When do we start experiencing emotions?

Most of the time, our emotions serve us quite successfully, mobilizing us to do what is important in our life, and giving us all sorts of pleasures. But sometimes our emotions can create problems for us.
This happens when our emotional reactions become inadequate to the situation in one of the three following ways. Firstly, we can experience and show the right emotion, but with the wrong intensity (for example, our concern was justified, but we showed excessive fright). Secondly, we may experience the right emotion, but to manifest it improperly (for example, our anger was justified, but the silent form of its manifestation was counterproductive). Section 4 describes the ways in which we can change these two inappropriate emotional reactions, with the wrong intensity or with the wrong way of expressing emotions. On this page and on the page of section 3, I consider the third type of unsuitable emotional reaction — which is harder to change and which turns out to be even worse than the first two. It manifests itself not in the fact that our reaction turns out to be too strong or is expressed in an irregular form, but in the fact that we generally experience not the kind of emotion that we should have experienced. The problem is not that we were too frightened or showed our fear improperly, but that we, as it turned out later, should not have been afraid at all.
Why did an inappropriate emotional reaction occur? Is it possible to completely destroy the trigger (i.e., “trigger mechanism”) of emotions, so that, for example, when another subscriber connects to your telephone conversation, you do not feel anger? Is it possible to change the emotional response so that in this case you show joy or arrogance? If we cannot suppress or change our emotional reaction to a trigger, can we not at least weaken its strength in order not to react to the event in an inappropriate way?
These questions would not have arisen if we all responded equally to the same stimulus, if every event in our life caused the same reaction in everyone. But it is obvious that this is not the case in life: some people are afraid of heights, while others are not; some mourned the death of Princess Diana as the death of the closest person, while others showed complete indifference about this. However, there are some triggers that trigger the same emotion in all: for example, a car accident, which was miraculously avoided, is sure to cause short-term fear. How does this happen? How each of us acquires its own unique set of triggers of emotions and at the same time has the same reactions as everyone else to other triggers? Almost everyone feels fear when the legs on the chair on which he sits suddenly break, but some people are afraid to fly on airplanes, while others are not. We have the same triggers in the same way as we have common expressions for each emotion, but there are triggers that are specific not only for a given culture, but also for a particular individual. How do we acquire emotion triggers that we would not like to have? Section 2 addresses all of these issues. We need to get answers before we address the practical question in the next chapter about whether we can change what drives our emotions.
Finding answers to these questions is not easy, because we cannot, at our discretion, extract them from the head of the person we are interested in, nor can we (I will tell you about the reasons for this later) constantly find the answers simply by asking people about why or when to experience this or that emotion. There are special methods for stimulating the appearance of images in the brain, in particular the method of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), using which the human head is placed inside a magnetic coil and images are generated by active brain regions with a period of two to three seconds. Unfortunately, it is too slow to learn how emotions begin, because they often occur in less than one second. And even if fMRI has the necessary time resolution, it will not give us useful hints, since it will simply determine which brain structures are in an active state, and not in what their activity is expressed.
Although at present there is still no reliable scientific evidence to give definitive answers to all these questions about how emotion triggers arise in our brain and whether we can eliminate these triggers, and perhaps it will take decades to answer these questions then approximate conclusions can be made now on the basis of a thorough study of how and when people behave under the influence of emotions. Although the answers I offer are largely intuitive, they can still help us better understand our own emotions and the emotional reactions of others.
We do not come into emotional excitement from everything and we are not constantly in the grip of emotions. Emotions arise and disappear. We experience an emotion at one point and may not experience any emotion at another. Some people are more emotional than others (see the final section), but even the most emotional ones have periods when they do not have any emotions. Some scientists claim that some emotions are always present, but they are too weak to be noticeable to us or to influence what we are doing. But if the emotion is so implicit that we cannot notice it, then, I believe, we can say that at times we do not experience any emotion. (Sometimes even those who believe that we always experience some kind of emotion recognize that this emotion is not always the same. For this reason, they also have to explain why we experience one emotion at one moment and another in another.)
Considering the fact that not every minute of our life is colored by some kind of emotion, the following question remains unanswered: why do we begin to experience emotions? Most often, emotions arise when we sense, correctly or erroneously, what is happening or is about to happen some event that can positively or negatively affect our well-being. This is not the only way we have emotions, but it is very important and perhaps the main one, and therefore we will focus on it a special attention. (Later, I will describe eight other ways in which emotions arise.) This is a simple fundamental idea: emotions arise in order to prepare us for quick actions in the conditions of events that are of great importance to our lives.
