazefsky et  al., 2013; Samson, Wells, Phillips, Hardan, & Gross, 2015). Further, problems of regulation have been linked to alexithymia, which refers to an impairment in the identification and description of one’s own emotions. This has been found in a number of psychological disorders including autism, eating disorders, and schizophrenia (Bird & Cook, 2013).

A fourth and final view of psychopathology is the emotional adaptation to negative environ- ments hypothesis. Here, the idea is that psychological patterns in children (viewed as disor- dered) actually reflect strategic adaptations to negative environments (Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van Ijzendoorn, 2011). Consistent with the evolutionary framework on which this model is based, stressful environments are viewed as contexts to which children must adjust in order to achieve reproductive success. For example, a child who has angry outbursts and steals things from others may be (unknowingly) attempting to gain a survival and reproductive advantage over others who are similarly competitive. An extremely anxious child may have devel- oped hypervigilance so that he or she is prepared to generate an appropriate response in the face of potential threats. In contexts where there is no adversarial competition or threat, these children’s tendencies toward anger and fear are viewed as disruptive and maladaptive.

Prevalence of Psychopathology in Childhood We have begun to think about the origins of childhood disorders such as externalizing and inter- nalizing tendencies. How prevalent are they? The science of epidemiology is concerned with this question of how frequently disorders occur in the population and the ways in which their patterns are explained. Epidemiologists are concerned with prevalence, the proportion of a population who suffer from some disorder over a particular time period, and incidence, the number of new onsets of a particular disorder in a given time.

Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology Epidemiological studies examine the rate or prevalence of psychopathology in the general popu- lation. These studies reveal that psychopathology in childhood and adolescence is surprisingly common. In a study of kindergarten children in Massachusetts, investigators found that one in five children met criteria for a disorder within the year prior to school entry (Carter et al., 2010), with boys showing more externalizing problems and girls more internalizing problems. A study in Norway found an overall prevalence of 7.1 percent, much lower than in other developed coun- tries (Wichstrom et al., 2012). By middle childhood (i.e., age 9–10), Costello and colleagues (Costello, Mustillo, Erkanli, Keeler, & Angold, 2003) found in a study in the United States that one in five children met criteria for a disorder within the past three months. You can see from Table 12.1 that gender differences in psychopathology continue from age 9 to 16 and that exter- nalizing disorders, substance abuse, and depression generally increase over this period, while anxiety disorders generally decrease.

Prevalence of Psychopathology in Childhood 313

By the time adolescence has been reached (13–18 years), nearly half of all children have met criteria for a diagnosis at some point in their lives (Merikangas et al., 2010). If the threshold is set at serious impairment (when the disorder has a significant impact on the child’s every- day functioning), this estimate drops to 22 percent. Gender differences in psychopathology per- sist into adolescence, where girls experience higher rates of internalizing disorder (with female depression in particular increasing as adulthood approaches), and boys experience higher rates of externalizing disorders. Overall, behavioral disturbances of boys are picked up at an early age, whereas some of the emotional disturbances of females become noticeable only at later ages, which are in part driven by hormonal and other pubertal changes (Martel, 2013).

A recent meta-analysis of 41 studies across 27 countries found that the worldwide pooled prevalence rate of psychopathology among children and adolescence was 13.4 percent (Polanc- zyk, Salum, Sugaya, Caye, & Rohde, 2015), which equates to about 241 million children of age 5 to 19 globally. These estimates compare to those of other chronic childhood ailments such as asthma (8.5%) and obesity (16.8%). Rates for specific disorders were as follows: Any anxiety disorder (6.5%); any depressive disorder (2.6%); ADHD (3.4%); ODD (3.6%); and conduct dis- order (2.1%). Perhaps more shockingly, it has now been estimated that the cumulative prevalence rate by young adulthood may be as high as 82 percent (Copeland, Shanahan, Costello, & Angold, 2011), suggesting that psychopathology, like physical illness, may be a nearly universal phe- nomenon. The prevalence of these disorders is one of the most pressing public health concerns facing the world today; total annual expenditures due to child and adolescent psychopathology are approximately $247 billion in the United States alone (Perou et al., 2013).

Comorbidity, Heterogeneity, and the “p” Factor One of the biggest challenges faced by clinicians and researchers is comorbidity. Kessler and his colleagues (2005), using the National Comorbidity Survey in the United States, showed that about half of all individuals with a psychopathology diagnosis have at least one additional diagnosis: 55 percent carried a single diagnosis; 22 percent had two diagnoses, and 23 percent had three or more diagnoses. Lifetime comorbidity is upward of 70 percent for some disorders, such as depres- sion, anxiety, disruptive behavior disorders, and bipolar disorder (Merikangas et al., 2011; Moffitt et al., 2010; Ruscio et al., 2017). Thus, comorbidity is the rule rather than the exception.

A second challenge is the notion of heterogeneity, or the fact that different clusters of symp- toms or behaviors across individuals can result in the same diagnosis. In other words, various sub- types of disorders may be present, each with a potentially different etiology, course, and treatment response (Carragher et al., 2015). These challenges have inspired a new wave of research examin- ing the hierarchical or meta-structure of psychopathology, with the notion that there may be an

Table 12.1 Three-month prevalence rates of psychopathology among a representative sample of children and adolescents of different age groups

Type of disorder Total 9–10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Girls Boys

Externalizing 7.0 5.7 4.4 5.3 5.2 6.3 10.0 10.3 4.5 9.5

Anxiety 2.4 4.6 2.6 0.9 2.0 1.8 2.8 1.6 2.9 2.0

Substance use 2.4 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.3 1.4 5.3 7.6 2.0 2.8

Depression 2.2 0.5 1.9 0.4 2.6 2.7 3.7 3.1 2.8 1.6

Any disorder 13.3 19.5 12.7 8.3 12.7 9.7 14.2 12.7 10.6 15.8

Numbers are percentages.

Adapted from Costello et al., 2003.

PsychoPathology of Emotions in childhood314

overarching factor that confers vulnerability to many domains of psychopathology (Lahey et al., 2012). This factor has been called the p factor (where “p” is for psychopathology) by Caspi and colleagues (2014), and it accounts for an average of 42 percent of the variance in psychopathol- ogy. It has been suggested that emotion dysregulation and negative affectivity are the essence of this factor. This p factor is reliably and systematically evident in adolescents (Laceulle, Kleber, & Alisic, 2015; Patalay et al., 2015; Tackett et al., 2013) and younger children (Lahey, 2015; Martel et al., 2017). These findings align with recent work on transdiagnostic models of psychopathol- ogy, which aim to uncover a subset of key behavioral, psychological, and biological dimensions of functioning that are compromised in all disorders (Krueger & Eaton, 2015). This has implications for prevention and intervention, a topic that we return to at the end of this chapter.

The Relationship Between Risk Factors and Psychopathology As Alan Sroufe (2009) has emphasized, child psychopathology can only be understood within a complex, systemic framework that is dynamic in nature. Many small influences—including genetic vulnerabilities and risky experiences—set children onto pathways that eventually result in compromised development. The relationship between risks and outcomes is nondeterministic and nonspecific (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996). That is, the presence of a particular risk factor may increase the probability of a particular disorder, but its presence never guarantees disorder. Simi- larly, many environmental risks contribute to a single disorder, and one environmental risk can lead to many different disorders. The processes involved in the development of psychopathology are transactional (Beauchaine & McNulty, 2013; Cabaj, McDonald, & Tough, 2014; Sameroff, 2010). Children influence their environments, and their environments, in turn, continue to shape their behavior and emotions over time. (The evocative gene–environment correlation discussed in Chapter 11 is one version of a transactional process.)

People, Contexts, and the Multilevel Environment We introduced the multilevel perspective in Chapter 11. It is equally important for conceptual- izing the development of psychopathology in children (Jenkins, Madigan, & Arseneault, 2015) with influences on children and their families operating at multiple levels, both in terms of distal and proximal influences. This multilevel organization of a child’s ecological system is depicted in Figure 12.1.

One of the implications of thinking in terms of multilevel influences is to recognize the indirect effects that occur between various aspects of a child’s environment. For instance, living in a dangerous neighborhood and experiencing poverty have been found to increase parental negativity toward children. When parents are negative with their children, children are more likely to get involved with deviant peers and become delinquent, which, in turn, impacts parent- ing in a transactional manner (Gault-Sherman, 2012). When we think about the development of psychopathology in children, we think in terms of a maladaptive person-context: the child is difficult for the environment, and the environment is difficult for the child. Thus, children who are difficult and oppositional elicit more harshness and negativity from their parents (Kerr, Stattin, & Ozdemir, 2012; Laukkanen, Ojansuu, Tolvanen, Alatupa, & Aunola, 2013) and increase con- flict  between their parents (Jenkins, Simpson, Dunn, Rasbash, & O’Connor, 2005). Both harshness from parents and marital conflict further increase the children’s difficult behavior. Children with problematic emotions also choose friends who share these characteristics. For instance, angry and aggressive children befriend other children who are angry and aggressive,

The Relationship Between Risk Factors and Psychopathology 315

and depressed children befriend others who are depressed (Sijtsema, Rambaran, Caravita, & Gini, 2016; Stone et al., 2013). Thus, children co-create their family and peer environments, and these environments go on to influence their subsequent development, including the likelihood they will struggle with disorders of different kinds.

In Figure 12.2, we have summarized these processes. The person’s emotional functioning is at the center of the diagram. Above are the environmental risks that operate, and below are the vul- nerabilities that begin as endogenous risks within the child. Over time the interactions between person and context set children on a trajectory of good or poor mental health. Almost invariably, these dynamics mean that a person’s previous functioning is a much stronger predictor of subse- quent difficulties than anything related to their present context (Enoch et al., 2016).

Risk and Resilience: The Combination of Risk and Protective Factors The founding figure in helping the field understand psychopathology in childhood is Sir Michael Rutter, who was the first to conceptualize children’s emotional problems in terms of risks and resilience (e.g., Rutter, 1979, 2013). There is increasing evidence that the risks that we describe below are not independent of one another.

Like psychopathological problems themselves, contextual risks tend to aggregate; they co- occur and combine in systematic ways. For instance, in a study of adverse childhood experi- ences (ACEs; abuse, poverty, mental health or substance abuse in parents, marital discord), Dong et al. (2004) found that 87 percent of respondents that reported one form of childhood adversity reported a second adversity. Life’s difficulties concentrate in children’s lives. When adversities in childhood are summed, the resulting metric is called cumulative risk. As the number of risks in the environment increases, so do physiological indicators of stress (Theall, Drury, & Shirtcliff,

FIGURE 12.1 The multilevel structure of children’s developmental contexts, based on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Bioecological Model.

PsychoPathology of Emotions in childhood316

2012) and so does the likelihood of psychopathology. For instance, compared to children with- out any early adversities, those exposed to multiple adversities were 2–10 times more likely to have three or more mental and physical health problems (Mersky, Topitzes, & Reynolds, 2013). Thus, not only does cumulative risk predict poor outcomes such as depression, school dropout, arrest, smoking, and physical disease, but cumulative risk begets cumulative maladaptation from childhood through adulthood (Atkinson et al., 2015). Figure 12.3 shows this effect on the risk for psychopathology in children.

Context

Child

• Political and cultural factors • Neighborhood, school, and workplace • Between family (shared) • Within family (non-shared)

• Temperament and personality • Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral tendencies • Neural and endocrine activity • Genetic and epigenetic effects

Time

Psychopathology

–

+

×

Adjustment

Embodied psychological experience

Developmental trajectories

FIGURE 12.2 Development of psychopathology over time, influenced both by the context and by the factors inherent in the child.

Significant figures: Michael Rutter and George Brown

Michael Rutter trained in medicine. It was he who laid foun- dations for empirical child psychiatry. This work included (with George Brown, e.g., Brown & Rutter, 1966) working out how to interview families to understand their emotional characteristics. He also headed up the first large epidemio- logical study of childhood disorders. It’s called the Isle of Wight study (Rutter, Tizard, & Whitmore, 1970), because it took place on the Isle of Wight, which is just off the Eng- lish south coast. In this work, Rutter started, systematically, to define the risks for childhood emotional disorders. His recent work has been on gene–environment interactions in

the development of children. He is still a principal force in the field of child development and children’s emotional dis- orders.

George Brown trained as a sociologist, and after working with Michael Rutter, developed an interview that would ena- ble him to conduct first large-scale epidemiological study of depression among women. This work is published, with Tirril Harris (1978), as Social origins of depression. It remains a wonderfully innovative and important study for the devel- opment of emotional disorder. We discuss it in Chapter 13.

The Relationship Between Risk Factors and Psychopathology 317

The most important element in understanding how risk factors influence emotion-based dis- orders is to see how they combine (Kumsta, Rutter, Stevens, & Sonuga-Barke, 2010). Peter, whose case we sketched at the beginning of the chapter, experienced many risks and the co- occurrence and number of these risks pushed him off a normative developmental trajectory onto a disordered trajectory. He was born prematurely, which put him at increased risk of having a negative temperament. His parents always found him challenging. Consequently, they were harsh and reactive toward him, and he never learned appropriate emotion regulation. The close- ness that he had with his sister was protective for him when he was young, but their relationship deteriorated as his difficulties intensified. By the time Peter started to receive help from profes- sionals, his life was beset by difficulties and sadly lacking in opportunities or promise. More support from those around him would have buffered him from severe emotional difficulties, but because of his aggressive tendencies, it was hard for his family members or teachers to provide such support.

Good elements of children’s lives (Peter’s relationship with his sister when he was young) helped him to bounce back from the negative interactions that he had with his parents. To make sense of these changes in children’s lives, life-course models of health and development (Halfon et al., 2014) highlight the malleability of mental health, how difficulties ebb and flow as a func- tion of emergent risk, and protective factors that unfold during critical or sensitive periods of development. Within this thinking, it is clear that endogenous strengths of children such as high IQ (Masten, 2007), good temperament (Clark, 2005), and stable vagal tone (a marker of auto- nomic nervous system function; El-Sheikh, Harger, & Whitson, 2001; Graziano & Derefinko, 2013) protect children. But it is the quality of children’s relationships that is probably the most significant factor in helping people cope with adversity. In one longitudinal study, a number of children were found to have suffered adverse life events (Gass, Jenkins, & Dunn, 2007). How- ever, even when they had been exposed to many negative events, the presence of a close sibling relationship reduced the likelihood of experiencing internalizing symptoms. Relationships with parents, teachers, grandparents, and siblings have all been shown to have protective effects reduc- ing the likelihood that children will suffer disorders (e.g., Cicchetti, 2013; Rodrigues, Binnoon- Erez, Prime, Perlman, & Jenkins, 2017; Whittle et al., 2017). Contemporary systems models predict that resilience is the product of many systems—from the molecular to the macro level— that are continually interacting. Thus, resilience is not characterological per se, but rather about the balance of positive and negative aspects of ourselves and our contexts (Masten, 2014).

These considerations raise the question of how risks and protective factors operate together in children’s lives. Two conceptualizations of risk and resilience have shaped the field’s thinking about this question. The first is the diathesis-stress perspective that posits that a child’s disposi- tional vulnerabilities (e.g., genetic tendencies) only put children at risk for disorder in the context

FIGURE 12.3 Effects of cumulative risk on likelihood of developing psychopathology in children (Rutter, 1979). Children with one risk factor are no more likely to develop a disorder than those with none, but with each added risk factor the prevalence of psychopathology multiplies.

PsychoPathology of Emotions in childhood318

of negative environments. It is their combination that creates the difficulty rather than either genetic or poor environments on their own.

A second conceptualization is referred to as differential susceptibility. This suggests that some children are more influenced by both positive (development-enhancing) and negative envi- ronments (psychopathology-promoting) (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2015; Belsky & Pluess, 2013). This is the idea of dandelions and orchids that we discussed in Chapter 11. In the context of psychopathology, the idea is that children’s differential susceptibility is attribut- able to neurophysiological differences in reactivity and particularly heightened activity in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, discussed in Chapters 5 and 7. Highly susceptible children (called orchids; see Chapter 11) with greater baseline activation in the stress-related regions of the brain and body will show greater reactivity to both positive and negative contexts, in contrast to dandelions who are less reactive to all contexts, both good and bad.

Risk Factors Critical to the theorizing we have just reviewed is the central notion that risk factors within the child and in the child’s environment shape the likelihood of the child struggling with an emo- tional disorder. In the section that follows, we outline the key risk factors that operate across multiple levels of influence to increase the risk of children showing psychopathology.

Biological Risk Factors Our focus in this section is on neurobiological characteristics of children that are associated with psychopathology. We discuss genetic, epigenetic, endocrine, immune, and nervous system influ- ences, offering a brief summary of the role of each in children’s emotional disorders.

Genetics of Psychopathology There are about 20,000 genes that code for various proteins, which take the form of enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters, and receptors involved in human physiology and behavior. Most psychopathological disorders are heritable, meaning that certain genetic variants (in our genetic blueprint or DNA) are involved in their onset, course, severity, and overall presentation. For most psychopathological disorders, hundreds to thousands of common and rare genetic variants (referred to as polymorphisms) are likely implicated in their etiology (Uher & Zwicher, 2017). But genes do not operate in isolation. There are dozens of environmental exposures that are also related to different forms of psychopathology. Importantly, the effects of genes and environments are conditional on one another, giving rise to gene–environment interactions that govern emo- tions, cognition, and behavior. Moreover, the effect of certain genetic variants may depend on the presence of other variants (one gene variant can multiply the effect of another gene variant), and the effect of environmental exposures is contingent on one another (the effect of having a harsh parent is made worse by living in a violent neighborhood). Thus, when considering the role of genetics in psychopathology, bear in mind that the mechanisms of influence are complex and incompletely understood. Genes may nudge children toward certain types of outcomes, but there are no one-to-one relationships and it will likely never be possible to predict from people’s genetic blueprint alone how their lives will unfold.

As discussed in Chapter 8, quantitative genetics estimates the heritability for particular dis- orders, and many studies have investigated the relative contribution of genes and environments in the development of psychopathology. Recall from Chapter 8 that this is done by comparing the

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frequencies of a particular disorder between monozygotic twins (who share 100% of their genes) and dizygotic twins (who share 50% of their genes). Lahey and colleagues (Lahey, Van Hulle, Singh, Waldman, & Rathouz, 2011) conducted one of the most comprehensive heritability stud- ies of child and adolescent psychopathology in a representative sample of 1,571 twin pairs aged 9 to 17. Results are presented in Table 12.2.

Heritability estimates for all of the most common childhood disorders are high, as you can see. The table shows the proportion of variance in the disorder that is explained by genetic factors. The remainder of the variance is attributable to environmental influences (and meas- urement error). There are two other important findings to note. First, a general genetic risk for psychopathology—what Caspi and colleagues have called the p factor—was identified across disorders. Second, common genetic factors explained more of the overlap between disorders than environmental factors. This is consistent with recent studies demonstrating that about 43 percent of the variance in the p factor is due to genetic influences (Waldman, Poore, van Hulle, Rathouz, & Lahey, 2016). Together, these results raise the possibility that underlying different types of psychopathology is a genetic risk for something nonspecific, ubiquitous, and related to emotion, such as a vulnerability to negative emotionality, emotional impulsivity, or poor emotion regulation (Carver, Johnson, & Timpano, 2017; Martel et al., 2017; Tackett et al., 2013). Although these twin studies yield high heritability estimates, it should be noted that this is not the case for studies that assess DNA directly. Such studies seeking to find the single gene that predicts a kind of psychopathology or IQ find that individual genes account for tiny amounts of variance (e.g., 0.2% of the variance was the largest effect found for IQ by Benyamin et al., 2013). This difference between the heritability estimates that come from twin studies and the predictive power (or lack thereof) of single genes has been referred to as “missing herit- ability” (Plomin, 2013).

While once popular, candidate gene studies—which examine individual genetic markers in relation to psychopathology—have since given way to genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which test how thousands (if not millions) of genetic variants (including novel genes) may be associated with psychopathology. Because these involve the examination of so many

Table 12.2 Proportion of variance in childhood disorders attributable to additive genetic factors

Disorder Proportion of variance attributable to genetics

Major depressive disorder 0.61

Generalized anxiety disorder 0.57

Social phobia 0.45

Specific phobia 0.53

Agoraphobia 0.50

Separation anxiety disorder 0.55

Obsessive compulsive disorder 0.50

Conduct disorder 0.67

Inattention 0.79

Hyperactivity–impulsivity 0.79

Oppositional defiant disorder 0.69

Source: Lahey et al., 2011.

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associations, the GWAS studies are carefully adjusted for chance findings. One successful exam- ple of this approach is found in the literature on schizophrenia, where pooled data from over 140,000 individuals revealed 128 genes that reached genome-wide significance, 83 of which had not been previously reported (Ripke et al., 2014). Some of these genes were involved in known schizophrenia pathogenic pathways. However, while promising and still evolving, GWAS have yet to generate a reliable set of genetic markers that either consistently predict a particular form of psychopathology or differentiate among different disorders. They have also failed to identify single or small subsets of major genes that are responsible for causing psychopathology. Rather, it appears that many genes of small effect, and influencing multiple traits, offer the best explana- tion for how genes are operative in psychopathology.

Some of the genetic effects on psychopathology may be accounted for by rare genetic vari- ants, including copy number variants (CNVs) and other de novo mutations that arise spontane- ously in development. CNVs are a structural variation involving a duplication or deletion in a section of the genome. These rare variants have been documented in autism (Iossifov et al., 2014; Krumm et  al., 2015), ADHD (Martin, O’Donovan, Thapar, Langley, & Williams, 2015), and childhood schizophrenia (Ambalavanan et al., 2015).

Gene-Environment and Epigenetic Effects It is now well established that genes are rarely deterministic (i.e., they do not lead to a given outcome, such as externalizing or internalizing tendencies). Instead, the effects of genes on the physiological systems that govern behavior are modulated by environmental experiences. At the behavioral level, these effects are demonstrated by gene–environment interactions, wherein heightened levels of psychopathology are the product of both genetic risk and noxious envi- ronmental exposures (e.g., stress, adversity, toxins; Meaney, 2017). At the physiological level, circumstances of children’s lives, both pre- and postnatally, can influence the activity of genes. This is referred to as epigenetics, and occurs through processes such as methylation. Thus, adver- sities (toxins, stress, nutrition, infection) can alter the way that the gene does the job that it was programmed to do. They alter the “program,” with the consequence that the biological products of the gene (e.g., neurochemicals relevant to emotions such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin) are altered, even though the DNA sequence remains unchanged. These neurochemicals, as you learned in Chapter 7, support critical emotion-related processes such as appraisals of threat and reward and emotion regulation (Arnsten & Rubia, 2012; Charney 2012). Thus, we see that adver- sities can act on the genes to alter the production of neurochemicals that are central to our experi- ence of emotion.

Studies supporting the role of epigenetics in child psychopathology have examined the meth- ylation of individual genes and methylation across the whole genome. With respect to findings for individual genes, parental psychopathology, criminal behaviors, and substance abuse have been associated with greater methylation of the oxytocin receptor gene (Cecil et al., 2014). This is a gene that is involved in prosocial connection, emotion recognition, and regulation (Olff et al., 2013). Weder et  al. (2014) found from a genome-wide methylation study that methylation in genes involved in brain development and the stress response were significantly linked to depres- sion in children. Maternal stresses in infancy and paternal stresses when children were preschool- ers have been linked to patterns of methylation across the whole genome (Essex et al., 2013). Children who have been institutionally reared show high levels of gene methylation in regions that control immune and neural functioning (Naumova et al., 2012).

Overall, these findings underscore how social and environmental factors “get under the skin” and “get into the mind” to impact psychopathology (Belsky et al., 2016; Klengel & Binder, 2015; Kunda- kovic & Champagne, 2015; Lam et al., 2012; Lutz & Turecki, 2014; Szyf & Bick, 2013; Toyokawa, Uddin, Koenen, & Galea, 2012).

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Endocrine, Immune, and Autonomic Nervous System We are now going to consider the relationship between the stress response and childhood disor- ders. Before doing so, it’s worth revisiting what you learned in Chapters 5 and 7 about the neuro- physiology of stress. The HPA-axis is the central endocrine system modulating stress reactivity in humans and interacts with the immune system and the central nervous system in a coordinated fashion in response to stress.

Psychosocial stressors—social rejection, hostility, threat—are first detected by the thalamus, amygdala, and sensory cortices, all of which have evolved to alert us to potential threats in the environment. The hippocampus and regions of prefrontal cortex exert control over amygdala responses to stress. Amygdala activation induces activation of the “fight or flight response” via the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, which, in turn, triggers an immune response to prepare for potential infection and tissue damage. Amygdala activation also induces a neuroendocrine response, stimulating the HPA-axis to mobilize energy stores and secrete corti- sol, which is the primary stress hormone in humans. The coordinated response of the endocrine, immune, and nervous systems is critical for short-term adaptation to environmental stress. How- ever, when severe or chronic exposure to psychosocial stress is endured, the consequences on physical and mental health can be significant (see Danese & McEwen, 2012, for a review).

In childhood, the endocrine, immune, and nervous systems are not fully developed, and as a result, children are vulnerable to the negative effects of adverse environments. Chronic activa- tion of the HPA-axis may contribute to neuronal atrophy in the hippocampus, chronic amygdala activation, and suppression of the immune system, all of which combine to produce deleterious effects on physical health and cognitive function. Repeated exposure to stress and the cumulative “wear-and-tear” on the body (allostatic load) can result in both over- and underactivation of the HPA-axis. Puberty may be an especially relevant milestone for physiological reorganization as the HPA-axis appears to become more reactive to stress during this stage and begins to demon- strate an adult-like profile of hyperreactivity (Hankin, Badanes, Abela, & Watamura, 2010). This coincides with the increased prevalence of internalizing disorders observed during adolescence.

The emergence of depression during adolescence is also tied to increased inflammatory bio- markers (C-reactive protein, CRP; interleukin-6, IL-6) of the immune response (Miller & Cole, 2012), which you learned about in Chapter 5 in their relationship to shame and social rejection. Elevations of inflammatory markers indicative of immune involvement have been demonstrated for psychopathology in children, including bipolar disorder, PTSD, OCD, Tourette’s disorder, ADHD, and schizophrenia (Mitchell & Goldstein, 2014). Moreover, it has been suggested that the relation between inflammatory markers and psychopathology may depend on the presence of other genetic or neuroendocrine vulnerabilities (Felger & Lotrich, 2013), thereby highlighting the complex interactions across neurobiological systems in the pathophysiology of childhood disorders. In addition, endocrine and autonomic nervous system markers (e.g., heart rate and blood pressure) have been shown to predict internalizing and externalizing problems. In chil- dren with psychopathology, there is evidence that endocrine, immune, and autonomic systems are inefficiently or poorly coordinated with one another (El-Sheikh et al., 2008; Hastings et al., 2011). Together, these findings demonstrate the intricate involvement of the endocrine, immune, and nervous systems in the risk for psychopathology.

