PSYC18H3 Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Chapter 1 – Approaches to Understanding Emotions
What Is an Emotion? An emotion is a psychological state or process that mediates between our concerns (or goals)
and events of our world.
As Sylvan Tomkins has said: at any one time an emotion gives priority to one concern over others; It gives
that concern urgency.
Emotions are rational in that they help us deal adaptively with concerns to our current context.
They are local to the concern that has achieved priority, and the emotion makes it urgent.
Emotions are the source of our values: whom and what we love, dislike, and despise.
Emotions mediate our relationships.
Nineteenth-Century Founders
1) Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Approach
- Knowing this, you might imagine that Darwin would have proposed that emotions had functions in our
survival. WRONG
- A central tenet of Darwin’s theory was that humans are descended from other species: we are not only
closer to animals than had been thought, but we ourselves are kinds of animals.
o Darwin asked how are emotions expressed in humans and other animals?
o And, where do our emotions come from?
- He proposed that emotional expressions derive largely from habits that in our evolutionary or individual
past had once been useful.
o reflex-like mechanisms, and some of them occur whether they are useful or not.
o They can be triggered involuntarily in circumstances analogous to those that had triggered the
original habits.
- He thought emotional expressions were like the appendix, a small organ that is part of the gut but which
seemingly has no function; but pre-human ancestors used it
- Darwin; our emotions link us to our past: to the past of our species and to our own infancy.
- He helped provide descriptions of facial expressions, and he argued for the universality of such
expressions.
- The bulk of his book is given over to examples in which emotional expressions occur whether or not they
are of any use.
- At the end of his book does he writes: The movements of expression in the face and body, whatever their
origin might have been, are in themselves of much importance for our welfare.
- They serve as the first means of communication between the mother and her infant; she smiles approval,
and thus encourages her child on the right path, or frowns disapproval
2. William James: The Physiological Approach
- William James argued against the idea that when we feel an emotion it impels us in a certain way, that if
we were to meet a bear in the woods, we would feel frightened and run.
- James proposed that emotion is the perception of changes of our body as we react to that fact.
- When we feel frightened, James thought, what we feel is our heart beating, our skin cold, our posture
frozen, or our legs carrying us away as fast as possible. (James- Lange theory.)
- James’s idea is about the nature of emotional experience.
- He stressed the way in which emotions move us bodily.
- James concentrated on experience and argued that this experience is embodied.
o He proposed that our experience of many emotions involves changes of the autonomic nervous
system as well as changes from movements of muscles and joints.
- James proposed that emotions give “color and warmth” to experience.
o Without these effects, he said, everything would be pale.
o Colloquially we speak of “rose-colored glasses” or a “jaundiced view of life” to indicate how our
emotions affect our perceptions.
3. Sigmund Freud: The Psychotherapeutic Approach
- Sigmund Freud proposed that certain events can be so damaging that they leave emotional scars that can
shape the rest of our lives. His principal exposition was in a series of case studies.
- Freud was one of the first to argue that emotions are at the core of many mental illnesses.
- Like Darwin, Freud thought that an emotion in the present could derive from one in the past, in the
patient’s early life.
- Psychoanalysis: the telling by a patient of her or his life story, which is found to have gaps, the filling of
such gaps by “interpretations” of the therapist, and the insights of the person receiving the therapy, who
realizes something of which he or she had been unconscious.
o often energetically criticized, especially by therapists who prefer newer methods such as
behavior therapy and cognitive-behavior therapy
- Freud’s work suggests that the emotional life of adulthood derives from relationships we had in childhood
with parents or other caregivers.
- This idea was the foundation of the work of John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst who, from 1951 onward,
developed the theory of attachment—the love between an infant and its mother or other caregiver—and
his idea that all later social development derives from this emotional base.
- Richard Lazarus combined them with the Darwinian evolutionary idea of adaptation to propose that
emotions derive from how we evaluate events in the environment in relation to our goals.
Philosophical and Literary Approaches
Aristotle and the Ethics of Emotions
- His most fundamental insight was that whereas many assume that emotions happen to us outside of
our control, really they depend on what we believe.
- In this way, we are responsible for our emotions because we are responsible for our beliefs.
- Aristotle discussed how different judgments give rise to different emotions.
- The emotion is defined cognitively in terms of our belief that a slight has occurred.
- To be slighted is to be treated with contempt, or thwarted, or shamed.
