(Today’s article is by guest writer Katherine Peil Kaufman. With degrees from the University of Washington and Harvard Divinity School, she writes and speaks about the function, evolution, physiochemical and informational nature of emotions and their role in optimal health, development, psychological functioning, moral reasoning and spirituality. Katherine is the founding director of EFS International, a nonprofit organization with a mission to cultivate emotional wisdom worldwide.)
Philosophers and psychologists alike have struggled to answer questions such as: What is the nature of human emotions? Why do we experience good and bad emotions? Where do they come from? But the emotional system is incredibly complex, with tangled threads shooting out in dizzying directions. Emotions are fully embodied, from skin sensations to cellular activity to immune regulation. But emotions are also central to cognition, motivation, learning, culture, and even spiritual identity. The evidence has been so difficult to bring together coherently that some researchers deny that emotions are a useful concept for psychological theory. Others portray emotions as outdated or even dysfunctional, and offer limited evolutionary interpretations.
I argue that these conclusions are prescient, confusing, and contrary to empirical facts. Traditionally, researchers and theorists have focused on specific aspects of emotions without stepping back and looking at the system as a whole. I believe that deeper investigations and interdisciplinary approaches are needed, and we need to ask the question: what is the impact of emotions on the whole organism? What is their biological function?
Reframe your approach
A holistic approach to emotions reveals an ancient self-regulatory guidance system. Emotions are best understood as primitive senses, ancestors of all the remaining senses: touch, smell, sight, and hearing. Just as these other senses provide clues about the external world, good and bad emotions provide a flow of evaluative information about important environmental changes. The biological role of the emotional senses is to regulate the “self,” informing and regulating the organism in response to potentially harmful or beneficial situations.
Emotions move our bodies and inform our minds. Emotions are driving and guiding mechanisms that were once attributed to life forces or supernatural powers. But emotions began as humble biochemical feedback signals and control loops, like the kind of things engineers design today to control guided missiles and artificially intelligent robots.
Central to this discussion is understanding the early emergence of emotional sensations, their evolutionary development, and the enrichment of information along the way.I believe that human emotions contain three levels of information that are reflected in the structure of the brain.
The oldest of these operated on the basis of “good for me” or “bad for me” through simple signals like pleasure and pain. They said “yes” to life and “no” to death, steering the body away from bad things (like poison) and towards good things (like food and companionship). They also acted as digital codes like the 0s and 1s used in computer processors, forming the first crude memory structures and fuelling the development of the mind. This is perhaps the most important level as it encodes the logic of natural selection: pain and pleasure serve the twin imperatives of self-preservation and self-development (Darwin’s survival and adaptation – via the mind).
The second layer of information is conveyed by basic emotions such as joy, sadness, disgust, anger, and fear, which map neatly to the limbic system, an intermediate structure of the brain. These basic emotions identify a set of psychosocial human needs that together mediate and prioritize deeper imperatives. In most cases, these basic emotions are painful and urgent distress signals that say “no” to physical and social environmental conditions that threaten the body’s survival.
The third and newest layer of emotional information is the mental reserve processed within the neocortex. It provides meaningful blends and nuances of basic emotions in complex “social” or “moral” emotions such as trust and distrust, pride and shame, gratitude, contempt, envy, admiration, love and hate. This is the most individualized dimension of information. It is shaped by ongoing learning experiences and moulded by language, culture and creative willpower. Complex emotions relate to the adaptive nature of an individual’s mindscape, belief structures, social strategies, habits and attitudes.
Emotional perception and the nature of the mind
The idea of an emotional self-regulating guidance system originating in the earliest life forms calls into question the assumption that only humans experience emotions. It also adds to the philosophical debate about the origin of the mind. The model I propose is that emotional feedback control loops, which emerged long before the brain, themselves served as the first form of mind. Although science may never be able to provide objective proof of subjective experience, emotional signals are evident in the control mechanisms of even the simplest organisms.
For example, examination of the chemical machinery of Escherichia coli (E. coli) reveals the same interactive feedback control loops between the organism and its environment, the same stimulus-response behaviors, and the same evaluative memories that underlie our own emotions. Indeed, this same chemistry, with its binary (on/off, yes/no) logic, is used in cellular signaling cascades throughout the body and plays a central role in genetic, epigenetic, and immune regulation. It constitutes a bottom-up (body-to-mind) flow of information, and together with the brain’s top-down (mind-to-body) emotional experience, serves as a bidirectional self-regulatory feedback circuit. This suggests that the top-down “stress” chemistry of emotion sensations is likely to positively or negatively influence health outcomes and developmental trajectories, ranging from placebo and nocebo effects in psychosomatic disorders to the development of a healthy moral conscience.
