Kaila- Week 4

Kaila McIntyre-Bader

February 10, 2008

In Barrett’s introduction, she comments on an important topic slipping from scientific view as psychology transformed from the science of the mind into the science of behavior: the subjective experience of emotion. LeDoux states that he is not mentioning the subjective feelings of emotion because he believes that “the basic building blocks of emotions are neural systems that mediate behavioral interactions with the environment particularly behaviors that take care of fundamental problems of survival,”(p 125) and the “feelings” can only occur if the organism has the capacity for consciousness. He isn’t willing to say which animals have feelings and which don’t, which is understandable. It may be for this reason that he is focusing on Fear instead of an emotion more like sadness, which seems more subjective. (Just an aside: I really like the way consciousness is compared to digestion and photosynthesis in biological naturalism).

This choice of consistently using Fear as an example makes sense, since it is an emotion exhibited by most animals, and seems evolutionarily sensible, as every organism needs to protect itself long enough to procreate and pass down its genetic information. The physical response from fear is incredibly strong, causing organisms to jump back (like Darwin and the snake) and have an intense “fight or flight” response like the rats LeDoux mentions.

But as I’m reading this, I can’t help but wonder how understanding Fear, as an emotion (without “feeling”), will help us understand other emotions. What about grief? Grief seems to inspire apathy and debilitating distress. When thinking about it in pleasure vs. displeasure terms, or arousal terms, both emotions are unpleasant, yet fear is an active response and sadness makes one desire absolutely nothing. This is only hearsay and I can’t remember the source, but I’ve heard that many times when a baby elephant dies, the mother will stay with it in mourning, many times until she, too, dies, of starvation or some other cause. How can this possibly work with LeDoux’s theory of emotions as an evolutionary response? How can he reconcile it with the idea of emotions being behavioral responses to the environment in a way that “takes care of fundamental problems of survival?” If anything, this sadness took the organism out of the gene pool.

The discussion of consciousness as a biological phenomenon reminded me of a reading we did in my Origins seminar. We learned that some monkeys have a “fear grin,” a facial expression beyond their control when they are experiencing some kind of threat. In Ray Clarke’s class, we discussed a situation in which two monkeys were confronting one another, and one of them was more afraid and couldn’t help but show this grin on his face. He would repeatedly turn around and use his fingers to smooth his lips down and hide the expression, and then turn back around to fight. It seems he was conscious of his expression, and aware that the other chimp would see it and know what it meant.

The capacity to read faces is an incredibly interesting topic to me. The “Naked Faces” article was riveting. I am curious as to why so many people do so poorly on tests that are targeted at recognizing emotion through facial expression (the majority guessing correctly about 50% of the time), while a small minority shows an innate skill for it. What is even more interesting to me is how the skill can be learned. Once shown the “tricks of the trade,” it seems that almost anyone can decipher more information from a face than they’d thought possible.

Another student and I were struck by the idea of using the FACS (Facial Action Coding System) in political situations, like in the courtroom or analyzing the behavior of politicians. We found the anecdote about Bill Clinton’s “hand-in-the-cookie-jar-love-me-Mommy-because-I’m-a-rascal look” particularly amusing. It’s interesting to consider the ethics of people like Ekman pointing out qualities in a person based purely on facial expression. It seems Ekman is convinced that Clinton “needed to get caught,” and did, but how much of this speculation is hindsight and projection, and how much of it can FACS specialists truly predict? For some reason it reminds me of a sort of Minority Report situation. Can you really know if someone is going to do something wrong before they do it? When Harms shot the potentially dangerous man, did he really know that his intention was to turn the inside of the squad car into an inferno? Are people’s future actions demonstrated by their facial expressions? And when we look at those brief flashes of expression that happen so fast they are hardly detectable, how do we approach the censorship of feelings and the difference between emotion and cognition or that false dichotomy?