Remember the situation when you were driving a car and suddenly another car appeared in front of you, which you thought was bound to collide with yours. Your attention was taken by an interesting conversation with a friend sitting in the passenger seat, or listening to a radio program. An instant before you have time to think, before the conscious part of your Self can assess the situation, you will feel the danger and begin to experience fear.
The resulting emotion encompasses you within milliseconds and directs what you do, say or think. Without any conscious choice, you turn the steering wheel in such a way as to avoid a collision, and put your foot on the brake pedal. At the same time, an expression of fear appears on your face: the eyebrows are raised and brought together, the eyes are wide open, and the lips are pulled back. Your heart begins to beat faster, you sweat, and blood rushes to the large muscles of your legs. Note that you would have this facial expression, even if there was no one else in the car except for you; and in the same way, your heart would be beating faster, even if you did not experience a sudden significant physical exertion requiring activation of blood circulation. These reactions arise because throughout our evolution it was useful for other people to know when we feel danger, and in a similar way it was useful for them to be prepared to flee when they were afraid.
Emotions prepare us for important events without our thinking about what we should do. You would not be able to survive in a critical situation on the road, if a part of your I did not constantly observe the environment in order to detect danger signals. You also could not survive if you were to deliberately reflect on what you should do to cope with the danger when it becomes obvious. Emotions do this when you don’t know what is happening, and it usually benefits you, as in the example of a potential car accident.
After the danger has passed, you will still experience fear. It will take 10 to 15 seconds for your feeling of fear to pass, and you will have few opportunities to make this period shorter. Emotions cause changes in different parts of our brain, mobilizing us to act on what caused our emotions, as well as changes in our autonomic nervous system, regulating heart rate, respiratory rate, sweating intensity and many other physiological changes, and thus prepare us for different actions. Emotions also send signals that cause changes in facial expressions, tone of voice, and body position. We do not choose these changes consciously, they just happen by themselves.
When our emotion is strong and arises very quickly, as in the example with the machine, the memory of this episode after its completion will not be very accurate. You cannot know what your brain was doing, what processes occurred in it while recognizing the danger created by another machine. You know that you turned the steering wheel and pressed the brake, but you probably don’t know what expression appeared on your face. You have experienced some sensations in your body, but it is difficult for you to choose words for their exact description. If we wanted to know how you managed to feel the danger while you were talking or listening to the radio, you would not be able to tell us about it. You were not able to observe or direct the processes that saved your life. This amazing feature of our emotions — the ability to initiate our actions without our awareness of emerging processes — can also work against us, causing inappropriate emotional reactions. In the future we will talk about this in more detail.
If the process were slower, then we might be aware of what was happening in our brain; in other words, we might know the answers to the questions posed in this section. But we would not have survived in that road incident, as we could not act fast enough. At that initial moment, a decision or evaluation that gives rise to an emotion appears extremely quickly and is not controlled by our consciousness. We must have automatic assessment mechanisms that continuously scan the environment and determine when something important happens for our well-being or our survival.
When we learn to actually track the automatic evaluation operation performed by our brain, I expect that we will be able to detect several mechanisms for such an assessment, and not just one; for this reason, I will use the plural form of this word and talk about automatic evaluation mechanisms, which for brevity I will call auto-evaluators . ^[23]
Almost everyone who deals with emotions in our day agrees with what I have stated before: first, that emotions are reactions to factors that seem very important to our well-being; and secondly, that emotions often arise so quickly that we are not aware of the processes in our psyche that stimulate them. ^[24] The results of brain studies are in good agreement with my previous assumptions. We can make complex assessments very quickly, within a few milliseconds, without being aware of the actual evaluation process itself.
Now we can rephrase the first group of questions about how emotion triggers can be both universal and specific for a given individual. Why are auto evaluators susceptible and how did they become sensitive to these triggers? How do emotion triggers arise? Answers to these questions will allow us to find out why we have emotions. This will help us answer the question of why we sometimes experience emotions that seem completely unsuitable for us, although at other times our emotions perfectly correspond to what is happening around us and can even save our lives.
The answers will also tell us whether it is possible to change what causes the emotions. For example, is there something that we could do to no longer be afraid when the plane falls into an air hole? (The pilots told me that they achieve such a result, because they almost always receive a warning from the sensors of the plane about the approach of the region with adverse weather conditions. But if they did not receive such a warning, would they be afraid or not? I could not a clear answer to this question from none of the pilots, but the rest of the crew answered this question in the affirmative: they really experienced a momentary fear.) What do we need to do so that we no longer feel prompted Denia answer, for example, anger to anger? Is such a goal unattainable? Perhaps all we can do is change the sensitivity of the auto evaluators to some of the triggers. But perhaps even this will be unattainable for us. We still have to face this problem.
