A Popular Handbook of the Emotions

By Robert Hauptman

In A Popular Handbook of the Emotions, distinguished literary scholar Robert Hauptman summarizes various theoretical positions to analyze 18 emotions in terms of art and culture. Not merely a textbook and lavishly illustrated, A Popular Handbook offers a unique, interdisciplinary perspective on the human experience for students, specialists, and the interested public.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781680532449

Book preview

Preface

Emotions are a burgeoning business: For 1920, PsycINFO listed a mere 66 articles, book chapters, etc. on emotions. The ongoing growth rate is basically incremental: In 1950, there were 239; in 1975, 788; in 2000, 2,704, in 2018, 7,484; and on the second day of 2019, there were already 234. The total number of cumulated items dealing with emotions in the database was 179,132. The New York Public Library holds 7,203 items and these, naturally, are primarily books and in all languages. The same is true of the Library of Congress, which would only display the first 10,000 items! But A Popular Handbook is different from anything that has preceded it: It does not report on field work or experiments, propound a theory, advocate for either a delimitation or expansion of the emotions, advance ludicrous ideological positions, bludgeon with esoteric or incomprehensible scientific jargon, statistics, charts, or tables, unequivocally defend the folk tradition, or counter its critics, because there are none yet. What it does do is survey the entire field and not just recent material; it includes non-humans; and separately discusses 18 emotions in terms of basic attributes, practical applications, health, the arts, and social and cultural differences. Unlike virtually all other articles and books, it is extensively illustrated with various types of images. It is aimed at a popular audience but the most sophisticated scholar would profit from a careful reading, even though he or she might disagree with some of the contentions presented.

During the course of the following investigation, a number of outlandish beliefs or interpretations are mentioned or discussed. These include the position that neither free will nor moral responsibility exist, empathy is the cause of societal problems, happiness should be avoided, and altruism is evil. Some people angrily insist that this nonsense should not only not be considerately addressed but rather should be completely ignored. But since reputable scholars are responsible for these theoretical musings, it seems important to take them seriously, although they should be debunked in the same way that we rebut the seriously-minded who offer resistance to climate change, evolution, non-literal Biblical interpretation, and the Holocaust, and defend many ideologically motivated but false convictions. Human beings believe a diversity of things. Many are undoubtedly true, some are open to debate, and a few are unequivocally invalid. To the true believer, whether an adolescent who runs her life according to her daily horoscope or a Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist who insists, with no observational evidence, that the universe consists of nine dimensional strings, impinging reality does not matter. They continue to believe. These beliefs demand articulation and rational rebuttal.

Additionally, theoretical psychologists and neuroscientists propagate constructs that may well be valid, reliable, and true, but which are couched in bizarre pseudo-scientific terminology, jargon that makes little sense in the context. Thus, desire, say for a new car to replace one that blew up and that a person requires to commute to work is, according to the esteemed scholar René Girard, mimetic desire, a mere imitation of another person’s craving; or love is micro moments of positivity resonance…. Perhaps we should ignore this nonsense!

Scholars, especially but not exclusively psychologists, experiment, counsel, interview, and theorize and then write up their discoveries. These papers, presented at conferences and published in prestigious journals, may sometimes make real contributions to human knowledge, but often they are so bizarre, so riddled with extraneous and meaningless statistical tests, data, charts, and tables that they are a burden rather than a contribution. Does The Role of Emotions in Predicting Sperm and Egg Donations appear to be beneficial or useful? So many of the tens of thousands of scholarly articles that deal with the emotions are of little true value especially to the general reader who may be interested in the way anger manifests itself and what can be done to allay it in oneself and in others rather than in Positive and negative hysteresis effects for the perception of geometric and emotional ambiguities. I have culled the mental, physiological, and behavioral wheat from the chaff and baked some edible pastries.

Most people, including scholarly researchers, hold that we are rational creatures whose clear thinking processes are contaminated by internal and external emotional outbursts. But in reality, matters stand quite differently. Every human being comes equipped with a set of presuppositions, axiomatic beliefs, that derive from parents, siblings, teachers, peers, society, and especially ideological confusions based on political and religious dogma. In many cases, the tenets of one’s parents’ religion are unexamined, accepted, and held to be true. These basic axioms influence everything that one believes to be valid, and rational discourse cannot contravene the emotional hold that Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish commitment has on the true believer, whose attitude is well summarized in the following apothegms: credo ut intelligam, or worse, credo quia absurdum. Instead of being entities whose rationality is polluted by emotions, we are, in reality, emotional creatures whose rationality helps to control our baser physiological and societal instincts.

