What are emotions made of?
Noticing and expressing feelings like disgust
No surprise. There is a huge scientific literature covering the neurobiology of emotions . Our workgroup will have to be patient as we try and become comfortable with this complex science story. I thought I would put together a bit of a teaser, a preview of stories to come, citing just a few recent findings on emotions (starting with studies that might provide us with the neurobiolgical underpinnings of the emotion disgust). Martha Farah and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania published an article in Science about a year ago (VOL 323 page 1168) and found that the oral expression of bad taste overlapped well with moral distaste. “Leaving a bad taste in the mouth” for foods evokes the same motor activity as disgusting behavior. From an evolutionary perspective a disgust response has adaptive sense in giving up a heads up for avoiding poisons and perhaps also people that are toxic.
Other studies seem to show that moral and gustatory disgust also triggers similar patterns of brain activity. Bruno Wicker (in the Journal, Neuron) also points out that disgust in the presence of stench has some survival value. After all you want to learn well not to go back to foods that made you sick the last time you ate them. Stench that triggers disgust is an effective learned response. In Wicker’s experiment he had subjects smell odorants that really reeked, that were disgusting. He then looked at the brain response to disgust using a standard brain imaging method, fMRI. The same participants also got chance to see pictures of people, faces, expressing feelings of disgust. The same area of the brain becomes activated when seeing someone else disgusted as when we are disgusted because of a lousy food odor. One of the brain areas that is particularly active when we are disgusted is the anterior insula and the anterior cingulated cortex, areas known to be involved in emotion.
How well are others able to ‘read’ our feelings of disgust. There are loads of facial cues available for reading emotions it takes time and experience to learn to read and interpret what we see and perhaps also what we smell. For example Denise Chen at Rice University found that “Familiarity with a partner enhances detection of emotional cues in that person’s smell,” and proved her point in the laboratory. Chen collected sweat from couples while inducing (with videos) happiness, fear, sexual arousal or neutral feelings. The subjects then sniffed odors from four jars containing sweat from either the person’s partner or a stranger of the opposite sex. Subjects were rather good at detecting specific emotions from their partners’ body odor and couples that had lived together the longest were the most accurte. Reading emotions takes experience. In another study James Russell and colleagues at Boston College completed a series of studies in 600 children and found that generally 5 year olds to can not grasp the meaning of disgust in the facial features of adults and even 14 year olds have trouble in understanding the meaning of a disgusted face. Young children often know the meaning of emotion words well before they can discern the that emotion being facially expressed. They have less trouble identifying happiness and sadness.
On another note….I can’t help a final thought that provides some of the personal (inappropriate) background for this report. I can’t understand the need for the comments made by my friend Renata Mannheimer addressed to Eric Weiler (see posted article ‘Deconstructing educational research’). I find it inappropriate as does LAK that she would air personal problems in public, to someone who she doesn’t even know in a posted website article. When her husband Maurice Flehinger left Renata and joined me in my bungalow it was not out of anger or lack of loving Renata but rather disappointment and a long history of a relationship that was not working for him. Renata felt the need to expose their family life in a public forum. Maurice had told her hundreds of times how it was important to maintain some semblance of a private life particularly because we of New Bretten live so closely tied to one another. Why can’t she understand that love and trust includes having some boundaries and as LAK has pointed out, keeping hands out of each other’s pants?
I can’t leave this posting without pointing out that emotional states alter how the brain processes and responds to information. We can understand the notion of the ‘hot head’ or cognition in the context of hate, love, disgust, despair, fear, as different from cool cognition that is active when not much is at stake. About a decade ago Janet Metcalf and Walter Mischel suggested that we distingu9ish between hot and cool cognition especially when trying to account for self control and willpower. Cool (neutral) cognition is based on knowing and is contemplative, flexible, slow, strategic. In contrast hot cognition is impulsive and under stimulus control and is the basis for classically conditioned learning and responding. It makes sense although it still leaves us searching for a detailed picture of the underlying neural mechanisms responsible for these two types of cognitive operations.
The original article that Metcalf and Mischel published is as follows.
Metcalfe, Janet; Mischel, Walter. A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower Psychological Review. Vol 106(1) Jan 1999, 3-19.