Similarly, immune allocation and targeting may vary with disgust, with the potential for injury, or with the demands of extreme physical exertion. Therefore, I am afraid"). Symons, D. 1979. Antagonistic emotional contagion and evolutionary game theories influence each other to determine antagonistic crowd behaviors. Specialized perceptual inference systems may be mobilized as well: If you've heard rustling in the bushes at night, human and predator figure-detection may be particularly boosted, and not simply visual acuity in general. Again, a superordinate program is needed that coordinates these components, snapping each into the right configuration at the right time. Nevertheless, the automatic, involuntary expression of many emotions is a key feature of the biology and social life of our species, and their presence provides powerful evidence that ancestral humans spent a large portion of their time with close cooperators, as opposed to antagonists and competitors. Researchers less familiar with evolutionary psychology often equate adaptive problems exclusively with short-run threats to physical survival. Recent evolutionary theories of emotion also consider emotions to b… Shepard, R. N. 1987. Emotion mode obviously impacts the assignment of hedonic values to acts. The emotion of sexual jealousy evolved in response to these properties of the world, and there should be evidence of this in its computational design. Review of General Psychology, 2, 300-319. (Eds.). improving the optics of the lens, or reducing a liver enzyme's detoxification efficiency). Studies with the Wason selection task. Most notably, many emotion programs produce characteristic species-typical displays that broadcast to others the emotion state of the individual (Ekman, 1982). These designs are largely conserved through genetic inheritance from generation to generation (accounting over the long term for homologous similarities among related species). Why do you think this theory is a better account of human emotion? These processes - chance and selection - explain how species acquired their designs. If your child died because you made an incorrect choice (and given the absence of a controlled study with alternative realities, a bad outcome always raises the probability that you made an incorrect choice), then experiencing grief will recalibrate you for subsequent choices. and on to frontal association areas, where appraisal occurs. Other things being equal, individuals will be shyer and less spontaneous with strangers (creating problems in public speaking), and more expressive with intimates. Where are others who can protect me? Usually this leads to a system, like language, in which the decision to communicate something (or not) can be made by the individual in detailed response to the immediate circumstances. Undoubtedly they sometimes are. When the representational space assumes certain configurations, an interpretation is triggered that activates the associated emotion program - corresponding approximately to what others have called a cognitive appraisal (see, e.g., Lazarus & Lazarus, 1994). Daly, M. & Wilson, M. 1988. The sister's sickness functions as a cue that the previous allocation weighting was in error and that the variables need to be reweighted-including all of the weightings embedded in habitual action sequences. Emotion and computation. & Cosmides, L. 1992. In this view, the exploration of the statistical structure of ancestral situations and their relationship to the mind's battery of functionally specialized programs is central to mapping the emotions. Over evolutionary time, it was the computational properties of alternative neural circuits - their relative ability to solve adaptive information-processing tasks - that caused some neural circuits to be selected for, and others to be selected out. For cognitive scientists, brain and mind are terms that refer to the same system, which can be described in two complementary ways - either in terms of its physical properties (the neural), or in terms of its information-processing operation (the mental). In The latest on the best: Essays on evolution and optimality, J. Dupre (Ed.). The payoff of each "factor of production"-of each act in the sequence-must be computed before an agent could determine whether the whole sequence was worthwhile. For this reason, we expect that circuits have evolved that regulate global emotional expressiveness depending on whether one is (apparently) alone, with people one shares interests with, or with social antagonists such as enemies or higher ranking individuals where leakage of damaging information should be suppressed. Evidence of the presence (or absence) of high degrees of coordination between adaptive problems and the design features of putative adaptations allows researchers to distinguish adaptations, byproducts, and noise from one another (Williams, 1966; Cosmides & Tooby, 1997). Not only may highly stereotyped behaviors of certain kinds be released (as during sexual arousal or rage, or as with species-typical facial expressions and body language), but more complex action-generation mechanisms should be regulated as well. Mapping the design features of emotion programs can proceed independently of their resolution, at least for the present. ), The adapted mind. Both are highly informative, and emotional expressions provide a continuous commentary on the underlying meaning of things to companions. June 6, 2019. We think it likely that this had an impact on the history of emotion research. These are not explicit concepts, representations, or goal states, but rather registers or indices that acquire their meaning by the evolved behavior-controlling and computation-controlling procedures that access them. Evolution and the