Emotions as Cognitive-Affective-Somatic Hybrids
Emotion Review
Vol. 1, No. 4 (October 2009) 294–301
© 2009 SAGE Publications and
The International Society
for Research on Emotion
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073909338304
http://emr.sagepub.com
Rom Harré
Psychology Department, Georgetown University, USA
Abstract
One way of studying emotions which is sensitive to cultural differences is to analyze the vocabularies people use to describe their
own and other’s emotions, which can be called the local emotionology. Wittgenstein’s concepts of language game and family
resemblance can be used in this project. The result of research in this mode is a three-factor account of emotions, involving bodily
perturbations, judgments of meanings, and the social force of emotion displays. This treatment of a psychological phenomenon is
typical of recent conceptions of psychology as a hybrid science, linking cognitive, cultural, and physiological phenomena. It can
be seen as a further development of the cognitive account of emotions that has appeared in the last century.
Keywords
emotionology, hybrid psychology, meanings, social force, Wittgenstein
From a philosophical and a psychological point of view, emotions are not
theoretical states; they involve practical concerns, associated with readiness to act. Since emotions are evaluative attitudes, involving a positive or
a negative stance towards the object, they also entail either taking action
or being disposed to act in a manner compatible with the evaluation.
Ben-Ze’ev (2002, p. 84)
In the first part of this article I will use the noun “emotion” to
describe topics that arise in the discussion of such “somethings”
as “anger,” “jealousy,” “joy,” and so on, but not such “somethings” as “nausea,” “pain,” and so on. However, as the argument
progresses it will become more and more obvious that the use of
the word “emotion” as a noun is so replete with misleading implications, just from its grammatical role alone, that a case will
emerge for dropping it from the discussion of these vital human
experiences, such as being angry, falling in love, being envious,
and so on. Instead I will make use of the cognate adverbial and
adjectival forms. These forms are used to express qualifications
to what we do, rather than to refer to something that we might
contain or a state we might be in. “Being angry,” “being jealous,”
“being ashamed” are more like a person’s doings than a person’s
attributes. Gilbert Ryle (1949, p. 98) made a similar point about
moods. He argued that a mood like “sadness” is a complex of
dispositions to feel, do, and say certain sorts of things. Each component disposition is an indispensable part of what it is to be sad.
So sadness is not just a shading of one’s life in tones of gray, but
also a matter of what one is disposed to say and do. Gabriella
Taylor (1996) argues in a similar vein in her analysis of grief.
The Emotionology Principle
This principle asserts that we can discover what a particular
emotion is by charting the conditions for the use of the relevant
words. The result of surveying the uses of an emotion word is
very likely to be a field of family resemblances. This offers the
opportunity to detect the essentialist fallacies that come from
taking one of the uses of a key word as a model for all the other
ways such a word is used. It also makes possible a systematic
study of emotions of past times. Carol and Peter Stearns (1988)
showed how the uses of the word “anger” and its cognate forms
changed from describing how people behaved to referring to
private feelings. Other cultures may have different emotion
repertoires from ours. How would we be able to tell? Lutz
(1988) used the techniques of comparative linguistics to analyze the unique emotionology of the Ifaluk people. I believe
that, just as Carol and Peter Stearns revealed a different emotion
repertoire among our ancestors, so Lutz has revealed a different
range of emotions among the Ifaluk. In what follows I link
up work using the emotionology principle with some key
Wittgensteinian concepts and themes.
