My guess is that Barrett would say that, if someone has learned an ability to reliably and effortlessly know whether they are Duchenne-smiling or not, then that person has definitely acquired an “emotion concept” corresponding to that signal. Even if they don’t have a word for it. Is that concept “happiness”? Maybe not. But it’s an emotion concept nonetheless.
My guess is that Ekman would say that, if someone has learned an ability to reliably and effortlessly know whether they are Duchenne-smiling or not, then that person now has a better understanding of their moment-to-moment emotional state than they did before.
For my part, I’m reluctant to take a position on what the word “emotion” means by itself. That’s why the post talks about “emotion concepts”, a term that Barrett often uses. That seems unambiguous to me.
For example, if someone says to me: “I think people can be in the throes of an emotion, whether they’re aware of it and thinking about it or not”, then I’m inclined to say “OK, I guess that’s how you’re using the word ‘emotion’, thanks for the heads up”. Whereas I think Barrett would say “Nope that is wrong wrong wrong.” For example, she says in her book that if animals don’t have emotion concepts, then animals don’t have emotions full stop.
(She writes: “The theory of constructed emotion prompts us to ask whether animals have three necessary ingredients for making emotion. The first ingredient is interoception: do animals have the neural equipment to create interoceptive sensations and experience them as affect? The second is emotion concepts: can animals learn purely mental concepts like “Fear” and “Happiness,” and if so, can they predict with these concepts to categorize their sensations and make emotions like ours? Finally, there’s social reality: can animals share emotion concepts with each other so they are passed down to the next generation?”)
I’m more open-minded. It seems to me that it is perfectly reasonable to identify the word “emotional state” with “something about the configuration of which hormones and neuropeptides and hypothalamus/brainstem cell groups are active right now, independent of how we’re thinking about that configuration or even whether we’re aware of it at all”. Like, there are plenty of cultures with very weird-to-us theory-of-mind (cf. Julian Jaynes). They don’t have “emotion concepts” as we would think of them. But we can observe those people, and we can see them behaving in ways that we would describe as stressed out, or angry, or calm, etc. If someone wants to point to that fact and say “those three people are in very different emotional states”, then I am very sympathetic to that terminological choice. As long as everyone’s defining what they’re talking about, it seems fine to me. In particular, I claim that this choice lines up with common usage just as well as Barrett’s preferred definition does, if not better.
Anyway, even if you think that “emotion” = “emotion concept” is the only possible definition, there’s plenty in this post about emotion concepts too, see Section 2.3. :)
For my part, I’m reluctant to take a position on what the word “emotion” means by itself.
Ekman clearly proposes that there’s a cluster of things like fear and happiness that we wants to call basic emotions.
For example, if someone says to me: “I think people can be in the throes of an emotion, whether they’re aware of it and thinking about it or not”, then I’m inclined to say “OK, I guess that’s how you’re using the word ‘emotion’, thanks for the heads up”. Whereas I think Barrett would say “Nope that is wrong wrong wrong.” For example, she says in her book that if animals don’t have emotion concepts, then animals don’t have emotions full stop.
You seem to assume that the concepts people have don’t influence them if they are not consciously aware or thinking about the concepts. I think that’s wrong.
I’m not 100% convinced that the following is true but one hypothesis for me would be:
“A two-month-old baby can’t be angry or sad as that would involve certain type of matching signals together into a concept that a two-month-old baby hasn’t yet learned. Just like the two-month-old baby might not have a concept for channeling all the nerve impulses about his left big toe together into a concept or the left big toe that they could consciously direct to move, they might not have the anger or sadness concept.
If you however have a five-year old child that child can be angry or sad without them being consciously aware of that fact. Their brain does follow a pattern that corresponds to matching signals together as sadness or anger but it still doesn’t raise to conscious awareness. In a similar way they are often also not consciously aware of their left big toe”.
Most of what the brain does is not in conscious awareness. Conceptualization is not limited to conscious awareness.
As long as everyone’s defining what they’re talking about, it seems fine to me.
