The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition

By Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel.

Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel.

Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more.

From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780674238923

Book preview

The Emotional Mind

THE AFFECTIVE ROOTS OF CULTURE AND COGNITION

Stephen T. Asma

Rami Gabriel

Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England

2019

Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover design: Tim Jones

Cover art: Phrenology head lying sideways © David Muir / Getty Images

978-0-674-98055-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-674-23892-3 (EPUB)

978-0-674-23893-0 (MOBI)

978-0-674-23891-6 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Asma, Stephen T., author. | Gabriel, Rami, author.

Title: The emotional mind : the affective roots of culture and cognition / Stephen T. Asma, Rami Gabriel.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018046433

Subjects: LCSH: Emotions. | Human evolution. | Emotions and cognition. | Social evolution. | Evolutionary psychology.

Classification: LCC QP401 .A76 2019 | DDC 612.8/232—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046433

For Tom Greif and Jaak Panksepp

Contents

Introduction: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition

1 Why a New Paradigm?

2 Biological Aboutness: Reassessing Teleology

3 Social Intelligence from the Ground Up

4 Emotional Flexibility and the Evolution of Bioculture

5 The Ontogeny of Social Intelligence

6 Representation and Imagination

7 Language and Concepts

8 Affect in Cultural Evolution: The Social Structure of Civilization

9 Religion, Mythology, and Art

Notes

References

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction

THE AFFECTIVE ROOTS OF CULTURE AND COGNITION

WHEN DARWIN WROTE the Origin of Species, he famously closed the book with the provocative promise that light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.¹ In his Descent of Man and his Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin began, as promised, to throw some of that light—especially regarding the emotional and cognitive similarities (homologies) of mammals.² But shortly after this beacon, all went dark again. The rise of positivism in the early twentieth century, paired with the turn toward genetics and the ascent of behaviorism, effectively lowered the curtain on biological speculations about the evolution of the mind.

When researchers finally turned again to the mind in the mid-twentieth century, it was the computer that both sparked the cognitive sciences revolution and served as its exclusive investigative heuristic. Yet, for all the successes of artificial intelligence (and they are impressive), our understanding of biological minds seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. While algorithmic digital computation produces problem-solving machines, such problem-solving—confusedly called intelligence by the dominant paradigm—lacks the obvious motivational goads and other affective triggers observed in real animals. In fact, artificial intelligence and artificial life research has lost interest, unapologetically, in the biological creature. And, more surprising—with a putative biological orientation, evolutionary psychology gained popularity in the 1990s by actually ignoring the evolved nature of brain and body in favor of describing computational modules to explain human behavior in some largely mythical Pleistocene. Indeed, contemporary moral psychology and its philosophical counterpart often continue this modular approach, assuming the existence of innate normative switches in the human mind and discounting the emotional nature of ethical actions.

With much less fanfare, the late 1990s saw the recognition of an affective science, especially in the pioneering work of Jaak Panksepp, Antonio Damasio, and Richard Davidson. Affective neuroscience isolates emotional brain systems (largely those regions of the brain we share with other mammals) that undergird adaptive behaviors in vertebrates. With the help of neuroscientific and behavioral research, we are beginning to appreciate how the ancestral mammal brain is alive and well inside our higher neocortical systems. Unlike the computational approach to mind, the affective turn is deeply rooted in what we know about the brain as a biological reality. In the first decade of the new millennium, affective (or emotional) studies began to trickle into disciplines like ethology (e.g., Frans De Waal), economics (Daniel Kahneman), therapeutics (Jonathan Rottenberg), and even pharmaceutics.³ But the time has finally come for a full-scale exploration of the evolution of emotions and mind in the biologically rooted human being.

The Affective Roots of Mind

In this book, we will argue that emotional systems are central to understanding the evolution of the human mind (as well as that of our primate cousins). We bring together insights and data from philosophy, biology, and psychology to shape a new research program.

For at least 200 million years (and that is a conservative figure based on the rise of mammals), the emotional brain has been under construction. By comparison, the expansion of the rational neocortex (around 1.8 MYA), which is the focus of the cognitive approach, is a latecomer on the scene, and the development of our language-symbol system is younger still. In the suite of adaptive tools, the emotions have been at work eons longer than rational cognition, so it makes little biological sense to think about the mind as an idealized rational cost-benefit computer, projected into deep time.

A sufficient account of the evolution of mind will have to go deeper than our power of propositional thinking—our rarefied ability to manipulate linguistic representations. We will have to understand a much older capacity—the power to feel and respond appropriately. We will have to think about consciousness itself as an archaeologist thinks about layers of sedimentary strata.⁴ At the lower layers, we have basic drives that prod the animal out into the environment for the exploitation of resources. Thirst, lust, fear, and so on are triggers in evolutionarily earlier regions of the brain that stimulate vertebrates toward satisfaction and a return to homeostasis. Subsequently, the brain of a mammal creates a feedback loop between these ancient affective systems and the experiential learning and conditioning that the creature undergoes. And, finally, another feedback loop exists between the neocortical rational cognitive processes and the aforementioned subcortical triggers and learning systems. As Jaak Panksepp argues, there are bottom-up causes of mind (i.e., those that push the organism to satisfy specific physiochemical requirements) but also top-down causes (i.e., those that regulate limbic experiences through neocortical cognitive and behavioral strategies).⁵ Conscious subjectivity does not suddenly arise at the top arc of this feedback circle; rather it exists throughout creatures of the mammalian clade as a foundational motivation process related to biological homeostatic triggers.

