Evolutionary Psychology of Each Emotion

“Each emotion evolved to deal with a particular, evolutionarily recurrent situation type”

Joy

Joy and other positive emotions are expressed when fulfilling a biological need, when pursuing a goal, and when a negative or painful state is fixed. The level of joy felt is based on how expectations compare to reality in a given situation. The evolutionary origin for joy is to facilitate approach behavior, continue the action, or recreate the situation the caused the emotion. Joy prompts people to interact with their surroundings and to act productively.

Sadness

Since the emotion is related to the loss of a person or object of importance to the self, the adaptive benefit to sadness is a period of personal reflection following loss. This reflection turns attention inwards, and a decrease in arousal allows for cognitive structures to update according to the lost objects. Sadness makes a person more detail-oriented and more accurate, allowing them to rely less on heuristics in considering choices and making decisions, and sad people spend more time making decisions. It has been noted that sadness also decreases the odds of false-memory bias occurring; after running their experiment on sadness and false memories, Storbeck and Clore (2005) noted that “with sadness comes accuracy.” The idea of ‘depressive realism’ has also been widely studied and reported on. Sadness helps with decision-making in approaching similar situations in the future to avoid similar loss outcomes.

Fear

Fear is the easiest emotion to explain from an evolutionary perspective: It is necessary to stay alive in order to pass one’s genes on, and fear cues people into potential hazards in their environments. Some fears are more ingrained, as it is easier to condition a fear response to snakes than to flowers. Researchers have discovered four primary ‘fear factors’ from which most every fear arises: social situations, death or injury, animals, and space-related fears including wide open spaces and small enclosed spaces. Fear elicits adaptive learning (fear conditioning), so that the stimulus can be better avoided in future circumstances.

Surprise

When experiencing surprise, a person must have been interrupted from what they were originally doing. Surprise is therefore a process through which the person can appraise the unexpected event’s relevance for action. This process determines whether the unexpected event requires immediate action, or whether the interrupted activity can continue. Surprise requires a large amount of attention, particularly so that the next time the event is experienced it is not so jarring and does not catch the individual so much off guard. Surprise and attention is a topic worthy of more focus later, but for now it is worth mentioning that surprise has a notable effect on memory. People experiencing extreme surprise often report ‘flash-bulb’ memories that are very vivid; many people can recall exactly what they were doing when they learned about the Kennedy assassination or 9/11.

Disgust

It has been theorized that disgust originated as an avoidance response to bad tastes and only in recent human history has become an abstract emotion. The main drivers of disgust come from only nine domains: “food, body products, animals, sexual behaviors, contact with death or corpses, violations of the exterior envelope of the body, poor hygiene, interpersonal contamination (contact with unsavory human beings), and certain moral offenses.”