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Solution Manual for Understanding Emotions 3rd Edition by

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Book Title: Understanding Emotions

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Author: Keltner Oatley Jenkins

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 INSTRUCTOR’S MANUAL
to accompany
Keltner, Oatley & Jenkins
Understanding Emotions, third edition

by
Michelle Hilscher, Dacher Keltner,
June Gruber & Keith Oatley

CHAPTER 1.
 Introduction to this Manual

This manual has been prepared for instructors who use Understanding Emotions, Third Edition,
as a textbook for a course on emotions. The manual is made up of two parts: lecture notes by
people who have taught the course using this textbook, and a set of multiple-choice questions to
test students’ knowledge of material in the book.

The lecture notes can be regarded as examples of the kinds of emphases an instructor
can offer when teaching the course. They can be drawn on if you wish, and be substituted by your
own notes.

In addition to lectures, it is useful in a course of emotions to conduct in-class

discussions. One good way to stimulate discussion is to choose a question from the section
entitled To Think About and Discuss in the chapter on which you are working, and ask students
in the class to discuss in pairs the question for, say, 5 minutes. Next, merge three pairs into groups
of six people to have wider discussions for five more minutes. With the experience of these
discussions students will have got started in thinking about the question, and feel less anxious
about airing their views since they will now have people with whom they have talked, who have
engaged with what they had to say. Now the question can be taken up in plenary discussion by
the whole class, of a kind in which the instructor can also take part.

Other kinds of activities are suggested in the book. For instance, you can ask students to
keep an emotion diary in the interval between two class meetings, and such diaries are discussed
on pages 178 to 179.

And we would like to draw your attention to two excellent and free resources developed
by two authors of this instructor’s manual. The first is a series of interviews put together by
Professor June Gruber. She interviews all sorts of emotion researchers, and these interviews are
available at the following locations:

Experts in Emotion Series – Playlist

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNew731mjIZn43G_Y5otqKzJA
Human Emotion Online Course – Playlist (if relevant!)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewieO9Dsj-OhNBC9bF4FoRp

And second, for the past 10 years Dacher Keltner has been the faculty director of the
Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, which is devoted to disseminating the science of
emotion and happiness to a broad audience. At its site (greatergood.berkeley.edu) you will find
all sorts of articles, science briefs, videos, and quizzes and tests (e.g., an emotion intelligence test)
that could be integrated into your teaching.

A selection of multiple-choice questions is provided with each chapter of this manual.

We suggest that a selection of these questions be used for paper-and-pencil tests given in class.
The questions can be supplemented by others, or used as models for your own questions.

It is very important to keep the multiple-choice questions in this manual safe, limiting
their accessibility only to you, and not to distribute the questions electronically. With a previous
edition of this textbook, at some point, a set of the multiple-choice questions that accompanied
the instructor’s manual started circulating on the internet and this, of course, markedly reduced
their value for assessing students’ learning of the material.
CHAPTER 1:
Approaches to Understanding Emotions

CONTENTS

Introduction

What Is an Emotion? First Ideas

Nineteenth-Century Founders

Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Approach

William James: The Physiological Approach

Sigmund Freud: The Psychotherapeutic Approach

Philosophical and Literary Approaches

Aristotle and the Ethics of Emotions

René Descartes: Philosophically Speaking

George Eliot: The World of the Arts

Brain Science, Psychology, Sociology

John Harlow, Tania Singer: New Brain Science

Magda Arnold, Sylvan Tomkins: New Psychological Theories

Alice Isen: New Experimentation

Erving Goffman, Arlie Russell Hochschild: Selves and Others

What Is an Emotion? Some Conceptions

Researchers’ Conceptions of Emotions

The Emotional Realm: Emotions, Moods, Dispositions

Episodes of Emotion

Moods

Emotional Disorders

Personality Traits

Summary
To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Chapter 1: Lecture Notes

