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A General Theory of Emotions andSocial Life

This unique volume presents a general theory linking emotions and ratio-nal thought to social relationships. In his innovative new book TenHoutenpresents an encyclopaedic classification of the emotions (describing 54 intotal) and offers one of the most original and multi-leveled accounts of theemotions and social life ever developed.

This neurocognitive sociology of the emotions shows primary emotionsto be adaptive reactions to fundamental problems of life which haveevolved into elementary social relationships and which can predict occur-rences of the entire spectrum of primary, complex secondary, and tertiaryemotions. The scope of this work is comprehensive and includes the devel-opment of emotions in childhood, symbolic elaboration of complexemotions, emotions management, violence, and cultural and gender differ-ences.

This volume is essential reading for all those with an interest in theemotions across the social and behavioral sciences.

Warren D. TenHouten, UCLA Professor of Sociology, has pioneered theinterdisciplinary perspective of neurocognitive sociology. In Time andSociety (2005), he presented a general theory of culture and time con-sciousness. Here, affect-spectrum theory classifies the primary, secondaryand tertiary emotions and links each to specific, elementary social relation-ships.




Routledge advances in sociology

This series aims to present cutting-edge developments and debates withinthe field of sociology. It will provide a broad range of case studies and thelatest theoretical perspectives, while covering a variety of topics, theoriesand issues from around the world. It is not confined to any particularschool of thought.

1 Virtual GlobalizationVirtual spaces / tourist spacesEdited by David Holmes

2 The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and AestheticsPeter Hutchings

3 Immigrants and National Identity in EuropeAnna Triandafyllidou

4 Constructing Risk and Safety in Technological PracticeEdited by Jane Summerton and Boel Berner

5 Europeanisation, National Identities and MigrationChanges in boundary constructions between Western and EasternEuropeWillfried Spohn and Anna Triandafyllidou

6 Language, Identity and ConflictA comparative study of language in ethnic conflict in Europe andEurasiaDiarmait Mac Giolla Chríost

7 Immigrant Life in the U.S.Multi-disciplinary perspectivesEdited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Colin Wayne Leach




8 Rave Culture and ReligionEdited by Graham St. John

9 Creation and Returns of Social CapitalA new research programEdited by Henk Flap and Beate Völker

10 Self-CareEmbodiment, personal autonomy and the shaping of healthconsciousnessChristopher Ziguras

11 Mechanisms of CooperationWerner Raub and Jeroen Weesie

12 After the Bell – Educational Success, Public Policy and FamilyBackgroundEdited by Dalton Conley and Karen Albright

13 Youth Crime and Youth Culture in the Inner CityBill Sanders

14 Emotions and Social MovementsEdited by Helena Flam and Debra King

15 Globalization, Uncertainty and Youth in SocietyEdited by Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Erik Klijzing, Melinda Mills andKarin Kurz

16 Love, Heterosexuality and SocietyPaul Johnson

17 Agricultural GovernanceGlobalization and the new politics of regulationEdited by Vaughan Higgins and Geoffrey Lawrence

18 Challenging Hegemonic MasculinityRichard Howson

19 Social Isolation in Modern SocietyRoelof Hortulanus, Anja Machielse and Ludwien Meeuwesen

20 Weber and the Persistence of ReligionSocial theory, capitalism and the sublimeJoseph W.H. Lough




21 Globalization, Uncertainty and Late Careers in SocietyEdited by Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Sandra Buchholz and Dirk Hofäcker

22 Bourdieu’s PoliticsProblems and possibilitiesJeremy F. Lane

23 Media Bias in Reporting Social Research?The case of reviewing ethnic inequalities in educationMartyn Hammersley

24 A General Theory of Emotions and Social LifeWarren D. TenHouten

25 Sociology, Religion and GraceArpad Szakolczai




A General Theory ofEmotions and Social Life

Warren D. TenHouten




First published 2007by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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© 2007 Warren D. TenHouten

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For Maria




Contents

Preface xiAcknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction 1

2 From Darwin to psychoevolutionary theories of primary and secondary emotions 10

3 The four pairs of opposite primary emotions: acceptance and disgust, joy and sadness, anger and fear, anticipation and surprise 25

4 Secondary emotions: the four pairs of opposite primary dyads – love and misery, pride and embarrassment, aggressiveness and alarm, curiosity and cynicism 50

5 Secondary emotions, continued: the four pairs of half-opposite secondary dyads – dominance and submissiveness, optimism and pessimism, delight anddisappointment, repugnance and contempt 73

6 Secondary emotions, continued: the eight tertiary dyads – resourcefulness and shock, morbidness and resignation, sullenness and guilt, anxiety and outrage 85

7 Secondary emotions, continued: the four antithetical,quaternary dyads – ambivalence, catharsis, frozenness,confusion 102




8 The sociorelational approach to the emotions: four elementary forms of sociality 113

9 Affect-spectrum theory: the emotions of rationality and of intimacy 129

10 Affect-spectrum theory, continued: the emotions linking informal community and formal society; a typology of four character structures 142