We can make certain conclusions about the sensitivity of our auto evaluators to various events by examining when emotions arise. Most of the information we know is not obtained by observing when people experience a particular emotion. On the contrary, it was obtained from their answers to the questionnaire about when, as they remember, they were experiencing this or that emotion. In his famous book, the philosopher Peter Goldie called this type of information post-rationalizing. ^[25] This was not done to make such information useless. The answers people receive to these questions — similar to the explanations we give ourselves after the episode that caused us to understand why we did what we did — may be incomplete and possibly stereotypical because they pass through filters that let people know and remember. When using such questionnaires, there is a problem that a person is really ready to tell other people. But still these answers are capable of teaching us something.
In the 1970s My former student, psychologist Jerry Boucher, asked such questions to residents of Malaysia and the United States. ^[26] A few years later, my colleague, psychologist Klaus Scherer, and his staff ^[27] conducted a similar survey among students from eight Western cultures. Both researchers found evidence of the universality of expressions: it was reported that the same types of triggers caused the same emotions in representatives of different cultures. At the same time, both of them also received evidence of the presence of intercultural differences in specific events that caused certain emotions. For example, in every culture, the loss of something important served as a trigger for sadness, but what was perceived as a loss changed from culture to culture.
One of the Malaysians surveyed by Boucher told a story about a man who heard the call to prayer on the occasion of an important Muslim religious holiday. “It made him feel sad when he thought about his wife and children who were celebrating a holiday in his home village. Now he is in the jungle, where he fights for the freedom of his country. He serves as a soldier and is not able to celebrate a religious holiday at home with his wife and children. ” The European surveyed by Scherer said: “I was thinking about something that caused me to recall my school friend who died in a car accident. He was a talented scientist and a wonderful person. His life ended so ridiculously. ” The topic of loss was present in both stories, but these losses were so different.
The results of my research in our culture revealed many differences among Americans with regard to what causes them sadness, anger, fear, disgust, etc. It cannot be said that these reasons were always different. Some events almost certainly made everyone feel the same emotion: for example, a suspicious-looking man with a baseball bat, suddenly appearing from a dark alley, almost always causes fear. But my wife is afraid of mice, but I am not afraid of them at all. I am annoyed by the slow service in the restaurant, but she just does not notice him.Thus, the question again arises before us: how do auto valuers become sensitive to the universal triggers of emotions that are present in each of us, and to those triggers that trigger different emotions even among individuals belonging to the same culture?
When thinking about this issue, it becomes clear that auto evaluators should carefully observe two types of triggers. They must identify events that everyone faces that are important for the well-being or survival of all people. For each emotion, apparently, there are several such events that are deposited in the brain of each person. It can be a general scheme, an abstract plan, or a scene algorithm, such as the threat of causing harm to the emotion of fear or a heavy loss to sadness. Another equally probable possibility is that what is stored in memory is not at all abstract, but rather a specific event: for example, for fear it could be a sudden deprivation of support or a rapid approach of something that could harm us.For sadness, the universal trigger can be the loss of a person to whom we are strongly attached. However, the lack of a rigorous scientific rationale for choosing between these two possibilities does not affect how we regulate our emotional life.
Over the course of our lives, we encounter many specific events that we learn to interpret in such a way that they cause us fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, or pleasure; these events are added to the universal events from our evolutionary past, expanding the list of what auto evaluators are responding to. These memorized events may closely or remotely resemble the previously accumulated events. They serve as refinements or additions to universal past events. They are not the same for all people and vary depending on the personal experience of each. When I examined representatives of the Stone Age culture in New Guinea at the end of the 1960s, I found that they were afraid of being attacked by a wild pig. In urbanized America, people are more afraid of robbers attackingbut both cases reflect the threat of harm. ^[28]
In our earlier book ^[29] , my co-author Wally Friesen and I described scenes that we thought were universal for seven emotions. Later, psychologist Richard Lazarus made a similar assumption. ^[30] He used the concept of pivotal related topics to reflect his idea that emotions are mainly related to our relationships with other people, with which I largely agree (although such events occurring independently of people like the sunset or earthquake, also cause emotions). The word “theme” is very successful, as it allows us to speak about universal themes and their variations that arise in the process of acquiring individual experience by each person.
