Emotions
TLDR: Emotional skill-building is neglected, and we lack mainstream language to distinguish different aspects of emotion, such as emotional components and emotional landmarks.
Prerequisites: None, but I reference The Onion Test
Having and dealing with emotions is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. But despite this primacy, emotions are remarkably poorly understood, and emotional skills are not usually something that people deliberately study and practice, in either childhood or adulthood.
That’s not to say that emotions are neglected, exactly. The arts and broader humanities, in theory at least, provide a lot of important surface area on which to explore emotion and become familiar with the nuances of the inner world. It’s also pretty common to engage with material directly addressing emotion as a child. Shows like Sesame Street or films like Inside Out are great resources for young people to learn to recognize and respond to their feelings.
But, as one might expect, the stories we tell to children are oversimplifications — ones that often fail the onion test, and thus lead to pernicious misconceptions. And while art can be great, it alone cannot provide the space and resources to properly learn and grow.
As a result, we suffer. Nearly a third of Americans (just as an example1) report having been depressed at some point in their life, with similar numbers of people dealing with anxiety disorders. Less common, but still significant, are serious anger issues or other forms of emotional dysregulation. Mental health is downstream of many factors, and some of these cases are doubtless best framed as “brain chemistry” issues in need of physical medicine, but my guess is that a large majority can be significantly helped by training and inner work.
Those fortunate enough to have resources can hire therapists, read books, go to meditation retreats, and generally prioritize picking up the skills to understand and deal with emotions well. But for many, especially in adulthood, this is a difficult thing to add on to a life that’s already a struggle. Being proactive, especially on the societal level, is thus vital. Each conversation about emotion that brings additional nuance and wisdom to the mainstream is extremely valuable, especially if it reaches young people. So let’s dive in and try to get a basic handle on the subject!
Human Universals
Let’s begin our investigation by considering “universal human experiences.” In this context, the word “universal” doesn’t mean the experience applies to absolutely everyone. Rather, it means that it is common across all cultures, places, and times.
For instance, trichromatic vision — seeing color in a 3-dimensional space — is universal. Whether you live in Papua New Guinea or Canada, the people around you mostly see the same space of colors, built out of color-sensing cone cells specialized for detecting red, green, and blue light. Some individuals, however, are colorblind, and can’t distinguish as many shades, while at least one woman is a known tetrachromat who can see even more colors than most of us.
A nearby example of something that is not universal, by contrast, is how the space of colors is divided and categorized. English speakers, for example, are likely to describe each of these shades as “blue:”
People from China might use the word “qīng” (青) for all of those colors, but would also use that word to refer to shades that we’d describe as “green.” The word “lán” (藍) can be used to specify blue that’s not green, but lán decidedly does not apply to cyan.
Language, another example of something that’s centrally non-universal, presents a particularly tricky problem when comparing the subjective experiences of people from different cultures. While we can compare “blue” with “qīng” by getting people from both parts of the world to look at the same object, there’s no clear way to get two people to feel exactly the same emotion.
We might try to tell a story meant to convey a certain experience, such as anger, and then guess that the word someone uses to describe how they feel hearing that story as meaning “anger.” But this assumes that they can feel angry in the first place. What if half the population (men/women, perhaps), due to some quirk of nurture or nature, never feels something which is common to the other half?
Even in the domain of something as objective as color, many people don’t realize they’re colorblind! They assume that “red” and “green” are different words for the same general shade, much like “sky blue” vs “cyan.” How can we be sure that something similar isn’t happening in the realm of emotion? Are “joy” and “happiness” synonyms or distinct states? What about “frustration” and “anger”? “Fear” and “anxiety”? “Jealousy” and “envy”? How would you even know?
The First Axis: Arousal (SNS vs PSNS)
But while it might seem like emotion is entirely subjective, we can find some footing by looking at physiological indicators, such as heart rate. While it’s certainly possible to have an elevated heart rate without having an emotional experience, if our subjective experience correlates with that indicator, then the presence of that indicator in another person is at least weak evidence that their experience is similar.
