Feeling Bodies: Embodying Psychology

John Cromby

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349560714
  9781137380579
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137380586
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sanità, amministrazione e assistenza pubblica

Before we are anything else, we are feeling bodies. In fact, feelings are an important part of every experience we ever have. This book explains what feelings are, describes their relationship with other psychological phenomena, and shows how their analysis transforms understandings of some key topics related to health and illness.

1

Introducing

Before we are anything else, we are feeling bodies. Feelings – novel, satisfying, intense, prolonged, challenging or transcendent – are sought by bungee jumpers, mountaineers and practitioners of ‘extreme’ sports; by millions of consumers of alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and other recreational drugs; by users of pornography, music and painkillers; and by consumers at festivals, carnivals, fairgrounds, music events, cinemas and sports stadia. The management of feeling is integral to identities that are both gendered (‘big boys don’t cry’) and cultural (‘keep a stiff upper lip’) and emphasised by advice to ‘keep a cool head’ to make unbiased, rational decisions. Simultaneously, the fabric of everyday relating includes countless conversations that begin with some reference to feeling (“So, how are you today?”), conversations of which a sizeable minority take feeling as their primary focus (“I’m sorry I upset you”). In fact, the ubiquity and relevance of feeling is such that sometimes it is even parodied (“so – how does that make you feel?”).

Viewed from the perspective of the public realm, feelings are the target for manipulation and inculcation in advertising, propaganda, public relations and politics: from the crowd manipulation techniques developed by Goebbels to multinational corporations’ use of phenomena such as the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1980) and attempts to associate positive feelings with brands in order to foster loyalty (Barsky & Nash, 2002); or politicians’ use of contrasts and three-part lists to generate approval (Atkinson, 1984), and ‘dog-whistle’ phrases to mobilise support (Goodin & Saward, 2005). Recently, there has been greatly increased interest in feelings within social science and humanities disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, geography, criminology, economics and history, as well as within psychology. And feelings – specifically, of happiness and well-being – have even emerged as a goal of UK government policy, with the creation of a new national index purporting to provide an assessment of their demographic associations and annual movements (Cromby, 2011).

Troubling concepts

But what are feelings? For now it is enough to think of feelings as bodily states that can be subjectively experienced. Understood this way, feelings are not just emotions, although they include components of emotion. Hunger, thirst, tiredness, itchiness and pain are all feelings, despite their typical characterisation in psychology as mere sensations (a category seen at once as more primitive than the cognitions presumed to dominate them). Feelings also include the heterogeneous somatic experiences associated with moods and inclinations, and the vague, fluctuating, liminal states associated with as-yet tentative desires, or with emergent judgements that an argument, claim or situation feels either right or wrong (feelings that bear no necessary relation to more intersubjective criteria of truth and accuracy).

It is nevertheless notoriously difficult to identify consistently agreed definitions of feeling, affect, emotion and related terms. This is in part because the phenomena they index are known in their fullness only subjectively or experientially and are therefore, to some extent, private. Simultaneously, important components of these phenomena are embodied and therefore somewhat ineffable (Stam, 1998; Shilling, 2003): not capable of being wholly represented using words or symbols. Moreover, at the same time, it seems to be a characteristic of feelings that they have us before we have them. Feeling arises within experience without our needing to reflect upon it – however much its appearance then demands reflection, and however much that subsequent reflection is shaped and constituted by the intensities and preoccupations it brings.

Feeling is thoroughly embedded in history, and this extends to the basic concepts that designate it. Whilst in the (not too-distant) past we might have discussed passions, appetites, sentiments, affections and sensibilities, today we talk about emotions, moods, affects and feelings. And just as feeling is embedded in history, so it is also infused with culture. There are culture-specific emotions such as toska: a Russian term for an experience blended from what Anglo-Americans see as two relatively distinct emotions – anxiety or fear, and sadness (Ogarkova et al., 2012). Conversely, it is often claimed that, for good evolutionary reasons, ‘disgust’ is a culturally universal emotion. However, Wierzbicka (1999) notes that in Polish there is no word that corresponds exactly to this English term – a peculiar state of affairs if disgust, conceived in Anglo-American terms as a specific and distinct affective capacity,¹ really were universal. Wierzbicka also describes how Polish people experience an emotion, tesknota, which has parallels with homesickness and nostalgia, and with experiences of missing someone or ‘pining’ for them, yet which differs from each of these. Other likely examples of culture-specific emotions include amae, schadenfreude and amok.