Historically, philosophers and social theorists have often argued that emotions are pernicious, and
harmful to social harmony. Some have concluded that humans would be better off without
emotions. Aristotle urged moderation as the unifying principle of the mind and moral behavior. In
the Nicomachean Ethics, he was concerned about the negative effects of passion. He thought that
emotions can be good, but he also expressed some suspicions of them. The Stoic philosophers,
who based their work on Aristotle’s, encouraged us to rid ourselves of emotions. During the
Enlightenment, the philosopher Hobbes argued that humans in a state of nature were dog-eat-dog
creatures; our emotions had to be constrained by laws. Nietszche wrote about the superior
individual who might set a model for humanity, and that people were prevented from becoming
superior because of negative effects of the emotion of compassion. Freud said that we have
impulses of an emotional kind, id, sex drives, and the drive to destroy; these all had to be
constrained by civilization. So you can see that in the West there has been a lot of skepticism
about emotions.
In the East too, for instance in Confucianism and Buddhism, there has been skepticism.
The Buddha was said to have sat under a Bo tree seeking enlightenment and he hit upon the
Noble Truths. First, life is suffering. Second, we suffer because of our attachment to goals and
desires. Third, a state of nonattachment is the way forward. And fourth, the eightfold path, which
centers around meditation, is the way to nonattachment, and freedom from ill effects of the
emotions of suffering.
In the West, from the middle of the eighteenth century, emotions began to be valued and
explored in the movement called Romanticism, which particularly affected politics and the arts.
In a way, we are still in the Romantic era, with its recommendation that in your life with others,
you should do what you do with style, and with heart.
In science, the person who introduced the study of emotions was Charles Darwin. His
theory of evolution was his most famous work, but his research on expression of emotions was
also very significant. He argued that emotions are shaped by evolution, and that they derive from
our past: our past as prehuman animals, and our past as preadult infants. Darwin argued that
emotions are human universals. Derived from evolution, they are shared by all humankind.
William James, the founding father of American Psychology, added the idea that emotions have
bodily components. He argued that an emotion is a perception of a bodily change, for example, a
feeling of tears in the eyes, or of becoming tense during an argument. In novels, the nineteenth-
century writer George Eliot (pen-name of Mary Ann Evans) explored an idea that is central to this
current textbook: emotions mediate our human relationships.
In the nineteenth century, too, the idea that the brain was the organ of mind started to be
explored. Here again, emotion became important, with the case of Phineas Gage, a railway
construction foreman, who, in 1848, suffered a terrible accident that damaged the frontal lobes of
his brain. He was attended by a country doctor, John Harlow, who wrote up his case. Gage’s
accident left him emotionally impaired, no longer able to be employed, no longer able to conduct
personal relationships in ways that were satisfactory to himself or others. Since then, of course,
brain science has advanced very substantially. With the latest methods of brain imaging, emotions
remain on the agenda, for instance with Tania Singer’s work on the bases of empathy.
Cognitive approaches to emotion were taken up in the 1950s with the work of Magda
Arnold, who extended Aristotle’s ideas, and showed first—perhaps the most important single idea
about emotions—that most typically an emotion occurs when some event in the world affects an
inner concern or goal. This meeting of outer and inner then makes emotions not an impediment
(as some earlier theorists had argued) but the very center of psychology. At the same time Sylvan
Tomkins proposed that emotion is at the center of motivation. Motivation is not explained by
drives. The crucial issue is that emotion selects among our drives, and gives one priority over the
others. Emotion is the amplifier that gives the oomph to what we do. Each emotion, too, argued
Tomkins has its own physiological system, and its own pattern of muscle movements, by which it
is expressed.
Continuing the cognitive approach and also taking up Tomkins’s idea about emotions
setting priorities, Nico Frijda has argued that the central concept of and emotion is that, when an
event occurs, it gives priority to one set of goals or concerns, while relegating others to a
background. When we experience fear, we concentrate only on danger and safety; the emotion,
says Frijda, is the readiness to identify the danger and the urge to escape, or to deal with the
danger in some other way. Others who took a cognitive approach included Richard Lazarus, who
focused on beliefs and the evaluative components of emotions. Following Arnold, he said that a
central component of emotion is an evaluation of something in the person’s world. Lazarus was
also one of the leading researchers in the psychology of emotion’s relation to stress. We get
stressed when our resources to cope are overwhelmed. Short-term stress can be good, but chronic
stress is not good for us. Lazarus noticed that people would feel stressed at not having enough
money or because of their relationship with their mates; there are many kinds of stress, and he
needed a specific language for it. He realized it had to do with emotion.
Following work of this kind, emotion also came onto the agenda of experimental
psychology and social psychology. Influential, here, was Alice Isen who showed how
experiments could be done on the effects of emotion. She became especially known for her
experiments on effects of happiness, which she found could improve creativity, and also prompt
us to help other people.
Among productive answers to the question of how emotions affect our social lives were
those offered by Erving Goffman, who saw that we each give, as it were, performances of
ourselves. We occupy roles, as offspring of our parents, as friends, as students, as customers in
stores, and as competitors in sports. Our emotional satisfaction in life depends on how deeply we
engage in such roles. Not only that, but our work lives also involve us in enacting roles and, as
Arlie Russell Hochschild has shown, many of these roles have important emotional aspects. As an
employee you would generally do well to be emotionally pleasant to your boss. As a purchaser
for an organization, you wouldn’t listen to a recommendation from a sales person whom you did
not trust emotionally.
What is an emotion? This is a question that was asked by William James, and it is a hard
one. We don’t have a really good, universally agreed definition of emotion yet. But that is all
right. One of the wonderful attributes of language is that we can talk effectively without always
knowing exactly what we are referring to. So language is usually rather provisional. We can use
the word “tree” in a conversation perfectly well without having to go over the botany department
to find exactly what a tree is. So to start with we can say that an emotion is a mental state that has
a sense of urgency to it. It’s a mode of relating to the environment—most importantly the social
environment—so that we are in urgent readiness to maintain, or to change, or to end, our current
relation with that environment. For instance, if we love someone it’s important to us to seek to
maintain that relationship. If we are angry with someone, we seek urgently to change the
relationship with the person who has made us angry, for instance by getting even with that
person. If we are sad, we become urgently preoccupied, in a distinctive way, with how and why
some important person or project in our lives has ended.
The duration of emotional states. It is useful to compare emotions with moods. In a
mood, you may feel generally depressed or happy. Whereas discrete emotions usually have a
specific intentional object—they are about something—moods are often free-floating. They also
generally last longer: a few hours, or a day, or a week.
 You may also compare emotions and moods with sensations like pains or bodily itches.
With purely physical sensations, your back hurts, your legs feel numb after sitting in one position,
or you have a pain. These are mental events that have some properties of emotions and moods.
What people believe about sensations (which distinguish them from emotions) is that sensations
really are unrelated to your existential goals and concerns: your goals and concerns about your
identity, yourself, and your relationships.
In Understanding Emotions, we argue that emotions are systems, which include moods
that organize our experience, prioritize our concerns, and mediate our relationships. Sensations
are lower-level responses, based in physiology, that do not have to do with social goals, identity,
or moral issues. This distinction can be challenged in certain ways but it seems right. The
difference can be thought about in what happens with panic attacks. These can sometimes start
with heart palpitations, which are sensations, and we may think we are dying from a heart attack.
But in such panics, the sensation becomes an emotion: acute anxiety, a kind of fear.
In terms of the duration of emotion-based phenomena, a sentiment can be thought of as
long-term attitude that feels like an emotion toward particular objects. To use a tragic example,
Palestinians and Israelis may have longstanding hatred toward each other, a sentiment that goes
back generations. In a more positive example, a recent line of research, which we will describe
later in this book, is of how to cultivate sentiments of emotional well-being by way of concern for
others.
Also in terms of the duration of emotional states, disorders of emotion last a long time.
For instance, the diagnosis of depression requires that a state of sadness, or a state of being unable
to take pleasure in things that previously were pleasurable, lasts for at least 2 weeks. Some
emotional disorders, for instance, disabling social anxiety, can last for decades.
Most traits of personality have an emotional component, for instance shyness, irritability,
or cheerfulness. They can be thought of underlying emotional dispositions that start with
temperament in infancy and continue to affect us throughout our lives.
Overall, the world of emotions is the world of what we value in life, the world in which
our evaluations make certain kinds of thoughts and action urgent. If we think of psychology as
made up of such subjects as development, perception, motivation, social interaction, memory,
thinking, and language, it’s emotion, in its shorter-term and longer-term aspects, that links these
processes together. Emotion is at the center of human life. Only in the last few years has it started
to come toward the center of our understanding of the mind and brain.
 Sample Test Questions for Chapter 1:
Approaches to Understanding Emotions

