Emotion and Reason

Mind, Brain, and the Social Domains of Work and Love

Warren TenHouten

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317580607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although much academic work has been done on the areas of mind, brain, and society, a theoretical synthesis of the three levels of analysis – the biological, the mental, and the social – has not until now been put forward. In Emotion and Reason, Warren TenHouten presents a truly comprehensive classification of the emotions.

The book analyzes six key emotions: anger, acceptance, aggressiveness, love, joy and happiness, and anticipation. It places them in historical context, relates them to situations of work and intimacy, and explains their functioning within an individuated, autonomous character structure. Divided into four parts, the book presents a socioevolutionary theory of the emotions – Affect-spectrum Theory (AST), which is based on a synthesis of three models, of the emotions, of social relationships, and of cognition.

This book will be of value to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers, with an interest in the sociology of emotions, anthropology of emotions, social psychology, affective neuroscience, political science, behavioral neuroeconomics and philosophy.

Part I

The emotions and social relations

1 The primary, secondary, and tertiary emotions

Distinguishing emotions, feelings, affects, sentiments, moods, and passions

A general consensus concerning the meaning of emotions has emerged among emotions researchers. Emotions are commonly viewed as reactions, of humans and other animals alike, to events, interruptions, threats, dangers, and opportunities in the environment. Emotions play a central organizing role in an individual’s experience of reality, sense of self, and cooperative or competitive orientations toward others. Emotion will be understood as a prototypical, conscious, subjective, psychophysiological, state of mind – such as anger, pride, or confidence, which arises in response to a danger or opportunity in the environment or to an event or situation in the social world, and which prepares one for a potentially adaptive, expressive, and/or communicative behavioral reaction. The term “emotion” traces to the Latin emovere, where e- means “out” and movere means “move.” As stated by Frijda (1986), an emotion: (i) is usually triggered when a person consciously or unconsciously evaluates an event relevant to a concern or goal; (ii) stimulates a readiness to react to this event in an appropriate way, giving a sense of urgency to a small set of potential actions; (iii) can interrupt, or compete with, alternative mental processes or actions; and (iv) is experienced as a distinct type of mental state, often associated with bodily changes, expressions, or actions. Emotions are intrinsically social, and their primary adaptive function is interpersonal communication (D. A. Miller et al. 2004). So defined, emotions can be distinguished from instincts, which are seen in both cognitive and affective terms as domain-specific information-processing modules that have evolved to detect relevant stimuli, either external or internal, and to respond with adaptive behaviors. Like emotions, instincts are adaptive reactions having evolutionary significance.

The word feeling refers to the physical sensation of touch, but also connotes all conscious experiences of inner bodily states, including the experience of physical drive states, such as hunger, pain, and fatigue, as well as emotional states (Arieti 1970: 136), sentiments, and desires. Thus, a person might have a warm feeling toward another, or a feeling of unease in a social situation. Feelings and emotions are often conflated in everyday discourse. Feelings are often described as emotions, as in saying, “I feel angry/jealous/happy,” while emotions, in turn, are often defined in terms of feelings. In psychology, feelings are taken to refer to a person’s conscious state of mind, especially their evaluation of what is agreeable and disagreeable, pleasant or painful, as experienced by the body. Emotions involve actions and movements, often in a social context, and are manifested in facial expression, posture, gesture, behavior, and speech. Feelings, which temporally follow emotional reactions, are, in comparison, private. Feelings reflect emotions and their perturbing effects on the body, but they are also influenced by the brain’s mappings of the state of the muscles, the posture and orientation of the body, and the states of the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and nervous systems. All of these are mapped in body-sensing regions of the brain. A feeling, in its essence, then, is a mind-state expressing an idea of the body. Thus, while the object of an emotion is apt to be external – typically the behavior of another person with whom one is socially engaged – the object of a feeling is internal, for it is of the body (Damasio 2003). Damasio (1999) draws on Spinoza (2002: 219) who, in 1677, regarded emotions as what is here rather defined as feelings, which “must indicate or express the state of the body or some part of it, which is the body or some part of it possesses from that fact that its power of activity or force of existence … is increased or diminished, assisted or checked,” together with the conscious ideas of such bodily modification. We will see that emotions such as anger, anticipation, surprise, fear, and disillusionment can, under some circumstances, contribute to rationality in goal-setting and decision-making, and also that somatic feeling-states, which Damasio (1994) calls “somatic markers,” can also contribute to rapid and effective decision-making, especially in risky and uncertain conditions in which cognition would require a great deal of time and energy to carry out a fully rational decision, optional behaviors must be formulated, the costs and benefits of pursuing each must be subjected to calculation, and such cognitive processes would be arduous and time-consuming.

Affect derives from the Latin noun affectus.¹ Affect now means the conscious subjective mental experience of an emotion, apart from its physiological concomitants. A person who intentionally assumes a certain behavior, such as a pretentious accent, is said to be “affected.” As a noun, affect refers to an emotion or psychophysiological state. The scientific study of emotion is referred to generally as “affect science.” An “affect display” refers to observable manifestations of an experienced emotion, such as gestures, postures, facial expressions, and speech acts.

Sentiments are an organized system of complex affective tendencies directed to any number of objects, persons, or potential goal-states. They express our likes and dislikes and typically involve person–object relations. A person might have a fear or dislike of strangers, or a fondness for Italian food. Sentiments often reflect one’s thoughts, opinions, judgments, or attitudes, which are colored with emotion. Complex emotions such as envy, shame, guilt, and pity can be regarded as moral sentiments, or evaluative judgments related to one’s well-being, or to the well-being of others.

