Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The most general function of the ANS: For an excellent, detailed overview of the autonomic nervous system, see W. Janig, “The Autonomic Nervous System and Its Coordination by the Brain,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Richard Davidson, Klaus Scherer, and Hill Goldsmith (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 135–86.

The autonomic nervous system is like the old furnace: My colleague and former mentor Robert Levenson has done some of the most rigorous and original research on James’s thesis about emotion. He is the source of the furnace metaphor, and of much of my thinking about the autonomic nervous system’s role in emotion. For his own thinking, see Levenson, “Autonomic Specificity and Emotion,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, 212–24.

What followed was a rather strange and controversial study: Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen, “Autonomic Nervous System Activity Distinguishes Among Emotions,” Science 221 (1993): 1208–10. For a follow-up study, see Levenson, Ekman, and Friesen, “Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity,” Psychophysiology 27 (1993): 363–84.

these distinctions are not the kind of emotion-specific physiological signatures that James envisioned: For a superb and fair-minded critique of the work using the Directed Facial Action task, see John T. Cacioppo, D. J. Klein, G. C. Berntson, and E. Hatfield, “The Psychophysiology of Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Lewis and Haviland, 119–42.

Levenson and Ekman subsequently packed their physiological equipment up: Levenson, Ekman, K. Heider, and Friesen, “Emotion and Autonomic Nervous System Activity in the Minangkabau of West Sumatra,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (1992): 972–88.

And in other research: Levenson, L. L. Carstensen, Friesen, and Ekman, “Emotion, Physiology, and Expression in Old Age,” Psychology and Aging 6 (1991): 28–35.

“A man goes to the supermarket once a week”: For a full complement of these moral scenarios, see J. Haidt, S. H. Koller, and M. G. Dias, “Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 613–28.

People’s responses to this kind of thought experiment have led Jonathan Haidt: Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34, and “The Moral Emotions,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, 852–70. M. D. Hauser, Moral Minds (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). J. D. Greene, and Haidt, “How (and Where) Does Moral Judgment Work?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6 (2002): 517–23.

well-known theory of moral development: Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach,” Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and Social Issues, ed. T. Lickona (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), 31–53. For excellent extensions of some of Kohlberg’s claims, see the work of Elliot Turiel: The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); The Culture of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Turiel, M. Killen, and C. Helwig, “Morality: Its Structure, Functions, and Vagaries,” in The Emergence of Morality in Children, ed. Jerome Kagan and S. Lamb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 155–243.

In one study: D. Keltner, P. C. Ellsworth, and K. Edwards, “Beyond Simple Pessimism: Effects of Sadness and Anger on Social Perception,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 740–52.

consider the following neuroimaging study: J. D. Greene et al., “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment,” Science 75 (2001): 2105-08.

When the Dalai Lama visited: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York; Riverhead, 1999), 63.

Confucius was on the same page: Armstrong, The Great Transformation, 249.

Martha Nussbaum, bucking the trends of moral philosophy: Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 297–454.

Emotions have not fared well in these thought experiments: For an excellent survey of treatments of emotion in Western thought, see Keith Oatley, Emotions: A Brief History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).