More fundamentally, the very notion of the affective as a distinct realm separable from the cognitive is perhaps itself a cultural construction. Lutz (1988) describes how the Ifaluk of Papua New Guinea have no concepts that correspond to the categories of thought and emotion. Their term, nunuwan, which translates roughly as ‘being’ or ‘experience’, uniformly encompasses all of the phenomena that Anglo-Americans typically parse into these two distinct categories. Ifaluk people do experience what we would call emotions, moods or feelings, but they do not understand these experiences as belonging to a category that is distinguishable from another containing other experiences called ‘thoughts’. Consequently, whereas Anglo-Americans see maturation from childhood as involving a process of learning to regulate, tame or control emotion, the Ifaluk see it as one of increasing and differentiating nunuwan. And, as Ratner (2000) notes, there are other cultures such as the Illongot who do not sharply distinguish the cognitive from the affective.

So affective phenomena are intimate, experiential and embodied, incapable of perfect capture or absolute representation in language, yet, at the same time, thoroughly bound up with and shaped by history and culture. So perhaps it is not surprising that they seem constantly to elude singular and agreed definitions, or, more accurately, that they appear capable of accommodating multiple yet somewhat incompatible conceptualisations. It is similarly unsurprising that these concepts mutate over time and travel imperfectly between cultures, notwithstanding that there must be elements of the affective that, just like the human capacity for language, are endowed by our species-nature.

Despite this, psychology predominantly treats concepts of affect, emotion and feeling as largely unproblematic. In psychology, the cognitive contains elements such as words, symbols, factual knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, and processes such as attention, memory encoding and recall, learning, judging, reasoning, calculating, problem solving and decision-making. The affective, by contrast, contains emotions such as happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, disgust, shame, guilt and so on. It also contains moods, which like emotions are valenced and have motivational effects, but which differ from them in being both less focused (their cause or object is often unclear) and more temporally extended. Feeling is also typically included within the affective, where it is sometimes a synonym for emotion, sometimes used to refer specifically to emotions’ phenomenological aspects (‘he felt angry’), but sometimes also recruited into cognitive analyses (e.g. in research into the ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomena).

Nevertheless, this does not mean that psychology has a single, agreed concept of emotion. And indeed, psychology is not the only relevant discipline to be characterised by such multiplicity. In her introductory text on emotion science, a field informed by psychology, neuroscience and other disciplines, Fox (2008, p. 23) frankly acknowledges that “there is no general agreement in emotion science on how emotion should be defined”.

For example, despite being the target of numerous well-founded critiques, some research still invokes the notion of basic emotions. This is the idea that a core set of emotions – most commonly anger, sadness, surprise, happiness, disgust and fear (Ekman, 1992) – are universal within our species. These emotions are said to be enabled by genetically endowed, hardwired neural modules, the existence of which can, at least in principle, be associated with selection pressures flowing from the survival or reproductive advantages produced by the action potentials and states of preparedness that these capacities bestowed: to fight off predators (anger), manage changes in social status (sadness), prepare for something unexpected (surprise), cement a social bond (happiness), avoid something toxic (disgust) or retreat from something dangerous (fear).

The most influential current conceptualisation of emotion is probably Scherer’s (e.g. 2009a) component process theory. Here, emotions are complex phenomena that simultaneously recruit cognitive and somatic capacities in orchestrated patterns where multiple levels and components of information processing combine to appraise situations and prepare individuals, mentally and physically, for appropriate action. There are five core components in Scherer’s model: cognitive (appraisal), neurophysiological (bodily), motivational (action tendencies), motor expression (facial and vocal) and subjective feeling. These combine in dynamic, variable patterns, constituted of multiple feedback loops and bidirectional influences, to generate central representations of brain–body states to which verbal categorisations and labels (e.g. ‘angry’) get added; this representation and labelling then loops back into the appraisal processes that began the entire cascade.

