February 7

The greatest debate within the readings for this week was centered on when emotions are biologically based and when they are sociologically based. In The Emotional Brain, LeDoux presented many interesting arguments from several different theorists. Some groups have asserted that the presence of emotion is inevitably biological, while those such as “Social constructivists” (The Emotional Brain, 115) feel that emotions are socially constructed. Based on all the ideas presented, I feel that emotional reactions to situations are inevitable. However, the ways in which we deal with these emotions are certainly socially constructed, as LeDoux said. To support this notion, he makes the point that people’s facial expressions often deceive them, because they are often more telling than a person’s words. We have all experienced situations in which our immediate facial expressions reveal more about our reaction than we wished for others to know. On a sociological level, individuals are conditioned to respond properly in certain situations. Reactions to different stimuli, such as fear, are certainly hugely influenced by social constructs. However, their presence within our biological makeup is inevitable.
Branching off what LeDoux said about varied emotional reactions to different situations, particularly fear, the study entitled Facial and Vocal Expressions examined the experience of the receiver and sender. The primary conclusion of the authors was the fact that receivers make many diverse deductions about a sender’s expression of emotion. Although facial expressions may fall on a universally broad spectrum, there still exists a huge range of expressions and receptions on the part of receivers. This point struck me as extremely important, because each person’s expression and reception to emotion will certainly be affected by their social experiences. As LeDoux said, the immediate presence of the mechanism is biological, but our individual responses are socially based.
The article The Naked Face made references to tests in which the subject had to decide if people were lying or telling the truth. A point made about them was that, “There is just too much information – words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth – and it is impossible to know how the various cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together, and in any case it’s all happening so quickly you can’t even follow what you think you ought to follow.” (The Naked Face, 2) This point was also raised in Facial and Vocal Expressions of Emotion, which acknowledged the fact that as much as we try to understand these expressions, they occur much too quickly. Additionally, our psychological response to them is largely unconscious, thus it becomes nearly impossible to recognize why we respond as we do.
One of the major issues throughout the readings was just how much one can judge by simply looking at someone’s face. I previously discussed the way in which our facial expressions can deceive us and what they truly reveal. The face has involuntary reactions to numerous different emotional situations, which appears to derive from the fact that these responses are primarily biological, although socially driven. This consistent battle of nature vs. nurture appears in most major issues throughout psychology and surfaces once again on a biology vs. sociology level. The debate was addressed in one way or another throughout all the readings, which led me to all of the above conclusions.