And when we look in this direction, we find an obvious and strong candidate for one of the emotional foundations: arousal.2 Being highly aroused is connected to being awake, hot, alert, active, and stressed. It’s connected to the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), largely located in the brainstem and spinal cord. Physical indicators of high arousal include increased heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, muscle tension, pupil dilation, goosebumps, stomach/belly tension, dry mouth, and fast reaction times. Interestingly, high arousal is associated with both dilated and constricted blood vessels in the skin, leading to blushing and paleness, depending on the specific situation.
But arousal is a dimension, not a distinct mode. Just as it’s possible to have high arousal, we can consider low arousal, often brought about by the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS). When someone’s arousal is low, they tend to be sleepy, cold, calm, sedentary, and relaxed. Physical indicators include deep breathing, obliviousness, slow reaction times, and increased appetite.
Arousal is merely one part of what it’s like to be a human being, of course, and neither high nor low arousal states should be taken to be “emotions” per se. Rather, arousal is an axis of psychological experience, and serves as a primary component of emotion. For instance, “excited,” “surprised,” “anxious,” and “infuriated” all share the property of being high-arousal.
The Second Axis: Valence
High arousal states can be pleasant, such as when playing sports, or unpleasant and unhelpful, such as insomnia brought on by anxiety around geopolitics. And the same goes for low arousal — “calm and cozy” is pleasant, while “apathetic and bored” is not. This leads us naturally to the psychological axis of valence — how (overall) good/appealing/pleasant versus bad/repulsive/awful things are.
I put valence after arousal because arousal is much more physiologically obvious, and maybe evolved first. But both emotional foundations likely evolved well before vertebrates, and likely exist in some form in nearly all animals.3 Even nematode worms seem to have persistent internal states that reflect a sense that things are good or bad. After encountering negative stimuli, like strong pain, animals show a lasting desire to change environments (or hunker-down/hide), and retreat from (or fight) other animals. These behavioral tendencies last for many minutes after the initial pain has faded, and are shared with various other forms of negative experiences, including hunger, heat, cold, and so on. Likewise, getting food or other positive things can lead to a persistent desire to stay in the same location and approach/investigate/tolerate other animals.
The mechanisms of valence are also remarkably well understood (at least compared to much of neuroscience). The neurons in our brains are regularly being exposed to serotonin at a certain rate. After a genetically-coded positive event occurs, such as eating, “reward” circuits increase the level of serotonin, leading to a general sense of optimism on the order of a few minutes to a couple hours,4 depending on how good it was. Likewise, when something bad happens the serotonin-production slows down for a while, creating a widespread sense of pessimism.
All psychological systems are interconnected, but just as valence is distinct from arousal, it’s also distinct from motivation. The neural pathways that control aversion and desire are in some sense trained by the flow of serotonin, but are mostly mediated by a different neurotransmitter: dopamine. Where serotonin circuitry is involved in tracking rewards, dopamine is involved in predicting rewards. Unlike serotonin, increased dopamine levels don’t (immediately) produce feelings of satisfaction and optimism. Animals that get a surge of dopamine stay focused on that expected payoff until it becomes an obtained payoff, and only then does the primary change in valence usually kick in.5
In theory, these two systems (motivation and valence) are supposed to be closely coupled, but because the dopamine circuitry is particularly sensitive to surprises (good and bad) for the purposes of learning, the two can become surprisingly disconnected in some circumstances. Some particularly visible examples of this kind of disfunction are anhedonia and addiction, where a person might have a strong desire to repeatedly engage in a specific behavior, only to find it unsatisfying or unpleasant most of the time.
Before moving on, it’s important to note that (like all biology) the specific neuro-physiological details here are an oversimplification, especially as they apply to emotion. It’s often useful to have a fake framework to help get a handle on the basics, but one should not forget that there are deeper layers to the onion. (For instance, cortisol levels are simultaneously relevant to valence and to arousal via the HPA axis. And we haven’t even touched on opioids or cannabinoids!) In general, nothing is simple in biology, and the emotional framework I’m presenting here should be understood to be somewhat fake.