•   •   •

Affective science can demonstrate the surprising relevance of feelings to perception, thinking, decision-making, and social behavior. The mind is saturated with feelings. Almost every perception and thought is valenced or emotionally weighted with some attraction or repulsion quality. Moreover, those feelings, sculpted in the encounter between neuroplasticity and ecological setting, provide the true semantic contours of the mind. Meaning is foundationally a product of embodiment, our relation to the immediate environment, and the emotional cues of social interaction—not abstract correspondence between sign and referent. The challenge then is to unpack this embodiment. How do emotions like care, rage, lust, and even playfulness create a successful social world for mammals, an information-rich niche for human learning, and a somatic marking system for higher-level ideational salience?

Additionally, these remarkable adaptive emotional systems are suffused with a deep animating power, only dimly understood and alternately called intentionality, conative drive, wanting, seeking, motivation, or the will. From the ancients to the present, we have struggled to understand the goal-directed striving of organisms. Aristotle posited a species-specific and fundamental teleology, Spinoza an essential conatus, Schopenhauer a will to life, Freud an energizing Id, and now we have the motivational functions of mesolimbic dopamine. Our book will acknowledge this biological aspect of embodied mind, track its evolution into behavioral and even cultural pathways, and stand it against the disembodied computational paradigm.

In addition to looking at the fundamental conative structure of the mind, we will track the way that emotional drives were decoupled from specific targets and became available for multi-target and multipurpose adaptive uses (e.g., oxytocin bonding broadened in the Homo genus to include alloparents). This is a crucial aspect of the evolution of the mind. How did vertebrate reflexes (which are automatic and require minimal subjectivity) evolve into mammalian capacities (which are optional, albeit dispositional)? While the evolution of a symbol system certainly gives Anthropocene humans a way of representing behavioral options, we will argue that pre-symbolic humans (probably pre-sapiens) had nonlinguistic grammars (based on association, simulation, memory, etc.) as well as cultural mechanisms that fostered the development of such flexible capacities.

In the last few years, our picture of Homo sapiens success has grown more comprehensive. Older simplistic models of selfish genes, sudden brain expansion, and even the central dogma of biology have been complicated by upgraded biology (e.g., evo-devo, epigenesis, cladistics, etc.), but also we have come to appreciate the constitutive role of social and cultural forces on the developing mindbrain, and vice versa. We view the relationship in a way that is best described by the word dialectical, which has fallen out of vogue (if it was ever in). Other candidate phrases for capturing the interpenetration of causality—like feedback loops, generative entrenchment, enactive embodiment, and emergent holism—are equally fraught, but we’ll avail ourselves of them occasionally because a better terminology has failed to develop.

Recent Insights

Paired with the rise of the affective sciences, three insights, among others, have come to the fore to enable our position in the decades since Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin pushed for a non-reductionistic biology.⁶ One is the empirically strengthened fact of neuroplasticity, in which it has become clear that ontogenetic experience has formative and re-formative influence on the mindbrain. Secondly, we have greater appreciation for the autonomous levels of scientific subjects and methods. Reductionistic consilience—the collapse of psychology to biology, to chemistry, to physics—we know now, is a parlor game not worth pursuing. Thirdly, we have the recent emergence of extended mind theory. Starting with the philosophical work of Andy Clark and David Chalmers, subsequent life scientists, anthropologists, and ecological psychologists have argued that the external environment of objects and social hierarchies function as part of the animal’s mind.⁷ We will explore and exploit these insights to help us make our case for a mind that evolved through constant engagement with its physical and social environment.⁸

If we think of evolution as a mosaic of developmental systems, then we see that populations (e.g., early humans, but also nonhuman primates) have recurring stable resources, some of which are genetic, some phenotypic, and some environmental. Exciting work in anthropology has emphasized how adaptive behaviors can be drawn from the social and cultural spheres as well.⁹ We no longer need to commit to the increasingly outmoded dichotomy of genes vs. environment. An affectively grounded associational system (of emotional learning) in pre-sapiens is precisely the sort of plastic system that can be shaped by selection (with multiple levels of selection) into stable biocultures. These biocultures, in turn, help determine which genetic traits spread through a population.