11 Social identity and social control: pride and embarrassment, pridefulness and shame 172

12 Socialization and the emotions: from alexithymia to symbolic elaboration and creativity 191

13 The development of tertiary emotions: jealousy, envy, ambition, confidence, and hope 200

14 Emotions, violence, and the self: vengefulness and hatred 228

15 A partial empirical test of affect-spectrum theory 241

16 Discussion 254

Notes 258References 264Name Index 295Subject index 302

x Contents




Preface

Emotion is a relatively new topic within the social sciences, particularly inthe field of sociology. Since the mid 1980s, the sociology of emotions hascome to be recognized as a crucial problem for social theory. Interest inthe emotions has increased in every decade since the 1950s, with publica-tions concerning emotions in many fields of inquiry increasing nearly lin-early through the second half of the twentieth century and accelerating inthe twenty-first. It is most certainly an exciting time for emotions researchand theory.

The emotions were linked to medical symptoms by means of hypnosisin the nineteenth century and to the repressed unconscious through psy-choanalysis at the dawn of the twentieth century. Then the study of emo-tions, which showed so much promise at that time with the work ofDarwin, Freud, and James, was retarded by the advent of behaviorism inthe 1920s and the rise of cognitivism in the 1950s. Neither of these per-spectives lent itself easily to modeling the emotions (Evans and Cruse2005: vi), which were seen as irrational, inaccessible, and refractory toscientific investigation. Emotions have overcome this history, to become atopic for vigorous scientific research effort by psychologists, cognitive sci-entists, neuroscientists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, andthrough all sorts of interdisciplinary efforts.

Sociology, the most general of the social sciences, was founded on theidea of understanding not just society but mind and society, and the mindcannot be understood without considering both affect and rationalthought. Clearly, human beings are not motivated entirely by rationalchoice and socioeconomic calculation but also by non-rational factors,including levels of emotional commitment to norms, values, and beliefs(Durkheim 1893; Hochschild 1975; Thoits 1989). It is entirely obviousthat the social, behavioral, and life sciences cannot understand the rela-tionship of people to their social world if emotions are not understoodtheoretically. As William Ian Miller (1997) observes, emotions “give ourworld its peculiarly animated quality; they make it a source of fear, joy,outrage, disgust, and delight. They also de-animate the world by making ita cause for boredom and despair. They even provide the basis for our




character and personality traits, our peculiar stance toward ourselves andthe outside world” (p. 8). Thus without emotion we are not engaged fullyin the world, and without an understanding of emotion we do not knowwhat it means to be so engaged.

Advancement of the social and behavioral sciences requires an under-standing of the human mind. This means the social sciences must draw oncognitive neuroscience and on the science of psychology in order to under-stand thought, perception, and ideas as they impact the social world.Insofar as “emotions are feelings connected to ideas, perception, and cog-nitions, and to the social and cultural contexts in which it makes sense tohave those feelings and ideas . . .” (Miller 1997: 8), it follows that anunderstanding of emotions and social relations can only be obtained withtheory that considers emotions to be “level-ubiquitous” (de Sousa 1991:36). That is, emotions require the interaction of three distinct systems.When an emotion, such as anxiety or love, is experienced, “a complexinteraction of physiological activity, cognitive activity, and overt [social]behavior takes place” (Comadena 1999: 6). Thus, emotions exist on thelevels of brain and body, mind, and society. This book presents such athree-level theory, affect-spectrum theory, which makes possible predictionof the entire spectrum of the emotions – ranging from eight primary emo-tions, to 28 secondary emotions, to a potential 56 tertiary emotions. Thistheory will be developed as far as space allows, and it will, at least for itsfirst eight propositions – in which eight primary emotions are predictedfrom each of the eight elementary social relations – be tested empiricallyusing textual data in two radically different cultures, Australian Aboriginesand Euro-Australians.

In studying the literature on primary emotions, I came to the realizationthat the problem of identifying them has been solvable for nearly half acentury, ever since Plutchik (1958) first published his model of the primaryand secondary emotions. While Plutchik’s work is widely respected, Iknow of no one who has claimed it is valid; still, I believe it provides auseful beginning point for developing a general theory of the emotions.Plutchik’s modeling of the secondary emotions (combinations of two of hiseight primary emotions), it will be shown, nevertheless leaves much to bedesired, and it is a major contribution of this book to have developed acomprehensive model of the secondary emotions, and to have defined 17of the possible 56 tertiary emotions, the combinations of three primaryemotions.

