Donna Chapman Philosophy 455

donna@sypub.com Adv. Philosophy of Mind

October 26, 2004 Fall 2004

The Universalist View of Emotion

The question put forth here is: Are there basic universal emotions or patterns of emotional response that every human being shares. Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Charles Darwin, and Paul Ekman all think so. Descartes and Spinoza both believe that these emotions originate in the realm of “mental substance”, and result from “mental processes”. Darwin and Ekman believe that these emotions are part of our genetic code. Interesting variations exist between Descartes and Spinoza, and between Darwin and Ekman, in terms of exactly how these processes occur (Descartes/Spinoza), and how they become part of our genetic code (Darwin/Ekman).

I am presenting the theory of each view separately. But will discuss Descartes/Spinoza together, and Darwin/Ekman together. I do this because the theories piggy back off of each other. This paper will conclude with a discussion of the merits of each, and my opinion concerning the viability of any or all of the theories put forth.

Descartes

Descartes would say that the soul exists because we think about it. There are two types of thoughts that we think about our souls – Actions of the Soul and Passions of the Soul. Actions of the Soul are desires originating in the soul, and of the soul with no external, finite causality. Passions of the soul are responses in the soul and body based on sense impressions or sense data and how we value it. Passions would be the impetus for experience based fear for example – my fear of flying is based on a bomb scare experience on a 747 18 years ago. Desires are an “other” thing. They have two parts, actions of soul, such as desire to know God, and actions of body wherein we wish to walk across the room, so our legs animate and we move across the room.

Both Actions and Passions of the Soul are caused and maintained by information elicitors called “animal spirits”. Animal spirits are present in the blood, and serve to agitate the passions in a bi-directional fashion. Descartes implies that animal spirits can either excite an emotion based on sense impression, or they can excite an emotion based on the desires of the soul – hence the bi-directional reference. They excite and drive the soul to want to act. For example in the case of fear, animal spirits excite the soul to want to run. In the case of courage, animal spirits make the soul want to stand and fight. On the other hand, they drive the soul to willingly bond with objects that it sees as pleasant or worth having as in the case of love, with no apparent physical connection at all.

This is a mechanical process. To diagram the process, I’ll examine the emotion “fear”. Fear is usually rooted in a mental image initially related to a sense impression most of the time. Such as, I was bitten by a dog once, so now I’m afraid of dogs. So I’ll use the example of seeing a dog. The “heat of the heart” circulates blood and animal spirits throughout the body. When I see a dog coming toward me, the animal spirits pass through pores in my brain to the place where the impression of “dog biting me” resides, along with its associated feelings. The animal spirits are excited by apprehension or fear or a combination of other emotions, the intensity of which is determined by the intensity of the mental impression of “dog biting me” that is stored in my brain. The animal spirits move to the pineal gland in the brain, and excite it to motion. When the gland vibrates, the animal spirits are able to pass through it into the circulatory system and on to the glands that control the heart beat (pumps faster), and the legs (prepare for flight). They also circle back to the brain (through the pineal gland again) to maintain and strengthen the passion of fear. The degree of intensity of the initial impression (could be a memory of an actual sense experience) is determined by my judgment as to the import of it.

Under most circumstances reason can supervene the passions, particularly in the case of actions of the soul. The soul can act in harmony with reason and control the emotion /passion. However sometimes the soul and the animal spirits conflict with one another. Such is the case of raging anger. In this case the animal spirits are agitating the body/muscles with such strength and persistence that the soul has no control over them, and reason cannot surface. It is much more difficult for reason to supervene on passions of the soul because of their root in reality (a physical sense impression).