Finally, I have examined and read many hundreds of articles and books and have encountered only two studies that are remotely similar to A Popular Handbook of the Emotions. Stuart Walton’s Natural History of Human Emotions does comment on a series of ten emotions, but his volume is as different from mine as Steinhäger is from water, since his remarks derive from and revert to historical events. The second work, John Archer’s Nature of Grief, is the only study that not only features literature and art but additionally is appropriately illustrated. (Almost all other books only occasionally contain statistical charts or CAT scans of the brain.) Archer’s book, however, deals exclusively with grief, whereas mine covers 18 different emotions, their literary, cinematic, artistic, and musical manifestations, and many other aspects, and is profusely illustrated. It is a carefully wrought work that encompasses most aspects of emotionality and emotionology.

Part I

Exploratory essays orienting the work

Chapter 1

Sources, Antitheses, Expression

We all live at the mercy of our emotions. Our emotions influence and shape our desires, thoughts and behaviors and above all our destiny.

--Dr T. P. Chia

Showing your emotions is a sign of strength.

--Brigitte Nicole

In a ‘post-truth’ world, facts are less influential than emotion and belief.

--Michael V. Hayden

People make so many [bad] decisions based on emotions.

--Toni Ortner

The sign of intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.

--Marya Mannes

Human and animal emotional reaction to the universe is innate and ubiquitous, an instinctive, biological response, sometimes uncontrollable and unconscious. For thousands of years we have believed this to be so because it appears to be a reasonable conclusion based on both personal experience and scientific observation. No sheep ever manifested courage or anger and chased a wolf in order to devour it. Herbivores come equipped with fear that protects them from predators, who also have innate emotional responses to their environments. On the other hand, little children do not usually fear things that cause adults so much psychological pain: poisonous snakes, reptiles, arachnids, and insects; dirt and germs; even larger potentially harmful mammals such as rampaging rhinoceroses or Hell’s Angels. So does this prove that emotions are not innate? I have my doubts. Lisa Feldman Barrett casts aside accepted emotional etiology (and many other myths) and insists that emotions are constructed; emotions are different in different environments and they appear because of a stimulus; they are created (xii): Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions (31) and your memories as well (237). Barrett goes about her business in laboratory experiments and field work among groups of people who have not been exposed to the major world civilizations. She informs readers in innumerable scholarly articles as well as in How Emotions are Made, a large popular volume that covers every conceivable aspect of her encompassing theory and its allied program, which will improve humankind.

Her belief in her iconoclastic conjecture is unwavering and reminiscent of the denial of instinctive reactions (animal migration, parental defense) that the agenda-ridden cannot abide or the bizarre postmodern contention that science is socially constructed, which is an especially apt comparison because Barrett’s idea integrates an analogous etiology: The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavors of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuroconstruction, it adopts the idea that existence wires the brain (35). Infants hear the words for an emotion repeated, eventually form a concept, and then construct specific instances later in life (110). But this does not work for animals and there can be little doubt that some animals do experience some emotions, for example, fear.

But let us hypothetically allow that Barrett is correct and that emotions are constructed rather than elicited; what difference does it make, epistemologically, ethically, or practically? I am fairly certain that we will not return to raising children in Skinner boxes (that is, in a constrained environment) in order to deter them from constructing anger or hatred or stimulating them to favor happiness and empathy. But again, I am apparently wrong for Barrett insists that this minor intellectual adjustment (her new program) will positively alter health (…some major illnesses considered distinct and ‘mental’ are all rooted in a chronically unbalanced body budget and unbridled inflammation [203]) and legal matters (our senses do not reveal reality [247]); indeed it envisions A new view of human nature (152). Barrett is fond of hypothesized anecdotes. How about this countering one? An adolescent with a very low IQ and no intercalated (linguistic) conceptualizations of emotions is pleased and appears happy or is really irritated and apparently gets angry or is petrified (by proximity to fire) and becomes fearful. Are his emotions not innate rather than constructed based on a learned (linguistic) paradigm? It will come as a surprise, but after all of that, I have no stake or agenda here; if Barrett is correct, that is fine; nevertheless, I do now go about my investigation as if emotions are innate*.

Robert Plutchik summarizes four primary etiological emotional traditions:

evolutionary (Darwin), the psychophysiological (James), neurological (Cannon), and dynamic (Freud) (197). Naturally, more recent work has produced additional perspectives but these are historically telling.

Plutchik is very fond of charts which prove extremely useful. For example, here is one that describes states for emotions using subjective language (fear, terror), behavioral language (withdrawing, escaping), and functional language (protection). He does this for eight emotions (200). Another table indicates the emotion (disgust), the experience (disease and illness), and the social institution that deals with it (medicine). Eight emotions are covered here as well (216). Some people divide emotion into positive and negative classes. Common knowledge makes it fairly simple to assign specific emotions here: Anger and jealousy are obviously negative and happiness and sympathy positive. Some think that one should abjure anger even for Nazi murders of innocent relatives; that, however, is an extreme belief. Strangely, disgust can be both depending on whether it is harming or saving one from a toxic substance; the same is true for guilt, which is negative, since one did something wrong, but positive if it helps to expiate the problem.