With definitions, you always have to be careful about the difference between map and territory. You usually want terms to point to things in the territory. A precise definition on the other hand is entirely on the map.
That’s especially if the territory has interesting poorly understood features.
Again, I’m not interested in a yay-Ekman versus boo-Ekman debate. I’m sure Ekman has said things that are right and things that are wrong, and I don’t care how they balance out.
I am happy to defend the steelman-Ekman-text-block that I added to Section 5 though.
Ekman clearly proposes that there’s a cluster of things like fear and happiness that we wants to call basic emotions.
Why can’t “the feeling that I’m Duchenne-smiling right now” be “a thing like fear and happiness that we want to call basic emotions”?
If your answer is: that’s not what other people have traditionally meant when they say “basic emotions”, then I don’t care, I am proposing this as a new revised version.
With definitions, you always have to be careful about the difference between map and territory. You usually want terms to point to things in the territory. A precise definition on the other hand is entirely on the map.
That’s especially if the territory has interesting poorly understood features.
As above, I offered a possible definition where we choose to identify the word “emotional state” with “a point in the high-dimensional space of which hormones and neuropeptides and associated hypothalamus/brainstem cell groups etc. are active right now”. You seem to dislike that definition, but I don’t understand why.
If I called that thing by the made-up term “florp” instead of “emotional state”, would you be OK with it then?
Anyway, I claim that “florp” and “emotion concept” are very different from each other, but they are both decent matches to how a typical English-speaker uses the term “emotion”. I also claim that “florp” and “emotion concept” are inherently good terms, in the sense of facilitating clear-thinking and accurate predictions. Therefore, I think it’s a judgment call which path we want to go down when specifying what the word “emotion” means in the context of a technical discussion.
You seem to assume that the concepts people have don’t influence them if they are not consciously aware or thinking about the concepts. I think that’s wrong.
I think that a person’s “florp” has a strong influence on their thoughts and behaviors. People with certain “florps” are inclined to start punching, people with other “florps” are inclined to start crying, people with still other “florps” are equally inclined to punch or cry, etc.
I also think that people’s thoughts and actions influence their “florp” in turn. (And “people’s thoughts” includes, as a special case, their idiosyncratic vocabulary of emotion concepts.)
Obviously infants and animals that lack emotion concepts still have a florp, which is different at different times.
I think that we can define an even-higher-dimensional space including both their florp and relevant context affecting that florp. And then we can define “anger” and “sadness” as clusters in that high-dimensional space. If we do so, then (by this definition) babies and animals can be angry or sad, despite babies and animals not having any emotion concepts. This is obviously not how Barrett would define those terms, but it seems like a coherent and reasonable choice.
As above, I offered a possible definition where we choose to identify the word “emotional state” with “a point in the high-dimensional space of which hormones and neuropeptides and associated hypothalamus/brainstem cell groups etc. are active right now”. You seem to dislike that definition, but I don’t understand why.
The problem with that definition is that it’s very unpractical unless you are constantly in brain scanning or have intuitions built up about “associated hypothalamus/brainstem cell groups”.
The kind of anthropological methods that Lisa Feldman Barrett and Paul Ekman use also doesn’t involve getting information of that type. When it comes to actual social neuroscience the field has its voodoo problem.
There might be useful things to be said about how hormones and brain areas but if you want to approach emotions from that perspective you probably shouldn’t focus on anthropologists but listen to neuroscientists.
On practical issue is that if we look at fear, the freeze response has a strong parasympathetic response while fight/flight don’t but when people like Ekman speak about basic emotions they cluster all three together into fear.
If your answer is: that’s not what other people have traditionally meant when they say “basic emotions”, then I don’t care, I am proposing this as a new revised version.
That’s sort of the straw-vulcan rationalist position of not caring about what people who talk about emotions care about.
On practical issue is that if we look at fear, the freeze response has a strong parasympathetic response while fight/flight don’t but when people like Ekman speak about basic emotions they cluster all three together into fear.
I’m pretty much on your side there. I think everyday English-language emotion concepts are a mix of internal state (florp) and context, and Ekman makes the common mistake of treating the context as more relevant to the internal state than it actually is.
