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Emotional Prosody Processing for Non-Native English Speakers pp 27–51Cite as

Emotion Universals—Argument from Nature

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Part of the book series: The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series ((BMBBS,volume 3))

Abstract

The discipline of psychology is the natural home of the systematic research of emotions in all their aspects. For almost half a century the mainstream of emotion research has been dominated by the radical universalist framework that there exist at least six panhuman emotion concepts: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise (Ekman et al. 1969). This framework is so entrenched that it has earned the title of the standard view in psychology (Russell 1994). However, both the theory and practice of emotion research has been anything but monolithic in their ideas about and approaches to investigating emotions. This chapter is a historical review of all major theories of emotions starting from Charles Darwin’s observations which predated the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline, to the contemporary revisionist theories represented by James A. Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett. The continuous shift between reconciliation and opposition of the universalist and culture–specific views of emotions is shown to be the main driving force in the progress of thought on the nature of emotions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Though correspondence with scientists and artists around the world.

  2. 2.

    In deference to Darwin’s cautiousness, I will use his preferred term for the process. Contrary to the popular belief, he did not like the term “evolution”. He hardly used it in any of his writings on the subject, and it did not appear at all in his major work on the subject, On the Origin of Species (1859).

  3. 3.

    Neurasthenia was a frequent diagnosis at the time and it remains a recognized medical condition until today. World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) defines it as a psychosomatic disorder characterized by mental and physical fatigue, distractedness, stress-related drop in immunity, often accompanied by depression and emotional instability. Although James suffered greatly from this disorder, it likely saved him from being drafted to participate in the American Civil War (WHO 2015).

  4. 4.

    All of the James children were seemingly bound for excellence in literature. William’s brother was the popular writer Henry James, and his sister was the now increasingly appreciated diarist Alice James. William himself was deeply dissatisfied with The Principles, however, despite the praise heaped upon it. Wilhelm Wundt praised it as literary tour-de-force, but he was also mostly condescending regarding its portent for psychology; as he put it: “It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology” (Parajes 2002).

  5. 5.

    Professor Carl Lange specialized in medicine and investigated emotions from the perspective of outward expression, while James tackled it from the internal, psychological perspective. Both appear to have come to very similar conclusions about the primarily somatic nature of emotion at around the same time. Hence the name of the theory honors them both in equal measure (Titchener 1914).

  6. 6.

    Watson’s experiments and Little Albert’s reactions were captured on film and can easily be obtained today from a variety of online sources. The video allows us to assess the commendable coherence and consequence with which the experimental procedure was conducted. However, the video also reveals the disturbing levels of distress Albert was subjected to, and an analysis of study background reveals that no informed consent from the child’s parents was ever obtained. Landis’ experiments were a model of effective emotion evocation, but the procedures involved in the evoking stage and in subject recruitment were highly questionable. One of the procedures to evoke disgust had the participants take a live rat and cut its head off with a kitchen knife. The subject screening was so poor it allowed the participation of a teen referred to Landis’ Psychology Department with an initial diagnosis of emotional instability. Both experiments are today often featured in research ethics seminars as examples of various facets of unethical research conduct in Human Subject Research.

  7. 7.

    Prior to being published fragments of the textbook circulated among the Columbia University students, who found it of great value in their study of psychology. Hence the name “Columbia Bible”.

  8. 8.

    They used epinephrine/placebo injections and suggestion manipulation to evoke different emotions from the same neurochemical/physiological arousal.

  9. 9.

    This was, somewhat ironically, in an Afterword to an edition of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal. The disdainful comments were directed at the notable anthropologist Margaret Mead.

  10. 10.

    His acerbic response to Russell’s detailed critique of his work.

  11. 11.

    Ekman stated outwardly his desire to give the ultimate answer quite unequivocally: “My goal was to settle the matter [of defining what emotions are] decisively” (Ekman 1998).

  12. 12.

    For example in the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) Bradley et al. (2008) or the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS) (Bradley and Lang 1999).

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  1. Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

    Halszka Bąk

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Bąk, H. (2016). Emotion Universals—Argument from Nature. In: Emotional Prosody Processing for Non-Native English Speakers. The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44042-2_2

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