xii Preface




Acknowledgments

Throughout my career, I have been interested in the human mind and itsrelationship to the social world. A few scholars have greatly influenced mywork and caused me to go in new directions. My first debt of gratitudegoes to Dr. Joseph E. Bogen, a brilliant neurosurgeon and neurobiologistwho, beginning in 1970, encouraged me to extend my study of the mind tothe organ of the mind, the human brain. This led me to develop a perspect-ive that I called “neurosociology” (TenHouten 1997, 1999a), perhapsbetter termed neurocognitive sociology. Dr. Bogen died recently, and it is apleasure to acknowledge his friendship, exemplary scholarship, andenlightening conversation, which led me to a serious study of neuroscience.Bogen introduced me to Dr. Klaus Hoppe, a psychiatrist interested in thementality of survivors of traumatic experiences and alexithymia (no wordsfor feelings) and interhemispheric transfer deficit theory. The resultantstudy of Dr. Bogen’s split-brain patients and normal controls was thebeginning of my investigation of the emotions. The fourth member of ourteam was Donald O. Walter, a systems physiologist who did much toguide my study of the neurosciences and of neurometric methodology.

My interest in the sociology emotions was triggered by a conversationwith sociologist Dave Kemper in 1991 at an annual meeting of the Amer-ican Sociological Association. He suggested that my perspective on themind was overly cognitive and should be broadened to include the emo-tions, and provided excellent advice on how to proceed. He convinced methat a “sociorelational” approach could eventually lead to a general theorylinking involvement in social relations to the experience of specific emo-tions. Professor Kemper also stimulated my interest in the concept ofprimary, or basic emotions, and their differentiation into the spectrum ofaffect.

Sociologist Eddie Rose, who died in 2002 at the age of 91, led me to akeen interest in the use of words as units of culture, and in stories told inthe everyday world as a basic kind of data for sociological investigation, asexpressed in his ethno-ontology. Before my trip to Australia to begin col-lecting a corpus of life-historical interviews that are used in the data analy-sis presented in here, I traveled to Boulder and spent several days with




Eddie learning his philosophy of conducting and organizing interviews.For all of Eddie Rose’s sage advice and friendship, I am most grateful. Thesubsequent field research was indirectly supported by a grant from theUniversity of California Pacific Rim Research Program, which enabled meto spend a semester as a Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University ofNew South Wales. Data acquisition and data processing were facilitatedby grants from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Officeof Academic Computing. I am grateful for the support, encouragement,facilitation and for the direct involvement in the life-history project fromthe New South Wales Aboriginal Family Education Centres Federation,with special thanks to Lex Grey, and to Maisie and Kevin Cavanagh andthe members of their extended family, and to numerous other Aborigineswho have been supportive and helpful during three years of fieldwork,especially the late Wally LeBrocq at Old Burnt Bridge, Kempsey, NSW.

Charles Kaplan, a sociologist with specialization in social psychiatryand substance use and abuse, has been of enormous help in developingmany of the ideas in this book. For many months, with interruptionscaused by his many travels, we have met every Thursday at UCLA todiscuss ideas and the world, and he has made important contributions tomany concepts in this book, especially the distinction between catharsisand abreaction and the concept of emotions as an overall adaptive reactionto a life situation. For his help and constructive criticism of several chap-ters of the manuscript, I am deeply appreciative.

My wife, sociologist Maria Gritsch, who specializes in economic global-ization and U.S. labor history, has been an invaluable resource in develop-ing the ideas and theories of this book. She has made important theoreticalcontributions throughout the work and has provided detailed constructivecriticism of the entire manuscript, which she also carefully copy-edited.She read the entire manuscript more than once, offering innumerable theo-retical suggestions and criticisms, and offering the encouragement,support, and companionship that made laboring on this book a dailypleasure.

Acknowledgment is made for parts of this book that have appearedelsewhere. The cover is from Sir Frank Dickerseé’s La Belle Dame SansMerci, exhibit 1902 (detail), City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, usedwith permission. Some of the materials in Chapter 8 originally appeared as“Explorations in Neurosociological theory: from the spectrum of affect totime-consciousness,” in D.D. Franks and T.S. Smith (eds), Mind, Brain,and Society: Toward a Neurosociology of Emotion; Social Perspectives onEmotions, vol. 5, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Inc 1999. Some of the mater-ials in Chapters 8 and 9 appeared as “Outline of a socioevolutionarytheory of the emotions,” International Journal of Sociology and SocialPolicy, 16: 189–208, 1996. Much of Chapter 11 and portions of Chapter12 are in press as “Alexithymia – born of trauma and oppression, to sym-bolic elaboration and the creative expression of emotion,” in J. Kaufman

xiv Acknowledgments




and J. Baer (eds), Reason and Creativity in Cognitive Development, Cam-bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, in press. The data pre-sented in Chapter 15 is in press as “Primary Emotions and SocialRelations: A First Report,” Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology.

Acknowledgments xv




1 Introduction

This book presents a general theory linking emotions and rational thoughtto social relationships. This introduction considers scholarly efforts todefine emotions and related phenomena before moving into the book’s firstphase, a classification and description of the emotions. Chapter 2 considersDarwin’s evolutionary approach to the emotions and Plutchik’s psycho-evolutionary classification of the emotions. Chapter 3 models four pairs ofopposite primary emotions – acceptance and rejection/disgust, joy andsadness, anger and fear, and anticipation and surprise. Chapters 4–7 radic-ally revise Plutchik’s classification of the secondary emotions, the pairingsof primary emotions.