Some researchers have suggested that hominin evolution exploited a unique cognitive niche.¹⁰ According to these proponents, the niche includes the coevolution of intelligence, language, and sociality. More recently, Whiten and Erdal have refined this claim by showing how the cognitive niche was fundamentally or primarily social.¹¹ We will be arguing that humans evolved in an emotional niche, having affective features homologous with other primates but also having unique affective capacities. We want to provide a key ingredient to the socio-cognitive niche, namely affective or emotional modernity. How did humans become emotionally modern, and what advantages flow from such a transformation?

In alliance with an extended mind approach—hitherto focused on information—we argue that emotions are also distributed beyond the organism itself. Some instinctual homologous affects are generated deep inside the animal in response to perceptual / motor stimuli, but even amygdala-governed fear is based on the connections it has with specific environmental experiences. Pavlovian associations only become adaptive when, in the course of development, the random external stimuli are paired with painful or appetitive events in such a manner that goal-directed behavior (intentionality) is improved. This environmental and developmental influence alone should give us pause when assuming that emotion is inside the head of the animal, for as soon as we ascend into the social affects of the upper-limbic and cognitive affects of the neocortex, we see that emotions are managed as much outside the animal—in social custom and cultural niche—as inside the animal. Moreover, the animal itself does not perceive the world as filled with neutral objects that then get affective salience assigned to them. The associational work is largely invisible to the animal, and the world itself is perceived as populated with threat objects, appetitive objects, and so on. An animal’s affective taxonomy of objects and social con-specifics is relatively stable and also revisable, but the animal’s world, or umwelt, is intrinsically emotional.

In humans, the emotional life is more complex—in the sense of cognitive influence, the intermixing of emotions, executive control, and so on—but is also more extended in and through the environment. Our social and cultural world is designed to trigger and manage affect, partly because this is the most expedient means of triggering pro-social behavior, but also because we are connoisseurs of emotion and pursue their intrinsic as well as instrumental values.

The impressive achievements of a human cognitive niche are often heralded, but the emotional niche has gone unsung. Yet, the advances of complex tool industry, for example, could not have happened without parallel advances in Homo emotional life. During the Acheulean (to 100 KYA) and Mousterian periods (160 KYA to 40 KYA), families (whether nuclear or common) were required to be domesticated (i.e., emotionally modern) enough to learn and to, eventually, patiently teach the skills involved in flint-knapping. In this interpretation, social skills and language as a communication system itself have certain affective prerequisites; sophisticated language may be the result rather than the cause of emotional modernity.

In short, while impressive research has been emerging in disparate fields such as neuro-ethology, ecological psychology, physical anthropology, the evolution of culture, enactive psychology, and the philosophy of biology, no one has yet characterized an affective paradigm that draws together these data and projects a fruitful way forward. Our book hopes to provide such a conceptual roadmap.

Our approach to the mind is heavily indebted to the revolutionary affective neuroscience paradigm of our late mentor Jaak Panksepp (1943–2017). Following Darwin’s conviction that the difference between human and other animal minds is one of degree rather than kind, Panksepp thoroughly investigated and conceptualized the common emotional systems in all mammals. In the course of this book, we will show how the homologous mammalian systems, such as FEAR or CARE, animate human mental life and are, in turn, redirected to and constrained by cognition and culture that are uniquely human. All mammals, according to Panksepp, share seven foundational affective systems: FEAR, LUST, CARE, PLAY, RAGE, SEEKING, and PANIC / GRIEF.¹² Each of these has specific neural electrochemical pathways, with accompanying feeling states and behavior patterns. Although other researchers, like Paul Ekman, draw the map slightly differently regarding what counts as a basic emotion, continued affective science will iron out the best taxonomy in the decades to come.

As Panksepp argued, however, human beings are not just an assembly of mental modules or even emotional circuits. The affective systems are hierarchically structured in three layers of interpenetrating brain activities: primary, secondary, and tertiary functions. Mindbrain processing that is stacked like a layer-cake—or perhaps like nested Russian dolls, with one inside another—is a better metaphor.¹³

At the very bottom or the core are the instinctual drives, like fight-or-flight, or as we will explore in this book, intentional seeking. This primary-process layer is housed largely in subcortical areas of the brain. Panksepp describes primary-process emotions as (1) sensory affects (sensorially triggered pleasant-unpleasant feelings); (2) homeostatic affects (hunger, thirst, etc. tracked via brain-body interoceptors); and (3) emotional affects (emotion-action tendencies).¹⁴ We share these primordial affective systems with all other vertebrates. This layer heavily influences the layer above it, secondary-process emotion, which is more developed in mammals.

