The Emotions and Cultural Analysis

Ana Marta González

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138273115
• eBook ISBN: 9781317034322
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie moderne

Amidst prevailing debates that construe rationality and emotionality as polar opposites, this book explores the manner in which emotions shape not only prevailing conceptions of rationality, but also culture in general terms, making room for us to speak of an 'emotional culture' specific to late-modern societies. Presenting case studies involving cultural artefacts, narratives found in fictional and non-fictional literature and television programs, speech patterns and self-talk, fashion, and social networking practices, The Emotions and Cultural Analysis sheds light on the relationship between emotion and culture and the ways in which emotion can be harnessed for the purposes of cultural analysis. An interdisciplinary volume containing the latest research from sociology, philosophy, literary studies, linguistics, and communication, this book will be of interest to those working on the sociology and philosophy of emotion, cultural studies, and cultural theory.

PART I
Emotions, Culture, and the Self

Chapter 1
Emotions and Culture

Robert C. Roberts

Introduction

I’m not very clear about what cultural analysis is, but it seems probable to me that a careful account of emotions within what philosophers call “folk psychology” will better serve the purposes of cultural analysis than an account, say, in terms of emotions’ neurological structure or evolutionary history. The account that I will sketch here is an attempt to refine and analyze the concept of emotion that dominates in the ordinary thought and language of daily life in Europe and America. It seems plausible to suppose that cultures rather different from those in Europe and America will have more or less close analogs of our concept of emotion.

What is an Emotion?

To answer that question we need a fund of paradigm cases. The precision of this discussion is hampered a little bit by the fact that people disagree in their intuitions about which mental states belong in the class, and many of us are less confident of our intuitions about those items on which others disagree with us. Fortunately, the disagreements seem to be on the periphery of the class, with lots of agreement about the paradigm cases. So the class of emotions is definite enough to make a topic of discussion, but probably not definite enough to submit to a very rigorous philosophical definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Most of us are pretty comfortable with denying that a mere reflex such as the startle response or the gag response belongs to the class of emotions, and also in denying that desires and appetites (say, the desire for a new computer or the hunger that one feels after going without food for twelve hours) are emotions. Thus not all urges and feelings are emotions. Some psychologists also talk about unnamed “affects” or “preferences” (see Zajonc 1980), which also have dubious credentials as bona fide emotions.

The central kinds of emotion are relatively episodic mental states that go by such names as fear, anger, pity, envy, jealousy, resentment, disappointment, grief, the feeling of guilt, shame, and boredom. We are less confident about surprise and amusement (the sort of mental reaction we have to something humorous like jokes). I myself am inclined to include surprise and amusement among the emotions, and then to treat them as falling just a bit outside the main paradigm. Because they, like the more central kinds of emotions, vary interestingly with culture, I would expect them also to be of interest to cultural analysts. It seems obvious that the sense of humor varies with culture, as does readiness to be surprised.

I said that emotions are “relatively episodic” mental states, but some thinkers (see Goldie 2000) have argued that the most basic concept of an emotion is not that of an episodic mental state—a state that you might be in between 3:00 and 3:15 on a Wednesday afternoon—but instead an almost trait-like dispositional kind of state that may last for years, as in, “I have been horrified by Harry Truman’s nuclear bombing of Japan ever since I heard about it as a child.” I think the correct analysis of such an “emotion” is that a person who has it tends consistently to feel horror whenever he or she turns his attention to that bombing and, probably, also to act consistently with that disposition, even when one is not feeling horror (say, to work for nuclear disarmament). On my view the emotion itself (so to speak) is not the disposition to feel horror, but the episodes of feeling or otherwise displaying horror to which the disposition disposes the subject. In this way an emotion tendency is like an action tendency. A person might be inclined to play soccer, in which case he plays it gladly when he gets a chance and pretty regularly seeks opportunities to play it; but the tendency is not an action. The action of playing soccer is what the tendency tends toward.

Emotions as Judgments or Feelings

What kind of episodic mental state is an emotion? Various proposals have been made within a folk psychological paradigm.

Judgment

A very long tradition, going back at least to the ancient Stoics, has it that an emotion is a kind of judgment—that is, an episode of believing that the object of one’s emotion has one or another kind of positive or negative value. Thus, on this view, anger is a judgment to the effect that somebody has culpably injured you or somebody closely associated with you, and that this is very bad, and that it would be good if that person were hurt or punished for this injury. Similarly, fear is a judgment to the effect that some harm is fairly likely to befall you or somebody or something closely associated with you, and that it would be good to avoid that harm. The view that emotions are value judgments has been revived and advocated in the last forty years by Robert Solomon (1976) and Martha Nussbaum (2001) and others.