Chapter 8 considers the sociorelational approach to the emotions, pio-neered by Kemper (1978). Chapter 8 presents a model of social relationswhich synthesizes formulations developed in classical sociology, primateand human ethology, and classical and contemporary social theory. Twomodels, of the emotions and of social relationships, are then used todevelop concepts of self and social identity. Chapter 11 explores the rela-tionship between social control and the important emotions of pride andpridefulness, and of embarrassment and shame. Chapter 12 considers thedevelopment of emotions and cognition in socialization. Four processes areshown to be involved in developing basic emotions and complex, sec-ondary and tertiary emotions: verbalization, desomatization, symbollexia,and symbolic elaboration. It will be shown that massively traumatic eventscan retard and even reverse these processes, resulting in deverbalization,resomatization, asymbollexia, and a reduction of symbolic elaboration,which together constitute alexithymia, an inability to talk about one’s feel-ings and emotions.

The classification of the emotions in Chapters 4–7 is adequate for abasic consideration of the primary, secondary, and tertiary emotions, butthe sociorelational model makes possible a useful reclassification of theemotions, which is carried out, in three stages, in Chapters 9–10. First, theemotions of formal, “agonic” society exist as adaptive reactions to thepositive and negative experiences of power-based and market-orientedsocial relations. These emotions are anger and fear, anticipation and




surprise, and six secondary emotions resulting from pairing these prim-aries. Anger and anticipation contribute to instrumentally rational action,while the other seven come into play when situations with negative aspectsare encountered on the rocky road to rationally organized goal attainment.A parallel argument is then made for the emotions of the informal,“hedonic” community – acceptance, disgust, joy, and sadness – which arereactions to the valenced experiences of exchange-based and communalsocial relationships. It will be shown that acceptance, joy, and love (thecombination of joy and acceptance) are core natural emotions, with sevenother emotions seen as reactions to problematic experiences of close orintimate personal relationships. Next, a typology of character structures isattained by identifying four clusters of emotions that form bridges betweenthe individual in the informal community and in the larger, formal society.In addition to the secondary emotions of social identity, several of the 16possible tertiary emotions that address the problem of the individual’s selfin society are considered. Emphasis will be given to two pathological char-acter types, those of hostile intentions and of impulsivity/sensation-seeking. Other tertiary emotions – jealousy, envy, ambition, confidence,and hope – are the topic of Chapter 13. Chapter 14 discusses human viol-ence and a final tertiary emotion, that of hatred.

Results from a partial empirical test of this theory are presented inChapter 15. The dataset used is a corpus of 658 life-historical interviewswith Australian-Aborigines and Euro-Australians. Emotions and socialrelations are measured through lexical-level content analysis of these inter-views. It will be shown that the eight independent variables formed fromthe positive and negative experiences of four elementary social relationsare predictive of the eight primary emotions, but in order to obtain a fullfit of data to theory, one social relationship – the negative experience ofeconomic, market-based social relations – must be defined differently inthe two cultures.

Emotions and related phenomena

Emotions

At the outset, it is helpful to consider what is meant by emotion and theclosely related notions of feeling, mood, sentiment, and affect. As wemight expect, emotions have been defined in many ways (see Plutchik2003: 18–23) using many epistemological orientations. Frijda (1987),using a functionalist approach, defines emotions as “tendencies to estab-lish, maintain, or disrupt a relationship with the environment . . . [so that][e]motions might be defined as action readiness in response to emergenciesor interruptions” (p. 71). This helpful definition suggests emotions areways in which individuals deal with the people and events they encounterin the social world, as they react to complex social situations. That the

2 Introduction




most elementary of emotions are valenced, positive or negative, has beenemphasized by psychologists with a cognitive orientation (e.g., Ortony etal. 1988). Thus, emotions are ways of coping and adapting to the socialsituations that life presents. Despite the arguments of some social-constructionists that emotions are purely social (e.g., by Averill 1980 andHarré 1986), emotions also have a biological substrate. The word emotioncomes from a Latin word, movere, meaning “to move” or to “stir up.”Aristotle (383–323 BC), in De Anima, spoke of emotions as a principle ofmovement in human experience. Change occurs in what we feel, Aristotleargued, because jealousy, anger, and the other emotions are the results ofsensations reflected upon and thought about, a process that enables us toact in the social world. Aristotle, as we shall see, was on the mark, but hiscontemporaries saw emotions as visited upon humans by their gods, aview that reappeared in the Middle Ages, when human passions came tobe seen as the voice of the Devil (Sennett 1980: 4–5). The psychologicalmeaning of emotion is defined as “a mental ‘feeling’ or ‘affection’ (e.g., ofsurprise, hope, or fear, and so forth) as distinguished from cognitive orvolitional states of consciousness” (Oxford English Dictionary 1971: 853;hereafter, Oxford) and came into use in the English language in the middleof the nineteenth century.