Descartes outlines six emotions of a special type. He calls them “primitive passions” because he believes that that they are innate, a-priori, in all human beings. They are “first cause” impressions of: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. By “first cause” I mean that animal spirits excite “actions of the soul” to turn its attention to a type of mental state that he calls an “immaterial mental state”. Descartes would say that these emotions (the immaterial mental states that are the basic six) exist “a priori”, as innate states without previous input of any kind. He would also say that God put them there. (Descartes also considers knowledge of logical principle and mathematics, and the knowledge of God all “a priori” or innate.) All of the other states that we call “emotions” are either subsets of the original basic six or combinations of them with or without a sense impression connection. These secondary emotions are differentiated further by desire (move to want for a future good, or impending need) and the excitations or elicitations of the animal spirits based on how significant to us the impression are that they are connected with, and how many senses they actually affect.

So let us break down a secondary emotion, agent – an event occurs that causes the soul to apply itself to thinking about an object or person which seems contradictory/antagonistic/upsetting to I, associating these thoughts to the impression in the brain representing the object as someone or something to get angry about. The animal spirits are then attracted to the areas of basic emotions involved with the impression to intensify it and strengthen it. In the case of anger we may be thinking about hatred, desire truncated (didn’t get what I want), and perhaps even sadness (sadness might add a spin of disappointment to the mix) They are driven, by exciting the pineal gland, to pass through it to the muscles that control the sense organs causing them to react: blood pressure goes up, jaws may clinch, fists may clinch, yelling may occur etc in proportion to the judgment I make about the importance of the issue that has triggered the anger.

Spinoza

Spinoza believed that emotions are modes of imagining. They are misunderstandings based on flawed information. He is a bit of a Stoic in his thinking. He regards emotions as irrational responses which should be under the control of reason. Obviously there are emotional situations that appear to be “out of control” therefore they must be created out of some sort of misunderstanding or bad information input. Why else would we exhibit such irrational behavior?

Emotions have their origin in “affects”. The root of an affect is the concept of “striving” (desire/dukah – an eastern concept). All people possess as a part of their nature an instinct for survival both in a figurative sense and in a literal sense. Striving to preserve one’s being is conatus. Striving to preserve ones mind and body – an existential survival – is called an appetite. When an appetite becomes conscious, it is “desire” the first of Spinoza’s basic emotions of affects. As we experience, or become aware of higher degrees of being, or perfection, we experience “pleasure”. If we experience a reduction of perfection, or we are distracted from striving to preserve our being, we experience “pain”. All other emotions are a subset of desire, pleasure or pain. The degree to which we can differentiate good and evil is relative to the level of intuitive perfection (knowledge) that we have attained. Pity, for example is a type of sadness arising from another persons injury or misfortune. To experience pity is to experience a decrease in one’s own power to preserve being. Spinoza builds in his “out” here. He defines intuitive perfection/knowledge as relative to our innate desire to strive for God. The more knowledge we have (the more perfect our powers of reason) the more God-like we are.

Spinoza offers a further differentiation of emotion type: passions and actions. Passions are desires attached to inadequate ideas. Passions occur outside of us. Actions are desires attached to adequate ideas. They occur within us as the result of our nature. It is through passions and actions relative to the basic three desire, pleasure and pain, that the vast body of emotions of various flavor and intensity are generated.

Spinoza believes that only knowledge can lead to happiness. Happiness is breaking our slavery to our passions. If we don’t understand our emotions, or when our desires attach to finite things, things that can be destroyed, then we are enslaved by our passions. The more we understand our emotions, the less power our appetites and desires will have and the happier we will be.

Descartes/Spinoza Evaluation

Neither Descartes nor Spinoza actually did any experiments to prove their theories of emotions. They both believe that reason should suffice. Vis: If we can think, then we can think about emotions. And because we can think about emotions, the result attained through reasoning must be correct. They didn’t experiment because they didn’t think they needed to.

Descartes has written a philosophy based on reason. All his power lies in being able to think through a problem whether it be mathematical or ethical or emotional. He never asks the question “is it appropriate to apply my theory of mental processes to emotions?” . He assumes that it does, and proceeds to shoe horn his observations of emotional behavior into his “method of reason”. When he hits the wall with questions like – “how ARE these emotions innate?, and “how DOES everyone have them?” – he throws the God card.

