This week’s musings will select from a grab bag of topics. IF I can muster the energy to write at all on those days that are predicted to be 108 degrees (42 in Celsius….) in Portland, OR!

Emotions ran high last week in the political realm and I thought it would be interesting to tackle the topic of emotions. Not that scientists agree on what emotions are. If anything, they strongly disagree and publicly scorn each other in often not so subtle ways. Here is a review by Carrol Izzard from a couple of years back that states the minimum consensus:

Emotion consists of neural circuits (that are at least partially dedicated), response systems, and a feeling state/process that motivates and organizes cognition and action. Emotion also provides information to the person experiencing it, and may include antecedent cognitive appraisals and ongoing cognition including an interpretation of its feeling state, expressions or social-communicative signals, and may motivate approach or avoidant behavior, exercise control/regulation of responses, and be social or relational in nature.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1754073910374661

The major camps in the debate propose that there are

a) distinct emotions ( numbers vary from 5 – 21 with 7 being most frequently accepted), that they are innately rooted and that they are universally recognized in the respective facial expressions of joy, surprise, anger, fear, sadness and contempt. Paul Ekman is representative for this approach; he and his research group  also developed a theory of micro expressions that give fleeting hints to what a person is feeling and/or concealing. They have, in addition, developed tools that they claim can improve your ability to detect and correctly identify emotional expressions, which they are happy to sell you ( and, it turns out the CIA, FBI, and other three lettered organizations…) I always wonder when a scientist starts having a website .com….

http://www.paulekman.com

The work has led to all kinds of testing yourself how good you are at identifying emotions….https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/well-quiz-the-mind-behind-the-eyes/

You could also test your skills with the facial expressions of today’s photographs….

b) Margaret Mead was an early sharp critic of Ekmans et al.’s theory, but within the field of psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett an her colleagues provide the strongest alternative to the above claims. She questions that emotions are biologically basic and that there are universally alike. Emotions do not exist in a vacuum and context is everything – that can be the cultural context or the individual’s history guiding the interpretation of and reaction to stimuli that produce an affective response. (if this interests you, she has an interesting book out: How Emotions are made – The Secret Life of the Brain. Link below is to an earlier research article.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1934613/

One thing,  though, is agreed upon, from Freudians to Neuroscientists: emotions, whatever they are, do organize and govern behavior. Without them we are toast. Best example comes from a patient of D’Amasio’s who had medically necessary brain surgery that removed any ability to feel emotions. He was paralyzed in everyday life for the simplest tasks, because decisions based on just gut level – do I prefer orange juice or coffee for breakfast –  were out of reach for him.