I think he’s not doing it quite as egregiously as you think he is. Like he says “the family of fearful experiences can be distinguished in terms of three factors…”. I agree that he ought to go further than that, and say that it’s not really a “family” in the first place.
That’s sort of the straw-vulcan rationalist position of not caring about what people who talk about emotions care about.
I’m interested in what normal people mean when they say “anger” and “emotions” etc. Sure. But my understanding was that “basic emotions” (two words, not just “emotions”) is a specific theory-laden technical term, which was invented by Ekman, or at least popularized by him.
If Ekman recently invented a theory-laden technical term, and the theory underlying it is somewhat confused, then I think it’s perfectly reasonable to try to fix it up rather than throwing it out.
The problem with that definition is that it’s very unpractical unless you are constantly in brain scanning or have intuitions built up about “associated hypothalamus/brainstem cell groups”.
I mean, when people say “That dog is angry”, they’re communicating something. And it’s something about that dog’s brain, not about my own brain. And it’s highly relevant to making good predictions about the dog. I claim that my “florp” discussion is a good start towards grounding out those types of claims.
I think he’s not doing it quite as egregiously as you think he is. Like he says “the family of fearful experiences can be distinguished in terms of three factors…”. I agree that he ought to go further than that, and say that it’s not really a “family” in the first place.
One of the main reason for him about grouping it together seems to be that if you operationlize the term by looking at faces you get that clustering.
He also seems to have talked with some Buddhists who meditated a lot.
I mean, when people say “That dog is angry”, they’re communicating something. And it’s something about that dog’s brain, not about my own brain.
My current hypothesis would be that dogs are able to conceptualize enough to be angry or sad in a way that a two-month-old human baby that cries doesn’t have.
There are also empathy processes where “That dog is angry” can quite reasonably mean “If I use the empathy module of my brain to empathize with the dog, it picks up anger.”
A lot of why emotions are important is about how they interact with empathy. I have experiences with babies where trying to pick up any emotion when they cried through empathy didn’t give me anything besides the fact that they were crying.
I think there’s a sense of “That dog is angry” which is:
A meaningful and correct claim about the territory (the dog)
In the sense that it enables better predictions of the dog’s future behavior.
…and not a claim about the observer’s own map
In the sense that if I say “That dog is angry”, and you say “No it’s not, it’s happy”, I would not respond “Well, it’s angry from your perspective, and it’s happy from my perspective. Both of us are equally correct.” People wouldn’t say that, and I don’t think they’re making a mistake in that respect.
…and also not a claim about the dog’s map
In the sense that it is an equally-correct claim for very young dogs who presumably have not learned emotion concepts
If you don’t want to use the word “angry” for that claim, fine, I can make up a silly word for it. But I do think it’s a meaningful claim, and that it corresponds with probably the most common (or at least one of the most common) ways that normal people use the word “angry”, and that we can flesh it out into a precise scientific definition involving the dog’s florp, and that definition will line up with the actual common-sense usage.
Of course, you can remove all mentions of emotions from the language and only talk of phenomena in ways that don’t reference emotions. I would claim that this means that this is very straw-vulcan because emotions are actually a useful concept.
I think most normal people who use the word “angry” do so in a way that’s consistent with my most recent comment—i.e., a claim about the territory, not their own map, and not about the angry person’s map.
This is how everyone uses adjectives all the time. For example, if somebody says “This rock is metamorphic”, they are making a claim about the territory, not a claim about their own map (i.e., “I believe that this rock is metamorphic” would be a different claim), and certainly not a claim about the rock’s map (because rocks don’t have maps).
By the same token, I claim that it is possible for Person X to say “This person / dog / baby is angry”, and intend it in a similar way: a claim about the territory, not about their own map, and not about the person / dog / baby’s map.
That’s my claim. You can respond in either of two ways:
You can say “Person X is just being confused and incoherent.” I’m arguing against that. I think Person X is making a legitimate meaningful claim about the territory, and the claim is ultimately related (among other things) to not-directly-observable latent variables involving the hypothalamic and brainstem state variables of the person / dog / baby (I was calling it “florp”), and these latent variables have easily-observable (probabilistic) implications on various things like ‘probability of punching someone’ and ‘probability of laughing’.