Neurological Factors In Chapter  8 we discussed the role of prenatal adversities on the developing brain and the individual differences in negative emotionality that can arise from such adversities. Pre- and perinatal influences have long been linked to atypical brain development and psychopathology. Thus, children born prematurely (Arpi & Ferrari, 2013; Montagna & Nosarti, 2016; Potijk, de Winter, Bos, Kerstjens, & Reijneveld, 2012) to mothers who smoke, drink or have poor

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nutrition during pregnancy (Flak et al., 2013; Hernandez-Martinez, Arija Val, Escribano Subias, & Canals Sans, 2012; Janssens et al., 2009; Pina-Camacho, Jensen, Gaysina, & Barker, 2015; Tiesler & Heinrich, 2014) have children who are more likely to show psychopathology later in development. Maternal depression and anxiety during pregnancy are also risks to the develop- ing fetus (Davalos, Yadon, & Tregellas, 2012; Dunkel Schetter & Tanner, 2015; Pearson et al., 2013; Qiu et al., 2013). Thus, one of the early contributing factors to child psychopathology is nonoptimal brain growth in utero.

Brain structure does look different in children with psychopathology when compared to typically developing peers. Such differences have been reported for the size of the prefrontal cortex (Arnsten & Rubia, 2012; Dolan, 2012), the structure of the amygdala (Pagliaccio et al., 2014; Pervanidou & Chrousos, 2012) and receptor densities of neurotransmitters in the prefron- tal cortex (PFC), amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and hippocampus (Lovheim, 2012; Matthys, Vanderschuren, & Schutter, 2013). Such consequences to the developing brain influence how we express, recognize, and regulate emotions.

Remember, though, that these influences on the developing brain are extremely complex involving both experience and biological programming, with the programming being alterable by experience! This complex interplay of biological propensity and experiential adversity is the story of psychopathology, with perhaps, emotion dysregulation at the center. Consider, for instance, that stressful life events interact with specific gene variants in the stress system (HPA system) to influence emotional responsivity in limbic regions (amygdala and hippocampus). In turn, reactivity in these regions is associated with a lack of emotion regulation (anxiety symp- toms, Pagliaccio et al., 2014, 2015). When children explicitly try to regulate their emotions, the prefrontal cortex and parietal and temporal lobe regions are activated (Belden, Luby, Pagliaccio, & Barch, 2014), leading some to argue that there may be a neural network that fosters emotion regulation (Fett et al., 2015; Meyer-Lindenberg & Tost, 2012). Think back to the p factor that we talked about earlier in the chapter. This psychopathology factor is associated with reduced gray matter volume in prefrontal regions (Snyder et al., 2017). Thus, it may be that for children with psychopathology, the neural network that helps them regulate their emotions has not devel- oped optimally. Fortunately, as we will see toward the end of this chapter, emotion dysregula- tion can improve over the life course both by intervention and by improved life circumstances (Rutter, 2013). While some of the negative effects of pre-, peri-, and postnatal influences on the developing brain are persistent, others show reversibility with development-enhancing experi- ences (Kofink, Boks, Timmers, & Kas, 2013; Toyokawa et al., 2012).

Proximal Risk Factors In Chapter 11 we considered the normative influences that are important for emotional develop- ment, influences such as attachment processes, the learning of emotion language, and socializa- tion processes. Here, some of the influences are on the same continuum but a more extreme version (Hatch, Harvey, & Maughan, 2010). For instance, in Chapter 11 we saw that responsive and warm parenting contributes to positive emotions and secure attachments for children. Here, we examine the impact of no attachment relationships. Such influences are considered proximal, meaning they bear directly on the child. Such detrimental experiences are associated with the abnormal emotions that we see in childhood psychopathology (Jenkins, Madigan, & Arseneault, 2015), and regrettably these emotional tendencies often carry over into adult life (Carr, Mar- tins, Stingel, Lemgruber, & Juruena, 2013; Sugaya et al., 2012). It is important to remember that there is never a one-to-one correspondence between risk exposure and psychopathology (Rutter, 2009). A given risk simply increases the probability of psychopathology.

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One of the most studied proximal contributors to psychopathology is the dynamic within the parent–child relationship. Parental hostility is the dimension of parenting most clearly associ- ated with children’s disorders (Edwards & Hans, 2015; Hoeve et al., 2009). For example, one longitudinal study of 1,479 children and mothers showed that children’s aggression and maternal negativity predicted one another in a “recursive feedback loop” over time (Norman et al., 2012; Plamondon, Browne, Madigan, & Jenkins, 2017). That is, child aggression elicited increased levels of harshness and negativity from the mothers, which, in turn, served to increase children’s aggression (Laukkanen et al., 2013; Plamondon et al., 2017). Hostile parenting is associated with biased appraisals by parents about children’s emotions when children are conduct disordered (Mence et al., 2014). The transaction between negative parenting and child externalizing behav- ior is called a “negative coercion cycle” (Granic & Patterson, 2006). As Patterson (1982) pointed out, as children become more and more difficult, parents withdraw their demands, and this func- tions to reinforce the child’s aversive behavior.

Though the majority of research on the emotional exchanges between parents and children in psychopathology has been observational, there has been some experimental research examining the effects of parental control on children’s emotions, adding strength to causal claims. One study trained parents to engage in (a) controlling and (b) autonomy granting behavior while children were preparing to write a speech, a typical anxiety-provoking situation (Thirwall & Creswell, 2010). When mothers were highly controlling, children had negative expectations of their own performance. Moreover, children exhibited more anxious behavior during the speech, especially if they were temperamentally anxious in the first place. Controlling parenting increases feelings of self-doubt, which may manifest as anxiety in performance situations. Meta-analyses confirm that overprotective and controlling parenting is associated with an increased risk of both internal- izing and externalizing problems in childhood (Moller, Nikolic, Majdandzic, & Bogels, 2016; Pinquart, 2017).

In Chapter 11 we thought about the effect of differential parenting on sibling relationships. It is also a predictor of psychopathology in children. For example, in a sample of 565 five-year- old monozygotic twins (who are genetically identical), Caspi and colleagues (2004) found that the twin who received more emotional negativity and less warmth from their mothers was more likely to develop antisocial behavior problems, defined by increased fighting and aggression. Importantly, the twin design of this study rules out a strictly genetic explanation for antisocial behavior. Moreover, a number of investigators have found that the more differential the parenting across all the children in a family, the higher the psychopathology among the children. As seen in Figure 12.4, when differential parenting is high, both the favored and disfavored child show higher oppositionality (Meunier, Bisceglia, & Jenkins, 2012). Moreover, mothers’ history of adversity, low socioeconomic status, and marital conflict all increase the degree to which mothers are differential with their children, which, in turn, predicts more psychopathology in children (Meunier, Boyle, O’Connor, & Jenkins, 2013). These findings suggest that the dynamics of the family as a whole— not just the child’s immediate relationships—are important to understand psychopathology.

Child maltreatment refers to the presence of physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, or emo- tional maltreatment (Norman et al., 2012). This represents an extreme and pathological relational environment clearly lacking in the developmental experiences that enable normal development. Problems among maltreated children are widespread, including delays with affect regulation, higher-order cognition (e.g., executive functioning), self-representation, social appraisals, and the coordination of physiological systems. The problems of maltreated children increase with age-as they fail to develop the necessary competencies at each stage of development, a problem that is compounded by deficient socialization experiences over the course of childhood (Cicchetti, Rogosch, & Thibodeau, 2012; Luke & Banerjee, 2013; Negriff, James, & Trickett, 2015; Shenk, Noll, Putnam, & Trickett, 2010). The placement of maltreated children into foster care does not

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necessarily reduce children’s problems, but rather sometimes increases the difficulties (Font, 2014; Putnam-Hornstein & King, 2014).

Children exposed to serious and prolonged marital conflict are also at an increased risk of developing psychopathology (Coln, Jordan, & Mercer, 2013; Davies, Cicchetti, & Martin, 2012; Kitzman, Gaylord, Holt, & Kenny, 2003). Researchers have concluded that exposure to marital conflict, especially when combined with autonomic markers of stress reactivity, can lead to heightened internalizing problems in childhood (El-Sheikh, Keiley, Erath, & Dyer, 2013). The costs of marital conflict begin early in the child’s life. Co-occurring internalizing and exter- nalizing problems in young children are also associated with marital conflict during the child’s infancy (Edwards & Hans, 2015), and trajectories of increasing marital conflict over the first five years of life predict more disruptive behavior in toddlerhood (Madigan, Plamondon, & Jenkins, 2017). It is important to recall from a discussion of these issues in Chapter 11 that the direction- ality of this process is not unidirectional. Difficult children make marriages more conflictual (Jenkins et al., 2005). Thus, in the same way that we saw children’s temperament contributing to their risk exposure in terms of the parenting that they receive, they also contribute to their par- ent’s marital dynamic. We also see differences in the associations between different physiologi- cal systems (endocrine and autonomic nervous system activity) among children who experience marital conflict, which may, in turn, increase the risk for psychopathology (Koss et al., 2014). At the extreme of marital conflict, domestic violence may occur. Exposure to domestic violence increases the risk for psychopathology (Vu, Jouriles, McDonald, & Rosenfield, 2016), as well as behaviors such as dating violence (Narayan et al., 2014).

Attachment status refers to the warmth and security of the attachment the child feels toward the parents and manifests in the different styles of secure, preoccupied, avoidant, and disor- ganized as we discussed in Chapter 11. As you might imagine, a child’s attachment status has

FIGURE 12.4 Children’s oppositional behavior as a function of differential parenting: Whether the children have been treated favorably or unfavorably ( from Meunier et al., 2012).

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been linked to both internalizing and externalizing disorders, as evident in a meta-analysis that included nearly 6,000 children. The strongest risk is for children in the “disorganized” cate- gory, followed by “avoidant” and “ambivalent” children, respectively (Fearon, Bakermans- Kranenburg, van Ijzendoorn, Lapsley, & Roisman, 2010; Groh, Roisman, van Ijzendoorn, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Fearon, 2012; Madigan et al., 2013;).

We saw in Chapter 11 that social disadvantage and unresponsive parenting were damaging to the development of attachment relationships, but it is the absence of an attachment relationship that is most damaging. Such is the case among children raised in orphanages deprived not only of physical and socioemotional stimulation and nurturance, but also devoid of a central attachment figure. The effects of being raised without an attachment figure are most convincingly demon- strated in the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP). When Romania was ruled by Nicolae Ceauşescu from 1965 to 1989, thousands of Romanian children were placed in institutions due to forced population growth and the inability of many families to care for their children. At the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, the BEIP began and a foster-care system was developed. A subset of infants raised in institutions was randomly selected for placement into foster care, while a similar group remained in the orphanages. The children have been intensely studied by Nelson, Fox, and Zeanah (2016). Findings from this remarkable 16-year longitudinal randomized controlled trial (RCT) demonstrate significant and long-lasting social, emotional, cognitive, and mental health difficulties of children raised in these orphanages compared to never-institutionalized children (Zeanah, Humphreys, Fox, & Nelson, 2017). There are also two critical timing effects: the first is perhaps unsurprising—longer periods of institutionalization resulted in worse outcomes. The second timing effect relates to the RCT component of the study: among those randomly assigned to foster care, earlier placement was associated with a greater likelihood of recovery or catch- up in intellectual functioning, as well as in cortisol reactivity, parasympathetic nervous system reactivity, and brain electrophysiology (see Zeanah et al., 2017, for a review). These effects were most prominent when children were placed before the age of two, suggesting that the first two years of life—which are characterized by rapid postnatal brain maturation—may serve as a sensitive period for early intervention and the establishment of healthy relationships with car- egivers. Moreover, children assigned to the foster-care group had better long-term outcomes than those that remained in institutions on several measures of cognitive and emotional processing. For instance, it was recently shown that children assigned to the foster-care group demonstrated a happy attention bias, being more attentive to positive stimuli (described in Chapter 8) at the 12-year follow-up, and this bias related to fewer internalizing problems, more prosocial behavior, and better coping skills in the face of stress (Troller-Renfree et al., 2017; see Figure 12.5). Insta- bility in foster-care placement was associated with increased threat bias.

Importantly, however, although children placed into foster care fare better than those who remain in institutions, rarely do they completely catch up to their never-institutionalized coun- terparts. Thus, it remains the case that prevention of child abandonment and neglect must be a public health priority.

Another type of abuse that children experience is being bullied or victimized by peers. These experiences are some of the most destructive for mental health across the life course, as frequent bullying in childhood is associated with an increased risk of mental health service use from child- hood through mid-adulthood (Evans-Lacko et al., 2017). In this longitudinal cohort study, those who were bullied as children had more psychological distress at ages 23 and 50 and were at a nearly two-fold increased risk of having depression, anxiety, and suicidality compared to nonvic- timized peers (Takizawa, Maughan, & Arseneault, 2014). By age 50, bullying victimization is also related to a lack of social relationships, more economic hardship, and poorer quality of life. In a separate study integrating across two large-scale longitudinal projects, those who were bullied as children had more psychopathology in adulthood than those experiencing early maltreatment without bullying (Lereya, Copeland, Costello, & Wolke, 2015), suggesting that the experience

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of bullying in childhood is at least as harmful as other maltreatment experiences on long-term mental health and well-being. Studies using genetically sensitive twin designs likewise reveal the impact of bullying victimization on psychopathology in both children and adults ( Silberg et al., 2016). The processes that translate bullying into psychopathology are not well understood, but are believed to involve some of the same mechanisms of stress-embedding reported earlier: altered cortisol response, epigenetic modification (e.g., gene methylation), and inflammation (Ouellet-Morin et al., 2013; Takizawa, Danese, Maughan, & Arseneault 2015). Thus, bullying victimization in childhood appears to operate on physiological systems that are generative of vulnerability to stress and psychopathology across the life course (Arseneault, 2017).

Distal Risk Factors Risks that are distal (meaning distant) are more indirect than those that bear directly on children. Among distal risks for child psychopathology are the psychopathology and poverty of their par- ents. A study from the World Health Organization (WHO) recently showed that nearly all parent disorders—major depression, generalized anxiety, panic, substance use, antisocial behavior, and suicidality—were significantly associated with psychopathology in offspring, but little specific- ity was found in types of parental disorder (McLaughlin et al., 2012). The strongest effects were observed when both parents had serious mental illness (e.g., psychosis). When this occurred, off- spring were 13 times more likely to show schizophrenia, 8 times more likely to show substance abuse, and 3 times more likely to show any disorder compared to individuals with unaffected parents. In a meta-analysis of 3,863 offspring of parents with serious mental illness and 3,158 controls, offspring of parents with serious mental illness were shown to be at an increased risk for a range of psychopathological outcomes, and one-third were predicted to develop serious mental illness by the time they reached adulthood (Rasic, Hajek, Alda, & Uher, 2014).

Depression is far more common than other psychopathologies like schizophrenia, as we dis- cuss in Chapter 13; it’s the second leading cause of disability worldwide (exceeded only by low back pain; Ferrari et al., 2013). A meta-analysis of 193 studies showed that maternal depres- sion was associated with increased internalizing and externalizing psychopathology among children; these effects were observed for children from infancy to the age of about seven. The magnitude of this influence of material depression upon childhood psychopathology was small, explaining between 1 and 6 percent of the variance across studies (Goodman et  al.,

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co re

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10 Threat Bias

NIGFCG

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CAUG

15

20

25

30

Happy Bias

FIGURE 12.5 Positive versus threat attention bias in early-institutionalized children ran- domly assigned to a foster-care group (FCG) or who remained institutionalized (CAUG) at age 12 (Troller-Renfree et al., 2017).

Risk Factors 327

2010). As depression shows substantial heritability (Lahey et al., 2011), some of this associa- tion is genetically mediated, but environmental factors such as parenting and marital conflict also play a role (Apter-Levy, Feldman, Vakart, Ebstein, & Feldman, 2013; Barker, Copeland, Maughan, Jaffee, & Uher, 2012; Elgar, McGrath, Waschbusch, Stewart, & Curtis, 2004; Lim, Wood, Miller, & Simmens, 2011).

There is also evidence that social processes within neighborhoods influence a child’s likeli- hood of psychopathology. These social processes include exposure to violence (Lynch, Manly, & Cicchetti, 2015), as well as social processes related to parents feeling supported in their raising of children (Freedman & Woods, 2013; Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). Higher levels of neighborhood support are associated with higher prosocial behavior in adolescents and involve- ment with nondelinquent friends (Krishnakumar, Narine, Roopnarine, & Logie, 2014). What’s more, neighborhood support has been shown to buffer against suboptimal parenting (e.g., physi- cal aggression, harsh discipline) in predicting children’s internalizing and externalizing problems (Krishnakumar et al., 2014; Riina, Martin, & Brooks-Gunn, 2014). Among mothers with histo- ries of adversity, neighborhood support protects against marital conflict and may thus mitigate children’s exposure to noxious environmental factors in the home (Madigan et al., 2016). As we might expect with distal factors, neighborhood support operates through more proximal influ- ences—such as parenting stress and maternal depression—in predicting risk of maltreatment (Barnhart & Maguire-Jack, 2016). Together, these results support a process in which structural disadvantage relates to lower neighborhood social support. In turn, lower support is associated with poorer family functioning and more parental emotional distress. These variables impact child psychopathology by exacerbating proximal influences such as inconsistent and punitive forms of parenting (see Kohen, Leventhal, Dahinten, & McIntosh 2008).

An experimental study, called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), confirmed the important influ- ences of neighborhood on children’s mental health. MTO randomly assigned individuals in low-income neighborhoods to a condition that enabled them to move to a better neighborhood, or to the control group (that did not facilitate moving neighborhoods). At the three-year follow- up, families who had moved to low-poverty neighborhoods reported significantly less distress, and young boys showed significantly fewer mental health problems such as externalizing and internalizing disorders (Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2003, 2004) than those in the control group. At the four-to-seven-year follow-up, however, although positive effects on emotions were seen in girls, this was not the case for boys (Kling, Liebman, Katz, & Sanbonmatsu, 2004; Kling, Ludwig, & Katz, 2005). Further, the effects on emotional well-being were not sustained over time. There was, however, one very long-term effect that was striking. This related to postsec- ondary education and earnings. For children who were moved to a better-off neighborhood before the age of 13, average adult earnings were 31 percent higher than those of controls (Chetty, Hendren, & Katz, 2016). Given the effect of education on the life course of individuals, this is a profound effect.

As we saw in Chapter 11, socioeconomic conditions, including poverty, are among the strong- est predictors of mental and physical health in children and adults (Letourneau et  al., 2013; McLaughlin, Costello, Leblanc, Sampson, & Kessler, 2012). The socioeconomic status of the individual, as you learned in Chapter 9, also influences a variety of emotional processes includ- ing empathy, stress, and negative emotionality (all adversely affected by lower socioeconomic status). Here, we think about how poverty and socioeconomic status influence childhood psycho- pathology. A study of 6,483 adolescent–parent pairs from a national sample of U.S. adolescents found that, after controlling for extreme poverty, food insecurity was associated with increased odds of past-year mood, anxiety, externalizing behavior, and substance disorders (McLaughlin, Green, et al., 2012). One of the pathways of influence may involve the heightened activation in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, involved in both appetite and mental health (McLaughlin et al., 2012).

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Over the last few years the effects of low socioeconomic status on the developing brain have become well recognized. Noble and colleagues (2015) examined cortical thickness and surface area of 1,099 children and adolescents who came from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Further, they investigated whether such associations accounted for the impact of socioeconomic adversity on children’s developing linguistic and cognitive competencies. They found that socio- economic status was related to child and youth brain structure, particularly in regions of the cortex associated with language, executive functioning, and memory. Further, they found that brain surface area explained the relationship between family income and children’s executive functioning.

These influences of poverty on the developing brain are not short term. Kim and colleagues (2013) had participants engage in emotion regulation tasks and tracked their neural activity. Par- ticipants were shown pictures and asked to decrease the intensity of their negative affect by using cognitive reappraisal. They found that adults who were in low-income families at 9 years old (without current low income) showed reduced activity in prefrontal regions associated with cog- nitive control and a failure to suppress amygdala activity while attempting to regulate negative emotions. The effect of early income on adult neural activity operated through chronic stressors (both physical and psychological) throughout childhood. Recent evidence is emerging to sug- gest that socioeconomic disparities impact child psychopathology via their effect on the brain and stress response systems, as we have suggested here (Barch et al., 2016; Merz, Tottenham, & Noble 2017; Ursache, Merz, Melvin, Meyer, & Noble, 2017). Thus, the consequences of these early experiences are pernicious, and social policies that aim to reduce family poverty are vital for supporting children’s emotional and intellectual development (Duncan, Morris, & Rodrigues, 2011; Noble et al., 2015).

The consequences of socioeconomic conditions are not just about absolute levels of income, but also income inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) developed an inequality metric by examining the ratio of incomes for the top and bottom 20 percent of a particular nation or society. They reported, for instance, that in United States, the top 20 percent were 8.4 times wealthier than the bottom 20 percent, whereas in Japan, the top 20 percent were only 3.4 times richer than the bottom 20 percent. We discuss this further in Chapter 13, and you can see a graph of this effect as Figure 13.2. In the United States, the gap between the rich and the poor has increased by 40–50 percent over the last four decades (Duncan & Mernane, 2011). This inequality relates to a number of outcomes, including increased rates of infant mortality, heart disease, homicide, mental illness, trust, and so on. A recent meta-analysis by Reiss (2013) showed that socioeco- nomically disadvantaged children were two to three times more likely to have mental health problems, with chronic disadvantage related to more problems. In addition to the toxic effects of absolute poverty, the “economic distance” between children (i.e., their socioeconomic position relative to their peers) is also associated with worse outcomes, even in overall wealthy nations. For instance, in a study of 34 North American and European countries with nearly 500,000 ado- lescents, income inequality uniquely predicted not only more psychological problems, but also higher body mass index (BMI), less physical activity, and more physical health problems (Elgar et al., 2015). Thus, both poverty and income inequality are important metrics in considering how socioeconomic factors impact child psychopathology (see Odgers, 2015).

Trajectories of Disorders How stable is child psychopathology over time? We often think of emotions as short-term reac- tions to events. When we look at psychopathology, however, patterns of emotional reactivity may occur over months or years and define the trajectories of our lives. There is stability in underlying

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affective biases, in the same way that there is stability in temperament or personality. As a con- sequence, we see strong continuities in internalizing and externalizing disorders among children. Unfortunately, child psychopathology confers significant risk for psychopathology later in life, with an approximately six-fold increased risk of having psychopathology in adulthood if one had some form of psychopathology as a child (Copeland, Wolke, Shanahan, & Costello, 2015). At least half of all disorders seen in adulthood start by early adolescence (Jones, 2013; Kessler et al., 2005).

Homotypic and Heterotypic Continuity Homotypic continuity describes the similarity or within-disorder stability of symptoms over time (e.g., early conduct problems predicting later conduct problems). Heterotypic continuity describes the cross-over in symptoms between different disorders over time (e.g., early con- duct problems predicting later depression or anxiety). In a seminal study by Jane Costello and her colleagues (2003), it was shown that from age 9 to 16, homotypic continuity was high for nearly all childhood disorders. Heterotypic continuity was also strong, especially from depres- sion to anxiety (and vice versa), from ADHD to ODD, and from anxiety and conduct disorder to later substance abuse. Homotypic continuity has since been shown to be virtually universal in both children and adults, with significant heterotypic continuity also observed both within and between internalizing and externalizing clusters (Lahey, Zald, Hakes, Krueger, & Rathouz, 2014; Shevlin, McElroy, & Murphy, 2017).

Why is this the case? Some have argued that homotypic continuity reflects the self- perpetuating or self-aggravating nature of disorders, which we have considered throughout this chapter (e.g., aggressive symptoms incite peer rejection, which propagates further aggression and then spills over into high conflict family dynamics when the child returns from school, which perpetuates this cycle). For heterotypic continuity, it has been argued that one disorder may trigger problems in other domains (e.g., aggression kindles peer rejection and harsh parent- ing, which foments later mood difficulties, such as depression). Both processes were observed in 1,042, 4-to-10-year olds (Wichstrøm, Belsky, & Steinsbekk, 2017). It is also the case that homo- and heterotypic continuity may be best explained by the p factor described earlier in the chapter. If emotion dysregulation is at the heart of psychopathology, then changes from, for instance, aggression to depression are not very meaningful because the core deficit of emotion dysregulation has remained unchanged. In one longitudinal study (Snyder, Young, & Hankin, 2017), heterotypic continuity was not observed once the stability in the p factor was accounted for. This supports the idea that the p factor may explain the cross-disorder correlations observed in studies.

Integrating these results with those from prior sections, these findings raise the possibility that there is a transdiagnostic vulnerability to psychopathology that explains heterotypic and, to a lesser extent, homotypic continuity in psychopathology over time. This p factor, as Caspi and colleagues call it, likely encapsulates challenges with emotional processing such as recognition, reactivity, and regulation of emotions. Moreover, this common liability may be etiologically linked to stable aspects of children’s bioecology, including genetic, neurobiological, parental, and peer influences that operate in tandem on development.

Trajectories of Externalizing Problems The concept of homotypic continuity implies that disorders are, to some degree, stable over time (Bufferd, Dougherty, Carlson, Rose, & Klein, 2012). This is not always the case, however, as you might have imagined. Nor is it the case that trajectories are necessarily linear, rising with intensity

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over time. Rather, when examining externalizing problems from age 5 to 27, a quadratic pattern appears to best describe the trajectories of this disorder over time in children’s lives defined by a decrease in symptoms from early childhood to preadolescence (age 5–11), an increase during adolescence (11–16), and a decrease again from late adolescence to adulthood (16–27); research- ers call such a pattern nonlinear continuity in externalizing problems over time (Petersen et al., 2015). Moreover, there is significant heterogeneity in the trajectories of symptoms between chil- dren over time, meaning that not all children show the same pattern. For conduct problems, there is now fairly strong consensus regarding the shape of these various trajectories (Colman et al., 2009; Odgers et al., 2008; Schaffer, Petras, Ialongo, Poduska, & Kellam, 2003; Shaw, Gilliom, Ingoldsby, & Nagin, 2003; see Figure 12.6).

Namely, studies tend to find a group of children with high levels of conduct problems that per- sist across development and into adulthood. This persistent group generally represents less than 10 percent of the population, but it is a highly problematic group who account for a large propor- tion of violent crime (Jennings & Reingle, 2012). Another group of children start high or moder- ately high on aggression in early or middle childhood, but as they mature, and perhaps their frontal lobes begin to reign in their impulses, their conduct problems decline. Another group of children are persistently low in their conduct problems. A fourth pattern is evident when adolescence to early adulthood is included in the assessment. This group is referred to as adolescent-limited, and they show conduct problems during adolescence, which are generally not as severe as those shown by children in the persistently high group, and which desist into adulthood (Shaw, Hyde, & Brennan, 2012). Generally speaking, membership in chronic, early-onset, or other high-symptom groups is characterized by difficulties regulating anger and negative affect and an absence of fear- fulness, harsh or rejecting parenting, maternal depression, parental conflict, poverty, maltreatment, and exposure to stressful prenatal events (MacKinnon, Kingsbury, Mahedy, Evans, & Colman, 2018; Odgers et al., 2008; Pardini & Frick, 2013; Shaw et al., 2012). Thus, not only do these risk factors predict the likelihood of conduct problems at any given point in time (described earlier), they also predict the longitudinal patterning of problems over time.

