Thank you Elena for the question in the comment to the last post - could it be that emotion is a sort of sense - like the 7th sense?

Of course much depends on the definition of what a sense is. The five senses that are usually referred to, sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste have specific sensing organs - receptors that are to a certain degree specific to some stimulation, for example chemical, or pressure. In fact there are more senses, such as nociception, or thermoception. In addition, there are senses that deal with stimulation inside of the body. Emotions in contrast seem to be aroused by the results of other senses, something we see, or hear - or imagine seeing or hearing. Thus, there seems to be a big difference. Emotional processes (let's not go back to the definition issue for the time being) follow other sense data, are not dependent to a specific modality, and, we now know, are linked to relatively complex networks in the brain that are not modality specific.

But is intuition not "the sixth sense"? Well technically not. More often sixth sense is associated with the notion of paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy. Independent of the fact that there is no scientifically validated evidence of such paranormal phenomena, the use of the term sense in this context is colloquial.

But what could it then be? I am at this point wondering whether augmented reality is a useful metaphor for the relationship of emotions and perception. Emotion can provide a different dimension to sense data - the dark ally that feels creepy, the cake that looks yummy, the dog that looks dangerous. In all of these examples words are used to convey a feeling that is the summary function of a rapid and typically automatic evaluation of properties of the object(s) perceived in relationship to their implication. One aspect of emotions is that they send nonverbal messages that are shorthand for the implication. They may trigger in human verbal associations and interpretations, but they need not. Important: these messages need not be consciously received. After all, part of the process is the rearrangement of resources to deal with situations, and that is the case whether one is aware of it or not.

Wait a moment ...? Unconscious emotions? Yes, If you did not already do so, please check out

Winkielman, P., Berridge, K. C., & Wilbarger, J. L. (2005). Unconscious affective reactions to masked happy versus angry faces influence consumption behavior and judgments of value. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1, 121-135.

So, Mr. Martian, what are emotions about you ask? OK, here is attempt Nr. 1.0 - I hope the translator works ...:

Emotions permit navigating an organism's complex physical and social environment by allowing to tag objects, actions, and events with meaning and implications for the organism. By linking to memories of the past, analyses of the present, and projections into the future, time is as much a factor as is space in optimizing such navigation. Emotions do that not only by providing information to the individual in the shape of subjective experience, but also by affecting every aspect of processing information regarding external and internal events. Thus, what to pay attention to, or what to remember (or not) is just as influenced by this system as is what elements to associate with other elements in the future. Bodily changes are often involved that might be helpful in supporting certain modes of response. These involve basically all other organismic systems ranging from muscles involved in locomotion, to cardiovascular changes, to modulating digestion and immune function. In this sense, emotions are active because they do not just facilitate dealing with situations, they actively influence them by biasing the own behavior as well as that of other organisms. Expressive behavior affects not only conspecifics, but can also have an effect on members of other species. In humans, a very social species, such expressive behavior leads to coordinated actions in many ways. Meaning can be assigned by direct experience, such as pain or pleasure, by observation of others' emotional responses, as well as by stories of real and fictional events. This allows rapid and slow mediated spreading of emotionally relevant information going beyond the effect of learning by first-hand experience. Thus, meaning is not only constructed by the individual, but also by aggregates of individuals, such as families, clans, companies, religious groups, nations, etc. It is particularly this process that distinguishes human emotions from emotional processes in non-human animals.

Events that are perceived by the organism as being of high relevance can lead to rapid and considerable change in basically every system of the body. Typically, such activation is self-regulating as the type of behavior that is being facilitated by the bodily changes will lead to the self-termination of the emotion-cascade. For example, running away from a threat, scaring away an annoying person, or obtaining comfort. With experience and learning the strategic manipulation of emotion relevant responses allows modulation of the own or others' emotional state, for example using expressive or other behaviors.