Descartes does have something interesting going on in the nature of the process. What if the concept of animal spirits/pineal gland notion pertains more to the hormones and endocrine system. Hormones are capable of profound almost instantaneous mood change. They have powerful impact on us physically and mentally. We can be laughing one minute and crying the next. Perhaps these are the actual “animal spirits” about whom he refers.

Spinoza also has a mental process approach, but it’s based on a more primal set of emotions. Descartes never really develops why the basic emotions are such elaborate constructs as love, hate wonder, desire, joy and sadness. He, no doubt, settled on them from a purely mathematical sense: he couldn’t break them down into any lesser elements. Spinoza does this very well and I think that there is merit to it.

He does however skirt dangerously the area of “psychological egoism” or the notion that we are constituted to only look out for our own interests. If we are indeed pleasure/pain/desire driven then at the very essence of our emotion process - we will avoid pain at all costs, and try to maintain a pleasure state. He does not account for the supervening of this process. Such a case would be that of an action involving personal sacrifice.

Spinoza also tiptoes into some very interesting territory when he uses the word “striving”. This has a strongly Eastern flavor (dukah/desire). It is interesting that he never takes the plunge to venture down the path “what would happen if we tried to dis-identify with “striving”?

Interestingly..neither Descartes nor Spinoza ever actually state that everyone has these innate basic emotions. However, the nature of their theories about reason apply to every one. ALL humans think therefore ALL humans are. All human machines work this way. There is no need to state that all humans have these emotions because they are talking about all humans in the structure of their theories. (obvious exceptions are mentally damaged people, or in the case of the timeline of Darwin and Spoinoza..women! men think, women didn’t)

Darwin

Darwin believes that emotions in humans and emotional displays in animals have similar origins. The watchword of his theory is “serviceability”. The term “serviceability” applies to purposefulness or usefulness. Which emotions or behaviors are necessary vs unnecessary to an individuals survival. Everything we do has purpose, and most of the time our emotional reactions to given stimulus are useful. Over time these purposeful, useful emotions/behaviors become genetically hardwired into us ensuring the survival or our species.

Sometimes the triggers of these useful emotions modify through natural selection, based on societal need, environmental need or other factors. Sometimes through specialization behaviors become unnecessary and drop out altogether. But the bottom line is that at some point emotions started out external to us as experience, and through repetition and habitual practice became genetically part of us.

Natural selection suggests that any behavioral change, no matter how small, if useful (serviceable) is preserved, if not useful is discarded. Natural selection is the key to Darwin’s theory that emotions are hard wired genetic responses. He believes that they are somehow hard wired because he observed certain emotional displays which crossed cultural and economic boundaries.

Darwin theorized three principles concerning the development and proliferation of emotional behaviors. The first principle answers the origin of the behaviors. It says that certain events or needs elicit certain useful mental states and certain useful behavior. These mental states attach to each other fear, run etc. The second principle answers the question “where did the tremendous variety of human emotions come from?” All emotions have a physiological component and a sensory component. In a dualist sense, if there is one emotion there must also exist its polar opposite, and antithetical position. This antithetical emotion also has an associated antithetical physiological component and an antithetical sensory component. The third principle explains physiological reactions triggered by emotion which persists after the emotion passes., such as trembling. Darwin considers these physiological occurrences to be independent stand alone emotional events. They occur independent of the will and independent of genetic hard wiring. Emotions as we know them are constructs based on these three principles.

Darwin does not name specific emotions, but through extensive and detailed observation of facial expression, he hoped to answer the question: “Why does an emotion occur?” He is the first to approach this question. Descartes and Spinoza have mainly been concerned with why and how emotions occur. Darwin thought that facial expression was connected with why because, for example, he observed that a smile usually elicits a pleasant response in an individual. This occurs whether the smile comes from the individual themselves or from another person. He makes the jump to a universalist statement because he observed the same facial expressions connected with the same emotions in various countries around the world. These responses were common whether the country was developed or not.

Ekman

Paul Ekman originally set out to disprove Darwin’s theory of universal genetic emotional expression, but his own experimentation not only proved it (by his evaluations of the results), but also actually implied that there are six basic namable emotions. They are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.