When we are confronted with a topic, such as the theme of sensations that we experience when a chair suddenly breaks beneath us, it causes an emotion with little or no assessment of the situation. Auto evaluators may take a little more time to evaluate any of the variations of this topic that we met in the process of growing up. The further the variation from the topic is, the more time can pass before we understand where the reflective evaluation takes place . ^[31]In the case of a reflective assessment, we consciously perceive our assessment processes, i.e., we consider and analyze what is happening. Suppose someone heard that in his organization is expected to reduce staff. He begins to think about the possibility of his dismissal and, reflecting on this potential threat, may feel fear. He can not afford to lose this job, because it is for him the only source of income. This event is related to the topic of loss of support - since I believe that this is one of the topics for fear, but it is so far away from this topic that the evaluation process is not automatic, but reflective. The consciousness of this person takes part in this process.
It is quite clear how idiosyncratic variations are acquired, that is, the individual triggers of the emotions of each individual. They are learned and reflect the experience we have gained (meeting with a wild pig or with a robber). But how are universal themes acquired? How do they accumulate in our brain in such a way that our car evaluators become sensitive to them? Are they also learned? Or are they innate and are a product of our evolution? It would be nice to take a pause and think about it, because the answer to this question is how are universal themes assimilated? - has implicit consequences for how easily they can be modified or destroyed. Unfortunately, we have no data on how universal themes are learned. I will present you two opinions on this matter and explain why, in my opinion,only one of them is true.
The first explanation is that not only variations are assimilated; themes for each emotion are also assimilated. Since the same themes, as scientists have figured out, arise in many different cultures, they must be based on experience that everyone or almost everyone experiences during the so-called learning, which is permanent for the human race .
Take anger as an example. We all get annoyed when someone stops us from doing what we really want to do or have already begun to do. At the same time, we learn that by approaching the source of the interference or by threatening to attack it, we can achieve its elimination. All that implies such an explanation of what is inherited by man genetically is the desire to achieve the goal, the ability to threaten or attack and the ability to learn from the example of successfully removing obstacles. If we allow the existence of such a desire, such a skill, and such an ability, then we can expect people to find out that it is often useful to try to remove an obstacle by threatening or attacking the source of interference. Such activity is accompanied by increased heart rate and blood flow to the hands in anticipation of the need to put them into action against the source of interference, i.e.all known signs of emotional anger reaction.^[32]
If universal themes were assimilated, then it would be possible to make people forget them. If we assimilate the subject of anger, then perhaps we are able to forget it. I began my research with the firm conviction that it was so. I thought that every aspect of the emotions, including what brings them into action, is the result of social learning. My own discoveries regarding the universality of facial expressions and the discoveries of other scholars have changed my ideas. Learning is not the only source of what becomes noticeable during the manifestation of emotions. Learning, which is constant for the human race, cannot explain why facial expressions in blind people from the birth of children are similar to facial expressions in sighted children. It is also unable to explain which muscles are used to create a specific expression, for example,why, in the case of pleasure being experienced, the lips rise, not fall, and the muscles around the eyes contract, and why this happens to people all over the world, although it may be imperceptible when people try to mask their expressions. Learning that is constant for the human race cannot also explain the evidence we have recently discovered that anger, fear, sadness, and disgust are characterized by different changes in the rhythm of the heartbeats, intensity of sweating, skin temperature, and blood circulation velocity (all these facts are discussed in section 4). These results led me to the conclusion that our evolutionary heritage makes an important contribution to shaping our emotional responses. But if this is so, then it seems likely that evolution should also play an important role in defining universal themes that evoke emotions.Topics are set initially, not digested; only variations and refinements of these themes are assimilated.^[33]
It is obvious that natural selection forms many aspects of our life. Consider the characteristic of having a distant thumb. This characteristic is absent in most other mammals, so how did it appear in humans? Apparently, long ago, those of our ancestors who, as a result of genetic variations, were born with this useful characteristic, turned out to be more successful in raising offspring, obtaining food and fighting predators. Therefore, they had more of their offspring in future generations of people, with the result that over time, almost everyone acquired this characteristic. The presence of a distant thumb was the result of selection, and now it is part of our genetic heritage.
Using similar reasoning, I suggest that those who responded to the hindrance with active attempts to eliminate it and gave a clear signal of their intentions were more likely to win in the competition - both for food and for females. Usually they had more numerous offspring, and over time everyone absorbed this topic of anger.
The difference between the two explanations of universal themes — with the help of learning that is constant for the human race, and with the help of evolution — is in considering whenspecific events occur. An evolutionary explanation points to the distant time when these topics were developed (and other aspects of emotions that will be described in the following sections). Explanation based on learning that is constant for the human race implies that some elements of the topic of anger (desire to achieve goals) arose in the process of evolution, but that other elements of the topic of anger (elimination of obstacles to achieving these goals using threats or attacks) are absorbed into during the life of each individual. Everyone learns the same things, and therefore they become universal.
