What is Emotion?, by Phin Upham
July 30th, 2011
What is emotion and how can it be studied? Is it hardwired or learned? A review of some of the seminal works on the topic.
The study of emotion is a difficult one from many perspectives. For one, it seems to suffer from a lack of agreed upon definitions; Or it suffers from too many common, everyday definitions and this creates too hazy a realm to fully capture with one definition. For another, it is an intrinsically maddening concept to try to study. One must rely on what people say about their emotions and people are not always fully aware of the order, complexity, or magnitude of their emotions. The size of an emotion seems a hard question, and different emotions are rather incommensurable. Emotion seems to play an enormous role in our life and, along with consciousness, another heavily debated concept, it is one of those perplexing things of which we are fully aware and about which we are almost fully ignorant.
Richard Lazarus claims that in almost all cases (he allows for the possibility that some hardwired emotions are an exception) cognition precedes – is necessary and sufficient for – emotion. His claim can be glossed with the idea that the world must be mediated with cognition since one must at a very minimum understand/interpret the objects of the world around oneself before one can emotionally react to it. In dealing with the counterargument that emotion seems to come very, very quickly and at the very beginning of some situations before full understanding has been processed, he argues that cognition can be partial and, once internalized, very quick. The disagreement can be seen in the statement “I would certainly agree that a person need not be aware of his or her cognitive appraisals — but I would argue against the idea that some appraisals (Zajonc refers to preferences) are non-cognitive” (1022). But if we are defining cognition as any sort of appraisal, then it does seem logically true that we must unconsciously appraise a situation before we can have an emotion to it. One some level it seems we must register “edge” or “snake” or merely “snakelike characteristics” upon which our fear and emotional reactions proceed.
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Phin Upham has a PhD in Applied Economics from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania). Phin is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He can be reached at phin@phinupham.com.
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