Secondary processing includes social emotions, like GRIEF, PLAY, and CARE. It is distinguished from the primary level because it can be sculpted by learning and conditioning. It is the layer of soft-wiring (part native instinct and part learned association), as compared to the hard-wiring of primary-level emotion. Panksepp describes the secondary-process mind in terms of (1) classical conditioning, (2) operant conditioning, and (3) emotional habits. Emotions in primary and secondary layers are largely unconscious, and even when we are regulating them, we do not have clear, introspective, conscious access to their functioning.¹⁵

Lastly is the top layer of the mindbrain: tertiary-process emotion. This is the layer of mind that most philosophers and psychologists tend to focus on exclusively. Here the emotions are still connected to the primary and secondary processes, but they are intertwined in the cognitive powers of the neocortex. Ruminations and thoughts, underwritten by language, symbols, executive control, and future planning constitute the tertiary level, though they are energized by the lower-level emotion. These ruminations and thoughts also serve as top-down regulators and directors of emotion. At this third level we arrive at uniquely human emotions, like those elaborate and ephemeral feelings so beautifully articulated by introspective literary savants such as Henry James and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Panksepp says tertiary affects and neocortical awareness function as (1) cognitive executive functions, (2) emotional ruminations and regulations (generally located in the medial frontal neocortex), and (3) free will, or reflective intention to act (frontal cortical executive functions).¹⁶

The biological and psychological sciences have historically isolated or focused on one layer of mind to the exclusion of others and have thereby presented partial and sometimes conflicting pictures of mind and behavior. Many computationally oriented cognitive scientists tend to focus on tertiary-level processing, while behaviorists focus on secondary-level processing.

Our approach in this book is to show how the lowest layers of mind permeate, infiltrate, and animate the higher layers. The evolution of mind is the developmental story of how these layers emerged and acted as feedback loops on each other. And it’s important to foreshadow here that such feedback is not strictly a brain process, but an embodied, enactive, embedded, and socio-cultural process.

While we want to emphasize our shared instincts with nonhuman mammals, we aim to connect this story to a theory of how culture is both a continuation and a transformation of shared mammalian mental capacities. Starting with bifacial tools, between 2.5 and 1.7 MYA, the mind of Homo became uniquely extended throughout the lived environment, and these external technologies expanded dramatically—distributing mind well beyond the cranium to the environment and back again. From 50 KYA, the archaeological record reveals a profusion of creative problem-solving technologies, like sewn clothing, heated artificial shelters, watercraft, small game and fishing tools, fired ceramics, portable lamps, and so on.¹⁷ These changes were not just intellectual or computational innovations, but also emotional innovations—involving impulse regulation for example. Moreover, the social environment that allowed for the elaborate apprenticeships of our tech-savvy ancestors (e.g., domestication of anti-social affects, divisions of specialized labor, etc.) created an extended, collective mind. Our claim is that emotions infiltrate all of these complex feedback loops between brain, body, and environment, allowing the crucial space for social and cultural innovation.

Recently, the biological basis of emotions has come into question by thinkers who focus largely on tertiary-level emotions and the cultural aspect of our narratives about emotional life; one example is the well-publicized work of social psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett.¹⁸ Barrett argues that emotion is inseparable from cognition and that our emotions, like anger or sadness, are very fast mental constructions—almost like real-time, miniature predictive theories about our experiences. Emotions, in this formulation, are intellectual processes, requiring language to carve raw feelings into discrete emotions. Instead of biological or physiological systems, emotions are said to be more like thoughts, and each person learns early in life how to name and organize them into seemingly natural kinds; but in truth, according to Barrett, they are cognitively and culturally constructed conventions.

The argument for this counterintuitive view rests precariously on an analogy with certain top-down aspects of sensory perception. The powerful effects of cognitive suggestion on perception are well known, and psychologists have made careers priming subjects to perceive something that isn’t there. Cognitive bias in certain kinds of perception is demonstrable.¹⁹ Cognitive expectation can sometimes shape a person’s seemingly unmediated perception. Similarly, Barrett claims, our minds suggest ways to categorize feelings into seemingly automatic or instinctual emotions. We simply don’t have conscious access to this mental-categorizing activity, and we recognize the emotion only when it is fully packaged by our conceptual activity. This view, according to Barrett, explains the cultural relativity and even individual relativity of some emotions.²⁰

However, there are several serious problems with this approach, and so our book will argue for the biological roots of emotion and against social constructionism. We will mention only a few objections to this view here and allow the rest of the book to develop arguments more fully.

First, the claim that emotions are shaped by cognitive functions hinges on an analogy of emotional behaviors to perception, but it is a weak analogy. While it is true that some perception is open to top-down structuring (e.g., prejudice influences how I see a stranger), the fact is that most perception is not. Recent work from the Yale Cognition and Perception Lab, particularly that by Chaz Firestone and Brian Scholl, shows that most perception is reliably free of top-down influence.²¹ Perception is not as penetrable to higher cognitive function as Barrett and others contend. This doesn’t mean perception is impenetrable to physiological conditioning and bottom-up influence; if anything, the empirical work seems to suggest that repeatable constraints or influences on perception come not from beliefs or language or concepts, as Barrett suggests, but from feelings, emotions, or affects. This means that the permeability of perception cuts against Barrett’s argument, since it reveals a physiological causal force (viz. the affective systems) that shapes and constrains perception and cognition.