Catherine Lutz conceptualizes emotion as an irrational, unintended and uncontrollable act, danger and vulnerability, physicality, subjectivity, natural fact, subjectivity, female, or value (59-80). Each of these useful analogues offers possible ways of approaching emotion practically or theoretically, but no single concept can fully encompass emotional diversity. Traditional emotional etiology produces scholarly confusion. There exist three possibilities: Either cognition precedes emotional response and this makes sense, since one perceives something that causes a reaction and this perception must roll through the cognitive process; or affect precedes cognition, but even the swiftest onset of an emotion (rather than a mere reflex), must involve physical (or mental) perception and therefore cognition must be involved; a third possibility is that both theoretical positions are valid; or finally neither, that is, affective response and cognition are independent of each other. The two final positions seem misguided.

The confusion here as elsewhere lies in necessity: Scholars are not willing to merely undertake a problem, propose a hypothesis, confirm or disconfirm it, and then move on to the next problem; in order to light up their vitae and reputations, they must propound a theory. This is why there exist so many competing, confusing, and often invalid theoretical formulations. Almost everyone, especially philosophers and psychologists, theorize about the emotions: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant come to mind. In 1973, K. T. Strongman summarized the emotional theories of 20 modern thinkers including W. James, J. B.Watson, R. Plutchik, and R.W. Leeper (13-35). Rom Harré makes it clear that he is dissatisfied with much of this; he prefers his own theorizing: I have been trying to build up a case, not only in support of a more complex psychological theory of the emotions than the intellectually anorexic accounts offered by recent academic psychology… (9), and this in defense of the social construction of the emotions. It is no wonder that these ideas clash and fail to validly explain and clarify matters.

Everything that is bad derives from our emotions, but then so too does everything that is good. Emotional reaction is so menacing that five of the seven deadly sins are emotional in nature: greed, gluttony, envy, wrath, and lust. Even laziness and pride might be snuck in here. Emotional reaction supersedes its rational, logical antithesis of which we humans are so proud. Emotions control our destines. It is often possible to decipher another’s emotional state by observing his or her tears, laughter, enraged face, or facial contortions--but not if a person attempts to conceal just how sad or happy, angry or aroused he or she happens to be. Luckily, computer scientists have come to our rescue and it is now possible for robots and software to interpret emotions. Honda is working on an emotion-sensing car and Fraudoscope employs a camera and software to detect deception (Rothman 42). Much worse, Andrew McStay claims that emotional AI (technologies that use affective computing and artificial intelligence techniques to sense, learn about and interact with human emotional life) will, in a few years, inundate us in cars, phones, policing, education, hospitals, prisons, and stores among many other possibilities (McStay 1).

Jerome Kagan discusses seven emotion classifying criteria: … origin, biological profile, expectancy and familiarity of the incentive or feeling, consequences, pleasant or unpleasant quality (called valence), … salience (or intensity) … [and] the semantic label… (55). Using these or others, scholars sometimes limit the emotions to a list of five or six or even seven basic (biological) responses, for example, anger, joy, sadness, fear, and shame or the first four plus disgust and surprise, but without duplication, such as anger and aggression or hate and dislike; there are many more distinct reactions and this text attempts to cover the most important ways in which humans react to the world when rationality is set aside and emotional responses detonate. Emotional reactions do not occur in a unitary vacuum, and one may undergo a complex of simultaneous feelings, some of which may be minimally invasive, while others can be overpowering and debilitating. The degree of response depends, at least in part, on the etiology of the emotion. Social and cultural influences may be more salient than the layman realizes.

And, naturally, even overpowering responses can be controlled. For example, most people before, at, or after funerals do not explode in unrestrained hysterical crying or keening. Only strangers who act as professional keeners in Greek culture or orthodox Judaism howl in sympathy with the bereaved. Otherwise, only twice in my three quarters of a century did I ever experience such extreme misery: I was overcome and cried uncontrollably at my father’s funeral and I once observed a woman at a veterinarian’s office as she was given some bad news about her pet. She exploded in loud, wild, uncontrolled, hysterical crying and sobbing that went on unbated for quite some time; her partner was unable to console her. Occasionally, in a television commercial, for example, one observes a person in wild anger throwing a partner’s material possessions out of a window, below which the items crash onto the sidewalk and shatter. This destructive act apparently acts as a catharsis and the anger diminishes. Whereas it is almost always better personally and socially to control one’s outbursts, sometimes a powerful emotional response is necessary to maintain sanity. Even stoics (and pointy-eared Spock) have feelings, though they may do all that they can to sublimate them; this can lead to eccentric ideas or behavior, neurosis, or psychosis. Those who attempt to extirpate either the emotions or rationality lead much diminished lives. History is replete with thinkers who have advocated both extreme positions; Nietzsche favored the blood and Descartes cogitation and it is easy to see what both positions engendered. A balanced response would improve human interactions: Not everyone can or should be Kant or a Buddhist mendicant.

