Ways of knowing – Emotion (p. 171)

Emotion is one of the eight ways of knowing:

Perception Language Emotion Reason Faith Imagination Intuition Memory

The nature of the emotions (p. 172)

The word ‘emotion’ is derived from the Latin verb movere (to move). An emotion usually consists of various internal feelings and external forms of behaviour, and it can vary in intensity from saw mild irritation to blind anger. The word ‘passion’ is usually reserved for a strong emotion. You can, for example, be in a passionate rage but you cannot be passionately irritated. A mood is an emotion, which continues for a period of time. Thus you may be in a bad mood all day long and your behaviour may be punctuated by fits of anger.

Task: Which of the following words to you naturally associate with reason and which do you naturally associate with emotion?

Word Reason or emotion?

Hot

Folly

Impulsive

Controlled

Cool

Powerful

Subjective

Objective

Voluntary

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Blind

Wisdom

Instinctive

Reflective

Weak

Primary emotions (p. 173)

According to psychologists, there are six basic emotions or primary emotions that are common to all cultures:

happiness sadness fear anger surprise disgust

When photographs of faces displaying these states of mind are shown to people they can readily identify the relevant emotion no matter what country they come from. Moreover, children who are born blind and deaf also show these emotions – which suggests that they are inborn rather than learnt.

Secondary emotions

In addition to primary emotions, we have a wide range of secondary emotions or social emotions. Secondary emotions can be thought of as blends of primary emotions. For example, contempt can be thought of as a mixture of anger and disgust, and disappointment as a mixture of sadness and surprise. Commonly mentioned secondary emotions include: admiration, anxiety, awe, despair, embarrassment, envy, gratitude, guilt, jealousy, pity, pride, regret and shame.

Task: See how good you are in perceiving emotions in people. Access the following website and take the test

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/ei_quiz/?utm_source=ad&utm_campaign=quiz&utm_medium=website#3

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The James–Lange Theory (p. 175)

The fact that primary emotions have typical facial expression associated with them suggests that there is a close connection between our emotions and our bodies. Indeed according to the James-Lange theory, the emotions are essentially physical in nature, and bodily changes come before and cause emotional changes.

Imagine the following situation. You are about to sit an exam and you are feeling very nervous. Your mouth is dry, you have a sinking feeling in the pit of you stomach, the palms of your hands are sweaty, and you want to go to the washroom. Now remove each of these physical symptoms one by one. What is left of your exam nerves?

If you went through the above thought experiment, you may have found that when you removed all the physical symptoms of nervousness, the nervousness itself disappeared. According to the James-Lange theory, the same holds true for all of our emotions – if you remove the physical symptoms the corresponding emotion disappears.

Interestingly, the theory also suggests that if you mimic the appropriate physical symptoms you can generate the corresponding emotion. For example, if you smile you will feel happy, and if you scowl you will feel angry.

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The James-Lange theory also suggests a mechanism through which we can come to know and empathise with other people’s feelings. The idea is that when you talk to someone who is, say feeling depressed, you unconsciously mimic some of the physical expressions of his mood. This is known as emotional contagion.

As the words imply, emotions can be contagious and quickly spread through a group. Studies show that if new-born babies hear other infants crying, they also become distressed and start crying themselves. If you find yourself in a seemingly dangerous situation, your fear is likely to be influenced by the fear of those around you. If you approach some friends who are laughing, you are likely to start laughing yourself before you know its cause. From a more negative perspective, waves of emotion can cascade through crowds of people and lead to outbreaks of mass hysteria or mindless aggression i.e. riot.

Jeremy Rifkin ‘Empathic Civilization’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g

The role of beliefs (p.177)

Despite the attractions of the James-Lange theory, it can be criticised because it ignores the fact that our emotions have a mental as well as physical aspect. Although our emotions are closely connected with our bodies, they can also be affected by our beliefs.

Task: The picture below called The Scream is by the Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944).

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(a) What is your response to the emotion being conveyed in this painting?

(b) Look at the parody of The Scream below. Is your emotional response to the painting different? Why?

As well as the primary emotions, we human beings can experience social emotions such as ambition, contempt, embarrassment, envy, gratitude, guilt, indignation, jealousy, pride, shame and sympathy. Our intelligence and imagination mean that we are also able to anticipate and picture more distant dangers.