1. According to Charles Darwin (1872), an emotional expression that uses the blood vessels
expresses which one of the following emotions?

a. Anger
b. Shame
c. Pleasure
d. Resignation

Source: Page 6, Table 1.1

2. According to Charles Darwin (1872), fear is expressed by way of changes in which of the
following bodily systems?

a. The sweat glands

b. The dermal apparatus
c. The somatic muscles
d. Both b & c

Source: Page 6, Table 1.1

3. Charles Darwin asked two broad questions that still guide emotion researchers today. These
questions included:

a. How are emotions expressed in humans and other animals?

b. What would happen if we did not have emotions?
c. How can we cultivate emotions in our relationships, and through the life course?
d. How are emotions different in different cultures?

Source: Page 6

4. The physiological approach to emotions is associated with which one of the following
scholars?

a. Charles Darwin
b. Sigmund Freud
c. William James
d. René Descartes

Source: Page 8

5. According to William James, the core of an emotion is

a. the pattern of bodily responses associated with an experience.

b. the changes within one’s autonomic nervous system.
c. the changes in how one’s muscles and joints move.
d. all of the above.

Source: Page 9

6. The psychotherapeutic approach assumes which of the following to be true?

a. The emotional life of adulthood derives from relationships we had in childhood with parents or
other caregivers.
b. We are responsible for our emotions because we are responsible for our beliefs.
c. Emotions have useful functions; they help us navigate our social interactions.
d. All of the above are consistent with the psychotherapeutic approach.

Source: Page 10

7. According to Aristotle, tragic drama impacts people in important ways. Notably, when people
are at the theater they
a. sympathize with the main character.
b. learn to distance themselves from the emotions of the main character.
c. come out of the theater feeling more confident about their own lives.
d. experience a purgation or purification of emotions.

Source: Page 11

8. One could say the Epicureans and Stoics were the first emotion researchers in the West. The
Epicureans taught that one should

a. avoid becoming emotional.

b. extirpate almost all desires from one’s life.
c. live simply and enjoy simple pleasures.
d. strive for great things like wealth and fame.

Source: Page 12

9. One could say the Epicureans and Stoics were the first emotion researchers in the West. The
Stoics taught that one should

a. avoid becoming emotional.

b. extirpate almost all desires from one’s life.
c. live simply and enjoy simple pleasures.
d. strive for great things like wealth and fame.

Source: Page 13

10. The philosophical approach to emotions is associated with which one of the following
scholars?
a. Charles Darwin
b. Sigmund Freud
c. William James
d. René Descartes

Source: Page 14

11. Which fundamental emotions occur in the soul according to René Descartes?

a. Fear, anger, sadness, resignation, and guilt

b. Wonder, desire, joy, love, hatred, and sadness
c. Happiness, surprise, and love
d. Disgust, curiosity, love, hatred, and shame

Source: Page 14

12. Greek doctors such as Hippocrates and Galen thought that disease was caused by an
imbalance among the humors, with an increase of each humor giving rise to a distinct emotional
state. Placidity was thought to derive from an excess of

a. black bile.
b. yellow bile.
c. phlegm.
d. blood.

Source: Page 15

13. Greek doctors such as Hippocrates and Galen thought that disease was caused by an
imbalance among the humors, with an increase of each humor giving rise to a distinct emotional
state. Hope and vigor were thought to derive from an excess of

a. black bile.
b. yellow bile.
c. phlegm.
d. blood.

Source: Page 15

14. According to George Eliot, literary art is important to the emotions because novels
encourage readers to

a. extend “sympathies” to people outside of their usual circle of friends and acquaintances.
b. more frequently express their emotions to others.
c. develop a more effective set of coping skills.
d. experience katharsis of their emotions.

Source: Page 16
15. Tania Singer and her collaborators (2004) assessed brain activity while volunteers
experienced a painful electric shock and compared it to that elicited when they observed a signal
indicating that their loved one—present in the same room—was receiving a similar shock. Singer
et al. found that when a participant felt pain ____________ whereas when a participant was
signaled that their loved one experienced pain ____________.

a. parts of their anterior cingulate cortex were activated; their somato-sensory cortex was
activated
b. their somato-sensory cortex and parts of their anterior cingulate cortex were activated; their
somato-sensory cortex was activated
c. their somato-sensory cortex and parts of their anterior cingulate cortex were activated; parts of
their anterior cingulate cortex were activated
d. parts of their anterior cingulate cortex were activated; their somato-sensory cortex and parts of
their anterior cingulate cortex were activated

Source: Page 19

16. The opposite of empathy is

a. schadenfreude.
b. contempt.
c. condemnation.
d. remorse.

Source: Page 21 (Special Section re. Novels and Films: Avatar)

17. In the 1970s and 1980s, Alice Isen studied how happiness influences people’s perception of
the world. Based on findings from numerous studies, Isen concluded that happiness impacts
cognition in which one of the following ways?

a. Happiness makes people more error-prone on simple tasks.

b. Feeling happy encourages people to be less critical about consumer goods.
c. Happiness encourages rapid decision-making.
d. Happiness makes people more cautious about loss when risks are low.

