Week 2 Post--Sylviane

Sylviane Boddy

I found one of the most compelling aspects of this week’s readings on the evolution of emotions to be the concept of the origin of emotions, a topic that is quite controversial. I was intrigued by James’s discussion in What is an Emotion?, in which he sequence of stimuli, body response and emotion. His rather unorthodox hypothesis that was the stimuli causes a body response that causes the emotion, such as you are scared of a bear because you run. This argument, which I feel has at least some merit, stayed in the back of my mind while I did this weeks readings and found that I was able to clarify some of my own feelings towards this standpoint.

The reading that I found most interesting was Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen’s article on autonomic nervous system activity. This paper discussed an experiment in which nervous system activity was recorded as participants relived emotional experience or constructed, muscle by muscle, facial expressions that are prototypes of specific emotions. It determined that not only are there autonomic differences between four negative emotions (disgust, anger, fear, sadness) but also that constructing emotional faces produces autonomic activity. This finding initially seems to support James’s theory that the physical reaction occurs before the emotional one, since creating the physical state of facial muscles can induce bodily responses that constitute emotional responses. However, upon further reading and thought, reveals that although some autonomic activity is generated, it is impossible for individuals to produce the complex patterns of autonomic activity that truly make up and emotional reaction. The minimal reactions that were produced and record in this study, such as heart rate and muscle tension, although usually indicative of some sort of emotion, do not necessarily create an emotion.

This idea was reinforced by the writings of Darwin, in which he detailed the emotional responses of many animals. For example, he describes a hostile dog walking towards a man and how his head is raised, tail erect, and walks stiffly. As I read through Darwin’s accounts of animals’ responses in different emotional states, I realized that many of the physical characteristic of these states overlap amongst emotions, and that it must be more than a combination of traits to cause a true emotion. The same is true of humans; a physical state of shaking and sweating may be found in individuals who are experiencing fear or anxiety. Similarly, activities such as exercising can cause an increased heart rate and sweating but do not result in an emotional response. Further, the physical reactions that occur must themselves start in the brain as well. All of this evidence leads me to think that the sequence of an emotional response must be stimulus to emotion to body response. Perhaps my biological background is creating a bias, but it seems illogical, in light of this weeks readings, to think that mere physical state can cause an emotion. I am curious if there would a way to test this idea, or if it has already been tested. Since physical states, such as muscle tension, would ultimately start in motor control regions of the brain, would it be possible to monitor which neural activity is happening first? Studies similar to the one conducted by Ekman, et al. but using more precise measure of emotional and physical state, such as MRI for example, would, I believe, reveal a great deal.