Annoying

reactions to irritations. “It’s quite possible,” says Rodrigues. “Oxytocin can decrease your stress hormone levels. I would definitely put my bet on it that oxytocin would cause less irritability.”

A few small studies have looked at how the behavior of people with autism changes after they take an oxytocin nasal spray. One study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, found that autistic adults seemed to interact more smoothly with others after oxytocin inhalation.^{52} It makes you wonder what it would do for candy- averse theater-goers.

Much of what we’ve learned so far about parts of the brain and fMRIs and so forth would seem to indicate that you become annoyed in your mind. Something unpleasant happens, you get annoyed, and your blood boils. Is that really the right order, though? The oxytocin study suggests a different route—perhaps your blood boils, and then your brain becomes annoyed. Where do feelings start—in the body or the brain? And what are emotions, anyway?

If you’re one of those people who finds it hard to express your feelings, you might feel better knowing that humans have a hard time even defining what a feeling is.

“Determining what an emotion is isn’t trivial from a scientific perspective,” says Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist and the director of the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the University of Michigan. “The attempts to define emotion, in my opinion, have consistently tried to focus on different legs of the elephant: some people say, ‘It’s physiology,’ and other people say, ‘No, it’s the subject of feeling,’ and yet others say, ‘No, it’s cognition.’ There’s been a lot of debate about which is primary.” Nesse argues that emotions are the whole elephant. They comprise all of those things.

Part of the difficulty in finding a working definition may be that we haven’t been working on it that long. Despite the fact that art, music, literature, war, and peace are propelled by emotion, not to mention that emotions are obviously central to our everyday lives, there is not a long tradition of scientifically studying emotion, with a few exceptions. “As the sciences of mind and brain flourished in the twentieth century, interests went elsewhere and the specialties which we loosely group today under neuroscience gave a resolute cold shoulder to emotion research,” wrote emotion researcher Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes’ Error.^{53}

The modern inquiry into emotion got a jump-start in the late nineteenth century when science heavyweights Charles Darwin and William James published their theories on the subject. Darwin tackled emotion in a book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.^{54} He explored emotions through the expressions we make, noting similarities between humans and animals in the external manifestations of our emotional states. He filled the book with pictures of people and animals grimacing, crying, and smiling. There is a particularly unflattering picture of the photographer’s wife snarling.

Around the same time, 1884, psychologist-philosopher William James took on the question “What Is an Emotion?” in the journal Mind.^{55} James wrote that his interest was the human state when a “wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas.” James was not concerned with things like pleasing arrangements of sounds and colors. His treatise covers only feelings that stir the body, he said, and it seems safe to say that annoyance belongs under his umbrella.

One struggle in defining emotion is finding a way to include the changes that occur in the body, the brain, and the mind (the awareness of the feeling). Here is James’s solution: “Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis 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.”

Translated: (1) We perceive something; (2) our bodies react—for example, heart rate goes up; we start sweating; we start running; and (3) our minds become aware that we’re experiencing an emotion. James sees emotions as the awareness of these reflexive bodily changes that occur when we perceive something. Carl Lange was developing a complementary theory around the same time—and what is now called the “James-Lange” theory of emotions was born. More than a hundred years later, scientists still reference this theory in emotion research.^{56}

In the last fifteen years, the field of emotion research has been on the upswing. Scientists are not simply studying emotion but have again begun to develop theories about what emotion is.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, in his book The Emotional Brain, argues that emotions are different from feelings. “I view emotions as biological functions of the nervous system,” he wrote.^{57} Emotions are the initial response of the brain to a perception, such as a loud noise or a snake in the road. LeDoux studies how rats process fear by tracing a fear-inducing signal, like a loud noise, from a rat’s ear through its brain.

In LeDoux’s preferred semantics, a feeling is the part that happens next. Feelings are a secondary reaction that is prompted by this initial brain response, the emotion. Feelings occur when we realize what is going on and start to sweat. While James sees emotions as the perception of changes in our bodies, LeDoux sees emotions as what happens initially in the brain and feelings as how our minds and bodies react to that initial brain change.

The two-stage process of emotion and feeling that James and LeDoux map out bears on the experience of feeling annoyed. It often seems as if you’re annoyed before you’re even aware of it. You first feel the bodily signs and symptoms—a flushed face, a rise in blood pressure, sweating, a quickened breathing rate—and then realize, “Oh, yeah, I’m annoyed!” In LeDoux’s construct, there would be an initial response in the brain—the emotion—and then that would set off a cascade of effects in the body and the mind, making us aware that we’re experiencing the “feeling” of annoyance.

Although scientists may be late to the emotion party, philosophers have been grappling with emotions for millennia, although annoyance is (again) conspicuously absent from the inquiry.

Ronald de Sousa, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, specializes in emotion but hasn’t thought much about annoyance. When asked to consider it, his first instinct is that annoyance is what philosophers call a “low- level emotion.” Full-fledged emotions, according to de Sousa, have an evaluative dimension. Take anger, for example: “In anger, you have a whole lot of thoughts about perhaps the moral badness or at least the personal badness of something that’s been done to you. If I’m angry at you, that means I actually think you did something wrong.” By comparison, if we feel annoyed, it’s because of something trivial, something that does not violate our moral standards.

Another characteristic of low-level emotion is that it’s hard to recreate it in your mind, says de Sousa—it exists only when you are experiencing the changes in your body. Higher-level emotions can be felt more abstractly. For example, you can be angry without feeling your blood pressure go up. Here may be a distinction between irritation and annoyance. Irritation seems to be confined to a sensation in the moment—a merely physiological response, as de Sousa describes. Annoyance, however, may be slightly higher level than de Sousa suggests, in the sense that it does seem possible for us to be annoyed generally with a situation, without feeling the bodily arousal of irritation.

Disgust may be an analogue to annoyance, says de Sousa. Researchers are learning that disgust—once thought to be primitive and low level—is not so simple. A study in Science by Hanah Chapman and colleagues looked at people’s facial muscles when they reacted to unpleasant things, from pictures of dirty toilets to the taste of a foul liquid to an unfair experience.^{58} Dating back to Darwin, facial expressions have been used to characterize emotions. In this case, it turns out that people contort their faces in a similar way when they are in all three situations. A repulsive idea triggers the same muscle response that something physically repulsive does. The idea is that you can be morally disgusted.

When it comes to understanding annoyance, psychiatrist and psychology professor Randolph Nesse frames it this way: “The question I would ask you to consider about annoyance is, can you map it to some particular situation