Source: Page 23, Table 1.2

18. For understanding emotions, sociologist Erving Goffman’s most instructive work is perhaps
the essay “Fun in games.” In this essay, Goffman contends that happiness emerges when people

a. interact recreationally with others.

b. act in accordance with the expectations of others.
c. act in accordance with their own personal values.
d. are fully engaged in what they are doing.

Source: Page 24
19. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild observed how “feeling rules” were instructed to Delta Airlines
cabin staff as part of their training regimen. The “feeling rules” associated with this occupation

a. aimed to produce staff who could play a particular emotional role.

b. aimed to encourage a particular emotional tone in passengers.
c. were ingrained by asking staff to practice particular expressions and recall memories to aid
performances.
d. all of the above are true of Delta Airlines training observed by Hochschild.

Source: Page 24

20. The term ______ refers to a state that typically lasts for hours, days, or weeks, sometimes as a
low-intensity background.

a. personality trait
b. emotional disorder
c. mood
d. emotional episode

Source: Page 28

CHAPTER 2:
Evolution of Emotions

CONTENTS

Elements of an Evolutionary Approach

Selection Pressures

Adaptation

Natural Design for Gene Replication

Three Social Motivations and One Antisocial Motivation

Attachment

Assertion

Affiliation

Emotions in the Space of Three Social Motivations

 Antisocial Motivation

Why Human Emotions Are as They Are?