Similar trajectories of ADHD have been documented across childhood, though the rising- symptom trajectory usually occurs before adolescence (MacKinnon et al., 2018; Pingault et al.,

FIGURE 12.6 Conduct problems across childhood and early adulthood. Approximately 10% of indi- viduals have life-course persistent (LCP) conduct problems (taken from Odgers et al., 2008).

Trajectories of Disorders 331

2011; Sasser, Beekman, & Bierman, 2015; Tandon, Tillman, Agrawal, & Luby, 2016). There are similar environmental predictors for problematic ADHD trajectories to those reported for conduct problems. For example, Sasser, Kalvin, and Bierman (2016) recently demonstrated that, from 3rd to 12th grade, parents of children in elevated ADHD groups not only reported more life stress and higher levels of inconsistent discipline, but these children were more socially iso- lated and had poorer emotion regulation skills. These results are fascinating in light of emerging evidence that posits emotion dysregulation as a key factor in the development of ADHD (Shaw, Stringaris, Nigg, & Leibenluft, 2014). This is interesting given that ADHD has traditionally been considered a disorder of self-regulatory and neurocognitive impairment.

Trajectories of Internalizing Disorders In general, continuities for internalizing disorders are less marked than those for externalizing problems (Masten et  al., 2005), though there are discernible trajectories for these childhood problems as well. When using a combined scale assessing both anxiety and depression from age 4 to 15, one finds evidence of four groups (Weeks et al., 2014). There appears to be a group of children who remain persistently high in depression and anxiety through their childhood (persis- tently high), a group of children who avoid such symptoms (persistently low), a group who start high but decrease over time (high decreasing), and a group for whom depression and anxiety appear in adolescence (adolescent onset). In early childhood, there may be fewer trajectories, with low-stable, high-decreasing, and medium-increasing groups (Parkes, Sweeting, & Wight, 2016). The four-trajectory grouping has been demonstrated in other samples from childhood all the way to young adulthood (Melchior et al., 2014). As we saw with externalizing problems, pre- dictors of membership in more problematic long-term trajectory groups variably include higher levels of negative/stressful life events, parenting stress and hostile, ineffective and punitive par- enting, school difficulties, illness/health problems, social isolation, and parental depression.

If we separate this internalizing cluster into anxiety and depression, we observe similarly patterned trajectories, including for separation anxiety in children age 1.5–6 (Battaglia et  al., 2016), and general anxiety symptoms from early to late childhood (Duchesne, Larose, Vitaro, & Tremblay, 2010; Feng, Shaw, & Silk, 2008). Some studies identify a fifth anxiety trajectory that has medium-stable symptoms through adolescence (Morin et  al., 2011). For depression, a meta-analysis suggests that persistently low (67%), moderate (17%), high (3%), increasing (4%), and decreasing (8%) groups are reliably identified. The number, shape, and prevalence of these trajectories are similar whether measured across early childhood or throughout adolescence (Shore, Toumbourou, Lewis, & Kremer, 2017). Moreover, these trajectories are differentiated based on several factors, such as socioeconomic status, stressful life events, conduct issues, sub- stance use, peer rejections, and problems with family relationships. Another systematic review has also identified parental depression, lack of self-esteem, rumination, and poor emotion coping as other risk factors, with a dose–response relationship between the severity of the trajectory and the odds of having a given risk factor (Musliner, Munk-Olsen, Eaton, & Zandi, 2016). In some studies, biomarkers such as increased inflammation have also been linked to higher depression trajectory groups (Duivis et al., 2015). An example of these depression trajectories can be seen in Figure 12.7.

Although there is some degree of variability in the shape and prevalence of trajectories both within and between disorders, there is considerable similarity as well. Several researchers have recently examined the correspondence between disorder trajectories. These studies gener- ally converge on the finding that there are significant associations between trajectories within a given cluster (e.g., between depression and anxiety; McLaughlin & King, 2015), and in the co-development of internalizing and externalizing disorders (Brière et al., 2015; Nivard et al., 2017). Such an overlap likely reflects shared underlying processes (emotional reactivity, negative

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affect and emotion dysregulation) in the course of psychopathological development—again reminding us of the p factor (e.g., Blandon et al., 2010; Davis et al., 2015; Letcher et al., 2012). A recent study by Forbes and colleagues (2017) showed that higher levels of emotional reactivity as reported by parents (e.g., if she/he is upset, it is hard to comfort her/him) at ages four to five predicted higher symptom trajectories for depression, anxiety, conduct, and ADHD through early adolescence, suggesting that poor emotional functioning early in development may represent a global risk for both the onset and longitudinal course of psychopathology in several domains across childhood.

Interventions for Child and Adolescent Psychopathology In Chapter 11 we looked at the programs that work to prevent or reduce the development of nega- tive affect in children. There are also therapeutic approaches that help children and adolescents once they are struggling with internalizing or externalizing disorders. Many of the treatment options used for adults—such as behavior therapy, cognitive-behavior therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy—are also used with children and adolescents. Over the last 50 years, dozens of evidence-based psychotherapies (EBPs) have emerged for children and adolescents. These have generally been shown to outperform “usual care” (which is anything other than the EBP in question), with mean effect sizes (i.e., standardized metrics that show the size of the treatment effect) in the small to medium range (Weisz, Kuppens, & Eckshtain, 2013). Despite the number of EBPs, there is a considerable science-to-service gap. On average, EBPs take 17 years to be incorporated into routine general practice, and about half of all EBPs never reach widespread clinical use (Bauer et al., 2015). Moreover, less than half of all children afflicted with psychopa- thology receive services. This is in part attributable to an inadequate number of trained mental health professionals, which has placed an increased emphasis on pharmacotherapy (Comer & Barlow, 2014; Olfson, Druss, & Marcus, 2015). Thus, availability and uptake of high-quality EBPs is a significant barrier.

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FIGURE 12.7 Trajectories of depression from age 12 to 16 as identified by Brière, Janosz, Fallu, and Morizot (2015). Trajectories of depressive symptoms closely mirrored the course of externalizing prob- lems (delinquency, substance use) and academic adjustment (school liking, academic achievement).

Interventions for Child and Adolescent Psychopathology 333

Most EBPs are focal treatments, meaning they aim to address a particular set of symptoms of a given disorder. These treatments often fail to adequately address comorbidities, and rand- omized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating the efficacy of particular EBPs often exclude children with comorbid conditions so that they can generate purer estimates of intervention effects. In addition to EBP availability and dissemination, treatment adherence is a notorious challenge for the field of clinical psychology. For instance, Weisz et al. (2012) found that less than 65 percent of youth and their families completed 90 percent of a given treatment protocol. In 13 percent of anxiety cases, 33 percent of depression cases, and 52 percent of conduct cases, less than half the number of sessions of specific EBPs were completed. However, when psychosocial interventions are delivered appropriately and clients are adherent, significant improvements can occur.

Perhaps the most important difference between child and adult psychotherapy is the emphasis on the child’s relationships, most often in the family (see Carr, 2014). One type of therapy that is especially effective in dealing with externalizing problems is parent management training (PMT). The theory behind this approach is that a child’s externalizing symptoms are instigated, exacerbated, or maintained as a result of maladaptive parent–child interactions, as we discussed in Chapter 11. Patterson and colleagues (Patterson, Reid, & Dishion, 1992) showed that antiso- cial behavior can begin in families when children are reinforced for aggressive and antisocial behavior, and parents are reinforced for using hostile/coercive parenting techniques. In PMT parents are taught to use more effective parenting practices aimed at consistently identifying, monitoring, and punishing problem behaviors, and reinforcing prosocial behaviors (Kazdin, 2017). Through various program components such as didactic instruction, live or videotaped modeling, and role playing, parents learn proper use of contingent reinforcement, differen- tial attention, and time-outs (Forehand, Lafko, Parent, & Burt, 2014; Michelson, Davenport, Dretzke, Barlow, & Day, 2013). The idea is to use environmental contingencies to make adap- tive behavior more rewarding than maladaptive behavior.

A second method of treatment for both internalizing and externalizing disorders is cognitive- behavior therapy (CBT), which focuses on children’s cognitive distortions, problematic thought patterns, emotion regulation, and social problem solving (Hofmann, Asnaani, Vonk, Sawyer, & Fang, 2012). An example of a cognitive distortion for aggressive children would be viewing the actions of others as hostile or malicious, even though the cause was an accident or unintended (e.g., a child bumping into another child in the hallway). There is evidence that cognitive behav- ior therapy improves psychological adjustment by changing negative appraisal biases in depres- sion (Shirk, Crisostomo, Jungbluth, & Gudmundsen, 2013), negative appraisals of potentially threatening social scenarios in socially anxious children (Vassilopoulos, Banerjee, & Prantzalou, 2009), and hostile appraisal biases for antisocial behavior (Lochman & Wells, 2002). This kind of therapy can also be delivered in the context of family sessions, thus impacting child behavior directly through cognitive restructuring, and indirectly by improving family relations, even for severe problems like bipolar disorder (West et al., 2014).

Multisystemic treatment (MST) addresses the multiple needs of children and families in one coherent intervention. It is based on ecological systems theory, in which it is proposed that disor- ders are influenced by multiple layers of the child’s environment, such as family, neighborhood, peers, and school (Henggeler, Schoenwald, Borduin, Rowland, & Cunningham, 1998). The idea is that a combination of factors—cognitive distortions, ineffective parenting, and poor teacher management—may all contribute to problem behavior. Take conduct disorder as an example: elements from various approaches are combined into a multicomponent intervention, which may include improving parental monitoring, child academic and emotional skill development, disen- gaging youth from delinquent peers, teacher training/consultation to improve classroom manage- ment, and creating a support network for families (van der Stouwe, Asscher, Stams, Deković, & van der Laan, 2014).

PsychoPathology of Emotions in childhood334

There is evidence to support the efficacy of psychological therapies in the amelioration of childhood disorders. This evidence, which is most often derived from RCTs, is summarized in Figure 12.8, which was drawn from a recent meta-analysis by Weisz and colleagues (2017), who summarized five decades of research on youth psychotherapy covering 447 studies and 30,431 children. This figure reveals that the effect size (ES) of psychotherapy differs based on the disor- der being treated. The way to read the effect size is that it represents the mean difference between the treatment and control groups in standard deviation units. Cohen (1988) recommended that 0.2 (of a standard deviation) should be considered small, 0.5 is medium, and 0.8 is large. In order of strength, the strongest effects were observed for anxiety (ES = 0.61), conduct disorder (ES = 0.46), ADHD (ES = 0.34), and depression (ES = 0.29). Behavioral treatments such as CBT yielded the most robust cross-informant effects, but caregiver/family-focused non-behavioral treatments were also moderately effective. Overall, the mean posttreatment ES was 0.43. This means that the probability that a randomly selected youth in the treatment condition would fare better at posttreatment than a randomly selected youth in the control condition was 63 percent. Although this is definitely better than chance, there remain significant opportunities for further refinement of EBPs.

Finally, Weisz and colleagues also showed that treatment of multiple concurrent problems produced startlingly small effects compared to targeted problems. These effects were essentially not different from zero. This again underscores the difficulties in treating youth with comorbid conditions. Combined with the service-delivery and availability challenges outlined above, this has led to the establishment of so-called transdiagnostic models of treatment, which aim to address multiple problems in one cohesive package of “modules” that target common elements. Several of these have been established for children and adults, including the Unified Protocol for treatment of affective and anxiety disorders in adults (Ellard, Fairholme, Boisseau, Farchione, & Barlow, 2010) and modified for children (Ehrenreich-May & Bilek, 2012), as well as other child-focused interventions that specifically address comorbid anxiety and depression (Chu et  al., 2015; Weersing, Rozenman, Maher-Bridge, & Campo, 2012). Another program—the

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To Think About and Discuss 335

Modular Approach to Therapy for Children (MATCH)—has 33 treatment procedures designed to address anxiety, depression, and conduct problems, allowing flexible delivery of content depending on the presenting concerns (Chorpita & Weisz, 2009). A more recent adaptation of this, the FIRST protocol, is a principle-guided approach that focuses on the application of five well-tested components of therapy across disorders: (i) feeling calm—relaxation techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation and deep breathing; (ii) increasing motivation—using environmental contingencies such as reinforcement to increase adaptive behavior; (iii) repair- ing thoughts—identifying and changing biased or distorted cognitions; (iv) solving problems— teaching children to identify problems, set goals, think of solutions, weigh pros and cons, and evaluate outcomes; and (v) trying the opposite—engaging in activities that directly counter the problem (e.g., graduated exposure for anxiety, behavioral activation for depression, and practicing adaptive responses to conflict for conduct problems). Although evidence for these transdiagnostic therapies is still emerging, preliminary findings suggest that they may not only yield clinical outcomes equivalent or superior to other EBPs and usual care, but they require less training time, are more flexible, have greater therapist adherence and compliance, and generally take fewer weeks to generate positive effects (Chorpita et al., 2015; Weisz et al., 2012, 2017). Given the compelling evidence around the existence of a global factor that confers broadband liability to psychopathology (the p factor), such transdiagnostic models may prove particularly fruitful as first-line interventions for treatment-naïve children and adolescents before adminis- tration of more intensive and focal EBPs. Such an approach may be particularly relevant in low resource communities where a lack of treatment availability continues to present a significant personal, familial, and societal burden.

S U M M A R Y

Psychopathology in childhood and adolescence is complicated. Emotions are implicated in disorders in several ways, including a predominance of one emotion system, inappropriate expression of emotion, emotional dysregulation, and emotional adaptations to harmful environments. These patterns manifest through the inap- propriate expression of emotions, projected outward in the case of externalizing disorders, or inward in the case of internalizing disor- ders. There are risk factors that operate at multiple levels of organi- zation within the child and within their context that contribute to the development of these problems. Also, there is an ongoing and transactional exchange between persons and their environments, which is manifested in an embodied psychological experience that plays out over the life course. Children who have experienced dis- orders in childhood are more likely to have psychological problems as adults, and continuities of disturbance are higher when there

are riskier environments. Despite the complex nature of child and adolescent psychopathology, there are established intervention pro- grams. These programs help children and adolescents to regulate their emotions and reduce reactivity to their environments. Parents and teachers, dealing with emotionally vulnerable and reactive chil- dren, are taught to concentrate on reinforcing children’s prosocial and positive behavior while changing their reactions to negative behaviors. Family members are also taught relationship-building skills that allow children with emotional challenges to feel more supported in their environments. Keep in mind the pre- and postna- tal prevention programs, as well as the programs that improve socio- economic conditions of families, that we outlined in Chapter 11. All of these measures are important to consider when we think about how to improve the dysregulated emotion that contributes to chil- dren’s mental health outcomes.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. What kinds of intervention approaches do you think might be most effective in helping Peter, the boy with externalizing prob- lems, whose case we introduced at the beginning of the chapter?

2. What kinds of vulnerabilities are evident within children that increase their risk of developing psychopathology?

3. Why does experiencing poverty result in children showing mental health problems?

4. What kinds of programs should our society make available to prevent and treat mental health problems in children and adolescents?

PsychoPathology of Emotions in childhood336

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

A comprehensive overview of infant, preschool, child and adolescent psy- chopathology and its influences:

Thapar, A., Pine, D. S., Leckman, J. F., Scott, S., Snowling, M. J., & Taylor, E. A. (Eds.). (2015). Rutter’s child and adolescent psychiatry. John Wiley & Sons.

An overview of key findings from behavioral genetics:

Plomin, R., DeFries, J. C., Knopik, V. S., & Neiderhiser, J. M. (2016). Top 10 replicated findings from behavioral genetics. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(1), 3–23.

On empirically based interventions for children and adults:

Roth, A., & Fonagy, P. (2013). What works for whom: A critical review of psychotherapy research, second edition. New York: Guilford.

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13Emotional Disorders in Adulthood

. . . human misery has awakened, stood before you, and today demands its proper place.

Jean Jaurès (1897) cited by Kleinman (1988, p. 53)

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FIGURE 13.0 A striking result in psychiatric epidemiology is that the prevalence of depression is 50% higher in women than in men.

CONTENTS Depression and Anxiety

Psychiatric Disorders: Symptoms and Prevalence

Psychiatric Epidemiology Kinds of Depression and Anxiety

How Disorders Are Caused Genetics Environment Life Events and Difficulties

Gene–Environment Interactions

Emotional Predispositions and Emotional Disorders

Vulnerability Factors Social Support Early Experience

Recurrence, Recovery, and Prolongation of Disorders

Recurrence Recovery and Fresh Starts Prolongation Cognitive Biases in Anxiety and Other Emotional Disorders

Neurophysiology of Depression and Anxiety Antidepressant Drugs

Beyond Depression and Anxiety Psychopathic People in Society Schizophrenia, Emotion, Expressed Emotion in Relatives Psychosomatic Effects

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Emotional DisorDErs in aDulthooD338

Depression and Anxiety Into the lives of many of us come periods of extreme negative emotion, such as hopeless depression or paralyzing anxiety. When such states reach levels at which a person can no longer function in ordinary life, they are referred to as emotional disorders.

In the United States, diagnoses of mental illness are now generally made according to criteria of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Dis- orders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5), published in 2013. More than half the disorders in DSM-5 have a prominent emotional component. In this chapter, we concentrate on the two most prevalent disorders, depression and anxiety states, with sections on genetics and environment, on vulnerability and recurrence, and then on emotionally significant mental illnesses other than depression and anxiety.

For an approach to the field of abnormal psychology, you might turn to Kring, Johnson, Davison, and Neale (2014), and for clinical psychology to Pomerantz (2016). In psychiatry, pop- ular texts are New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry by Gelder, Andreasen, Lopez-Ibor, and Geddes (2009), and Sadock, Sadock, and Ruiz’s (2015) Kaplan and Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry, updated with DSM-5.

Psychiatric Disorders: Symptoms and Prevalence Depression, sometimes called mood disorder, is intense sadness: an enduring despair that can be painfully persecuting and can drain all meaning from life (see Figure 13.0), Major depression, discussed below, is the most prevalent single diagnosis among all psychiatric disorders.

Anxiety disorders come in several forms (discussed below). They usually involve protracted moods of disabling anxiety, often avoidance of what is most especially feared, and often a loss of personal confidence.

When someone has a nervous breakdown, usually this means suffering an episode of major depression with or without an accompanying anxiety disorder. In an emotional disorder, aspects of one’s emotions become more difficult to understand than they normally are (Oatley & Duncan, 1992).

Psychiatric Epidemiology How common are emotional disorders? To answer this, we turn to psychiatric epidemiology: the study of how frequently disorders occur, which we introduced in Chapter 12. Epidemiology is detective work: moving from clues of diagnosis and aspects of how people live to causes of disorder.

Modern medicine seems to owe its success to drugs like antibiotics and to advances such as surgery with anesthetics and without germs. Infectious diseases were, however, receding before these innovations. Really, the advances that were most important in improving general health were the epidemiological discoveries of how people caught diseases and the prevention of infection by providing clean water and removing sewage from towns (Cartwright, 1977). Similarly, in psychiatry, the development of psychological and drug therapies for disorders has been important, but more important will be prevention (Dozois & Dobson, 2004; Munoz, Mrazek, & Haggerty, 1995).

Psychiatric epidemiology was slow to become established alongside the epidemiology of physical medicine, partly because it was at first difficult to agree on criteria for diagnosis of disorders. Just as for the psychiatric epidemiology of childhood discussed in Chapter 12, there are now classification schemes and interviews to make diagnoses for both research and clinical

Psychiatric Disorders: Symptoms and Prevalence 339

purposes. Populations have been studied to find how common mental health problems are. The most substantial study in the United States, by Ronald Kessler and his colleagues (Kessler, et al., 2005) used a research interview to make diagnoses according to criteria of DSM-IV-R, a diagnos- tic standard that preceded DSM-5 and is similar to it. With this they determined rates of disorder in the 48 contiguous United States. Interviews were carried out with 9,282 people of 18 years and upward, with a response rate of 70.9%. Kessler et al. (2011) followed up their American survey in a survey of 21,229 respondents from 14 countries.

As you can see in Table 13.1, the results of Kessler et al.’s (2005) survey show that the emo- tional disorders of depression and anxiety are frequent, but so too are impulse-control disorders, expressions of persistent anger or other resentful feelings and continuations of externalizing dis- orders in childhood (see Chapter 12). Substance abuse disorders are also related to emotions. Alcohol, for instance, is a drug that has been known for centuries to reduce anxiety, shame, frus- tration, and other negative moods. Other drugs, of course, have various effects and an excellent book on this subject is that of Lewis (2011).

As explained in Chapter 12, the percentage of people suffering from a disorder over a specific time is called prevalence; the two most common measures are prevalence over lifetime, as in Table 13.1, or during a year.

While Kessler et al. (2005; 2011) used retrospective designs, Terrie Moffitt and her colleagues (Moffitt, Caspi, et al., 2010) used a prospective design in a representative sample of 1,037 people who were followed up from birth with very little attrition up to the age of 32 in Dunedin, New Zealand. They found prevalence rates of disorder that were approximately twice those reported in Table 13.1, including a lifetime prevalence of 41.4% for depressive disorder and 49.5% for anxiety disorder. Most published surveys are retrospective, and they continue to be fundamental, but they underestimate prevalence rates because respondents may fail to remember a period of emotional disorder and often fail to report symptoms as they think back over their lives. Although Moffitt et  al.’s estimates of prevalence are much higher than those previously assumed, they probably offer a truer picture of the mental health problems that actually occur in people’s lives.

As we discussed in Chapter  9, gender differences occur in normal emotions, but they are small in comparison to differences in prevalence of mental illness, which you can see in Figure 13.1. According to Kessler et al. (2005), women are about 1.5 times more likely than men to suffer an episode of major depression during their lives and 1.6 times more likely to suffer an anxiety disorder. These differences continue trends seen in childhood and adolescence (see Chapter 12).

As Kober (2014) explains, people use alcohol and other drugs as more-or-less simple ways to diminish their negative emotions, so these struggles, too, are emotion-related. Keyes, Grant, and Hasin (2008) found that gender discrepancies in alcohol abuse decreased during the twentieth century in the United States. Alcohol abuse used to be largely a male condition. For the cohort born between 1913 and 1932, the ratio of alcohol abusers was 7.1 men to 1 woman. For the cohort born between 1968 and 1984, this ratio had decreased to 1.6 to 1.

Differences in kinds of mental illness due to gender, and to ethnicity, are large—far larger than differences found in most of psychology. Such data set us puzzles. We must become detectives. Why do more women than men become depressed or chronically anxious? Why are people from lower-class backgrounds more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, as they are to greater fear and threat (see Chapter 9)? Why are men more likely than women to become addicted to alcohol or drugs? Why are black people less susceptible to mental illness than white people?

The first hypothesis of the epidemiological detective is that such differences are based on genes and on how the brain works. But the detective will also think of cultural differences, about how we live in different societies. These issues have been subjects of the most important research on the subject. First, let’s orient ourselves by saying something more about the most common forms of emotional disorder.

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Kinds of Depression and Anxiety In a Fact Sheet published by the World Health Organization, in 2017, depression is described as a common illness, with some 300 million sufferers worldwide. It is the world’s largest contributor to disability and is a large global contributor to the world’s burden of disease. The fact sheet goes on to say that it causes people to suffer greatly and to perform poorly at work. It can lead to sui- cide which, in 15-to-29-year-olds, is the world’s second most frequent cause of death. Between 1999 and 2016, the rate of suicide rose in nearly every state of the United States, and in more than half the states it increased by over 30% (Centers for Disease Control, 2018).

Table 13.1 Lifetime prevalence (in percentages) of psychiatric conditions in people aged 18 and over in the 48 contiguous United States, using the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey version of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview

Total

Depressive (affective) disorder

Major depressive episode 16.6

Bipolar disorder 3.9

Dysthymia 2.5

Any depressive disorder 20.8

Anxiety disorder

Panic disorder 4.7

Agoraphobia without panics 1.4

Social phobia 12.1

Generalized anxiety disorder 5.7

Specific phobia 12.5

Post traumatic stress disorder 6.8

Obsessive-compulsive disorder 1.6

Separation anxiety disorder 5.2

Any anxiety disorder 28.8

Impulse-control disorder

Oppositional-defiant disorder 8.5

Conduct disorder 9.5

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder 8.1

Intermittent explosive disorder 5.2

Any impulse-control disorder 24.8

Substance use disorder

Alcohol abuse 13.2

Alcohol dependence 5.4

Drug abuse 7.9

Drug dependence 3.0

Any substance use disorder 14.6

Any disorder 46.4

Source: Kessler et al. (2005).

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Depression is not just protracted and intense sadness: according to DSM-5, an episode of major depressive disorder is diagnosed when, for at least two weeks, a person is unbearably sad or depressed, or has lost pleasure in nearly all activities (sometimes called anhedonia), and has impaired function in relationships, or at work or in education, along with at least five other symptoms that include depressed or irritable mood most of the day, decreased interest or pleasure in ordinary things, weight or appetite change, sleep disturbance, being agitated or slowed down in one’s actions, fatigue and lack of energy, inability to concentrate, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, thoughts or plans of suicide. Many people recover from this disorder, but it can also be chronic—lasting for months, or years. It can also recur.

Major depression is distinguished from manic-depressive disorder, now called bipolar disorder, characterized by a person having experienced at least one period of mania (Johnson & Kizer, 2002). Mania is a disorder that consists of great happiness, exhilaration, and pride. In it, people are expansive. Their self-esteem is inflated. They can become grandiose. They can work for long periods, need almost no sleep, and take unbounded pleasure in everything they do. Novelist Tom Wolfe said, in relation to an episode of hypomania (somewhat milder than full mania) that he experienced: “If I could only bottle that feeling . . . It was heaven on earth” (McGrath, 2004, p. 38). Wolfe thought he was very good company during this period, and people in such states can often be charming. But with severe mania, people can do alarming things such as run up huge debts that they can never repay. One of us remembers being in a car with some- one who, in a manic episode, drove at 60 miles an hour the wrong way down a one-way street in the middle of town, laughing about how ludicrous social conventions were. Only rarely is the mood sustained. Often—and this is what happened to Wolfe—after a few weeks comes a plunge into depression. Gruber, Harvey, and Purcell (2011) found that when people with a diagnosis of

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bipolar disorder who were between episodes watched film clips, they had stronger positive expe- riences and less vagal regulation than people who were not bipolar. So even between episodes, there is a bias of emotional processing among people susceptible to bipolar disorder. A first-hand account of the disorder, The unquiet mind, was written by Kay Jamison (1995), a professor of psychiatry. In this book, she wrote of being a mercurial person with exhilarating high moods— some of which had prompted ruinous spending sprees—as well as deep depressions that had included a suicide attempt. She says she accepts life’s passions, which she has not always been able to control, and has not always wanted to.

