Emotion

What function do they serve, in your opinion?

A different culture’s view :Upanishads

• “Know the soul - Ahman, as riding in a chariot. He who lacks understanding, whose mind is not constantly held firm, his senses uncontrolled, like the viscous horses of a chariot driver..”

• From Robinson lecture series: “Plato’s Republic: Man at Large”

• How does your culture view the emotion/reason split? Spend a few minutes researching

Aristotle on Reason and Emotion

Believed that nature provides us with our various facets for a reason and that therefore there must be a purpose for Emotion but did not go as far as to include this as part of the

reasoning process

F. De Waal 1982

How do we relate to one another?

• Stoics believed that it was language that separated us from animals and that our reason came from the Gods.

• Evolution – Chimpanzees spend about 20% of their time grooming and building “friendships”

• Neanderthals became extinct about 30,000 years ago – one theory-genocide

• Is this the first evidence of hatred?

The Four Temperaments

• Choleric – ambitious and leader like• Melancholic – introverted and thoughtful• Phlegmatic –relaxed and quiet• Sanguine –pleasure seeking and sociable• Four states that derive from nature of the

balance between the four elements, air, fire, water and blood

• Represented themselves as yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood.

Temperament as viewed by Modern Psychology – Hill Goldsmith

• Social Fearfulness

• Anger Proneness

• Interest/Persistence

• Pleasure

• Studies have shown that monozygotic twins likely to be more similar in relation to the first three categories than dizygotic twins.

Paul Eckman on Universal Emotions

• Found 7 Universal emotions

• Only 50 of 20,000 people could consistently spot deception without training

Worked on Facial Electromyography – currently used in advertising research and gaming

Emotion, Reason and the Human Brian – Phineas Gage

•Damage to the left frontal cortex•Rod landed over 100 feet away

covered in blood and brains•Rod around 45cm long

Phrenology revisited

• Founded by Joseph Gall in the late 1700s

• Moved away from dualist thinking

• Was incorrect in simplifying what we now know to be brain “systems”

• Phrenologist parties amongst the middle classes

• Rod had intersected

benevolence and veneration!

Dr. Harlow’s findings

• “the equilibrium … between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities had been destroyed.”

• What does this tell us about the way that medicine in the 19th Century viewed reason/emotion?

• Why would Harlow’s comments have been ignored?

Modern Phineas Gages

• Elliot – needed prompting to get up, divorced twice, lost jobs, went bankrupt yet passed the below tests:

• IQ test in superior range• Wisconsin Test• Incomplete Knowledge tests - How many

giraffes in New York?• Various Personality Tests• Tests based on hypothetical ethical situations

“His free will had been Compromised” p38

“But I still wouldn’t know what to do!”

• “We might summarise Elliot’s predicament as to Know but not to feel.”

Ventromedial sector damage leads to impairments of reason/decision making and emotion/feeling

Further Studies

• Fulton and Jacobsen at Yale

-Becky and Lucy fought until

frontal lobes were damaged when

became placid.

• Myers has shown greatly decreased grooming behaviour and crucially that monkeys with other disabilities will still receive and seek support, unlike those with frontal brain damage.

Other instances…

• Anosognosia – the inability to acknowledge disease in oneself – Justice William O. Douglas “I’ve been kicking 40 yard field goals” Damasio p68

• Phantom Limb syndrome

• Synaesthesia – “I wanted the shape of this chicken to be pointy but it came out all round.” p150 Alchin

Feelings, Emotion and Thought

• Biological regulation – e.g. hunger

• Hypothalamus’ neurons detect

Change in blood sugar levels

hunger

•Outside stimuli (Darwin at the Zoo)

•Internal/thought stimuli

William James Experiment

The James-Lange Theory• James suggested that actually what you are

left with when you remove the bodily effects is simply ‘a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception’ i.e. a thought unhindered by emotion.

• He argued that our emotions do not cause our body to react and respond, it’s actually our bodily responses that cause our emotions.

• Do you agree? Why? Why not? • Does this theory apply to all emotions?

Artificial Emotion

• If the James-Lange theory is true then surely we should be able to feel an emotion simply by artificially creating the bodily responses connected to it.

• However, research has shown that this is not the case. Participants injected with adrenaline reported the bodily feelings one would associate with the fight or flight response but didn’t feel the emotion usually connected to it.

Can we create emotions?Consider Left/Right side of brain

damage.

Oxytocin and the Prairie Vole

• Manufactured in the hypothalamus as well as the ovaries and testes

• Released during breast feeding and love making

• Is this a counter argument to what we’ve discussed re: artificial emotions?

A proviso:Damasio on neuroscience..

• “I have a difficult time seeing scientific results, especially in neurobiology as anything but provisional approximations, to be enjoyed for a while and discarded as soon as better accounts become available.”