Alternatively, you can say “Person X is saying something sensible, but really they shouldn’t be using the word ‘angry’ for what they’re saying. That’s not what the word ‘angry’ means. ‘Angry’ is short for ‘the anger concept’ which must by definition be part of some world-model, like all concepts. Person X should make up a new different word, rather than misusing the word ‘angry’ which already means something different.” Now, I’m trying to not directly get in an argument about that, because those kinds of arguments (“what does a word really mean?”) are annoying and often pointless. Or at any rate, we should have that terminology argument last, after we agree about everything else. So I was temporarily conceding this bullet-point for the sake of furthering this discussion, by making up silly terms like “florp”. But at the very least, I think you have to admit that Person X is not a “straw-vulcan” per your comment. They are using emotion words like “angry” in a very normal, common-sense way, in the normal situations where that concept is useful.
My guess is that Barrett would say that, if someone has learned an ability to reliably and effortlessly know whether they are Duchenne-smiling or not, then that person has definitely acquired an “emotion concept” corresponding to that signal. Even if they don’t have a word for it. Is that concept “happiness”? Maybe not. But it’s an emotion concept nonetheless.
My guess is that Ekman would say that, if someone has learned an ability to reliably and effortlessly know whether they are Duchenne-smiling or not, then that person now has a better understanding of their moment-to-moment emotional state than they did before.
For my part, I’m reluctant to take a position on what the word “emotion” means by itself. That’s why the post talks about “emotion concepts”, a term that Barrett often uses. That seems unambiguous to me.
For example, if someone says to me: “I think people can be in the throes of an emotion, whether they’re aware of it and thinking about it or not”, then I’m inclined to say “OK, I guess that’s how you’re using the word ‘emotion’, thanks for the heads up”. Whereas I think Barrett would say “Nope that is wrong wrong wrong.” For example, she says in her book that if animals don’t have emotion concepts, then animals don’t have emotions full stop.
(She writes: “The theory of constructed emotion prompts us to ask whether animals have three necessary ingredients for making emotion. The first ingredient is interoception: do animals have the neural equipment to create interoceptive sensations and experience them as affect? The second is emotion concepts: can animals learn purely mental concepts like “Fear” and “Happiness,” and if so, can they predict with these concepts to categorize their sensations and make emotions like ours? Finally, there’s social reality: can animals share emotion concepts with each other so they are passed down to the next generation?”)
I’m more open-minded. It seems to me that it is perfectly reasonable to identify the word “emotional state” with “something about the configuration of which hormones and neuropeptides and hypothalamus/brainstem cell groups are active right now, independent of how we’re thinking about that configuration or even whether we’re aware of it at all”. Like, there are plenty of cultures with very weird-to-us theory-of-mind (cf. Julian Jaynes). They don’t have “emotion concepts” as we would think of them. But we can observe those people, and we can see them behaving in ways that we would describe as stressed out, or angry, or calm, etc. If someone wants to point to that fact and say “those three people are in very different emotional states”, then I am very sympathetic to that terminological choice. As long as everyone’s defining what they’re talking about, it seems fine to me. In particular, I claim that this choice lines up with common usage just as well as Barrett’s preferred definition does, if not better.
Anyway, even if you think that “emotion” = “emotion concept” is the only possible definition, there’s plenty in this post about emotion concepts too, see Section 2.3. :)
Ekman clearly proposes that there’s a cluster of things like fear and happiness that we wants to call basic emotions.
You seem to assume that the concepts people have don’t influence them if they are not consciously aware or thinking about the concepts. I think that’s wrong.
I’m not 100% convinced that the following is true but one hypothesis for me would be:
“A two-month-old baby can’t be angry or sad as that would involve certain type of matching signals together into a concept that a two-month-old baby hasn’t yet learned. Just like the two-month-old baby might not have a concept for channeling all the nerve impulses about his left big toe together into a concept or the left big toe that they could consciously direct to move, they might not have the anger or sadness concept.
