Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
The Story of Psychology (99 page)
This still left unanswered the question of why we so often experience emotions that mislead us, are useless, or are damaging. Nico Frijda of the University of Amsterdam, a leading emotion researcher, offered several answers, among them that dysfunctional emotions sometimes result from a faulty evaluation of the situation, sometimes from contingencies that are more than one can cope with, and sometimes are emergency reactions in situations where slower and more thoughtful evaluation would serve us better.
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Psychosomatic research has shown, too, that when we cannot escape from or take action against a threatening or tense situation, our emotions are no guide to action but a source of pain and illness.
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The hostage held by fanatics, the front-line soldier, the terminal cancer patient, cannot benefit from most of their emotions but only be damaged by them. Finally, when we have opposing or incompatible desires, or desires that are in conflict with social constraints, we experience emotions that are pathological.
In recent years many researchers have been mining narrow lodes, not making large illuminating discoveries but adding bits and pieces of all
sorts to an emerging multicausal—or, to put it more candidly, patch-work—theory of emotion and motivation. Their work ranges widely from the somatic to the neural, the cognitive, and elsewhere. What follows is a hodgepodge of latter-day examples; feel free to sample as much or as little as you like.
—Some researchers have explored how specific neurotransmitters influence emotion and motivation. The molecules of cholecystokinins, for instance, plug up certain neural receptors in the GI tract and the CNS, and thereby affect appetite; obese men, given doses of the chemical, eat less.
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—Others have sought to link specific emotions to particular parts of the body. In one such study, 172 volunteers named the parts in which they felt different emotions: shame mostly in the face, fear in many areas but especially the anal region, disgust in the stomach and throat, and so on. But the researchers did not feel that this meant the emotions were based primarily on bodily experience; rather, they saw the somatic information as part of a composite in which awareness, cognitive appraisal, and body feeling all interacted.
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—In seeking the sources of empathy, researchers have observed children over time to see when precursor emotions appear and develop. They have found that an infant will cry when it hears another infant cry, apparently out of a primitive form of empathy (the same infant will not cry if it hears a tape recording of its own crying). And as we saw earlier, a child nearing one year will react with distress to the sight and sound of another person in pain, but at two or three will try to comfort or even help the other person. The reasonable conclusion: Compassion is a product of personality development and socialization, building on the empathetic emotional foundation.
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—Antonio Damasio has distinguished between
emotional states
(bodily symptoms of an emotion) and
emotional feelings
(cognitive awareness of the symptoms). This far, he sounds like William James, but he goes beyond James by saying that emotional states and emotional feelings can be unconscious and that the physiological experience of a strong emotion, once learned, becomes a
somatic marker—
an automatic guide to swift action in emergencies and to swift decision-making. To prove the existence of somatic markers, Damasio tested patients who had ventromedial
frontal lobe damage and compared them with control subjects: Both reacted to an innately alarming stimulus (a sudden loud sound) with increased skin conductance, but when they were shown pictures of disaster scenes or mutilations (stimuli which should produce a learned emotional response), the control subjects showed a sharp spike in skin conductance; the patients with ventromedial cortical damage showed none. What the patients had learned was no longer connected to their somatic systems.
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—Other research, related to Damasio’s, compared the startle responses of patients with damage to the amygdala (as mentioned earlier, a small area of the medial temporal lobe involved in emotional processing) with those of normal people. People in both groups were startled by a sudden loud noise, but when the noise occurred in the context of a dark, empty street, the control subjects showed a much stronger startle response and the amygdala-damaged patients did not. Yet, most curiously, the patients were able to say that the dark street stimulus was the far more arousing one; they knew it was arousing—but were unaroused.
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—A number of researchers have been interested in the effects of emotions on perception and memory. In one very recent study, participants saw a key word flashed for 4/10 of a second, and then two words, one of which was the same one they had so briefly seen. If that key word was related to either a positive or negative emotion, they were more likely to identify it correctly than if it was emotionally neutral; evidently, we see more clearly if what we see has some emotional impact. As for memory, various studies found that participants could more easily recall events or information when they happened to be in the same mood as when they first had the experience or learned the information. In a good mood, one can recall more pleasant or positive events in one’s life than when in a bad mood.
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—For the past dozen years the subject of “emotional intelligence”(EI) has been the focus of a good deal of research and theorizing. What EI is depends on who’s talking about it. From one point of view, it is the ability to understand and regulate our emotions; from another point of view, it is the reliance on emotions to aid us in making judgments as to how to behave. Psychologist Daniel Goleman in his book
Emotional Intelligence
says that people can be smart in a way that has nothing to do with IQ scores but with self-awareness, impulse control, zeal and motivation, empathy and
social deftness; our emotions, in short, are often very smart—but, he admits, can also be very stupid. As for the research evidence: In a study employing personality tests and a special scale that rates EI, students who scored high in EI were more likely to report positive relationships with others, including greater perceived support from their parents and fewer negative interactions with their close friends, than those who scored low. In a study of people with careers in insurance, employees with higher EI scores were rated by their supervisors as more tolerant of stress, more sociable, and having greater potential for leadership than employees with lower EI scores. Higher scores were also related to higher salary and more promotions.
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These few examples illustrate the extent to which the old field of emotion and motivation is showing new vigor. Can the resulting mass of findings of the past eighty-odd years be pieced together into a unifying coherent theory?
A few psychologists believe they can, although no single overall scheme seems dominant. But the general view, to judge from a sampling of top textbooks, is that the three major theories—the James-Lange, the Cannon-Bard, and the cognitive appraisal (Schachter, Lazarus, and others)—all have grains of truth. But so do a number of the variants and developments of them that we have seen.
