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).
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