Another prominent notion of emotion is supplied by core affect theory (Barrett, 2006), where physiological changes in valence states and arousal levels combine with stored representations (shaped, amongst other influences, by culture) to generate different emotional experiences. But there are also other concepts of emotion, including notions derived from psychoanalysis and its variants such as attachment theory, along with more recent conceptualisations such as that proffered by discursive psychology, which treats emotion as an interactional resource and accomplishment (Edwards, 1999).

In the social sciences and humanities, where what is being called an ‘affective turn’ has been occurring (e.g. Blackman & Cromby, 2007; Clough & Halley, 2007; Athanasiou, Hantzaroula, & Yannakopoulos, 2008; Blackman, 2012), parallel diversity is evident and at least three distinct concepts of affect have been influential. The first is Tompkins’ affect theory, an early variant of basic emotion theory which strongly emphasised the ways in which affect can flow in complex, recursive circuits and feedback loops both within and between individuals. Tompkins’ theory has been taken up by writers such as Probyn (2004) and Sedgewick and Frank (1995) within their penetrating analyses of shame. The second comes from psychoanalysis, where affect refers to primary-process activity, the seething motives, nameless compulsions and unspeakable desires of the unconscious, the operations of which are forever too threatening to be known directly and so must always be diluted or disguised before they enter awareness (Mitchell & Black, 1995). The third and the most influential conception of affect comes from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and specifically through its interpretation by Massumi (2002). Here, affect is the capacity of organisms to act upon and be acted upon by their worlds,² a capacity that is both interpellated (‘called out’) and impelling. Affect is pre-personal, before experience and consisting of ‘unqualified intensities’ that constitute and precede the sociolinguistic. Unlike its ‘captured’ residue, emotion, affect is an untamed force, neither individual nor specifically human, but a general property of living things and the motive force for becoming – the ceaseless process of restless change that characterises life itself.

When conceptual clarity is needed but the empirical evidence is ambiguous, philosophical analysis may help. Philosophers often equate affect with irrationality and contrast it against calm, rational judgement, treating emotion and feeling as something to be managed and regulated so that neutral, calm judgements can be made. Hence Aristotle recommended moderation with respect to emotion, whereas the Stoics advocated rigorous control. Nevertheless, philosophers also disagree about the limits and character of the affective. Spinoza saw affect as a fundamental power of the body, a notion that reappears in Deleuze’s work. Hume saw reason as the “slave of the passions”, treating their dominance as not only inevitable but also morally or normatively correct. Recent work by Griffiths (1998) grapples more directly with the character of emotions, proposing that they lie on a continuum from basic to culture-specific – effectively, from the wholly biological to the wholly socially constructed – with an in-between region occupied by what he calls ‘higher cognitive emotions’ not unique to particular cultures and containing marked cognitive components. By contrast, Prinz (2004) argues that no emotion is wholly biological since, to be understood and recognised, it must necessarily have a cultural aspect: at least in a weak sense, all emotions are socially constructed (Harre, 1986). But simultaneously, no emotion is wholly socially constructed, since all experience is also necessarily embodied. Hence all emotions occupy something like the middle ground that Griffiths identifies – although Prinz’s characterisation of them as ‘embodied appraisals’ subverts the emphasis that Griffiths places upon cognitive factors.

Feeling the way

Ultimately then, neither psychology nor any other field seems able to decide exactly what the affective realm contains, nor agree precisely where its boundaries lie. This has implications across the discipline because many psychological concepts, usually treated or described as simply cognitive, actually straddle the presumed cognition–affect divide. For example, self-esteem contains a prominent affective dimension, alongside or bound up with its representational, discursive or cognitive elements (Scheff & Fearon, 2004). And, as I will argue later, the psychological concept of belief can also be considered as such a hybrid. Nevertheless, it is not that we don’t know anything about affect, emotion and feeling. At the same time, what we do know lacks coherence, and – despite frequent claims in psychology to be strictly empirical or ‘scientific’ – rests (if only because of the methodologies deployed) upon implicit assumptions that are culturally and historically specific.