Secondly, Barrett and other constructionists cannot say how various emotions are differentiated except by cognition, but this explains very little. On this view, we, or our culture, could decide to define fear as happiness, and the redefinition would make it so ipso facto. But fear feels awful and drives different behavior than happiness. Constructionists like Barrett admit to a low-level positive or negative valence of feelings but then ascribe discrete emotions like fear and anger to the cognitive labeling of this low-level feeling. In our view, this theory radically underdetermines the phenomenology, neuroscience, and ethology of emotions. Constructionists like Barrett point to atypical emotional responses in some individual’s self-reports and to atypical neural patterning in fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) studies and erroneously conclude that the emotions are not universal and natural but are relative matters of cognitive taste. But exceptions prove the rule, in this case, and are not anomalies that unravel the biological paradigm of emotions. The brain is plastic enough to account for diversity without having to throw out the biology of emotions. The reason we classify a handful of behaviors, expressions, and feelings as anger is because an identifiable physiological pattern underlies them, and such patterns evolved in mammal brains to aid their survival.

Third, the argument of constructionists might work for very rarified neocortically enmeshed emotions like ellipsis, but that is not the correct model for primary-level affects (genetically engraved and largely dedicated to a suite of behaviors). Ellipsis is a word coined to describe the sadness a human feels when he contemplates that he will not live to see the future. An unscientific but intriguing online site, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, details many of these tertiary-level emotions, including the emotion of liberosis—a desire to care less about things, as when an adult longs to be a child again. Barrett’s theory of emotions might indeed help explain some of these more cognitive, discursive, and culturally bounded feelings, but mammalian affective systems (primary and secondary levels) are very different (albeit sublated within the tertiary level), not to mention far more numerous and common.

Fourth, neuroscience disagrees with the constructionists. Over the last two decades, neuroscientists like Panksepp, Damasio, Davidson, LeDoux, Berridge, and many others have mapped clear neural pathways for basic emotions. Constructionists argue that the facial expressions of emotions like anger are more diverse and variable than previous researchers suggested; but even if this were true (and the jury is out), it doesn’t follow that the underlying brain and body processes for anger are diverse. Extensive research on the amygdala, for example, reveals that fear has a clear brain signature. And precise, localized electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) reveals specific affective and behavioral responses in animals. Mammalian fear, for example, is a natural kind (similar to that of a biological species) with diverse variability (again, similar to a biological species).

Fifth and most important, we must consider the constructionist view in regard to nonhuman animals. Barrett’s theory, which makes emotion dependent on higher conceptual cognition, the understanding of cultural context, and language, renders emotion in nonhuman animals and even babies unintelligible. In response to this problem, Barrett falls back on the old epistemic quandary that diagnosing an emotion in a nonlinguistic subject is very difficult. We cannot know if they are having emotions, she suggests, unaware of philosophical literature on the problem of other minds. But the clear (albeit unowned) implication of her conceptual act theory of emotions is that animals and babies do not have emotions because they lack language.²² This seems remarkably inconsistent with evidence from animal studies and developmental studies, as well as common sense. In fact, it strikes us as an unhealthy return to both behaviorist and Cartesian agnosticism about animal consciousness; and we will argue in this book for the reality of animal emotions.

Our Approach: Chapter Synopses

In Chapter 1 we chart our epistemological orientation. The mind is too frequently conceived as a computer system of circuits and modules, but it is a biological system first and foremost. We begin with a short history of recent metaphors of mind, especially from empirical psychology. We describe how an affective perspective rectifies mistakes in behaviorism and cognitive science, while also building on the breakthroughs these views made possible. We describe a non-modular model of affective mechanisms and its implications for an evolutionary approach to cognitive psychology. Most models of value generation are based either on behaviorist conditioning paradigms or cognitive, rational cost / benefit decision-making. But the former mechanical associations are too dumb, and the latter discursive and computational reasoning is too smart. We argue that the neuroplastic brain generates and assigns affective values with pushmi-pullyu representations and somatic markers long before the mind engages in propositional manipulation of the external world. Buttressed by interpretation of experimental findings on attitudes and unconscious reactions in a prosopagnosic patient, this new paradigm describes a model of intentions in action.

In Chapter 2, we lay out our ontological positions with an emphasis on key issues in the philosophy of biology, including teleology, intentionality, and the causality of developmental feedback processes. Our debt to Aristotle and Spinoza reveals our deeper perspective on the intrinsic properties of biological entities. Spinoza saw nature in fairly mechanical deterministic terms, but he recognized that living things share a simple goal-oriented tendency; namely, they strive to survive. He called this animation principle of living systems conatus (striving) and considered it the very essence of all biological creatures.