OK, then there is the part with different emotions, learning about emotions, what happens when emotions get out of hand, and what happens to emotions when some of the systems that are usually involved do not work well, but that was already a massive chunk of conjecture, so what do you think?

There is something intriguing - I find at least - about the hypothetical NASA scenario I outlined in my last post. Try to come up with a time capsule explaining what we know about emotions. One of the big problems in discussing emotions scientifically is that everybody feels she is a specialist. We all have emotions, so nobody needs to explain to us what they are and how they function. Worse, if there is something that is counter intuitive it elicits strong reactions. So what if you had to explain what emotions are to somebody outside of that system. Very outside of that system. Just try to think about it for a moment.

I believe a good starting point is not to try to explain what emotions are, but what they do ...

(Comments encouraged - to be continued)

image from NASA Pioneer Mission

OK, here is your brief: You are contacted by NASA - they are preparing another interstellar messenger probe that should contain a time capsule with various artifacts of culture and science to document who we are and what we do - you are the one who is to contribute the section on human emotion. Specifically. the task is to summarize what we know about emotions. There is no need to worry about the translation - they have somehow figured out a babel fish contraption to take care of that. What are you going to do? How much space do you need to write what we know about emotions?

(to be continued) U5RGS43MMA5K

Thanks so much for the feedback on the list ... I have received some comments to my previous posting “pain and pleasure” via the blog, but also via email, and via facebook. All of these are of course welcome and I will use them to make more lists and entries real!soon!now! I appreciate the encouragement, and also the challenges ;-)

Right now, I am still in the process of thinking about what to write in the next weeks and months. For me, this blogging thing is new - it is interesting, exciting, daunting, and also, at times, perplexing. Yet, curiously, problems in planning the blog resonate with problems in conducting emotion research. Topics here are: levels, dynamic aspects, intensity, and function.


LEVELS :: In the emotion context, levels may refer to levels of analysis and specifically the approach put forward by Cacioppo and Berntson (1992) when introducing the notion of Social Neuroscience. I love this idea very much; it had a huge impact on my thinking, my teaching, and also my research. The idea here is that some researchers might focus on something like the immune system, others on psychological processes, such as stress, yet others, on interindividual differences, and someone else on the role of social support networks for well-being. Typically, in each case the focus is on a single level of analysis, but the mantra Cacioppo and his colleagues have been repeating ever since is that to understand the type of phenomena that we are dealing with, one a) needs to take into account how the same process relates to different methods, theories, and observations at different levels and b) how these levels relate to each other and interact. In the example, knowing about the inner wokings of the immune system will help in understanding how psychological processes at the individual level, and here interindividual differences, relate to social support. In a nutshell. I will get back to this issue of the necessity of multi-level approaches often. If you do not know the classic paper by Cacioppo and Berntson, the reference is below. John Cacioppo's page lists many relevant papers and gives also access to many. An excellent place to check out!

For the blog context, levels refers to how I should discuss the issues I want to discuss – for the specialists (and I know that there are some who are checking out this blog), or for the colleague with some interest in emotion, for students, or for somebody who is not interested in the nitty gritty of academic discourse, but who wants to understand something about emotions and wonders how such a complex and subjective thing could be studied by science? Frankly, I have not fully decided what level should be the target level. It is sure, that I will sometimes try to be more on the introductory level, and at others, go into some of the more arcane details of specific theories – for sure, there are parts of my website arvidkappas.com that simply list some starting points for the non-specialist – such as, what to read, or where to go to find out more. However, as a rule, the topics here, and the language chosen, will be a bit more on the advanced side, assuming the reader has already some familiarity with key theories of emotion. Feedback is most welcome. I am aware, that it will not be possible to do everything for everybody. I will also try to make cross-links to other blogs so that the interested reader might serendipitously find something even more interesting than this blog ;-)

DYNAMIC ASPECTS :: Dynamic aspects relate to how things develop over time – things like duration, fluctuations. This is a major problem in emotion research. We know so little about how long an emotion lasts, how one emotion tends to change into something else, how frequent we smile, how often we show certain physiological responses. One of my own interests relates to the role of dynamics in facial expressions, particularly smiles. How fast does a smile have to show up on the face for you to feel that it is genuine and not fake?