It seems to me unlikely that natural selection does not manifest itself in something so important to our life as emotion triggers. We are born prepared for life, having innate sensitivity to events that were important for the survival of individuals of our kind in the distant past, who at that time were engaged in hunting and gathering. Topics for which auto evaluators constantly scan the environment, and usually so that we do not even know about it, were selected in the process of human evolution.
Evidence in support of this viewpoint was provided by a series of brilliant studies carried out by the Swedish psychologist Arne Ohman. ^[34]He claimed that for most of our evolutionary history, snakes and poisonous spiders were considered very dangerous. Those our ancestors, who quickly learned about this danger and avoided these creatures, had more chances for survival, had more children and could take better care of their offspring than those who learned about it too slowly. If we are really prepared by our evolution to fear what was dangerous in the environment surrounding our ancestors, then modern people, Okhman predicted, would have to learn faster to fear snakes and spiders than flowers, fungi, or geometric objects. That is what he was able to detect.
Okhman used electric shock (played the role of unconditional stimulus, because it caused emotional activation without learning) along with stimuli that were either associated with fear (snake or spider), or not associated with fear (mushrooms, flowers, or geometric objects). After just combining an electric shock with one of the fear-associated incentives, people showed fear when they were shown a snake or spider without an electric shock, while much more electric shock associations were needed with flowers, mushrooms, or geometric objects, so that people would be afraid of these non-fear-related incentives. In addition, people continued to experience fear of a snake or spider for a long time, and after showing flowers, mushrooms or geometric objects, the feeling of fear quickly disappeared. ^[35]
Of course, we are afraid of snakes and spiders in the current conditions, so is it really evolution that explains the results of Ohman? If this counter-argument were true, then people would react to other dangerous objects in our current environment, such as guns or electrical outlets, just like they react to spiders and snakes. But this is not the result that Ohman received. It took the same amount of time to cause a conditioned fear reaction to guns and electrical sockets and a conventional fear reaction to flowers, mushrooms, and geometric objects. However, guns and electrical outlets were not so long present in the process of natural selection in order to become universal triggers. ^[36]
In his visionary book, On the Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin described an experiment with a snake, which he conducted more than a hundred years ago and which agrees perfectly well with the recent work of Ohman. “I brought my face close to the thick glass behind which the African viper was, with the firm intention not to jerk my head back if she pounced on me; but as soon as the snake tried to bite me, nothing was left of my previous determination, and with surprising agility I jumped back one or even two yards. My will and mind were powerless in the face of the danger I had never experienced. ” ^[37]Darwin's experience shows how rational thinking is unable to prevent the reaction of fear to the inherent theme of fear. To review this issue, we will soon return again.
It is impossible to say for sure whether any such themes of emotions act as active triggers before gaining experience linking them to the emotional result. Recall that Ohman's research required a certain amount of experience so that the snake and the spider triggers fear, since during the initial screening they did not frighten the subjects. It took only one association with an unpleasant result, so that they really became triggers of fear, but still it was required. Perhaps this is not always the case, as Darwin wrote that he was frightened by the viper, not having any direct experience with snakes in the past. From a practical point of view, it doesn’t matter at all whether an emotion needs some kind of learning to create a theme or whether some themes do not require our prior experience in orderso that we become sensitive to their occurrence. But in any case, we benefit from the experience of the entire human race that lived on this planet when we quickly respond to the triggers important to our survival.
I am convinced that one of the most important distinguishing features of emotions is that events that cause emotions have an imprint not only of our individual experience, but also of the past experience of our ancestors. ^[38] Emotions, as Richard Lazarus successfully said, reflect the “wisdom of the ages” both in the themes of emotions and in emotional reactions. Auto valuers reveal that it was important for survival not only in modern life, but also in the life of our distant ancestors who were engaged in hunting and gathering.
Sometimes we react emotionally to problems that were important to us before, but now are no longer of interest to us. Variations of each topic, which provide and add detail to what was identified using the automatic assessment, begin to be assimilated very early — some in infancy, and others in childhood. We can discover that we are not responding in an inadequate way to those things that caused us to fear, anger, or disgust before, and that we now consider such reactions inappropriate in our adult life. We are more likely to make mistakes in the early assimilation of emotion triggers simply because our learning mechanisms are not yet so well developed. However, what we learn at the beginning of life may be more difficult to forget than what we learn later.(This assumption is the basis of many methods of psychotherapy and is supported by the results of research.)