If you however have a five-year old child that child can be angry or sad without them being consciously aware of that fact. Their brain does follow a pattern that corresponds to matching signals together as sadness or anger but it still doesn’t raise to conscious awareness. In a similar way they are often also not consciously aware of their left big toe”.
Most of what the brain does is not in conscious awareness. Conceptualization is not limited to conscious awareness.
With definitions, you always have to be careful about the difference between map and territory. You usually want terms to point to things in the territory. A precise definition on the other hand is entirely on the map.
That’s especially if the territory has interesting poorly understood features.
Again, I’m not interested in a yay-Ekman versus boo-Ekman debate. I’m sure Ekman has said things that are right and things that are wrong, and I don’t care how they balance out.
I am happy to defend the steelman-Ekman-text-block that I added to Section 5 though.
Why can’t “the feeling that I’m Duchenne-smiling right now” be “a thing like fear and happiness that we want to call basic emotions”?
If your answer is: that’s not what other people have traditionally meant when they say “basic emotions”, then I don’t care, I am proposing this as a new revised version.
As above, I offered a possible definition where we choose to identify the word “emotional state” with “a point in the high-dimensional space of which hormones and neuropeptides and associated hypothalamus/brainstem cell groups etc. are active right now”. You seem to dislike that definition, but I don’t understand why.
If I called that thing by the made-up term “florp” instead of “emotional state”, would you be OK with it then?
Anyway, I claim that “florp” and “emotion concept” are very different from each other, but they are both decent matches to how a typical English-speaker uses the term “emotion”. I also claim that “florp” and “emotion concept” are inherently good terms, in the sense of facilitating clear-thinking and accurate predictions. Therefore, I think it’s a judgment call which path we want to go down when specifying what the word “emotion” means in the context of a technical discussion.
I think that a person’s “florp” has a strong influence on their thoughts and behaviors. People with certain “florps” are inclined to start punching, people with other “florps” are inclined to start crying, people with still other “florps” are equally inclined to punch or cry, etc.
I also think that people’s thoughts and actions influence their “florp” in turn. (And “people’s thoughts” includes, as a special case, their idiosyncratic vocabulary of emotion concepts.)
Obviously infants and animals that lack emotion concepts still have a florp, which is different at different times.
I think that we can define an even-higher-dimensional space including both their florp and relevant context affecting that florp. And then we can define “anger” and “sadness” as clusters in that high-dimensional space. If we do so, then (by this definition) babies and animals can be angry or sad, despite babies and animals not having any emotion concepts. This is obviously not how Barrett would define those terms, but it seems like a coherent and reasonable choice.
The problem with that definition is that it’s very unpractical unless you are constantly in brain scanning or have intuitions built up about “associated hypothalamus/brainstem cell groups”.
The kind of anthropological methods that Lisa Feldman Barrett and Paul Ekman use also doesn’t involve getting information of that type. When it comes to actual social neuroscience the field has its voodoo problem.
There might be useful things to be said about how hormones and brain areas but if you want to approach emotions from that perspective you probably shouldn’t focus on anthropologists but listen to neuroscientists.
On practical issue is that if we look at fear, the freeze response has a strong parasympathetic response while fight/flight don’t but when people like Ekman speak about basic emotions they cluster all three together into fear.
That’s sort of the straw-vulcan rationalist position of not caring about what people who talk about emotions care about.
I’m pretty much on your side there. I think everyday English-language emotion concepts are a mix of internal state (florp) and context, and Ekman makes the common mistake of treating the context as more relevant to the internal state than it actually is.
I think he’s not doing it quite as egregiously as you think he is. Like he says “the family of fearful experiences can be distinguished in terms of three factors…”. I agree that he ought to go further than that, and say that it’s not really a “family” in the first place.
I’m interested in what normal people mean when they say “anger” and “emotions” etc. Sure. But my understanding was that “basic emotions” (two words, not just “emotions”) is a specific theory-laden technical term, which was invented by Ekman, or at least popularized by him.
