Why Do Humans Actually Have Emotions? - Dr Laith Al-Shawaf

The discussion delves into the evolutionary significance of emotions, highlighting their adaptive functions despite often being perceived as irrational. Emotions like fear, disgust, and anger evolved to protect us from danger, pathogens, and unfair treatment, respectively. The conversation, featuring insights from Laith Al-Shawaf, explores the "emotion paradox," where emotions are both beneficial and distressing. It emphasizes understanding emotions as coordinating mechanisms that influence physiology and behavior to solve adaptive problems. The dialogue also touches on cultural perspectives, evolutionary mismatch, and the nuanced role of emotions in social dynamics, challenging the dichotomy between emotion and cognition.

• Emotions are adaptive and serve essential functions tied to survival and reproduction.
• Fear protects us from danger, disgust from pathogens, anger helps negotiate social interactions, and love bonds individuals.
• Emotions help navigate status hierarchies, repair relationships, and build alliances.

"Each emotion has an evolved function, something tied to survival or reproduction or some other kind of goal that is tributary to survival and reproduction."

• Emotions are not just irrational forces; they are crucial for survival and social navigation.

• Emotions are both adaptive and distressing, causing psychological disorders and leading people astray.
• They help with survival and reproduction but can cause behaviors that don't serve our interests.

"There are these two truths that we need to reconcile: the fact that they are adaptive and useful and functional on the one hand, and we really couldn't do the basic tasks of survival and reproduction without them, but on the other hand, they do cause distress."

• Understanding emotions involves reconciling their adaptive benefits with the distress they can cause.

• Emotions are often misunderstood as merely feeling states, but they involve complex changes in the body and mind.
• Fear, for example, narrows attention, suppresses unnecessary physiological functions, and enhances memory for escape routes.

"Emotions are more than just the feeling state; more than just the subjective phenomenology. There are a whole host of changes in our body and brain and mind and behavior."

• Emotions coordinate various physiological and psychological systems to solve adaptive problems.

• Emotions regulate multiple systems in the body and mind, affecting attention, physiology, behavior, and memory.
• They solve adaptive problems by coordinating these systems in a coherent way.

"An emotion coordinates or regulates many different systems in your body and mind—attention, physiology, deception, behavior, memory, etc.—in service of solving an adaptive problem."

• Viewing emotions as coordinating mechanisms helps understand their broader role beyond mere feelings.

• People focus on the feeling aspect of emotions because it is the most consciously accessible and salient.
• Emotions are also valued for how they feel, leading to a hyperfocus on the feeling state.

"It's basically a cognitive bias on our part, whereby one, as you say, it's simply the thing that is most salient and that we have the most conscious access to."

• The focus on feelings is due to their conscious accessibility and inherent positive or negative valence.

• Emotions help advocate for personal needs and interests, though some are more social than others.
• Emotions like guilt and anger involve negotiating social relationships, while disgust and fear are more about personal survival.

"Some emotions seem more social than others. Guilt seems to be about repairing relationships where we've harmed somebody that we are supposed to be valuing."

• Emotions serve both personal and social functions, advocating for interests in a broad sense.

• Love helps solve commitment problems by bonding individuals and discouraging infidelity.
• It brings future costs of cheating into the present, altering decision-making.

"Love helps you to solve the commitment problem. It helps you to bond with another person when it might be in your interest to always remain open to other options."

• Love's irrationality is adaptive, preventing purely rational calculations that might undermine relationships.

• Negative emotions, despite feeling bad, serve crucial protective functions.
• Fear, disgust, shame, and jealousy protect against dangers, pathogens, status loss, and relationship threats.

"Fear feels bad, but it protects you from various dangers. Disgust feels aversive, but it protects you from pathogens."

• Negative emotions are signals of external problems, similar to pain indicating tissue damage.

• Evolutionary lens highlights the utility of negative emotions and broadens understanding beyond feelings.
• Emotions involve changes in attention, memory, and behavior, solving adaptive problems.