Our auto evaluators are very strong, they continuously monitor our external environment without the participation of our consciousness, identifying themes and variations of events related to our survival. Using a computer metaphor, we can say that the mechanisms of automatic assessment lead in our environment to search for what is accumulated in the database of emotional readiness , which is formed partly by our biology, due to the process of natural selection, and partly by our individual experience. ^[39]
Remember that what is recorded as a result of natural selection can be not triggers per se, but only preparatory material, thanks to which some triggers can quickly appear in this database. Many psychologists have concentrated their efforts on a related, but still different set of questions about how automatic evaluators qualify a new event to determine whether it fits, if my terminology is used, to an element already in the base of emotional evaluations. I have doubts about the correctness of their assumptions, which were based on what people were saying to them, although none of us knows what our mind is doing at the moment when it uses the automatic assessment process. This study has provided good models for depicting how people explainwhat causes their emotional arousal. In any case, their assumptions are not directly related to the theory, which I will set out later in this section - theories about why we experience emotions.
This database is open, not closed; information flows continuously. ^[40] Throughout life, we are faced with new developments that can be interpreted in an automatic assessment as similar to a topic or a variation stored in a database, and when this happens, an emotion arises. In the opinion of psychologist Niko Freud, what I call variations is not just the result of previous direct experience, but often represents new incentives that we face and which seem to relate to what we are concerned about and what we call our worries . ^[41]
Since we do not need to divert our conscious attention to observing events that become triggers of emotions, we can use our conscious processes to do something else. (If, with conscious attention, we are concerned about the possibility of events that can cause emotions, this, as I will explain later, is a sign of mental disorder.) As soon as we learn to drive a car, we start to do it automatically and can direct our attention to a conversation with a fellow traveler , listening to radio broadcasts, thinking about future events, etc. By making a left turn, we can not stop listening to the radio in order to take the right lane after turning. And if danger arises, then we still act properly. This is one of the main virtues of emotions,providing them with functionality.
Unfortunately, what we are responding to may not always suit our current environment. If we visit a country with left-hand traffic, then our automatic actions can create a threat to our lives, since we can easily perform a wrong action, going to the track or making a turn. We cannot talk or listen to the radio. We must consciously prevent automatic actions that we could perform. Sometimes it turns out that our emotional life takes place in another “country,” that is, not at all in the environment to which our automatic assessment mechanisms are sensitive. In this case, our emotional reactions may be inadequate to what is happening around us.
This would not be a big problem if it were not for the fact that our emotional evaluation mechanisms operate incredibly quickly. If they worked more slowly, they would not be as useful, but we would have time to realize what caused our emotions. Our conscious assessments would allow us to interrupt the process if we decided that it was inappropriate or harmful to us before we experienced emotion. But nature has not given us such a choice. From the point of view of increasing the chances of survival, it would be more useful to have slow rather than fast evaluation mechanisms, more useful for the entire history of the human race, and then we would not have such fast automatic evaluation mechanisms beyond our control.
Although emotions are most often triggered by automatic evaluators, they can also arise through other means. Let's look at eight other ways to generate emotions. Some of them provide more control over whether we are going to experience emotion or not.
Sometimes emotions arise as a result of reflective evaluation.in which we consciously consider what is happening, but we can not say with certainty what it means. As the situation develops or our understanding of what is happening improves, we begin to pick up something familiar; it corresponds to something that already exists in our database of emotional readiness, and the evaluation mechanisms begin to operate. Reflective evaluation deals with unclear situations — situations for which automatic evaluation mechanisms are not yet tuned. Suppose you meet someone who begins to tell you about his life, but you do not understand why he tells you this or for what purpose. You reflect on what he says, trying to imagine what these words can mean to you. At some point you can understandthat it poses a threat to you in terms of keeping you in your workplace — then the automatic assessment mechanisms come into play and you begin to experience fear, anger, or another suitable emotion.
Time is the price we pay for receiving a reflective evaluation. Auto-rating mechanisms save us those moments or minutes. Often, our automatic evaluation mechanisms can save us and really save us from adversity, reducing the time required for reflective evaluation.
A positive factor here is the ability to influence what comes through when, as a result of reflective evaluation, emotions begin to manifest. ^[42]To make this impact, we must be well aware of our own hot emotion triggers — specific variations of universal themes for each emotion that are most noticeable in our lives. After reading about these topics and their typical variations in sections 5 through 9, you can better understand the hot triggers that you and the people around you have. If we know our hot triggers, then we can make conscious efforts not to allow them to distort our interpretations of what becomes noticeable to us when the emotion is manifested.
Suppose the trigger of your sadness / suffering reaction is a hint that a woman dear to you is going to leave you because she revealed a secret that you carefully guarded - the (assimilated by you) sense of aimlessness of life. If you have time, you can use a reflective assessment to take precautions against your own judgment that you will soon be abandoned. It will not be easy, but as a result of training you will be able to reduce the likelihood that you will experience sadness or suffering when in reality no one leaves you. Reflective evaluation increases the importance of the role of your consciousness. You have the opportunity to learn how to deliberately protect yourself from misinterpreting what is happening around you.