Theory of Games. Ethology and Sociobiology. Typically, the goal is to explain why emotions are present in humans today by referring to natural selection that occurred some time in the past. For emotion researchers, this means that one's working hypotheses (which are always open to empirical revision) should begin with the expectation of high levels of evolutionary functionality, and one's research methods should be sensitive enough to detect such organization. The single most limiting resource to reproduction is not food or safety or access to mates, but what makes them each possible: the information required for making adaptive behavioral choices. When selection is neutral, the signs of an emotion should only be the byproducts of whatever is necessary to run the emotion program, without any selection to make the cues informative. basic emotions originate in the limbic system _____ theory suggests that organisms are motivated to achieve and maintain an ideal or optimal level of arousal that maximizes their performance. Adaptive problems. Today, many psychologists agree … An evolutionary perspective breaks categories like "thinking" into a large set of independent domain-specific programs, and so opens up the possibility that distinct emotions affect separate inference programs in diverse, yet functionally patterned, ways, rather than in a single, aggregate way. Filial emotions, such as a human mother’s love for her offspring, seem to have evolved among early mammals. Additional elements include: (1) a sexual rival with a capacity for social action and violence, as well as allies of the rival; (2) a discrete probability that one's mate has conceived with the sexual rival; 3) changes in the net lifetime reproductive returns of investing further in the mating relationship; (4) a probable decrease in the degree to which the unfaithful mate's mechanisms value the victim of infidelity (the presence of an alternative mate lowers replacement costs); (5) a cue that the victim of the infidelity will likely have been deceived about a range of past events, leading the victim to confront the likelihood that his or her memory is permeated with false information; (6) the victim's status and reputation for being effective at defending his or her interests in general would be likely to plummet, inviting challenges in other arenas. Other modifications interfere with replication: these act to edit themselves from the population and the species design (negative feedback). Depending on the relative importance of the situations and the reliability of the cues, the prioritizing algorithms decide which emotion modes to activate and deactivate, and to what degree. According to the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, _____. This leads to an expectation of that different constellations of effects will be diagnostic of different emotion states (Ekman, Levenson & Friesen 1983). The expressions of emotion that Ekman noted as most universal based on research are: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and enjoyment. Signal detection thresholds shift: Less evidence is required before you respond as if there were a threat, and more true positives will be perceived at the cost of a higher rate of false alarms. Recalibration (which, when consciously accessible, appears to produce rich and distinct feeling states) is therefore a major functional component of most emotion programs. Caution: The print version may differ in minor respects from this draft. Motivating the focus of attention. The Evolutionary Theory of Emotion. 1970. Programs directed to remain active may be cued to enter subroutines that are specific to that emotion mode, and that were tailored by natural selection to solve the problems inherent in the triggering situation with special efficiency. Emotions are such programs. Phenomena such as hypnotic blindness and blindsight - where people lack the conscious experience of seeing, yet can be shown to be processing visual information - demonstrate that a computational state can exist without a person being aware of it. Perceptual mechanisms: Perceptual systems may enter emotion-specific modes of operation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (1987). What ultimately happens to each mutation is shaped both by chance and by the stable consequences the mutation has on the design of the organism -- selection. The accumulated effects of this positive feedback is one reason why species tend to have universal, species-typical evolved architecture in their functional components (see Tooby & Cosmides, 1990b for details and exceptions). To characterize an emotion adaptation, one must identify the following properties of environments and of mechanisms. Comments about this article? But even when people deliberately lie, microexpressions of face and voice often leak out (Ekman, 1985), suggesting that certain emotion programs do in fact create involuntarily emitted signals that reliably broadcast the person's emotion state. If an individual contemplating a course of action detrimental to you knew you would take revenge, regardless of the magnitude of the punishment to you that they might unleash, then they are less likely to take such harmful action. Describe evolutionary theories of emotion and how they support the connection between emotion and stress. The suspension of behavioral activity accompanied by very intense cognitive activity in depressed people looks like an effort to reconstruct models of the world so that future action can lead to payoffs, in part through stripping away previous valuations that led to unwelcome outcomes. 