"An evolutionary perspective shows us how the other components like the changes in cognition and physiology and behavior form a functionally coherent set that are solving a certain problem."

• Evolutionary insights reveal the adaptive logic behind emotions, including hyperactive anxiety.

• Superficial linguistic differences in emotion words reflect deeper psychological uniformity across cultures.
• Words like "Schadenfreude" illustrate universal emotions despite linguistic variations.

"Superficial linguistic differences are underlain by cross-cultural uniformity in the psychology."

• Evolutionary perspective suggests emotions are universal, with language differences not implying emotional absence.

• Emotions evolved for adaptive action, not happiness or accuracy, explaining their distressing aspects.
• Concepts like the smoke detector principle explain hyperactive anxiety as a safety feature.

"Our brains have evolved to be adaptively biased in the direction of the safer error. That's why our anxiety has so many false alarms."

• Understanding emotions as evolutionarily biased systems helps reconcile their adaptive and distressing nature.

• Modern environments differ from ancestral ones, potentially heightening anxiety and depression.
• Factors like lack of kin, sedentary lifestyles, and processed foods contribute to emotional distress.

"Emotions that were ancestrally adaptive may or may not be currently adaptive in some of the situations that we face."

• Evolutionary mismatch explains why some emotions may not align with current environments, adding to distress.

• Basic emotions like fear and disgust are universal, but cultural variations exist in emotion expressions.
• Emotions are complex, with numerous permutations and cultural influences.

"Some emotions are universal, and there's debate about other emotions and a perspective on the emotions that suggests a kind of cultural perspective."

• Basic emotions are shared across humanity, but cultural differences enrich the emotional landscape.

• The concept of "basic" emotions is a historical notion without strong theoretical backing.
• Emotions like joy, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, and fear were labeled as basic due to universal facial expressions.
• The necessity of a universal facial expression to define an emotion as basic is arbitrary.

"There is a common view that there are some emotions that are more basic or more fundamental than others. I don't buy this view."

• The speaker challenges the traditional classification of basic emotions, suggesting it lacks a strong theoretical foundation.

"Just because they don't have an Associated facial expression is not a good reason to count them as less fundamental or less basic."

• The presence of a universal facial expression should not determine the fundamental nature of an emotion.

• Emotions evolved for different purposes, not to be ranked as more or less fundamental.
• Emotions like guilt, romantic love, and gratitude are universal and serve specific functions.

"I think of each of them as having evolved for a different purpose."

• Each emotion serves a unique evolutionary function, regardless of its perceived fundamental status.

"Romantic love bonds us to partners, gratitude helps us to increase how much emphasis we place on valued other when they've given us something good and helped us out."

• Emotions serve distinct roles in human relationships and social interactions.

• Fear is an emotion that protects against dangers and mobilizes psychological resources.
• It heightens perception, narrows attention, and reallocates energy to address immediate threats.

"Fear mobilizes a bunch of different things in your psychology to solve the problem at hand."

• Fear coordinates multiple psychological and physiological responses to address immediate threats.

"It's changing the way you feel, the way you think, the way you remember, the way you conceptually carve up the world and the way you behave."

• Fear induces a comprehensive shift in perception and behavior to escape danger.

• Surprise is a less complex emotion that focuses attention and evaluates unexpected events.
• It is a response to a broken pattern prediction, prompting quick evaluation and reaction.

"It's supposed to focus your attention on the surprising thing quickly, evaluate it as positive or negative, and then react accordingly."

• Surprise functions as a rapid assessment tool for unexpected events.

"I'd probably think about it as some kind of pattern prediction that has been broken."

• Surprise arises from a disruption in expected patterns.

• Shame functions to prevent behaviors that lead to status loss and reputation damage.
• It helps mitigate social devaluation by prompting corrective actions.

"Shame seems to function to prevent you from engaging in behaviors that would cause you status loss and reputation loss in your society."

• Shame acts as a deterrent against behaviors that could lead to social ostracism.

