A story of emotion (I)

Unfortunately, one of the most significant things ever said about emotion may be that everyone knows what it is until they are asked to define it.

Joseph LeDoux

Being humans, we are experiencing emotions with every breath we take and in the same way our heart beats, we feel. It is automatic, unconscious most of the time, and necessary to our (social) survival. Emotions are part of our everyday life; whether we are able to identify the emotional state we are in at a given time or not, by default we are feeling and those feeling will affect our actions and interactions with others. But what is this actually, what we are talking about?

Emotions are part of our default vocabulary, which means we do not even define the term anymore. New scientific publications presenting novel aspects of the research on emotions scarcely define the object of their studies. It is only when looking at a specific category of emotion (we will come back to that later) that one will define what is included in this category. I had to start my PhD research focusing on emotion to realise the lack of definition surrounding this concept; it is such a common thing to refer to that we all have a general understanding of what it means but no actual, precise definition. Ever since Darwin, scientists agree on defining emotion as coordinated suites of behavioural, physiological, cognitive, and affective processes, summarised as automatic-motoric-cognitive states. By itself, such definition does not bring much information; let’s try to shed some light.

Why do we have emotions?

The first step in understanding the definition of emotion is, in my opinion, to try understand the reason for their existence; what does it do for us? Knowing how feelings can torture us, why do we have emotions?

Darwin originally attributed to emotion a warning function; they are supposed to prepare the body, or the organism, to respond adaptively and rapidly to environmentally recurrent stimuli. So emotions, or feelings, are internal states resulting from physiological changes, triggered by our social and physical environment, triggering behavioural, cognitive, and affective processes. Each emotion triggers a specific set of processes, making the response adapted to the situation experienced by the organism. For example, fear will trigger physiological reactions redistributing blood to the muscles and limiting the irrigation of secondary areas (i.e. skin, intestines…); fear will also trigger an adrenalin rush preparing of fight or flight.

What we define as ‘emotion’ is then a physiological response; trying to name all the feelings we can experience and splitting them into categories is merely a wish that we, humans, have to try to grasp and define what is happening in our body. Based on this Darwinian definition, it seems reasonable to think emotions are not human-specific; any animal living in a given habitat will face environmentally recurrent stimuli that could affect the animal’s fitness (i.e. its survival ability and reproductive success). Thus, when taking the adaptive, evolutionary approach to the study of emotion, which would help understand the origin of and reason for human emotions, other species should also be considered. The difference between human and animal emotions lies in degree, not in the facts; human societies are one of the most complex forms of social and cultural system on Earth. Social systems exist in a whole range of species because some sort of organisation between individuals is necessary for survival. The distinction is thus in the complexity of the given organisational system, impacting the complexity of a social environment, which in turn influence the physiological responses displayed in an individual. I think we can say that as our social environment developed more complexity, the triggered changes become in turn more complex, and the more emotions they are now to experience.

In summary, emotion first evolved as a signal in response to specific environmental changes. With time and the evolution of human societies into more complex systems, the triggered responses became more difficult to grasp and required a specific classification system, dividing emotions into categories and families.

To be continued...

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You made it! Thank you and I hope you enjoy reading through this first post. As you probably guess, more will follow on the same topic but as every good story, we can't say it all at once...

Sciencely yours.