Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [333]
This still left unanswered the question of why we so often experience emotions that mislead us, are useless, or are damaging. Nico Frijda of the University of Amsterdam, a leading emotion researcher, offered several answers, among them that dysfunctional emotions sometimes result from a faulty evaluation of the situation, sometimes from contingencies that are more than one can cope with, and sometimes are emergency reactions in situations where slower and more thoughtful evaluation would serve us better.81
Psychosomatic research has shown, too, that when we cannot escape from or take action against a threatening or tense situation, our emotions are no guide to action but a source of pain and illness.82 The hostage held by fanatics, the front-line soldier, the terminal cancer patient, cannot benefit from most of their emotions but only be damaged by them. Finally, when we have opposing or incompatible desires, or desires that are in conflict with social constraints, we experience emotions that are pathological.
In recent years many researchers have been mining narrow lodes, not making large illuminating discoveries but adding bits and pieces of all sorts to an emerging multicausal—or, to put it more candidly, patch-work—theory of emotion and motivation. Their work ranges widely from the somatic to the neural, the cognitive, and elsewhere. What follows is a hodgepodge of latter-day examples; feel free to sample as much or as little as you like.
—Some researchers have explored how specific neurotransmitters influence emotion and motivation. The molecules of cholecystokinins, for instance, plug up certain neural receptors in the GI tract and the CNS, and thereby affect appetite; obese men, given doses of the chemical, eat less.83
—Others have sought to link specific emotions to particular parts of the body. In one such study, 172 volunteers named the parts in which they felt different emotions: shame mostly in the face, fear in many areas but especially the anal region, disgust in the stomach and throat, and so on. But the researchers did not feel that this meant the emotions were based primarily on bodily experience; rather, they saw the somatic information as part of a composite in which awareness, cognitive appraisal, and body feeling all interacted.84
—In seeking the sources of empathy, researchers have observed children over time to see when precursor emotions appear and develop. They have found that an infant will cry when it hears another infant cry, apparently out of a primitive form of empathy (the same infant will not cry if it hears a tape recording of its own crying). And as we saw earlier, a child nearing one year will react with distress to the sight and sound of another person in pain, but at two or three will try to comfort or even help the other person. The reasonable conclusion: Compassion is a product of personality development and socialization, building on the empathetic emotional foundation.85
—Antonio Damasio has distinguished between emotional states (bodily symptoms of an emotion) and emotional feelings (cognitive awareness of the symptoms). This far, he sounds like William James, but he goes beyond James by saying that emotional states and emotional feelings can be unconscious and that the physiological experience of a strong emotion, once learned, becomes a somatic marker— an automatic guide to swift action in emergencies and to swift decision-making. To prove the existence of somatic markers, Damasio tested patients who had ventromedial frontal lobe damage and compared them with control subjects: Both reacted to an innately alarming stimulus (a sudden loud sound) with increased skin conductance, but when they were shown pictures of disaster scenes or mutilations (stimuli which should produce a learned emotional response), the control subjects showed a sharp spike in skin conductance; the patients with ventromedial cortical damage showed none. What the patients had learned