It seems to me implausible to claim that all instances of emotions like fear, anger, and guilt are judgments of value. Stoics like Chrysippus and Seneca make it very clear that a judgment involves assenting to—that is, actually believing—the propositional content of one’s mental state. Many instances of full-fledged emotions are “irrational” in the sense that the subject of the emotion, at the time of the emotion, does not believe what his emotion is “telling” him. Think of cases of phobic fear, or irrational guilt or anger, in which the subject is aware at the moment of feeling the emotion that the situation is not really as his or her emotion depicts it.

The Stoics are very clear that full-fledged emotions all involve a two-stage mental process. The first stage is that the subject has a “phantasia” or “appearance” (phainomenon) or impression of the situation as being a certain way (say, that of an injury by a culpable agent whom it would be good to see punished), and the second stage is that of the subject’s assenting to that impression, believing it to be true of the world. On the Stoic view the phantasia doesn’t become an emotion until the subject assents to it. My view is that while the second stage is often exemplified in cases of emotion, it is not necessary for the mental state to be a full-fledged emotion. Thus my view is that, phenomenologically, an emotion just is the impression of the situation being a certain value-laden way. I call this kind of impression a concern-based construal. There is, of course, much more to be said about what emotions are, in terms of neuro-physiology and chemistry, and also in terms of evolutionary background and current social function; but phenomenologically, emotions are not judgments, but concern-based construals.

Gut Reaction

A different answer to our question—What kind of episodic mental state is an emotion?—centers on the idea of bodily arousal. When we experience emotions of a certain degree of intensity, typically some changes occur in our body. Perhaps we perspire a bit more, or our mouth goes dry, or our heart beats more rapidly, or various muscles (arms, hands, neck, etc.) tense up, and so forth. Sometimes we are aware of these changes, and sometimes we aren’t. Some psychologists have thought that the arousal is the emotion, but the more popular view among philosophers is that the emotion is, not the changes themselves, but the awareness of the bodily changes. William James (1950) famously and rather paradoxically argued that the sequence of events in the case of fearing a bear is this: I see the bear, my heart starts beating faster and my legs start running away (or perhaps freezing in place); then I become aware of the state of my heart and legs; and this awareness of the state of my heart and legs is the fear.

Popular opinion disagrees with this picture, and would have it, instead, that I first become afraid of the bear, and this causes the changes in my heart and legs. The fear is a kind of awareness of the bear (that the animal constitutes a threat to my wellbeing, for example), and the changes in my heart rate and legs are consequences of my fear, and my awareness of these changes is a consequence of the changes and thus a by-product and concomitant of my fear. According to James, this kind of folk psychology is an exact reversal of the truth.

James’s reversal of common sense has made his theory difficult for many to swallow, and the main argument against it by thinkers like Solomon, Nussbaum, and myself has been that it skews the phenomenology of the emotion. After all, my fear of an approaching bear is about the bear, and my safety, and the possibility of being mauled, and the possibility of escaping, not about some goings-on in my chest and legs.

Jesse Prinz, who is a Jamesian, agrees that we must accommodate this fact of phenomenology, and has tried to accommodate it while maintaining an essentially Jamesian theory of the nature of emotions. Like James, he identifies the emotion with the awareness of the bodily process, but he adds a twist that gives the emotion a kind of intentionality. He says that the complex of sensations that constitutes the emotion functions for the subject as a reliable sign or signal of some life-significant environmental situation. Prinz (2004: 64–7) follows R.S. Lazarus (1991) in calling the life-significance the “core relational theme;” each emotion type has one core relational theme.

We might say that the subject “reads” his body state for the story it can tell him about the situation. If we apply this account to the case of the approaching bear, then the whole sequence is as follows: 1) the subject sees the approaching bear (this is not yet an emotion, but an emotion-neutral cognition of some kind); 2) the body reacts with a “gut reaction;” 3) the subject becomes aware of the gut reaction and this awareness is the emotion; 4) the subject “reads” his gut reaction, by way of his awareness of it, as saying the bear is dangerous. So the emotion is not a reading of the situation, as it is in the judgment theory and in my own account, but instead something like the text from which the situation is read to be, or categorized as, a situation of danger. It is a kind of “vehicle” for a judgment or construal of the situation.

