Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [332]
Social psychologist Ross Buck said that the resolution of the controversy lay in the recognition that there is more than one sort of cognition: “knowledge by acquaintance,” or direct sensory awareness, and “knowledge by description,” the cognitive interpretation of sensory data, a distinction expounded some decades ago by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Feelings may occur first, said Buck, but are transformed by the mind’s knowledge into cognitive judgments about the information they convey—which then modify the feelings. The process is a continuing interaction. “Feeling, expression, physiological responding, cognition, and goal-related behavior are interrelated processes, playing integrated and interacting roles in motivation and emotion.”76
Robert Plutchik identified the Zajonc and Lazarus views as only parts of a larger whole. He defined an emotion as a chain of events in a complex feedback-loop system. A stimulus starts the process, but from then on there is an interplay between cognitive evaluations, feelings, and physiological changes, impulses to action, and overt actions, the results altering their own causes in a continuing process.77 Plutchik interpreted both the Zajonc and Lazarus data as products of research methods that look at single events rather than the whole process:
One can put an electrode in the brain of a cat, or of a human being, and produce emotional reactions without a cognitive evaluation of an external event…It is obviously possible to focus attention on any of the elements of the chain. One can then produce theories that emphasize, for example, the primacy of arousal, or the primacy of expressive behavior.78
The ancient theory that emotions are a major source of motivation that often overpowers the better judgment of the mind seemed to be made obsolete by the Darwinian evidence that emotions are signals and cues calling forth behavior with survival value. Yet how could the Darwinian view be reconciled with the ample evidence that we are often governed by useless or harmful emotions—panic, depression, jealousy, self-loathing, persistent grieving for a lost love, phobias, and even more crippling and tormenting emotional disturbances?
The question is quicksand; tread upon it and you may never escape. Let us be cautious; let us only look at it from afar and for an instant.
Although there is nothing like general agreement, a number of leading figures in the field hold a generally neo-Darwinian view of the emotions. They regard them as a source of information that enables us to appraise situations and judge what actions to take to achieve valued goals.79 But the classic antagonism of emotions and intellect has largely vanished; in the light of cognitive psychology, it has come to appear that emotions and cognition serve the same end, self-preservation. Robert Plutchik has argued that in simple animals, emotions are the cues to actions with survival value, and in more complex animals, including humankind, cognitive capacity performs the same function, correcting or amplifying the predictions of the emotions—though we still need their power to produce the behavior:
The appropriateness of an emotional response can determine whether the individual lives or dies. The whole cognitive process evolved over millions of years in order to make the evaluation of stimulus events more correct and the predictions more precise so that the emotional behavior that finally resulted would be adaptively related to the stimulus