The Fantastic Logic of Emotions
Emotion, Cognition, and Automaticity
A myth continues to dominate discussions about emotions, which is that emotions are irrational. Fundamentally, this myth follows from the mistaken belief that emotion and cognition are distinct mechanisms in the mind, where the former refers to feeling states and the latter refers to information processing, including thinking and calculation. This view largely comes from psychology research that was done in the 1980s, which led to the widespread notion that emotion was independent of and primary to cognition. However, the brain as a whole, is an information processing organ that was designed by natural selection to take in a fairly limited set of inputs and generate outputs in the form of behavioral patterns and physiological controls that solve the unique and specific challenges the evolutionary environment posed to us.
Emotions are motivational states and like instincts, are not empty of reason and logic. In fact, emotions are hyper-logical and hyper-reasonable because they are solutions to particular adaptive problems humans have faced throughout their history. Additionally, emotions have been so successful that their logic has been ingrained within us, unconsciously, across a variety of psychological domains.
It might help you to understand emotions as being hyper-logical if you think of a particular emotion as being a skill that you have mastered. Like many skills that become mastered, their operation and execution begins to slip below conscious processing. It’s analogous to a professional pianist whose fingers dart across the keys seemingly with a mind of their own, or those days when you drive and you arrive at your destination, but on reflection you don’t remember in the slightest how you got there. But compare the automaticity of your driving along a familiar route now to when you first where put in the driver’s seat. Back then, everything in that car was screaming out confusion, caution, and fright to you. Emotions are like these other automatic skills, except we mastered them in our infancy.
Evolutionary Psychology and The Recalibrational Theory of Emotions
Evolutionary psychologists take an engineering perspective when it comes to the mind. For them, understanding the mind and its functions is a case of reverse engineering, where researchers start with the device (the brain) and extrapolate backwards in time, attempting to understand how the mind and its functions could have been selected for, given the environmental context in which it developed. From this perspective, mental abilities are phenomena that solved specific adaptive problems for the organism such as fleeing from predators, hunting prey, building relationships with kin and non-kin, and finding a mate.
Rather than analyzing emotions in terms of brain regions and neuronal activity, evolutionary psychologists analyze the function of emotions at the level of information processing, which is the level most relevant to cognitive psychology. The neurons could just as well be microchips or silicon. What is important is the information processing that occurs midway between receiving information from one’s environment and the execution of behaviors based on that information. What the brain decides to do at the information processing level is based on the selection pressures that have selected for a brain that can execute behavioral patterns and physiological changes on behalf of information received from one’s environment.
According to one theory, known as the recalibrational theory of emotions, recalibrational emotions are emotions that involve the recomputation of one or more of the following regulatory variables: “how valuable to the individual a mate is, a child is, one’s own life is, etc; how stable or variable the food productivity of the habitat is . . . how good a friend someone has been to you; the extent of one’s social support; one’s aggressive formidability; one’s sexual attractiveness; one’s status or self-esteem” among others. Indeed, the leading pioneers of evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby said, “Most evolutionarily recurrent situations that select for emotion programs involve the discovery of information that allows the recomputation of one or more of these variables.”
The recalibrational theory of emotions was first derived from basic principles of evolutionary biology, namely the concepts of bargaining and game theory. In this view, human beings have two fundamental ways of bargaining for better treatment: conditional aggression (e.i., If you don’t do X, then I’ll harm you) and conditional cooperation (e.i., If you give me X, then I will give you Y). Using these bargaining methods, organism X can incentivize organism Y to shift Y’s behavior in a way that is more favorable to X. This evolutionary biology theory of bargaining was married to a new and emerging theory of emotions in evolutionary psychology. This theory states that the neural basis of any specific emotion is a superordinate mechanism that orchestrates many other programs within an organism to best shift it into a configuration most relevant to dealing with an evolutionary recurrent adaptive problem. To put it simply, emotions do a lot, and are not reducible to a facial expression, an internal feeling state, or physiological marker like increased heart rate. In contrast, a particular emotion orchestrates a large set of changes that are universally shared among the human species.
