The Story of Psychology (94 page)

Either because this was so recent a development or because the subject is so heterogeneous, emotion researchers and theorists found it difficult to agree on a definition of what they were studying. Ordinary people have no such difficulty; even a child of three knows what he means when he says he is happy, sad, or afraid—it’s how he feels. But research psychologists were looking much deeper; their definitions of emotion included causes, physiological concomitants, and consequences, and may strike the layman as ponderous and abstruse. An example:

But neither this nor any of the dozens of then-extant professional definitions of emotions was generally accepted by psychologists. As the authors of one journal article commented in 1984, “Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition.” Even in 2004, long after emotion had re-emerged as a key topic in psychology, the editor of a book of research articles on the subject said, in his introduction, “There is, at present, no consensus about what the emotions are… [or] any good single definition of emotion.”
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And although most psychologists said that there is a handful of basic emotions and that the many others are derived from or related to these, there was no agreement as to what the basic emotions are. Some experts included “desire,” others did not; some included “surprise,” others specifically excluded “startle,” which most people would consider a form of surprise; most psychotherapists used “affect” to mean either conscious or unconscious emotional states, but some academic psychologists said that sensory likes and dislikes are affects, emotions are not.

Seeking to filter out the essentials, in 1984 Robert Plutchik, a noted emotion researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, asked volunteers to rate a long list of pairs of emotion-related words in terms of their similarity. Factor-analysis of their ratings showed
which emotions had the greatest degree of overlap with others and thus were the most central. Plutchik concluded that there are eight basic emotions: joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. Other common emotions, he found, are milder or stronger versions of these; for example, grief is sadness at an extreme, and pensiveness is sadness at a low level.
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It’s as good a list as exists, yet though it has often been cited, it did not become the standard among emotion researchers—nor did any other such list.

And there was not yet—nor is there today—a generally accepted theory of the emotions. Some theorists stress the causes of emotions, others their behavioral consequences; some say emotions consist of visceral states, others of higher mental processes, and still others of autonomic and central nervous system phenomena. The proliferation of theoretical ideas is typical of a science in its early, exploratory years; by 1985 one report said that there were roughly a hundred distinguishable theories of the emotions and that even when similar ones were grouped, there were still eighteen groups or types of theory.
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But one can group all those theories into three categories: those that focus on the physical changes accompanying an emotion, such as increased heart rate, skin temperature, palmar sweating, and activation of areas of the brain; those that center on how an emotion feels—the subjective experience that we seek when we ask someone, “How are you feeling?”; and those that are concerned with what people believe or understand about why they feel as they do.
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The studies of the emotions throughout the twentieth century to the present essentially followed this very track: The early inquiries centered on somatic theory, the next group on ANS (autonomic nervous system) and CNS (central nervous system) aspects of emotions and motivation, and the third on the cognitive or thought processes involved.

All this may make emotion research sound remote from real life, and it is true that psychologists are interested in lofty questions about the emotions: what functions they serve, whether they are innate or acquired, whether they are universal or culturally variable, and how they are related to changes in the body and to mental processes. But psychologists are also interested in an eminently practical question: How are emotions related to behavior? Most of them agree that an emotion is not just a signal to the creature that some object or event is relevant to its needs; it is the means through which motivation becomes purposive action.
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Thus the ancient question—Why do we do what we do?—has
become central to modern psychology, and the emotions are now seen as a crucial part of the answer. The study of emotion and motivation began with philosophic speculations, in the scientific era turned first to the investigation of physical needs, then to that of nervous system functions, later to that of cognitive processes, and finally to that of brain activation. It is a paradigm of the evolution of psychology itself.

What sort of person would starve a captive rat for two days, then put it in a box with a food pellet at the far end, which the rat cannot reach without scurrying across an electrically charged grid that shocks its feet? What sort of person would put a mother rat at one end of that box and her babies at the other?

A sadist, you might think. But Carl J. Warden was a very decent young man and not in the least sadistic; he was simply a typical experimental psychologist of the behaviorist era. The time was 1931, the place Columbia University, the apparatus his invention, the Columbia Obstruction Box, by means of which he was seeking to measure, as objectively as possible, the strength of two sources of motivation, the hunger drive and the maternal drive.

His data, he hoped, would validate the simple hypothesis that the greater the rat’s need, the greater its drive or motivation to allay that need. The measure of the need for food was simply how long the rat had been without any; the measure of the resulting drive was how frequently the rat would cross the electric grid for another morsel of food. The experiment proved Warden’s hypothesis correct up to the third day of deprivation; after that the rat became weakened and less driven to cross the grid. Motivation research could hardly have been more objective. (The trials with the mother and her babies yielded less satisfying results; the absence of the pups did not create as clear-cut a need as hunger.)
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In Warden’s report, as in other behaviorist writing, there was no talk of instinct. Behaviorists believed that almost everything a higher-order creature (like a mammal) does is the result of learning, and they viewed instinct theory as reactionary. By the 1920s they were calling the goal-directed energy of motivated behavior “drive” rather than instinct. Robert S. Woodworth, who proposed the concept of drive in 1918, said that although organisms possess innate mechanisms for such activities as seeking and devouring food, these lie idle until activated by a drive that
directs the creature toward goals it has learned will allay the need. Behaviorists found drive a comfortable concept. Moreover, unlike instinct, it was one they could experimentally generate, measure, and modify by conditioning in the effort to determine the laws of motivation.