Corresponding author: Rom Harré, Psychology Department, 303 White Gravenor, Georgetown University, 37th and O Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20057, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Harré In this discussion I am not concerned with Wittgenstein’s
own views on emotions. I will be using several of his most
powerful analytical tools to undertake an exploration of my
own. The exploratory tools I will be using include such familiar
philosophical tools as the “expression/description” distinction,
conceived as a key to the possibility of public discourse about
private experiences; that is, with the “grammar” of words for
bodily feelings. Wittgenstein pointed out that words for subjective feelings could not have been learned by pointing to exemplars, which always remain essentially private. He suggested
that they are learned as substitutes for behavioral expressions,
tendencies that are part of the emotion (Wittgenstein, 1953,
p. 244). He also made much of the idea that a common mistake
is to think that a particular use of a word defines its real meaning. In most cases there are many ways a word is used, a field
of “family resemblances.” The study of words, the key to emotionology, results in a survey of a domain of diverse uses of the
items of a vocabulary (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 67). There are no
essential meanings, rather a variety of context sensitive uses. A
third essential notion is that of the “language game,” practices
in which words have an essential role. Life is a sequence of
episodes in which people carry out all sorts of projects in which
both practical and linguistic skills are put to use. These are the
language games that constitute a form of life (Wittgenstein,
1953, p. 67). Finally, I will make use of Wittgenstein’s concept
of a “hinge” (Moyal-Sharrock, 2004). A hinge is an unexamined
basic practice which the people of a particular culture simply
take for granted. A hinge differs from a rule or convention, which
may have a similar constitutive role in a form of life. Rules and
conventions are arbitrary and could be different, while hinges as
practices have conceptual doppelgangers, very general empirical presuppositions which express matters of fact (Wittgenstein,
1974). Hinges seem to be arbitrary, but depend on the way the
world is. Gender has socially defined aspects, but rests on sexual
dimorphism as a hinge, that is a classificatory practice that
“stands firm” throughout all sorts of changes in social life.1
Psychologists have more or less settled on a three-fold
account of emotions, though there are still some backsliders
intent on reducing an emotion either to nothing but a bodily
state or to nothing but a cognitive process. When a person is
properly said to experience an emotion three conditions obtain,
reflected in the rules for the use of the relevant vocabulary.
1. A person undergoes a perceptible disturbance of his or her
normal bodily states, due to some causal or other kind of
triggering condition, which may be extrinsic (a snarling
animal) or may be intrinsic (a recollection of a past act).
2. The person makes a judgment, sometimes explicit but more
often implicit, as to the significance of the situation in
which abnormal bodily states are experienced, or other
people are seen or heard to make certain kinds of responses
(“That dog is dangerous;” “That remark was a gaffe;” “That
sunset is romantic,” and so on).
3. There is a tendency to act in response to such a situation
in the light of the implicit judgment a person makes of
the character of what is going on. The action one takes or
Emotions as Cognitive-Affective-Somatic Hybrids 295
the speech act one produces in the circumstances will be
intelligible only if in accord with local moral conventions
or counsels of prudence as to the proper response to the
triggering condition so interpreted. So when faced with a
dangerous dog one calmly backs off; when one has spilled
coffee on a priceless oriental rug one apologizes to the host
(at the very least); when moved by the setting sun one sighs,
a little tearfully perhaps, displaying a rare sensibility.
Each condition needs to be qualified.
1. A situation may be bodily perturbing just because it has
been given a certain interpretation. For example, I may not
be aware for a moment that a remark directed at me was
intended to be offensive. The realization that it was may lead
me to change my good humored response into a protest. My
bodily calm is then shattered by a rush of adrenaline.
2. An interpretation may involve beliefs about patterns of
rights and duties and other features of a local moral order.
These beliefs tend to become premises in the cognitive
processes by which interpretations of impinging events are
made. Cognitive conditions, such as longstanding beliefs
and conventional judgments, are complex, since rights and
duties are contestable. Positioning theory has shown the
intricate relation between local moral orders and the narrative structure of an episode, particularly ones in which
emotions are experienced (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999,
chap. 1). The interpretation of a perturbation as a component of a particular emotion complex may depend on the
storyline one takes to be unfolding.
3. The action that someone performs or the words that are used
in an emotionally charged situation may need to be interpreted in terms of their social force as acts. For example, a
shout might be a protest, a demand for an explanation, a cry
of ecstasy or a Tourette’s tic. A slap on the shoulder might
be a request to step to the other side of the escalator or congratulations on some happy event. A display of anger may
have the force of a protest against injustice. In speech-act
theory we say that such and such an action in these circumstances has a certain performative force as a social act. An
angry frown may be a protest against injustice, but it may be
a response to humiliation, and so on.
This three-fold set of conditions takes many specific forms, as
one turns one’s attention to the various emotions recognized in
our culture, and tries to understand the emotional lives of people of other places and times.
