The Laws of Emotion

Nico H. Frijda

• Editore: Psychology Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351543002
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychology
• Categoria: History & Theory in Psychology

The Laws of Emotion is an accessible work that reviews much of the insightful new research on emotions conducted over the last ten years. It expands on the theory of emotions introduced in Nico Frijda's earlier work and addresses a number of unanswered, basic problems on emotion theory. The author's goal is to better understand the underlying psychological mechanisms of emotion. In this book, Professor Frijda also examines previously neglected topics of emotion such as determinants of emotional intensity, the duration of emotions, and sexual emotions. It touches on both evolutionary and neuroscientific explanations. The book begins by reviewing a number of principles governing emotion, or "the laws of emotion". The author then examines the passionate nature of emotions and the motivational processes underlying them, and the nature and causes of pleasure and pain. Professor Frijda then explores the processes that lead to emotional arousal, including cognitive influences and why people care more about certain things than others. Emotional intensity is then discussed, including the often-neglected topic of the course of emotions over time. The book concludes with the author's insights into complex emotional domains such as sex, revenge, and the need to commemorate past events. The Laws of Emotion will appeal to social, cognitive, and developmental psychologists, social scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists, as well as anyone interested in the workings of the mind. It also serves as a text for advanced courses in the psychology of emotions or the neuroscience of emotions.

1
Laws

Emotions are probably the most individual and often idiosyncratic of human phenomena. They express what the world means to the individual, as a particular person at a particular crossroads in the world, and they compose his or her individual reaction to that crossroads. Yet, at the same time, emotions are lawful. They emerge and develop according to definite laws that can, at last in principle, be specified. In this first chapter I sketch these laws. The laws summarize the major regularities in the emotional phenomena.

These laws of emotion were first written down in 1987, after interest in emotions had exploded over the preceding 10 or 20 years, and made emotions reenter psychology as one of its major areas of concern.¹ The article's title was a proud one. I felt that our insight in emotions had advanced enough to venture laws. We were obtaining a grip that would allow siding emotions with other natural phenomena, without sacrificing that which makes them the most idiosyncratic of human phenomena and which reflects the meaning the individual assigns to his or her life. The aim of this book is to seek to understand those regularities. This book is driven by the pathos to, one day, understand the regularities without sacrificing the individualities and personal meanings.

The laws of emotion summarize the main points of how one can view emotions as natural, fully determined phenomena. I did not change them much. Over the past 20 years, considerable advances in knowledge and insight regarding emotions have been achieved. Much more is known both about emotional phenomena, through evolution and over cultures, and much more is also known about emotional differences between species, cultures, and individuals. Considerable advances have been made in understanding the processes of emotion arousal and their development over time; the advances allowed making several of my laws more precise (notably those of Situational Meaning and Apparent Reality). Affective neuroscience has emerged as an almost novel discipline.² So far, however, they gave me no inspiration or grounds for further generalizations at the level of these laws.

Also, the considerable progress notwithstanding, basic puzzles in understanding emotions stand out almost equally as they did 20 years ago. These puzzles are conceptual as well as empirical. They concern the nature of elementary processes involved. They include the following: What is the structure of emotional action, and how do actions like self-protection, flight, and intimate interaction come about? What are the mechanisms involved, and how are they related to the subjective experiences of urge or impulse, and the behavioral manifestations that give rise to the notions of impulse or urge? What is the nature of pleasure and of pain (in the wide sense of unpleasantness), and what is the functional nature of the processes involved? How do emotions interact with cognition; that is, how do the dispositions for emotional reaction interact with impinging as well as earlier and expected information? What is the nature of feeling, and its role in the totality of emotional processes? These are the main topics to which I seek to return in the coming chapters.

The laws of emotions recapitulate the main points of how one can view emotions as natural, fully determined phenomena. Formulating a set of laws of emotion implies not only that the study of emotion has developed sufficiently to do so but also that emotional phenomena are indeed lawful. They emerge, develop, and wax and wane according to rules in strictly determined fashion. When experiencing emotions, people are subject to laws. They are manifesting the workings of laws.

There is a place for obvious reservations here. Can lawfulness be expected, given individual idiosyncrasies? Yes, it can. Lawfulness can be hidden behind the chance encounters of multiple unconnected lawful sequences. One should recall Simon's parable of the ant: The simple mind of an ant makes it follow an erratic path that nevertheless ends at a water edge, because the straight path for which its mind is set meets the local laws of encountering pebbles and gusts of wind.³

More important is the reservation that laws imply invariable validity, but little is invariable in the domain of emotion. Sure, most emotions can be easily predicted. Loudly cry wolf and most people will become afraid. Still, not all people will. Some shrug their shoulders. Other become angry, blaming you for stirring trouble. In the domain of emotion, the regular causal connections are perhaps better captured by more modest terms. They may indicate "mechanisms" that operate over an indistinct range under indistinct, unpredictable conditions. This proposal comes from Elster.⁴ He stresses that different mechanisms may make opposite predictions that both apply under circumstances that can be specified only post hoc, and perhaps not exhaustively. Mechanism 1: Oppression promotes conformity. Mechanism 2: Oppression breeds revolt. The laws of emotion described here are midway between mechanisms in Elster's sense and fully specific laws, if only because no forms of quantitative relationships are specified. The laws are observed or suggested empirical regularities that merely allude to the underlying causal laws in a stricter sense.