Humans learn to control their emotions as they mature. The very young cry when they do not get what they want and some throw temper tantrums: They may be desirous, greedy, jealous, sad, and angry all at the same time. Doting parents who give in to emotional outbursts may turn their young children into spoiled, entitled monsters, who go through life expecting to receive everything they desire. On the other hand, thwarted youngsters, who frequently fail to achieve their ends, may devolve into emotionally immature, rebellious teenagers, asocial adults, or sociopaths. Think of the orphans in Rumanian facilities who were deprived of emotional sustenance or the spoiled little girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who angrily, hysterically demands a squirrel. Emotional balance begins in infancy and carries through the developing years, as children learn to cope with denial and frustration. It is an important accompaniment to the physical and intellectual achievements that parents so relish in their offspring.

The manifestation, strength, and endurance of emotional reaction vary in individuals, social and cultural environments, and at various chronological points in a person’s life. An infant is just beginning to emote, an adolescent must learn to control her emotions, and the elderly react differently than they would have as newlyweds. Few societies condone angry, violent, vulgar outbursts; they are frightening, stressful, and harmful to their victims. The very young may not have mastered their worst tendencies but older folks, especially those with some form of dementia who are no longer in touch with reality, can unprovokedly lash out even at loved ones with a string of shockingly vulgar execrations. The victim probably had no idea that her mother or aunt was conscious of these words. It is lamentable that in 2017, the Gallup World Poll found that the emotional lives of more than 154,000 people in some 145 countries were burdened with worry, stress, pain, anger, and sadness; this is the worst that things have ever been (Chokshi, 2017).

Ratio: Intelligence, knowledge, smartness

A sometimes unbridgeable abyss exists between rationality (ratio, reason, logic) and emotions (along with feelings), even though in the best case scenario, they should function harmoniously in tandem with each other.

Contrarily, Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist, claims that feelings are the instruments of reasoning which discourage, drive, and warn ( Gaylin The Rage 21). Well, perhaps. Rationality may be explicated in the following way. Even highly-educated, well-informed people confuse terminology and often misunderstand human functioning and perception. They interchange words whose meanings are precise and fail to fully comprehend how we understand the universe. For example, emotions, which occur experientially in the body and feelings which are mental states, are not the same thing (for Antonio Damasio feeling is associated with pain or pleasure [Damasio Looking 3]); and most people impressed by a fellow human being will offer that he or she is extremely intelligent, but the chances of a perceiver truly knowing this is infinitesimal. What we do is deduce that one is intelligent based on apparent knowledge, but there is no necessary correlation. Intelligence is not a measure of knowledge; rather it is an indicator of an innate ability to learn, and it is measured by the intelligence quotient (IQ). A person with a very high IQ may know little**, and a less gifted person, through diligent hard work may be extremely well-informed.

Knowledge is the codified data and information that one acquires by applying one’s intelligence, by studying, learning, and working in the world. Lamentably, what we know is often false. This is because a very high percentage of what we know comes to us through authority, including humanity’s accumulated information, and mass and social media, and we prefer to believe what pleases us: God answers our prayers, homeopathy cures ailments, astrology and The Book of Changes (I Ching)*** offer excellent guides to our lives, and history and now even science are bunk!

Edward Thorndike, the influential, early twentieth century psychologist, propounded a theory of social intelligence. This was expanded upon many years later by Howard Gardner, whose work on multiple intelligences has had a profound effect in education, where methods of instruction have altered to accommodate a child who is intellectually wanting but creatively or musically or mathematically intelligent. A person who is extremely capable (historically, intelligent) across a broad spectrum but who cannot deal with peers or has temper tantrums is said to be emotionally wanting. He or she lacks emotional intelligence (not a Gardner category). Multiple intelligences, which sounds useful, and whose original categories (linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and personal) have been multiplied, is rather misleading, since it distorts the meaning of the term intelligence, which originally indicated the unqualified intellectual ability to learn, so that now, one supposes, a person who cannot easily learn and so is illiterate, knows nothing about the world, and does a bad job living in it, but who can repair any non-electronic device, would be mechanically intelligent. Maybe!

Now we turn to a more pointed concept than Gardner’s, Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence, a convergence of two ostensibly antithetical conceptions, but in reality, this makes sense. Since intelligence (the