The Emotion Machine

profession.”

In any case, repeated failures can cause you to ‘brood’ about what the future might hold for you or about your social relationships, as in, “I should not get into such situations,” or “My friends will lose their respect for me,” or “I don’t have enough self-discipline.” Such thoughts can lead to the large-scale cascades that we usually call ‘emotional.’

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§7-6. Emotional Embodiment

Many thinkers have maintained that emotional states are closely involved with our bodies—and that this is why we so often can recognize happiness, sadness, joy, or grief from a person’s expressions, gestures, and gaits. Indeed, some psychologists have even maintained that those bodily activities do not merely ‘express’ our emotions, but actually are what causes them:

William James: “Our natural way of thinking about ... emotions is that the mental perception of some facts excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.”

For example, James suggests that when you sense that a rival is insulting you, this makes you clench your fist and strike—and that your anger does not come first, but from you feeling of these activities. However, your annoyance with such a situation must depend on the memories that intervene to affect how we interpret those ‘exciting facts’—and then cause you to clench your fist—so it seems unlikely that those perceptions ‘directly’ lead to those actions. Nevertheless, James argues that such intermediate thoughts could not have such strong effects by themselves:

William 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, no “mind stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. … [I cannot imagine] what kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present. ... Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face.[137]

Nevertheless, I would argue all this that must begin with activities that start in your brain before your body reacts to them, to eventually lead that “impulse to vigorous action.”

Student: But then, why should your body react to them at all?

The expressions of rage that James depicts (including that clenching of teeth and flushing of face) could have served in primordial times to help to repel or intimidate the person or creature that one is angry with; indeed, any external expression of one’s mental state can affect how someone else will think. This suggest an idea about what we mean when we use our most common emotion words; they refer to classes of mental conditions that produce external signs which make our behaviors more predictable to the persons with whom we are dealing. Thus for our ancestors, those bodily signs served as useful ways to communicate such so-called ‘primary’ emotions as anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, curiosity, and joy.

Student: Perhaps this could also be because our most common emotions evolved long ago when our brains were simpler. Then there were fewer levels between our goals and our sensory-motor systems.

The body and face could also serve as a simple sort of memory: those states of mind might soon fade away—except that those body-expressions could help to maintain them by sending signals back to the brain. In that respect, William James might be right: without such ‘mind-body’ feedback loops, those ‘cold and neutral’ mental states might not persist for long enough to grow into larger-scale cascades. For your external expressions of anger serve not only to frighten your enemies, but also ensure that you will stay frightened for long enough to carry out some actions that might save your life.

For example, your face might display an expression of horror—even when no one else is present—when you realize that you left the door unlocked, or forgot to turn the oven off, or that something that you believed was false. After all, you need your body to stay alive, so, given that it is always at hand, it makes sense for your brain to exploit it as a dependable external memory device.

When we are young, we find it hard to suppress those external expressions, but eventually we learn to control most of them, to at least some degree, so that our neighbors can’t always see how we feel.

Student: If those physical symptoms are not essential parts of emotions, then how can we make a distinction between our emotional states and our other ways to think?

It is hard to make that distinction clear, partly because we have so many names for our various emotional states, whereas most of our many other ways to think (such as those we described in §7–4) do not have popular names at all. Presumably this is because we don’t yet have good ways to think about them. However, here is an ancient but still useful view of what distinguishes the mental conditions that we tend to describe as emotional:

Aristotle: The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure.

—Rhetoric, Book II.

In a modern version of this, some psychologists talk about ‘Valence,’ which refers to the extent to which one’s attitude toward some thing or situation is generally positive or negative.[138] Similarly, there is a popular view in which we think of emotion and thoughts as complementary, in much the same way that an object’s color and shape can change independently; we thus can think of each object (or idea) as having various ‘matter of fact’ or neutral aspects that, somehow, are also ‘colored’ by additional characteristics that seem to make it attractive, exciting, or desirable—versus disgusting, dull, or repulsive.

More generally, our language and thoughts are filled with distinctions like ‘positive vs. negative’ and ‘rational vs. emotional.” Such pairs are so useful in every day life that it’s hard to imagine replacing them (any more than we should discard the idea that the sun rises and sets each day and night, because this is technically incorrect). However, if our goal is to understand our minds, we’ll have to outgrow many dumbbell ideas.

In particular, exaggerating the body’s role in emotions can lead to serious misconceptions. Do the talents of pianists reside in their fingers? Do artists see with talented eyes? No: there is no evidence to suggest that any of those body-parts think; it’s the brain that sits in the driver’s seat. Ask Steven Hawking or Christopher Reeve.

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