Lifetime prevalence of bipolar disorder was estimated by Kessler et al. (2005) in the United States to be 3.9%. Genetics are discussed below, but here we note that heritability of bipolar dis- order is some 60% higher than for major depression (Smoller & Finn, 2003).

To diagnose an anxiety disorder according to DSM-5, the condition must have lasted at least six months. This disorder often includes panic attacks with sudden terror or dread, frequently with bodily symptoms such as racing heart, dizziness, and shortness of breath. The panic attack is a clear example of an emotion, fear, that is difficult to understand: people may have no idea why it occurs, and this lack of insight can send the mind racing to thoughts that one is about to die.

Anxiety disorders include also phobias, which are almost-irresistible urges to avoid certain places, objects, or activities. A disabling form is agoraphobia: the fear of being away from home (Fyer, Mannuza, & Coplan, 1996; Mathews, Gelder, & Johnson, 1981). As you may see from Table 13.1, the lifetime prevalence of agoraphobia without panic attacks in the United States is 1.4%; with panic attacks the prevalence is higher. Often agoraphobia starts when a person’s life is in a precarious state. Then, perhaps in the supermarket (agora is Greek for “market”), the person has a panic attack, rushes home, and feels calm. A powerful learning script is set up—away from home, unbearable fear; back at home, a feeling of calm. The result is a strongly conditioned anxi- ety about repeating the experience (Bouton, Mineka, & Barlow, 2001).

Some agoraphobic people fear being in places that they cannot leave without embarrassment. People with agoraphobia often find it more and more difficult to go out at all, except perhaps with a partner (an attachment person). The area in which they feel safe on their own can become much reduced. It can be just their own home. It can be just a bedroom. Often they lose social con- fidence, and as they isolate themselves from the world, confidence drains further. The restriction of life in agoraphobia can be treated successfully, for instance, by cognitive-behavior therapy and gradual exposures to what is feared (see Chapter 14). With treatment, people can go out again, get a job, and visit friends. Whereas phobias for specific objects or activities such as spiders or flying are common, they are troublesome rather than disabling. Agoraphobia and social phobia (fear of being with other people and excessive worry about their judgment) can, however, be severely disabling. Social phobia is more common than agoraphobia, with a lifetime prevalence in the United States of 12.1% (see Table 13.1). Generalized anxiety disorder, defined as at least six months of disabling and persistent anxiety or worry, has a lifetime prevalence of 5.7%.

A second group of anxiety disorders is of obsessions and compulsions (Jenike, 1996). Obses- sions are intrusive anxious thoughts, for instance, of being contaminated by germs. Such thoughts occur repeatedly and the person cannot stop them even though she or he might know them to be irrational. Obsessions are repeated actions or rituals such as washing one’s hands many times a day, or checking and rechecking light switches or water faucets to ensure that certain things have been done. Performing the action diminishes anxiety, but only temporarily. It is possible that the disorder is a defect in the emotional knowledge that a security- motivated action has been completed (Szechtman & Woody, 2004). In severe cases, many hours a day can be spent per- forming compulsive actions. The lifetime prevalence of obsessive- compulsive disorder has been estimated, in the United States, at between 2 and 3%.

Posttraumatic stress disorder involves intense anxiety, disturbed sleep, flashbacks in which a traumatic event is remembered and repeatedly reexperienced, together with avoidance of

How Disorders Are Caused 343

anything that might remind one of it (McNally, 2003; McNally, Kaspi, Riemann, & Zeitlin, 1990). Traumas of the kind that can provoke this disorder occur in war (Grinker & Spiegel, 1945) when people have been in danger of their lives, when they have acted in ways they hate themselves for, or when companions have been killed and maimed. Elder and Clipp (1989) found that experience of combat in World War II and the Korean War was damaging and increased the risk of emotional and behavioral problems later in life. The Vietnam War brought the damaging effects of combat to notice in the United States (see, e.g., Shay, 1995). Its repercussions on vet- erans include increased antisocial behavior, especially among those who were in combat ( Barrett et al., 1996; Brewin et al., 2012). The syndrome can also result from natural and industrial disas- ters (Ironson et al., 1997), and from criminal assaults such as rape (Burnam et al., 1988).

Brewin, Dalgleish, and Joseph (1996) defined a trauma as anything that radically violates one’s basic assumptions about the world. Such assumptions might be that the world is by-and- large a safe place, that one can achieve one’s life goals, and that people including oneself will act in reasonable and decent ways. Brewin et al. concluded that the chaotic nature of posttraumatic flashbacks and intense phobic anxiety can be explained in terms of two memory systems, one of which is verbal and subject to the making of meaningful sense of experience. The other is auto- matically triggered by aspects of situations, external or internal, often reminiscent of the context in which the trauma originally occurred. For example, women who have been raped may become extremely upset by the sight of unfamiliar men or places that seem creepy. The working of this automatic system is not closely coupled to the verbal system and its processes are far less vol- untary. The traumas are represented in memory in both systems, which are repeatedly activated, and do not necessarily correspond to each other. The confusion adds to the intense fears that are experienced.

How Disorders Are Caused A widespread understanding of how emotional disorders are caused is the diathesis-stress hypothesis (Kring et al., 2014; Monroe & Hadjiyannakis, 2002). In Chapter 12, we discussed this hypothesis in relation to disorders in children and adolescents. It is that in the presence of an inherent condition that makes a person vulnerable—a diathesis—an episode of emotional disor- der is caused by a stress. The epidemiological detective gets onto this. Two matters that she or he might think about are how far diatheses—predispositions or risks—are due to genetics and how far the environment is stressful in the societies in which we live.

Genetics As Plomin, DeFries, Knopik, and Neiderhiser (2016) explained in their article “Top 10 replicated findings from behavioral genetics” all significant traits of human beings show significant genetic influence. There are genetic influences on preferences, abilities, and personality traits. The same is true for susceptibilities to emotional disorders and addictions. A major finding is that genes alone do not cause the effects: these are always caused by genes in relation to particular environ- ments. Some diseases are caused by single genes, for instance, phenylketonuria, which causes intellectual disability. But by far the largest influences are of polygenic effects: influences of groups of genes, each one of which has only a tiny influence.

Effect sizes for groups of genes on emotion-related predispositions are far larger than most of those seen in psychology. Using a sample of 542 twin pairs, Kendler and Myers (2010) examined the Big Five personality traits: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness, and found heritability estimates for these traits that ranged between 0.44 and 0.64 (similar to other published estimates). In a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, with over

Emotional DisorDErs in aDulthooD344

400,000 participants, Jeronimus, Kotov, Riese, and Ormel (2016) found associations between Neuroticism, which includes focus on negatives in life, with depression, anxiety, and nonspecific mental distress, of between 0.5 and 0.7.

Sullivan, Neale, and Kendler (2000) did a meta-analysis on five methodologically sound twin studies and found that the likelihood of a person and that person’s twin both having a diagnosis of depression was highly significant. Monozygotic twins showed higher rates compared to dizy- gotic twins of both having the condition; the aggregate estimate for genetic liability to depres- sion was 37%. In a Swedish sample of 15,493 complete twin pairs, Kendler, Gatz, Gardner, and Pedersen (2006) made a similar estimate of 38% for the heritability of depression. This suggests that roughly 40% of our likelihood and experience of major depression is shaped by the genes we inherit from our parents.

Genetic predispositions have also been found for anxiety disorders (Hamm, Vaitl, & Lang, 1990; Scherer et al., 2000). A high genetic sensitivity of a mechanism that associates certain cues to schemas of danger may explain why some people are generally more fearful than others, indepen- dently of whether they have experienced serious danger in their lives. Boomsma, van Beijsterveldt, and Hudziak (2005) and Kendler, Gardner, and Lichtenstein (2008) studied twin pairs in child- hood, adolescence, and early adulthood. They found that genetic factors influenced anxiety and depression in younger children, but that by age 20 this influence was much diminished.

On the outcome measure of subjective well-being, an inverse of depression and anxiety—Nes and Roysamb (2015) found in a meta-analysis that heritability of this outcome was of the order of 40%.

Kessler et al. (2005; 2011) found in their large epidemiological studies that people can suffer from more than one disorder, as we saw with the childhood disorders last chapter. The term for this, as you will recall, is comorbidity. A current way of thinking about the genetics of mental health with this in mind is in terms of the p factor. We introduced this concept in Chapter 12, in the discussion of emotional disorders in early life. The p factor is characterized by heightened negative emotionality, which includes more sadness, fear, and anger. The hypothesis is that this factor is a diathesis—a predisposition—based on a group of genes, which increase risk for any or all disorders, rather than just for any single one.

As Caspi, Houts, Belsky et al. (2014) explained, there has generally been thought to be three groupings of mental disorders which begin in childhood or adolescence. They are internalizing disorder (liability to depression and anxiety), externalizing disorder (liability to antisocial behav- ior and substance abuse), and thought disorder (liability to psychosis). Caspi et  al. examined persistence, co-occurrence, and comorbidity of mental disorders in the sample of 1,037 people whom they followed up from the age of three-years-old in Dunedin, New Zealand, which we dis- cussed in the section on prevalence (Moffitt et al., 2010). Concentrating on people in this sample from age 18 to 38, Caspi et al. found an underlying disposition to all three groupings: that is to say a general disposition to psychopathological disorder, the p factor.

Environment Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) offer evidence on effects of one pervasive kind of stress: social inequality. Within developed countries, prevalence of mental illnesses has strong associations with disparities of income. Figure 13.2, from Wilkinson and Pickett, shows rates of mental ill- ness in four different countries as a function of income inequality: the ratio of the mean after-tax income of the top 20% of people in a society to that of the bottom 20%.

In a more recent report than that used by Wilkinson and Pickett (United Nations World Development report, 2008, Wikipedia), the ratios of top-to-bottom 20% income rates shown in Figure 13.2 have remained the same for Japan, Germany, and France, but in the United States

How Disorders Are Caused 345

the ratio has risen to 9.4. In Scandinavian countries, this ratio is 4.3 to 1 or less; in the United Kingdom, it’s 7.2 to 1.

Wilkinson and Pickett showed that an even wider array of outcomes, including rates of physi- cal illness, lack of psychological well-being, lower levels of trust in society, low educational performance in children, high numbers of teenage births, high murder rate, and high prison popu- lations, are also associated with income inequality.

How might we understand this? In developing societies, measures of health and well- being relate to the national average income; people who are poor have inadequate diets and few resources. In developed nations, this process is no longer at work; most people have enough, physically, to sustain themselves. But once a country reaches the level of develop- ment attained by Europe, North America, and many countries in Asia and Central and South America, health and well-being no longer relate to average national income. They relate instead to inequality. Lower levels of physical and mental health—not just for the poor but for almost everyone in each nation—become far more closely associated with inequality of income in the nation. With the same income, you are better off living in a more equal than in a more unequal country.

To counter the idea that unrecognized features of different countries might be responsible, Wilkinson and Pickett did similar analyses of states in the United States, in which people have the same American ideals, live in the same kinds of accommodation, eat the same kinds of food, and have their children go to similar schools. Louisiana and California, which are among states with the highest income inequality, have overall poorer physical health and psychological well-being than the average. New Hampshire and Utah, which have lower income inequality, have better physical health and psychological well-being. Oishi, Kesebir, and Diener (2011) have shown that in years of greater income inequality in the United States, people were more unhappy and their unhappiness was due to perceived unfairness and lower trust. Across nations, Oishi, Schimmack, and Diener (2012) found that people in nations where income taxes are progressive (so people who earn more pay higher rates of tax) evaluated their lives as closer to the ideal and reported having more positive and less-negative daily experiences than did respondents living in nations with less-progressive taxation.

The inference is that inequality produces stress. Do its effects occur because living in hierar- chies makes people ashamed to be at the bottom of the heap, unable to bring up their children as they would like? Are people who are in this position affected by constant advertising of things

Japan 0

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Percentage of Mental Illness in Different Countries

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FIGURE 13.2 Rates of mental illness as percentages of the populations of four different nations as a function of income inequality (data from Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009, graph drawn by Keith Oatley).

Emotional DisorDErs in aDulthooD346

they can’t afford? Are these people affected by expensive cars and houses of the wealthy? Does the lowered trust engendered by inequality adversely affect us all? These are pressing questions.

In the World Health Organization’s worldwide study of mental disorders (2004), the United States had the highest overall prevalence rates of mental disorder (26.4%), with European coun- tries being lower (France, 18.4%; Germany, 9.1%), and Asian and African countries having the lowest overall rates (Japan, 8.8%; Nigeria, 4.7%).

Could one reason why prevalence rates of depression are so different—more than five times higher in the United States than in China—be due to living in individualistic as compared with interdependent societies as discussed in Chapter 3? In the West, there are more kinds of competi- tion and more opportunities for individual success, but yet far more possibilities of failure, social comparison, and feelings of rejection. Think of applying for a prestigious job. One person will get it, but how many won’t?

Some risk factors are common across different societies. For instance, Patel, Araya, De Lima, Ludermir, and Todd (1999) found that in India, Zimbabwe, Chile, and Brazil, being female, being poor, and having little education were associated with depression. Kessler et al. (2005) observed something similar in their publication of 12-month prevalence in the United States: being depressed was associated with being female, having little education, being poor, and living in a city rather than in a smaller community. Have a look at Figure 13.3. What would you think of living in this place?

In terms of outcomes, Kessler and Bromet (2013) found in their review of depression across cultures that outcomes of depression included lower educational attainment, unstable unemploy- ment, difficulty in role transition, marital difficulties, and earlier mortality.

Life Events and Difficulties Genetics, stress, and the emotional disorders of depression and anxiety states: can we go deeper? Perhaps the best of the epidemiological detectives at work on this question have been George Brown and Tirril Harris (1978). Like other kinds of detective, Brown and Harris conducted

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How Disorders Are Caused 347

interviews. They interviewed 458 adult women in London, England. They found that in the previous year 37 of them (8%) had suffered an onset of depression (some with anxiety) at a level of major depressive disorder, as it would later be categorized by DSM-5. A further 9% of the women had experienced a disabling psychiatric problem for more than a year (totaling 17% with a disorder during the year before interview).

In Brown and Harris’s study, 89% of women with an onset of depression had suffered a severe life event or difficulty shortly before their breakdown. By contrast, of women who did not have any disorder, only 30% had suffered a severe event or difficulty in the year before interview. Severe events included bereavement, marital separation, and job loss. Difficulties were long- lasting problems such as having to cope with an abusive husband or looking after a demanding and chronically sick relative.

Brown and Harris developed a new method that yielded better predictions than had previously been possible of who would get depressed. The method was a semi-structured interview, the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule, which replaced the checklists of recent changes such as the originally popular version by Holmes and Rahe (1967). Checklists are far less accurate than the Life Events and Difficulties Interview Schedule (McQuaid, Monroe, Roberts, Kupfer, & Frank, 2000; Thoits, 1995). Using the interview schedule, interviewers asked people about 40 areas of life: employment, finances, housing, children, relationships, and so on. Interviews were audio recorded, and each stressful event or difficulty was written up, with its date, so that its relation to any onset of depression could be known (not possible with checklist methods). The description of the event was later read to the members of a research team, who made a rating of the degree of long-term threat (lasting more than a week) that this event or difficulty would cause in a woman living in the described circumstances. Ratings of long-term severity of an event or difficulty were made by members of the research team who lived in the same society. At the same time, these ratings passed the tests of being reliable, because levels of severity are anchored by comparing them with dictionaries of previous ratings made by the research team over the years. The ratings were unbiased because raters did not know the woman’s diagnosis. They were independent of the woman’s own evaluation of events, which might be affected by how depressed she was.

Here is the case of Mrs. Trent, one of the women in Brown and Harris’s study.

Mrs. Trent (not her real name) had three small children and was married to a van driver. Her apartment had two rooms and a kitchen. Her third child was born eight months before the interview. Around that time her husband lost his job. She didn’t worry too much, and he got another job quickly. But after two weeks he was fired from that job too, without explanation. Seven weeks later her worries had become so severe that she felt tense all the time, she felt miserable, did not sleep well and became irritable with the children. She found it difficult to do the housework, became unable to concentrate, and her appetite declined. In the next two months these symptoms worsened. She would often cry all day. She got some sleeping pills from her doctor. Her relationship with her husband deteriorated. She lost all interest in sex and thought her marriage finished. Three times she packed and walked out but returned because of the children. She felt self-deprecatory, felt she could not cope, and thought that she might end it all. By three weeks before the interview things had started to get better. She still tended to brood, though her concentration was now good enough for her to watch television which dis- tracted her. Her sexual relationship with her husband had returned, and indeed was bet- ter than before. She had been depressed for five and a half months (paraphrased from Brown & Harris, 1978, pp. 28–30).

In this case, the severely threatening event was her husband being fired for the second time, which left the family without income. In different places in this book—Chapter 9 and Chapter 12

Emotional DisorDErs in aDulthooD348

in particular—we have seen how the lack of financial resources is a source of threat, anxiety, and despair. Low mood, sleep disturbances, loss of weight, lack of concentration, self-deprecation, loss of interest in sex, and suicidal thoughts were symptoms recorded in the diagnostic interview. They are symptoms of major depression. In Brown and Harris’s method, Mrs. Trent’s marital dif- ficulty was not counted as an event that could have caused the depression because it could easily have been caused by it. Other researchers, too, have distinguished between events that one could have brought on oneself and those that were beyond one’s control. Shrout et al. (1989) found that clinic patients suffering from depression were three times more likely than people in a non depressed community sample to have suffered a negative and uncontrollable event. So, depres- sion is not necessarily irrational. It involves sadness and hopelessness, brought on by events that have serious implications for our lives and our sense of ourselves. Since the early work of Brown and Harris, the association of depression with severe social adversity (e.g., job loss, death of a loved one), particularly for the first onset of depression has been well established around the world (Kinyanda et al., 2011; Korkeila et al., 2010).

An event that can cause depression is loss of a role that is highly valued ( Oatley & Bolton, 1985). Using life event interviews, Hammen, Ellicott, Gitlin, & Jamison (1989) found that people who valued their relationships became depressed when a social loss or social disruption occurred, for example during bereavement or a difficult divorce. This kind of loss influences attachment dynamics and friendships. By comparison, those to whom autonomy and work were most impor- tant were more likely to become depressed when a failure in achievement occurred.

Anxiety can also be caused by threatening, negative events, or difficulties (Monroe & Wade, 1988). In one study of a community sample, 2,902 men and women were interviewed using standardized measures to diagnose generalized anxiety and to assess life events occurring over the previous year (Blazer, Hughes, & George, 1987). Severe negative events were associated with a threefold increase of anxiety disorder in both men and women.

What kinds of adversities cause depressive and anxiety breakdowns? Kendler, Hettema, Butera, Gardner, and Prescott (2003) offered a list that can be seen in Table 13.2.

Most episodes of major depression and some onsets of anxiety disorder occur when things go severely wrong in people’s lives and have serious long-term consequences. Like episodes of normal emotion, most emotional disorders are responses to events and circumstances. They affect what is important to us. When Mrs. Trent’s husband lost his job, she experienced feelings of defeat and of dread about not being able to live adequately or to provide for her family.

Appraisal theories of emotion (see Chapter 6) predict that depression and anxiety are caused by different kinds of events, each with different meanings for the individual. Using Brown and Harris’s method, Finlay-Jones (1989) interviewed women attending a family doctor: 82% of cases with depression, 85% of cases of anxiety, and 93% of cases with mixed depression and anxiety had suffered a severe life event as compared with 34% of those who were not suffering from any emotional disorder. Depressive disorders were most often precipitated by events that were losses, a finding that is in keeping with appraisal analyses of emotion. In addition, Suzanne Vrshek-Schallhorn et al. (2015) found in two samples of emerging adults that stress, which is

Table 13.2 Adversities that cause depressive and anxiety disorders

Loss: events such as deaths of loved ones, losses of means of livelihood

Humiliation: events such as separations in which there has been infidelity, or the delinquency of a child, rapes, putdowns and public humiliations by loved ones or persons in authority, which threaten core roles

Entrapment: being stuck in an adverse situation with no way out

Danger: likelihood of future loss, or of an event that has yet to realize its full potential

Source: Kendler et al. (2003)

Gene–Environment Interactions 349

long lasting (chronic), particularly of an interpersonal kind, predicted the onset of depression. In a meta-analysis, Lundorff, Holmgren, Zachariae, Farver-Vestergaard, and O’Connor (2017) found that one in 10 adults who suffered bereavement suffered from prolonged grief disorder. Clinical anxiety states were most often precipitated by danger; they were future directed and centered upon appraisals of threat. They included receiving a diagnosis of a cancer, unwanted pregnancy, or threat of eviction from home. People who suffer both depression and anxiety have typically experienced events appraised as both loss and danger and sometimes also humiliation and/or entrapment.

In a synthesis of these kinds of studies, Jacobson and Newman (2017) showed in a meta- analysis of longitudinal studies, which involved 88,336 people, that not only do people often suffer from both depression and anxiety but also that each condition predicts the other. So when a person becomes depressed, this makes it more likely that she or he will later suffer an anxiety state such as a social phobia, perhaps out of feelings of apathy, hopelessness, and a lack of confidence. Likewise, a person who experiences an anxiety disorder is more likely to become depressed, for anxiety disorders can be exhausting and diminish the individual’s sense of control.

One should not think that emotional disorders are only about losses and dangers. As Johnson (2005) showed, some people who have manic tendencies aren’t beset by losses at all. Their dis- order is to react to successes by becoming overenthusiastic, overconfident, and irrationally opti- mistic. But bipolar disorder, defined as we discussed above, by inclusion of at least one episode of mania, is a difficult problem. As Johnson, Tharp, Peckham, & McMaster (2016) explained, it is associated with high rates of homelessness and suicide. It is also associated with hospitaliza- tion, after which only 35% of sufferers return to the workforce. In terms of its emotions, Johnson et al. found that the condition generally involves more intense negative emotions and lower levels of positive emotion. In this condition, more positive emotions, and better abilities to reappraise events, predicted better outcomes.

Gene–Environment Interactions Early in thinking about gene–environment interactions, Plomin and Bergeman (1991) discussed how, although there are direct influences of genes on predispositions to depression and anxiety, for instance, by tending to focus on the negatives in life (which we discuss below), there are also indirect effects, in which genetic tendencies help to bring about certain kinds of life conditions which, in turn, increase the likelihood of emotional disorders. For example, some people are genetically more likely than others to experience adverse life events, such as job loss or marital problems: they bring more stresses on themselves. By doing so, they are more likely to precipi- tate themselves into episodes of anxiety and depression. This kind of effect is among the 10 big findings in genetics that Plomin et al. (2016) presented, which we discussed in Chapter 8. We show the list of these findings in Table 13.3; effects of genetics on environmental outcomes are findings 7, 8, and 9.

Among evidence of genetic influence on environment-based outcomes is that reported by Middeldorp, Cath, Beem, Willemsen, and Boomsma (2008) who examined a large sample of twin pairs and found that Neuroticism (the tendency toward negative emotionality, as discussed above) increased the rate of exposure to difficult life events such as extreme conflict in marriages and adversarial relations at work. Federenko et al. (2006) found, in a sample of 180 twin pairs, that genetic risk of encountering a larger number of life events was higher if the events were per- sonal (for instance, lack of social recognition), if they were negative rather than challenging, and if they were enduring. Eberhart, Auerbach, Bigda-Peyton, and Abela (2011) studied young adults over a six-week period and concluded that the diathesis–stress hypothesis needs to be extended to

Emotional DisorDErs in aDulthooD350

include the idea of some people having the diathesis of being more likely to generate more stress- ful events for themselves because of persistent mental schemas that include a sense of emotional deprivation, distrust, and social isolation.

As another example, Caspi, Houts, et al. (2014) suggested that for people who have the p factor (explained above in the section on genetics), the stress of being maltreated in childhood makes it more likely that they will suffer mental illness that extends into adulthood. The new field of epigenetics introduced in the previous chapter is about how genetic processes are switched on and off by environmental factors. For instance, stress can reprogram genetic mechanisms, perhaps including those that affect the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and the stress system, in ways that make depression more likely (Nestler, 2014).

In thinking about the patterns of life events that increase the likelihood of emotional disorders, a thought-provoking idea is that, as aspects of Darwinian variation, humans are distributed on a spectrum of different kinds of lifestyle. As Marco Del Giudice (2016) explained, people with fast lifestyles have a syndrome of early maturation, high fertility, high impulsivity, risk taking, high promiscuity, and less caring for offspring. People with this style are high on the p factor, which Carver, Johnson, and Timpano (2017) suggest consists largely in people’s impulsive reactivity to their emotional urges. With this style, they are more likely to encounter stresses of many different kinds. Those with slow lifestyles have later maturation, lower fertility, longer lasting relationships, and better caring for offspring, patterns of social living that reduce the likelihood of emotional disor- ders, and those disorders being transmitted to offspring. This speculative thinking adds a new wrin- kle to our understanding of why some people are more vulnerable to emotional disorders than others.

Syndromes that we now label as disorders derive from a proclivity of genes to reproduce themselves. In the course of human evolution, the fast-living syndrome seems to be what John Maynard-Smith (e.g., 1984) called an evolutionarily stable strategy, not in the whole popu- lation but in a proportion of it, to enable certain set of genes successfully to reproduce them- selves. Perhaps this gene-set for fast-living was especially able to reproduce itself during times of change and disruption. In times of stability—in a world of peace and cooperation—the genes of the slower lifestyle seem more productive. Perhaps, part of the job of psychology will be to find how to do less of the fast-living lifestyle, since it has such risks of emotional disorder, and to encourage the slower-living mode.

Emotional Predispositions and Emotional Disorders The way that severe life events elicit depression and anxiety is similar to the way that more ordinary events—setbacks to our projects and concerns—elicit emotions of sadness and fear. We experience such emotions, and usually we deal with their implications. In a more extreme way, severe events can threaten fundamental life roles and our very identities within society in ways

Table 13.3 Plomin et al.’s (2016) top ten replicated findings in behavioral genetics

1. All psychological traits show substantial genetic influence 2. No traits are 100% heritable 3. Heritability is caused by many genes of small effect 4. Correlations between psychological traits show substantial genetic mediation 5. Heritability of intelligence increases throughout development 6. Age-to-age stability is mainly due to genetics 7. Most measures of environmental effects show significant genetic influence 8. Most associations between environmental measures and traits affected by genetics 9. Most environmental effects not shared by children growing up the same family

10. The abnormal is normal

Emotional Predispositions and Emotional Disorders 351

that seem impossible to deal with. Imagine losing something fundamental to your life, to which you have given your best energy and aspiration: an important relationship, perhaps, or your place at university, or your expectation of a career. Losses of this kind can cause the despair of depres- sion. When they occur, they can drain meaning from life and lead to a sense of hopelessness and lack of purpose (see Figure 13.4). No way forward seems possible, and the state can become disabling. As we have learned about more transient emotions, these enduring states will alter your relationships, how you appraise the environment, how you reason, and the reactions you evoke in others. Interviewed by Brown and Harris (1978), Mrs. Trent experienced loss of her family’s income, perhaps loss of faith in her husband and hence her hope for her family and the life they had made. She became unable to do things that had been important to her, such as care for her children.