Strasser (1970: 302) points out that emotional behavior can easily berecognized, and has three defining characteristics: (i) emotions often occurin situations in which one’s vital needs are apt to be at stake; (ii) emotionalbehavior, by nature, is eruptive and expressive, which is why it stands out,is often easy to recognize, and is often not based on rational grounds aftera careful weighing of motives and a search for suitable means to reach aclearly defined goal; and (iii) an emotion is a primitive form of a responseto a situation, which is not evaluated in an objective manner but immedi-ately, in light of existential needs, and by means of partial information.Thus, emotions are often described as “hot” and as demonstrating one’slack of a “cool head.” While emotions are adaptive reactions, they areoften maladaptive, as they can be acted upon without due consideration ofconsequences; a sequence of acts, driven by an emotion, is apt to be per-formed in an inappropriate, unhelpful, or destructive temporal order. Itshould not be inferred from this, however, that emotions necessarilyundermine reason. Quite the contrary, it will be shown that even the mostbasic emotions can be understood as efforts to attain rationality.

Aristotle understood that emotions have a social dimension. Consistentwith the idea that emotions are adaptive reactions to situations of life, hesaw that the totality of a person’s emotional experience provides a frame-work through which the world is viewed. In his Rhetoric, he claimed thatthe emotions consist of those feelings that so change persons as to affecttheir judgments, and they are attended by pain or pleasure. An emotion, healso asserted, comes into consciousness together with its own justification.An emotion, for Aristotle, is a mental structure that makes a claim for its

Introduction 3




own reasonableness, its own rationality (see also Lear 1990: 49–50). Anemotion, then, is potentially rational but it can be irrational to the extentthat the framework it provides is invalid, if it is directed inappropriately toan object or person in the world, or if the emotion is in conflict withbeliefs, morals, values, and states of affairs that would undermine its justi-fication.

Many emotions are triggered by events significant for the welfare of theorganism. As examples: the presence of a prey or a predator; the presence ofa friend, enemy, mate, or competitor; a novel occurrence. Emotions are adap-tive reactions to such stimuli in the life of an organism. This means thatantecedents are related to consequences: for example, the emotion of fear hasthe associated behavior of flight. As a second example, anger and its associ-ated attack behavior acts to move aside or even destroy a barrier to the satis-faction of a need or the attainment of a goal. Plutchik (1962) argues that astimulus event results in a cognitive evaluation, a good/bad, plus/minusvalues judgment, which in turn determines the way we think, feel, and act,which can involve approach of the good and avoidance of the bad.

Feelings

Feelings and emotions are often conflated in everyday discourse. Feelingsare described as emotions, as in saying, “I feel angry/jealous/happy.” Emo-tions, in turn, are often defined in terms of feelings. Feelings refer to aperson’s own state of mind, especially with reference to an evaluation ofwhat is agreeable and disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant. The Englishword feeling has a vast connotation, as it includes the experience of phys-ical drive states, such as hunger, pain, and fatigue, as well as emotionalstates, so that it refers to all experiences of inner states (Arieti 1970: 136).Antonio Damasio (1999, 2003) describes recent advances in affectiveneuroscience which elaborate Arieti’s helpful definition and clarify the dis-tinction between emotions and feelings: people react emotionally to objectsand events, usually in social interactions, and these emotional reactions arefollowed up by a pattern of feelings whose necessary components includesome levels of pain and pleasure. Thus, emotionally-competent socialstimuli trigger emotional reactions, which in turn can contribute to ouroverall feeling state. Inspired by philosophical insights of Spinoza (2002;lived 1632–1677), Damasio (2003) conceptualizes the human mind asabove all else the idea of the human body, such that mental processes areguided by the brain’s various mappings of the body’s parts and systems.Emotions involve actions and movements, often in public view, revealed infacial expression, posture, gesture, specific behaviors, and conversation.Feelings, which follow emotions, are in comparison private, playing outnot in the body but in the mind and at a higher level. Of course, we canchoose to share our private feelings and talk about them to others, to theextent that they are known to consciousness.

4 Introduction




Damasio (2003) argues that pain and pleasure are essential ingredientsof feelings. Feelings arise from a set of reactions aimed at maintenance ofsteady internal states (homeostasis), which include emotions, but alsocome from other sources of bodily condition, which together findrepresentation in the brain’s maps of parts of the body and their states.Feelings reflect emotions and their perturbing effects on the body, but theyare also influenced by the brain’s mappings of the state of muscles, theposture and orientation of the body, the state of the circulatory, respira-tory, digestive and other systems, and brain neurochemistry, all of whichare mapped in body-sensing regions of the brain. A feeling, in its essence,is a mind-state expressing an idea of the body. Thus, while the object of anemotion is apt to be external, typically another person with whom one isinteracting, the object of a feeling is internal, for it is the body. Emotions,as we will see, are built up from simple adaptive reactions to prototypicallife situations, which evolved in animals before the emergence of the brainpower and creative intelligence necessary for feelings about our emotionsemerged as a vital capability of the human mind.