Biological systems are intentional. Equipped with conatus, proto-representational abilities, and homeostatic processes, creatures with locomotion pursue maximum grip on their environments. Conative aboutness in dynamic ecological systems is a kind of intentionality that occurs prior to symbolic representations. This line of thinking has been neglected, however, because earlier theories were tangled in theology, and Cartesian and recent digital notions of mind have failed to incorporate this aspect of embodiment. Biological teleology, and emotional intentionality in particular, need to be worked out before the representational theory of mind, which is in turn derivative of those earlier forms of goal-directness.

In this chapter, we reconceive teleology in terms of a post-Darwinian ontology. These ontological considerations will lay the foundation for those telic features of mind, articulated nicely by William James in 1890: [C]onsciousness seems to itself be a fighter for ends. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to those ends, discerning which facts further them and which do not.²³

After these more explicitly philosophical chapters, in Part 2 we offer a three-chapter section on the evolution and development of social intelligence. Here we outline a model of social intelligence and the foundation it provides for the phylogenetic and ontogenetic cultural accumulation of information. This model includes an emphasis on the features of mental life that are homologous with nonhuman primates. Much of our understanding of primate ethology is gained through the work of primatologists Frans de Waal, Craig Stanford, Robert Sapolsky, and Sarah Hrdy. Drawing on the ecological psychology of researchers like Louise Barrett and the situated cognition approach of Andy Clark, we describe the environmental contours of primate emotional life. We also discuss a set of perceptual, emotional, and social processes as the proximal causes that enable culture and cultural learning, as investigated by philosopher Kim Sterelny and psychologist Darcia Narvaez and colleagues.²⁴

The first chapter of this section (Chapter 3) provides a theoretical model for the complexity of social processes using the notion of affordances as a conceptual lever to transform the scope of perception and the role of emotions therein. The second chapter of the section (Chapter 4) delivers a phylogenetic story of social intelligence through a comparative analysis of primate social behavior in its ecological and emotional context. The final chapter of this section (Chapter 5) tracks an ontogenetic narrative—the developmental psychology of social intelligence in humans, with particular attention to the infant-caregiver relationship.

In Part 3 of the book we offer chapters on the affective roots of human culture, tracing affective systems through transformations that enabled representational mental processes, social organization, religion, and art. Our key principle is the notion of decoupling: when an affective response, or a perceptual representation, is freed from necessity and attaches onto, and expands into, other functions. Put another way (following philosopher Ruth Millikan), the human mind evolved the ability to separate or disconnect the indicative from the imperative functions of an image, sound, or memory. This provided enough distance from automatic action-responses that representations could be manipulated (i.e., counterfactuals arose), and a second universe slowly emerged inside the head of Homo.

Most contemporary work on the evolution of mind fails to address the way in which intellectual representations originated in earlier animal abilities. In this section of the book, we articulate an empirically informed model of how primates transitioned from bodily simulations (the beginnings of decoupling) to symbol systems, and how those eventual symbolic systems still bear the mark of their affective roots.

Chapter 6 is an exploration of representation and imagination. Representational abilities were decoupled from perceptual tasks and allowed an expansion of involuntary and agent-directed simulation possibilities. These representational processes remained nested in the brain processes we described above but, through the pressures of expanding social groups and cognitive needs, acquired new possibilities. The decoupling of representations (in simulations that include valence tags) marked the key shift from here-and-now perception and action demands onto more long-term tasks, which are generally related to social needs and require inhibitory abilities. We postulate an arc from stimulus-response reflexes to affordance-based perceptual systems, associational conditioning in mnemonic systems, cross-modal imagination (enabled by decoupled task grammar and analogical modeling), and, finally, inferential symbolic capabilities. In this trajectory, we will describe how affect can be an organizing principle in the associational and decoupling stages. The transition we sketch here is from direct perception’s automatic behavioral affordances to bodily simulations for action and perception in spatial navigation, and from affective reconsolidation of memory in dreams to conceptual and linguistic symbol systems used in the executively directed simulations and novel compositional activities of voluntary imagination. Spatial navigation and the dream state observed in mammals may have served as the crucibles for this evolutionary transformation.

The decoupled simulators and executive processes that constitute cognition and representational mind were necessary for the evolution of the concepts we discuss in Chapter 7. Dialectical cycles between these mental abilities and complex social processes presumably led to our infinitely iterative natural language and culture. The evolution of representations and imagination runs through the valley of the decoupling of affect and leads to the mountaintop of symbolic communication. Analytic philosophy, with its focus on the lingua mentis, has erroneously treated the conceptual realm as a syntactic and semantic system that is entirely independent from the body, perception, emotion, and even developmental learning. This nonbiological approach has led to distorted theories of concepts, in our view, and we argue for a more embodied approach.

We discuss how imagination mediates between perception, memory, and judgment unconsciously or preconsciously, and we trace the roots of these ideas from Aristotle, Kant, and, more recently, Mark Johnson. Dreams and mind-wandering are examples of detaching affect from agent-directed goals and here-and-now perceptual-motor tasks, allowing synthetic mental processes for affect organization and representation. Our prototype of unconscious imagination is dream decoupling, wherein objects are assigned new emotional valence tags (or old ones are reinforced), leading toward the creation of more appropriate or adaptive social behavior simulations for use in waking life. We propose the thesis that imagination acts as a middleman between sensory-motor capacities and the cognitive-linguistic mind with its behavioral affordances in body grammar and task grammar.