What Even Is an Emotion
Arousal and valence are useful to talk about because they’re points of common agreement in the contentious field of affective science. Despite its primacy in our lives and over a hundred and fifty years of study, there is remarkably little scientific consensus about how to broadly conceptualize emotion, which emotions exist, and whether experiences like lust count as emotions.
This is, to some degree, a failure of language, I think. Consider how we might choose any of the following as a definition for “emotion,” but also note that each of these are meaningfully distinct concepts:
A subjective, internal experience that is hard to locate in any particular part of the body and which can be brought on without specific external influence.
A broad psychological state that influences general behavior.
A location along a specific dimension of broad psychological variation.
An evolved pattern of changes to neurochemistry and other bodily hormones lasting more than a second and less than a day.
An evolved pattern of socially recognized facial expressions and other body language. This definition could further be subdivided according to whether the pattern must be a human universal or whether it can be culture-specific.
A subconscious appraisal of an individual’s overall situation, manifest through subconscious influences on the body.
A learned pattern of subconscious reaction, simultaneously influencing many parts of the body and mind.
Though I haven’t surveyed a wide range of scholars who work in the field, my guess is that almost all of them would recognize that each of these exist to some degree, and that the word “emotion” is at least somewhat connected to each. In fact, a common “definition” for emotion is a kitchen-sink approach that throws all these ideas (and more!) together into “a complex interplay.” Which is one way to use language, I suppose, but it doesn’t really provide much practical insight or handholds for precise communication.
When we fail to distinguish, we end up in fights built on miscommunication. For instance, are emotions universal human experiences, or unique and personal? Are you responsible for your emotional reaction or not? These questions create fierce disagreement, and likely more than would be necessary if we gained a broader vocabulary to distinguish things like emotional behaviors, emotional subcomponents, and the emotional gestalt which includes subconscious appraisal.
Emotional Landmarks
One of the most useful applications of the concept of emotions is to efficiently communicate our state to others. It’s hard to know what’s going on in other people, and body language only goes so far. From this angle we want words for familiar patterns of being that are shared between speaker and listener, and which focus on internal experiences that are important to be aware of. Words like “sad” and “calm” are useful here, but are also not meaningfully distinct from “cold” and “hungry.”
It’s the need for emotional landmarks — shared points of reference for describing our inner worlds — that likely drives many researchers to attempt to categorize emotion. And it similarly explains much of the emphasis on universality. If “triumph” is a human universal, it is useful to study and understand so that future people can more easily identify it and understand what is implied about someone else who’s experiencing that emotion. And indeed, there are a set of universal patterns which are highly useful for talking about how we are. For instance, babies smile in familiar situations, indicating joy, even if they’re born blind. Similar facial indicators exist for fear, disgust, wrath, sadness, and surprise — the six emotions identified as human universals in the 1970s. (For more on sadness and crying, I recommend this essay.)
But despite their utility for communication, emotion classification schemes have produced a lot of confusion and controversy due to three major misconceptions:
1. There are far more than six points of reference when describing internal state. Even researchers who are fond of a narrow conception of emotion will usually concede that there are at least a dozen “core” emotions and many times that many “secondary” emotions. And as long as the goal is to communicate internal state, I think it’s useful to consider words like “tired,” “focused,” “confused,” and “bloated” as landmarks in the same category.
2. The inner world is not fully describable using emotional landmarks, even if we were able to definitively name all of them. Anyone with significant practice meditating knows that the true state of body and mind is subtle, quantitative, and dynamic. We respond differently depending on our memories, skills, and the particular balance of various chemical and neurological systems. The use of emotion words is an efficient starting point for understanding each other, not a precise description of how we are.
3. It isn’t relevant whether an emotional landmark is universal, only whether the listener knows what’s being referenced. Universality is a nice baseline, but all that really matters for communication is that the speaker and listener both know what’s being referenced. And as we discussed earlier, just because something is common across cultures, does not mean it is universal across individuals. Trusting universality too much runs the risk of alienating people who fall outside of the norm, such as those with autism or other forms of neurodivergence. In general, specificity is good, even if most people won’t understand — the goal usually is to share internal awareness with friends, family, or even just to one’s self. I think that this feature is part of what makes internet memes so popular.