Consider an example. Upon learning of the death of someone we areclose to, we immediately experience the emotion sadness, which is fol-lowed up by feelings of sadness and grief. While the emotion sadness canoccur well within a second following realization of such a social loss, thecorresponding feelings of sadness and grief are experienced later and overa longer period of time. Feelings commonly last for a period of two totwenty seconds (Lutz et al. 2002; Damasio 2003: 122) and can recursystematically as the loss is thought about. Such feeling of sadness includethoughts consonant with the emotion of sadness, such as concern for one’ssaddened or even depressed condition, a sense of fatigue, feelings of disap-pointment with life, and, on the pathological level, despairing ruminationsof death and putrification, which might recur over many years and lead toa protracted, or even permanent, state of painful sadness and depression.People are strongly motivated to seek emotional happiness and feelings ofwell-being, and are equally motivated to avoid negative emotions and feel-ings of sadness, but it should be kept in mind that life presents problematicsituations as well as hopeful opportunities, and that the emotions and feel-ings appropriate to specific situations, both negative and positive, areadaptive responses to our body, our sense of self, and our social reality.

Sentiments

Sentiments are defined by Steve Gordon (1981) as “socially constructedpattern[s] of sensations, expressive gestures and cultural meanings organ-ized around a relationship to a social object, usually another person . . . orgroup such as a family” (pp. 566–7). Sentiments include romantic love,parental love, loyalty, patriotism, trust, friendship, happiness, and otherrelatively enduring social orientations that serve as affect elicitors.

Introduction 5




Sentiments typically focus on a particular person or object. Thus, a personcan have a longstanding love for a mate or parent, a longstanding sorrowfor someone who has died, a longstanding hostility to a rival or competi-tor. Such sentiments are generated, and continue to exist, as they relate tospecific objects, situations, and processes.

Emotions, in contrast to sentiments, are acute, tightly tied to an elicitingsituation, and episodic in nature. They are triggered by perceived changesin the environment, usually with respect to another person or a social situ-ation, and have an intense feeling dimension. Emotional episodes lastlonger than emotions. Extended emotional episodes become sentiments.On the temporal level, “sentiments are enduring emotions which lastlonger than typical emotions, but are shorter than affective traits” (ibid.).Thus, sentiments are emotions with long duration. Emotions that havestable features thus become sentiments. Emotions with this potentialitywould include love and hatred, envy and guilt, joy and sadness. Love, forexample, can become a long-term favorable attitude toward anotherperson, which is a sentiment, but this sort of stable love can be punctuatedby short-term outbursts of passion and strong feelings. Here, the sentimentof love is no mere aggregation of short-term episodes of intense love, for itis rather stable, long lasting, and of a moderate level of intensity, in whichthe feeling component of the emotion is not continuously present.

Moods

The term “mood” is used in many ways. In ordinary discourse, people usethe term broadly to refer to all kinds of feeling states, so that we might bein a happy, cheerful, or blue mood. A narrower usage refers to an intenseand pervasive form of feelings, so that we might be in a depressed,anxious, or melancholic mood, where a more general technical term wouldbe an “affective disorder” (Ben-Ze’ev 2000: 86). Moods basically expressthe subject’s own situation, and in this sense are similar to feelings. Butsubject–object relationships, which are crucial to emotions, are of lesserimportance to moods. Moods differ from emotions in that they are gener-ally of less intensity and longer-lasting than are emotions. Moods andemotions also differ in their causes. Emotions are typically triggered byevents and changes in the social environment that are sudden and urgent,but moods are less specifically tied to an eliciting situation and are ordinar-ily lacking in urgency.

Affects

Brennan (2004) considers an affect to be a sensation of pleasure, orunpleasure, or both, together with the ideas associated with this valencedsensation. Ben-Ze’ev (2000: 79–116) defines the “affect realm” verybroadly, to include emotions and related phenomena such as sentiments,

6 Introduction




moods, and feelings, and affect disorders such as depression, agoraphobia,and social anxiety, which are ultimately topics for the sociology of emo-tions but are beyond the scope of this book. Consistent with Brenner, Ben-Ze’ev sees affective phenomena as having an inherent positive(pleasurable) or negative (unpleasurable) evaluation, which shows theideational intention of the affect, and a non-cognitive sensation, or feeling.

Ben-Ze’ev (2000: 83) clarifies the distinction between emotions, senti-ments, and affective traits using the example of anger. A tendency tobecome angry, irrespective of the situation at hand, is an affective trait.Affective traits work their way into the personality, so that we mightdescribe a person as easily irritated and short-tempered. When this personactually becomes angry, “hot under the collar,” the experience is one ofthe emotion anger. There are important temporal differences betweenemotions and these related concepts. Emotions usually last between aminute and a few hours, whereas sentiments and affective traits, which arebasically dispositions, last for a longer period. Moods can last for hours,days, even months. Sentiments can last for weeks, months, years, evendecades. Affective traits, and affective disorders, can last a lifetime.