In Chapter 8 we examine social structures, considering, in turn, the role of affect in cultural evolution, and specifically, collective social organization in the rise of civilization. We draw on archaeological findings that suggest that human social organization has taken many shapes, including hunter-gatherer bands, the tribe, the chiefdom, the state, as well as complex variations and hybrids of each.

As social institutions become a part of our lived environment, culture serves as a secondary niche for the species. This unique ability we have to learn from others and to transmit and reproduce ideas and all forms of knowledge opened a world beyond genes. While sociocultural arrangements are, first of all, responses to ecological pressures, with each solution making survival possible in the given ecological circumstances, the most telling part of the anthropological record demonstrates how the ecological pressure of population growth called forth new technology (such as hunting tools), new forms of social organization (such as the nuclear family), and political regulation (for example, the creation of the chiefdom). What we add to the consideration of the question of society’s evolution is how these changes are both bound to, and grow out of, our affective needs and motivations. Indeed, social norms—from reciprocity to ritual restrictions—are ultimately forms of affect management.

The resource-sharing, nomadic movement and the face-to-face social interaction of hunter-gatherer groups reinforce cultural adaptations that are based on complex cooperative strategies. Likewise, changing social and ecological factors—such as an increase in population, the establishment of defensible resources brought on by sedentism, and the firm establishment of kin groups—are foundational to the rise of civilization in the agrarian state. These changes suggest types of societies that tend to be stratified, centralized, and often organized with abstract ideological norms such as laws and ritualized customs.

We argue that affective adaptation to the specific ecological and social topography of human groups is a causal factor in the creation, maintenance, and eventual change of the social norms that define culture and organization. The cultural and ecological factors of band-sized populations, face-to-face interaction, and continuous foraging played a role in orienting our affective motivations, the bandwidth of our empathic broadcast, and the relations between emotion, action, and inhibition. This orientation created the cultural adaptation of some versions of enforced sharing that take hold and serve as a structural force that contributes to the shape of social organization. If social and ecological circumstances change, our motivations, feelings, and group affiliations will recalibrate accordingly. The particular changes that took place in the shift from hunter-gatherer band to agrarian state in the Upper Paleolithic (50 KYA till 10 KYA) were influenced by what has been termed a release from proximity (i.e., a loss of immediacy).²⁵ Under these circumstances, enforced sharing may be abandoned, empathy may take on new forms, and abstract ideology may become decoupled from more immediate social norms to serve as a more prominent source of social organization. In this chapter, our goal is to propose an interpretation of the archaeological evidence of social organization that takes into account the role of affective mediators of social bonding.²⁶

In Chapter 9, our most speculative chapter, we explore religion, mythology, and art. Here we argue for an affective bridge that explains not only ontogenetic value generation but also sociocultural adaptations (and exaptations) such as religion and art. The pictorial and narrative faculty of imagination (under increasing voluntary control during the Upper Paleolithic) furnishes a bridge between passive sensory memory and associationism on the one hand and active adaptive appraisal (or judgment), as well as mimetic cultural codification of survival strategies, on the other hand.

From rather different perspectives, researchers like Scott Atran, Denis Dutton, Arnold Modell, and Steve Mithen have all recently challenged Steven Pinker’s famous suggestion that art is evolutionary cheesecake, a nonadaptive byproduct of big-brain ingenuity.²⁷ We stake our position in this debate by using evidence from affective neuroscience and anthropology, revealing the emotionally therapeutic, prosocial aspects of religion, mythology, and art. In those rare cases where researchers acknowledge an adaptive natural history of religion, for example, they tend to offer cognitive interpretations (i.e., primitive religion is crude proto-science that helps early man make predictions about and understand nature), but this is an incomplete picture and rides atop what we believe to be the principal role of religion, which is to shape social solidarity through ritualized affective sculpting.

An affective approach to culture also helps us understand some stubborn contemporary confusions. The New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, are evaluating religion at the neocortical level—their criterion for assessing its claims is the hypothetico-deductive method of verification. However, we argue religion may fail at the bar of rational validity because it is the wrong bar for evaluating religion. The limbic brain, built by natural selection for solving survival challenges, was not built for rationality. Systems that culturally manage our emotions, like religion, were selected for because they helped early mammals flourish. William James understood the tension between passional and rational agendas long before we had a neurological way of framing it. James recognized that faith is not knowledge, in the strict sense, but asserted that since it is deeply meaningful (as a felt emotion), it is important to see how and why faith might be warranted. He also understood, as did thinkers like Antonio Damasio, that secular reason is more feeling-laden than we usually admit—there is a sentiment in rationality. The recent debate about religion, like polarizing political rhetoric, lacks James’ refined understanding of the real stakes involved, and it lacks the appreciation of the affective roots of religion, myth, and art.²⁸

As such, we focus on the role of the spiritual emotions of awe, wonder, and transcendence in art and religion. Taking their energy and drive from basic affective sources like the SEEKING and PLAY systems, these spiritual emotions functioned to temper intense feelings of FEAR and GRIEF in the context of the neocortical imaginative elaboration of culture. The emotionally saturated state engendered in spiritual emotions is immanent in our neuropsychology, but the ways in which we communicate our transformative experiences in art are unique.