The mechanisms hide the underlying laws behind the operation of their joint effects of multiple simultaneous influences and the nonlinearity of many of them. Of this, the progress of Simon's ant is but a poor representative. Progress in each process is strongly determined by immediate feedback from its own results, as well as from overall effects of co-occurring processes and the shifting balances and imbalances between them. The cadre for appropriate viewing the true laws is that of dynamic systems theory, ably sketched for emotions by Lewis.⁵

It has been objected that what I propose in this chapter are not even laws at all but tautological statements that can be derived from a conceptual analysis of "emotion".⁶ The risk of tautology is not illusionary, because most or all of definitions of emotion contain interpretative statements that refer not to observables but to relations among them. But the risk can be escaped from. One can arrive at criteria for "emotion" that are logically independent of the other phenomena that the laws relate to them, and that has been done here.⁷ One can arrive at such criteria empirically, in bootstrapping fashion. One can begin with noting that what we loosely call "emotions" are responses to emotional events: to events that are important to the individual and that modify the continuity of its behavior or feeling. That definition is obviously circular. But one can then proceed to ask what the responses to such events consist of, observe what other kinds of events elicit such responses, and what further responses co-occur with them, in such a way building up noncircular descriptions both of emotional events and of the emotional responses themselves. The latter are what the laws are about.

Among the responses, one class of phenomena stands out, because its occurrence so much overlaps with the intuitive designations of "emotions." That class consists of states of action readiness: readiness to achieve a particular aim, such as protecting oneself, opposing someone, or obtaining intimate proximity. States of action readiness are felt phenomena, often present in verbal self-reports of experienced emotions. People report impulses to approach or avoid, desires to shout and sing or move, urges to retaliate. They report feelings of loss of control as well as, on occasion, loss of readiness, absence of desire to do anything, or lack of interest.⁸ Such felt states of action readiness correspond to behavioral signs of states of readiness. One sees others ready to flee or embrace or, while fleeing or embracing, to be set to somehow complete the actions involved. There is readiness to execute or complete them.

State of action readiness is a central notion in emotion. Its extension roughly corresponds with the extension of the emotion notion. If an event has no repercussion on an individual's inclinations to act, one will hesitate to call it an emotion, except perhaps in the case of emotions evoked by art.⁹ This applies in particular when action readiness and action have particular features: those of involving striving and interference with ongoing actions or goal pursuits. They were among the features leading to the concepts of affection and passion, which were the predecessors of the emotion concept. Discussion of the laws of emotion is therefore best preceded by stating a principle of passion.

The Principle of Passion

Many human and animal processes and phenomena manifest the principle of passion: to manifest states of action readiness, and feelings of readiness that bear on the aim of achieving or maintaining, or terminating or decreasing one's relationship to a particular object or event; and to have the characteristics of emerging involuntarily, of appearing to be set towards completing the aim in the face of delays and difficulties, and to seek precedence over ongoing behavior or interference from other sources.

Such states occur in response to emotional events. They are discussed in detail in chapter 2 and are what is meant by emotions in the laws that follow.

The Laws

The Law of Situational Meaning

Emotions arise in response to patterns of information that represent the meaning of eliciting situations. In principle, different emotions arise in response to different meanings.

The Law of Situational Meaning is phrased slightly differently from its earlier version. Emotions are determined by the meaning structures of events in principle precisely determined fashion. "Meanings" and "meaning structures" refer to the full spatial and temporal context of events, including their evoked associated information. The "in principle" refers to the fact that emotion may in addition be modulated by prevailing state of action readiness, and by availability or unavailability of relevant information. Information may be scant—for instance, when an event happens fast and unexpectedly. The information picked up or evoked may apply to different emotions simultaneously, and that emotion in fact appears to which the individual is at that moment inclined. Pain may elicit anger more readily when the individual is already angry, or recently was. It otherwise might have elicited sadness, disgust, or fear.¹⁰

On a global plane, this law refers to obvious and almost trivial regularities. Emotions tend to be elicited by particular types of event. Grief is usually elicited by personal loss, anger by insults or frustrations, joy by success, etcetera. This obviousness should not obscure the fact that regularity and mechanism are involved. Emotions, quite generally, arise in response to events that are important to the individual; he or she has to grasp that importance in some way. Particular types of event tend to evoke particular emotions. Events that appear to satisfy an individual's concerns, or promise to do so, yield positive emotions or are felt to be pleasant; events that harm or threaten concerns are felt to be unpleasant or lead to negative emotions. Input some event linked to a particular kind of meaning, out comes an emotion of a particular kind. That is the law of situational meaning in its simplest form. In goes loss, and out comes grief. In goes frustration or offense, and out comes anger. In comes concern satisfaction, and out ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Laws
• 2 Passion
• 3 Pleasure
• 4 Appraisal
• 5 Concerns
• 6 Strength
• 7 Time
• 8 "Feelings"
• 9 Sex
• 10 Revenge
• 11 Commemorating
• References