In the everyday world, language provides a rich vocabulary of affectthat for each emotion provides for all kinds of distinctions. Consider vari-ants of sadness: grief clearly can be an emotion, if it is an acute mentalpain resulting from loss, misfortune, or deep disappointment. Grief is bothmore acute and less enduring than sorrow, which can be considered a sen-timent. Mourning, also a sentiment, refers to a sorrow that is publiclyexpressed. Anguish is a painful, excruciating kind of grief, and woe is adeep and inconsolable sorrow. Sadness and unhappiness are genericsubjective terms that apply to this whole range of emotion, and can resultfrom a vague sense of want following the loss of a close personal relation-ship, from poor health, and from numerous other causes. A person withdisheartened spirits can be described as dejected and downcast, and such aperson can also be characterized as desolate, forlorn, gloomy, blue, andforsaken, and as having a dreary outlook on life (see Fernald 1914/1947:233, 377–8). Of course, it should be added that not all adult persons areequipped with a technical vocabulary of affect and are apt to use even themost common terms incorrectly, and to conflate everyday notions such asjealousy and envy, shame and guilt, fear and anxiety, disgust and con-tempt. In this book, the term emotion will be given broad meaning, sothat, for example, the discussion of the emotion joy is extended to includethe sentiment of happiness and the affective trait of being a happy person.

The language of emotions is thus complex and apt to be ambiguous. Aperson who is “blue” might describe herself as “depressed” or “sad,”which glosses over the fact that to be “sad” is an emotion, whereas to be“depressed” is an affective disorder. She might also, her real feelingnotwithstanding, insist that she feels fine and that nothing at all is wrong.People have many and complex reasons for sharing their emotions and

Introduction 7




feelings, and just as many for disguising or denying them. We will see thatpeople vary in their ability to verbally express their emotions, and that awide variety of traumatic experiences can stultify the normal developmentof emotions, not only in the developing child but also in the adult.

The complexity of emotions

The emotions have long been topical in philosophy, theology, and psychol-ogy, in the social and behavioral sciences, and in biology and the neuro-sciences. The breadth of interest in this topic suggests that it is in atechnical sense complex, meaning that its phenomena exist on a multiplic-ity of levels and as a result can be understood scientifically only by beingstudied in a wide variety of scientific disciplines and interdisciplinary fieldsof inquiry, and under the assumptions of differing epistemologies, philo-sophies, and metatheoretical orientations.

What is required for a general theory of the emotions is a three-levelanalysis encompassing (i) the biological and the evolutionary, (ii) themental and the psychological, and (iii) the social and the cultural. Such anapproach can be referred to as neurocognitive sociology of the emotions.Whenever a topic requires three-level analysis – of body, mind, and society– it is a certainty that evolution has been at work, and this is indeed true ofemotions. As Friston et al. (1994) point out, an ability to ascribe value toevents in the world, which is evident across all kinds of animal species, is aproduct of evolutionarily selective processes. Value, in this context, meanssimply an ability to sense the world and then to appraise events or situ-ations in the world as desirable or undesirable, positive or negative, todetermine to which problems of life these events refer, and then to developadaptive responses. Value means significance or meaning and is by naturesociorelational. To have valuable information about something is to appre-hend some social relationship in which value can be found. An adaptivereaction to a social relationship, by definition, includes an emotionalcomponent. Emotions signal that a social situation demands attention.They are adaptive reactions to the simplest and most basic problems of lifeand also to problems of great complexity. Emotions represent “complexpsychological and physiological states that, to a greater or lesser degree,indicate occurrences of value” (Dolan 2002: 1191). The more complexitythere is in an animal’s environment, the greater will be its range of emo-tions. Because human beings have created the most complex of environ-ments – involving culture, language, social interactions, and socialorganization on an immense, global scale – it follows that humans alsohave developed, by far, the greatest range of emotions. As Dolan (ibid.)explains, “[e]motion provides the principal currency in human relation-ships as well as the motivational force for what is best and worst in humanbehavior. . . . More than any other species, we are beneficiaries and victimsof a wealth of emotional experience” (p. 1191).