In this chapter, we have presented emotional disorders in the traditional way, in terms of diag- nostic categories such as depression and anxiety states. With the recognition that people have several diagnoses at the same time (comorbidity) Gruber and Keltner (2007) showed that we can see disorders as excesses of emotions, as diminished emotions, and as dysfunctions of emotions (see Table 13.4).

How are depression and anxiety states related to normal sadness and fear (Flack & Laird, 1998; Kring & Werner, 2004; Power & Dalgleish, 2008)? Helen Mayberg et al. (1999) found that in normal sadness subcortical brain regions of the subgenual cingulate and anterior insula increased their activation, while cortical areas of the dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior parietal regions decreased their activation. With recovery from depression, the reverse pattern occurred: decreased activation in subcortical regions that in sadness had increased, and increased activa- tion in the cortical regions that in sadness had increased (see also Webb & Pizzagalli, 2016). So, although depression is not just sadness, the emotion of sadness is usually involved. As to

Adverse event or difficulty

Emotions, plan to fulfill self- definition goal No depression

Yes Yes1 Severe?

2 Alternative

role?

No

Emotions, e.g., sadness, anger, dysphoric mood No depression

Depression at the case level

No

Resolution of crisis and of symptoms

Yes3 New role?

Chronic psychiatric and/or physical symptoms

No

FIGURE 13.4 Differentiation of normal emotions from depressive breakdowns (Oatley, 1988).

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Individual Emotion: Self-compassion

The search for how specific emotional states relate to men- tal health has led Kristin Neff to important work on self- compassion (2011, 2015). Self-compassion involves three different appraisals: the ability to treat one’s own failures kindly rather than critically; the ability to see oneself as part of humanity; and the ability to accept pain and suffer- ing with equanimity. In her research, Neff is finding that this state of self-compassion is an important buffer to depres- sion and anxiety; it consistently correlates with reports of reduced depression, anxiety, rumination, and perfectionism. More recent work by Julia Breines and Serena Chen (2012)

found that practicing self-compassion leads people to work harder in areas of self-improvement and to be more forgiv- ing of the self. The cultivation of self-compassion is a focus of contemplative practices of the kind we discuss in the final chapter. It involves taking a kinder perspective, perhaps like that of someone close to you, upon your own efforts, trials, and tribulations. If you are interested in this emotional state and how to measure it or cultivate it in yourself or people you are close to, you might visit Neff’s website: www.self- compassion.org.

anxiety, there is no question that its disorders are kinds of excessive fear. The main questions are why such fears can become entirely out of proportion to what the person seems to be frightened of (Öhman, 2000), and can be elicited by ambiguous stimuli (McNally, 1999).

Overall, we can say that the emotions of sadness, happiness, fear, and anger play central roles, respectively, in bouts of depression, mania, anxiety, and conduct disorder (Power & Dalgleish, 2008). Johnson-Laird, Mancini, and Gangemi (2005) found that emotional disor- ders are typically begun as elicitations of emotions such as sadness or fear that derive from the appraisals that we discussed in Chapter  6. It is not the elicitations of emotions that are inappropriate; it is their intensity, which remains cognitively impenetrable and which tends to prolong the disorder.

In the end, the reasons we humans are subject to disabling emotional states remain a challenge for theories of emotions, especially when nowadays we tend to argue that most emotions have useful functions.

Table 13.4 Disorders as excesses, deficits, and dysfunctions of emotions

Excess sadness: depression

Excess fear: phobias, general anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, hypochondria (fear of disease), obsessional/compulsive disorders, self-medication of anxiety by alcohol and drugs

Excess joy and pride: mania, antisocial personality disorder

Excess anger: conduct disorder, oppositional-defiant disorder, intermittent explosive disorder

Excess disgust: anorexia

Excess self-conscious emotion: narcissistic pride

Lack of self-conscious emotion: adult autism (lack of embarrassment), anhedonia (lack of pleasurable feeling), psychopathy (lack of guilt or remorse)

Dysfunctions of emotion: schizophrenia, other psychoses

Vulnerability Factors 353

Vulnerability Factors Although a first onset of depression is usually begun by a severe event or difficulty, not everyone who suffers a serious adversity has a breakdown. Why do some people respond to an event with a negative emotion while others suffer a disabling emotional disorder of depression or anxiety?

Social Support A central theme throughout this book is that strong relationships are a foundation of positive emotion, adapting to the environment well, and enabling emotion regulation. So we may not be surprised that relationships affect whether people develop major depression in response to adversities. The general term for relationships that can protect people from disorder is social sup- port; typical measures are presence of an intimate relationship with someone in whom one can confide, lack of interpersonal friction, interpersonal appreciation, integration in a social network, and accessibility of practical assistance (see Chapter 9 for an example).

People with good social support are less likely to become depressed than those without sup- port when they suffer an adverse life event. This was shown in women in the community by Brown and Harris (1978), and subsequently in different populations, such as men who suffered unemployment (Bolton & Oatley, 1987), adolescents (Stice, Ragan, & Randall, 2004), women psychiatric outpatients (Ali, Oatley, & Toner, 2002), and men with HIV (Johnson et al., 2001).

Van de Velde, Bracke, and Levecque (2010) confirmed that in European countries women were more likely to be depressed than men, but found that for both women and men marriage had a protective effect. In a report on the three-year longitudinal Women’s Health Initiative Obser- vational study, with 91,912 participants who were postmenopausal women, Uebelacker, Eaton, Weisberg, Sands, and Wllliams (2013) found stresses of many kinds provoked depression, but both social support and physical activity were protective against stress. In a meta-analysis of studies of students in China, similarly, Yang et  al. (2016) found that social support protected people from becoming depressed when they encountered stress.

By contrast, however, in one study of female twin pairs, Wade and Kendler (2000) found that although life events and absence of social support were both independently associated with depression, an interaction effect, of social support protecting against the impact of life events, was not found.

In this book, we suggest that the most important attribute of us as humans is that we are social beings; our most important emotions concern relationships (see Figure 13.5). The study of life events and depression throws additional light on these issues because, first, the events that induce depression are most often losses of relationship, and, second, social support has an additional effect, often protecting people from the enduring effects of stress.

With loss of important relationships, some of life’s meaning drains away. We lose part of our selfhood. A life lived without support of attachment and affiliation is more difficult than a life with this kind of support.

Early Experience Early experience affects people’s susceptibility to emotional disorders in adulthood. A person who loses a mother in childhood is more likely to develop depression than a person who has not lost her or his mother (Brown & Harris, 1978). Originally it was thought that it was loss of the

Emotional DisorDErs in aDulthooD354

attachment figure that left the individual vulnerable. It now seems that it is not this loss as such that has the main effect. It’s the lack of parental care that is likely to follow such a loss, which has more of an influence upon the likelihood of experiencing a major episode of depression. Women in Brown and Harris’s study who suffered neglect during childhood, or who experienced physi- cal or sexual abuse, were at an increased risk of both depression and anxiety as adults (Brewin, Andrews, & Gotlib, 1993; Brown & Harris, 1993).

Poor care in childhood tends to induce people to put themselves into situations of higher risk for life events. So, Quinton, Rutter, and Liddle (1984, discussed in Chapter 12) found that girls raised in institutions had earlier pregnancies, had poorer sexual relationships, and became less-competent parents than normal young women (see also Fleming et al., 2002, discussed in Chapter 9). Hammen (1991) found that women who had a history of major depression experi- enced more adverse life events than did women without a history of depression. Most such events were interpersonal, such as conflicts with a spouse or with children.

The vulnerability of early neglect may include damage to people’s sense of themselves as being valuable and worthy of love. Negative emotion schemas of self-in-relationship can increase people’s risk of depression by increasing chances of events that turn out badly. People who have experienced lack of care may have yearnings for love, which prompt them toward hasty or early marriages, in which there is higher risk of being badly treated. This can confirm expectations of defeat and loss, which become part of the self-deprecating pattern of depression.

Recurrence, Recovery, and Prolongation of Disorders People who experience one depressive episode are more likely than never-depressed peo- ple to experience another, and vulnerability to depression increases with subsequent episodes.

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FIGURE 13.5 Social support, the feeling of having people to turn to in difficult times, comes in many forms, including family, friends, and close colleagues at work.

Recurrence, Recovery, and Prolongation of Disorders 355

Backs-Dermott, Dobson, and Jones (2010) found, in a longitudinal study, that within a year of an episode of depression coming to an end, women were more likely to relapse into another episode of depression if they had avoidant coping styles, interpersonal difficulties, and/or lacked social support (see Figure 13.6).

Recurrence For many people, depression may occur just once in their lives and last for a limited time ( Monroe & Harkness, 2011). In the National Institute of Mental Health Collaborative Depression Study, within a year of onset of depression it was found about 30% of people remained depressed. By five years, this proportion was 12% (Mueller et al., 1996), and by 10 years the proportion was 7% (Keller & Boland, 1998).

A mechanism by which people become progressively more vulnerable to depression with successive episodes is called stress sensitization or kindling (Stroud et  al., 2011). Segal, Williams, Teasdale, and Gemar (1996) described it in terms of emotional patterns becom- ing established as mental habits, so that depression is made more likely by less severe events. Although at first, in research on recurrence, it seemed that each episode of depres- sion increased the kindling, it now seems likely that just a single episode of depression has the strongest influence on this process (Anderson, Monroe, Rohde, & Lewinsoihn, 2016). LeMoult, Kirkanski, Prasad, and Gotlib (2017) found in a longitudinal study of women that focusing on negative events predicted recurrence of depression; one episode was enough to establish this mode.

FIGURE 13.6 Standardized coefficients of factors that predicted relapse of depression in the study of Backs-Dermott et al. (2010).

Emotional DisorDErs in aDulthooD356

FIGURE 13.7 A vicious circle: depression caused by a life event may elicit memories of previous losses and failures, which, in turn, tend to make the person more depressed, and so on.

Kendler, Thornton, and Gardner (2001) observed the decline in association between life events and depression across episodes and found that this effect was most marked for those at low genetic risk. By contrast, a proportion of people who were at high genetic risk frequently expe- rienced a first depression without a severe adversity. Kendler et al. proposed that these highly vulnerable people could be thought of as “prekindled.”

Among pathways to experiencing depression during adulthood in the absence of major life stressors at that time is a life of substantial adversity that has begun in childhood.

Recovery and Fresh Starts Parrott and Sabini (1990) pointed out that most people do not get trapped in such inescapable cycles. Even when one is sad, some memories can come to mind that are not depressing. We can also say that in an episode of depression, people can start to reconceptualize their lives and make plans for the future (Nesse, 2000; Oatley, 1992). Such recoveries constitute what Brown, Lemyre, and Bifulco (1992) call “fresh starts,” which may involve a new relationship, a new role, a new life project to replace what was lost. Any of these may enable a person to feel worthwhile and purposeful. In a longitudinal study of recovery from diagnosed depression, Oatley and Perring (1991) found that whether an episode of depression ended or remained unresolved depended on whether new plans made by the depressed person went well or went wrong.

Prolongation In a survey of more than 19,000 members of the Swiss Household Panel, Anusic, Yap, and Lucas (2014) found that some severe life events, such as the death of a spouse, unemployment, and disability, produce long-lasting changes in life satisfaction, even when age-related changes have been controlled for; people did not adapt to them fully.

When one is depressed, one can become trapped in negativity, which drains one of hope ( Gotlib & Joorman, 2010). In Chapters 6 and 7, we showed that emotions change the organization of the brain to produce biases of processing—the heightened sensitivity to threat or acute awareness of loss. Emotional disorders prolong such changes. Because depressed people have a tendency to recall memories of loss and failure, Teasdale (1988) suggested that these memories lower mood and prolong depression (see Figure 13.7). This negative bias of depression makes people less likely to generate new life plans; then this lack of initiative can extend periods of depression.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema asked whether depression is prolonged by rumination: brooding on symptoms of distress in a repetitive manner rather than in a problem-solving way. Nolen- Hoeksema and Morrow (1991) studied emotional responses to a natural disaster—the earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area in 1989 that killed 62 and left 12,000 people homeless—and found

Recurrence, Recovery, and Prolongation of Disorders 357

that those who ruminated on the event had lower mood up to seven weeks afterward. In a study of people who had a close relative who had died in a hospice, Nolen-Hoeksema, Parker, and Larson (1994) found that the mood of people with a ruminative style was no lower than that of others a month after the death, but six months after the event their mood was still low, whereas that of non ruminators had started to lift. In another study by Nolen-Hoeksema and colleagues (Michl, McLaughlin, Shepherd, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2013), 1,132 adults were followed up over 12 months. Those who reported stressful life events were most likely to ruminate, and rumination moderated the relationship with becoming depressed, or suffering an anxiety disorder. Johnson, Whisman, Corley, Hewitt, and Friedman (2014) found that the tendency to ruminate was moder- ately heritable and overlapped with heritability of depression.

Joormann, Dkane, and Gotlib (2006) showed that rumination has two aspects. One is brood- ing, which is maladaptive. But there is also reflective pondering, thinking through problems that led to incidents that caused depression, and this can resolve and shorten episodes of depression.

A further explanation of how depression is prolonged has been proposed by Constance Hammen and her colleagues (Daley et  al., 1997; Hammen, 1999) and by Joiner (2002). This explanation is in terms of relationships. Depression tends to make relationships deteriorate, and this deterioration tends to prolong depression. Hokanson, Hummer, and Butler (1991) tracked mood and interactions between pairs of roommates at college. In one group, one member of the pair had prolonged depressed mood as indicated by a continuously high score on the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988, a widely used questionnaire to measure depression). In another group, one person was generally cheerful, with a continuously low score on the Beck Inventory. As compared with roommates of cheerful people, those living with con- tinuously depressed people became more depressed themselves over the year. They also reported becoming more managerial and saw their roommate as becoming more dependent.

Cognitive Biases in Anxiety and Other Emotional Disorders Anxiety states are more likely than depression to become chronic, and define a person’s daily living for long periods of time. Whereas, as we discussed above, cognitive mechanisms for sus- taining depression are influenced by memory of events and circumstances, mechanisms that sus- tain anxiety are mostly based on attention (Goodwin, Yiend, & Hirsch, 2017; Mogg & Bradley, 2004). People with anxiety traits and disorders are biased to attend to events that cause anxiety, especially their own particular kind of anxiety (see also Chapter 10). So, a person anxious about health, or with hypochondriacal concerns, attends to bodily events by thinking them to be symp- toms of illness (Stretton & Salovey, 1998). Such a person also tends to notice newspaper articles about health, attend to other people’s accounts of health issues, and build up mental schemas and habits of mind that heighten anxiety. So, fear produces a focus on fear-inducing items and events that in turn produce more fear. Fear also causes avoidance, so socially anxious people tend to isolate themselves, which makes them more anxious about presenting themselves in public, which further drains confidence.

As an example of this dynamic, consider what happened following the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001. During that time, symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder occurred among those who were closely involved, who had loved ones affected, or who lived nearby (Galea et al., 2002). Fear derived from the attacks caused further anxiety symptoms, some of which made it impossible for people to return to work and caused disruptions of personal rela- tionships. Lindstrom et  al. (2011) found that parents who were closely exposed to the 9/11 trauma in New York showed greater attention bias toward threat than parents with low trauma exposure. Anxiety is rooted in attentional biases to what is threatening and fearful, which can sustain the anxiety.

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Neurophysiology of Depression and Anxiety From a neuroscience perspective, Davidson, Pizzagalli, Nitschke, and Kalin (2003) identified loss of pleasurable goal achievement as a principal emotional cause of depression. Three brain areas seem to be important for depression: the frontal lobes, the hippocampus, and the amygdala (Nestler et al., 2002).

Involvement of the frontal cortex in depression has been found by van Tol et al. (2010) who examined 68 patients with major depression and found that they had lower anterior cingulate cortex volumes than 64 non depressed controls. They found, too, that patients with early onsets of depression had smaller prefrontal cortex volumes, regions you learned that support different kinds of emotion regulation, including strategies that help us find peace and perspective during difficult times. Saleh et al. (2017) found that people who in early life had suffered stress such as child abuse, or severe family conflict, and who in adulthood were depressed had lower volumes of their orbitofrontal cortex than those who were not depressed. Again recall that this region of the brain supports linking specific contexts to finding rewards; it would appear that early trauma disables this brain region so important to finding meaning and joy.

Farb, Irving, Anderson, and Segal (2015) suggested that two kinds of issues are prominent in people who have suffered an episode of depression. One is attentional: people tend to focus on events that have caused negative emotions in a process that is mediated by the brain’s salience network (which includes the anterior cingulate cortex, parts of the motor area, and the insula), which helps coordinate activity in other networks. The other is rumination, or brooding, elabora- tion of dysphoric emotional thoughts and attitudes. This may involve increased connectivity in the brain’s frontal lobes.

As to the hippocampus, a meta-analysis examining 143 magnetic resonance imaging studies found that reductions in the volume of the hippocampus and the basal ganglia are associated with major depression (Kempton et al., 2011).

As to the amygdala, centrally involved in appraisals of novelty and concern relevance, Yang et  al. (2010) found greater activation of the amygdala in depressed as compared with non depressed adolescents when they viewed images of people making different emotional expressions; you can see a brain image and a graph of this result in Figure 13.8. Siegle, Stein- hauer, Thase, Stenger, and Carter (2002) found that in depressed patients’ responses to negative comments, the amygdala remained activated for 30 seconds after such a comment, whereas the amygdala of nondepressed patients was activated for less than 10 seconds. Disner, Beevers, Haigh, and Beck (2011) proposed a neurobiological theory of depression, based on a role for the amygdala in encoding negative events. They argued that as the amygdala becomes hyperactivated

FIGURE 13.8 Activation of the left amygdala of adolescents in a control group (CTL) and in those with a disorder at the major depressive level (MDL) who were shown fearful, angry, and happy faces ( from Yang et al., 2010).

Neurophysiology of Depression and Anxiety 359

in depression, it also causes connected areas such as the hippocampus to become more activated, and thus more likely to recall negative events. What this suggests is that in depression, the brain regions that support appraising events for their concern relevance are elevated in their activation.

Antidepressant Drugs In this chapter, we have suggested that the researcher is a detective. The most famous detective, of course, was Sherlock Holmes, and in the case entitled Silver Blaze he mentions to a policeman who is working on a case: “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” The policeman says: “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” to which Holmes replies, “That was the curi- ous incident” (Conan-Doyle, 1894, p. 347). Holmes inferred that the dog must have known the intruder whom they are seeking.

In the neurophysiology of depression something similar has occurred. As Scull (2015) explains in Madness in Civilization, a huge change occurred in the Western world with closure of most mental hospitals and introduction of psychotropic drugs. These drugs became and remain the main treatment for mental illnesses of all kinds. Among them are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac, widely prescribed and widely advertised. These drugs reduce reabsorption of the transmitter substance serotonin, so that it remains in synapses for longer, which, as you learned in Chapter 7, tends to inhibit many emotion-related systems in the brain. The thesis advanced by many drug companies is that depression is caused by an imbalance of ser- otonin in the brain, which can be rectified by daily doses of these drugs. The “curious incident” here is the absence of any evidence-based neurophysiological theory of depression based on this idea that it is closely related to deficits in serotonin. The intruder has been the drug companies. The psychiatrists could have barked, but they haven’t yet done so.

In The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Myth of Anti-depressants, Kirsch (2009) has written: “It now seems beyond question that the . . . account of depression as a chemical imbal- ance in the brain is simply wrong” (p. 80). He found in meta-analyses of properly conducted randomized controlled trials that, as compared with placebos, serotonin reuptake inhibitor drugs showed only a small effect on depression. Placebos show surprisingly large effects on the self- report scales of depression that are commonly used, and they have the advantage that they don’t cause harmful side effects.

Angell (2008) made the case that drug companies now control most research on psychoac- tive drugs and that “there is mounting evidence that they often skew the research they sponsor to make their drugs look better and safer” (p. 1069). Kirsch explains that knowing whether psy- choactive drugs work as advertised requires far more than knowing whether they have reached a threshold set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

In 18 of 32 (56%) trials sponsored by the drug industry of selective serotonin uptake inhibi- tors as compared with placebos, Hieronymus, Emilsson, Nilsson, and Eriksson (2016) found that after six weeks on the drug or placebo, people showed no effect as measured by the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (Hamilton, 1960), the most widely used rating scale for depression in drug trials. Hieronymus et al. said the whole scale assesses a wide range of symptoms and is heterogeneous. They did find, however, that when they considered outcomes on just a single item of this scale—Depressed Mood—(“gloomy attitude, pessimism about the future, feeling of sadness, tendency to weep”), which participants rated from 0 “not at all” to 4 “extreme symp- toms,” then 29 of the 32 comparisons showed significant improvement with the selective seroto- nin uptake inhibitor as compared with the placebo.

A recent meta-analysis of 522 drug trials for 21 antidepressant drugs was made by Andrea Cipriani et al. (2018). The meta-analysis included trials of antidepressant drugs versus placebos and head-to-head trials between different drugs. Cipriani et  al. found that as compared with placebos, antidepressant drugs were generally more effective than placebos, but that for patients

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with major depression “effect sizes were mostly modest” (p. 6). Although amitriptyline was not as acceptable to patients as some of the other medications, it was the most effective drug for depression: about twice as effective as placebos (odds ratio 2.13). Fluoxetine (the SSRI marketed as Prozac and other names) was among the least effective.

In Ordinarily Well Peter Kramer (2016), previously a strong advocate of SSRIs in his book Listening to Prozac (1993), has moderated his advice, based on his review of outcome studies of these drugs. Although, he says, as a psychiatrist he advocates psychological therapy first, he concludes that these drugs can be useful for some of the people, some of the time.

Beyond Depression and Anxiety In the following sections, we discuss three further topics that focus on the relation of emotion to psychological disorder.

Psychopathic People in Society Although the proportion of people who can be diagnosed as psychopaths is less than 2% of the population, it was found in a British survey by Coid and Yang (2011) that these people were responsible for 18.7% of violent incidents reported in the survey. To be a psychopath is to have an emotional disorder with strong links to aggression. The person is likely to have two core components: (i) callousness together with lack of emotional connection to others and (ii) a ten- dency to antisocial behavior. The condition is associated with thrill seeking, sadism, fearlessness, impulsivity, lack of anger control, antisocial lifestyle, and lack of guilt or remorse. The prototypi- cal psychopath is male and socially antagonistic. He lacks social constraints of shame or worry about what others might think. He is not the usual young person diagnosed with conduct disorder or explosive anger disorder. In general, he is not reflective. In particular, he does not consider negative consequences of actions. Think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the kind-hearted Dr. Jekyll starts taking a potion that transforms him into Mr. Hyde: purely selfish, free of all conscience. Most of us are Dr. Jekylls, mindful of convention and considerate of others. Psychopaths are the Mr. Hydes of this world.

Psychopathy of this kind starts at an early age and is often identified in children with an externalizing disorder. It is usually identified by a score on the Psychopathy Check-List, or some variant of it (Hare, Clark, Grann, & Thornton, 2000). It predicts adult criminal offending (Lynam, Miller, Vachon, Loeber, & Stouthamer-Loeber, 2009).

A psychopathic person seems unable to form emotional commitments with others and dis- plays a lack of empathy. Although psychopathy seems to share with autism a deficit in empathy and theory of mind, the two syndromes differ (Blair, 2008). The psychopath is cruel, whereas the typical autistic person is not. Although it is possible for an autistic person also to be a psychopath, such a person would have two different traits, not one trait that is an aspect of the other (Baron- Cohen, 2011).

A prominent theory of psychopathic personality (Blair & Mitchell, 2009) holds that there is a deficit of emotional processing that involves dysfunctions of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, regions of the brain that you learned about in Chapter 7, which track the emotional significance of stimuli and are engaged in how we regulate our emotions. In this view, effects of past or poten- tial punishment are disrupted. Among other evidence is that people with this trait are impaired on several abilities assessed as emotional intelligence (Ermer, Kahn, Salovey, & Kiehl, 2012) and that they have difficulties in emotion regulation, which are associated with self-centered impulsivity (Patrick, 2018).

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Psychopathic people are fascinating to us in thrillers and murder-mysteries. They are not com- mon in ordinary society, but they are common in prison populations. As of yet, there has been little success in finding effective treatments for them or in finding how to avoid their attainment of positions of power in organizations or politics.

Schizophrenia, Emotion, Expressed Emotion in Relatives The psychotic disorder of schizophrenia has a lifetime prevalence of 0.87% (Perälä et al., 2007) with slightly more females than males being affected. Whereas depression and anxiety disorders are largely provoked by the adversities of life, schizophrenia is determined more closely by genetics and can occur without adversity. Diagnosis according to DSM-5 includes a disturbance that causes severe dysfunction in interpersonal relationships, at work, or in self-care, with at least two of the following symptoms lasting a month or more: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, disorganized or catatonic behavior, diminished emotions, and with some sign of distur- bance lasting at least six months.

Ann Kring and Ori Elis (2013) explained that people with schizophrenia often report emo- tional experiences similar to those who function well, but they show less emotion in their outward expressive behavior. They also have trouble anticipating emotional events, such as enjoyment in seeing good friends. They tend not to maintain ways of continuing emotional experiences of the kind which, for others, would be important. O’Driscoll, Laing, and Mason (2014) proposed that this is due to less effective emotional regulation, in terms of emotional management and cogni- tive reappraisal, as well as a tendency to alexithymia, a paucity of emotion words and concepts, which we discussed in Chapter 6. In studies of experience sampling, in which people are asked to report on their experiences at random times in day-to-day live, people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia report more negative emotion, but about the same amount of positive emotion as those without this diagnosis (Cho, Gonzalez, Lavaysse, Pence, & Fulford, 2017).