For instance, fear produces a particular facial expression, up-regulates physiological changes such as heart and respiration rate, pupil dilation, and down-regulates sleep and relaxation, digestion, and salivary secretion. Fear often causes one to raise an alarm (e.i., scream), run away, and perceptually reorganize the world into places to which one can run and places in which one can hide. In this sense, the emotion of fear is a mechanism that mobilizes and coordinates a wide array of changes all of which are geared towards solving a particular adaptive problem, namely, saving your or a kin’s skin.
The Function of Anger
More than any other psychological theory of emotions, an evolutionary psychology perspective has opened the door of possibility and discovery into understanding the functions of particular emotions because it asks and attempts to answer the question of what a particular emotion is for, what function does it serve. Consider anger. It’s pretty clear right? Anger is an emotion that causes us to get mad at others and to pose a threat to others. Well, not quite. This is merely a restatement of the emotion, tantamount to saying, “Anger makes us angry.”
According to the recalibrational theory of emotions, the function of anger is to resolve conflicts of interest between the offender and the offended party by inclining the offender to place more weight on the angry individual’s welfare. Such a seemingly overly-sophisticated explanation for an emotion as common as anger emerges as a result of a theoretical framework that looks to the origin and function of anger. Like other emotions, anger must have solved a sufficiently recurrent, adaptive problem or set of adaptive problems posed by our environment (environment being everything external to an individual, including other human beings) otherwise it wouldn’t have evolved as an aspect of our psychological architecture. A recurrent problem posed to a particular individual often was other individuals who possessed conflicting motivations and desires. Additionally, the interaction with other unruly individuals is an adaptive problem because those who were better able to align their interests with them were less likely to be at the wrong end of a bargain, which could easily become violent and deadly. They were then in turn more likely to survive and pass on their genes to the next generation.
The hypothesis that anger’s function is to incline the offender to place more weight on the offended, generates a number of falsifiable predictions that can be empirically tested. For example, one prediction that flows from this hypothesis is that anger will be reduced in individuals that receive an indication that the offender has put more weight on that individual’s welfare, i.e., has proffered a sincere apology. Another prediction is that individuals will be less angered by costs that were imposed on them by another person if that person imposed a small rather than large cost, did so in order to obtain a large rather than small benefit, and did so not knowing the identity of the recipient.
These predictions are in line with the hypothesis of the overall function of anger because they are predictions that if true would indicate that the offender has placed a greater value on the angry individual’s welfare. For example, if someone imposed a cost on you for a large benefit (say, for $1000) then you would be less likely to be offended and less angered than if he or she imposed that same cost on you for a small benefit (say, for $5). This is because the indication that you get when someone slights you for a large rather than small benefit is that the offender put a greater weight on your welfare since he or she needed the benefit of a whole $1000 before they imposed the cost on you.
All of these predictions, among others, were empirically tested in an interesting experimental design in which participants read scenarios and then rated how angered they would be in each of the situations. Participants were gathered cross-culturally, from USA to Romania to a tribal village in the Amazon rainforest. All of the predictions were supported, indicating that anger is, at least in part, a recalibrational emotion that incentivizes an offender to place greater weight on the welfare of an angered individual.
Other Recalibrational Emotions
Not all emotions that have this recalibrational design are fully encapsulated by its recalibrational function. For example, anger’s function is also to deter others with threats of violence and appearances of formidability. Other recalibrational emotions include guilt and gratitude, which are emotions that emerge as a consequence of imbalanced welfare tradeoff ratios (WTRs) between two parties. If someone has a high WTR towards another, that just means that he places a great weight on the other person’s welfare in relation to his own and if someone has a low WTR towards another, that means he places too little weight on another person’s welfare in relation to his own. While an individual feels anger when an offender places to little weight on their welfare an individual feels gratitude in the opposite case — that is, when another person places an unexpectedly high WTR towards him.
Guilt is another emotion that has been hypothesized to have a recalibrational design. Its function is to increase the WTR that the guilty individual once had for another based on new information that indicates the weight he or she once gave to another’s welfare was too low. Additionally, gratitude has been hypothesized to have a recalibrational design. Gratitude is the emotion program that is activated in one after he or she receives an unexpectedly high WTR from another person. In other words, another person acted nice to you in a way that was unwarranted based on your actions towards them.
