Basic emotions

Are some emotions the same for all human beings? In this video, we’ll consider the idea that there are basic emotions— built-in emotional responses shared by everybody. I met Takeshi on my first trip to Japan. I could tell he was happy to show me around Kyoto and he took me to his favourite Ramen shop, a place where they literally set fire to the noodles just before they got served. Takeshi, I suspect, could also see that I was enthusiastic to see the local hotspots; pun intended. Takeshi is from Japan and I’m from the Maldives. The cultural gulf between us meant that we both needed to do a lot of work to understand each other’s beliefs, traditions, and values when we first met. But we didn’t seem to have major issues understanding each other’s emotions, even on our first encounter. I can recognize and understand what he is feeling effortlessly and immediately. He didn’t have to say a word. I don't even need to speak his language. How is this possible? Why is it so easy to understand the emotions of people from cultures very different from ours when we do not share language, culture, traditions, values, and so much more? One influential idea is that there is a small list of emotions that are shared across all cultures. These are called basic emotions, a notion popularized by the psychologist Paul Ekman. Ekman took a set of photos of people’s faces which displayed various emotional expressions and showed them to people in very isolated communities, like the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. He found that some emotional expressions were widely recognised. Ekman originally identified six basic emotions: fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and surprise. His list now includes 16 basic emotions. But recognising people’s emotional expressions is one thing. Saying that all humans are capable of experiencing a specific set of basic emotions is another. Are we all capable of experiencing the same basic emotions regardless of our culture? One influential idea is that our brains are partly made up of a bunch of different mechanisms that perform specific functions. Theorists call these mechanisms modules. And some think that there are modules devoted to specific emotional responses. So, for example, there might be a specific module for generating fear, another one for generating anger, one for surprise, and so on. But we recognize a lot of different and complex emotions, and how we classify them varies across cultures and times. So those who argue for emotional modularity don’t think that our brains have a module for every emotion we experience. Some emotions, like romantic love, might actually be culture-specific— not having a specific module in the brain. Others might involve multiple different emotion modules operating in tandem. But what these theorists hold is that there are specific emotion modules in the brain responsible for generating a specific list of basic emotions. Consider an example: fear. Suppose that you’re walking through the woods, and suddenly you come across a large bear! Your face might look like this. Your heart rate might increase. You might sweat a bit, and your muscles might tremble. According to this hypothesis, this is because we have a fear module. That is, our brains have a special mechanism devoted to this set of responses you get when you detect a threat in your environment. The basic emotion we call fear is similar for everyone who shares this module. Not everyone agrees with this view of basic emotions. The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has recently criticized the idea of basic emotions. Her criticism is actually quite simple. When you look at lots and lots of neuroscientific studies all together, Barrett says, there don’t seem to be any parts of the brain we can identify as emotion modules! Consider fear again. When we look at individual studies of people’s brains when they’re experiencing fear, we see that their fear is associated with some neural activity in the brain. But when we look at a lot of studies collectively and all of the data together, we don’t find any specific neural activity we can isolate as the module for fear. Barrett’s work has become hugely influential. One response to her argument is to say that perhaps we just haven’t looked hard enough. According to this response, Barrett may be partly right. Maybe there aren’t any specific systems in the brain that correspond to our typical concepts of basic emotions like ‘fear’, ‘disgust’, ‘happiness’ and so on. But these are what philosophers call “folk categories”— they’re concepts we use in our everyday discourse, and they aren’t the result of any scientific investigation. And maybe our folk categories don’t match the emotion modules that evolution selected for us. The categories we use to make sense of our own minds might not match the features of our brains that explain how our minds really work. Sometimes they overlap, but they don’t always have to. This response suggests that are emotion modules devoted to specific basic emotions— it’s just that these basic emotions don’t fit our folk emotion categories. For example, maybe there isn’t a specific system in the brain for fear. But there might be modules related to fear. Maybe there is a specific system for anxiety and another system for panic, and so on. So, while we categorize your fear response to the bear as a basic emotion that is shared cross-culturally, maybe there are other related categories of emotion that are the actual basic emotions— like anxiety or panic. While Barrett’s work shows that our folk notions of basic emotions lack modules, this work doesn't actually rule out the idea that there might be basic emotions, even if they’re not the ones we’d list using our everyday emotion concepts. But can we really say that there are basic emotions, even if we don’t quite know which ones they are? The jury is still out on that. We need to do a lot more neuroscience and philosophy before we can tell if there are or there aren't specific modules in our brains that trigger certain emotional responses. Either way, I think the answer we get is quite intriguing. If there really are basic emotions, my friend Takeshi and I are capable of experiencing the same kinds of basic emotions despite our cultural differences. And if there really are no basic emotions, Takeshi and I, despite seeming to understand each other emotionally, would actually be experiencing very different kinds of emotions. Either we know each other really well, or we really don’t at all! What do you think?