Social Lives of Chimpanzees

Human Ancestry

Modern Hunter-Gatherer Societies

Emotions as Bases of Human Relationships

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Chapter 2: Lecture Notes

Darwin’s theory of evolution has probably had more influence on the way we think about
emotions than did his book on emotional expression. The theory was based on three principles.
The first one, which Darwin called superabundance, was that plants and animals produce more
offsprings than are necessary just to replace themselves. The second, which he called variation,
was that offsprings are different from each other and the differences can be transmitted by
heredity. The third, which he called selection, was that the variations that best fitted the plant or
animal to its environment survive, while other variations are more likely to die.
It’s the pressures of natural selection that most people remember about Darwin’s
evolutionary theory, and indeed this is a key idea. It is that we are very responsive to
environments. Selection pressures mostly take the form of threats to survival. What are they? A
principal idea about natural selection is that some kinds of events in the environment can kill us,
and evolution has designed us to avoid them. This is accomplished partly by means of emotions
such as fear. We avoid dangers such as cliffs. We do not like snakes and spiders. Another
example is pain. It is a signal that tells you that something is threatening your survival, for
instance a hot fire. Some people are born without the capacity to experience pain, and they have
difficulty surviving because they lack this mechanism for avoiding environmental threat. They
burn their hands, and they find it more difficult than others to learn to avoid bumping into things.
The idea of the survival of the fittest is that bodies of the kind that are best fitted to an
environment will survive, and the genes carried by these bodies are passed on. We are produced
by designs carried by our genes, and over the course of evolution these designs have increased the
likelihood that we and our offspring will reproduce. Intuitively, we think of evolution in terms of
our own survival. In 1964, however, W.D. Hamilton pointed out that it is not the individual per se
but the genes that are important, and these are carried not just by the individual but also by family
members. As one joke has it, you shouldn’t give up your life for a friend, but you can give it up
for a son and a daughter, or for eight cousins. An implication of this idea is that some of our
actions are designed to promote the survival of those who share our genes. This is seen most
clearly in the way we care for our children.
But there is a shock in all this. It isn’t really our genes that we pass on to our children.
Rather, we are the vehicles our genes use to pass themselves on. Really we are robots, designed
by our genes by means of the processes of superabundance, variation, and natural selection, to
make them more likely to survive and take part in reproductive activities. Emotions are among
the ways the genes use to program us. For instance, we are drawn to sexual mating, and this
enables genes pass themselves on.
A critical issue for us humans, in relation to the commands of the genes, needs to be
consideration of what our human purposes may be. We have evolved to be able to evaluate events
and think. So perhaps we need not just react to what our genes seem to command. As an example,
members of humankind have begun to choose how many children to have, and that’s a human
choice, not what the genes demand of us in their pressure toward superabundance. Perhaps, too,
we may have started to think about how we might stop excluding and even killing members of
groups of to which we don’t belong.
The urge to reproduce, to have sex, and rear offspring is a huge determinant that genes
have bequeathed to us. Among the implications of this is that we compete for sexual partners.
Across many species, animals form social hierarchies in which those at the top have more
opportunity to reproduce. We humans, too, form social hierarchies. Then there is competition
between the sexes. Females in many species have an urge to mate with males that have the most
resources, so they are tuned to look for, and be attracted to, signs of resources. Correspondingly,
males tend to show off certain features that indicate resources. Among humans you can see men
doing this when they flirt. They may display their expensive watch or the keys of their car. They
may make a show off producing their wallet as they pick up the check at a restaurant. Some silly
research showed that women find men more attractive in an Armani suit than in a McDonald’s
uniform.
Now look at mating from the point of view of the human male who typically invests less
of his time and effort than the human female in raising offspring. From this perspective, a woman
is seen as attractive when she gives signs of being fertile, and hence able to bear and nurture
children. What are the signs? Women in puberty grow breasts, which are signs of an ability to
nurture and also very sexually attractive to men. These young women also undergo a
redistribution of fat to the hips, which decreases the waist to hip ratio. Women with small waists
and larger hips are more likely to have the capacity to reproduce. Men around the world find that
the ratio of a smaller waist to larger hips attractive. Other signs of fertility are smooth skin and
full lips. These are associated with youth and health. So although all these physical signs are
merely aspects of the body, and have nothing to do with what kind of person the woman is, they
can give men the idea of having sex with women who show these characteristics.
The idea of an adaptation, as explained by evolutionary biologists, is that of a
characteristic that has been selected for, so that it fits a particular environment. Consider, for
instance, the feelings of sickness that often occur to women during pregnancy. Evolutionary
biologists argue that pregnancy sickness is an adaptation that deters a mother from taking in food
that may have toxins and hurt the embryo. For a particular time of pregnancy, the woman is
alerted to toxins in the environment. She avoids foods that have certain kinds of tastes. It seems
like a weird response, but evolutionary theory offers an explanation of why it is an adaptation. It
turns out that women get pregnancy sickness at the time when the embryo is most vulnerable to
toxins, and this sickness diminishes when the embryo becomes less vulnerable. There is some
indication that women who have the worst pregnancy sickness have the healthiest babies.
Social goals. We propose in this book that emotions occur when events affect goals. So if
human beings are predominantly social, what are our social goals? Jenkins and Oatley have
proposed that three such goals are predominant. The first is attachment, the motivation of a
mother or other caregiver to stay close to a baby, and the baby’s motivation to stay close to the
caregiver. The fundamental goal is protection of the infant, and the emotions associated with it
are anxiety at separation, and feelings of trust when baby and caregiver are together. The human
infant is born very premature. We would all have died if our caregivers had not protected us, and
cared for us. To parents, babies involve a lot of trouble; they cry at night and stop parents from
sleeping. They require constant watching over, and they give rise to tasks like cleaning up
diapers. And yet one of the great gifts of our genes is to enable us to love our infants. Baby-faced
features with big eyes, big forehead, small chin, little mouth are attractive to us. Show a slide of a
baby’s face to an audience, and you are likely to hear the sound: “Ahhhh.” The ability to love our
children is part of genetic programming. It is a part in which our human purposes can coincide
most easily and most closely with the purposes of our genes.
The second social goal is assertion, the urge to maintain our position in social
hierarchies. Sociologists call it power. Its characteristic emotions are anger when our status is
threatened, and shame when our position among others is diminished. Hierarchies pervade human
life: who is best, who has more money, who is fastest, smartest, most attractive? People at the
head of hierarchies have more power, more opportunities to find sexual partners, and thereby to
pass on the genes that they carry. Hierarchies are systems that we humans seem to be stuck with.
They have benefits of enabling social organization of certain kinds, with leaders who can give
overall directions to groups of people. Among their drawbacks are their potentials for social
conflict and injustice.
The third and most recently evolved social goal in humans is affiliation, the motivation
toward friendly cooperation with others, to be able to do together things that we cannot do alone.
Its characteristic emotions are affection and sadness when losses occur. We humans have more
abilities in relation to this social goal than do any of our primate cousins. It’s on the basis of our
abilities that derive from this goal that cultures are built, and technologies of housing, transport,
literacy, and information are founded. It is not so much, as the economists tell us, that if you get
on a bus and pay your fare that the utility of you and the bus company and the bus driver have all
increased. Rather it is that, because of the social goal of our proclivity to cooperate, such
processes of social exchange can occur in such a predictable and friendly fashion. We who study
emotions and the social goals on which they are founded might remind economists that the
increase in utility for the cooperators isn’t a starting point, but a useful by-product.
We have also been bequeathed anti-social goals, to eliminate, perhaps by killing, certain
kinds of other people, particularly members of out-groups. The characteristic emotions here are of
hatred, disgust, and contempt. If there is any part of our human emotional heritage that threatens
the human species more than any other, it is this. Although the incidence of interpersonal and
international violence seems to have been declining over the past 50 years, wars and genocides
still occur. Persistent, too, is the selfishness of our current consumption of the earth’s resources,
which has markedly anti-social consequences for our children and our children’s children.
Evidence for the sociality of emotions. In the last part of the chapter on evolution, we take
up the question of how and why human emotions are as they are, and we consider three kinds of
evidence.
The first kind of evidence comes from the social lives of chimpanzees. The person who
opened up this field was Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees in an area called Gombe, in
Tanzania. She found that chimpanzee social life and chimpanzee emotions are recognizable. Like
humans, chimpanzees have the social goals of attachment, assertion, and affiliation, although
their affiliative abilities are far less developed than ours. Chimpanzees are not as good as we
humans are at understanding the emotions and motivations of other individuals. They are,
however, on their way toward such understanding, and the ups and downs of their social lives are
very recognizable to us. So close is the resemblance of chimpanzee emotional life to human
emotional life that in a series of films taken of chimpanzee families in Gombe, by Hugo van
Lawick, which have been broadcast on television with voice-over by the actor Donald Sutherland,
the plots, the actions, and the emotions seem almost indistinguishable from those of soap opera.
Chimpanzees are empathetic to others, they share food, they form friendships, and they suffer
grief when an infant dies. But chimpanzees are also competitive; their hierarchies are very
important to them. They often compete with each other, and they defer to their leader, the alpha
animal. Also—shockingly—Goodall found in the chimpanzees she was studying that when a
smaller group split off from the larger group, members of the larger group would seek out
members of the smaller group and kill them. Chimpanzees thus have the anti-social motivation to
kill members of out-groups. Evidence from chimpanzees, then, is that our human emotions derive
in considerable part from our primate heritage, and these emotions include both those that make
for sociality and those that militate against it.
A second kind of evidence of how human emotions have come to be as they are comes
from studying human ancestry. Important changes occurred perhaps about 200,000 years ago,
when humans acquired language. In our view, the best account of how this occurred is that of
Robin Dunbar, who argued that whereas the number of individuals with whom a chimpanzee has
to maintain relationships is about 50, the corresponding number for humans is about 150. For us
moderns, it’s the number of people you know well enough to be able to recount something of
their history and relationships. This number, which Dunbar calls “group size,” required an
evolutionary leap as our ancestors traveled the line that led to us humans. Among chimpanzees,
affectionate relationships are maintained by an activity called grooming, sitting with another
individual, cuddling, and picking through the other’s fur for twigs and insects. With a social
group size of 50, chimpanzees spend 20% of their time maintaining relationships by grooming.
The group size of primates has been increasing in the course of evolution. With a group size of
150, three times as large as that of chimpanzees, individuals would need to spend 60% of their
time in maintaining affectionate relationships by grooming. That would not be possible in the
style of life of primates who need to explore, forage, eat, look after infants, and so on. The answer
to the problem of how to maintain relationships with more individuals, according to Dunbar, was
that as group size increased in the course of the evolution of our forbears, to about 70 or 75, a
new method of maintaining relationships had to emerge. It turned out to be conversation. So it
wasn’t so much that language as such came into being as that conversation came into being, and
that conversation is based on language. At the point at which this new way of relating started to
establish itself, relationships started to be formed and maintained in our human ancestors perhaps
first by sounds of the kind babies make, but which then became words that depicted actions and
outcomes, until we became equipped with the means to conduct conversations of a kind we can
now recognize. Conversation is verbal grooming. In our modern world, this is still the way in
which we form and maintain our relationships. And the subject matter of human conversations?
It’s the doings of ourselves and others, our own and others’ emotions, plans and aspirations,
matters that enable us to maintain and develop mental models of ourselves and others. By taking
part in conversations, we understand what is going on in our own small corner of the social
world, and cultivate our relationships to give us a place in this world. So according to this idea,
human emotions are as they are because we are the most social of the primates, living in an
adaptation based on cooperation and affection in which it has become important to us to develop
and maintain relationships not with others in general, but with particular others, whom we come
to know. Our brains are far larger than those of chimpanzees not because we are cleverer, but
because we have to contain more information about those we know, and also because we have
more elaborate ways of knowing these people. We have theory-of-mind, the ability to know what
another is thinking and feeling, though chimpanzees do not have this ability. And not only that,
we can know what another knows and feels about what someone else knows and feels; very much
the kind of thing that gets talked about in conversations. Our principal emotions, then, are no
longer those of animals who fear predators and undergo excitements of hunting. They are
principally the emotions of our inter-relations with others, of love and loss of individuals, of
committed friendships, episodic conflicts with particular other people.
The third kind of evidence of how human emotions came to be as they are comes from
modern people who live in ways that are comparable to those of our ancestors before the coming
of agriculture and cities. We all come from ancestors who lived in relatively small family-based
groups which, until 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, were nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies. Among
those who, until just a few years ago, continued to live in this way were the Inuit of Canada, and
the Kung of the Kalahari in Southern Africa. These groups of extended family members often met
other family groups in their travels. Many of our emotions seem, then, to derive from a longish
period in our evolution in which people lived in ways similar to these. People cooperated in
extended families, with division of labor in which women took the main share of caregiving of
infants and gathering vegetable foods, and in which men would supplement the vegetable diet
with high-protein foods derived from fishing, hunting, and scavenging. These people were
concerned with looking out for each other but also with sensing injustices. These were people
who were mostly affectionate but who might become angry or envious. They were people who
cared for their children and became sad when these children were sick or when they died.
The conclusion from evidence of these kinds, then, is that rather than thinking of
emotions simply as individual changes of experience, bodily events, and expressions, we should
think of emotions primarily as social. For us human beings our heart is in our relationships with
others. If we look at Table 2.3, on page 55 of Understanding Emotions, we might like to estimate
the frequency of situations of the social and the nonsocial type that occur to us in a day or a week.
Sample Test Questions for Chapter 2:

Evolution of Emotions

1. Charles Darwin described evolution in terms of all but which one of the following processes?

a. Superabundance
b. Variation
c. Adaptation
d. Selection

Source: Page 32

2. According to Charles Darwin, selection refers to the fact that

a. offsprings are somewhat different from others and differences are passed on by heredity.
b. organisms choose to cooperate more often than they choose to compete.
c. organisms are more likely to consume low-energy foods associated with a low level of risk
compared with high-energy foods associated with a high level of risk.
d. characteristics that allow better adaptation to the environment are selected because they enable
survival, and hence are passed on.

Source: Page 32

3. Many systems such as our preferences for sweet foods and aversion to bitter foods
developed in response to

a. selection pressures.
b. social demands.
c. environmental load.
d. intersexual competition.

Source: Page 32

4. Stags lock horns and engage in battles that are at times violent to find who is dominant and
who therefore has access to mates. This is an example of
a. dominance.
b. implicit aggression.
c. intrasexual competition.
d. intersexual competition.

Source: Page 32

5. Which one of the following is an adaptation that has evolved to help humans find a fertile
mate?

a. The perception that facial symmetry is beautiful.

b. A preference for males with status and resources.
c. A preference for a mate with a youthful appearance.
d. Both b & c.

Source: Page 33

6. Which one of the following is an adaptation that has evolved to help humans find a healthy
mate?

a. The perception that facial symmetry is beautiful.

b. A preference for males with status and resources.
c. A preference for a mate with a youthful appearance.
d. Both b & c.

Source: Page 33

7. Which one of the following behaviors illustrates an exaptation?

a. A dog that avoids consuming bitter foods.

b. A brief raising of the eyebrows, lasting a fraction of a second, when people approach one
another during greeting.
c. An adult human who laughs and feels happy when observing a baby who is cooing and
laughing.
d. All of the above.

Source: Page 35

8. Working from the assumption that genes need the body of a plant or animal to contain them
and enable them to reproduce, emotions play what role in animals?

a. Emotions help to ensure that genes will be protected and reproduced.

b. Emotions make us selfish and discourage altruistic actions that could compromise our genes.
c. Genes program our emotions so that all our actions are reflex-driven and none of our actions
derive from attractions and urges that our culture can modify.
d. All of the above.
Source: Page 37

9. Attachment is

a. a human form of imprinting.

b. a social motivation.
c. an adaptation that has been selected for during evolution.
d. all of the above.

Source: Page 38

10. Assertion is

a. an antisocial motivation.
b. likely to inspire behaviors such as differential smiling and exploration away from the mother as
a secure base in human infants.
c. associated with the social emotion of shame when one’s social status is diminished.
d. both a & c.