If Ekman recently invented a theory-laden technical term, and the theory underlying it is somewhat confused, then I think it’s perfectly reasonable to try to fix it up rather than throwing it out.
I mean, when people say “That dog is angry”, they’re communicating something. And it’s something about that dog’s brain, not about my own brain. And it’s highly relevant to making good predictions about the dog. I claim that my “florp” discussion is a good start towards grounding out those types of claims.
One of the main reason for him about grouping it together seems to be that if you operationlize the term by looking at faces you get that clustering.
He also seems to have talked with some Buddhists who meditated a lot.
My current hypothesis would be that dogs are able to conceptualize enough to be angry or sad in a way that a two-month-old human baby that cries doesn’t have.
There are also empathy processes where “That dog is angry” can quite reasonably mean “If I use the empathy module of my brain to empathize with the dog, it picks up anger.”
A lot of why emotions are important is about how they interact with empathy. I have experiences with babies where trying to pick up any emotion when they cried through empathy didn’t give me anything besides the fact that they were crying.
I think there’s a sense of “That dog is angry” which is:
A meaningful and correct claim about the territory (the dog)
In the sense that it enables better predictions of the dog’s future behavior.
…and not a claim about the observer’s own map
In the sense that if I say “That dog is angry”, and you say “No it’s not, it’s happy”, I would not respond “Well, it’s angry from your perspective, and it’s happy from my perspective. Both of us are equally correct.” People wouldn’t say that, and I don’t think they’re making a mistake in that respect.
…and also not a claim about the dog’s map
In the sense that it is an equally-correct claim for very young dogs who presumably have not learned emotion concepts
If you don’t want to use the word “angry” for that claim, fine, I can make up a silly word for it. But I do think it’s a meaningful claim, and that it corresponds with probably the most common (or at least one of the most common) ways that normal people use the word “angry”, and that we can flesh it out into a precise scientific definition involving the dog’s florp, and that definition will line up with the actual common-sense usage.
Of course, you can remove all mentions of emotions from the language and only talk of phenomena in ways that don’t reference emotions. I would claim that this means that this is very straw-vulcan because emotions are actually a useful concept.
I think most normal people who use the word “angry” do so in a way that’s consistent with my most recent comment—i.e., a claim about the territory, not their own map, and not about the angry person’s map.
This is how everyone uses adjectives all the time. For example, if somebody says “This rock is metamorphic”, they are making a claim about the territory, not a claim about their own map (i.e., “I believe that this rock is metamorphic” would be a different claim), and certainly not a claim about the rock’s map (because rocks don’t have maps).
By the same token, I claim that it is possible for Person X to say “This person / dog / baby is angry”, and intend it in a similar way: a claim about the territory, not about their own map, and not about the person / dog / baby’s map.
That’s my claim. You can respond in either of two ways:
You can say “Person X is just being confused and incoherent.” I’m arguing against that. I think Person X is making a legitimate meaningful claim about the territory, and the claim is ultimately related (among other things) to not-directly-observable latent variables involving the hypothalamic and brainstem state variables of the person / dog / baby (I was calling it “florp”), and these latent variables have easily-observable (probabilistic) implications on various things like ‘probability of punching someone’ and ‘probability of laughing’.
Alternatively, you can say “Person X is saying something sensible, but really they shouldn’t be using the word ‘angry’ for what they’re saying. That’s not what the word ‘angry’ means. ‘Angry’ is short for ‘the anger concept’ which must by definition be part of some world-model, like all concepts. Person X should make up a new different word, rather than misusing the word ‘angry’ which already means something different.” Now, I’m trying to not directly get in an argument about that, because those kinds of arguments (“what does a word really mean?”) are annoying and often pointless. Or at any rate, we should have that terminology argument last, after we agree about everything else. So I was temporarily conceding this bullet-point for the sake of furthering this discussion, by making up silly terms like “florp”. But at the very least, I think you have to admit that Person X is not a “straw-vulcan” per your comment. They are using emotion words like “angry” in a very normal, common-sense way, in the normal situations where that concept is useful.