Another aspect of emotion that is involved in schizophrenia is found in studies of the emo- tions expressed by family members of patients, who in the course of their illness have often been difficult to live with. The term used is expressed emotion, a measure taken in family interviews with such relatives. The original measure (Brown, Birley, & Wing, 1972) was of (i) the number of critical comments made by a relative, (ii) the degree of the relative’s hostility in nonverbal aspects and in content, and (iii) the degree of overinvolvement, such as treating the patient as a child. Vaughn and Leff (1976) found that among schizophrenic patients the degree of expressed emo- tion in their relatives predicted whether these patients who came out of hospital would relapse within the next nine months. For patients who came home to a family that was low in expressed emotion, irrespective of whether the patients took their antipsychotic medication, there was a low rate of relapse. But of those returning to a high–expressed emotion family, who spent more than 35 hours a week with them, and did not take their medication, 92% relapsed within nine months (see Figure 13.9).

In a meta-analysis of studies of expressed emotion, Butzlaff and Hooley (1998) found that high expressed emotion was associated with relapse of schizophrenia, and low expressed emo- tion was associated with low rates of relapse. All but three of the 27 studies that reached method- ological criteria for inclusion in the meta-analysis showed the effect, with about 65% of patients who relapsed being in high–expressed emotion families, and 35% being in low–expressed emo- tion families. Butzlaff and Hooley found also that effects of expressed emotion for depressive disorders were larger than those for schizophrenia, and larger still for relapse of eating disorders such as anorexia. In a review and analysis, Weintraub, Hall, Carbonella, Weisman de Mamani, and Holoey (2017) concluded that publication bias has not been a significant factor and that expressed emotion of relatives is a valuable predictor of relapse in schizophrenic people.

Emotional DisorDErs in aDulthooD362

FIGURE 13.9 Percentages of schizophrenic patients who relapsed within nine months of leaving hospital as a function of high and low expressed emotion, the amount of time they spent with their family, and whether they took their medication (Vaughn & Leff, 1976).

Psychiatric disorders are not just disturbances within the sufferer. They are disturbing to others, and families differ in how they cope with these disturbances. For instance, Grice et al. (2009) found that high–expressed-emotion relatives of psychotic patients tended to blame the patients for negative events, whereas low–expressed-emotion relatives were focused more on positive events. Expressed emotion research has shown that with acceptance of the patient’s condition and some flexibility in coping with it, not only may the lives be eased of families in which someone has a disorder, but the cycle of being emotionally critical and hostile, and hence provoking the patient into ever more difficult behavior and relapse, may be cut.

Psychosomatic Effects Emotional factors influence physical health in profound ways. Do adversities that can cause emotional disorders also influence physical ill-health by affecting the immune system? As we explained in Chapter 5, this system extends throughout the body and includes the bone marrow, spleen, thymus, lymph nodes, and the white cells of the blood such as lymphocytes and mac- rophages. The study of effects of stressors on the immune system is known as psychoneuroim- munology. Useful reviews are by Byrne-Davis and Vedhara (2008) and Kiecolt-Glaser (2009).

In this field, findings have at first been epidemiological, and two kinds of study have been particularly significant. One series was the set of Whitehall Studies by Michael Marmot and his colleagues, in which health was studied in men in the British Civil Service, all with the same health benefits and job security, but different status: Administrative at the top, then Professional/ Executive, then Clerical, then Other. In the first study, it was found that the higher people’s grade in the civil service, the longer they lived (Marmot & Shipley, 1996). In the second study, Kuper and Marmot (2003) found that work stress, typified by low control at work, was associated with an increased risk of heart disease. It seems that high status, of the kind studied in other pri- mates in their hierarchies, has health benefits. Following up the same population of civil servants, Boehm, Peterson, Kivimaki, and Kubzansky (2011) found that life satisfaction had a positive effect in protecting people from risk of heart disease.

In a second type of study, Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues (2002a; 2002b) also started epi- demiologically, and then took their detective work into the laboratory. They have found that negative emotions are risk factors, and supportive relationships are protective in a range of ill- nesses. They distinguished between short-term (acute) stress and long-term (chronic) stress. Kiecolt-Glaser has carried out a series of studies on acute stress, taking as a model students’

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acute anxiety and stress at exams. She and her colleagues have found that acute stress decreases immune responses to vaccinations (Glaser, Kiecolt-Glaser, Malarkey, & Sheridan, 1998) and that students who have a surgical wound administered three days before an exam have a 40% lower rate of healing than those with the same kind of wound made during the summer vaca- tion (Maroucha, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Favegehi, 1998). In a more recent work, Kiecolt-Glaser et al. (2017) have shown that stress and depression contribute to the incidence of inflammation and to increased blood pressure.

S U M M A R Y

Working on the disorders of depression related to sadness, and also on anxiety states such as panics, phobias, and obsessions, related to fear, the epidemiological detective notes first that prevalence rates are high, that women are more frequently afflicted than men, and that there are differences in prevalence in different nations and ethnic groups. By contrast, men suffer more often from alco- hol and drug addictions, as well as from impulse-control disorders that continue externalizing disorders of childhood. What causes these conditions? The detective finds that genetic predispositions exist for both major depression and clinical anxiety and that each onset of such a condition is usually caused by a stress: a severely adverse event or difficulty in life. One episode of major depression makes further episodes of depression more likely. The genetically influenced personality trait of Neuroticism not only inclines peo- ple to making their own lives more stressful, but also makes them more liable to depressive modes of thinking such as rumination, as

well as on anxious thinking with its focus on anything that might be dangerous. Among factors that protect against depression and anxiety disorders is social support. Brain mechanisms of emotional disorders are thought to involve regions such as the frontal cor- tex, amygdala, and hippocampus. There is, however, no evidence to support the proposal of drug companies that depression is an imbalance of serotonin in the brain. Beyond depression and anxiety, people with psychopathic personalities are found to lack empathy for others. Schizophrenia involves dysregulated emotions in the suf- ferer. At the same time, critical and hostile emotions of sufferers’ relatives can provoke relapse in schizophrenia and other disorders. Psychosomatic illnesses are affected by the same kinds of stresses that provoke depression and anxiety. So the puzzle of why we suffer from emotional disorders is beginning to be solved, but there is still far to go by way of prevention.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. Think back to a time of intense emotion for you, perhaps of sadness, or anxiety, or anger, or elation. What did you feel urged to think of at this time? What did you feel urged to do?

2. Do you know anyone, perhaps a family member or friend, who has suffered or is suffering a psychological disorder? What are the most important issues in caring for this person?

3. How do you think society should regard people with problems of mental health? Should they be regarded in the same kind of way as those who have problems of physical health?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

One of the most important books published on emotional disorders, a book which, though it came out some time ago, is still engaging to read is:

Brown, G. W., & Harris, T. (1978). Social origins of depression: A study of psychiatric disorder in women. London, UK: Tavistock.

A fundamental book for understanding societal effects on emotional dis- orders, but also trust in society, subjective well-being, the extent of criminality, life expectancy, and other outcomes:

Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The spirit level: Why more equal soci- eties almost always do better. London, UK: Allen Lane.

An article on the importance of interpersonal emotions in psychopathology:

Gruber, J., & Keltner, D. (2011). Too close for comfort? Lessons from excesses and deficits of compassion in psychopathology. In S. Brown, M. Brown, & L. Penner (Eds.), Moving beyond self-interest: Toward a new understanding of human caregiving. New York: Oxford University Press.

An interesting and comprehensive article on physical health in relation to emotions is:

Kiecolt-Glaser, J., McGuire, L., Robles, T. F., & Glaser R. (2002). Emotions, morbidity, and mortality: New perspectives from psychoneuroimmunol- ogy. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 83–107.

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14 A Meaningful Life

There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bod- ily diseases, from outside ourselves. We must endeavor with all our resources and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves.

Cicero: Tusculan Disputations, III, 6

CONTENTS A Significant Event

Meaning in Life Cooperation Happiness Relatedness Satisfaction Well-Being

Psychological Therapy with Others and by Oneself

Psychoanalysis: Unconscious Schemas of Relating Rogerian Counseling: Empathetic Support Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Changing Emotional Life by Thought Emotion-Focused Therapy: Changing Emotional Life by Emotions Outcomes of Psychotherapy Psychotherapy Without Therapists

Mindfulness, Ancient and Modern

Consciously Making Sense of Emotions

Emotions in Literature

Emotion and Free Will

Emotion and Meaning in the Social World

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

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A Significant Event In the summer of 1929, one of the largest textile mills in Austria, the main workplace of the industrial village of Marienthal, began to close down. By the end of February 1930, all the looms had stopped. The time was the beginning of the Great Depression that seized the Western world and lasted till 1941. Marienthal was a 35-minute train ride south of Vienna. As well as the mill, there was a park, a library, many social clubs, and a theater club. The village no longer exists.

A piece of research as revealing as any other in psychology was on the personal and social effects of the closure of the Marienthal mill. Virtually, the whole village became unemployed. It wasn’t just that people had no income except for a very small dole. That was terrible. Worse was that they no longer felt that they contributed to society. Many felt that their lives had become meaningless.

Fieldwork on the effects of the mill’s closure began in November 1931 and lasted until May 1932. At this time, the village had a population of 1,486 people. The project was written up by Marie Jahoda and published in 1933. It was later translated into English and published by Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel (1933/1971). The project, about the devastating effects of unem- ployment, became a model of comprehensive social research involving several methodologies. Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and their colleagues, in a team that included psychologists, social research- ers, physicians, and lawyers, drew on conversations, interviews, diaries, and other kinds of observations. The team used unobtrusive measures: One was of numbers of books loaned from the local library. After the mill closed, these numbers fell by half even though people had more time on their hands.

The loss of well-being included a sense of demoralization, apathy, and depersonalization. Jahoda et  al. concluded that although the income that work provides is essential, even more important are the social benefits of work, the sense of camaraderie, collaboration, and belonging. Clark and Oswald (1994) found that among severe stressors that include divorce, being unem- ployed is the greatest depressor of well-being.

Work structures our time and provides a sense of social purpose and personal worth. Several studies have shown that people who take part in paid work and volunteer work report higher lev- els of well-being than those who have no work (e.g., McMunn, Nazroo, Wahrendorf, Breeze, & Zaninotto, 2009). Associations between joblessness and well-being remain significant when income is kept constant, which means that unemployment reduces well-being independently of its economic effects. In an analysis of longitudinal data, von Scheve, Esche, and Schupp (2016) found although the decrease in happiness and increase in sadness and anxiety tended to persist only during the first year after people were unemployed, when unemployment persisted, life sat- isfaction continued to decline. Jahoda and colleagues’ early study of job loss, social community, and well-being speaks to the central question of this chapter. Imagine yourself as the person in Figure 14.0 at the head of this chapter. How do emotions contribute making your life meaningful?

Meaning in Life Seagulls fly in arcs across the sky. Beavers build dams. What do we do, we humans? We cooper- ate. We build families, communities, societies. It is, then, to our relationships and interactions with others that we look for the meaningfulness of human life, what gives us a sense of purpose beyond ourselves. We can understand why the Marienthal study concluded that the most mean- ingful function of work is social. We can understand why in most of our emotions the concerns are with other people and how we are getting along in the different relationships that make up human social life.

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While we can define the meaningful life in terms of social purpose, Martela, Ryan, and Steger (2017) identified four more specific contributions to meaningful life: autonomy (ownership of actions), competence, relatedness, and beneficence. They derived this framework from hundreds of studies on meaning and happiness and reported on how these four modes contribute to people’s sense of meaningfulness. We have drawn on this research and augmented Martela et al.’s ideas to construct Table 14.1. And we follow up these ideas in the sections below.

Cooperation As we have seen in earlier chapters, one distinctive aspect of our human lives, which distin- guishes us from other animals, is that we cooperate with each other to do things that we cannot do alone. Even in many of our conflicts, we cooperate. Some other animals are social, some form friendships, but no species can make deliberate arrangements with each other, give priority to mutual goals, and enact shared intentions like humans do. Based on attachment of mothers and offspring (Bowlby, 1969), which you read about in Chapter 11, on the development of long-term sexual partnerships in which males help to raise children (Lovejoy, 1981), on the emergence of joint intentions, and then on group intentions of the kind on which morality is based (Tomasello, 2016), we humans have become unusual. Forms of cooperation elicit positive emotions such as gratitude and activation in reward circuits of the brain (Chapter 7). The importance of coopera- tion and of being able to make contributions to others and to groups was found in Marienthal. If we can’t or won’t take part in joint and communal social activities, life is diminished. As Daniel Defoe’s (1719) Robinson Crusoe found, when he was alone on his desert island his life had become less meaningful.

In yet another study that speaks to our propensity to cooperate, in a brain imaging study, Sun and colleagues (2016) found that people playing a game in which they might make larger gains or losses if they acted in pure self-interest than in cooperation still acted cooperatively in nearly half the trials. This tendency to cooperate was associated with activation of the prefrontal cor- tex, which is involved in our tracking of social rewards, and a report of higher levels of positive emotions.

Happiness We generally know when we are happy, but the question of what makes us happy can be more puzzling. In 1926, after she had completed a psychology degree at the University of London and had started work as an industrial psychologist, Marion Blackett found herself wondering whether happiness was important in her life. She wasn’t sure what its sources might be. She had the idea of keeping a diary of incidents that made her happy and to relate them to her goals in life. The answer turned out not to be simple, and reaching it took far longer than she expected. She turned the project into a book under the pen-name of Joanna Field (1934). It produced the surprising

Table 14.1 Modes and characteristics of meaning in life

Mode Characteristics

Cooperation Contribution to family, community, society, beneficence

Happiness Positive emotions

Relatedness Love, friends, family relationships

Satisfaction Competence and identity, coherence of self with emotions and actions

Well-being Mental health, freedom from depression and anxiety

Meaning in Life 367

discovery that much of her life was ordered not by consciously recognized goals but by anxieties, on the edge of consciousness. Here is an example:

Oughtn’t we to ask those people to tea? That’s best, say, “Do you ever have time for a cup of tea? Will you come in any day?” Say we are free all the week, let them choose … will she be too busy? what shall we give them? go into town and buy a cake? will they expect it? Can’t afford these extras, but bread and jam won’t do, what does one give people for tea? (p. 114).

In this train of thought, she wonders how to approach some people who are far wealthier than she, rehearsing different forms of invitation and worrying. Her discovery of the pervasiveness of such anxieties prompted a change of career. She became the distinguished psychoanalyst, Marion Milner. Her identification of anxieties on the edge of consciousness did not become widely known at the time, but later became the center of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Here are some thoughts from Marion Blackett’s diary when she was happy, after falling in love, thinking about the person she would marry: “I want us to travel together, exploring, seeing how other people live … sleeping at country inns, sailing boats, tramping dusty roads together …” (p. 48). These are plans of activities in a shared life of new experiences with her loved one.

Reflection and Cultivation: Emotion Diaries

Emotion diaries are ways of recording your emotions so that, by writing about what starts them, what thoughts you have during them, and what effects they have, you can reflect on them and understand them better.

The first psychologist to publish on emotion diaries was Georgina Gates (1926), who asked 51 women students to record instances of anger for a week; she found that anger in daily life was usually caused by being thwarted.

One way to keep an emotion diary of your own is to look out for emotions that are distinct enough to recognize. Oat- ley and Duncan (1992) used this method and told partici- pants that indications of having an emotion were a bodily sensation such as the heart beating faster or thoughts com- ing to mind that were hard to stop or an urge to act emo- tionally. Among the questions we asked on a page made out like a questionnaire were as follows: What was the name of the emotion (or mood), how long did it last, what happened to start it, who was there, what thoughts came to mind dur- ing it, what urges were experienced, and what effects did it have? You can add to or delete from this list as you like.

Another way of keeping an emotion diary is to write down how you are feeling at certain moments in time. This method is called experience sampling, and it was invented

by Csikszentmihalyi and Larson (1984), who asked adoles- cents to record how they were feeling when signaled at ran- dom moments. You can do this by keeping a timer in your pocket or purse, dialing up some random time on it, maybe about 45 minutes ahead, and then recording how you feel when the timer goes off—what are you doing and how are you feeling at that moment?—then repeating the process as often as you like. You can write down as much or as little as you like in your diary entries.

Diary methods are often useful if there are aspects of your emotional life that you don’t quite understand. They are used in certain kinds of therapies to help people gain insight during difficult times. The work of James Pennebaker (1997), reviewed earlier, speaks to the benefits of such reflec- tion. Were you to keep an emotion diary, you might learn interesting things. Do you, for instance, sometimes experi- ence a wave of anxiety or despair for no obvious reason? Do you have some emotions more strongly than you think you should? Record when such incidents happen, what you are doing when they start, what just happened, and who else was there. Write what thoughts occur to you. Later, you can reflect on these thoughts: Are they still convincing? You might make some interesting discoveries about yourself.

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The American Declaration of Independence speaks of inalienable rights, among which is “the pursuit of happiness.” Happiness seems to be very positive, but Gruber, Mauss, and Tamir (2011) have shown that it needs to be of the right degree, about the right kinds of things, and in the right circumstances, otherwise it can be harmful (e.g., Ford, Mauss, & Gruber, 2015). Gruber, Kogan, Quoidbach, and Mauss (2013) have found, moreover, that too much variability in happiness also puts one at risk, as does the excessive striving for happiness, or attempts to maximize happiness in any situation (Ford et al., 2015; Schwartz et al., 2002). It is a complex matter to find meaning and happiness, one that requires patience and the acceptance of life’s complexities and difficul- ties alongside its delights and joys.

Psychological research has shown beneficial aspects of happiness in countries all around the world and has also explored means of increasing it (Myers & Diener, 1996, 2018). Sometimes happiness is used as a synonym for well-being, which we discuss further below. We can think of it as having three components: life satisfaction, positive affect, and lack of negative affect. It’s a state in which we can live our lives meaningfully and take part in our relationships in good heart.

Questions of happiness and its consequences have become central not just in psychology but also in economics and sociology. The reasons for this expanding interest in happiness in large part have to do with evidence showing how happiness matters in terms of a society’s economic and physical health. In a synthesis of over 200 empirical studies on the consequences of being happy, Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener found that enhanced well-being has three important ben- efits: It leads to enhanced productivity and creativity at work; it promotes stronger and more cooperative relationships; and it is associated with more robust health and increased life expec- tancy (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005).

So what is happiness? We might think of things we like, as Marion Blackett thought of traveling. Perhaps we might think of eating ice-cream or laughing with a friend. Such activities are usually called pleasures. They seem important if you compare them with their opposites, such as having no money to travel or to do much else, being ill and in pain that obliterates other experiences, or feeling socially isolated. But in the course of human history, many writers have been skeptical of the idea that pleasure is the only contributor, or even the most important contributor, to happiness.

Pleasure can be thought of as one component of happiness. A second is engagement in what one is doing. A third is a sense of meaningfulness of one’s activities. In a large Internet survey of 13,565 people, Schueller and Seligman (2010) asked about the extent of these three factors in people’s lives. They found that pleasure, engagement, and meaning were all associated with people’s subjective sense of happiness and well-being in their lives. But in relation to objective well-being, which included measures of educational and occupational attainment, only engage- ment and meaningfulness contributed positively, whereas pleasure made a negative contribution. These results suggest that engaging in meaningful activity, socially and in other ways, has a stronger influence on well-being than the pursuit of pleasure.

Relatedness Although no direct source has been found, Sigmund Freud has been cited as saying that the meaning of life is “love and work.” We have discussed work, above, so what about love? Freed- man (1978) found in a survey of 100,000 Americans that it was not wealth, not power, not even health, that was the aspiration they valued most in their lives, but love in marriage as the state that they identified most closely with the possibility of being happy. Most emotions, including positive ones, occur because humans’ main concerns are with other people, perhaps especially in love and friendship, which you will have read about in Chapter 9.

With the specific concern for how interaction affects our sense of meaning in life, sharing joy and affection with others can lead to supportive relationships. At the same time, engagement in the social world opens up opportunities (Fredrickson & Cohn, 2008).

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Richards and Huppert (2011) followed up 2,776 people in a British 1946 birth cohort. Teach- ers had rated these people at age 16 on domains that included energy level, happiness, popularity, and ease at making friends. As compared with those who received no positive teacher ratings in these domains, those who received positive ratings on two or more domains were 60 percent less likely to have mental health problems later in life. They were also more likely to be in frequent contact with family and friends and more likely to be satisfied at work.

Friendship has been repeatedly shown to be a source of joy and satisfaction. What is it about friendship that promotes happiness? In a study of 423 university students, Demir and Weitekamp (2007) found that the quality of friendships, especially companionship and self-validation, had significant effects on happiness. Although on its own, friendship accounted for 58 percent of the variance in happiness, most of this effect was due to personality variables of the kind we discussed in Chapter 11. When these variables were controlled for, quality of friendship added a small independent effect to happiness. So taking part in friendships and nurturing them is impor- tant. Many of the core elements of friendship you learned about in Chapter 9—gratitude, shared laughter, empathic connection—certainly play a role in why friendships are central to well-being.

Satisfaction How satisfied are we with ourselves and with our lives? This was the question behind the only large-scale piece of research that William James ever did. He published it in 1902 as The Varie- ties of Religious Experience. Its subject is what happens when people become anguished about themselves; it’s about life’s meaning. In his book, James compares people whom he calls the

Reflection and Cultivation Flow

Csikszentmihalyi (1990) found that although many people’s emotions were principally affected by the accidents of life, others conceived the world quite differently. Rico Medelin, for instance, worked on an assembly line in a factory that made movie projectors. His task was supposed to take 43 seconds, and he had to do it some 600 times a day. Although we could probably imagine grumbling if we had to earn our living at such a job, and had been doing it for as long as Rico—five years—the samples of his experience on the pro- duction line were of happiness. He had consciously analyzed his task and worked out how to use his tools to become bet- ter and faster. His best average for the day was 28 seconds per unit. “It is better than anything else,” said Rico. “It’s bet- ter than watching TV” (pp. 39–40).

Through Rico and people like him, Csikszentmihalyi dis- covered a state he called flow. Another of his participants, who lived in the Italian Alps, enjoyed tending her cows and her orchard. She said, “I find a special satisfaction in caring for the plants. I like to see them grow each day” (p. 55). A dancer described how in a performance her attention was very complete, without any wandering of the mind. She was

completely involved in what she was doing. A young mother described the time she and her small daughter spent together in similar ways.

Csikszentmihalyi also calls the state of flow optimal expe- rience and says it is characterized by a sense of creativity, of purpose, and of being deliberately and fully engaged so that self and the activity merge. To cultivate this state, we can choose to do what we are doing and turn it into a project in which we are engaged. Csikszentmihalyi has described some of the conditions for doing this and for achieving the state of engagement. It is not a matter of waiting for pleas- urable events in the world. One needs to be creative (Csik- szentmihalyi, 1996).

The best way is to accept or choose an activity and make it meaningful. It might be to learn the piano, or to become better at understanding what others are thinking. It’s best to set yourself a goal, and set yourself specific problems and try to solve them on the way to reaching the goal. The goal and problems should be sufficiently specific so that that you can observe your own actions and their effects (feedback) to know whether you are progressing.

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once-born with those who feel they need to be twice-born. The once-born grow up in a society and, with the developmental influences of parents and culture, feel themselves to be part of it. These influences have worked for them. They derive their meaning from taking part in the society they know. Others, however, feel they don’t fit in. For some, this involves them in yearning to make the huge change of a religious conversion.

In his book of 1902, James abandoned his theory of 1894, which was that emotions are per- ceptions of changes of muscles and glands within the body. In this 1902 book, he concludes that emotion is not a perception, not an end point, but a prime mover; emotions give meaning to the ever-shifting social contexts of our lives. It is emotion that makes some people feel dissatisfied with their lives, that makes them anguished, and that makes them long to be born again.

The metaphor James uses is that we are each like a solid object, a polyhedron, which has a number of flat sides. The side on which we rest is the one of our day-to-day routines, the side of habit. An emotion of deep dissatisfaction with oneself and one’s life can lever up the polyhedron, onto one of its edges, and perhaps push it over, so that it falls on another side, another mode of life. James uses this metaphor to help us see what occurs in the most profound changes that people make in their lives such as a religious conversion, but it works as well for changes such as going to college, starting a sexual relationship, starting a new job (Oatley & Djikic, 2002).

Well-Being Part of a statement issued by the World Health Organization (2014) is about the state of well- being:

Mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.

Lyubomirsky et al. (2005) suggested three factors in thinking about well-being, which they also call happiness (see Figure 14.1). The first is a genetic set-point that regulates temperament and personality. Several twin studies have shown personality-based sense of happiness accounts for about 50 percent of the variation in well-being and that although life events may cause fluc- tuations around this point, most people return to their baseline level (this is in keeping with what you have learned about the heritability of temperament). The second factor is of circumstantial,

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FIGURE 14.1 Determinants of happiness and well-being (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005).

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but long-term elements of a person’s life, such as gender, cultural background, social class, mari- tal status, and even the kind of political context one is born into, for example, a war-torn state. Circumstantial factors account for an additional 10 percent of the variability in a person’s hap- piness. Although achieving a desired job, or finding oneself having to live with less money than anticipated, seems, at the time, to make all the difference, these kinds of circumstances make less of a difference than one assumes, because people adapt to conditions. The third factor involves intentional activity: the practices and patterns of thought that make up how people organize their lives with families, friendships, work, and leisure time. Intentional activities account for about 40 percent of the variability in well-being. In a paper of 2013, Lyubomirsky and Layous proposed that this last set of influences can be enhanced by actions such as expressing gratitude, practicing kindness, building a bit of mindfulness into your life, and seeking awe.

The inherited influence of positive temperament, of the kind we discussed in Chapter 11, the dispositional capacity to feel joy, calm, mirth and to handle stress well predicts well-being. Cohn, Fredrickson, Brown, Mikels, and Conway (2009) found that the association between positive emotions and greater life satisfaction is mediated by greater ego resilience, a mental resource that helps a person deal with life stressors. According to this idea, positive emotions build resources— cognitive resources, such as the ability to have perspective upon stress, and social resources, such as the sense of being supported—to help people attain success in various life domains.

Personality influences well-being through positive and negative mood. Abbott et  al. (2008), for instance, found that Neuroticism and Extraversion, measured during adolescence, together accounted for between 13 and 18 percent of the variance in well-being measured more than three decades later, when participants were nearing the middle of life. Stewart, Ebmeier, and Deary (2005) found a positive correlation between Extraversion and positive mood and proposed that effects of Extraversion on mood occur by creating conditions for positive experiences. Associations of Neuroticism with well-being are generally less consistent across samples from different socie- ties. Neuroticism includes susceptibility to depression and anxiety. It involves a focus on immediate problems, and viewing them in a negative way. This contributes to emotional maladjustment.

As well as genetics, circumstances are also important for well-being. In Chapters 12 and 13, you encountered one of the largest circumstantial determinants of reduced well-being: poverty. In this vein, it has repeatedly been found that moderate wealth is significantly associated with subjective well-being both within a country and when comparing between countries. This asso- ciation is most marked between higher and lower income groups. Kahneman, Kreuger, Schkade, Schwarz, and Stone (2006) found that as compared with those who earned less than $20,000 per year, nearly twice as many people were “very happy” who earned between $50,000 and $89,999. But earning $90,000 or more made almost no extra difference to happiness. Kahneman et al. proposed that well-being does not continue to increase with increased income because it is influ- enced by judgments of relative wealth, and a person’s position in the economic hierarchy is likely to persist. People with above-average incomes tend to be more tense and do not spend more time doing particularly enjoyable activities.