In this book, I will navigate through this uncertainty by consistently emphasising feeling, in preference to affect or emotion. The intention is not to institute a sharp definitional distinction between the three terms, but to develop an argument that feeling is integral to the phenomena described by each of them. Hence I will sometimes use adjectives such as ‘affective’ to refer to the realm of embodied influence and responsiveness within which what get called affect, emotion and feeling are significant, whilst still favouring feeling as a central concept. This preference is partly because, unlike affect and emotion, ‘feeling’ is a linguistic prime: all human cultures, so far as we know, have a word or concept that denotes feeling (Shweder, 2004), making it a strong candidate upon which to base analysis. The term also emphasises the psychological, whilst potentially sidestepping some of the uncertainty surrounding definitions of emotion and affect. It largely (although not exclusively) ties analysis to the experiential realm, and in this way might constrain some of the ‘overspill’ or indeterminacy that Wetherell (2012) associates with analyses of affect. This is in part because, unlike contemporary notions of affect, the concept of feeling elaborated here does not reside “outside social meaning” (Hemmings, 2005, p. 565): consequently, it might avoid some of the problems noted by Hemmings, Wetherell and others (e.g. Leys, 2011).³ Finally, feeling is a more inclusive concept than affect or emotion, potentially encompassing a considerably broader range of bodily states and experiences. This makes feeling especially valuable for analyses of health and illness, such as those presented later, because – alongside the emotional – feeling includes the sensations associated with pain, fatigue and other relevant bodily experiences.

Embodying psychology

A central argument of this book is that a focus upon feelings might facilitate an embodied psychology: one that takes seriously the observation that absolutely all experience depends upon our living bodies for its very character, as well as its mere possibility (Merleau-Ponty, 2002). But emphasising the living body also means challenging the successive mechanical metaphors that have dominated psychology, metaphors Leary (1994) traces back to Descartes’ separation of the immaterial soul from the material body-machine it was said to temporarily inhabit. Freudian psychoanalysis, for example, invokes a hydraulic metaphor: Victorian steam-driven machinery supplied a model of mind pushed by hidden forces, a mind which must regulate, balance and control the seething pressures that provide its impetus. Behaviourist psychology, by contrast, emphasised external quasi-mechanical functions. Subjective capacities such as feeling, even if their occurrence could be reliably demonstrated, were treated as epiphenomenal: the study of behaviour did not require any consideration of experience. Byrne (1994) uses the analogy of a clock, the hands of which produce ‘time-telling behaviour’. Under behaviourism, the clock’s inner workings – water-driven, spring-coiled, battery-operated, solar-powered, pendulum-regulated, radio-controlled – were ignored: what mattered was understanding the patterns in which its hands moved. Researchers explored how different reinforcement schedules caused organisms (much data was gathered using rats, pigeons, dogs and other animals) to produce altered response patterns. Their experiments positioned living creatures as appendages to the machines that conditioned them – to press levers, push buttons, solve mazes, salivate, startle, blink and so on.

More recently, psychology has been dominated by a computational metaphor where functions and abilities are understood largely in terms of information processing. Impelled to a notable extent by covert military funding (Bowers, 1990), the so-called cognitive revolution contributed to an interdisciplinary effort to reproduce in machines the advanced cognitive abilities of humans, by developing and testing computer models of human capacities.⁴ The computer metaphor yields a psychology that closely resembles the head on this book’s cover, in that it is for the most part individual, lifeless, artificial and disembodied. Other metaphors also inform cognitive psychological research: in relation to memory alone, Hoffman, Cochran and Nead (1990) list metaphors including a wax tablet, house full of rooms, dictionary, encyclopaedia, muscle, telephone switchboard, computer, hologram, conveyor belt or archaeological reconstruction. Nonetheless, these other metaphors are consistently subordinated to an overarching computational notion of information processing, a presumed general cognitive ability that might equally be enabled by silicon and wire as by flesh and blood.

Shotter (1993, p. 153) obser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introducing
• 2. Feeling
• 3. Relating
• 4. Experiencing
• 5. Researching
• 6. Believing
• 7. Exhausting
• 8. Maddening
• 9. Concluding
• Notes
• References
• Index