Source: Page 40

11. Affiliation is

a. what encourages mothers to protect their offspring.

b. what inspires warmth and affection in human relationships.
c. more associated with the system of smell than the system of touch.
d. all of the above.

Source: Page 41

12. Which of the following is true about pair-bonding?

a. Pair-bonding is common among all primates.

b. A pair-bonded male and female maintain a lasting sexual interest in each other.
c. Pair-bonding is observed more often in urban as opposed to rural human communities.
d. Pair-bonding is observed between romantic partners and between platonic friends.

Source: Page 41
13. The loss or absence of an attachment figure inspires

a. anxiety.
b. sadness.
c. anger.
d. surprise.

Source: Page 42, Figure 2.2

14. According to the textbook’s authors, our biggest handicap as a social species is the fact that

a. we tend to compete with others.

b. we tend to be territorial.
c. we tend to be highly emotional.
d. we feel emotions like contempt and social disgust.

Source: Page 44

15. High-status male chimpanzees

a. maintain their status by monopolizing food.

b. are the largest animals within their group.
c. spend a good part of their time breaking up the conflicts of lower-status chimps.
d. avoid reconciliation following conflict with others in their group.

Source: Pages 46 & 47

16. The making of tools, the making of fire to prepare food, the use of language, and the making
of art are human universals (Brown, 1991) that are similar because they

a. are innovations that distinguish humans from other living primates.

b. are social.
c. have emotional aspects.
d. all of the above.

Source: Page 50
17. Robin Dunbar argues that conversational language emerged in human beings because:

a. Human groups became too large for grooming to be a practical way of maintaining social
bonds; therefore, conversation developed as a necessary replacement for grooming.
b. Human beings naturally imitated noises in their environment, and these noises became words.
c. Humans developed tongue movements to mimic manual gestures, something that helped with
the acquisition of increasingly sophisticated manual habits.
d. Humans needed words to help mediate conflicts within the group.

Source: Page 52

18. The varying environments of evolutionary adaptedness were primarily defined by their

a. climate.
b. terrain.
c. social characteristics.
d. all of the above.

Source: Page 54

19. Feeling interested and surprised when we find ourselves exploring a novel environment is
linked with which of the following motivations?

a. Attachment
b. Affiliation
c. Assertion
d. Non-social goals

Source: Page 55

20. Feeling jealous when we find ourselves threatened by an interloper is linked with which of
the following motivations?

a. Attachment
b. Affiliation
c. Assertion
d. Non-social goals

Source: Page 55

CHAPTER 3:
Cultural Understanding of Emotions

CONTENTS

The Construction of Emotions in the West

A Cultural Approach to Emotion

Self-Construal: Independent and Interdependent Selves

Values

Epistemology

Approaches to Studying Cultural Influences on Emotion

Cross-Cultural Comparisons

Ethnographies

Emotions on Ifaluk

Historical Approaches

Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches to Emotion

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

Chapter 3: Lecture Notes

Social construction really emerges out of sociology and anthropology. Let me talk about

two intellectual origins. It is a very influential perspective, even though we won’t read a lot of

research on it. It is very appealing for a lot of different reasons. We can distinguish strong from

weak versions of social constructionism. I will focus on the strong version to highlight the

differences with evolutionary theory. Social constructionists hold that emotions have no

biological bases; they are created as we are socialized into a culture. All cultures are different,

with radically different values, self-construals, morals, and beliefs. As a result, emotions will
differ dramatically across different cultures. Anger in India is very different from anger in the

United States from this perspective.

Social construction has two intellectual origins. The first is cultural relativism and comes

out of anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s. Boas, Mead, and Kroeber are a few of the scholars

behind this development. A source of inspiration for cultural relativism is that, before the 1920s,

anthropology was profoundly racist. Anthropologists would go to another culture, and start

writing about them, and produce hierarchies with Europeans and Americans at the top of course.

It was racist and Eurocentric. Boas, Mead, and others challenged this racist view of cultures, and

advanced a view of anthropology called cultural relativism, which comes out of a very careful

observation of human culture. The thesis is that cultures are radically different. We raise our

children in different ways; we speak different languages; we organize matrilineally and

patrilineally. They argue that, though all cultures are quite different, they are fundamentally

equally sophisticated. They have different practices, institutions, and values that serve different

functions. Steven Pinker claims that all languages are different and equally sophisticated, and

exemplify similar principles. They all have equal status and do the same basic things. Cultural

relativism insists that all cultures are equally sophisticated.

A second influence on the constructionist perspective is deconstructionism.

Deconstructionism is a philosophical perspective found in literary criticism and the writing of

people like Derrida. It blows apart the idea that there is an objective reading of a text or situation.

There is no single correct, objective interpretation of the world. It blows apart the idea of

objectivity, the idea that there is a single truth about any particular phenomenon. Deconstruction,

when applied to emotion, says there will not be universal, evolved emotion. Emotions are

subjective and varying across individuals and across cultures. There is no single, uniform

meaning of emotion to be found across individuals; emotions are created in every moment in

every particular society.

 The main idea in literature is that there is no single way to read Shakespeare. So there is

no single truth about emotion; there is no essence to an emotion. Emotions change according to

how culture is created and how we think about it from a cultural perspective. This branches out to

an approach to emotion.

These are nice ideas, but what do they really mean? There are a few basic assumptions to

social constructionism. First, you don’t worry about biology. Biology will play very little role in

this, so don’t worry about facial musculature, or the autonomic nervous system, or the brain.

There is no such thing as a prototypical biological response to an emotion, so let's not worry

about that. They ignore hundreds of studies in making this claim.

Second, the more positive view is that emotions are created by culture. In a well-known

assertion by Rich Shweder, culture and the human psyche create each other. They make each

other up. So culture creates emotion. What does that really mean? Culture is about value and

equality and hierarchies. Let me give you some ideas about how culture shapes emotion. Values

shape emotion. In a lot of the world, outside of Western European culture, the world is really

interdependent, as opposed to independent. The primary emphasis is on being cooperative and

connected to others, as opposed to being unique and different and individualized. They argue that

this value shapes the kind of emotions we experience. So anger is very different in other cultures.