Since emotions have both a physical and mental aspect, they can be affected not only by our bodies, but also by our beliefs. This suggests – in theory at least – that a change in our beliefs can lead to a change in the corresponding emotion. For example, if you enter a badly lit cellar and see a snake in the corner, you will probably be frightened. But if you look more closely, you discover that it is not a snake but a coiled rope, your fear will vanish. A change in your beliefs has led to a change in your emotions.

There is then a two-way relationship between emotions and beliefs: not only do our emotions affect our beliefs but our beliefs affect our emotions.

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Cultural factors

While our emotions are rooted in biology, they are also shaped by our culture. There are differences in the extent to which emotions are displayed in different cultures. For example, while Americans are more inclined to show their emotions, Japanese are more inclined to hide them; See Paul Ekman’s work.

Emotions as an obstacle to knowledge (p. 180)

Since emotions are an integral part of our mental lives, they are likely to influence the way we see and think about the world. Strong emotions can sometimes distort the three other ways of knowing.

Perception – our perception of things can be coloured by strong emotions; ‘love is blind’. Such emotional colouring can make us aware of some aspects of reality to the exclusion of others. If, for example, you are in love with someone you are likely to be blind to their faults, whereas if you loathe them you are likely to see only their faults.

Four of the primary emotions mentioned earlier are negative (sadness, fear, anger, disgust) and only one is positive (happiness). As this suggests, our emotions are biased towards the negative. There are many examples of this negativity bias. If your are typical, you are more upset by bad grades at school than you are pleased by good ones; you fear looking stupid more than you like looking smart; you dwell longer on criticism than you do on praise; you dislike losing one hundred dollars than you like winning it and so on.

There may be good evolutionary reasons for the prevalence of negative emotions. If you ignore something bad you could die. So when we consider potential threats, it makes sense to err on the side of caution and over-react to them rather than under-react to them.

The obvious problem with negativity bias is that it can distort our perception and cause us to have an unduly pessimistic view of the world.

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Reason – can also be negatively affected by our emotions, and if you hold your beliefs with too much passion, this can prevent you being open-minded and lead to a ‘my theory right or wrong’ kind of attitude.

Language – a person in the grip of a powerful emotion is likely to use slanted and emotive language.

Rationalisations (pp. 182)

When we are in the grip of strong emotions, we tend not to reason in an objective way but to rationalise our pre-existing prejudices. It is interesting to note that if we have a particular emotional attitude towards something we may manufacture bad reasons in order to justify it. According to psychologists, this kind of behaviour is quite common. We tend to rationalise when there is a conflict between two or more of our beliefs. For example, a cigarette smoker who is familiar with the evidence that smoking is bad for her health may try to explain away the evidence.

At the limit, the tendency to rationalise can lead a person to develop an illusory but self-confirming belief system. To illustrate, imagine that Henry has an emotional prejudice against immigrants. His prejudice will probably lead to the following:

1. Biased perception – he notices only lazy immigrants and overlooks hard-working ones

2. Selective memory – he remembers other negative examples which confirm his prejudice

3. Fallacious reasoning – he makes hasty generalisations from his own limited experience

4. Emotive language – he concludes that immigrants are ‘bone idle’ and ‘don’t know the meaning of hard work’.

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The above factors will reinforce the original prejudice and make it difficult for Henry to be objective. He can escape from such a vicious circle only if he is willing to question his prejudiced assumptions and actively consider other ways of looking at things.

Irrational behaviour (p. 185)

Our emotions can not only distort our beliefs, but also lead to make poor decisions. Some emotions are urgent and short sighted and they can easily blind us to the longer-term consequences of our actions. How often have you said something in a moment of anger that you immediately regretted? Or given into temptation when it would have been better to exercise self-control?

