reading for feb 7th

Most of this weeks readings looked at issues we have come across before: emotional expression, emotion recognition, new ways of looking at emotions categorically, neuroimaging techniques, emotion subjectivity, and the evolution of emotions, yet one issue that was brought up at various relevant times in some of the readings was the idea of “context” in dissecting and defining emotions and their processes. In the article Facial and Vocal Expressions of Emotions the authors break down the connection between physical emotional expression and the internal emotion process. They claim that modern evolutionary theory partially rejects the historical interpretations of Darwin and Sylvan Tompkins (of basic, cross-species, cross-cultural emotional expressions) for a more socially relevant theory: that the “sender” of the emotional expression has a direct intention with that expression towards a “receiver”, who interprets the sender’s emotion with the vocal and physical cues provided. What the paper generally argues is that although a great deal can be deduced from these “signals” which the sender provides, they are not always accurate. This isn’t to say that the work of Tompkins and Eckman, specifically with facial expression decoding, isn’t valid, but rather, that the role of a “context” is more important then modern day scientists have been able to study. How can you break down the vocal emotional cues of a baby? Are cries and screams really a good way of measuring distress? Is there anything to be said about possible habit forming in these facial and vocal cues? Or more specifically, what kinds of roles do habit, current affective states, gender, current activation states, age, location, time, etc. play in defining these outward emotional responses.
In relation to these points, the article entitled The Experience of Emotion delves into a similar situation with the roles of content and context in defining emotional states and expressions. In the beginning of the article, the authors mention three different methods in defining emotions: the materialist idea, that emotions are defined by their causes, the behaviorist idea, that emotion is simply a behavior (in bodily states, basic emotion models, activity in neurochemical/brain circuit systems, or a combination of all these things), and the functionalist idea, that emotion is defined by immediate causal relations, specifically, the function as opposed to the brain or body. Contemporary science, in the view of this article, needs to find a common ground between these three in testing emotional responses. In addition to this, a greater awareness needs to be given to content and context in the research process of evaluating emotion on a subjective basis. This is hard to do because how do you evaluate someone’s conscious state if there is no way to see, on a first hand basis, what they are experiencing at the moment of an emotion and how that emotion comes about or is influenced by the many factors of that person’s life, current state, and relation to the space they are in? How can you relate an individual’s personal physical, sociocultural, location specific context to a simultaneously occurring emotion without seeing or experiencing it subjectively? Going along with this question, how can you effectively evaluate or define an emotion without a way of measuring the content surrounding the emotional state in addition to the actual physical response and the context, i.e. the person’s active/inactive state (what the authors call “arousal”), level of dominance/submission in their response (“relational”), or mental representation of that emotion (“situational”). All of these factors of content relate to previously discussed (in our class) notions of appraisal systems.
One key point that Ledoux brings up in chapter five of his book, The Emotional Brain, is that an “all-purpose emotion system” doesn’t exist, and that emotions need to be studied on a case by case basis is any information in terms of their cause and effect relationship is to be assessed. Different systems and different modules make up the emotional response in the same way the brain is divided. After Ledoux goes through the theories of James, Tompkins, Darwin, and Eckman, he brings up this same notion of subjectivity that was addressed in the Experience of Emotion article; that each emotional response is different in each human, at a given point of time, in a given situation. Yet, each emotion has commonalities through different cultures and species. He focuses on fear, sstating that fear is pervasive, both on a physical level and on an existential/intellectual level, fear is related to psychology, and that fear exists in humans and animals. This last point brings up the fact that survival tactics are inherent, and sometimes genetic in terms of bodily responses (with the nervous system, mental processes, and bodily functions) yet not in terms of cognitive factors. This, again, raises the issue of context (which Ledoux doesn’t go into) in that genetically even a simple emotion such as fear will not exist in the cognitive association that we all experience as individuals.
I saved the best for last with the New Yorker article entitled The Naked Face in which Gladwell discusses all of these points in a narrative fashion, with two cases in the police force and in sharing his own personal encounter with Eckman. It was particularly interesting hearing about Tomkins and Eckman’s strategies in evolving facial expression recognition as a technique, one that could be mastered with practice. Tomkins, who was said to be a natural perceiver of these facial cues, even exercised his abilities at horse races, which took into account the horses’ previous wins/losses in relation to their emotional state and physical manifestation of their emotional responses. Emotion, for Tomkins, came to be seen as the “code of life” in interpreting and predicting every aspect of personal being and social interaction. Eckman’s own use of the techniques developed by himself and Tomkins proved to be very entertaining, especially when he commented on facial expression number AU two, “It’s very hard, but it’s worthless. It’s not part of anything except Kabuki Theater.”(p. 6)
The question of how the two cops accessed situations and determined whether danger existed becomes key in the issue of facial expression detection and interpretation as inherent in some but not all people. Clearly, both cops had a certain gut instinct that was tied both to their own natural perceptive abilities and experience in their professions. This point again calls to mind the idea of context, in that the abilities of the cops and the practices of Tompkins and Eckman are both natural and acquired techniques.
Another point of interest is this technique’s application to software development, as in the Maya renderings of companies like Pixar, where the facial recognition software (FACS) is used to develop realistic interpretations of emotional expression. This development could lead to a great many things in decoding emotional responses, specifically with artistic uses and surveillance, crime detection systems. It’s both useful, as Gladwell points out, and dangerous in that it opens up a whole realm of, what he calls, “uncomfortable possibilities”.
All of the articles focused on a broad range of topics we have seen before, yet what came to mind in applying all these theories we have been studying to actual manifestations and interpretations of emotional responses is the need for context to be taken into account in the definition and evaluation process. Context socially, mentally, physically, and pertaining to time, space, and other engrained factors of our consciousness. The question that we are left with is: How can you evaluate this in an objective way?