One of those hypotheses—a rather obvious one—was that the stronger a physiological need and the greater the drive to satisfy it, the more activity the creature will manifest. To test this hypothesis, in 1922 a Johns Hopkins University psychologist named Curt Richter mounted cages on springs and automatically recorded the movements of rats. Gratifyingly, the traces showed that hungry ones prowled around more than fed ones. In 1925 at the University of North Carolina, J. F. Dashiell used a checkerboard maze for the same purpose. He counted the number of squares rats entered and found that hungry ones explored more squares than fed ones. In 1931 Warden’s Columbia Obstruction Box was a still better method of measuring the same drive.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a good deal of such experimentation explored other primary drives, including those originating in the needs for fluids, oxygen, sex, a comfortable temperature, and the avoidance of pain. In 1943 these physiological aspects of motivation were merged in an elegantly simple theory by Clark Hull, the mathematical behaviorist, who asserted that all drives seek the same fundamental satisfaction—relief from the unpleasant tension created by a biological need—and that the ideal state sought by all creatures is the tranquillity that comes from the satisfaction of all drives.
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Nearly half a century later, ethological research would indeed show that many animals are torpid for a while when they have filled their bodily needs; a lion, after a big meal, may lie in the same spot for twelve hours at a stretch.
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But many forms of behavior do not fit within the borders of Hull’s theory. A dog will obey commands not to allay a biological need but to please its master; a hamster will run inside an exercise wheel for no apparent reason; a rat will learn to press a bar for a drop of saccharine-flavored water that has no nutritive value. To account for such behavior in accord with drive-reduction theory, behaviorists decided there were such things as “acquired” or “secondary” drives and motives. These arise from nonphysiological needs but gain their motive power by association with primary drives.
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The dog, for instance, learns to obey its master because at first it is rewarded by food and approval; eventually it develops a drive for approval, and approval becomes the reward.

Yet this jerry-built repair of drive theory could not account for some other kinds of behavior. It could not explain the hamster’s running or
the rat’s working to get saccharine water. And unless “secondary drive” was defined so broadly as to include behavior not linked by conditioning to a physiological need, it could not explain why monkeys in one experiment pushed open a window again and again (it remained open only for thirty seconds) in order to watch a toy electric train running, or why monkeys in another experiment repeatedly unlatched a battery of hooks and latches even after they learned that doing so opened no doors and yielded no reward.
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Or why a music lover goes to a concert, a reformer labors to change the political system, a theologian strives to justify the ways of God to man, a penitent lashes his back with chains, a mountain climber scales the Matterhorn, or a psychologist investigates the phenomenon of motivation.

Hull’s idea that drive reduction is the goal of all motivated behavior was further challenged by a much-publicized experiment in sensory deprivation conducted at McGill University in 1957. Volunteers, wearing padded mitts and translucent goggles that admitted light but no images, spent several days lying on a soft foam-rubber pad in a small chamber where the monotonous hum of an air conditioner masked all other sounds. (They were allowed out briefly from time to time to eat, relieve themselves, and be tested.) Most of them had looked forward to a long, pleasant rest but soon found the absence of almost all sensory stimulation disagreeable and disorienting. They had difficulty thinking coherently, their moods fluctuated between hilarity and irritability, their performance on standard tests of mental ability deteriorated markedly, a few of them experienced hallucinations, and nearly all asked to be released from the experiment after a few days.
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Clearly, many kinds of behavior are motivated by complex needs generated by the autonomic and central nervous systems and the mind; this was what emotion and motivation researchers had been ignoring.

Over the years, however, as researchers explored the complexities of conflicting motivations that could not all be accounted for by internal drives or needs, they recognized that some behavior is motivated by “incentives”—external stimuli or rewards not directly related to biological needs. Many people will stay up late watching a movie although they need, and know they need, to go to sleep; many will keep nibbling canapés at a party to be social, even though they feel overfull. Eventually, in 1989 and 2001, the British psychologist Michael Apter advanced a “reversal theory” of “metamotivation”: We can switch from one motivational state to its equally rewarding opposite, but can never be in a state where both pertain. For instance, we are in an achievement
oriented motivational state when working on some important project, but may at some point reverse to an enjoyment-motivated state to take a break and have a snack; both states gratify needs but in opposite ways. Apter’s team asked parachute jumpers about their feelings just before and after jumping: In both conditions the reward was one of great arousal, but before jumping the arousal was due to great anxiety, afterward to great pleasure.
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But now we must get back to our story.

Although behaviorists could observe and measure the external activities associated with motivation, they could neither observe nor measure physical indices of emotion. A rat could not tell them what it was feeling, and though a human being could, they regarded such information as unverifiable and scientifically valueless.

Not all psychologists, however, felt bound by the behaviorist prescription for acceptable evidence; some were willing to accept a human being’s identification of what he or she was feeling. But even they, during the early decades of the century, were interested chiefly in the physiological changes accompanying the emotions the subjects said they felt and which, the researchers believed, were the source of those emotions.

This theory, as we saw earlier, had been advanced by William James in 1884 and almost simultaneously by Carl Lange, a Danish physiologist. The James-Lange theory held that—contrary to our impression that some fact excites an emotion in us and this gives rise to bodily changes—an exciting fact brings about bodily changes, and our perception of those changes is the emotion. (As James put it, we meet a bear and tremble, and because we tremble feel afraid.)