The scheme presented above is clearly a hybrid theory—
there is a physiological component, a cognitive component, and
a social component. The last might be more prudential than
moral in some contexts. In this respect it is in sharp contrast to
the influential account of emotional experience proposed by
William James (1884). According to James, the ethological
component, a simplified version of the response component
above, is the prime aspect. We are happy because we smile,
fearful because we are running from danger, and so on.
296 Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 4
According to the emotionology principle, the three components
are also the three sets of conditions for the correct local use of
an emotion word. Thus I would call myself “angry” if I felt a
certain kind of agitation, I thought that I had been unjustly
injured in some way, and I had a tendency to respond to the
situation in some rather strong manner. Other people might judge
me to be angry more on my public display than their guesses as
to my private feelings.
Each of these conditions is nearly necessary and together they
are almost sufficient to establish a person’s joint state of mind and
body as the core of the experience of an emotion. The emotionology principle makes this hybrid pattern of events, meanings, and
dispositions the grounds for the use of a certain word to describe
the whole situation, personal and environmental. The qualification “nearly” is needed because sometimes there is no bodily
disturbance discernible either by the person producing an emotional display or by the bystanders. Pride, in the sense of quiet
satisfaction in a job well done, might be one example. The qualification “almost sufficient” is needed because one can sometimes
be persuaded to reinterpret an emotional situation. For example,
“They were only trying to say they were sorry.” The complexity
of the conditions leaves room for change in assigned meanings.
Fear of a dangerous dog is a simple emotion—rightful pride
in an accomplishment is a good deal more complex. Each of the
three components of the “total emotional situation” needs to be
elaborated. Consider the example of jealousy, or in our terms
the rules for the correct (local) use of the word “jealous.” In
current English the word is used in situations in which there are
two people, A and B, each of whom believes that he or she has
a pre-emptive right to a certain good, say X. A, let us say, has
managed to appropriate X. When is the person, B, who has lost
or failed to get X, properly to be said to be jealous of A rather
than envious or angry with or disappointed in A? There seem to
be three conditions:
1.B feels an unpleasant combination of bodily feelings,
including tearfulness, anxiety, and a sort of rigidity of the
facial muscles—the sensation of a forced smile.
2. a. A believes that he or she has a prior right to X, while B
believes that he or she has that prior right.
b. B takes him or herself to have been humiliated by A’s
possession or appropriation of X.
3. B has a variety of actions open—protests, denigrations of
A, and attempts to recover X or take it away from A, and
many more of hostile intent. These can all be seen as performative acts relative to the injustice, as B sees it, of the
taking or appropriating of something that the sufferer
believes to be rightly his or hers. The entity in question may
be one of a huge variety of things, from lovers, honors,
friends, jewels, to children, and so on.
Expression and Description
In the examples sketched above the words “fear,” “anger,” “jealousy,” and so on, appeared in my analysis. The physiologicalexperiential, cognitive, and social act conditions described in
these analyses were constituents of experiencing that emotion,
and, according to the emotionology principle, necessary and
sufficient conditions (almost) for the use of the word—but by
whom? People rarely express fear, anger, jealousy, chagrin, joy,
and so on, by using the corresponding words in a self-description.
Here we need to consider Wittgenstein’s powerful distinction
between words used expressively in the first person from those
very same words used descriptively in the third person. This
is the familiar corollary to the private language argument
(Wittgenstein, 1953, pp. 244–246). While it seems intuitively
plausible to treat “I’m in pain” as an expression of pain rather
than as the (fallible) description of a personal feeling, does it
seem equally intuitively correct to analyze “I am angry with you”
as similarly expressive rather than descriptive? Is it a verbal
substitute for a natural expression of anger, and so, as in the
private language argument, subject to the grammar of expression?
It seems not. If I am right this is the first of several ways in
which the grammar of “pain” and the grammar of “angry” differ. In most cases it seems to me that when one is saying “I’m
angry with you [about that]” rather than shouting, turning red in
the face, and waving one’s fists about, one isn’t really expressing anger—and this is a grammatical remark!