My question is this: if the original, world-focused cognition is capable of giving rise to the particular bodily state that carries the core relational theme, it will itself have to be capable of detecting the character of the situation as exemplifying the core relational theme. As Prinz comments, “... all the representations that trigger the bodily response [characteristic of fear] will do so in virtue of being recognized as dangerous” (2004b: 55). But if, as a precondition for triggering the bodily response characteristic of fear, the representation of the situation has to represent it as involving danger, then the fear has started before the bodily response gets going, and even longer before the subject feels the bodily response. The reason is that danger is a heavily evaluative and motivational property. To recognize a danger in such a way as to get the body going in the way characteristic of fear is not an emotionally neutral “cognition;” it is itself an emotion.

Emotions as Concern-based Construals

So I think that emotions are neither judgments nor gut reactions, but concern-based construals. They are “takes” on or ways of “seeing” situations (in the “world,” not in the body), some crucial element(s) of which the subject cares about.

Consider, for example, two different emotional responses to the same situation. Amos and Andy are twins. Because of the poverty in which their parents found themselves at the time of the twins’ birth, they were given up for adoption to two different families. Their mother has died, but their father has kept track of them, though for reasons of delicacy he has not contacted them. At his death, the father leaves each of them $250,000, a relatively small portion of his total estate. When they receive their inheritance, Amos and Andy learn about the situation of their birth and also about their father’s wealth at the time of his death. Amos feels grateful to his father, both for the money and for the attention and love that it seems to him to express. Andy, by contrast, feels angry with his father, both because the bequest is such a small portion of his father’s estate and because of the lack of regard that this smallish gift seems to him to betoken.

Amos and Andy construe (“see,” perceive, understand) the gift very differently: Amos sees it as a blessing or benefit, and one that was undeserved and expressed good will on his father’s part; Andy sees the gift as a sort of insult and a violation of his entitlement as a rich man’s son, and as expressing a lack of concern for Andy. Possibly, neither of them is quite convinced of the truth of his construal, but the situation of the inheritance strikes them in the rather different ways that I have sketched. Had they merely believed the propositional contents of their states of mind, they would not have experienced emotion. Note, too, that they would not have felt the emotions they felt, were they not concerned about elements of the situation. Presumably, both care at least a little bit about money; it is an “issue” for both of them. They also care about their father’s attitude toward them: if they did not want to be loved and respected by him, Amos would not have been moved to gratitude by his father’s gesture, nor Andy to resentment. Had they cared neither about the money nor about their father’s attitude toward them, they would not have responded with emotion to the bequest, even if they had believed the content of their respective construals. Prior dispositional concern about elements of the situation as the subject construes it is necessary for emotion, as is the conceptualization of the situation that structures the construal.

For purposes of analysis I have distinguished conceptualization from concern, but my view of emotions is that these aspects of the construal are deeply integrated. In the case of emotions, the “seeing” in terms of the conceptualization is a concerned seeing, and the concern about the situation is a conceptualized concern. For example, in fear, the situation is conceptualized in terms of aversive possibility, but the aversiveness of the possibility is not properly conceived unless the subject cares about something (e.g. his safety) in such a way as to present the possibility in question as aversive. Symmetrically, the concern is a conceptualized concern inasmuch as it is concern, not just in general, but for one’s safety. Thus emotions, in my understanding of them, constitute a striking counterexample to the modern psychological dogma that mental states can be divided neatly into “cognitions” on the one side, and “affects” on the other. Emotions are affective “cognitions” or cognitive “affects.” Emotions are not, for example, two-part mental states in which there is a belief part to which is added a desire part. They are concern-based construals or construal-shaped concerns.

My Amos and Andy illustration is meant to show that emotion responses can vary from individual to individual, even when the situations in the “world” to which the emotions are responses are the same or very similar. It is also meant to show the two dimensions along which these individual variations arise: on the one hand, the dimension of what we might call the subject’s conceptualization of the situation, and on the other, the dimension of the subject’s pattern of concerns about the situation as he “conceives” it.

Emotions and Culture

The two bases of individual differences in emotional response—how the subject conceives the situation at which his emotion aims, and how the subject cares about that situation’s elements—are also the bases of cultural differences in emotional response.

Lots of emotions researchers these days—especially those who are neurologically or evolutionarily inclined—think of emotion types as being biologically rather than culturally determined. We are “wired” for fear and joy and anger and other “basic” emotions, and it is possible to trace neurological differences among some of the different emotion types, as well as to speculate about the ways in which these response patterns evolved, making us “fit” for the various life-situations in which we needed to survive and reproduce.

Hard-wired though some response potentials are, the view of emotions that I am proposing holds that those responses—at least in the paradigm emotion typ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction Emotional Culture and the Role of Emotions in Cultural Analysis
• Part I Emotions, Culture, and the Self
• Part II Fiction, Emotions, and Social Life
• Name Index
• Subject Index