In global comparisons of well-being, Diener, Vitterso, and Diener (2005) found that the large majority of Kenyan Massai (see Figure 14.2) scored above neutral on scales of well-being. The same was true of the Amish who lived in the United States and of the Inughuit who lived in Greenland. These people were living traditional lifestyles without modern comforts or luxuries. Their scores were comparable to those of people living in ways that are more conventional in the United States. Happiness, as you might imagine, does not depend on modernization and goods of industrialized societies; often modernization diminishes certain sources of happiness, such as engagement in community. Among consistent factors that predict happiness cross-culturally are health, marriage, a sense of community, and employment.

Factors such as income inequality thus vary in their influence on well-being based on the context. On the evidence of surveys, Graham (2010, 2017) argues that many people around the

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world are adapted to the contexts of the region in which they live, even when they are not finan- cially well off. People who are poor in America, however, are less likely to believe in their own future, and with good reason because their rates of incarceration and other severe adversities are higher. Tay and Diener (2011) found in a sample of 123 countries that fulfillment of basic needs was strongly associated with subjective well-being across cultures. Social needs and respect pre- dicted positive affect, whereas lack of respect and lack of autonomy predicted negative affect across cultures. They also found that whereas being able to meet basic needs was dependent on the society in which a person lived, meeting psychosocial needs was possible in many different kinds of societies, and an ability to meet such needs enables people to adapt even to lives in which they are unable to meet basic needs.

Among other activities that contribute to well-being is learning. In infancy, we can’t help doing it. In childhood, we are pretty much compelled to do it at school. In young adulthood, we can choose to do it, as perhaps you are doing now. We hope that your learning with this book is worthwhile and contributes to your well-being.

Psychological Therapy with Others and by Oneself Psychotherapy is a practice in which a therapist listens to clients (or patients) and makes occa- sional remarks, perhaps to help understand what a person has said, perhaps to engage in the relationship that is forming, perhaps to make suggestions about what the person, or people, might think or do (see Figure 14.3).

It’s useful to begin thinking about these issues with Sigmund Freud’s psychotherapy, which focused on emotionally traumatic events in a patient’s earlier life. We briefly presented the idea

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FIGURE 14.2 Often people in traditional cultures with fewer possessions and material wealth, as in these Massai men participating in a ritual, scored on well-being measures as high as or higher than people in cultures of greater wealth.

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of it in Chapter 1: Freud’s case of Katharina (reported in Freud & Breuer, 1895). This therapy was aimed at having the patient recall the trauma, in this case sexual abuse, enabling its details to become conscious, and allowing the emotions associated with it to be experienced and expressed. The idea of this was to free the patient from the trauma’s continuing harmful effects.

Not long after he had published his first papers on this method, however, Freud came to believe he had been mistaken in thinking that emotional disorders were typically caused by child- hood sexual abuse. The center of his new idea, the basis of psychoanalysis since then, was that people can suffer from inner conflict, for instance, feeling sexually attracted to someone in a way they are not quite aware of and at the same time inhibited by the prohibitions of society.

Almost from its beginning, psychoanalysis attracted both adherents and detractors. Detractors argued that psychoanalysis was less a therapeutic procedure, more a matter for the police! The debate continues: Psychoanalytic therapy continues to flourish and has become part of Western culture. Among attacks have been those of Grünbaum (1986) who argued that Freud was never able to distinguish between traumatic events that were repressed, to become unconscious so that they caused neuroses, and those that stayed vividly in people’s memories. An ongoing antagonist is Crews (2017), a literary theorist who had fallen in love with Freud’s theories, then abandoned them, and devoted himself over decades to denigrating Freud. Other lines of attack on therapy of the psychoanalytic kind have come from cases in which people report having recovered memo- ries of childhood sexual–emotional traumas and abuse (see Ochsner & Schachter, 2003) that, although they may have been repressed, may have been suggested to them by therapists.

Most enduringly, however, it was Freud who established the idea of therapy as including listening carefully, with respect, and with what he called “evenly hovering attention,” to patients who suffered from emotional disorders. In Western psychiatric practice, all psychological thera- pies with individuals owe something to this practice of active listening. It was Freud, moreover, who started us thinking about the bases of human character in our emotional relationships with parents, a direction that Bowlby (1969), a psychoanalyst, took up and made the foundation of our understanding of attachment.

Many clinical psychologists and psychiatrists describe themselves as eclectic, which means they incorporate aspects from different kinds of therapy into their practice (Kring, Johnson, Davison, & Neale, 2012; Lambert, 2004). Most therapies involve a relationship with a thera- pist, conversation, and suggestion. Nearly, all involve emotions in a more-or-less explicit way (Greenberg & Safran, 1989). Therapy, then, is an interaction with another person in which, as

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FIGURE 14.3 Almost all forms of psychological therapy involve a therapist listening and coming to understand a client, or in this picture a woman and a man who talk about their emotional life together.

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patient or client, a person can discover some of the properties of his or her emotion schemas. You will remember the idea of “schema” from our discussion of the work of Frederic Bartlett (1932), on remembering, in Chapter 10. Most typically schemas that one wants to change are those that propel us into anxiety, anger, or despair. In therapy, one aspires to make life more meaningful and less fraught. Therapy offers a relationship in which our distress-prompting schemas may be better understood and taken responsibility for, so that aspects of behavior and feeling might be modified.

The medical approach to emotional disorders is that of trying to relieve the suffering and anguish of emotional symptoms with prescription drugs. Antidepressant and tranquilizer medi- cations, which we discussed in Chapters 13, are aimed, respectively, at decreasing the intensity of depression and anxiety states. Drugs are the treatments of choice for many psychiatrists because they are relatively cheap, convenient for the clinician, and frequently, also, preferred by patients.

Psychological therapies try to enable the client to exert some free will in the domain of the emotions. First we introduce four basic forms of psychological therapies. Then we’ll review evidence for their efficacy.

Psychoanalysis: Unconscious Schemas of Relating The distinctive feature of psychoanalytic therapy is the recognition and interpretation of transference. The idea of transference was discussed by Freud (1905) in the case of Ida Bauer, to whom Freud gave the name “Dora.” She came every day except Sunday to see him at his consult- ing rooms at Berggasse 19, in Vienna (Bernheimer & Kahane, 1985). In his case history of Dora, Freud explained his new method: the patient was to narrate the story of her life, and say whatever else came spontaneously to mind. Freud suggested interpretations to fill gaps in her story. One of the gaps Dora left was that, as she denounced her father for having an affair with another woman, Frau K., she omitted to say that, partly facilitated by her father’s affair, she herself enjoyed the courtly attentions of Herr K., the woman’s husband.

Transference is the manifestation of emotion schemas, mental models that embody ways of relating to others that have become parts of ourselves. It is perhaps best thought of as a set of emotional attitudes toward significant others from the past. Such attitudes and emotions are pro- jected onto people in the present, including the therapist. “What are transferences?” asked Freud (1905). “They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which  ...  replace some earlier person [such as a parent] by the person of the physician” (p. 157). Thus, Dora said her father “always preferred secrecy and roundabout ways.” Her relationship with him was one of distrust. For instance, when he started his affair with Frau K., Dora’s father diverted her attention from it by arranging for Herr K. to pay courtly attention to her. In her analysis, Dora’s transfer- ence included treating Freud as she had treated her father: with distrust. She took this to the point of dumping Freud by leaving therapy after three months, just as she had emotionally detached herself from her father.

Psychoanalytic therapy is designed to recognize transferences and to bring them to the patient’s consciousness. Transference occurs in many kinds of relationships (Miranda & Andersen, 2010). It occurs in almost every consultation with a physician, as we find ourselves hoping he or she will make everything better, as once a mother or other caregiver could. It occurs, as even therapists who are not analysts admit, in every kind of psychological therapy. It occurs in relationships of students with teachers. It occurs in encounters with people who have power or influence, so-called authority figures. It occurs in romantic relationships, in which we may be affectionate, or needy, or demanding, or irritable, or unavailable, or controlling, as we once were with our parents. These transferential processes have been demonstrated in the attachment styles of infancy carrying for- ward into adulthood (Groh, Roisman, van Ijzendoorn, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Fearon, 2017; Waters, Merrick, Treboux, Crowell, & Albersheim, 2000), as we discussed in Chapter 11.

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The idea of psychoanalytic therapy is that our relationships are so fundamental to our emo- tional health that, if they are based on figures from the past rather than on real people in the pre- sent, there will be at best misunderstandings and at worst intractable problems. Emotion schemas that are problematic are often based on intense wishes bound tightly to beliefs that people hold about what is wrong with them, or how they can never be satisfied (Dahl, 1991). So, a woman might have an emotion schema derived from childhood in which she knows that only bad things can ever happen if she is angry. She tries more-or-less unsuccessfully to suppress her anger, per- haps restricting her life so that occasions for anger do not occur, but then finds her life narrow and unsatisfying. Or, from experiences with his parents, a man may feel it’s too dangerous to have any strong emotion because of the likelihood of losing control; so, his personality becomes rigid like a stone. Yet another person may long for intimacy but be terrified of being taken over by the other.

The idea of psychoanalysis as the interpretation of transference is that effects of the emotion-relational schema are brought directly into the therapeutic relationship. As Strachey (1934) wrote, from the viewpoint of the therapist:

Instead of having to deal as best we may with conflicts of the remote past, which are concerned with dead circumstances and mummified personalities, and whose outcome is already determined, we find ourselves involved in an actual and immediate situation in which we and the patient are the principal characters. (p. 151)

Then, as Strachey continues, there is the possibility that, when the partly unconscious terms of the schema in which the client is lodged become conscious, the client can choose a new solu- tion in the relationship with the therapist, and this kind of new solution can generalize to other relationships outside therapy.

An innovative form of psychoanalytic therapy has been pioneered by Fonagy and Luyten (2009). It is called mentalizing therapy, and it has been particularly important for people with borderline personality disorders. People with this kind of disorder are impulsive. They have unsta- ble relationships and an unstable sense of self. They have difficulties in regulating their emotions and are often self-mutilating and suicidal. The condition is thought to be based on attachment

Significant figure: Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 of an impecunious wool merchant and his wife. From the age of four until a year before he died, he lived in Vienna. Soon after qualifying as a doctor in 1881, he met Martha Bernays, fell deeply in love, and began a chaste four-year engagement, the frustrations of which may have contributed to his theories of sexuality.

After various more-or-less unsuccessful attempts to make his way in biology and neurology, Freud started treating patients by hypnosis, at which he said he was not very good. He then began the treatment that has become famous as psychoanalysis, listening to the narratives people tell about their lives in order to discover inner conflicts, which, as they become conscious, can be resolved.

In 1902, Freud was promoted to professor extraordi- narius (equivalent to associate professor) at the University

in Vienna. Although he was always touchy about the recog- nition he felt he deserved, in retrospect one can see that from this time his fortunes improved, and his influence spread until, in his own lifetime, he became the world’s most famous psychologist.

In 1938, Freud and his family fled from the Nazis to Eng- land. His last year, before he died of cancer in Septem- ber 1939, was spent in London. Freud’s work was not only foundational to psychology and psychiatry but also impor- tant in art and literature. He affected the very texture of twentieth- century thinking: Ideas such as the unconscious, anxiety, neurosis, and psychotherapy would not have the meanings they have today without Freud. (Biographical information: Gay, 1988; Sulloway, 1979.)

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(discussed in Chapter 11), which, for these people, has been insecure, or has gone wrong, so that they have grown up with a very meager sense of others and of themselves. Mentalizing therapy has the aim of enabling such people to develop empathy and theory-of-mind.

Among empirical studies of transference in therapy are those of Luborsky and Crits-Christoph (1990), who devised a method to use in brief therapy, to recognize in transference Core Con- flictual Relationship Themes, such as longing for intimacy but fearing disapproval, which can pervade a person’s relationships. Using this method, Henry, Strupp, Schacht, and Gaston (1994) found that when therapists recognize and interpret occurrences of such themes, the patient made better progress in therapy, and Slonim et al. (2013) found that in therapy for adolescents based on this method, participants changed their relationships with parents, and their symptoms improved. In an fMRI study, Loughead et al. (2010) found that autobiographical narratives preferentially activate areas of the brain concerned with theory-of-mind, self-referential processing, and emo- tion and that the higher the content of Core Conflictual Relationship Themes in these autobio- graphical narratives, the stronger was the activation of areas concerned with memory.

Rogerian Counseling: Empathetic Support The father of counseling therapy was Carl Rogers (1951). Starting in the late 1930s, Rogers formulated the principles of counseling. The aim for the client is to experience a relationship with the therapist that is genuine and non judgmental. The aim for the therapist is to enter into the relationship, to be emotionally warm, and to listen to the client with empathy. In the absence of threat, and in the presence of this kind of therapist, a person can experience incongruencies in the self and start to change.

This form of therapy came to be known as “person-centered.” Rogers believed that only the person him- or herself could initiate change in response to experienced incongruencies. It wasn’t a matter of a therapist offering interpretations (as in psychoanalysis), or of any kind of teaching or coaching (as in the behaviorally based therapies). Although it arose separately, Rogers’s form of humanistic therapy is related to the tradition of existentialist and phenomenological therapies (Binswanger, 1963).

Rogers was among the first to take audio recorders into therapy sessions for research purposes.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Changing Emotional Life by Thought The idea that we can change our emotions by thinking about them can be traced back to the ancient Epicureans and Stoics, introduced in Chapter 1; just as they took thought to avoid being influenced by desires that were worthless, so cognitive-behavioral therapy, founded by Tim Beck (1976), works on thoughts in a comparable way. It is based on enabling people to recognize and avoid errors of evaluation of incidents that lead to problematic and disruptive emotions. For instance, clients who suffer anxiety and depression are asked to keep an emotion diary. In it, when they experience a negative emotion, they are to write in their diary what incident preceded the upset, what emotions occurred, and what thoughts. Then they have to write some alternative thoughts, not necessarily what they believe, just something different. In this way, clients can gain some distance on their emotions, see some of the repetitive causes, and understand some of the cycles of thoughts-causing-emotions that bring to mind thoughts that cause more of the same emotions (Teasdale, 1988). The first intimations of this kind of therapy were discovered by Marion Blackett (Joanna Field, in the diary she began in 1926, which we introduced earlier in this chapter). Writing, it turns out, has, in all cultures that have used it, become one of the main means for reflecting on and becoming conscious of the meanings of emotions.

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In this therapy, Beck (Beck, 1976; Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery,1979) found that patterns of appraisal that cause anxiety and depression tend to involve evaluations that are arbitrary, absolute, and personalizing: If clients can make evaluations of other kinds—attributions that are external rather than internal, local rather than global, impermanent rather than permanent—then differ- ent emotions can occur that will break vicious cycles. Cognitive-behavioral therapy then allows revision of both core beliefs and plans, changing the answer to the question that Stein, Trabasso, and Liwag (1994) proposed as central to the evaluation of an emotion-prompting event: “What can I do about it?”

In an extension of cognitive-behavioral therapy, many clinicians and theorists have now added mindfulness meditation (Philippot & Segal, 2009), which we discuss further below. One of the properties of meditation is that it enables people to learn how to disconnect problematic thoughts from the emotions such thoughts trigger and emotions from urges to act. Another recent develop- ment, by Marsha Linehan, is dialectical-behavioral therapy for patients with borderline personal- ity disorder (Linehan et al., 2006). It targets suicidal and self-injurious behavior, concentrates on improving patients’ capabilities and motivation (for instance, by reducing interfering emotions), making sure that gains transfer to the natural environment, and reinforcing functional behavior.

Emotion-Focused Therapy: Changing Emotional Life by Emotions Why have emotions such a central role in therapy? One answer is offered by Greenberg (1993; 2017), who argues that making emotions explicit confers on emotion schemas a sense of clar- ity and possibility of control, something akin to Aristotle’s idea of “catharsis” we spoke of in Chapter 1. Greenberg (2002) cites Spinoza (1661–1675) as saying that the only way to change an emotion is by means of another emotion, and this is the goal of emotion-focused therapy. In therapy, emotions can be explored. For instance, a person who in life and in therapy is angry, angry, angry, may suddenly find her anger change to sadness as she realizes that she, too, has been partly responsible for some of what she is angry about.

In the course of life, we take on many goals and many projects. Some, like attachment, are formed without words. Others formed later may have arisen more explicitly, but without us real- izing how our goals may affect each other, so some of their implications may be unconscious. Emotions signal that some goal or concern is affected. If it is only partly known, an emotion may be our best clue to the importance of this concern. A persistent feeling of sadness may provide clues to our sense of loss; a sense of chronic fear reveals that we may be uncertain in our lives. One of the tasks of emotion-focused therapy, then, is to work on such clues to build a consciously comprehended model of our goal structure as part of our sense of self.

Part of the task of therapy, and life, is to recognize emotions that we have not allowed ourselves to experience fully enough. Therapy, in this case, consists of encouraging a fuller experience of such emotions, which Greenberg (2002) calls primary emotions. So, clients may recognize that they are angry, although they had not allowed themselves to be so, or full of grief that they had not recognized. With recognition and expression, primary emotions and their origins become more comprehensible. They become, as philosophers say, more intentional, and the implications for relationships become clearer.

In addition, however, clients can experience some emotions too much. Greenberg (2017) calls these secondary emotions. They are what psychoanalysts call defenses. Secondary emotions derive from, or have emerged to cover up, certain primary emotions that were unacceptable. So, women who have been taught to be submissive may feel sad when really they are angry, but then their feeling of impotence makes them despairing and yet more sad. Men who have been brought up never to be afraid may have covered up their fear with anger, and their angry disposition has

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distanced them from others and become a cause of isolation. Often when primary emotions are not known or accepted, they can metamorphose into secondary emotions rather easily (Elster, 1999). Here the therapeutic task is not to encourage clients to experience secondary emotions— they do that too much already—but to understand that these emotions conceal something more authentic.

A third category is of instrumental emotions—the emotions that people have learned will help them get their way: the tears that elicit sympathy, the easy irritation that makes others hesitate to challenge or to be close.

Both the process and outcome of emotion-focused therapy have been objects of empirical research.

Outcomes of Psychotherapy Do psychological therapies work? We live in an era of evidence-based interventions and empir- ically supported psychotherapies (Hunsley & Lee, 2010). Health-care systems don’t want to devote resources to treatments for which there is no evidence of effectiveness.

There have now been thousands of empirical trials of different kinds of psychotherapy, assign- ing clients randomly to groups, or comparing outcomes for people who received one kind of therapy with those who received a different kind or with members of a control group. Among such studies was that of Sloane, Staples, Cristol, Yorkston, and Whipple (1975). One of the first applications of the now-widespread statistical technique of meta-analysis was by Smith, Glass, and Miller (1980), who used it to estimate the effects of psychotherapy. Smith et al. found that

Individual Emotion: Gratitude

The Ancient Greeks believed that reverence—the deep appreciation of all in life that is given to you—is essential to healthy individuals and societies, and as important as a sense of justice. Reverence is a form of consciousness, an awareness of the extraordinary things that are given to us— the chance to have good health free of disease and to have enough to eat, to learn, enjoy good health, be surrounded by loved ones, travel the world, and give to society. One emotion intimately intertwined with reverence is gratitude. Robert Emmons, the world’s leading researcher in this area, defines gratitude as a reverence for things that are given to you (Emmons, 2007). In the course of this book, we have written about the evolution of gratitude. It likely emerged in acts of appreciative touch, in which chimpanzees and bonobos expressed their own form of gratitude to fellow primates who had shared food (de Waal, 2009). We humans can express gratitude, as you learned, with touch, and of course with the spoken word in acts of appreciation that are good for relationships.

In a seminal study that explored the benefits of grati- tude, Michael McCullough and Robert Emmons simply had

students take a moment once a week to write down a few things they’re grateful for, and this simple act, compared to a control condition, led to a 25 percent boost in well-being and physical health (McCullough et al., 2003). Lyubomirsky and her colleagues found that even taking a few moments of time and writing down three things you are grateful for can boost well-being for a month (Boehm, Lyubomirsky, & Sheldon, 2011). Based on these findings, several kinds of gratitude interventions or practices have been tested and are proving to yield important benefits. In his book Thanks (2007), Emmons reviews ways in which gratitude practices are becoming an important form of reflection, helping chil- dren socially and academically in schools, and helping boost the morale of workers in organizations, the satisfaction of couples in relationships, and individuals going through tough times (see also Ma, Tunney, & Ferguson, 2017). Red- wine et al. (2016) have even found that practicing gratitude can promote better immune profiles (reduced inflammation; see Chapter 5) and cardiovascular profiles in people who are at risk for cardiovascular disease.

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in over 475 studies, the average effect size over a range of kinds of psychotherapy was 0.85 of a standard deviation. What this means is that the average person receiving therapy was better off than 80 percent of the members of control groups who did not receive therapy. In a review of meta-analyses of psychotherapeutic trials and educational interventions, Lipsey and Wilson (1993) broadly confirmed these results. In comparison with educational interventions, a relatively modest amount of time in psychotherapy—typically on the order of a dozen sessions—has been found to be more effective than the majority of educational interventions designed, for instance, to produce more effective learning of mathematics. Ten years after this finding, Lambert and Ogles (2004) offered an extensive review of meta-analyses of different kinds of psychotherapy and came to similar conclusions. Outcome studies have been performed for many established psychological therapies, in which emotion is a large component, in the way we have discussed, usually with positive results. Despite partisan commitments, therapists of different persuasions often produce effects of similar size.

Not all therapy is effective, however, and not all therapists are helpful. Orlinsky and Howard (1980) reviewed case files of 143 women seen by 23 therapists. Six therapists were good: over- all, 84 percent of the clients they saw were improved at the end of therapy and none was worse. Five therapists were not good: for these, less than 50 percent of their clients were improved and 10 percent were worse. A review of the outcome literature by Westen, Novotny, and Thompson- Brenner (2004), moreover, concluded that even with empirically supported therapies, some peo- ple do not get better and many do not maintain the gains they make.

As to psychoanalysis: it has been attacked by some critics because it takes a long time and is expensive, so there has been skepticism about its efficacy. Efficacy has, however, been found in a large study by Blomberg, Lazar, and Sandell (2001), in Stockholm, Sweden, with over 400 patients who received national-insurance-funded psychodynamic treatment for up to three years: either full psychoanalysis, five times a week, or what is called psychoanalytic psychotherapy, once or twice a week. The authors argued that measuring outcomes as a function of the duration and frequency of treatment was equivalent to assigning people randomly to treatment groups (Sandell, Blomberg, & Lazar, 2002): the more psychodynamic treatment, the better the out- come. Follow-ups after three years of full psychoanalysis of 156 patients who had symptoms that included depression and anxiety when they started showed substantial improvement with treatment. As you may see in Figure 14.4, they continued to improve after treatment to the point at which their mental health scores had become the same as a nonclinical sample (Normgroup M in Figure 14.4).

In a review of results of randomized controlled trials published between 1960 and 2008, Leichsenring and Rabung (2008) found that long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy had sig- nificantly better outcomes in overall effectiveness, target problems, and personality functioning than shorter forms of psychotherapy, so that patients with complex mental disorders were, on average, better off than 96 percent of the patients in comparison groups. A follow-up review by Leichsenring and Rabung (2011), which included newer studies, confirmed that longer term psy- chodynamic therapy was more effective than shorter therapies. A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials by Smit et al. (2012) found that although long-term psychoanalytic therapy did better than control groups without any therapeutic input, it was no better than other kinds of psychological therapy.

As to cognitive-behavioral therapy: studies of the effectiveness of relatively short periods of this therapy have been performed repeatedly and convincingly, especially for depression and anxiety disorders. It is perhaps for these reasons that cognitive-behavioral therapy has become a treatment of choice (Hollon & Beck, 2004). Gloaguen, Cottraux, Cucherat, and Blackburn (1998) found in a meta-analysis that in cases of depression it was more effective than antidepres- sant medication and associated with a lower rate of relapse. Hollon and Ponniah (2010) found in a review of 125 published studies that cognitive-behavioral therapy, including variants that

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included mindfulness meditation, was effective for depression and other mood disorders. Stewart and Chambless (2009) found in a meta-analysis that for anxiety disorders, cognitive-behavioral therapy was effective, not just in specially arranged trials but in clinical practice.

Therapy does seem to require a supportive relationship with the therapist (of the kind empha- sized by counseling therapies), but such a relationship alone has not been found especially effec- tive for improvement. Thus, client-centered therapy (counseling) on its own has been found to be not as effective as cognitive-behavioral therapy (Watson et al., 2003).

Emotion-focused therapy is newer than cognitive-behavioral therapy, so there is less research on it. It has, however, been found to produce gains of approximately the same size as those of cognitive-behavioral therapy (Elliott, Greenberg, & Lietaer, 1994). This kind of therapy has also been found more effective than client-centered therapy and counseling (Goldman, Greenberg, & Angus, 2006; see Table 14.2).

Before

Treatment start Treatment termination

Normgroup 1 28 SD

Normgroup M

Psychotherapy

Psychoanalysis

1.5

1

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during during late

during

Phase in the Treatment Process

G S

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FIGURE 14.4 Symptom levels, measured by the General Symptom Index (GSI), over different phases of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the study by Blomberg et al. (2001), as compared with norm for the case level (upper horizontal dotted line, labeled Normgroup 1 28 SD) and a normgroup who were without significant symptoms, lower horizontal dotted line (labeled Normgroup M). (Source: Blomberg et al., 2001).

Table 14.2 Pretreatment and posttreatment means on two symptom measures for clients receiving client-centered therapy or emotion-focused therapy

Client-centered therapy (n = 36) Emotion-focused therapy (n = 36)

Beck Depression Inventory

Pretreatment 24.6 26.1

Posttreatment 9.5 6.2

Global Symptom Index

Pretreatment 1.4 1.5

Posttreatment 0.7 0.5

Posttreatment differences between the two treatments was significant at p < .05 for both symptom measures.

Source: Goldman et al. (2006).

Psychological Therapy with Others and by Oneself 381

In a study of 291 psychiatric in-patients who were hospitalized for their condition, Watzke et  al. (2010) compared the results of random assignment to psychodynamic (i.e., to say psy- choanalytically based) or cognitive-behavioral therapy with selection of patients as especially suitable for one or the other kind of therapy. For cognitive-behavioral therapy, selection showed no advantage over random assignment. For psychodynamic therapy, there was an advantage: deliberate selection of patients who were thought to be suitable for this form of therapy improved the treatment effect.

