Programs directed to remain active may be cued to enter subroutines that are specific to that emotion mode, and that were tailored by natural selection to solve the problems inherent in the triggering situation with special efficiency. Jealousy, guilt, or boredom are all genuine emotions lacking distinctive signals. When selection disfavors others knowing the organism's internal state, selection should suppress and obscure external cues identifying internal states. Perceptual mechanisms: Perceptual systems may enter emotion-specific modes of operation. Image formation and cognition. If the brain evolved as a system of information-processing relations, then emotions are, in an evolutionary sense, best understood as information-processing relations - i.e., programs - with naturally selected functions. Robert Plutchik devised the psycho-evolutionary theory of emotion and this helps categorize emotions into primary emotions and the responses to them. Adaptation and natural selection: A critique of some current evolutionary thought. How does this happen? The conditions that characterize the EEA are usefully decomposed into a constellation of specific environmental regularities that had a systematic (though not necessarily unvarying) impact on reproduction and that endured long enough to work evolutionary change on the design of an adaptation. He used as an example contracting of eyebrows (furrowing the brow), which he noted is serviceable to prevent too much light from entering the eyes. The role of imagery and emotion in planning: Imagery is the representation of perceptual information in a format that resembles actual perceptual input. Evolutionary theorists tend to downplay the influence of thought and learning on emotion, although they acknowledge that both can have an effect. (Ed.). When the representational space assumes certain configurations, an interpretation is triggered that activates the associated emotion program - corresponding approximately to what others have called a cognitive appraisal (see, e.g., Lazarus & Lazarus, 1994). The expressions of emotion that Ekman noted as most universal based on research are: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and enjoyment. ; how stable or variable the food productivity of the habitat is; the distribution of condition-independent mortality in the habitat; one's expected future lifespan or period of efficacy; how good a friend someone has been to you; the extent of one's social support; one's aggressive formidability; one's sexual attractiveness; one's status or self-esteem; the status of the coalition one belongs to; present energy stores; present health; the degree to which subsistence requires collective action, and so on. Other modifications interfere with replication: these act to edit themselves from the population and the species design (negative feedback). NY: Cambridge University Press. Specialized perceptual inference systems may be mobilized as well: If you've heard rustling in the bushes at night, human and predator figure-detection may be particularly boosted, and not simply visual acuity in general. Feelings of fear compel people to either fight or flee the source of danger. For example, if in ancestral situations of sexual infidelity there was a substantially higher probability of a violent encounter than in its absence, then the sexual jealousy program will have been shaped by the distillation of those encounters, and the jealousy subroutines will have been adjusted to prepare for violence in proportion to the raised probability in the ancestral world. The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Other goals and the computational systems that subserve them are deactivated: You are no longer hungry; you cease to think about how to charm a potential mate; practicing a new skill no longer seems rewarding. For example, the earlier design would go into a fear emotion mode, and flee the predator when encountered. In the younger system, sensory information travels from the thalamus to the relevant cortical sensory areas (touch to the somatosensory cortex, vision to the visual cortex, etc.) When angry, domain-specific concepts such as social agency, fault, responsibility and punishment will be assigned to elements in the situation. A woman who has just found strong evidence that her husband has been unfaithful may find herself flooded by a torrent of memories about small details that seemed meaningless at the time but that now fit into an interpretation of covert activity. (7) Specialized inference systems are activated: Information about a lion's trajectory or eye direction might be fed into systems for inferring whether the lion saw you. Natural selection can extract statistical relationships that would be undetectable to any individual organism (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a). The genetical evolution of social behaviour. Although you feel as if your energy reserves are depleted, at a physical level the same fat reserves and digestively delivered glucose are available. The Schachter-Singer theory also sought to explain how different emotions can have the same set of physiological responses. Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. in press. Increased lung volume in preparation for encountering challengers, Reduces and hides vulnerable body areas from potential attacks. (1997). They function to recalibrate previous value states which had led to underinvestment in or underexpectation for the successful activities or choices. Information-processing programs - food preferences and aversions, or rules for inferring emotions from facial expressions - acquired one set of design features rather than many others because the retained features better computed solutions to these information-processing problems. Buss, D. M. 1989. This rule says nothing, however, about the procedures by which a mechanism could estimate the value of, say, a particular piece of food to oneself and one's kin. Initially, the commitment to exploring the underlying computational architecture of the emotions may strike one as odd or infelicitous, but it leads to a large number of scientific payoffs, as we will sketch out below. Consideration of recurrent situations our ancestors would have had to be good at solving can prompt one to look for emotion modes even if one has never experienced them oneself (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994). Origins 