So it may often be that the common practice of using emotion words in the first person is descriptive while the characteristic displays are expressive. If there are verbal substitutes, then
they will not include the emotion word. An angry person might
verbally display anger by shouting “F*** you!!” but not “I am
angry with you.” This leads to questions about what are the
primary language games in which the emotion words are used.
It seems that there is no such simple answer to this question as
there is to the question about the expressive substitutions as the
primary language games for words for simple bodily feelings,
such as nausea. Similarly, one could ask, “How much of an
occasion that calls for the use of the word ‘grief’ is a matter
of feeling and how much a matter of appropriate displays?”
(Stearns & Knapp, 1996, pp. 132–150).
Family Resemblances
Close study of the uses of “envious” discloses a distinction
between “benign envy” and “malign envy” (Sabini & Silver,
1998). The former might be expressed as “I wish I had one of
those too,” while the latter comes through such remarks as B
declaring, “I don’t think A has any right to X, and anyway I am
the person who really deserves it.” Malign envy is rather like
jealousy without perhaps the strong implications of the injury to
B that comes from A’s possession of X. Suffering malign envy,
B, feeling slighted, might set about trying to destroy X, letting
A have a taste of the feeling of loss. The sufferer from jealousy
might try to injure A as punishment for the injury B believes he
or she has suffered at the hands of A.
Here we have a nice example of a fragment of an extensive
field of family resemblances. If this is a correct report of the
grammar of part of that field it precludes the question “What is
envy really?” We might be tempted to suggest that there is an
essence by claiming that at least two people and a valued item
Harré are required for the word to have any application—granting that
there are various patterns of relationship between the three entities in question. What if it is B’s good luck to have a splendid
physique? Or a shapely bosom? Moreover, even if it is a necessary condition for the use of the word “envy,” which the above
considerations throw into doubt, it is a (perhaps necessary) condition for several other emotions. It seems to me that such a
three-fold interpersonal relation occurs in the grammar of “jealousy.” By way of contrast, acts of sexual betrayal notoriously
lead to displays and feelings of anger rather than those of jealousy. The grammar of “chagrin” involves a protagonist, a
project, and the surrounding people who heard the protagonist
make the claim for competence that is later found to be spurious. The good in question is the highly abstract one of succeeding at some task one has claimed to be able to perform.
Language Games
Language games are practices—activities in which people are
engaged as players. Language games are what people do. Since
emotions often seem to overcome one, to be out of one’s control,
is it plausible to take the display of an emotion, be it privately
as a significant feeling, or publicly as an action, as something
somebody does rather than something that happens to somebody? Is it more like walking than it is like indigestion?
Two constituents of the emotional situation seem to be more
like doings in that a person may take control and manage them.
One is the interpretation of the situation and its implications as
to the source of the bodily disturbance. The other is the kind of
response that is appropriate to the situation, when it is read in a
particular way. This may involve managing bodily movements
or considering the performative force of this or that legitimate
response. Here are some examples of each kind of management:
Once when walking in the woods with two children we came
out near a farm house. The guard dog approached with a threatening snarl. I felt my muscles tense to push the children forward
between me and the dog. Horrified by my body’s reaction I
firmly pushed them behind me and we beat a measured retreat
back into the forest.
The soft answer sometimes turneth away wrath. Instead of
angrily rejecting a criticism of a treasured piece of reasoning, a
reaction that is likely to rile the critic too, one can say “Oh, I see
what you mean—you may well be right. Thanks.” Or on seeing
a friend stepping into a new silver Maserati Biturbo one thinks
better of expressing a pang of envy and says “Lucky you.” Both
owner, perhaps a bit embarrassed by the ostentation of his transport, and you emerge from this encounter feeling good.
The use of words in establishing a primary language game
entails that in similar situations it cannot be wrong to use that
word in just the way it has been established in the primary language game. Spiraling out from primary language games there
are all sorts of secondary language games which depend on tacit
knowledge of the primary. A famous example of the priority of
primary language games is the paradigm case argument—in the
“Case of the Smiling Bridegroom.” The meaning of “He married
her of his own free will” establishes a common root meaning for
Emotions as Cognitive-Affective-Somatic Hybrids 297
“free will” by contrast with the case where the bride’s father
stands behind the bridegroom with his loaded shotgun.
