The Human Genome Project Book

Ekman writes about "the" emotions. These are anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, happiness.

While his focus is on universal facial expressions, Ekman has a lot to say about emotions. They "can go on for minutes." Anything beyond a few seconds or minutes is a mood. Beyond that they are a personality type. Emotions have specific triggers, but moods "just happen" for unknown reasons. Emotions motivate our lives and we "organize ourselves" to maximize positive emotions and to minimize negative emotions. Emotions are responses to outside triggers. For example, "we are gripped" by an inappropriate emotion when we are furious "about having been insulted in public."

Emotions evolved for evolutionary usefulness, Ekman states. Sadness and despair "may bring help from others." But many of our modern-day emotions are not really emotions. We have to learn that a car bearing down on us directly is harmful, and we move out of the way because of this knowledge. It's not fear that makes us move, but a learned response. Anger is a dangerous emotion and justified only when lives are threatened and there's no other way to prevent injury. Sex and hunger have specific locations in the body so they are not emotions. Hatred and resentment are not emotions because they last too long. But they are not moods either, so Ekman calls resentment an "emotional attitude" and hatred an "emotional attachment" along with romantic and parental love. Love is not an emotion because "love endures" and parents "never stop worrying about their kids."

Startle is a physical reflex, but not an emotion. The core of fear is the possibility of pain, but pain is not an emotion. It's too specific and we know exactly where it hurts, unlike anger, fear, and sadness which reside in some undefined part of the body. Empathy and compassion are not emotions because we actually feel what another is feeling but the other's feeling is not really our emotion. Rather than emotion pure and simple, Ekman calls empathy and compassion "compassionate empathy," and "cognitive empathy" and "emotional empathy." Disgust is a negative emotion because it doesn't feel good. There are sixteen enjoyable emotions including a few with foreign names. Jealousy is not an emotion. It is an emotional scene or plot involving three actors. Finally, it is not until the last chapter that Ekman defines emotions in a summary way. Emotion is a feeling, it's brief, it's something that matters, and it happens to us and "not chosen by us." When in the "grip of an emotion," we can't reappraise, and an emotion's facial signals are clear. Ekman is sure that shame, guilt, and embarassment are emotions, even though they don't give off visual signs.

Ekman's view of emotions raises numerous questions and issues. Anger, sadness, fear and happiness are emotions if they occur in flashes. If they last longer, they are something else. It's difficult to imagine a "flash" of happiness, particularly when the author gives sixteen variations of this emotion that includes physiological states lasting for more than a few minutes. These longer-lasting variations include, for example, contentment, ecstasy, "fiero" (satisfaction for a hard task accomplished), gratitude, and schadenfreude. Emotions motivate our lives, the author says, and we "organize ourselves" to seek positive emotions and to minimize the negative ones. But how does this work if emotions are triggered responses? Ekman uses fear and anger to illustrate triggered responses and most of the examples he uses in the book are these two clearly reactive emotions.

"Happiness" is a large emotional concept that Ekman says we seek to maximize. But if we seek happiness, how is that a reactive, response? Ekman has us as passive beings, waiting to respond when the right stimulus comes along. How is that "seeking" happiness? For that matter, why do we seek to minimize "the negative" emotions? Presumably, we care enough to want to minimize negative emotions so that raises the question of what is "care" all about and how does "care" relate to our emotional makeup? Ekman says that pain is not an emotion because it's a physical pain. But we also know that "sadness," the flip side of happiness, is psychologically painful. We know sadness is a pain (per Buddha among others), and we know that happiness is "pleasurable." If happiness is an emotion, why is not the pain that comes from not getting what we want or from getting what we don't want?

Ekman states that an insult is a triggering event for anger, but why does the self react to an insult? What is it about the self that cares enough to be angry? In "Descent," Darwin is clear enough that not everything in our makeup has to have an evolutionary function. Ekman tries to find a function for sadness and despair (inducing help from others) but these could be and are likely to be byproducts of a self that didn't get what it wanted or having lost what it had. A good part of life is, simply, a bummer and it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Ekman's example of moving away from a car bearing down on a person is interesting. He says it is not fear but a learned response since we didn't have cars back in our reptilian days when fear originated. True, but back in the day our ancestors probably had rocks falling from cliffs or some predator charging them and the reaction was likely the same as getting out of the way of the car: a fear-based reaction. And it was probably quite reflexive and preceded by a startle.

It's easy to focus on the obvious problems with anger, and Ekman refers to "His Holiness, the Dalai Lama," for his perspective on this and other emotions. In limiting the appropriateness of anger to just one, narrow example (referred to previously), Ekman is removing one of the primary tools for an individual to defend its interests. Done well, anger signals to the other that there's a problem, in contrast to burying it and having it come out in other ways. There's something to be said for honest reactions without insincerity. For one things, you know there's a problem that needs to be addressed. For that matter, Ekman's takes too much of his understanding of emotions from the Dalai Lama whose understanding of emotions comes from a distinct religious viewpoint that works only if one subscribes to that perspective (Mindfulness, Oneness, Deliverence) and devotes years to it.

Sex and hunger and physical pain have specific locations in the body but why is that a criterion for a non-emotion? We feel Ekman's seven listed emotions in a body-wide way. But all are FELT. Hatred, resentment, jealousy, parental and romantic love are also felt, and feeling is one of his definitions of an emotion (disgust is an emotion because "it doesn't feel good"). Regarding feeling, those who have felt jealousy know that they are in the grip of something far more powerful than three actors trying to work something out. Those who love their parents or children or partner know they are in the grips of something powerful, even if it transcends Ekman's brief moment in time criterion. "Love endures" Ekman says, and so does "worrying" about kids. But what is worry if not a low-grade, chronic fear. It can't be a mood because there's a specific source for the worry, and it's hard to imagine "worrying about the kids" as a personality type. Despite Ekman's rewording exercise, compassion and empathy are just alternative words for "sympathy" as Hume uses that term which is regarded by most as an emotion of some sort. What difference does it make if the other has "the emotion" that we feel, if we are feeling it as if it is our own?

All in all, Ekman delimits his subject matter too severely. He is really after the universal facial expressions. All of those feeling states and behavioral expressions that do not give off a universal facial expression are chucked. They are non-emotions. Rewording and reconceptualizing is not helpful and do not resonate. Darwin viewed emotional life more holistically. There are gradations of feeling relating to cognitive control - ranging from reflex to simple emotions, to complex emotions, to free choice under cognitive direction in the service of some internal need, and gradations in intensity. Ekman's seven emotions are closely aligned with those that Darwin's gave in his "Expressions" book, but Darwin's book was about those emotions that had their counterparts in animals and had a universal expression in humans. He was not limiting the discussion about what is and what is not an emotion. Ekman's seven emotions are likely a small subset - those with universal facial expression - of a much larger story about our emotional life.