KEY THEME

Emotions are complex psychological states that serve many functions in human behavior and relationships.

KEY QUESTIONS

The exhilaration of reaching the top of a steep trail. The fear and worry when a friend is late coming in to camp, and the relief and joy when he finally shows up, safe and sound. Emotions color our life from the earliest days of infancy throughout old age. But what, exactly, is emotion?

Emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response. How are emotions different from moods? Generally, emotions are intense but rather short-lived. Emotions are also more likely to have a specific cause, to be directed toward some particular object, and to motivate a person to take some sort of action. In contrast, a mood involves a milder emotional state that is more general and pervasive, such as gloominess or contentment. Moods may last for a few hours or even days (Gendolla, 2000).

Emotional processes are closely tied to motivational processes. Like the word motivation, the root of the word emotion is the Latin word movere, which means “to move.” Often emotions do move us to act. For example, consider the anger that motivates you to seek out a new job when you feel you’ve been treated unfairly by your manager or co-workers. Emotions often motivate behavior (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013).

Emotions help us to set goals, but emotional states can also be goals in themselves. We seek out romantic partners to enjoy the bliss of falling in love or we practice hard to experience the exhilaration of winning a sports competition. And most of us direct our lives so as to maximize the experience of positive emotions and minimize the experience of negative emotions (Gendolla, 2000).

At one time, psychologists considered emotions to be disruptive forces that interfered with rational behavior (Cacioppo & Gardner, 1999). Emotions were thought of as primitive impulses that needed to be suppressed or controlled.

Today, psychologists are much more attuned to the importance of emotions in many different areas of behavior, including rational decision making, purposeful behavior, and setting appropriate goals (Mikels & others, 2011). Most of our choices are guided by our feelings, sometimes without our awareness (Kouider & others, 2011). But consider the fate of people who have lost the capacity to feel emotion because of damage to specific brain areas. Despite having an intact ability to reason, such people tend to make disastrous decisions (Damasio, 2004; Rilling & Sanfey, 2011).

Similarly, people who are low in what is termed emotional intelligence may have superior reasoning powers, but they sometimes experience one failure in life after another (Mayer & others, 2004; Van Heck & den Oudsten, 2008). Why? Because they lack the ability to manage their own emotions, comprehend the emotional responses of others, and respond appropriately to the emotions of other people. In contrast, people who are high in emotional intelligence possess these abilities, and they are able to understand and use their emotions (Mayer & others, 2008; Telle & others, 2011).

EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATIONS OF EMOTION

One of the earliest scientists to systematically study emotions was Charles Darwin. Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, 13 years after he had laid out his general theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and only a year after his book on the evolution of humans, The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin (1872) described the facial expressions, body movements, and postures used to express specific emotions in animals and humans. He argued that emotions reflect evolutionary adaptations to the problems of survival and reproduction.

Like Darwin, today’s evolutionary psychologists believe that emotions are the product of evolution (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013; Cosmides & Tooby, 2013). Emotions help us solve adaptive problems posed by our environment. They “move” us toward potential resources, and they move us away from potential dangers. Fear prompts us to flee an attacker or evade a threat. Anger moves us to turn and fight a rival. Love propels us to seek out a mate and care for our offspring. Disgust prompts us to avoid a sickening stimulus. Obviously, the capacity to feel and be moved by emotion has adaptive value: An organism that is able to quickly respond to rewards or threats is more likely to survive and successfully reproduce.

Darwin (1872) also pointed out that emotional displays serve the important function of informing other organisms about an individual’s internal state. When facing an aggressive rival, the snarl of a baboon signals its readiness to fight. A wolf rolling submissively on its back telegraphs its willingness to back down and avoid a fight.

Emotions are also important in situations that go well beyond physical survival. Virtually all human relationships are heavily influenced by emotions. Our emotional experience and expression, as well as our ability to understand the emotions of others, are crucial to the maintenance of social relationships (Reis & others, 2000).

In the next several sections, we’ll consider each of the components of emotion in turn, beginning with the component that is most familiar: the subjective experience of emotion.

Most emotion researchers today agree that there are a limited number of basic emotions that all humans, in every culture, experience. These basic emotions are thought to be biologically determined, the products of evolution. And what are these basic emotions? As shown in TABLE 8.3, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, anger, and sadness are most commonly cited as the basic emotions (Ekman & Cordaro, 2011; Matsumoto & Hwang, 2011a).

Many psychologists contend that each basic emotion represents a sequence of responses that is innate and hard-wired in the brain (Tooby & Cosmides, 2000; Vytal & Hamann, 2010). But your emotional experience is not limited to pure forms of each basic emotion. Rather, each basic emotion represents a family of related emotional states (Ekman & Cordaro, 2011). For example, consider the many types of angry feelings, which can range from mild annoyance to bitter resentment or fierce rage.

Further, psychologists recognize that emotional experience can be complex and multifaceted. People often experience a blend of emotions. In more complex situations, people may experience mixed emotions, in which very different emotions are experienced simultaneously or in rapid succession (Larsen & McGraw, 2011).

CULTURE, GENDER, AND EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE

In diverse cultures, psychologists have found general agreement regarding the subjective experience and meaning of different basic emotions. Canadian psychologist James Russell (1991) compared emotion descriptions by people from several different cultures. He found that emotions were most commonly classified according to two dimensions: (1) the degree to which the emotion is pleasant or unpleasant and (2) the level of activation, or arousal, associated with the emotion. For example, joy and contentment are both pleasant emotions, but joy is associated with a higher degree of activation (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999).

While these may be the most fundamental dimensions of emotion, cultural variations in classifying emotions do exist. For example, Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama (1991, 1994) found that Japanese subjects classified emotions in terms of not two but three important dimensions. Along with the pleasantness and activation dimensions, they also categorized emotions along a dimension of interpersonal engagement. This dimension reflects the idea that some emotions result from your connections and interactions with other people (Kitayama & others, 2000). Japanese participants rated anger and shame as being about the same in terms of unpleasantness and activation, but they rated shame as being much higher than anger on the dimension of interpersonal engagement.

Why would the Japanese emphasize interpersonal engagement as a dimension of emotion? Japan is a collectivistic culture, so a person’s identity is seen as interdependent with those of other people, rather than independent, as is characteristic of the more individualistic cultures. Thus, social context is an important part of private emotional experience (Kitayama & Park, 2007).

What about gender differences in emotional experience? Both men and women tend to believe that women are “more emotional” than men (Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009; Vigil, 2009). However, many studies have shown that men and women don’t really differ in either frequency or intensity of emotional experience (see Kring & Gordon, 1998; Thunberg & Dimberg, 2000).

Rather, the sexes do differ in the expression of emotions. In a nutshell, women tend to be more emotionally expressive (Langer, 2010). Women tend to be much more at ease expressing their emotions, thinking about emotions, and recalling emotional experiences (Feldman Barrett & others, 2000). We discuss gender differences in emotion in more detail in Chapter 10, Gender and Sexuality.