There should be similar primary language games for emotion
words—in particular because certain fields of uses with family
resemblances to one another depend on such a moment. “Fear”
looks like a good candidate for a word the uses of which cover
a wide field of family resemblances. Is there a primary language
game for “fear”? Consider “I feared for my life when the rope
broke;” “I feared for my reputation when the story got out;”
“I fear I may have left out the salt,” and so on. Is there a case
for taking situations of physical danger and threat of injury as
those occasions on which a core meaning is established? How
could one argue for such a claim? Whatever is germane must be
compatible with a rejection of any essentialist claim as to what
“fear” really means.
The following entry appears in the Compact Oxford English
Dictionary (OED):
Fear
Noun:
1. An unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain or harm.
2. The likelihood of something unwelcome happening.
Verb:
1. be afraid of.
2. (fear for) be anxious about.
3. regard God with reverence and awe (archaic).
The compilers of the OED offer two uses of the word “fear” in
language games in which the emotion is closely bound up with
physical danger in one case, but with something much less specific, merely unwelcome, in the second case. This seems to
suggest that we should so structure the semantics of “fear” that
we recognize two primary games. They resemble one another in
the respect that the situations are aversive, but differ in whether
the body has an essential role in the situation. This, of course, is
a case of family resemblance.
Hinges
It is now widely agreed (Moyal-Sharrock, 2004) that
Wittgenstein’s views on the nature of the normative constraints
on linguistic practice developed over the course of his life. In
the period of the Tractatus he confined the norms for empirically meaningful discourse to the laws of logic. All other uses
of words were, in a certain sense, meaningless; that is they
had no referents, objects which they routinely denoted. In the
Philosophical Investigations Part One he extended the range of
such norms to the rules of the proper uses of words of all kinds.
Such rules did not reflect matters of fact, but were the content
of meaning determining and maintaining grammars. However,
by Part Two of that work, and particularly in On Certainty, he
expanded the domain of normative constraints still further to
include another category of linguistically expressible objects,
for which he took the word “hinge.” Hinges were effectively the
unexamined constituent practices of forms of life. Unlike rules
of grammar that are in a sense arbitrary, hinges were associated
298 Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 4
with very general empirical facts that were never seriously
questioned. Hinge propositions had empirical content but they
were not brought into the domain of testable propositions.
Indeed, some philosophers resist the idea that we should talk of
“hinge propositions” as the normatively efficacious items in
cognition, perception, and so on. Be that as it may I want to
open the question of stable but unexpressed hinges on which the
door of the uses of an emotional expression might turn.
One way to explore this issue is to ask a seemingly naïve
question: what do the uses of the words “anger” and “jealousy”
have in common? Is there a higher order pattern of use that
informs both? What about “pride” and “chagrin”? And “joy”
and “being pleased”?
There are obvious superficial answers. “Anger” and “jealousy” are used when the bodily component of the emotional
occasion is unpleasant, and there is a marked implication that
the one who has such an experience condemns the actions and
perhaps also the character of another person, invoking different
aspects of the local moral order. “Pride” stands at the opposite
pole from “humiliation.” The latter is a prime ingredient in the
grounds for describing one’s emotional experience as “chagrin.” “Joy” and “pleasure” are used when an experience is
agreeable, and one might like to repeat it.
Here is a propositional expression of a hinge: “An unpleasant experience is someone’s fault.” It expresses a hinge because
it seems to be a prime part of the background to the range of
uses of “anger,” “jealousy,” and so on, as third person descriptions of first person practices constituent of our way of life. Our
lived practices take this form—but only occasionally do people
actually come out and say what they believe it is that makes up
the content of a hinge proposition. “Envy is the right response
to someone else’s good fortune” might be true as a description
of the Western way of life. But I believe it rarely passes anybody’s lips.