Aristotle defined man as a rational animal and economics is based on the assumption that we are all rational. But the underlying reality may be more in line with Thomas Schelling’s amusing conceptualisation:

How should we conceptualize this rational consumer whom all of us know and who some of us are, who in self-disgust grinds his cigarettes down the disposal swearing that this time he means never again to risk orphaning his children with lung cancer and is on the street three hours later looking for a store that’s still open to buy cigarettes; who eats a high calorie lunch knowing that he will regret it, does regret it, cannot understand how he lost control, resolves to compensate with a

Rationalisation

Selective memory

Fallacious reasoning

Emotive language

Powerful emotions

Biased perception

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low calorie dinner, eats a high calorie dinner knowing he will regret it, and does regret it; who sits glued to the TV knowing that again tomorrow he'll wake early in a cold sweat unprepared for that morning meeting on which so much of his career depends; who spoils the trip to Disneyland by losing his temper when his children do what he knew they were going to do when he resolved not to lose his temper when they did it?

People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert, or one who yearns to improve himself by reading Adam Smith on self-command. The two are in continual contest for control.

As this suggests, we are all masters of acting against our own best interests and making resolutions that we break at the first sign of temptation.

Since turbulent emotions can distort our ability to think clearly and behave intelligently, you might think that the ideal situation would be one in which we did not have any emotions at all and could look at the world in a balanced and objective way. In ancient times, such a belief was held by a group of philosophers known as the Stoics. The Stoics advocated a state of mind called apathy – literally ‘without passion’ – in which the mind could mirror reality in a calm and untroubled way.

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Emotions as a source of knowledge (p. 186)

Necessity for emotion in order to be able to make decisions

Despite the Stoic ideal, it is difficult to imagine a meaningful human life without any emotions. If you describe someone as being ‘cold and unemotional’, you do not literally mean that they have no emotions, but that they have few emotions compared with the average person. You might think that Mr. Spock, the half human, half Vulcan character in the original Star Trek series, comes close to having no emotions. But, as Steven Pinker pointed out Spock is not so much lacking in emotions as in control of his emotions.

“Supposedly Mr. Spock, the Vulcan mastermind, didn’t have emotions (except for occasional intrusions from his human side and a seven-year itch that drove him back to Vulcan to spawn).

But Spock’s emotionlessness really just amounted to his being in control, not losing his head, coolly voicing unpleasant truths, and so on. He must have been driven by some motives or goals. Something must have kept Spock from spending his days calculating pi to a quadrillion digits or memorizing the Manhattan telephone directory. Something must have impelled him to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man had gone before. Presumably it was intellectual curiosity, a drive to set and solve problems, and solidarity with allies—emotions all. And what would Spock have done when faced with a predator or an invading Klingon? Do a headstand? Prove the four-color map theorem? Presumably a part of his brain quickly mobilized his faculties to scope out how to flee and to take steps to avoid the vulnerable predicament in the future. That is, he had fear. Spock may not have been impulsive or demonstrative, but he must have had drives that impelled him to deploy his intellect in pursuit of certain goals rather than others.”

~from How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

[http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/06/was-emotion-at-the-core-of-spocks-brilliance/, accessed Saturday, 3rd October 2015]

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Some recent studies of brain-damaged patients in fact suggest that if you did not have any emotions then your life would quickly disintegrate. The psychologist Antonio Damasio cites the case of a patient called Elliot who suffered damage to the emotional centres in his brain. Elliot appeared normal in many respects and performed just as well on IQ tests as he did before his accident. Nevertheless, he became a ‘rational fool’ whose life fell apart because he had lost the ability to make decisions.

Damasio speculates that emotions help us to make rational decisions about things by narrowing down our options so that we can choose between a manageable number of them. Since patients such as Elliot do not have any emotions to guide them, they try to decide what to do on the basis of reason alone and end up experiencing a kind of mental paralysis.

The relation between reason and emotion (p. 188)

The previous discussion suggests that although we tend to think of reason and emotion as two different things; in practice they are closely related to one another and it is difficult to make a clear distinction between them.

Rather than think of reason and emotion as completely different either-or things, it probably makes more sense to say that there is a more-or–less continuum of mental activity running from the very rational to the very emotional. When you are engrossed in a mathematics problem you are at one end of the continuum and when you lose your temper you are at the other end. Most of the time you are probably somewhere in the middle and have a mixture of thoughts and feelings floating around in your mind.

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Furthermore, rather than think of reason and emotion as being opposed to one another, it makes more sense to say that our emotions can themselves be more or less rational. When we discussed the nature of emotions, we saw that they have a mental as well as a physical aspect and that a change in our beliefs can lead to a change in the corresponding emotion. For instance, if you are angry with someone because they insulted you and you later find that you misunderstood what they said, then your anger should disappear. With this example in mind, we might say that in general an emotion that is sensitive to the real nature of a situation is more rational than one that is not.