With regard to the blog it means, how often can and should I write? How much time should I leave between? Should I try to have a fixed rhythm? I’ll see.

INTENSITY :: How intense should this get – meaning, should I provoke? Should I challenge specific readers? I intend to be relatively spontaneous, as I am when I teach – this is not a scientific article, it is a soap box, so I will see whether this works or whether I am burning my fingers as I go along. Maybe I might get a bit out of control? That would be fitting for a blog on emotions, I guess.

In the emotion world, intensity is a tricky one – sometimes it feels as if, for example, anger and slight irritation are the same thing, but at different intensities, and indeed researchers have made that point. Others believe these are different states with different properties Also concepts such as moods or temperament are not only linked to temporal differences, but also to intensity differences. How to measure the intensity of an emotion is no doubt linked to how I define emotion – so is the definition issue, alluded to in the previous post, really a red herring, or is it more important than that?

FUNCTION :: I believe strongly that a functional analysis of emotions is key to understanding them. Emotions are not there to amuse or to puzzle us – they do things. We have evolved emotions because they are particularly good in dealing with certain types of situations. Sometimes they are not so useful, but overall we are much better off with than without. This is a notion that goes back to Darwin’s analysis, particularly of emotional expressions, but also to all behaviors and biological systems. A functional analysis can also be misleading, but by and large it’s the best we can do. What that means, I will say in more detail later, as I will pick up on these other topics. I apologize to Tom – your comment was well taken, much abstract, little concrete in these opening posts …

But what is the function of the blog? Should the function(s) and goal(s) not shape the form and the content of what is being discussed? So I should know what this is about before I start. In an ideal world this might be the case, but in reality, well, this is difficult to achieve. Surely, there is more than one function I guess. Some relates to vanity and hubris. Some relates to idealism and naiveté. Some relates to me trying to make meaning out of what I can observe. This however, for me, is a distributed task – it is about making meaning for myself, but also being part of a larger enterprise that makes meaning out of observations linking many brains - this is why we teach, why we have schools and universities. Emotions are such wondrous things, it takes many brains and much time to discover some of the whys and the hows. The internet is such a curious thing, it allows connections in unexpected and rather direct ways, so I guess what it really is, is an experiment that is trageted at joint discoveries. However, I will also try to entertain a bit, along the way, and I hope I succeed.

So for now I ask you to bear with me until I have a better grasp on the blog, relating to LEVELS, DYNAMIC ASPECTS, INTENSITY, and FUNCTIONS. So that I can talk about LEVELS, DYNAMIC ASPECTS, INTENSITY, and FUNCTIONS of emotions.

Cacioppo, J. T., & Berntson, G. G. (1992). Social psychological contributions to the decade of the brain: Doctrine of multilevel analysis. American Psychologist, 47, 1019-1028. PDF

So of course my immune system reacts to the fact that I have reached the critical end-of-semester deadline and under much stress submitted all grades on time. It decided squarely that once that had been taken care of, it was time to multiply all those happy little thingies in my blood stream and do some about this and that thing that has been bothersome to my immune system all along. Three days down the road, two teeth less, and, on the upside, a good level of drugs in my blood I am sufficiently delirious to try to identify some of the big topics that have been taking up time, paper, and energy in emotion research over the last century or so. Of course, I surely have forgotten important issues when preparing this list ad-hoc and I invite comments from readers. I will use this top 10 list to pick what to write about in the coming weeks, but of course not exclusively. The issues are numbered from 1 to 10, but the sequence does not imply anything with regard to importance or hierarchy.

