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Professor S. Pinker Week 9, Lecture 2: Emotion
Emotion
What are emotions?
- Emotions as the source of adaptive but conflicting goals. - Fear: goal = safety. - Anger: goal = respect. - Love (toward mates and children): goal = reproduction. - etc.
Concomittants of emotion:
- Cognitive & behavioral goals
- Attention.
- Samuel Johnson: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
- Physiology: "fight or flight"
- Facial expressions
The Limbic System
Professor S. Pinker Week 9, Lecture 2: Emotion
The Limbic System, cont.
- Hypothalamus
- Hippocampus
- Amygdala
- “Old cortex”: cingulate cortex, parahippocampal gyrus
- Phylogenetically old: For “The Four F’s”
- BUT highly interconnected with frontal lobes (seat of reason)
Darwin's First Principle:
Serviceable Habits Darwin’s Second Principle:
Antithesis
Professor S. Pinker Week 9, Lecture 2: Emotion
“Your friend has come and you
are happy”
“Your child has died”
“You are angry & about to fight” “You see a dead pig that has been
lying there for a long time”
Professor S. Pinker Week 9, Lecture 2: Emotion
Basic Emotions Some other universal emotional
expressions:
Some other universal emotional
expressions:
- greeting (eyebrow flash)
- flirt
- stare
- play & laughter
Professor S. Pinker Week 9, Lecture 2: Emotion
More evidence that emotional
expressions are innate:
- homologues in other animals
- appearance in blind and deaf children
More evidence that emotional
expressions are innate:
- homologues in other animals
- appearance in blind and deaf children
- Cross cultural variation in display rules
An example: Fear.
- Little Albert and the Pavlovian conditioning theory.
- Problems for the conditioning theory:
- Preparedness: monkeys can easily learn to fear snakes, but not flowers.
- Most phobics never experienced a conditioning event (e.g., snakes)
- Universality of fear stimuli.
Stimuli universally feared by
infants:
Professor S. Pinker Week 9, Lecture 2: Emotion
Are any stimuli universally
feared, by children and even by
adults?
Professor S. Pinker Week 9, Lecture 2: Emotion
Mastering fear:
- Flooding (real) and implosion
(imagery)
- Controlled exposure (a kind of
classical conditioning) or
desensitization (imagery)
A second example: Disgust
Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, Mutilated monkey meat, Concentrated chicken feet. Jars and jars of petrified porpoise pus, And me without my spoon! (French fried eyeballs, Little birdies' dirty feet. Chopped up baby parakeet. Perforated ponies' feet. ...)
Apparent Irrationality of Disgust
Why not eat insects, spiders, worms, toads, maggots, caterpillars, grubs?
- Carry germs? Sterilized cockroach experiment.
- Disease?
- Taste bad?
"none distasteful, a few quite palatable, notably the giant waterbug. For the most part they were insipid, with a faint vegetable flavour, but would not anyone tasting bread, for instance, for the first time, wonder why we eat such a flavourless food? A toasted dungbeetle or softbodied spider has a nice crisp exterior and soft interior of souffle consistency which is by no means unpleasant. Salt is usually added, sometimes chili or the leaves of scented herbs, and sometimes they are eaten with rice or added to sauces or curry. Flavour is exceptionally hard to define, but lettuce would, I think, best describe the taste of termites, cicadas, and crickets; lettuce and raw potato that of the giant Nephila spider, and concentrated Gorgonzola cheese that of the giant waterbug (Lethocerus indicus). I suffered no ill effects from the eating of these insects."
Professor S. Pinker Week 9, Lecture 2: Emotion
Components of the Disgust
Reaction (Paul Rozin)
- Animal parts & products as triggers. (cf. plants, inedibles).
- All animal parts & products except a few.
- Fear of incorporating object into body: eating, smelling, touching
- Facial expression.
- Contamination by contact
- Resemblance.
- (cf. Sympathetic magic or “voodoo”)
- Other triggers: sex with inappropriate partners; body violations.
How Does Disgust Develop?
- Learning what is disgusting versus Learning what is not disgusting (cf. fear)
- Critical period:
- Below 2 yrs, put anything in mouth.
- Above 2 years: tastes spontaneously shrink. Eat only what was eaten in first 2 years.
- Sometimes expand to a few new foods.
What is Disgust for?
- "Omnivore's dilemma."
- Disgust as caution for untested animal foods
- Contamination thoughts as an adaptation to the multiplication of microorganisms.
- Marvin Harris:
- Ecological reasons for food taboos (cows, pork)
- Optimal foraging theory and preference for large over small animals.