What the new approach means
A narrow approach to emotions has led to the dismissal of emotional feelings and behaviors as irrelevant vestiges from our evolutionary past, with no place in modern life. We are encouraged to ignore and suppress our emotions with rational thinking, not drug intervention. This is a mistake. The values that govern our behavior in modern society arise from emotion, not reason. “Good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong” are evolutionarily based concepts of emotional yes/no, with no legitimate meaning outside of these universals.
Understanding this brings value to the scientific realm and adds an important chapter to the evolutionary story: organisms have been active participants in their own evolution from the beginning, each equipped with real-time emotional feedback about how well their evolution is going. As this information is accepted over time, individual fitness increases, pain is experienced less, and organisms enjoy greater flexibility and creative control than ever before.
From building optimal mindscapes to constructing complex cultural landscapes, adaptive self-development becomes the main game, validated by increasingly positive emotional experiences, which serve as a true north beacon for realizing innate potential. If survival really matters, the four basic pains (sadness, fear, disgust, anger) are enough. However, the predominance of complex negative emotions (distrust, resentment, worry, rage, shame, hatred, etc.) is a maladaptive deviation of human origin. The regularity and intensity of complex negative emotional experiences indicates the degree to which we are wrong, i.e., the degree to which nature has selected against us. Understanding the deeper function of emotions therefore adds a new framework to moral and ethical theories and even to the interpretation of human spirituality.
Both science and religion are guilty of misunderstanding emotions, missing their important messages, and even blaming their message bearers. While science ignores emotions as a biological source of value, religion confuses evolutionary theory with social constructions of “good” and “evil,” even viewing negative emotions as evidence of guilt. But religion attributes to supernatural deities the myriad “fruits of the soul,” divine inner “wisdom of the heart,” that naturally result from positive emotions such as wonder, curiosity, trust, honor, gratitude, compassion, faith, and love.
Many sociocultural approaches, designed without the benefit of nature’s emotional compass, unintentionally invert the logic of evaluation and increase the very conditions that trigger basic distress signals. In fact, humans have used all emotions of distress to punish and dominate one another, a third-party misuse of nature’s personal guidance system.
We routinely use ideas, social conventions, regulators, and dominance hierarchies that instill fear, shame, humiliation, guilt, or terror to obtain behavioral submission. But such tactics doom us to failure, because ultimately, disgust and anger at injustice and loss of dignity, freedom, and empowerment surge forward to protect our inalienable self-regulatory institutions. That is, our emotional guidance system has been hijacked and weaponized for social manipulation and coercion, causing endless cycles of suffering, conflict, and needless self-destruction. But this new science offers both practical interventions and an optimistic path forward, because we still need to explore and cultivate the full spectrum of positive emotional experience to begin to enable and unleash the greater truth, beauty, and goodness inherent in our human nature.
summary
My research has interwoven various theories, literature, and empirical evidence from a wide range of disciplines to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of human emotions, which, in their ancient functional core, emerged as primitive sensitivities that serve important purposes in human emotion. Self-control – Activates, guides, expands, complicates, and integrates all aspects of one’s identity leading to self-actualization of all innate potentials.The spiritual, moral, and transpersonal implications of how nature universally defines the “optimal” human being (a fully alive, vibrant, righteous, and responsible co-creator in a precious interconnected biosphere) break new ground between science and religion.The model is fully testable and integrates many seemingly contradictory empirical studies, and many of its predictions have already been noted in the social and physical sciences.
The model is not without its shortcomings: researchers must overcome traditional approaches both theoretically and practically, and a more expansive approach requires a revision of vocabulary. However, it is the first model to present a biologically justifiable function for emotions, and its merits are certainly worth overcoming the challenges. Indeed, the model has important implications relevant to all of us, empowering us to trust our everyday emotions and use them to guide our thoughts and actions. The model gives purpose to our emotions and offers an optimistic portrayal of human nature.
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Note:
Frijda, N. H. (2016). The evolutionary emergence of what we call “emotions”. Cognition and Emotion, 30(4), pp. 609-620.
Griffiths, P. (1997). The Nature of Emotions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 14.
Gross, J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. General Psychology Review, 2 (3), 271-299.
Maclean, P. (1990). The Triune Brain in Evolution: Its Role in Paleocerebral Function. Kluwer academic publishers.
Peil, K. T. (2014). Emotions: A sense of self-control. Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 3(2), 80-108.
Peil, KT (2012). Emotions: A sense of self-control? EFS International.