Kallestad et al. (2010) conducted a randomized controlled trial in which cognitive therapy was compared with psychodynamic therapy in 49 patients with personality disorders of the anxious or fearful type. Among those in psychodynamic therapy, insight was found to increase and to predict improvement of symptoms and of interpersonal functioning during a two-year follow-up period. Among patients assigned to cognitive therapy, measures of insight did not improve substantially during therapy and insight did not predict improvement.

An important area of research is on whether therapy can maintain well-being and increase resilience to the natural shocks that we humans are heir to. Fava and Tomba (2009) showed that therapy aimed at improving well-being by enabling people to evaluate themselves more posi- tively, by focusing on a sense of continued development and determination, on the belief that life is meaningful and that relationships with others are important, has been validated in randomized controlled trials, with outcomes of positive evaluations of oneself, a sense of continued growth and development, and the belief that life is purposeful and meaningful, especially in relationships with others.

Although short-term therapies, perhaps especially cognitive-behavioral therapy, have been found useful in enabling people to lessen symptoms such as those of depression and anxiety, the kinds of therapies that enable people to gain insight into their emotional life—to come con- sciously to understand something of the functioning of their own emotion schemas—do better over the long term than those that merely improve symptoms over the short term.

Among the aims of psychiatric health care should be that of enabling civil society to evolve so that fewer people become socially marginalized and at risk for emotional disorder. At the same time, where practices have been discovered by mental health professionals that have been helpful in therapy for emotional suffering, arguably, rather than distributing these services for fees, the job of mental health professionals might better be seen as giving them away, diffusing them into the community.

Psychotherapy Without Therapists A serious problem for therapy is its availability. Look at the prevalence of psychiatric disorder in the United States, described in Table 13.1 of the previous chapter, based on the work of Kessler et al. (2005). Consider the most common disorders, depression and anxiety. Now multiply the prevalence rates that you see there of 20.8 percent for depression and 28.8 percent for anxiety disorder by the population of the United States of about 326 million in 2017, more than half of whom are between 15 and 54, the age-band of these prevalence figures. You will see that each year several tens of millions of Americans suffer from clinically significant depression or anxiety or both. Even in such a highly resourced society, there are just not enough mental health professionals to go around. Kessler et al. indeed found that in any year in which people suffered a disorder, only about one fifth of them consulted a professional, and for only about half of those was this person a mental health professional. Psychoanalysis, four or five times a week for several years, is clearly available only to a few. Even short treatments, such as 8–12 sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy, are not available to all. There is a sad irony at play in the United States: The unavailability of such therapies is especially pronounced for the impoverished, who are more vulnerable to depression and anxiety disorders.

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One answer, proposed by Karen Horney, is self-analysis. In her important and engaging book of 1942, Horney shows us how to think about ourselves, on how we grew up, and how we can work on ourselves, for ourselves.

Another answer is that a newly developed form of cognitive-behavioral therapy is delivered by computer or mobile phone. Ebert et al. (2015) found in a meta-analysis that this kind of therapy was significantly effective for anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescents and young adults. In an example of this kind of intervention, Newby et al. (2018) found that in 86 people of mean age 30, with a diagnosis of health anxiety according to DSM-5 (fears of being ill, such as being about to die of cancer), those assigned randomly to a course of six sessions on the Internet, over 12 weeks, of cognitive-behavioral therapy, of the kind described above, which included bring- ing to awareness experiences of anxiety, understanding how their anxieties occurred, and so on, did significantly better than those assigned to an education group, who had six deliveries of fact sheets over the Internet, in a 12-week period.

Another answer is that alongside ideas of individual therapy developed by psychologists and psychiatrists, another kind of therapy involves people meeting in groups. Its founders included Jane Addams, who opened a house for group social work for the impoverished in 1889 and was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Not many years later, Joseph Pratt discovered that tuberculosis patients, whom he arranged to meet together in groups of 20 or so, formed sup- portive social structures among themselves that had important therapeutic effects on the course of illness. In terms of outcomes, group therapy, like individual therapy, has generally been found effective (Lambert & Ogles, 2004; Tillitski, 1990). Many self-help organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous base their practices on group processes arranged around emotionally salient issues.

Still, there is not enough to go around. It is therefore not surprising that when people are sur- veyed about those to whom they turn in times of emotional crisis, they name a wide variety of persons, including priests, rabbis, doctors—but principally friends. Recall from Chapter 13 that one factor most widely found to be protective against emotional disorder is relationships with other people—close relationships with relatives and friends, known as social support.

In Chapter  6, we introduced the finding by Rimé (2009) that most emotions are socially shared. At the beginning of this research, he thought that such sharing had a regulatory func- tion so that intensities of emotions that were shared would diminish as compared with those that were unshared, but no such difference was found. When an injustice has been experienced, talk- ing about it does not diminish the anger one feels! People do want to share their emotions and, when asked, say they benefit from doing so. It derives from being able in conversation to make meaningful sense of their emotions. This sense includes the implications of the emotions for the speaker and others, as seen both from the inside the person and from the outside. It seems likely that this is an important aspect of social support.

Mindfulness, Ancient and Modern Think back to the emotional anguish that William James (1902) wrote about in The Varieties of Religious Experience (introduced in Chapter 1). The anguish can propel people toward being born again, toward conversion. One of the world’s most famous conversions, prompted by emo- tion, took place some 2,500 years ago. As Armstrong (2001) tells it, at the age of 29, Siddhartha Gautama put on the yellow robe of an ascetic, took one last look at his wife and new-born son as they slept in their comfortable home, in Kapilvastu, which now is in western Nepal. Then he left forever. As he recalled later, his decision caused his family great pain. Ordinary life, he felt, was pain and suffering. The Indian idea of reincarnation made the problem worse: one life of suffering after another.

Mindfulness, Ancient and Modern 383

Siddhartha was drawn to discover what it would be to transcend it all. For six years he lived on alms, took up yoga, spent a period of starving himself, to try conquer the ego, to erase desire, which he saw as the cause of human suffering. He never fully gave up yoga, but decided it involved the ego trying to be superhuman, and that wasn’t what he was seeking. After a period of yoga, or of going without food, there it was still: the ego, wanting this and wanting that.

Armstrong recounts how Siddhartha remembered an incident from his childhood, when he had sat in the shade of a rose-apple tree, watching a field being ploughed. He saw that young grass had been torn up and that roots and insects had been destroyed. Looking at this, he felt a strange sorrow, as though his own relatives had been killed. But the day was beautiful, and an equally strange joy rose in his heart. Empathetically, he had been taken out of himself. It was six years after he had left home, emaciated and exhausted from starvation, that this memory came to mind. It occurred to him that his experience in the ploughed field had not happened in a superhu- man way. It had happened without effort. He wondered if this could be the way to enlightenment: a natural state, reached by entering a place of seclusion, in which he could become aware of the world as it is, of his sensations, of his actions.

Siddhartha Gautama turned to the development of forms of meditation practiced quietly, in which one calms the nagging and often critical voice of the self, and finds contentment, and serenity. Siddhartha was a devoted teacher, and these practices would become the foundation of Buddhism, which would spread to Himalayan countries such as Tibet and Bhutan, to China and South Korea, to Japan, eventually to the West, and beyond. Within these different strains of Bud- dhism, there are many meditation practices by which people train their minds. They take place in the meditative state of quiet and reflection. They are focused on four things: the body, feel- ings, the mind and its ever-changing mental states, and mental objects such as images or dreams (Wallace, 2005). They enable the individual to cultivate what in Buddhism is called the four immeasurables, the four pillars of happiness: loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy (the joy experienced in seeing other people be happy), and equanimity (or calmness).

The person who, in recent years, has been most responsible for introducing practices of mind- ful meditation to the West is Jon Kabat-Zinn (2006, 2013). Earlier in his life he did a PhD at MIT and became a researcher in molecular biology. He was introduced to mindfulness by Buddhist teachers. He took up meditation and started to move it from its religious context into a secular mode. He developed a program called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction: a secular set of prac- tices that includes yoga, mindful breathing, loving kindness, and different kinds of imagery. To convince the skeptics, Kabat-Zinn first showed that this kind of mindfulness is helpful for people living with pain and health problems (Ludwig & Kabat-Zinn, 2008). Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is now widely practiced in contemporary society, schools, workplaces, prisons, and homes. It has become incorporated into psychotherapy often, for instance, paired with cognitive- behavioral therapy (see Szabo, Long, Villatte, & Hayes, 2015). This practice, with its ancient roots, has become integrated into contemporary Western life (Wilson, 2014).

In modern times, the practice of meditation is to spend perhaps 10–45 minutes each day when one goes to a quiet place, adopts a particular posture, puts aside the preoccupations and concerns of one’s daily life, and concentrates on something such as one’s breathing. If, during this time, a thought or an emotion comes to mind, one allows it in without judging it, and then brings one’s mind back again to one’s breathing in and breathing out. This enables mental states such as anxi- ety, self-criticism, preoccupation, and torment of self-accusation to drift out of the mind again.

Mindfulness may be the most important innovation in psychological therapy to have come to the Western world in the last 25 years: incorporated into sessions with therapists, or practiced as a therapy by oneself or in groups (see Figure 14.5).

Does mindfulness work? There have now been many reviews and meta-analyses. They gen- erally show positive effects. A review of Kabat-Zinn’s approach found that in studies that ran- domly assigned individuals to treatment or a control condition, engaging in Mindfulness-Based

A MeAningful life384

Stress Reduction led people who were in physical pain to feel less distress and feel greater well- being and people suffering from clinical disorders to report less depression and anxiety and to believe they could cope better (Fjorback, Arendt, Fink, & Walbach, 2011). A meta-analysis by Khoury, Sharma, Rush, and Fournier (2015) showed mindfulness to be useful in stress reduc- tion, and improvement in quality of life, for healthy people. Another meta-analysis by Parsons et al. (2017) found that once people begin practicing mindfulness, they tended to integrate it into their lives.

We have introduced mindfulness as coming from the East, as deriving from Buddhist medi- tation. But another approach has come from the West, introduced three decades ago by Ellen Langer (2014). It’s on centering one’s attention on what one is doing, on the making of novel distinctions, on taking new perspectives. Savoring of the kind introduced as the fifth direction in the Box on Mindful Practices (on the next page) is one example, and Flow of the kind writ- ten about by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), which we introduced earlier in this chapter, is another. Eastern and Western approaches are somewhat different but, as Maja Djikic (2014) has shown, at a deeper level there is an underlying unity. Eastern practices, based in meditation, make for acceptance by being non judgmental about one’s thoughts and emotions. Western-derived mind- fulness—being engaged in what one is doing and perceiving—makes for dissipation of illusions and helps us not to become too stuck in the past or in worries about the future, or in any other single view.

Consciously Making Sense of Emotions When we talk to a friend about an emotion, we narrate a story. Bruner (1986) has contrasted the narrative mode of thinking with what he calls the paradigmatic mode, which is used in

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FIGURE 14.5 Mindfulness is being taught and practiced in just about every setting, from schools to prisons to workplaces of different kinds, including in the military.

Consciously Making Sense of Emotions 385

explanations, for instance, in science. Narrative is the mode in which we understand ourselves and others as people who have intentions that meet vicissitudes.

Vicissitudes, or problems with goals and intentions, are the events that tend to cause emotions. Meaning-making occurs by casting emotional events into narratives about the social world, into stories with settings, characters, conflicts, and character development. Narrative meaning-making occurs with turning over emotions in our minds or with a friend, and also in reading novels and poetry and watching plays and movies, which can also help us represent our emotions in narra- tive form.

Cultivation and Reflection: Mindful Practices

How might you begin a mindful practice, to calm anxieties in your life, to find more meaning and joy? If you are inter- ested, you might consult the Greater Good Science Center, which tracks the science of mindfulness (greatergood. berkeley.edu), and has provided a free place where you can download and practice the most widely used practices in this tradition (ggia.berkeley.edu).

Here we indicate five practices that have been studied that might appeal for you. First, most practices begin with mindful breathing. Find a quiet place where you can be in a comfortable posture (e.g., sitting on a chair or on the ground). Then simply slow down your breathing to a healthy, steady rhythm with deep exhalations. You might add count- ing to this practice: as you expand in your chest and belly inhaling deeply, count to six; and then as you exhale count to six. Try this for 21 breaths (Wallace, 2005). This action of deep breathing, and deep exhalation, activates the vagus nerve and can reduce stress-related cardiovascular arousal.

A second practice is to take brief moments to attend mindfully to sensations in the body. As you breathe, slowly do a body scan, moving your attention to different parts of your body, beginning, for example, in the toes and mov- ing progressively up to the facial muscles and crown of the head. In a similar spirit, an anxious child might be taught to tighten specific muscles and then relax them, to be aware of the sensations of tension and relaxation.

Third, most meditation practices—for example, those popularized by the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism— encourage training in loving kindness. Here, the medita- tor extends feelings of love, warmth, and kindness toward family members, friends, loved ones, strangers, the self, and ultimately adversaries, and all sentient beings—other spe- cies, all living forms. In a field experiment, Fredrickson and colleagues (2008) tested the benefits of loving kindness with

139 adults, half of whom were assigned to begin a practice of loving-kindness meditation and half were assigned to a control group. Over time, this practice increased the medita- tors’ amounts of positive emotion, which, in turn, produced increases of personal resources such as increased mindful- ness, increased sense of purpose in life, and social support, as well as decreased symptoms of illness and depression. In a similar vein, you might practice once a week listing three things you are grateful for.

Fourth, take a moment each week in a state of mind- fulness to practice self-compassion. We know scientifi- cally that young people—perhaps you, the readers of this book—are working harder than ever before, are in many ways more critical of yourselves and face greater pressures and anxieties than in past generations. Self-compassion is a way of being kind to yourself. It involves three components: accepting failures, being at peace with pain, and appreciat- ing your common humanity with others, in particular around themes of making mistakes and failing (Neff, 2011). Here’s one way to practice self-compassion. Imagine a friend is suf- fering, and think of kind things you would say and do for that friend. Now, simply direct these kind thoughts to yourself in a moment of difficulty or stress. Imagine that voice, or the voice of a friend, offering forgiving and kind words to you as you navigate difficulties of modern living.

Fifth, take a savoring walk outdoors (Keltner, 2017). Savoring involves slowing things down and taking in the sensations around you and appreciating what is good in the moment (Bryant, Chadwick, & Kluwe, 2011). In this practice, once a week you might walk in a beautiful part of the city you live in or in a park, and take in the sights, the changing colors of the leaves, architectural touches of favorite build- ings, sounds of children at a playground, the sound of water in a river or stream.

A MeAningful life386

Emotions can be mere stirrings or unshaped movements of the mind. We have presented evidence that there is a biological basis for them (see Chapters 5 and 7), and that emotions are embodied in physiological systems of mammals. If that were all, we would have emotions like those of our relatives, the apes. But we are born not just into the biological world, but into society, which includes people to whom we may become attached in friendship or with whom we may become involved in conflict. In every society, in every community, in every family, narrative his- tories are recounted, with their characters and their traditions of custom: human meanings about what we people are up to with each other. In such traditions, emotions and our understandings of them are the pivotal points.

Emotions in Literature “There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life,” wrote Karl Popper. The history most of us learn at school, he continued, is largely “the history of power politics [which] is nothing but the history of international crime” (Popper, 1962b, p. 270). This means international power assertion. Among the many histories that would be more edifying—the history of ideas, the history of technology, the history of the family—we can think of histories of the emotions, of development of human communities and relationships, which can be approached via written stories where emotions and their effects are typically at the center.

From the earliest times, emotion has been a focus of poetic, fictional, and folk-historical nar- ratives. From the Sumerians comes the epic from 4,000 years ago about Gilgamesh, who experi- ences a loss of meaning in his life and becomes depressed when his friend, Enkidu, dies. From Egypt comes “The dispute between a man and his soul,” dating from about 3,700 years ago, in which a man complains to his soul of his misery and his longing for death. His soul becomes irritated with this grumbling and says that death will occur in due time (Lichtheim, 1973). From India, from 3,500 years ago, comes the Mahabharata (Vyasa, c. 1500 bce) about the angry hostility that becomes a war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, two branches of a dynastic family. From the Hebrews come the first five books of the Bible, written about 2,800 years ago, with their theme of a family history in which the human protagonists oscillate between fear of, and hopeful dependence on, their god, Yahweh (Rosenberg & Bloom, 1990). From the same period, from the Greeks, comes the Iliad, whose first words are: “Of rage sing, goddess.” This work was central to Greek culture. It’s a tale of the repercussions of a sulk by Achilles during the long and angry war triggered by the abduction of Helen by the Trojan prince Menelaus (Homer, 850 bce).

Hogan (2003) surveyed stories from all round the world, from before the age of European col- onization. He found that three prototypical stories, all based on emotions, are so common as to be universals. Most common is the love story, in which two lovers long to be united but are impeded by a male relative or a powerful suitor. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a famous story of this kind. Second most common is the story of angry conflict, usually between two male members of a family. The Mahabharata is an example. Third most common is the story of a community, disintegrating in distress until someone arises to diagnose the problem and sacrifice himself or herself for the good of all. The Christian Gospel is an example. So from the first, and still con- tinuing, in stories, originally told orally and then written down, we find the intense preoccupation to understand and reflect upon emotions and to augment our consciousness of them in narrative.

In the nineteenth century, novels such as those by Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola in France, by Jane Austen and George Eliot in England, by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Russia, and by Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe in America came to be ways of experi- encing emotions so that they could be assimilated, so that identification with others can occur.

Emotion and Free Will 387

In these ways, we can take part emotionally in lives beyond the boundaries of our personal lot, so that imagined lives can become, as George Eliot put it, “the raw material for moral senti- ment” (Pinney, 1963, p. 270).

Hunt (2007) argued that novels were important in the invention of human rights—an idea that didn’t exist before the eighteenth century—as people started to read about others in more difficult circumstances than their own, to identify with them emotionally, and to experience moral intui- tions about the autonomy of the individual.

By the 1920s, novels had become more inward, and the idea—not new but beginning at least with Shakespeare—became common: Becoming a person was concerned with being able to understand oneself in terms of an emotionally informed narrative of one’s life. Music, too, has emotional effects, either on its own, or in musical dramas, or as soundtracks to films and videos (Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 2014).

Stories provide possibilities of mental action and interaction, as well as pieces of solutions and possibilities, for problems of how to be a person in society. It has been found, too, that reading fiction is associated with better empathy and understanding of others and that literary reading can enable people to change their personalities (Oatley, 2016, 2018). Stories in print and film are externalized pieces of consciousness, which offer examples that we can think about and discuss, and of emotions and their implications over a wide range. They help us to reflect on and become part of cultural traditions in which we live. As Baumeister and Masicampo (2010) suggest, by making the unconscious conscious, we enable conscious thoughts to affect our automatic associ- ations, so that we align ourselves with ourselves, attain an inner coherence, and be in community of those with whom we live.

Emotion and Free Will In his discussions of free will in the regulation of emotions, Nico Frijda (2010, 2013) refers to the experiments of Milgram (1963) in which volunteers were induced to be obedient to someone in authority and to administer by a machine that you can see in Figure 14.6, what they thought were damaging electric shocks to punish someone who seemed to be making mistakes while learning lists of words.

Frijda refers, also, to the Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973) in which men volunteered to take part in a study in which they were assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison.

In a historical study, Browning (1992) analyzed interviews with men who had been recruited by the Nazis into Battalion 101 of the Order Police, whose jobs would be to murder Jews in Poland.

In all three of these studies, a substantial proportion of men were cruel, but a minority refused to act in this way. They did not just go along obediently with social pressures. They exercised their free will. Instead of being emotionally coerced by obedience, by deference to authority, or by fear of consequences for themselves, they were able to act in a way that they felt was right, influenced by their empathetic concern for others. In the same way, Frijda gives examples of non-Jewish people who harbored Jewish people in Nazi-occupied territories in World War II and in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, of some Hutu women who sheltered Tutsi children, putting themselves at risk of death (Prunier, 1995).

As Simon Baron-Cohen (2011) shows in The Science of Evil, some people lack empathetic concern for others and don’t have much theory-of-mind, the ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings (discussed in Chapter 8). It’s as well if such people don’t take on positions of author- ity over others, in organizations or nations. They need to be looked after, by society, in ways that they are not able to look after others.

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So what are we to think of free will, and of giving priority to empathetic concern and compas- sion above other kinds of emotion? We can, if we wish, smile at the naïveté of imagining a self, sitting inside our head, freely making decisions. But the real issue is to consider our own lives in relation to what we would do if we were confronted by coercions of the kind faced by participants in Milgram’s experiment or the Stanford Prison Experiment, or if we were recruits to Battalion 101 of the Order Police. Would we just do what we were told? Or would concern for others be more important?

Gailliot et al. (2007) found that, whether you believe in free will or not, exercising the will lowers levels of blood glucose: the conclusion is that it’s effortful. So, whatever you may want to call the activity of conscious free will, it can be measured psychologically (Baumeister, Masi- campo, & Vohs, 2011). Belief in free will is associated with thoughtfulness and helpfulness to others. It can be problematic, as shown by those who have stood out against genocidal policies in their societies. Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall (2009) have shown that people who are induced to decrease their belief in free will become more aggressive and cruel. Free will affects how we live and it affects our societies.

Another way to estimate our ability to exercise free will is to consider mental health, as dis- cussed in Chapter 13. People who suffer from serious anxiety and depressive disorders, and those in the grip of addictions, have their free will narrowed. They can no longer act as they would wish and their lives are thereby diminished.

Free will may not be an ideal term, but it refers to something fundamental: the ability to make meaning in our lives. That, too, is the quest in the psychological therapies, as we have discussed in this chapter.

By understanding our own makeup, as a human with propensities, and as an individual who lives in a particular culture, we can, as Stanovich (2004) has put it, join the robot’s rebellion. We are robot-vehicles for our genes. But selfish as Dawkins (1976) has shown human genes to be, as programs with the principal function of reproducing themselves, we can rebel: we can make our own choices, and that’s what free will is about. Our genes, moreover, have given us the gift, via attachment, of the ability to love our children, our sexual partners, our families. They have given us the gift of our ability to cooperate and live morally within societies (Tomasello, 2016). They’ve given us the gift of making our relationships more important than anything else. They’ve given us gifts of thinking, consciousness, and discussion with others. Using such abilities, we humans find that we can aspire to human purposes rather than being compelled by mere gene reproduction.

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Emotion and Meaning in the Social World 389

A principal means by which genes guide their robot-vehicles—us—is our set of emotions: urges, that motivate us to be friendly, to be downcast, to be hostile. But again, our genes may have put their vehicles into a state that’s not quite straightforward. This has happened because, as we discussed in Chapters 6 and 10—a fact that wasn’t realized in the early history of emotion research—not only have most emotions in humans come to be social rather than individual, but they often engage us not singly, but several at a time. As Mesquita and Fridja (2011) pointed out, it’s up to us, in our sense of what is not just urgent but meaningful, to give priority to one emotion rather than another. In affection for our friends as they sing “Happy Birthday,” we look at them warmly rather than giving way to the embarrassed urge to leave the room.

We have moved beyond the conviction of the ancient Epicureans and Stoics, discussed in Chapter 1, that emotions are so dangerous that it would be better if they were abolished. Yes, we do suffer anger, and it can be destructive, but it can also motivate us toward justice (Bondü & Richter, 2016). Yes, we do suffer fear and anxiety, but it’s often for reasons such as attachment, based on keeping loved ones from harm (Nielsen et  al., 2017). We do feel sad at significant losses, but rather than merely despair or sink into depression, as Karnaze and Levine (2018) explained in their chapter in a book on how and why emotions help us, sadness can be an archi- tect of cognitive change.

We do have emotions and we are pressed by their urges, but also we can distinguish the impor- tant from the merely urgent.

Free will does not mean acting outside the laws of neural causality. It means being able to act for reasons that are meaningful, rather than being compelled. Even though it generally takes time, and a willing search for understanding, in order for adjustments to be made in the association structure of our minds (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2013), choice and responsibility in concern for others and ourselves become possible.

It’s not known how biological beings can make human meaning. It could be an emergent property of our ability to cooperate. Whatever the explanation, instead of just behaving, we can act meaningfully and act for reasons that we can articulate consciously and discuss with others. Human actions are—of course—pressed by emotions in ways that you have been reading about in this book. It seems also that we have free will and that our movements toward the meaningful life are assisted by understanding our emotions.

Emotion and Meaning in the Social World In this chapter, we have focused on individuals and relationships. But meaning-making also involves the political world: how our societies are organized and run, how international relation- ships are conducted. Such matters are discussed in newspapers, on television, on internet sites. Although governments of nations promote policies worked out over decades, with much discus- sion, they are often portrayed in the news in terms of leaders and their emotions: The Chancellor was saddened, the Prime Minister felt undermined, the President was furious. This seems to make politics easier to think about.

A deeper issue is the relation of our personal emotions with those of our community, our nation, our world. Recall from the previous chapter that a fundamental risk factor for emotional disorders, physical ill-health, as well as for crime rates, obesity, and other negative outcomes, is the degree of income-inequality in each society (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). How do you feel about this? Recall too the work of Diener, Tay, et al. (2017) that includes satisfaction and well- being in different countries.

And what about climate change? Are we passing on to our children, and our children’s chil- dren, a world that is more dangerous, in which meaningful life is likely to be harder to achieve? By understanding our relation to the future of our planet, we can perhaps become less greedy,

A MeAningful life390

more thoughtful of our successors. This had better be a possibility or we will go the way of the dinosaurs.

You might like to recall, too, the statement written by George Eliot, whose novels and other writings on our emotional lives, we introduced in Chapter 1: “What do we live for except to make the world less difficult for each other?”

This brings us to the close of our book. If emotions are the joints and sinews of our relation- ships, the deepest clues to our authentic selves, communications of how things are going within and between us, they are the means by which we articulate our lives with each other.

S U M M A R Y

Several principles are involved in being able to lead meaningful lives. They include cooperation, the ability to be happy, relatedness, and coherence within oneself in relation to our thoughts and emo- tions. In the twentieth century, many forms of psychotherapy have been developed, and most have an emotional base: among principal forms are psychoanalytic therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and emotion-focused therapy. Benefits of many, though not all, forms of psychological therapy have been found empirically; however, not every therapist is helpful with every client. We discuss, too, how

we might undertake therapy with ourselves. One form of doing this is mindfulness, by means of meditation, and in a way of noticing what is new, and different, as we act in the world. We discuss, too, the contribution literature makes to empathy and to understanding ourselves and others in the world. We end the chapter by suggest- ing that free will is important, so that because emotions often don’t come just one at a time, we can choose among them. Our emotional lives are not just individual and relational, but also political, as we consider arrangements for society as a whole.

T O T H I N K A B O U T A N D D I S C U S S

1. What benefits do you think you might derive from keeping an emotion diary? Is there anyone you know who might benefit from doing this, and if so why?

2. If you were to enter psychological therapy, what kind would you prefer, and why?

3. What aspects of your life do you find most meaningful? Is there anything you might do to change your life?

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

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