Understanding Another Person
Wittgenstein’s many remarks regarding the importance of the
natural tendencies on which the human form of life rests not
only point to what he later came to call “hinges,” but also to the
roots of the knowledge we seem to have of other people, in
particular their feelings and emotions. A stone is too smooth to
be seen as expressing anything. That begins with the wriggling
legs of the fly. The point is that one does not infer an animate
being’s feelings but experiences them in their expression,
which is internally related to that which is expressed. It would
not be pain if one had no tendency to groan, complain, and
writhe, and so on. Wittgenstein suggests that we do not need to
be taught basic empathies and sympathies. They come with the
whole package that includes the human repertoire of basic
emotional responses.
It is a primitive reaction to tend, to treat, the part that hurts when someone else is in pain, and not merely when oneself is—and so to pay attention to other people’s pain behaviour, as one does not pay attention to
one’s own pain behaviour. . . . But what does the word “primitive” mean
to say here? Presumably that this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that
a language game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking
and not the result of thought. (Wittgenstein, 1970, pp. 540–541)2
In short, these practices are hinges.
Is there deeper knowledge of others to be found in reflecting
on the repertoire of displays through which one comes to know
of their emotional life than their mastery of the relevant repertoire of words and actions? There is no doubt that we make
characterological and personality attributions in the light of
how people react emotionally to situations. We may see them as
cold and unfeeling, as they calmly pull the injured from the
wreckage. We may see them as flighty and foolish if they react
extravagantly to every passing social situation. Cold by what
standards? Flighty by what conception of the dignity required
of a person like that?
Emotion displays are always up for assessment as to their
propriety in the presumed situation, and of course, as to what
sort of persons are there. In this respect too the emotional life
presupposes certain unspoken hinges.
The topic of tendencies to act as an ineliminable part of the
total package that is an emotion has already been broached.
The question of character and personality calls for the use of
dispositional concepts. How are emotions and personal dispositions related?
Misleading Grammatical Models
The familiar pairing of noun forms with adjectival and adverbial
forms in the grammar of emotion words can be a convenient
starting point for exploring temptations to misunderstandings.
We have “anger, angry, angrily;” “happiness, happy, happily;”
“fear, fearful, fearfully;” “pride, proud, proudly,” and so on. The
adjectival and adverbial forms seem to be more philosophically
sanitary than the nouns since displays of characteristic and specialized ways of performing routine actions directed to some
normal end do not offer much in the way of temptation to invent
abstract nouns. “She was angry;” “She slammed the door angrily,”
are not forms likely to encourage ontological proliferations.
However, “anger,” “pride,” “fear,” “joy,” and so on, do. I once
attended a Sinanon Group3 meeting in the US, in the guise of
anthropologist, I hasten to add. The procedure involved picking
on one member of the group, insulting and abusing the victim
until he or she became angry. Afterwards the target was calmed
down by being rolled around by the members of the group. The
leader accounted for this activity as a way of releasing all the
anger that had been accumulated during the week between
Sinanon meetings—rather like releasing the air from an overinflated tire.
How could it be shown that the Sinanon members who
believed this nonsense were making a grammatical mistake? So
far as I can see, lacking any formal guidance from Wittgenstein
at this point, the best strategy might be to recover the primary
language games in which each triad of forms was established and
demonstrate how it could not have been grounded in a referential
act from the noun form to a mysterious substance. The same style
Harré of argument that disposes of bodily sensations and feelings as
inner things while not denying their privacy and reality, could
perhaps dispose of “anger” as the name of a quasi-substance.
The disparity between the criteria for “same feeling” and “same
thing” (say “coconut”) showed the fly the way out of the fly
bottle. Let us compare the grammar of “anger” with the grammar
of a genuine bodily fluid, say “blood.” We do not know of the
presence of blood in the body by bloody expressive acts, as we
discern anger in angry exchanges and doors slammed angrily.
We learn the word “blood” by direct acquaintance with some of
the stuff that has unfortunately leaked out.
The primary language game for the anger triad must also
involve the priority of expressive acts, since for the same reason
as “pain” cannot be learned as the name of a feeling, “angry
displays” must be the ground of the relevant language games.
The semantics of “anger” must rest on the language games of
displaying or expressing the complex state of feeling and cognitive judgments that angry people are doing.