The philosopher, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was one of the first to suggest that emotions can be more rational or less rational.

‘Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.’ [http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aristotle132211.html, accessed Saturday 3rd October 2015]

Allowing that our emotions may be more of less rational, there is still a problem that we may be able to see that a particular emotion is irrational and yet find it find it difficult to change it. This is particularly true with strong emotions such as fear and disgust. You may, for example, know that grass snakes are harmless, or that it is statistically safer to fly than to drive, but you may still be unable to contain your fear when you encounter a grass snake or are sitting in a plane.

We all experience irrational emotions but, since it is difficult to switch them off, we may find it easier to adjust our beliefs to our emotions than bring our emotions into line with reason. We are back to the problem of rationalization. When the object of our irrational fear and disgust is, say an ethnic minority, the consequences can be serious.

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Emotions as a source of values

Some people claim that just as we come to know facts through thinking, so we can come to know values through feeling. There is support for this view. After all, our emotions implicitly judge things as positive or negative, good or bad; and if we did not have any emotions then nothing would matter to us and we wouldn’t care about anything. The fact that we do have emotions allegedly enables us to discern various moral qualities. For example, it could be argued that gratitude alerts us to kindness, anger to injustice, pity to suffering, guilt to wrongdoing and disgust to perversion.

Consider an emotion such as disgust. The American intellectual Leon Kass coined the phrase the wisdom of repugnance to suggest that disgust is not a mindless bodily reaction to something unpleasant but conveys morally significant information, which is ‘beyond reason’s power to articulate’.

President Obama speaks about ‘Empathy Deficit’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4md_A059JRc

Emotional Intelligence

Since our emotions look inward as well as outward, they give us knowledge about ourselves as well as the world. The ability to understand our own and other people’s emotions is part of what is known as emotional intelligence. This concept has been popularized in recent years by the American psychologist Daniel Goleman who suggests that EQ (emotional quotient) may be more important for a happy and successful life than IQ (Intelligence Quotient).

Emotional intelligence test

http://www.maetrix.com.au/meit/eitest.html

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Conclusion

Emotions are relevant to the search for knowledge. For not only do they provide the energy that fuels intellectual endeavor, but they also play a central role in our mental lives. So rather than think in terms of an either-or choice between reason and emotion, it might be better to say that a balanced intellectual outlook requires both reason and emotion.

At the same time, we need to be aware that the emotions can sometimes be an obstacle to knowledge. For, strong emotions can easily cloud our judgment and tempt us to find bad reasons to justify our pre-existing prejudices; and, despite their value, they cannot always be trusted. So it is worth keeping in mind that having strong convictions about something does not in itself guarantee that it is true.

Interesting articles on Emotion as a way of knowing

1: Report of research study connecting the ability to perceive emotions through vocal cues and healthy social relationships. - http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/05/18/decoding-the-brains-response-to-vocal-emotions/

2: Article about emotions and the seven deadly sins. - http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=24&editionID=197&ArticleID=1794

3: A study shows that isolated cultures can hear western music for the very first time and correctly identify associated emotions. - http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/04/08/even-isolated-cultures-underst/

4: Five Emotions Invented by the Internet - http://thoughtcatalog.com/leigh-alexander/2011/01/five-emotions-invented-by-the-internet/

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5: Discussion (with Susan Boyle as starting point) of the rational and emotional roots of stereotyping. - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/fashion/26looks.html?em

6: Article about the role of emotion in science- http://scienceblogs.com/worldsfair/2010/01/16/but-do-you-like-the-big-bang-t/

7: Discussion of how a complete lack of emotion causes a failure of decision making. - http://www.radiolab.org/story/91640-choice/

8: Ellen Goodman piece about fact-checking; pits emotion vs reality. - http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2009/12/04/Ellen-Goodman-Facts-matter/stories/200912040167

9: Moral Judgment Fails without Feelings

http://news.usc.edu/19069/Moral-Judgment-Fails-Without-Feelings/

10: Emotional Intelligence

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/17/books/ruling-passions.html

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