Feeling emotions is also possible, recalling past emotional episodes. We can, at our choice, recall some episode, consciously rethink it and go on to think about what happened, why it happened or how we could act differently. Or the memory may not be the result of a choice; it can arise in our mind involuntarily. But no matter how the memory arises, consciously or involuntarily, it can include from the very beginning not only an episode and a script of emotional experience, but also an emotional reaction. We can relive the emotion that we felt in the actual event, or now we can experience another emotion. For example, a person may be disgusted with himself because he experienced fear in an episode that actually occurred,but now he can only feel disgust and no fear experienced by him earlier. It is also possible that we initially recall emotional episodes, but do not re-experience those or other emotions. Or an emotion may occur when the episode begins to play again in our mind.
Robert Levenson and I used the task of checking the memory, evoking people emotions in the laboratory to study facial expressions and physiological reactions characteristic of each emotion. We thought that it would be difficult for people to relive past emotional events, knowing that they were being videotaped and that sensors measuring heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, intensity of sweating and skin temperature were attached to different parts of their body. It was just the opposite. Most people seem eager to be able to replay and relive the past emotional scene. Give them a chance, and it will happen almost immediately for many, if not all, of emotions.
We asked people to recall their own version of one of the events, which was considered universal for all emotions. For example, to cause sadness, we asked people to recall the time in their lives that was associated with the death of a loved one. We asked them to imagine the moment when they experienced the most intense sadness, and then try to relive the emotion they experienced upon learning of this death.
By the time these brief instructions were completed, all subjects changed their physiological parameters and subjective feelings, and in some even the expressions of emotions on their faces. This should not have been surprising, since everyone had the experience of recalling an important event and sensation of emotion. What was not known before our study is whether the changes that occur when recalling emotions really resemble the changes that occur when emotions are triggered by other means, but both changes were similar. Memories of the events that caused our emotions, i.e. about the events that we ourselves decided to extract from our memory and which do not force us to immediately re-experience the emotions we initially experienced, provide an opportunity to figure out how to reconstruct what is happening in our life in this way,so that we can change what makes us feel emotional.
Imagination is another way of causing an emotional reaction. If we use the imagination to reproduce scenes that cause us to experience emotions, then we get the opportunity to “cool” the trigger. In our minds, we can rehearse and try other ways of interpreting what is happening so that this interpretation does not correspond to our usual hot trigger.
Talking about past emotional experiences can also trigger our emotions. We can tell the person with whom we have experienced an emotional reaction, about what we felt and why we think that we felt this way and not otherwise, or we can tell it to a friend or therapist. Sometimes a simple conversation about an emotion-provoking episode forces us to re-experience this emotion just as it does in our experiments, when we ask people to act in that way. ^[43]
Re-experiencing the feelings that we experienced in the past emotional episode can bring its own benefits. It may give us a chance to give matters a different direction; it can provide support or understanding for the person we are talking to. Of course, sometimes re-experiencing emotions is harmful. You may decide to talk in cold blood with your spouse about the misunderstanding that occurred between you a few days ago and make sure that you again feel the anger of the same or even more strength. This can happen even if you were hoping that this would not happen, because most of the time we are not in control when we begin to experience emotions. And if you really experience an emotion, your face will probably show it to others and your spouse will get angry becausethat you were angry again.
Suppose you tell a friend how badly you felt when you learned from the vet that it was impossible to cure your sick beloved dog. The story itself makes you re-experience and show sadness, and your friend, while listening to you, is also starting to look sad. We can all experience emotions experienced by other people, i.e., empathy. This is the sixth way that emotions arise — based on observing the emotional response of another person.
This is not always the case: for example, in those cases when we do not consider ourselves obligated to take care of this person, when we do not identify ourselves with him at all. Sometimes, observing the emotion of another person, we begin to experience a completely opposite feeling. For example, we may feel contempt for him for experiencing such anger or fear, or be afraid of the manifestation of his anger.
In order for us to have a sympathetic emotional reaction, misfortune does not have to happen to our close friend. It can happen to a completely unfamiliar person, and not necessarily before our eyes. We can see such a person on a movie or television screen, read about him in a book or in a newspaper. Although there is no doubt that we may experience emotions when reading about a person we are unfamiliar with, it is surprising that it is precisely the written language that has arisen in the history of the development of mankind quite late can cause emotions. I believe that the written language is transformed in our consciousness into sensations, images, sounds, smells, or even taste of something, and then these images are interpreted by automatic assessment mechanisms just like any other event that can cause emotions.If we could block the creation of such images, then I’m sure that emotions wouldn’t be caused only by one language.