Utopian Emotional Training
In a better world, I think it would be normal and expected for people to deliberately study emotion as teenagers, as well as children, and to practice various emotional skills. I think having at least a hundred hours of meditation practice by adulthood seems like a good place to start, perhaps with a ritualized (but mostly secular), week-long meditation retreat around age 16, with the goal of unlocking at least one rūpa jhāna. Meditation is hardly the end-all-be-all of emotional work, but taking the time to learn to quiet the mind and look inward is an important step towards understanding one’s emotions and broader human condition.
Beyond meditation practice, I think Utopian children deliberately train skills of emotional suppression and release. There is a time and place for setting aside feelings and thereby gaining self-control, denying panic and rage through burying emotion, especially in high-stakes situations. Having the skill to take a breather, rather than react reflexively all the time, can save many a relationship. But conversely, many people who learn to suppress their emotions fail to learn the complementary skill of releasing that pent-up energy and returning to a normal baseline in a healthy way. In general, feelings need to be felt.
In order to practice suppression and release, young people need dramatic settings where they are encouraged to play with emotions in a safe way, such as by consuming intense art, doing theater exercises/roleplaying, and especially by playing games, including physical sports6 and social/party games. These controlled environments allow adolescents to grapple with feelings like rage, loss, and triumph while learning healthy ways to process and express them. Much effort is similarly put into learning how to tolerate and engage with strong emotions in others, including deliberately practicing listening and empathy skills.
Underneath practice, young people gradually learn to understand the nature of emotion, including all the various sub-concepts contained within that broad umbrella. They are taught, for example, about how their mind contains multiple pathways by which they see faces — the normal, potentially conscious pathway going through their visual cortex, but also a subcortical pathway through their amygdala7 that processes faces extremely rapidly and unconsciously. It is this alternative route that is primarily responsible for gut-level reactions such as fear and cuteness. They learn, through both meditation and through instruction, that their inner worlds contain much more than the simple emotional landmarks that they learned when they were very young, and that exploring and communicating the full extent of their emotional landscapes will be complex, and unique to them.
Perhaps most importantly, Utopians learn that their non-conscious mind is often giving them useful information that is worth processing and listening to. While our emotions often come from parts of the mind that lack a complete, nuanced view of the world, they are often vital in telling us important truths, such as what we want out of life, or who to trust. Utopians have a better awareness of how the “emotional” parts of the mind are often smarter than our world gives them credit for.
A pernicious misconception about emotion that I once had was that some health issues, such as depression, are partly caused by affluence. Some of my error stemmed from how mental health researchers tend to be based in western countries, leading to statistics like I gave, above. Issues like depression and anxiety are also often understood differently in other countries, manifesting as alcoholism or going unnoticed, for example. I do think the USA tends to be marginally more mentally unwell than some other parts of the western world, but this is likely in spite of affluence, rather than because of American’s wealthy lifestyles.
While arousal is connected to sexual arousal, it is importantly distinct — too much arousal leads to stress, not orgasm.
This essay originally contained a significant mistake: connecting valence to the specific evolution of the limbic system, which didn’t happen until well after the evolution of vertebrates. Big thanks to Gleb Tsipursky for pointing me to the excellent book A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett, which I highly recommend for an accessible expansion on some of the ideas presented in this essay.
Very transient elevations of serotonin levels can last mere tens-of-seconds. The precise duration is impossible to say exactly, even for a specific event, as the levels gradually fade back to baseline.
While I stand by the idea that the primary valence change doesn’t usually kick in until the game is done, so to speak, it’s important to note that serotonin levels can, in fact, increase in anticipation, not just upon reaching some desired state. Biology is messy!
Notably, unlike our world, adolescent sports in Utopia are often explicitly structured to allow for productive engagement with emotions, rather than relegating such learning to incidental interactions with a coach.
Again, this may be an oversimplification. There’s good evidence to suggest that there is evolved/biological/innate/unconscious processing of faces, but cognitive science doesn’t yet have a consensus around the story of how that works, exactly.
FYI, I just read "A brief history of intelligence" by Max Bennett, and he suggests lampreys have valence states. Otherwise, fully agreed 😄