- Our emotional experiences are shaped by our judgments and evaluations.
- Drama, said Aristotle, is about human action, and what can happen when human actions miscarry and
have effects that were unforeseen.
o Nonetheless, we remain responsible for our actions.
- Aristotle noticed two important effects of tragic drama.
o First, at the theater, people are moved emotionally.
o Second, we can experience katharsis of our emotions; purgation or purification, as if one goes to
the theater to rid oneself of toxic emotions, or to elevate them.
▪ Aristotle katharsis meant neither purgation nor purification. It meant clarification—the
clearing away of obstacles to understanding.
- Taking up this line of thought, that emotions are evaluations and depend on our beliefs, not long after
Aristotle’s death, two important schools of philosophy grew up.
o The first was Epicureanism, based on the teachings of Epicurus, who lived near Athens around
300 BCE in a community of like-minded friends.
o The second was Stoicism.
▪ The Stoics were more radical than the Epicureans.
▪ They thought that because emotions derive from desires, to free oneself from crippling
and destructive emotions one should destroy almost all desires.
- The Stoic understanding was that most emotions, especially such emotions as anger, anxiety, and lust, are
damaging to the self and to society, and so should be disciplined out
o As Christianity began to spread, the bad desires and bad thoughts that the Stoics sought to
extirpate became the Seven Deadly Sins
- Epicurean and Stoic philosophy is called ethical because the members of these schools did not only have
the goal of understanding how emotions work, but also the goal of understanding how one could shape
one’s life for the better; does not mean knowing what one should do.
o It is about all the considerations we might have as to how best to structure our own life in
relation to others.
- It’s been said that when one gets right down to it, there are only two real choices in life: epicureanism,
living in a way that is pleasurable though moderate, and stoicism, living so that rationality is the highest
virtue.
Rene Descartes: Philosophically Speaking
- Descartes focuses on the emotions in The Passions of the Soul (1649), which offers a detailed discussion
of sensory and motor nerves, reflexes, and memory.
- As for the emotions (called the passions); He claimed that six fundamental emotions—wonder, desire,
joy, love, hatred, and sadness—occur in the thinking aspect of ourselves, the soul.
- Whereas perceptions tell us about the outer world, and bodily states like hunger and pain tell us about
critical events in the body, emotions tell us what is important in our souls—as we might now say, in our
real selves, in relation to our concerns and our identities.
- Descartes describes how emotions cannot be entirely controlled by thinking, but they can be regulated
by thoughts, especially thoughts that are true.
- Like Aristotle, Descartes suggests that the emotions depend on how we evaluate events.
- Descartes’s idea—a perceptive one—is that our emotions are usually functional but can sometimes be
dysfunctional.
- Blood gives rise to hope and vigor, and from it comes the term sanguine; phlegm gives rise to placidity,
and from it comes the term phlegmatic; yellow bile gives rise to anger, and from it comes the world
choleric; black bile gives rise to despair, and from it comes the word melancholy.
- In the new physiology to which he contributed, emotions arise in the mind, functionally enable our plans,
and affect our bodies.
George Eliot: The World of the Arts
- His writing offers some of the most impressive ideas regarding emotional experience and its place in
intimate relationships.
o Importance of literary art for the emotions and emotions not just in individuals but between
people.
- Eliot says, “sympathies”—emotions that connect us to each other—can be extended by novelists and
other kinds of artists to people outside our usual circle of friends and acquaintances.
- Eliot published Middlemarch, a novel about emotions, which portrays experience from inside the person’s
own consciousness; Each character has aspirations and plans, but each is affected by the unforeseeable
accidents of life.
- Our emotion can act as a sort of compass.
- Eliot’s ideas about how emotions arise and are communicated; They are what relationships are made
of.
Document Summary
An emotion is a psychological state or process that mediates between our concerns (or goals) and events of our world. As sylvan tomkins has said: at any one time an emotion gives priority to one concern over others; it gives that concern urgency. Emotions are rational in that they help us deal adaptively with concerns to our current context. They are local to the concern that has achieved priority, and the emotion makes it urgent. Emotions are the source of our values: whom and what we love, dislike, and despise. Nineteenth-century founders: charles darwin: the evolutionary approach. Knowing this, you might imagine that darwin would have proposed that emotions had functions in our survival. He thought emotional expressions were like the appendix, a small organ that is part of the gut but which seemingly has no function; but pre-human ancestors used it.