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Not a simple answer, to be sure.
To hark back to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter— Why do we do what we do?—at this time there is no one integrated theory, no overall design, to what has become a theoretical patchwork quilt. Those who must have a simple, easily understood answer will not find it in psychology. At least, not yet.
The
Cognitivists
Revolution
I
n 1960, George A. Miller, though youthful and somewhat pixieish in appearance at forty, was a professor of psychology at Harvard and assured of his prestigious post and comfortable style of living for the rest of his career. Yet that year he felt compelled, despite deep misgivings, to reveal his true colors even if it meant giving up his place at Harvard.
His revelation would not be about radical politics or radical sex, both on the rise at that time, but about his interest in the mind.
The
mind
? What could be subversive or disreputable about that? Wasn’t it the core concern of psychology?
No, not then, nor had it been since the beginning of the behaviorist dominion over American psychology four decades earlier. To behaviorists, the mind, invisible, nonmaterial, and conjectural, was an obsolete metaphysical concept that no experimental psychologist concerned about his career and reputation would talk about, much less devote himself to.
But Miller had become a covert mentalist over the years. Born and raised in Charleston, West Virginia, as a freshman in college he had been uninterested in and even a trifle hostile toward psychology; in a memoir he says, tongue in cheek (a frequent mode of his), that he saw drawings of the brain and other organs in a psychology textbook and, “raised by Christian Scientists, I had been trained to avoid
materia medica
, and I could recognize the devil when I saw him.”
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Either education or infatuation changed his outlook. In his junior
year at the University of Alabama, Miller, smitten with a girl (whom he later married), went to the informal seminars in psychology she was attending, given by Professor Donald Ramsdell at his home. Miller made such an impression on Ramsdell that a couple of years later, when he completed a master’s in speech and communication, Ramsdell offered him a job teaching psychology to undergraduates, although Miller had never had a formal course in the subject. By then married and a father, Miller needed the job and took it; a year of teaching psychology made a convert of him.
He went to Harvard for graduate studies, received a solid grounding in behaviorist psychology, and so distinguished himself that after earning his doctorate he was made an instructor. For the next fourteen years, first at Harvard and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he conducted experimental studies in speech and communication. Despite his behaviorist training, this work, unlike rat-based research, forced him willy-nilly to think about human memory and other higher mental processes. He drifted still closer to mentalism after attending a summer seminar at Stanford, where he worked closely with the psycholinguist Noam Chomsky, and a sabbatical year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, where he was exposed to new ways of doing research on thinking, especially the simulation of thought processes by computer programs.
In the fall of 1960 Miller returned to Harvard a changed man. As he tells it in his memoir:
I realized I was acutely unhappy with the narrow conception of psychology that defined the Harvard department. I had just spent a year romping wildly in the sunshine. The prospect of going back to a world bounded at one end by psychophysics and at the other by operant conditioning was simply intolerable. I decided that either Harvard would have to let me create something resembling the interactive excitement of the Stanford Center or else I was going to leave.
Miller confided in his friend and colleague, the social psychologist Jerome Bruner, about his discontent and the dream of a new center devoted to the study of mental processes. Bruner shared both his feelings and his vision. Together they approached McGeorge Bundy, provost of the university, won his approval, and with funding from the Carnegie Corporation established the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. Naming it that made Miller feel like a declared apostate:
To me, even as late as 1960, using “cognitive” was an act of defiance. It was less outrageous for Jerry [Bruner], of course; social psychologists were never swept away by behaviorism the way experimental psychologists had been. But for someone raised to respect reductionistic science, “cognitive psychology” made a definite statement. It meant that I was interested in the mind—I came out of the closet.
And became a leader of the movement that radically changed the focus and methods of psychology and has guided it ever since.
George Miller’s coming-out typifies what was happening to experimental psychologists in the 1960s. At first a few, then many, and soon a majority abandoned rats, mazes, electric grids, and food-dispensing levers in favor of research on the higher mental processes of human beings. Within the decade, the movement had assumed such proportions as to earn the name “the cognitive revolution.”
Many forces had been building toward it. During the two previous decades, Gestaltists, personality researchers, developmentalists, and social psychologists were all, in their different ways, exploring mental processes. Coincidentally, a series of developments in several other scientific fields (some of which we have already heard about, some of which we will hear about shortly) were producing knowledge of other kinds about how the mind works. Specifically:
—Neuroscientists, using microelectrode probes and other new techniques, were observing the neural events and cellular interconnections involved in mental processes.
—Logicians and mathematicians were developing information theory and using it to account for both the capabilities and limitations of human communication.
—Anthropologists, analyzing the thought patterns of people in other cultures, were discovering which mental processes vary among cultures, and which are universal and therefore possibly innate.
—Psycholinguists, studying language acquisition and use, were learning how the mind acquires and manipulates the intricate symbol system we call language.
—Computer scientists, a new hybrid (part mathematician, part logician, part engineer), were contributing a brand-new theoretical model of thinking, and designing machinery that seemed to think.
By the late 1970s, cognitive psychology and these related fields came to be known as the cognitive sciences; a number of enthusiasts called them collectively, “cognitive science” and regarded it as a new and distinctive field.
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In the 1980s and early 1990s they expected it to replace the field of psychology; instead, standard psychology morphed, absorbing the new ideas of cognitive science. Today, most departments of psychology include many cognitive science topics, and the relatively few separate departments of cognitive science that exist include many or most classical psychology topics.
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The bottom line: The cognitive revolution was more than a remarkable broadening and deepening of psychology; it was the extraordinary—indeed, wholly improbable—simultaneous development in six sciences of new knowledge bearing on mental processes.