1. The big red herring: The definition issue: What is Emotion?
2. What is the relationship of emotion and cognition? Can cognition be a requirement, changes in cognition a consequence, and still the two be separate/separable processes?
3. Can emotion and emotion regulation be separated?
4. What is the relationship of automatic processes and conscious processes in the elicitation and the subjective experience of emotions?
5. To what degree does it make sense to separate emotion and motivation - in the sense that emotion motivates and no emotion occurs without something being at stake, i.e., having motivational relevance?
6. How do biological constraints and cultural context interact over the course of the life span in shaping our emotions?
7. How do categorical/discrete representations of emotions relate to dimensional models?
8. Does it make sense to separate emotions from moods, i.e., create classes of affective processes that can be distinguished by their time course?
9. Assuming that there are patterns of expressive behavior that occur universally - regardless of how they are interpreted in different cultures, what can we conclude from that?
10. To what degree does an analysis of emotional processes take the social brain hypothesis seriously? Do we need to work more in social contexts?
11. What should we make of the low cohesion between emotion components, such as subjective experience, peripheral and central physiological changes, and expressive behavior?
    

Eleven? Was this not supposed to be a top-10 list? Well, as a devotee to Spinal Tap, this list is better because it goes all the way up to 11! Of course.

I apologize for those readers who start to be interested in emotion science - the points mentioned on this list are often too brief to understand what issues I am referring to - this is more something for those already in the know - but as I said, I will discuss these things in the coming weeks. I will then also try to outline what the problem is, and as usual, try to put some useful references and links in there. BTW - I am open to wishes as regards which topics I should attack with preference.

The release of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street was the excuse I needed to finally plunk down some electronic cash and get the Rolling Stones Boxed Set. Among the treasure trove of all things Jagger/Richards also Emotional Rescue - by coincidence - or is it - the name of an article about some of the work my colleague Heather Urry is doing at Tufts University.

The research described relates to regulating emotion - apparently the topic of the week for this blog. The article in Tufts Journal is worthwhile reading and might be a good starting point to find out more about Heather's work. What I find fascinating is that in my mind much of the work on the cognitive regulation of emotion goes back to the pioneering work of Richard Lazarus fifty years ago. This is not a criticism regarding today's work but a praise to this early groundbreaking work. Already then, Lazarus and his colleagues demonstrated that the physiological response to a stressful film could be manipulated by either a text presented while the film was shown or given before to create an orientation that influenced the meaning of the bloody film. What these studies showed is that there is no fixed link between a stimulus and the emotion it would elicit, but that how the stimulus is appraised - what the meaning of this stimulus is - plays an important role. This was a revolutionary statement then and to some degree it still is now. It is the basis of teaching people to control their emotions by trying to think about certain things in a different way. GIven how much modern emotion research focuses on the brain it also underlines the plasticity of emotional processes. The brain might have a particular sensitivity to some things, such as faces, or snakes, but in many cases the reaction to a particular pattern is not fixed. The intermediate step between a stimulus and a response is the meaning of that stimulus. Today, rather than just looking at peripheral measures of emotional arousal, such as skin resistance, we can  observe how brain activity in specific locations, such as the amygdala, is affected by how we think about a stimulus, such as an ugly picture. Consider the study by McRea and colleagues below as an example.

One of the most interesting challenges in emotion research is to integrate two types of processes - those which we can control by thought and automatic processes that often even happen outside of our awareness. I will be talking more about that ...

Now back to listening to some Stones ...

McRae, K., Ochsner, K. N., Mauss, I. B., Gabrieli, J. D. E. & Gross, J. J. (2008). Gender Differences in Emotion Regulation: An fMRI study of Cognitive Reappraisal. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 11, 145-162.

I remember very well that in the early stages of my PhD thesis I had intense discussions with John Lanzetta regarding emotion theory. John was a very emotional emotion researcher! Content-wise, I had been very much influenced by the second wave of appraisal theories that appeared at the time. Coming from Klaus Scherer's lab - in Giessen, Germany, at the time -I was very much into his component process model. At about the same time Craig Smith and Ira Roseman were publishing their seminal papers about their work with Phoebe Ellsworth.

