William James argued in 1884 that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike and afraid because we tremble, not the other way round. The James-Lange theory said emotions are feelings made from perceptions of changes in physiological conditions relating to autonomic and motor functions. Appraisal theories say that emotions differ from one another because of how a person evaluates the significance of a situation. Two people can be in the same situation and feel different emotions because they have different thoughts about it. Paul Ekman writes that emotional responses are automatic: we do not choose to feel them, they just happen to us. The experiential part of an emotion, what we feel in our bodies, is the only part we really notice.
Scientists disagree about facial expressions of emotion. Lisa Feldman Barrett argued that recent evidence challenges the idea that they evolved, while Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner replied that the science shows they are universal. In the late 1960s, two researchers separately showed photographs of facial expressions to people in various cultures and found strong cross-cultural agreement in how the expressions were labeled. To test whether media explained the agreement, Ekman studied people in a New Guinea community who had seen few outsiders and no media portrayals of emotion, and they recognized the same emotions. Ekman and Keltner say that choosing an emotion word from a list for each face, in cultures that are very different from each other, has been replicated nearly 200 times. Experiments on facial expressions have been done with observers from dozens of countries, with significant agreement on which emotion is portrayed.
Two researchers wrote that it is fair to ask whether people in radically different cultures interpret facial expressions the same way when describing them in their own terms rather than choosing from a list. A different kind of study looked at spontaneous expressions. It compared Japanese and American people and found the same expressions in private but different expressions in public, which fits the idea of display rules. Communities shape what people should feel at certain times, which are called feeling rules, and how an emotion should be expressed, which are called display rules. Trying to hide a feeling is called emotional suppression, and showing an emotion you do not feel, such as smiling when you are angry, is called masking.
How many emotions are there? Most emotion scientists agree that there are at least five core emotions, though experts hold differing views. Basic emotion theory predicts a bodily signature for each basic emotion: correlated changes in facial expression, autonomic nervous system activity and preset and learned actions. Scientists think emotions are made up of several parts that work together, involving both the brain and the body and how they interact. Anger and fear can both make a person shaky and make the heart beat faster, so different emotions can feel alike in the body. Many different areas of the brain process emotions, and scientists call this an emotion processing network.
Scientists continue to debate emotional development. One question is whether children build emotion concepts onto inborn capacities. The other is whether they start with undifferentiated feelings that they carve into distinct emotions. Empirical studies have been unable to settle the debate, with scientists drawing divergent conclusions, sometimes from the same data. Research shows that by three to four months of age, infants possess rudimentary concepts for pleasantness and unpleasantness. Researchers who study how children learn emotions hypothesize that children learn emotion categories by observing others use the same emotion word to label highly variable events. Infants and young children cannot yet name an emotion or say why they feel it. Babies are born crying, and in their first three or four months they cry often.
The amygdala is a tiny part of the brain, the shape and size of an almond. In a 2007 UCLA brain-imaging study, the amygdala was less active when people labeled the emotion of a face. The study scanned 30 people, aged 18 to 36, while they viewed pictures of faces making different emotional expressions. Labeling a face with an emotion word such as "angry" reduced the amygdala response, but labeling it with a name such as "Harry" did not. The lead researcher compared labeling feelings to braking at a yellow light, though the effects are likely to be modest.
The brain changes as children grow. The prefrontal cortex is called the brain's executive control center, and it handles planning, impulse control, attention, decision-making and emotional regulation. The amygdala can detect an important fearful event and pass that information to the prefrontal cortex. In one cross-sectional study, information flowed mainly from the amygdala to two frontal regions in childhood, and from those frontal regions to the amygdala in adolescence. Because the brain's regulating system is still maturing, young children often feel emotions more intensely and find it harder to regulate their reactions. The right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex develops largely in the preteen and teen years, the UCLA researcher said, and friends and family could shape its response, but this is not yet established.
Even crying is not settled. One scientist proposed that crying flushes out chemicals present during strong feelings, but not all scientists agree. Some doubt that crying flushes out enough hormones to explain relief, since even a long bout of sobbing produces only a thimble full of hormone-laden tears. Some studies suggest we cry not because we are upset but because we are trying to get over being upset, so crying may reset the body toward calm. Many scientists argue that crying is an involuntary way of calming down, but studies have not been conclusive because genuine grief and crying are hard to induce and measure in a laboratory.
What do emotions do for us? Some researchers say emotions have adaptive value because they quickly mobilize the resources needed for life tasks and communicate socially useful information through bodily expressions. Researchers have argued that sadness may serve useful purposes, including encouraging reflection and signaling the need for social support. Neuroscience has shown that emotion is not an obstacle to reasoning but a necessary part of effective decision making, providing information for judging risk and predicting consequences. Some scientists think emotions make us act without thinking, while others, like Aristotle and Hume, think emotions are an important part of thinking and making good decisions.
Words to know
- universal: the same everywhere
- appraisal: judging a situation
- suppression: hiding a feeling
- adolescence: the teen years
- involuntary: not chosen