8 Introduction




Emotions are absolutely necessary to rational thought, yet are apt toresult in rigid and fixed belief systems. A state of emotional equilibrium isnecessary for human happiness, but emotional disequilibrium contributesto unhappiness and to a whole range of mental disorders and pathologies.Understanding and control of emotions promotes adaptation to the prob-lems of life, but emotions can go out of control, resulting in intemperateoutbursts of anger, disgust, envy, jealousy, resentment, hatred, a thirst forvengeance, and a whole tangle of pathologies of mind and behavior. As LeRochefoucauld wisely cautioned, “[t]he passions possess an unjust andselfish quality that makes them dangerous to follow. We should learn todistrust them even when they appear most reasonable.” Understanding ofemotions and passions, then, is absolutely essential for an understandingof human behavior. The discipline of sociology, the most general science ofhuman social behavior, requires, for its own progress, an explicit inclusionnot only of cognition and thought, but also of emotion. The more we learnabout the emotions, the more important they seem. Understanding of emo-tions is of course valuable on the personal level. To understand what emo-tions are, generally, and to be able to analyze particular emotions,including the circumstances of social life in which they are most apt tooccur, is to gain understanding of self and an enhanced ability to dealeffectively with immediate social situations and with long-term relation-ships, and to formulate realistic goals and work with confidence and effec-tiveness to attain these goals. Knowledge is power, and knowledge of one’semotions contributes to knowledge of one’s mind, self, personality, charac-ter, and prospects for success and failure.

Introduction 9




2 From Darwin topsychoevolutionary theories ofprimary and secondary emotions

Darwin on the evolution of the emotions

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859,the Bishop of Worcester’s wife was most distressed. “Let us hope it isnot true,” she is said to have remarked. “But if it is, let us pray that itdoes not become generally known!”

(Opening of a lecture by R.D. Keynes)

Darwin was an exceptionally gifted biologist who did much to shape ourconception of the nature of the human being and our place in the universe.His theory of evolution, claiming a continuity of all species, provoked amajor revolution in the history of ideas (Petrinovich 1973: 223). Thistheory was, and continues to be, met with outrage and scorn because itplaced the human being in a modest position in the universe. Suddenly, thesharp line that theology had drawn between the Human and the beasts ofthe animal world was dramatically obliterated. Darwin had shown that thehuman is but one animal species, a mammal, a primate, an ape closelyrelated to the chimpanzee and the bonobo, which gradually evolvedthrough natural selection (Dennett 1995: 34).

Darwin realized that evolution applied not only to anatomy and mor-phology but also to an animal’s mind and expressive behavior. His studyof emotional expression led him to conclude that behavioral patterns andmental activities are as reliably characteristic of species as are bodily struc-tures. It follows that human intelligence, and emotions as well, have anevolutionary history. Darwin’s work on the emotions was presented in asingle book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872;hereafter, Expression) originally intended to be a chapter of The Descentof Man (1871). Darwin claimed that we cannot understand human emo-tional expressions without first understanding the emotional expressions ofother animal species. He asserted:

With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of hair underextreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious




rage, can hardly be understood, except on the belief that man onceexisted in a much lower and animal-like condition. The commonalityof certain expressions in distinct though allied species, as in the move-ment of the same facial muscles during laughter by men and byvarious monkeys, is rendered somewhat more intelligible, if we believethey’re descended from a common progenitor.

(Darwin 1872/1965: 12)

Darwin saw that communication is more highly developed in the humanthan in any other animal, for only humans enjoy the power of speech. Hisfocus, nonetheless, was on facial expressions. He saw an evolutionary con-nection between animal and human behavior, for example, an animalbaring its teeth and the snarl of a human being. Similarly, flushing of theface with anger is characteristic of monkeys and humans alike. Through-out the vertebrates Darwin found involuntary erection of body hairs, ruf-fling of feathers, and erection of extradermal appendages with fear andanger: this reaction creates the appearance of larger size and is frightful toenemies and rivals.

Darwin proposed three principles which, he dubiously claimed, worktogether to account for the involuntary expressions and gestures ofhuman and other animals: (i) the principle of serviceable associatedhabits; (ii) the principle of direct actions of the nervous system that areindependent of will and of habit; and (iii) the principle of antithesis. Thefirst two principles are highly flawed and find no application incontemporary emotions theory (see Fridlund 1992); the third was articu-lated in a confusing and obtuse manner (Ghiselin 1969: 206). Yet, theprinciple of antithesis was important and will find application and elabo-ration in this book. The principle of antithesis holds that once a state ofmind is accompanied by an associated habit, a contrary state of mindtends to evoke an opposite habit, performed involuntarily. For example, adog threatens, is on ‘point’, its teeth bared, tail erect, on its toes, backhair standing on end (as in Figure 2.2A), suddenly recognizes that theman in the distance is his master and immediately switches to a cowering,submissive posture (Figure 2.2B). Anger and fear are an obvious exampleof opposite emotions, alike in some ways, opposite in others, whose basicbehaviors are opposite: in anger, there is a moving toward opportunity; infear, a moving away from danger. Both emotions make the hair stand onend, an effect that is maximized when these evaluations of fear and angerare combined, or when one quickly succeeds the other after a frozenmoment.

Ever since Darwin, evolution-oriented theorists of emotions have under-stood that members of various species employ emotions as adaptive reac-tions to problems posed by the environment, to thereby increase theirchances of survival and reproduction. Human ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989) postulated that a number of emotional expressions are

12 Theories of primary and secondary emotions




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