February 7

In chapter 5, LeDoux highlights the ever-present role evolution plays in the formation of the brain mechanisms and expression of emotions. LeDoux proposes that emotional behaviors developed before the conscious feelings that now accompany. After all, it was the unconscious workings of the brain’s defense system that mediated the behavior necessary for animals to survive and reproduce. The conscious feeling of fear, for instance, seems less significant to natural selection than fear behavior like running from a predator.

The evolutionary origins of emotions and their behaviors also give evidence for the shared experience and brain systems of emotions between humans and animals. With the repeated example of fear, many species (including humans) share response strategies to dangers, such as fleeing, freezing, aggression, and submission along with physiological responses such as endogenous pain suppression. Regardless of the stimuli that elicit these responses, that the underlying neural circuitry of many different species share the common function of providing defense strategies makes animals good models for understanding human fear.

As LeDoux puts it, "different classes of emotional behavior represent different kinds of functions that take care of different kinds of problems for the animal and have different brain systems devoted to them." It has been shown that there is no single emotion system in the brain. It is also true that scientists have not come to an agreement on a spectrum of basic, innate emotions. This is not to say, however, that there are no inherited universals of emotion. Paul Ekman is one strong believer in the display of emotions through universal facial expressions. According to Ekman, culturally established display rules for emotional expression do not contradict the evidence that individuals of all cultures can identify the emotions behind certain facial configurations. He even went through the trouble of compiling photographs of the thousands of possible facial combinations along with their emotional connotations in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The fact that studying FACS can greatly increase the ability to interpret intent and emotional content behind expressions gives evidence for the assertion that emotions cause facial expressions. What’s even more interesting is the finding that facial expressions can cause emotions.

The article "Facial and Vocal Expressions of Emotion" mostly corroborates the conclusion that the facial expressions are universal representations of emotions, though cites studies that lower the degree of certainty. Vocal expressions (excluding language) are also considered as measurable results of emotion, but are found to be less reliable than faces. The review reminds us that the decided "correct" emotions corresponding to faces and voices is a subjective matter. Agreement is less common in people of non-Western nations. Are the expressions universal even if there is disagreement about which emotions and faces correspond? It may be, if Ekman and Tomkins are right. Logic does not require people to be logical, and if someone does poorly on the tests it may mean he is just not a good face reader. Societies that do not value emotional expression may not be as skilled in the area, but one might guess that they would perform better if the photographs were of members of their own culture or race, as it has been shown that people can distinguish the details of native, familiar faces better than those of foreign ones.

The article "The Experience of Emotion" took a more dimensional approach to studying emotion. Core effect, or general feelings on a positive/negative scale, is deemed a major feature of the emotional experience. Core effect includes states of pleasure/displeasure, reward/punishment, arousal/calm, etc. In addition to core effect, a mental representation of an emotion is intimately related to the surrounding psychological situation. This includes appraisal, but more broadly includes all sensory input combined with people’s memory, knowledge, and history as they have been integrated into their minds and behaviors. Such wide influences refer more to the causes of emotions of emotions rather than their experience, as we have seen that many affective factors are unconsciously processed. The article gives a review of the neural mechanisms behind core effect and the integration of experience into emotion, but admits, like in the problem of explaining consciousness, that how neural activation actually causes emotions is still unknown.

The final study, by Bechara and Naqvi, showed that activation and size of the anterior insular cortex (AIC), an area associated with the subjective experience of emotion, is correlated with a person’s ability to recognize the tempo of his heartbeats. It is interesting that accuracy is also correlated with self-reported anxiety; fast heartbeats are easier to feel than slow ones. I also wonder about the implications for size differences in the AIC. Can a larger size really predict a greater capacity to introspect? Can the conclusions even be extrapolated enough to consider the ability to sense one’s own heartbeat indicative of the propensity to understand one’s own emotions?

I’m also wondering about the emotional implications (neural, mental, and behavioral) of social isolation. Hasn’t the ability to experience emotions and sense them in others been preserved in feral children? It makes sense considering the similarities between humans and animals in emotional processing.