Intro Mind Notes, Week 11: Emotions
(HMW, Ch. 6)

 



A. What Good Are Emotions?

  1. People tend to contrast rationality with emotions, and to suggest that our reason is at odds with our feelings.
  2. However, emotions are essential to our cognitive abilities. Emotions or feelings are the "motors" of action. Without them, we would have not desires or goals, and so would take no action at all. If appropriate action is the mark of intelligence, then reason without emotion would make intelligence impossible. (Even Dr. Spock cares enough to (say) communicate with his mates.) Emotions are crucial for setting our goals. Each one mobilizes the body in its own special way to met some challenge in managing the cognitive niche.
  3. People with frontal lobe damage illustrate this point. Typically such patients are emotionally "flat" - they just don't care. Their lack of motivation cause devastating consequences for their ability to manage the world. They are unable to make decisions, even faced with obvious choices in the face of danger.

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B. Are Emotions Universal?
  1. The evidence from cognitive science is that a good many emotions are universal, for example grief, happiness, disgust, fear, love, surprise and hate. These emotions are found in all cultures, and the facial signs of these emotions in one culture are recognized by people belonging to another culture. In short the "facial language" of emotion is common to us all.
  2. It is true that different cultures differ in the extent to which emotions are expressed (especially in public). (Compare reserved northerners with outgoing southerners.) They also differ on the normal occasions one would expect to feel emotions. (For example in some cultures people are disgusted by cow's milk.) Nevertheless, the range of possible (basic) emotions seems to be common to all normal humans.

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C. Evolutionary Sources of Emotion
  1. Pinker argues that all emotions can be understood as the products of evolution. Human emotions are nicely designed to work in parallel with intelligence to adapt humans to the cognitive niche. Emotional conflicts in present social life arise from a mismatch between our present life styes and the hunter gatherer life style to which we were adapted.
  2. Beauty. Why do we find certain landscapes attractive or beautiful? Because these are exactly the ones two legged hunter-gatherers can best exploit. In these landscapes there are good opportunities for food and protection. But what explains our interest in mountains, high vistas, flowers, sunsets, fire, etc.? Mountains make good navigational aids. High vistas let us scout new territory. Flowers are signs of food. Our interest in sunsets, fire, and the like is prompted by the need to attend to possible threats (coming darkness in the case of fire).
  3. Disgust. Disgust is obviously designed to keep us from poisoning ourselves. Humans have amazingly varied diets; but many items are dangerous, so it is important that the child learn what to eat. The biggest threat comes from animal products, which explains why hardly any non-animal materials (like cloth, sand or bark) are found disgusting. In the first two years, children are open to new foods. This is the period where they learn how their culture eats and are feed by their parents. When they are on their own, it is very important that they not select the wrong food. So they learn disgust at foods not familiar, especially animal foods.
  4. Fear. Fear protects us from threats by causing us to escape or "freeze". Fear of snakes, spiders and large carnivores is basic and universal. Kids in the city fear lions they have never even seen! Fears develop through the child's recognizing the sources of fear in others. Fear is infectious because we all need to learn what to fear, and we also need to know when the group which protects us is or is not going to withdraw from a threat. Humans also have a tendency (largely genetic) for thrill seeking. The function of this is to allow humans to master their fears in case the fearful items are not the threat they appear.
  5. Happiness. Our desire for happiness keeps us motivated to seek the things that better our fitness: e.g. food, shelter, love and social status. When these needs are met, further improvements in these areas (or in the means to obtain them like money) provide fairly small increases in happiness, even when one is motivated by an interest in happiness to obtain them.
  6. Self Control. Self Control is not an emotion, but it involves the control of emotions during goal selection. The fundamental issue is whether to satisfy desires now, or to defer gratification to the future. Any animal whose survival depends on saving resources needs self control. Deciding when and how long to defer gratification is a very complex trade-off. It must take into account the advantage of a "bird in the hand", versus the risk that one may not ever get to enjoy the delayed gratification.
  7. Love and Sympathy. It would appear that love and sympathy are not compatible with natural selection, because they cause an organism to sacrifice its befit (and hence its reproductive opportunities) for the good of others. But selection pressure does not act on animals. The issue is which genes get passed on. An animal that contains a gene for helping its relatives will cause that gene to increase in the future populations. Although such an animal may pay a price in its own reproductive fitness, by helping its relatives who have the same genes, the over all effects on reproduction may be positive. This is the source of emotions of love and sympathy that cause use to care for others.
  8. Altruism. Another source of mutual aid might be that cooperation between two animals may raise the reproductive fitness of both of them. Pinker presents the example of birds that need others to groom their heads. The problem with the development of arrangements of this kind is that when cheaters come on the scene, (that is individuals that receive the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs) they receive more total benefits and so are likely to spread though the population, thus eliminating the kind of animals that originally cooperated. However, if animals can recognize such cheaters and fail to cooperate with them, then cheaters will suffer a disadvantage and so eventually die out. This suggests that the evolution of altruism (aiding others) depends on systems for detecting and punishing cheaters. This, Pinker suggests is the foundation of the human "moral sense", and emotions such as feelings of friendship, anger, gratitude, sympathy, guilt and shame. The evolution of cheating strategies and countermeasures can be very complicated, and may explain the development of intelligence. One tactic is to pretend to cooperate, but cheat just enough to avoid being detected. This would cause the generation of very subtle cheater detectors, and such emotions as trust directed at those who reliably cooperate. One strategy to obtain the benefits of trust is appearing or actually being incapable of resisting altruistic feelings. ("I am incapable of hurting you, no matter what you do.")
  9. Passion. A passion is an emotion out of control or one that seems so. Having passions is can provide one with evolutionary advantages in a social setting where others need to predict and respond to your actions. For example, if you passionately defend your home, leaving the impression that you will do anything to protect it (even fight to the death), then others are less liable to bother with you. Pinker explains that patriotic passions may have a similar source. Similarly the lust for revenge makes it clear to the potential cheater or exploiter that the potential avenger will go to even irrationally excessive lengths to punish any crime against him. This makes it less likely that cheating will be directed at him.
  10. Romantic Love. Why do we fall passionately in love, so badly that we are out of control? Falling into romantic love makes sense in the singles market place where individuals compete for the best possible mate. The problem to be solved is to make sure that an investment in a mate will not be wasted when that mate finds someone else more desirable. Romantic love says to the potential partner: I am so crazy that I will go to any lengths to be with you, so you can trust me not to abandon you. This message is attractive to others and so valuable to the person who sends it.
  11. Grief. Why should we feel grief at the loss of a loved one? What evolutionary sense does that make? It only debilitates the griever. For reproductive fitness, one should get over a loss as quickly as possible. Pinker suggests that grief plays the function of making sure that we protect the ones we love. If grief weren't awful, then loss of the people we love would not matter to us, and we would not protect them.
  12. Self-Deception. It can be an advantage to a person not to know their own motives or emotions. People planning to cheat on their spouses can do a better job of deception if they are not really aware of what they are up to. Confabulations are stories we tell about ourselves that are clearly false, but which we think are true. Split brain patients illustrate confabulation clearly, as when the left hemisphere explain actions caused by right hemisphere as if the left hemisphere were in control. It may be an important advantage to deceive oneself, for this allows a person to present a much more positive front to the world. By believing it oneself, the deception is harder to detect by others. Loss of this "social face" and the revelation of ones hidden (and usually ignoble) motives can be very threatening, since this undermines social power.

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