07:55 Chapter 3. Chichester: Wiley. Recalibrational emotions, evolved regulatory variables, and imagined experience: Information about outcomes is not equally spread throughout all points in time and all situations. Where are others who can protect me? Similarly, immune allocation and targeting may vary with disgust, with the potential for injury, or with the demands of extreme physical exertion. In fact, whenever the adaptive problem can be well-specified (as in color constancy, object recognition, grammar acquisition, word meaning induction, tactile perception, chemical identification), natural computational adaptations have consistently and strikingly outperformed the best artificial devices that teams of engineers, using decades of effort, and millions of dollars of funding, have produced (consider, e.g., artificial vision or speech recognition programs). Still others have no systematic effect: neutral alterations randomly drift in frequency, sometimes disappearing and sometimes becoming species-typical. These are just a few of the many factors that constitute a list of elements associated in a probabilistic cluster, and that constitute the evolutionary recurrent structure of a situation of sexual infidelity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Although the evolved functional logic of this process is deterrence, this function need not be represented, either consciously or unconsciously, by the mechanisms that generate the vindictive behavior.). His theory is resonating with my thoughts and I am using each of his basic emotions as a starting point for each of the major works. Evolution and the Theory of Games. This changes the question from: Why are emotions automatically signaled? In this chapter we will (1) briefly state what we think emotions are and what adaptive problem they were designed to solve; (2) explain the evolutionary and cognitive principles that led us to this view; and (3) using this background, explicate in a more detailed way the design of emotion programs and the states they create. Nevertheless, averaged over evolutionary time, it was functional for the organism to signal the activation of only some emotion states. The most effective design will be the one that best embodies design features that reflect most closely the actual long-term statistical structure of the ancestral world. He researched emotions to support his theory of evolution. When fearful, acuity of hearing may increase. These domain-specific inference systems have a distinct advantage over domain-independent ones, akin to the difference between experts and novices: experts can solve problems faster and more efficiently than novices because they already know a lot about the problem domain, and because they are equipped with specialized tools and practices. 6) An internal communication system: Given that a situation has been detected, the internal communication system sends a situation-specific signal to all relevant programs and mechanisms; the signal switches them into the appropriate adaptive emotion mode. According to modern evolutionary theory, different emotions evolved at different times. Share on facebook. Isen, A. The first component can be handled by automating the broadcast of the identity of those emotions that, on average, reliably produced a benefit when shared: Approval or disapproval assist in communicating to social interactants one's values; fear communicated the nature of a common danger; disgust communicated avoidance and spoilage; anger, a conflict of values with a willingness to enforce one's values with a sanction. Darwin's original plan was to include his findings about expression of emotions in a chapter of his work, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Darwin, 1871) but found that he had enough material for a whole book. Cambridge: MIT Press. Cross-cultural studies and studies on the congenitally blind have found that these groups display the same expressions of shame and pride in situations related to social status. Malaise is a computational state, not a physical one, and is designed to cope with the adaptive problem of illness, shunting energy from behavior to the immune system and possibly signaling the need for aid. ("I am trembling. NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Signal detection thresholds shift: Less evidence is required before you respond as if there were a threat, and more true positives will be perceived at the cost of a higher rate of false alarms. Undoubtedly they sometimes are. In: Characterizing human psychological adaptations (Ciba Symposium Volume #208). Researchers less familiar with evolutionary psychology often equate adaptive problems exclusively with short-run threats to physical survival. a. cross cultural studies b. schachter's epinephrine studies c. brain-scan studies d. zuckerman's sensation-seeking studies Indeed, recalibrational emotion programs are emotion programs such as guilt, grief, depression, shame, and gratitude, whose primary function is to carry out such recomputations (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a), rather than to orchestrate any short run behavioral response. Each of these acts can be thought of as an intermediate "factor" in the production of a behavioral sequence (to use economic terminology). Over evolutionary time, it was the computational properties of alternative neural circuits - their relative ability to solve adaptive information-processing tasks - that caused some neural circuits to be selected for, and others to be selected out. Individuals often behave as if they are in the grip of an emotion, while denying they are feeling that emotion. A design feature may be said to solve an adaptive problem to the extent that its presence in an organism (when compared to alternative designs) increases the organism's net lifespan reproduction, and the reproduction of kin (who are likely to carry the same genetically based design feature; Hamilton, 1964). Situation-detecting subprograms lie dormant, until they are activated by a specific constellation of cues that precipitates the analysis of whether a particular ancestral situation has arisen. Evolved psychological adaptations are selected to use cues that (1) can be reliably and easily detected by the individual, and (2) reliably predicted the hidden structure of conditions relevant to determining which course of action one should take. This same principle applies to our evolved cognitive programs and neural circuitry. For example, to solve the adaptive problem of selecting a good mate, one's choices must be guided by qualitatively different standards than when choosing the right food, or the right habitat, or the right meaning for an unfamiliar word. How the mind works. Some situations are information-dense, full of ancestrally stable cues that reliably predicted the fitness consequences of certain decisions or revealed important variables (e.g., discovering who your father really is or how good a friend someone has been to you) and could therefore be used to alter weightings in decision rules. According to modern evolutionary theory, different emotions evolved at different times. Journal of Personality. Your planning focus narrows to the present: worries about yesterday and tomorrow temporarily vanish. Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. They are adaptations that have arisen in response to the adaptive problem of mechanism orchestration (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a; Tooby, 1985). The fitness payoffs of such acts of assistance vary with circumstances. Pitman, R. & Orr, S. (1995). Although the hominid line is thought to have first differentiated from the chimpanzee lineage on the African savannas and woodlands, the EEA is not a place or time. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, 1-52. Natural selection is a causal process in which a structure spreads because of its functional consequences. Sometimes, a more recently evolved part of the brain moderates an older part of the brain, such as when the cortex moderates the amygdala's fear response. It is also important to understand that evolutionarily recurrent situations can be arrayed along a spectrum in terms of how rich or skeletal is the set of probabilistically associated elements that defines the situation. Memory: The ability to call up particularly appropriate kinds of information out of long term memory ought to be influenced. The discussion so far should give some indications of how this theoretical approach allows the construction of testable, functional models for each emotion, and for the relations between emotion programs and other aspects of psychological functioning. 1995. 1994. The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? 1992. improving the optics of the lens, or reducing a liver enzyme's detoxification efficiency). Tooby, J. Why do you think this theory is a better account of human emotion? 11: 375-424. Fears, phobias, and rituals. Daly, M., Wilson, M., & Weghorst, S. J. For Darwin, emotion had an evolutionary history that could be traced across cultures and species—an unpopular view at the time. (1994). 1987. Index. Feb 4, 2017 - This infographic visualizes Robert Plutchik's: Psycho Evolutionary Theory of Basic Emotions. Pinker, S. 1997. NY: Guilford. Selection, through ancestral mutant experiments, would have sorted emotions based on the average importance of the consequences stemming from each, and the extent to which joint activation was mutually incompatible (or facilitating). The ideas found in his book o… Corresponding emotion programs guide the individual into the appropriate interactive strategy for the social "game" being played, given the state of play. You stuffed yourself with a hot dog, a large tub of popcorn, and a box of Milk Duds while watching a movie. Are the creaks footsteps? The articulated features of the adaptation are designed to mesh with the features of the environment that were stable during the adaptation's evolution, so that their interaction produced functional outcomes. New York Review of Books, June 12, 1997. By removing the need for a conscious cognitive appraisal, the theories provide a basis for why such phenomena as increased positive emotions toward unrecognizable stimuli occurs. Shrugging of the shoulders is an example Darwin used of antithesis, because it has no service. One might expect the same phenomenon in combat veterans, with post-traumatic stress syndrome being an extreme version in which, for some reason, the shut-off mechanism malfunctions (Pitman & Orr, 1995). Tooby, J. Emotion programs have evolved to take such elements into account, whether they can be perceived or not. Adaptations were designed by selection to exploit these opportunities and to circumvent these obstacles. This global regulation may be largely automatic and nonconscious, and may involve open parameters set culturally and developmentally. However, unlike most of Darwin’s other work, this area of inquiry lay dormant for almost 100 years. Consequently, the key to unlocking and activating many complex evolved decision and evaluation programs was chained to the present: to being in an environment displaying specific perceptually detectable cues and cue constellations (sweetness, predators, running sores, emotion expressions). Feelings of love and affection lead people to seek mates and reproduce. (1987). The photographs had been previously used in studies using subjects from Western cultures. Discrepancies between expected and actual payoff can occur in the other direction as well: Joy or precipitated surges of happiness are an emotion program that evolved to respond to the condition of an unexpectedly good outcome. Homicide. 1982. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it - including the emotions. It was based on observations, both those around him and of people in many parts of the world. New York: Basic Books. 1994. What kinds of programs can emotions mobilize? Three factors govern whether transmitting information will be beneficial or harmful: the signaler's relationship to the audience, the nature of the information that an emotion signal would release, and the computational overhead of computing the benefits and costs of information sharing on a case by case basis in order to regulate whether to make a broadcast (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). Communication and emotional expressions: Emotion programs are expected to mobilize many emotion-specific effects on the subcomponents of the human psychological architecture relevant to communication. Usually this leads to a system, like language, in which the decision to communicate something (or not) can be made by the individual in detailed response to the immediate circumstances. Share on twitter. Cork-screws and cups have different properties because they are solutions to different problems, and each therefore solves its targeted problem better than the other. Fighting, falling in love, escaping predators, confronting sexual infidelity, experiencing a failure-driven loss in status, responding to the death of a family member (and so on) each involved conditions, contingencies, situations, or event-types that recurred innumerable times in hominid evolutionary history. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Cambridge University Press. A trait is a… The only emotions the preliterate people found hard to distinguish between were fear and surprise. Energy level, effort allocation, and mood: Overall metabolic budget will be regulated by emotion programs, as will specific allocations to various processes and facilitation or inhibition of specific activities. We also compare the simulated crowd behaviors with real-world crowd videos and use our approach to predict the trends of crowd movements in violence incidents. New York: Oxford University Press. Primal emotions, such as fear, are associated with ancient parts of the brain and presumably evolved among our premammal ancestors. Cognitive adaptations can use perceivable events as cues for inferring the status of important, nonperceivable sets of conditions, provided there was a predictable probabilistic relationship between them that was maintained over evolutionary time. We evaluate our approach on real-world scenarios consisting of different kinds of agents. The lactase digestive enzyme presupposes an infant diet of milk with lactose. Culture, ontogeny, and individual differences: How this theory of emotion can be integrated with models of culture, models of human development, and models of individual differences must be treated elsewhere (see Tooby & Cosmides, 1990b, for an extended analysis of the relationship between emotions and individual differences; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992 for a discussion of culture). Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear and rage. Those alterations that improve the machine's ability to solve reproduction-promoting tasks (compared to the earlier model design feature) will increase their own frequency over the generations, until (usually) they become universally incorporated into the species design. Evolutionary explanations of emotions. Robert Plutchik's PSYCHOEVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF BASIC EMOTIONS Postulates 1 ANIMALS AND HUMANS The concept of emotion is applicable to all evolutionary levels and applies to all animals as well as humans. NY: Norton. The benefit gained by inhibiting release of an expression on a case by case basis must be large enough to offset the cost of such computations for selection to favor the evolution of such regulatory circuits. The New Hacker's Dictionary defines a "demon" as a "portion of a program that is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur." (5) Memory processes are directed to new retrieval tasks: Where was that tree I climbed before? A richly structured situation, such as sexual infidelity or predator ambush will support a richly substructured emotion program in response to the many ancestrally correlated features: Many detailed adjustments will be made to many psychological mechanisms as instructions for the mode of operation. When the situation detector signals that one has entered the situation "possible stalking and ambush", the following kinds of mental programs are entrained or modified: (1) There are shifts in perception and attention: You may suddenly hear with far greater clarity sounds that bear on the hypothesis that you are being stalked, but that ordinarily you would not perceive or attend to, such as creaks or rustling. He conducted research by showing photographs exhibiting expressions of basic emotion to people and asking them to identify what emotion was being expressed. The psychological foundations of culture. Emotions serve to increase chances for survival. evolutionary theories of emotional states, posit that emotions have evolved as behavior modifiers responding to specific situations that provided fitness benefits in our ancestral past. [1] Darwin researched the expression of emotions in an effort to support his theory of evolution. 167-196). Appeasement to aggressor. Recreating cues through imagery in a decoupled mode triggers the same emotion programs (minus their behavioral manifestations), and allows the planning function to evaluate imagined situations by using the same circuits that evaluate real situations. Highly specialized learning mechanisms might be activated, such as those that control food aversions (Garcia, 1990) or predator learning (Mineka & Cooke, 1985), or fear conditioning (LeDoux, 1995). Vision handicapped by tears to show appeasement. According to modern evolutionary theory, different emotions evolved at different times: primal emotions, filial emotions and, later on, social emotions. So, from an evolutionary and a functional point of view, the brain is intrinsically and by its nature an organ of computation - a set of information-processing devices realized in neural tissue (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Pinker, 1997). It is difficult to sleep when your heart and mind are racing with fear, and this is no accident: disastrous consequences would ensue if proprioceptive cues were activating sleep programs at the same time that the sight of a stalking lion was activating ones designed for predator evasion. As many have recognized, this simulation process can help in making decisions about future plans: Even though you have never actually experienced the death of a child, for example, an imagined death may activate an image-based representation of extremely negative proprioceptive cues that "tell" the planning function that this is a situation to be avoided. Evolutionary Theory of Emotion. Ethology: The biology of behavior. For emotion researchers, this means that one's working hypotheses (which are always open to empirical revision) should begin with the expectation of high levels of evolutionary functionality, and one's research methods should be sensitive enough to detect such organization. Just as a computer can have a hierarchy of programs, some of which control the activation of others, the human mind can as well. 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