Taking place in the association-rich cultural spaces of affective modernity, shamans, artists, and mystical individuals sought to materialize their unique experiences in aesthetic ways that engendered faith, belief, and further transcendent states. While scientists seek the cognitive processes behind wonder and curiosity, we also urge consideration of the emotional landscape that gives this sphere of culture its indelible importance to individuals and groups. As others have said, art and religion coalesce formats of emotional manipulation that are prosocial, but the mystical experience, as William James wrote in 1902, produces an added dimension of emotion … and a new reach of freedom for us … performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill.²⁹

1

Why a New Paradigm?

LIKE ANY OTHER FIELD of inquiry, psychology is slow to change but is always changing. The insight of this book is that research undertaken during the last couple of decades in the life sciences, evolution, and neuroscience suggests it is time for psychology and philosophy to alter fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of mind. In the early twentieth century psychologists favored the methods of behaviorism, while in the late twentieth century the methodology of cognitive science came to the fore; each in its own way was startlingly successful, but the time is nigh for us to synthesize and supersede. Behaviorism enabled empirical precision of great subtlety, best suited to nonhuman animal experiments. Cognitive science enabled systematic modeling of internal information states, best suited to computers and some higher human cognitive skills. It is now clear that both approaches reveal different levels of mental functioning; but while the former is not flexible enough to explain the adaptability of the mind, the latter is neither subtle nor tender enough to explain the heat of consciousness.

Behaviorism and cognitive science are comprised of methodological frames and epistemological assumptions that do not adequately take into account the role of the emotions in the mind. The case we put forward tips its hat to the work of psychologists of the twentieth century, but it stakes its roots in the psychology of the nineteenth century, when phenomenology, philosophy, and an appreciation for cultural and anthropological insights played more significant explanatory roles. Maintaining strands from post-Darwinian natural philosophy, our goal is to bring them back in touch with the even older paradigms of Aristotelian-via-Spinozistic neutral monist ontology as well as with the contemporary life sciences, paleoanthropology, animal ethology, and social and affective neurosciences.

With the development of our understanding of affect in the brain, we believe a middle way between behaviorism and cognitive science has become possible. While sufficient empirical evidence has not been previously available to explain how cognition is embodied and how endogenous innate associationist systems are able to point at the world, in our opinion, the great breakthrough of the affective sciences is that it points to how the middle systems of affective processes can be trained through ecology and experience—that is, how they enable complex associationist / behaviorist abilities and, at the same time, give cognition its bodily basis in the sentient values that determine behavior and thought.

Although many questions remain, the time is ripe to develop a philosophy of the affective sciences that may enable empirical psychology to synthesize a robust evolutionarily valid framework of behavior and motivation, and of thought and action. Such a frame will allow for more fruitful connections to research on human culture and, subsequently, the humanities. In this chapter, we provide a paradigm for integrating the prevailing methodologies of psychology around the function of emotions.

Paradigms of the Mind

The paradigm that has dominated scientific attempts to explain how the mind works is called associationism. We know it in its more recent derivation from the work of the British empiricists and subsequently from James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill.¹ It was thereafter used as the basic model to describe how the mental imprint of past events structures future behavior. The essential claim of this approach is: Ideas are copies of sensations. All ideas, whether they are complex, simple, or combinations thereof, are derived from sensations (i.e., impressions), which are more vivacious than ideas. Further considerations relate to the strength of associations; Mill considered association a relation between permanence, strength, and facility, but associations could also be labeled in terms of their similarity, contrast, and contiguity.² While J. S. Mill pictured the mind as active and underscored the emergent properties of associations, Alexander Bain emphasized how habits formed the basis of learning.³ The mind in this latter formulation is essentially passive—it reacts through conditioned reflexes—and this position is what provided the bedrock for associative learning and conditioning theory to be elaborated upon extensively in controlled laboratory experimentation.⁴ Through the work of John Watson, Donald Hebb, and B. F. Skinner, this approach developed directly into the empirical paradigm of behaviorism that sought to clarify basic learning processes in nonhuman animals.⁵ We do not see the behaviorist adoption of associationism as exhausting the insights of this intuitive theory; in fact, we believe that whether affective and cognitive processes require associationist architecture at some level is an empirical question.⁶

With access to laboratories and lab animals, behaviorism focused on stimulus-outcome relationships. Findings from this approach are now successfully applied to