There is some evidence that, in interdependent cultures, infants are less anger-prone than in

Western European cultures because anger disrupts social harmony. That would be a radically

different framework of emotion. Lutz talks about the emotion of “song” which the Ifaluk show. If

someone is wronged, they withdraw from this very social culture and sulk; other people notice it

and find out why you feel wronged; then they go to the offender and scold them. Then the

offender comes to you with a gift and apologizes. This is a complex social script; this is their

version of anger.

We talk about emotions as roles. One neat example is an emotion like embarrassment,

which is a way of playing out a submissive role. To the extent we assign people to different roles,
we embody those roles in our emotional experience and display, and that leads to a different

cultural construction of emotion. We can talk about emotions as being shaped by various

culturally specific institutions. One of the interesting things that Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist

here, has argued is that the service industry requires that a lot of people work to serve other

people and make them feel happy. That institution creates the culturally specific experience and

display of an emotion. Who did she study? Flight attendants. She studied their emotional lives, as

they try to make people feel happy flying in the skies. The service industry constructs their

emotional experience in ways that she thinks is harmful. She talks about feeling work. If you have

ever worked at McDonald’s, you are told to smile at everyone. Some people think this is

dangerous to workers. So social constructionists believe that biology is irrelevant to emotions;

that emotions are created by culture; and that emotions are an open system. We put together the

pieces of emotion that provide us an unlimited range of feelings. Evolutionary theory says

emotions are a coherent closed system, constrained by biology and evolutionary processes.

What are some of the conceptual assumptions in thinking about emotions from a social

constructionist perspective? We talked about how our emotions form constructionist perspectives,

which are the ways that we play out culturally determined roles. How do we study it? Discourse

is a concept that refers to the complex social practices involved when people talk to each other.

Culture profoundly affects how people conceive emotions. Abu Lughod studied the Bedouin

culture—a nomadic culture outside of Cairo—and found that women are modest and deferential

and show a lot of almost pleasurable embarrassment in an emotion called hasham. They also have

rituals where they recite poems and sing songs together that are very sexual and bawdy and make

fun of the men.

A second message of social constructivism is relativize, which means that you highlight

differences across cultures rather than similarities. The aim is to show how emotions are

culturally specific and unique. The emotion called hasham is felt by women who are around men

for whom it is inappropriate for the women to foster sexual feelings towards. It is an apparently
pleasurable feeling of shame and embarrassment that Abu Lughod claims is very different from

emotions that we experience in Western cultures. Doi talks about amae, which is a word in

Japanese for the feeling of pleasurable dependence on others; you feel kind of weak and

dependent and taken care of by others. Social constructionists would say that this is an emotion

that we do not often, if ever, experience in the United States.

Where do emotional words come from? How do they occur in cultures? What historical

and cultural processes give rise to an emotion within a particular culture? One of the best

examples is that social constructionists believe, according to the gospel, that romantic love did

not exist prior to the thirteenth century when knights were fighting for fair maidens. They were

justifying why they were unfaithful to their wives and they developed this construct of romantic

love and obsession. Constructionists argue that it is a historical product. It is created by history

and you would not see it in other times. The origins of emotion are located in history rather than

in evolution.

One of my favorite examples of how institutions can influence emotions is Norbert

Elias’s The Civilizing Process, a well-known book in sociology. Elias studied politeness and

etiquette. It turns out that around the seventeenth century in French society and other parts of

Europe, people became very concerned with politeness, manners, and how we eat. The reason for

this was the rise of an elitist court society that hovered around the royal family, the court

members. They developed their own ideas about manners that differentiated them from the

common person. They invented the fork; before then they ate off collective plates. They

developed ideas about cleanliness; before then if you had to blow your nose, you would use your

sleeve to do it. The emergence of the collar was as an aid to wiping your face. That was how we

conceived of public life prior to the emergence of court society. Court society said we were

different. People used to defecate in public; they would eat big meals and throw up on the side.

Court society developed emotions of disgust and embarrassment, so that you became embarrassed
at crude behavior. You would show disgust at the person who blew his nose in the handkerchief.

Norbert Elias would argue that all of these emotions stem from the institutions of court society.

Another notion important to the constructionist approach to emotion is gender. Lutz and

Abu Lughod take on the interesting question of gender and emotion. What are the differences?

Here is a constructionist take on gender and emotion that comes out of Kathy Lutz. Lutz argues

that in all cultures, women have less power. That is changing. We have a problem: We have to

justify inequality and the gender hierarchy. Why do they get less? Why are they treated

differently? Why are they subject to more violence? She argues that one way we justify inequality

is in the way that we conceptualize emotion. We think of emotions intuitively as irrational, as

things that disable us and make us irrational, weak, and out of control. The last thing that we want

is people in positions of leadership who are emotional. We do not want leaders being irrational

and out of control and overly emotional. Lutz argues that we have this cultural context of

inequality and we create ideas and values about emotions as irrational (out of control) and we

superimpose them on one kind of person. That justifies inequality. How does that play out

empirically? First, there are several studies of the stereotypes of emotions. Who do we think is

more emotional? Most people in the United States believe that women are much more emotional

than men. When you look at the real data, are they more emotional than men? Not that much.

They smile a little more. I can find no study of physiological differences. There are very few

studies showing real experiential differences. We have this conception of women as more

emotional, but the objective truth may be much different. Lutz argues that the concept of emotion

relegates women to a lower status. Second, how do moms talk to daughters and sons as they grow

up and have their temper tantrums? In general, moms encourage daughters to construe their

experience more in terms of emotion than action, which is how they encourage boys to construe

their experience. At the cultural stereotype level, we conceive of women as emotional, and we see

it in social practice. Lutz argues that this is culturally created to justify differences in power. In

relationships, women are more focused on emotion and suffer more depression than men; at least