The term mood has been subjected to various casual usages, even among researchers, but has been carefully defined by William Morris (1989: ch. 1). Moods, he explains, are frames of mind which instigate a relatively limited set of responses and which must be distinguished from emotions. Moods can alter our affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to a wide range of events and objects. Moods are typically less intense than emotions, and, unlike most emotions, typically lack an object (which can be the self), for they are feeling states that are general, pervasive, and long-lasting. Karl Pribram (1970: 51–2) describes moods as monitors that describe our general state of being and reflect our appraisal of life’s circumstances. Nowlis and Nowlis (1956: 351) more explicitly defined mood as a “predispositional factor that is a source of information or discriminable stimuli to the organism” concerning its current functioning characteristics. Individuals’ moods can be described by contrasting terms such as calm or agitated, attentive or distracted, inclined toward stereotypic classification, or unaware of differences. Mood is the quality of one’s mind, which even for the same person, can range from dull and uninvolved, to passionate and impressionable. While moods can be partially described as aspects of mind, they do not lend themselves to classification or rigorous description.

The term passion derives from the Latin pati, meaning to suffer or to undergo. A passion can be seen as a precursor to an emotion. The key difference between the two is that passions are passive in nature. The experience of a passion is always caused by an object or situation external to, yet acting upon, the individual, whereas emotions, while typically stimulated by ongoing social relations, are experienced first as internal to, and taking place within, followed by possible behavioral responses. Thus, a passion is suffered, but an emotion produced by the subject. Passions are accompanied by bodily pleasures or pains, and bridge action and emotion; they are manifested by facial expressions, blushing, trembling, and posture.² Today, passions have come to be valued as motivators of action that can be harnessed to liberate human potentialities, and as resources for decision-making.

The cases for and against primary emotions

Those who deny to other animals essential neuromental abilities, such as affective experiences to guide long-term behavioral strategies, reinforce an arrogant neo-dualistic cortical creationism that severely constrains modern neuroscience from coming to terms with the evolved mental apparatus of human beings.

(Jaak Panksepp 2002: xi)

No consensus exists concerning the criteria for considering an emotion “primary.” Many emotions researchers, especially those with an evolutionary and biological orientation (Plutchik 1962; Izard 1977), consider a small subset of emotions primitive, primordial, foundational, elementary, basic, or primary. These primary emotions are thought to produce other, complex secondary and tertiary emotions, through differentiation, association, or a combination of the two. Other researchers, especially those oriented toward cognitive science (Ortony and Turner 1990; Solomon 2002) or social constructionism (Averill 1980, 1985; Harré 1986; Hardcastle 2008), deny the existence of primary emotions. Yet others argue that all emotions are unique, thus nullifying the primary/secondary/tertiary distinction. George Mandler (1984: 295), for example, contends that all emotions, including jealousy, are sui generis.³ I take my place within this contentious literature by proposing seven necessary criteria for considering an emotion primary,^4,5 and by identifying the eight emotions that meet all of these. The seven criteria are:

1. A primary emotion must have a deep evolutionary history – meaning it is present in a wide variety of vertebrate classes, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, marsupials, and mammals, and can be conceptualized in terms of natural selection.⁶ Darwin (1859, 1871, 1872) elucidated this concept, for his theory of evolution posited a continuity of all species of plants and animals.⁷ Evolution, he argued, governs not only anatomy and morphology but also mental states, including adaptive emotional reactions. Behavioral patterns and mental activities are as reliably characteristic of species as bodily systems and structures.

2. A primary emotion must have an “innately stored neural program” (Izard 1977: 18). This does not mean that a primary emotion can be seen as a single neural event that takes place in a single brain region. Rather, an emotion emerges from complex processes involving interactive networks whose activities are distributed in time and space, and which involve memory, social cognition (including the perception of the speech, gestures, and facial expressions of other social actors), executive processes, intentionality, and rationality (Panksepp 2002). The brainwork involved in emotion is most complex in humans, yet other species also confront a set of existential problems for which they have developed analogous underlying brain mechanisms, through an evolutionary process.

3. To be considered primary, an emotion must be irreducible, and not a combination of two or more other emotions. Anxiety, for example, has a biological infrastructure (Weisfeld 2002), meeting the second criterion. Yet, anxiety is not primary, but secondary, as it is defined as a combination of the two primary emotions, fear and anticipation.

4. A primary emotion must be psychologically elementary, and must be able to combine with all other primary emotions, to form secondary emotions. For example, the primary emotion anger combines with disgust to form contempt, with surprise to form outrage, with sadness to form sullenness, etc.⁸ (see Table 1.3). It is possible that a primary emotion can combine with all secondary emotions that do not include it as a component, but it would be premature to include this as a criterion. This criterion could be added only if all 56 possible tertiary emotions are given substantive interpretation.

5. An emotion is primary if it addresses a fundamental problem of life. Plutchik (1979) proposed that identity, temporality, hierarchy, and territoriality are existential problems widely shared in the animal kingdom, and that the primary emotions are adaptive reactions that have evolved to address them.

6. A primary emotion must possess a positive or negative valence. This follows directly from Darwin’s (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I The emotions and social relations
• PART II The emotions of formal society
• PART III The emotions of rationality in agonic society
• PART IV The emotions of rationality in hedonic community
• Notes
• References
• Index