Other people may tell us what to fear, what to be angry about, what to rejoice about, etc. This symbolic way usually implies the presence of a person taking care of us in early childhood, and the influence of this person will increase if the emotion we tell, appreciated highly. Often, what causes emotions in people who play an important role in our life, involuntarily causes us to assimilate their variations of emotions as our own. For example, a child whose mother is afraid of the crowd may also have a fear of large crowds.
Most authors who wrote about emotions discussed the violation of norms and those emotions that we experience when important social norms are violated by us or other people. ^[44]We may experience anger, disgust, contempt, shame, guilt, surprise, and perhaps fun or pleasure. It all depends on who violated the norm and what this norm is. Of course, the norms are not universal; some norms may not even be considered norms by all representatives of one nation or culture. Take, for example, the differences between the views of modern young and elderly Americans on the acceptability and importance of oral sex. We are familiar with the rules that people must comply with, both in childhood and in adulthood.
There is one more, the last, way of appearance of emotions - rather new and unexpected. I discovered it when my colleague Wally Frizen and I were developing our method for measuring facial movements. To find out how the facial muscles change the appearance of the face, we videotaped ourselves while we systematically compiled various combinations of movements of our faces. We started with single muscle contractions and then developed a way to combine six muscle movements simultaneously. It was not always easy to make these movements, but after several months of training we learned how to do it and recorded ten thousand combinations of facial movements on tape. Studying our videos later, we understood how to recognize each expression and which muscles created it. (This knowledge formed the basis of our measurement system - "Coding system of facial movements" (FACS ) ^[45] , which we discussed in the “introduction”.)
I found that when I gave specific expressions to my face, I was overwhelmed with strong emotional feelings. These were not just any facial expressions, but only those that I have already identified as universal for all people. When I asked Freisen whether something like this happened to him, he replied that he also experienced emotions when he gave certain expressions to his face, and these emotions were often felt as very unpleasant.
A few years later, Bob Levenson had a chance to work in my laboratory for a whole year. Apparently, he really liked living in San Francisco and helping us test our crazy idea that a simple change in facial expression can cause changes in the human autonomic nervous system. Over the next ten years, we conducted four experiments, including one conducted not in Western culture, but in the west of the island of Sumatra. When the people involved by us followed our instructions about which muscles to move, their physiological parameters changed and most reported that they experienced emotions. Again, this change was not caused by any movement of the face. The subjects had to do those muscle movements, which, as established by our previous studies, provided universal expressions of emotions.^[46]
In another study devoted exclusively to smiles, we, with psychologist Richard Davidson, studying brain and emotions, found that the appearance of a smile on his face causes numerous changes in the brain that occur in a person who has pleasure. These were not any kinds of smiles, but only those that, as I discovered earlier, really expressed pleasure. ^[47]
In the course of this study, we asked people to make certain movements with the muscles of the face, but I’m sure that we could get the same results if people made sounds that correspond to each emotion. Most people find it harder to consciously reproduce the voice of an emotion than to make an appropriate facial expression. But we found one woman who could do it, and she really achieved the same results with her voice and her face.
Creating an emotional experience that changes your physiological state by giving your face an intentional appearance that corresponds to a given emotion is probably not the most common way of experiencing some kind of emotion. But it can be used much more often than we originally thought. Edgar Allan Poe knew about this when he wrote his story “The Stolen Letter”:

“When I want to find out how smart, or stupid, or kind, or angry this boy is or what he is thinking now, I try to give my face exactly the same expression that I see on his face, and then I wait to find out what thoughts or feelings will arise in accordance with this expression ”(translated by I. Gurova).

I have described nine ways in which emotions arise. The most common of these is associated with the use of so-called auto-evaluators, i.e., automatic assessment mechanisms. The second path begins with a reflective evaluation, which then drives our car evaluators. Recalling past emotional experience is the third way, and using imagination is the fourth. The fifth way involves a story about a past event that caused the emotion. The sixth way is empathy. The seventh way involves teaching us what our emotions should evoke. The eighth way is a violation of social norms. The last, ninth, way is associated with giving the face an appearance corresponding to the expression of a particular emotion.
The following section is written based on the information you already know about how our emotions are activated. In it, you will learn when and why it is difficult for us to change what causes us emotional excitement. It contains assumptions about what we can do to more accurately recognize the emotions that arise when performing an automatic assessment. The emergence of emotions based on automatic evaluation often occurs when we find ourselves in an unpleasant situation, and subsequently we often have to regret how we behaved in such an emotional situation.