1982. Symptoms: The complete home medical encyclopedia. Appeasement to aggressor. Chance and selection. Emotion: A psychoevolutionary synthesis. The field of evolutionary psychology is based on the idea that human emotions and behaviors have been shaped by natural selection. For example, when you are sick, initiating actions and going about your daily activities is more effortful than usual: your impulse is to stay home and lie still. There are six basic human emotions: anger, fear, surprise, sadness, happiness, and disgust. We also expect that what is stored about present experience will also be differentially regulated. You stuffed yourself with a hot dog, a large tub of popcorn, and a box of Milk Duds while watching a movie. This coordinated adjustment and entrainment of mechanisms is a mode of operation for the entire psychological architecture, and serves as the basis for a precise computational and functional definition of each emotion state (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a; Tooby, 1985). New York: Harper & Row. Feelings of love and affection lead people to seek mates and reproduce. Evolutionary psychologists consider human emotions to be best adapted to the life our ancestors led in nomadic foraging bands. 1995 / 2000. Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, Volume 1: Theories of Emotion, presents broad theoretical perspectives representing all major schools of thought in the study of the nature of emotion. Emotions as Corrupting • Myth of the Phaedrus: The soul is a chariot drawn by two winged horses – White horse: spirit or will – Black horse: passions or emotions – Charioteer: reason • If the will follows the dictates of reason, then the chariot flies successfully, but if it follows the passions, it is doomed. Natural selection has shaped emotion programs to signal their activation, or not, on an emotion by emotion basis. Gould, S.J. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Autonomic nervous system activities distinguishes between emotions. For researchers seeking to understand organic design, natural selection is the most important component to consider, because it is the only force in nature that can build functional organization into organisms. Ekman, P. Consequently, the key to unlocking and activating many complex evolved decision and evaluation programs was chained to the present: to being in an environment displaying specific perceptually detectable cues and cue constellations (sweetness, predators, running sores, emotion expressions). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fredrickson, B. Those alterations that improve the machine's ability to solve reproduction-promoting tasks (compared to the earlier model design feature) will increase their own frequency over the generations, until (usually) they become universally incorporated into the species design. The benefit gained by inhibiting release of an expression on a case by case basis must be large enough to offset the cost of such computations for selection to favor the evolution of such regulatory circuits. In P. M. Neidenthal & S. Kitayama (Eds. Puzzles of consciousness and phenomenology. According to evolutionary psychologists, the human brain evolved in response to specific problems that early humans faced. According to the James–Lange theory, we experience emotions (such as fear, sadness, and happiness) only after physiological arousal (such as the fight-or-flight response) has occurred. Computational programs often have large numbers of open parameters, allowing their expression in adults to be highly variable, and until the mapping of the emotion programs is done, and tested cross-culturally (as Ekman and his associates did for facial expression), the range of variation will not be known. Cognitive and physiological antecedents of threat and challenge appraisal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. It is important to recognize that the evolutionary past frames the experienced present, because these situation-detecting algorithms provide the dimensions and core elements out of which many cross-culturally recurring representations of the world are built. (5) Memory processes are directed to new retrieval tasks: Where was that tree I climbed before? If evolution has created a multitude Individuals often behave as if they are in the grip of an emotion, while denying they are feeling that emotion. Information-processing programs - food preferences and aversions, or rules for inferring emotions from facial expressions - acquired one set of design features rather than many others because the retained features better computed solutions to these information-processing problems. For this reason, there should be mechanisms that assign hedonic and other motivationally informative values to acts (e.g., "dangerous", "painful", "effort-consuming", "informative", "fun", "socially approved"), tallied as intermediate weights in decision processes. In your description use either the James-Lange or Cannon-Bard theory of emotion to support your position. Such regulatory variables may include measures of: how valuable to the individual a mate is, a child is, one's own life is, etc. If the brain evolved as a system of information-processing relations, then emotions are, in an evolutionary sense, best understood as information-processing relations - i.e., programs - with naturally selected functions. A design feature will cause its own spread over generations if it has the consequence of solving adaptive problems such as detecting predators, deterring sexual rivals, helping sisters, or ejecting toxin-laden food. Lazarus, R. & Lazarus, B. 1985. The theory of evolution lends itself to several areas where psychological adaptations must occur in order for species to develop. Are the creaks footsteps? Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear and rage. 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