Moreover, the grammatical subject of most emotion words is
the person. People are angry, sad, proud, chagrined, joyful, and
so on. There is no such thing as embarrassment, but there are
plenty of embarrassed people. This points back to an earlier
point—the ineliminable involvement of local moral orders in
the grammar of certain words. The unit of analysis is something
like “people in situations.” The more morally sensitive a person
is the more readily are emotion displays triggered by the relevant type of situation.
Modern people in the West have learned the art of “bottling
up emotions.” It is common practice in many oriental cultures.
This points to another important aspect of the expression of
emotions. The expression may be entirely subjective, without a
flicker visible to others. In the general store in the village near
my former house in Spain the manager, a certain Señor Benavent,
when provoked by a difficult customer, would bend down below
the counter where he had secreted a bundle of sticks. Snapping
a few relieved the tension and up he came smiling. The distinction I am aiming at here is not so much between subjectivity and
objectivity, but between private and public displays as expressions of emotion.
Here we come back to the original problem with emotions—
the problem that has led people to slip into an unsustainable
physiological reduction of emotion states to neurochemical
goings on. If “anger” must have a referent, then perhaps some
bodily state or process would have to do. But we saw above that
the primary language game for this family of words is adjectival
or adverbial, not nominal. “Anger” does not need a referent
since its meaning comes from “angry man,” “stamped angrily,”
and the like. There is no primary language game for “anger” as
a noun. In particular we do not need to take a blood sample to
know whether someone is angry, or depressed, or joyful. There
is no place in our lives for emotion breathalyzers! “Is he angry?—
let’s do a blood test!” is absurd.
How do we reconcile the reactive and even automatic response
by a person to an emotion-provoking situation with the powerful
role that cognitive schemata evidently play in interpreting both
situational and bodily feelings as this or that emotion (or mood)
Emotions as Cognitive-Affective-Somatic Hybrids 299
from the vast repertoire available to us? The argument of this
article is that here, as in other cases in psychology, no reconciliation is possible. The ontology of molecules and the ontology
of meanings neither overlay one another in perfect synchrony,
nor do they reduce one to the other in either direction. Emotions
partake of the molecular ontology in that we become aware of
bodily disturbances. Emotions partake of the cognitive, in that
we give meanings to these disturbances—some of which are
personal and embedded in local moral orders. Some disturbances are very like those that get affective interpretations but
draw on cognitive interpretations other than the emotional. For
example, there is indigestion, sunburn, influenza, fatigue, need
to “visit the bathroom,” and so on.
Here is another Wittgenstein echo—the discussion of perception in Philosophical Investigations Part XI. Wittgenstein
reaches the conclusion that perception partakes of the physiological and also partakes of the cognitive. He uses the example
of Jastrow’s duck-rabbit sketch. This can be seen either as a
duck or as a rabbit. However, if asked to draw it, those who saw
a duck and those who saw a rabbit produce the same sketch.
There is a constant pattern of excitation on the retina without
which neither the duck-schema nor the rabbit-schema would get
a grip. However, it is easy to demonstrate that that pattern does
not determine whether one sees a duck or a rabbit.
In like manner the complex event of an environmental disturbance and a bodily perturbation requires the use of a cognitive
schema to determine whether it is part of an emotional experience, and which emotional experience that is.
Anthropological Research
As a result of anthropological research there seems to be good
grounds for the view that there are cultural differences in emotion repertoires, some minor, some major. However, one must
be careful not to be carried away by emotionological observations without careful scrutiny of the situations involved. Englishspeaking people sometimes congratulate themselves on the
absence of a neat translation for the German word “schadenfreude,” as if people who speak English never took delight in the
troubles of another. Of course they do. The emotion has simply
not been blessed with a single term in English. However, sometimes the lack of a neat verbal equivalent is significant. The
Spanish phrase “vergüenza ajena,” shame that comes from the
foolish behavior of a total stranger, has no equivalent in English.
This is an emotion indigenous to Spain.
