[From Bill Powers (961010.0915 MDT)]
Rick Marken (961009.1600) --
In the example above, there is no anger because there is nothing (like
internal conflict or marked external resistance) preventing achievement of
the goal (a slugged face).
What I've said about emotion is based on my observations of me, plus things
others have said about their emotions. If someone else observes something
different, then my neat theory has to be modified, doesn't it? Here's more
or less how I worked it out. If others experience emotions differently, of
course, then I am alone in this kind of experience.
First, I noticed that emotions are felt -- that is, they are perceptions of
something happening inside of me.
Second, I noticed that emotions seem to be caused by things happening to me.
That seemed strange; I wondered why there should be this apparently useless
hookup so that my perceptions simply cause feelings to arise. Naturally I
thought of the cause-effect illusion, and wondered what might be disturbed
by the external events that are being opposed by some control process. I
didn't get an immediate answer to that, but that thought led to another --
could the sensations of emotion be part of an action that is opposing, or
trying to oppose, some disturbance?
For at least one emotion -- anger -- the answer was easy to see: yes. When
something "makes me angry" the _first_ thing that happens is that I want to
DO something about it. If I don't have any urge to push back, there's no
feeling of anger. The tipoff really came from an incident when I was a
little slow on the uptake and didn't realize that someone had just insulted
the hell out of me. My first reaction was simply puzzlement: did this
reviewer (of my 1971 Rat Paper) really not understand that the data in that
paper were real? Then I realized that he was accusing me of making it up,
and POW, I wanted to strangle the son of a bitch!
In this case it was obvious that the reviewer's words were not simply a
stimulus connected to my adrenal glands. Before those adrenals kicked in, I
had to _understand_ what was being said, and then realize that it was
something that violated my earnest desire to be and be thought an honest
person. What triggered the emotion was not the words, but the fact that I
experienced a GREAT BIG GALLOLLOPING ERROR. And the immediate result of that
big error was for my whole body to get revved up to provide the energy it
would take to rip that reviewer limb from limb. I was all ready to go into
action, just as if my very life had been threatened -- which it had.
Of course, since we don't directly experience reference signals or error
signals, the first thing I knew consciously about this reaction was the
sudden flood of feeling and the ensuing imaginary scenario of getting in
this reviewer's face and shouting my outrage at him. It wasn't at all
obvious which was the chicken and which the egg. It was only much later,
after I had sent my (successful) outraged objection to the editor, that I
could step back and reflect on the incident, and tease out the sequence of
events that had taken place. If I had not initially misunderstood what the
reviewer was getting at, I probably would not have seen the role played by
my goals and perceptions, and the fact that the feelings arose only AFTER I
had done a double take and re-read the passages in the review several more
times. Then I thought, "What? Why that -- but he's saying -- my God, does
the editor think I fudged the data?" By that time I was shaking with
tension, literal muscular tension, muscle pitted against muscle. If that
reviewer had been in front of me at that instant I might well have slugged him.
So for that incident at least I had an answer: the emotion of anger arises
as a consequence of an error big enough to call for drastic aggressive
action against something. First the error, then the emotion.
With that picture in mind, it wasn't hard to visualized the general
arrangement. A high-order system experiences a large error. The error signal
is routed in two general directions: toward lower-order behavioral systems
that will produce the motor behavior that corrects the error, and to
lower-order biochemical or organ systems that will prepare the body to
support energetic action. Of course all these preparations for action
generate sensations, sensations from the musculature and from the sensory
monitors that tell us of our own biological states. The whole constellation
of changed perceptions is what we call an emotion. For the emotion of anger,
this is perfectly clear to me. It's not so clear how it applies to other
emotions, but the general proposition seems worth pursuing.
After this initial insight (what I thought was an insight), I remembered
what others have said about common emotional experiences. In combat, for
instance, it has been said that a soldier suddenly confronted with a
powerful threat to life will act instantly and very energetically to escape,
and only after a successful avoidance of danger will begin to feel the
"fear." "I was too busy saving my ass to think about being afraid," is one
way it's been said. The woman who lifted the car off her child, as I
remember it, said that she wasn't worried about the child; all she could
think of was getting the car off her. The prizefighter who pulverizes his
opponent would not say he is angry at the opponent; he is too busy
pulverizing him to indulge in feelings.
Common anecdotes like these made me wonder why it is that sometimes we act
very energetically but without experiencing anything we would call an
emotion. It's not that there's no feeling; it's just that the experience we
have doesn't seem to belong among the emotions. That observation led to the
next: that we feel the emotions most strongly when the action needed to
correct the initiating error is ineffective, or even worse, impossible to
carry out. The most frustrating situation is the one in which we are all
ready, behaviorally and biochemically, to take a drastic action, but are
stopped from even trying to take it because of conflicting goals. In
general, we feel the emotion the most strongly when the error doesn't get
corrected.
Suppose you're in Africa on a safari (an experience I'm sure we all have
frequently), and you're standing just outside your car watching a herd of
rhinoceroses (good Lord, how do you spell that?). You see one of them eyeing
you, and then it starts trotting toward you, faster and faster. Feeling a
little frisson of apprehension, you decide to get back into the car and
drive away. And the door is locked, with the keys inside.
THAT'S when you really feel fear.
If that reviewer had made his suggestion to my face, I probably would have
immediately hauled out Verhave's data and letters and shown him that the
data were perfectly real. I might have been annoyed, but the error would
have been corrected immediately. But there I was holding a review in my
hand, with no way to make an objection or a correction, and the editor had
the very same review and for all I knew believed the accusation. What I felt
was not just rage, but _helpless_ rage. There wasn't a damned thing I could
do but bash out a letter on the typewriter, rip the page out, stuff it into
an envelope, slaver onto a stamp, and jam the whole thing into a mailbox.
And wait.
THAT'S when you really feel anger.
What all this leads me to think is that "emotion" is just one of those
old-fashioned words that refers in a vague way to some particularly
noticeable kind of experience, but doesn't have any important meaning of its
own. Obviously, in order to do anything physical, we have to be in a
physiological state that is right for supporting the motor behavior. The
same states that we call emotions when they are blasting away at full
strength are present when we do anything. Athletes getting ready for a race
or a jump deliberately induce heightened states of physical preparedness,
but they don't refer to them as emotions: they call the process "psyching
up." Actors and other performers do the same thing. The body, the entire
complex of organ systems and other biochemical processes, responds quickly
and sensitively to the demands made on it; every organ system receives
reference signals from the brain and even the hormone systems are governed,
somewhat less rapidly, by neural and chemical signals from the hypothalamus.
And there are sensory endings everywhere, which continually present us with
a picture of our own internal states.
When the states become relatively extreme, we recognize patterns and give
names to them, like fear, anger, love, hate, anxiety, jealousy, or
excitement. It's been known for a long time that many of the physiological
states that go with different emotions are really quite similar -- the
fight-or-flight syndrome, for example. What really distinguishes one emotion
from another, one feeling from another, is the _goal_ that is involved,
which specifies that some experience is to be brought into being. To be
angry is to want to attack; to be afraid is to want to get away. If you do
attack immediately, or flee, the extra adrenaline and glucose are quickly
burned up and the sensations attached to them dissappear. The anger and fear
are fleeting, if they are noticed at all. It's only when the preparation
goes to completion and the resources thus called up are not used that we go
on experiencing the feelings, crashing around the house, belting walls, and
endangering our loved ones and typewriters.
At least all that makes sense to me.
Best,
Bill P.