Eventually John asked me to write an overview over emotion theories. I do not remember how long it took me, but the way I remember it, it was a massive file, amounting to about 100 pages. Probably it was less though. In any case, once I was done, John read it, approved of it, and said that I should put it away now. He said, there was no need to put it into the thesis itself because nobody would want to read it, but instead focus on the research I was going to do. I was quite furious. What a waste, I thought. Of course, that was not true. I have been talking about the history of emotion research ever since - I would call that a sleeper effect ...

However, the important lesson here was clearly not to get bogged down in some of the endless discussions between theorists. Know the theories yes, but do not waste too much time picking a fight. John pushed for data, empirical observations, and models that could make sense of these data. There was no question in my mind after discussing with him that emotions were foremost social processes. Thus, the regulation of emotion would always involve a social component. We regulate emotions in part because of social context, just as we regulate our social context with emotions (for example emotional displays). Our emotions are regulated because of the way that the different emotional components are connected in feedback loops. If the social rule states not to smile, and not smiling moderates how you feel, then social rules can modulate emotions via expression. Similarly, empathy is one of the bonds between people that imply that emotions are not just something inside of us, but also something between us. Emotions are social!

Today, when discussing these things I like to use expressions like

Emotions are self-regulating processes that serve nested intra- and interindividual regulatory functions. Psychological and neuroscience theories that deal with emotion regulation as an after-thought are bound to fail capturing the complexity of multi-level regulation that is part of typical emotional episodes.

Kappas, A. (2010). Emotion/Regulation: Never Tear Us Apart. Presented at the Emotion Preconference 2010 to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Meeting. Las Vegas, Nevada, January 28.

I just had the pleasure of reading a post on Jim Coan's new blog "Our Social Ecology", where Jim discusses the metaphor that humans might be the cheetahs of self-control. Interesting stuff and I am looking forward to reading the ongoing thread and recommend it highly.

Personally, I am fascinated by the recent interest in the regulation of emotion among emotion researchers. For me it is sort of a back to the roots. My PhD supervisor John Lanzetta (shown on the picture) was an engineer by training and he had the tendency to look not at just things, but at systems of things. How things interact. Not just what they do, but what makes them do what they do. Being more and more interested in emotions, John was fascinated in what we do to emotions, what emotions do to us, what we do to others and what others do to us. He did not focus so much on individuals, but at systems of individuals.

The topic of my thesis, at the time, in the late eighties, was "Control of Emotion". Basically, I was interested in how regulating facial activity impacts not only what we feel, but also our bodily responses. I looked also at distraction via breathing at different rates, at counting at different rates, but also what would happen to our feeling and bodily responses if we just put on a face, or breathed at a particular rate. In the next few days, I will talk a little bit about my own research in this area, as well as that of some colleagues, and I will later discuss the concept of auto-regulation of emotions - something I am currently writing about.

This week I attended the shooting of Die Große Show der Naturwunder in Freiburg. There will be a segment on felt and false smiles. This is a very interesting topic of course. Going back to Duchenne, we know that crows feet wrinkles can make the difference between a smile that looks "real" and one that does not. As it turns out, there is considerable empirical evidence that smiles showing this feature - it involves the contraction of the muscle orbicularis oculi are more likely to occur when somebody is indeed happy or amused, but that does not mean that all smiles with the wrinkles are genuine, and all smiles without are fake - just that the probability is higher. Other features that have been suggested to differ between posed and felt smiles relate to the timing - how long does it take for the smile to hit its maximum, or apex, how long does it stay there, how fast for it to disappear. It has also been suggested that felt smiles are more symmetrical than post ones. However, for this feature the empirical evidence is weakest. Some critical evidence regarding the differences of "felt" and "false" smiles has recently been presented by my colleagues Eva Krumhuber and Tony Manstead.
The show will be transmitted on July 1, 2010 at 20:15 in ARD