The work of Catherine Lutz, already mentioned (Lutz,
1988), is based on a lexical comparison with respect to word for
word translation between English and Ifaluk with a contextsensitive account of the occasions in which the words of the
Ifaluk vocabulary are used. For example, the word for “fear” is
not used in situations of physical danger, but only for social
anxieties. For physical threats, say from a shark in the fishing
grounds, the Ifaluk word goes along with words the contexts of
use for which suggest links with shame and despair. How does
Catherine Lutz know this? By tying word use to social and personal situations. An emotionology needs an ethnography to give
300 Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 4
a rounded picture of the emotion repertoires and their uses in
cultures other than ours. Even in analyses confined to emotions
indigenous to an author’s world there is an implicit ethnography,
evident in the choice of examples to illustrate analytical points.
Other Philosophical Approaches
So far the discussion of emotions in this article has been based
on Wittgenstein’s general approach to the investigation of psychological concepts. However, there are three strands in the
recent philosophical discussions of emotion that run parallel to
the Wittgensteinian treatment above.
In philosophical terms the first strand grew out of Kenny’s
(1963) argument that emotions have, as it were, proper objects;
that is, intentional, not merely felt, bodily reactions to stimuli.
In other words, the very notion of say “anger” or “grief”
involves the presupposition of an appropriate object to which
the emotion is directed. This insight was one of the points of
development of a strongly cognitive account of emotions. Not
only were emotion displays and feelings intentional, but they
expressed judgments as to the propriety, offensiveness, life
enhancing quality, and so on, of the emotion-provoking actions
of other people. The same point was made about the necessary
meanings of situations that led to emotional arousal. The situation must be interpreted as dangerous, joyous, one of loss,
humiliation, and so on, for the person encountering it to be afraid,
happy, grief-stricken, chagrined, and so on. William Lyons (1980)
anticipated much later writing in his argument that which emotion is supposedly experienced is determined by the evaluations
of the situation that has provoked a somatic reaction. Opening
up a related dimension, it has been argued that there is a close
connection between the emotions appropriate to situations and
the moral standards of a particular social order. The tie between
morality and emotion has been explored by Gabrielle Taylor
(1996) and more recently by Martha Nussbaum (2001).
Developing the cognitivist account further led to the idea of
the “social construction of emotions” (Averill, 1982). Not denying the affective, sensory quality of an emotional experience, the
social constructionists argued that displays of emotion had something of the character of speech-acts, that is, they had illocutionary force. A display of anger served as a protest, that is, as a social
act. Studies of embarrassment as a display of an act of contrition
for improper behavior strengthened this interpretation (Parrott &
Harré, 1996). A more general “communicative” account of the
role of emotions in everyday life has been proposed by Oatley
(1992), based on a more formal cognitive basis.
The flux of opinion in the philosophical literature of the last
few decades sketched above has been more a refinement of essentially cognitive approaches to the nature of emotions than any
return to simple physiological accounts. This story can be followed
in detail in an admirable review article by de Sousa (2007).
Conclusion
From whatever direction we approach the topic of the emotions,
whether via the study of the grammars for the use of the words
in emotion vocabularies, or from observation of the situations and
responses that appear in episodes we would regard as emotional,
or from the monitoring of bodily states, the three-fold character
of the concepts appear very clearly. Sometimes the situation is
as James (1884) describes it—a bodily state brought about by a
purely physical response to a situation interpreted as an emotional experience. Sometimes the situation is reversed, particularly in the case of the emotions of personal interactions. What
someone does, interpreted in a certain way, brings about a bodily state. In either case there is both a physiological and a cognitive aspect to the full experience. However, emotional states are
expressed to oneself and to others. They have a meaning appropriate to the situation in which they occur. We should follow
Wittgenstein in thinking that the form of expression and the
categorization of the emotional state are internally related. It
wouldn’t be joy if one had no tendency to smile or laugh. The
upshot of these analyses is emotion as a three-way hybrid. The
scientific study of emotions needs physiology, ethology, grammar, and anthropology to do a “proper job.” Looking back over
the last 40 years we can see a steady movement towards this
eclectic but critical point of view both in the writings of philosophers and in the work of many psychologists.
Notes
1 For a simplified version of this group of analytical tools see Harré and
Tissaw (2005) Part Two.
2 Taken from Brenner (1999, p. 104).
3 Sinanon was a psychotherapeutic organization in California and Nevada
in the 1960s.
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