While Darwin made conclusions about gross behaviors (Darwin did include his own evaluation of facial expression Ekman, observed the minutiae of muscle movements and their timing – particularly of the human face – and produced an extremely accurate measurement system for what he terms “emotions”. He is guilty of heavily implying that facial expressions are emotions. There are several obvious problems with this claim. For example, if facial expression is emotion, then why don’t we “feel” angry every time we frown? What about actors? Do they “experience” the emotions that they create the external structure of at will? His point of view for his observations is an exterior view. He is observing activity that is occurring inside an individual, evidenced by the manifestation of facial expression, and other physiological occurrences.

Ekman broke down the mental/sociological/biological process into of the emotional expression into what he terms “affect programs”. An affect program has a structure that models much the way a computer collects and parses information from relational databases. The “affect program” is the master code. It is a routine that “calls” and directs emotional responses from a multitude of databases such as our experiences, our memories, our expectations, our gene pool, our goals and aspirations. He believes that this code is genetic. This code updates and overwrites itself over time as we grow and mature. We have to learn to acquire control of our emotional expression, but the way we control them when we are10 years old is very different than the way we control them at 30 (hopefully). The next element of the program is the “appraisal system”. The appraisal system decides when to trigger an affect program. Timing is everything! We also need a way to decide which affect program to run. This job is accomplished by the “elicitor”. Now what’s the program output (facial expression) going to look like to the rest of the world? And, will any facial expression do? Shall a smile always be a huge toothy grin? We have the “display rules’ to handle those decisions. The last element of the program is the “coping mechanism”. This is the engine that lets us deal psychologically with the source of the emotional trigger event.

Emotional responses have finite attributes. Emotional responses are brief, usually lasting just a few seconds. Ekman differentiates emotions which last for a considerably longer duration (like days or weeks) as “moods”. Emotional responses are quick. The appraisal system, along with the elicitor, look up the appropriate (maybe, or not) affect program very rapidly and run it. Emotional responses are complex. As from a central core, the responses called by the affect program spoke out to many physiological systems almost simultaneously. It is not a linear process, it is a nexus. Palms sweat at the same time that hearts race, at the same time that eyes widen, at the same time that respiration becomes quick and shallow, at the same time that mouth opens to scream perhaps in the case of fear. Emotional responses are organized. They are constructs of experience, biofeedback, memories and expectations – all serving to temper the quality of an emotional event. Emotional responses are hard to control. Although facial expressions can be supervened by the will. Consciously controlling heart and respiration rates and sweaty palms is impossible.

Ekman considers facial expression to be a necessary component of the qualia of an emotion, but not the identity of the emotional event. (contradicts himself a bit here). For example, if an emotion occurs, vis happiness, which has a trigger for facial expression, vis a smile, and the individual willfully supervenes the facial expression, vis frowns, the person is still happy, but not as happy as if they had smiled.

Ekman believes that he proved his theory through experimentation. To eliminate the contamination of modern media exposure, he traveled to New Guinea to study the people of the South Fore. (whether or not this is true is debatable) These were a relatively illiterate people who had not been exposed to many outsiders. They were shown photos of faces expressing emotions and were asked to identify the emotion being expressed. Inversely they were asked to express a particular emotion themselves. It was found that the expression of happiness, sadness, anger and disgust all seemed to have universal content. That is, they expressed these emotions physiologically (by facial expression) the same way that we do , and as does everyone else in the world. There were two exceptions to Ekman’s confirmation of universal emotions. The exceptions were fear and surprise. These emotions have shared expressive elements, so although they were differentiated from the fist 4 emotions, but could not be differentiated from each other.

Based on the analysis of the results of this experiment, and many more like it, Ekman determined that there are six basic emotions – happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust – and the way that they are expressed (based on facial expressions) is genetically encoded into each human being and although the expression of the emotion is the same for all, the events which trigger the responses can and do vary from society to society based on cultural and socio economic influences.