Interestingly, another’s gratitude can lead to your guilt, something which most of you have probably experienced. Somebody does something so unexpectedly nice for you that you feel guilty if you don’t do something nice in response. Doing something nice in response to the other individual’s generous act can remedy your feeling of guilt because your reciprocating action would indicate that you also hold a WTR for that individual.
Shame and Social Devaluation
Shame is another emotion that has been suggested to have a very precise function. It has been suggested to have the function of preventing individuals from being socially devalued by others. The neurocognitive architecture of shame is designed to: (1) deter individuals from taking a course of action that would impose a cost on them in terms of greater social devaluation relative to the benefit they would get by doing that action; (2) limit the extent to which others learn about and spread potentially social devaluing information about one to others; (3) limit the costs of social devaluation when it occurs; and (4) prepare one to respond to the new social landscape he or she is in after social devaluation has occurred. Shame evolved as a strategy to manage the recurrent problem of being socially devalued due to negative information about that individual reaching others. If this hypothesis is correct, than a prediction would be that among items of negative information about an individual, those items that elicit the most devaluation from others would correspond to more shame being felt by that individual.
This hypothesis has been supported empirically where the intensity of shame one would feel from a negative item being known, closely tracks the amount of social devaluation others would heap on them if that item of information became known. This was studied in participants from America, Israel, and India in an experimental design comparing two separate groups of participants, those in the “audience condition” to those in a “shame condition.” Those in the audience condition were asked to rate on a scale from 1 (I wouldn’t view them negatively at all) to 7 (I’d view them very negatively) several different scenarios, such as a scenario in which someone has very bad table manners. Those in the shame condition were asked to rate on a scale from 1 (no shame at all) to 7 (a lot of shame) how much shame they would feel if they were the ones in that scenario with, for example, the bad table manners. This was done for 29 different scenarios in participants from America, India, and Israel, and the ratings were compared between the two conditions both within each country and across all three countries.
Within the countries the researchers found that there was widespread agreement between all the participants in the audience condition and all the participants in the shame condition within each of the three countries. This shows that individuals within each country agreed on which scenarios were more or less negatively valued and which scenarios were more or less shameful. Additionally, within each country, the scenarios that participants in the audience condition judged to be most negatively valued, were judged as most shameful by participants in the shame condition.
Between the countries — that is, comparing the two groups of participants from each country to the other countries— the researchers also found very strong positive correlations between how strongly each country rated how negatively and how shameful a scenario was. In other words, people in America agreed with people in Israel and people in India on which scenarios were most negative and which scenarios were most shameful. Additionally, the scenarios which were most devalued by one country were also found shameful by the other countries. This suggests that what each of these countries had in common was that the scenarios which were most negatively valued were also considered the most shameful. This collection of evidence all supports the hypothesis that shame is an emotion that attempts to safeguard against social devaluation by preventing one from taking a course of action that others would see in a negative light.
The researchers also wanted to make sure it was shame in particular that uniquely tracked social devaluation and not sadness and anxiety. They tested this because it very well could be that negative emotions like sadness, anxiety, and shame all involve the tracking of social devaluation. Additionally, the researchers assessed sadness and anxiety because, like shame, they are negative emotions that often co-occur with shame, but are not easily confused with shame as embarrassment or guilt might be. They found that sadness and anxiety did not correlate with devaluation ratings as shame did, suggesting that shame in particular tracks social devaluation.
This brief look at just a few emotions shows how an evolutionary psychology perspective is helping us understand emotions and other mental faculties. I hope to have shown you that emotions are not just irrational feeling states, but are mental computations like other cognitive abilities that have their own logic and rationality to them. Additionally emotions often operate with great subtlety as in the case of shame. The evidence so far seems to suggest that shame in particular tracks social devaluation and discourages one from being negatively valued by others, which is a function far more subtle and non-obvious as the function of fear, for example. In any case, however, emotions have a deeply ingrained logic to them and cannot be reduced to a mere subjective feeling state, physiological change, facial expression, or thought in one’s head. Rather, an emotion coordinates all of these together to solve a particular adaptive problem.
Sources:
“The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology.” (2016). Vol 1 & 2, 2nd ed. Edited by David Buss.
Sell, A. et al. (2017). “The grammar of anger: Mapping the computational architecture of a recalibrational emotion.” Cognition.
Sznycer, D. et al. (2016). “Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures.” PNAS.
