Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

This study undermined the very foundation of what would become the evolutionary approach to emotion—that the emotions are embodied in distinct, genetically encoded physiological processes universal to humans and shaped by our evolutionary past. Instead, it would seem that emotions can arise out of any physiological response, depending on the interpretation of that experience. The specificity of emotion—whether we experience shame, love, anger, or compassion—and the very nature of emotional experience are the products of culturally based constructive processes taking place in the rich associative networks of the mind.

To counter this ingenious study and its many implications, Ekman confronted a career-imperiling problem: how to measure emotions objectively. What sort of measure could be relied upon to capture fleeting emotional experiences as they stream by in our affective lives? Ideally, this measure could be captured as close to the experience as possible, and used in labs around the world. The most obvious answer is to ask participants to describe their experiences with words, as Schachter and Singer had done. Perhaps the most miraculous expressions of emotion are through words, as in this poem of love by E. E. Cummings:

which is the very

(in sad this havingest

world) most merry

most fair most rare

—the livingest givingest

girl on this whirlingest

earth?

why you’re

by far the darlingest

who (on this busily

nowhere rollingest

it)’s the dizzily

he most him

—the climbingly fallingest

fool in this trickiest

if?

why i’m

by much the luckiest

what of the wonder

(beingest growingest)

over all under

all hate all fear

—all perfectly dyingest

my and foreverless

thy?

why our

is love and neverless

 

Notwithstanding the wonders of words, they are inherently limited for studying emotion. The most critical limitation is their temporal relation to experience. When we tell someone how we feel with words, that report is a retrospective reconstruction of an experience. When you report on the delights and frustrations of a day, or your pleasures on a family vacation, or even how a play, art exhibit, or movie moved you, your report is filtered through your current feelings, your intuitive theories of emotional experience, social expectations about what is appropriate to talk about with respect to our inner emotional lives (for example, “how would a mover and shaker express herself here?”), and your personal style (are you prone to repression or dramatic emotional disclosures?). As memories of the emotional experience are dredged up through these filters and then materialize as a set of spoken words, much of the emotional experience remains in the evanescent present of the past, lost. On this, Linda Levine and George Bonanno have found in their research that when people report upon past experiences, be it a disappointing outcome in a presidential election or the death of a loved one, it is their current feelings and how they construe the emotional event that drive their reports of past emotions as much as or more than the original feelings being reported upon.