Darwin/Ekman Evaluation

In all of the reference material that I read I found that Darwin was careful to say “emotions in humans” and “emotional displays” in animals. Why is Darwin’s “emotion” in a human different from an “emotional display” in an animal? He does not seem to see that he is observing behavior only on both counts. He is external to and isolated from the actual emotional event. He is observing emotional displays on both counts…he is not documenting an emotion.

Whereas Descartes and Spinoza regard emotion as originating within us as type of mental state (in other words, they exist as a mental mechanical process) Darwin observed displays of emotional behavior and plugged them right into his evolutionary theory, and decided that they were genetic, selected by usability etc.

Darwin also thinks that emotions trigger more easily over time because of habit. I think that there is some sense to this. But an interesting question is: “what motivates this ease?” Ethics? Social Constructivism? Codependence?

Darwin believes that everyone experiences the same emotional response because of the commonality of facial expression that he observed during his documentation period. By virtue of his application of natural selection theory, these emotional responses are genetic to all people.

Every resource element that I read about Paul Ekman expressed concerns about his implication that facial expressions ARE emotions…he never comes right out and says it but the tone of his writing heavily implies that he thinks that this is the case.

Darwin’s explanation of genetic encoding through natural selection was Ekman’s deal closer in terms of answering the question of how do we all have these emotions.

Both allow for cultural relativism and they both do an excellent job of documenting emotional responses, and certainly there is a credibility to the notion that emotional responses may be universal, however they have not really said much about true emotional experiences.

Conclusion

All four are motivated by credibility. They all shoe horn emotions into their original thesis statements. They all think that if it works for one area it will work for all. They don’t ask necessary questions such as “Does my theory fit what I am observing about emotions?” They just make them fit.

Descartes’ motivation is to lend credibility to his “method of reason”. He has created a mechanistic theory of how the body and mind work based on dual substance, and he believes that all mental processes fit within this model. It does not necessarily follow that emotions work the same way that thinking does.

Spinoza’s motivation is to clear the waters a bit. He likes Descartes, but wants a more up front theological commitment. Emotions are very simply a matter of a drive to ensure survival, and our reason is mitigated by a desire to know or be like God. He is also lending credibility to his philosophy at large by applying the principles to every aspect of the human state again without regard for the appropriateness of it.

Although Descartes and Spinoza both outline very competently a possible process of feeling an emotion, neither of them ever actually define what an emotion is! They claim it but have not proven it.

Darwin is particularly obvious in his attempt to shape the origins of emotions within the framework of his theory of Evolution Through Natural Selection.

Ekman has observed in microscopic detail the physical evidence of emotional response in terms of facial expression, and Darwin’s theory on the genetic nature of these responses is the glue that holds it together. But neither he nor Darwin ever actually prove that the responses that they are documenting ARE in fact emotions. They want them to be, but haven’t proven anything.

The determination of the universality of emotion ends up being an issue of emotional experiences vs emotional responses. One can observe an emotional response but one cannot observe an emotional experience. Darwin/Ekman are only detailing emotional responses. Descartes and Spinoza try to express the emotional experience in terms of process.

I like Descartes’ notion of animal spirits..but I think they are probably hormones and the endocrine system. From Spinoza I like the primal drive emotions..desire/pleasure/pain relative to survival. From Darwin I like his idea of emotions being easier to trigger based on habit and repetition. And from Ekman I like the concept of affect programs. I have a feeling that the actual mechanism for emotion probably works something like an affect program. I think that the actual process of experiencing an emotion must be a combination of these. But there is something “other”. There is something beyond what we can describe from within our physiological shells that is “emotion”. The bottom line for me is: All descriptions or attempted definitions of what an emotion is fall short. No one to date has actually gotten it right. It seems that once one area is focused upon in detail, another aspect of the emotional experience is neglected. This concept is understood in Taoism. Once you try to communicate what the Tao is, you have lost it. So far the same seems to be true of emotions. I think that an emotional experience is something other than the sum of it’s parts.
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