Passiones et Scientia

I think some emotion psychologists may be missing the point. All too often they take emotions and try their best to simplify and sanitise what is a very complex and confusing world. Take my field of disgust for example. There is a reasonable level of psychological scientific consensus in two areas. The first is that disgust causes certain facial expressions; the second is that disgust evolved as a pathogen avoidance system, helping us to stay away from icky disease and horrid contaminants. Somehow – and I am yet to find a good paper explaining quite how – this became wired into our moral framework, creating an identical set of responses when decency is transgressed, and the actress is caught with the vicar.

Let’s take the idea of a ‘disgust face’ first. Ever since Darwin,[1] a series of experiments have been trotted out in an attempt to show that the face pulled when disgusted – the gape face – is cultural, and so historically, understood. Paul Ekman,[2] Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery, and Rhonda Ebert[3] all performed experiments to categorically prove that this is the case. The latter and subsequent papers have divided these disgust faces into three types: those for tastes, smells and general disgust including moral transgressions. Sadly, more recent papers have thrown this into doubt. A 2010 paper by Andrew J. Calder et al., showed that those suffering from the neurodegenerative disorder Huntingdon’s Disease, found it difficult to distinguish between faces of those who were disgusted, angry or fearful,[4] and this I not only true of HD patients. The same has been found in children who often label disgust faces as anger,[5] and even adults have been found to easily confuse the two if the face is linked to an aggressive physical posture.[6] The assumption that disgust is a basic, evolutionary acquired emotion has become a little more problematic than previously assumed.

There are also problems for the evolutionary pathogen avoidance explanation of disgust. In a paper so recent it is still marked as ‘under peer review’ [I like ‘em so hot they aren’t even off the press yet!], Chinese psychologists Ming Peng, Lei Chang and Renlai Zhou have demonstrated that that we are less disgusted by those people close to us than strangers. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that we are much more likely to hold a close friends hair out of the way while they call for Ruth on the porcelain telephone than we are a total stranger and it may well be that such an experiment is one of those that could be labelled ‘things we already know'. This one is interesting, though, because they used three experiments. One to test subjective responses through self-reporting, another to test physiological responses by monitoring reduced heart rates etc. and a third to test behaviour by testing our propensity for avoiding that we find disgusting. They found the same results in all three experiments. Thus, this ingroup/outgroup ‘source effect’ is deeply rooted at all psychological levels. So far so good, but the problem I have is with the conclusion. They claim this to be evidence that these result support ‘the evolutionary view that disgust as part of the human behavioral immune system to drive avoidance from disease-carrying agents should be activated more intensely in response to unfamiliar compared to familiar conspeciﬁcs; this is because they are potential carriers of diseases differently defendable by our physical immunity.’ They posit the idea that this is ‘to ward off foreign germs carried by strangers rather than common germs against which people living together are likely to have developed antibodies’.[7] This conclusion is difficult to support. Firstly, I haven’t lived with my Nan for many years, and even then only for a week, but I am pretty sure I could cope with her doing something gross much more than I could cope with the strange bag lady at the end of my road doing similar. Secondly, this is psychology doing what it does worst: suffering at the hands of reductionism in an attempt to sound like a grown-up ‘hard’ science.

Even if the psychologists are right and disgust is a universal basic emotions that began life as a pathogen avoidance system, this neat little sound bite tells us nothing about what those feelings mean. What effect, or affect for that matter, do the feelings have on individuals and society and what does this mean for the human experience. Many historians of emotions spend a great deal of time trawling through emotion psychology for titbits of information that can shed light onto our investigations – I am one of them. But the role of the historian is at its most basic to look at the sources and ask ‘what does this mean, and does it matter?’ History cannot take disgust and say ‘so and so was disgusted by the response due to a form of pathogen avoidance behaviour’; that tells us nothing. We have to understand what these feelings meant at the time. Emotions are complex subjective experiences outwardly performed within agreed intersubjective framework. Those experiences were and are complex ones, and untameable by the Occam’s Razor of psychological reductionism. The objectivity of psychology can only shine its light so far.

[1] Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, (London: D. Appleton and Company, 1896).

[2] P. Ekman, 'Universals and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion', in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation ed. by J. Cole (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), pp. 207-83. P. Eckman and W. V. Friesen, 'A New Pan-Cultural Facial Expression of Emotion', Motivation and Emotion, 10 (1986), pp.159-68, ; P. Ekman, 'The Argument and Evidence About Universals in Facial Expressions of Emotion', in Handbook of Social Psychophysiology, ed. by H. Wagner and A. Manstead (New York: Wiley, 1989), pp. 143-64.

[3] Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery, and Rhonda Ebert, 'Varieties of Disgust Faces and the Structure of Disgust', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66 (1994), pp.870-81.

[4] Andrew J. Calder and others, 'The Relation between Anger and Different Forms of Disgust: Implications for Emotion Recognition Impairments in Huntington’s Disease', Neuropsychologia, 48 (2012), pp.2719-29.

[5] Sherri C. Widen and James A. Russell, 'The “Disgust Face” Conveys Anger to Children', Emotion, 10 (2010), pp.455-66, also found in Peter Muris and others, 'Does ‘Yuck’ Mean ‘Eek’? Fear Responses in Children after a Disgust Manipulation', Journal of Behavior Therapy and Eperimental Psychiatry, 43, pp.765-69.

[6] H. Aviezer and others, 'Angry, Disgusted, or Afraid? Studies on the Malleability of Emotion Perception', Psychological Science 19 (2008), pp.724-32.

[7] Ming Peng, Lei Chang, and Renlai Zhou, 'Physiological and Behavioral Responses to Strangers Compared to Friends as a Source of Disgust', Evolution and Human Behavior, In Peer Review (Final revision Submitted 7 Octiber 2012).

About Me

Affective Neuroepigenetics, or, The Catchiest Title Ever!

PhD Vlog 2: Language and Aversion (10/01/2013).

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Blunting Occam’s Razor on the Psychology of Disgust