"There's evidence that shame works to prevent us from engaging in those behaviors that cause that loss."

• Shame is a social mechanism that aligns personal behavior with societal expectations.

• Guilt repairs relationships with valued others, while shame prevents social devaluation.
• Both emotions can coexist, addressing different social and personal issues.

"Guilt is thought of as functioning to repair a relationship with a valued other when you have hurt them or wronged them."

• Guilt focuses on mending personal relationships.

"Shame is about preventing your from falling in the eyes of your peers."

• Shame addresses broader social reputation concerns.

• Pride involves behaviors that enhance social status and respect.
• It is criticized but serves a pro-social function by promoting positive traits and skills.

"Pride is about engaging in behaviors and traits that bring you social valuation and respect from your peers."

• Pride promotes social recognition and respect for positive attributes.

"Studies on Pride show that the degree of Pride that you feel at those traits or behaviors closely tracks the degree of valuation others would give you."

• Pride correlates with societal recognition and valuation of positive behaviors.

• Modern lifestyle changes contribute to rising levels of anxiety and depression.
• Factors include social media exposure, sedentary jobs, and lack of close social networks.

"We live in a very different way than we used to... many of us now have overly sedentary jobs and bad diets and are not surrounded by kin and friends as much as we used to be."

• Modern societal structures and lifestyle choices contribute to increased anxiety and depression.

"With the broadened exposure to the best of the best... you compare their facade with your real life."

• Social comparison and unrealistic standards exacerbate feelings of inadequacy.

• Happiness is transient due to evolutionary mechanisms like the hedonic treadmill.
• Constant striving for new goals prevents long-lasting happiness but promotes survival.

"We accomplish something and then we feel happy and proud for a short period of time, but then the pride quickly dissipates."

• The fleeting nature of happiness is an evolutionary adaptation to encourage continuous achievement.

"The reason our brains are subject to the hedonic treadmill is again it's not a pathology, it's not a mistake."

• The hedonic treadmill is an adaptive feature, not a flaw, in human psychology.

• Unavoidable competition for resources and status contributes to unhappiness.
• Conflicting goals and interests lead to inevitable dissatisfaction and competition.

"As long as there's some competition, there's going to be some unhappiness because other people maybe are besting us."

• Competition and conflicting interests are inherent sources of unhappiness in human society.

• Emotions evolved primarily for survival and reproduction, not for happiness.
• Negative emotions can seem maladaptive but often serve an underlying adaptive purpose.
• Understanding the evolutionary mismatch can help in managing negative emotions.

"Emotions to begin with, they don't evolve for our happiness; they evolve for our survival and reproduction."

• Emotions are not designed to make us happy but to ensure our survival and reproduction.

"Understanding why something appears irrational but is underlain by a deeper adaptive logic takes some of the chaos and confusion and pain out of it."

• Recognizing the adaptive purpose behind seemingly irrational emotions can alleviate their negative impact.

• A personality trait that describes the extent to which individuals enjoy engaging in challenging cognitive tasks.
• Those high in Need for Cognition may find solace in understanding the reasons behind their emotions.

"These insights may help some of us take the sting out of our negative emotions, especially those people who are higher in Need for Cognition."

• People with a high Need for Cognition benefit from understanding the rationale behind their emotions, which can reduce emotional distress.

• Emotions are often mistakenly placed in opposition to cognition; however, both are complex information processing systems.
• Emotions are adaptively rational, serving specific functions that are not immediately apparent.

"Emotions like cognition are complex information processing instantiated in the nervous system that evolved for a reason."

• Emotions, like cognition, are essential for processing information and have evolved for specific purposes.

"We don't want blanket vilification and we don't want blanket always self-help trusting. What we want is a more nuanced approach."

• A balanced view of emotions is necessary, recognizing both their benefits and drawbacks.

• Anger serves as a negotiation tool when one's welfare is undervalued by others.
• Although anger can lead to problems, it evolved to help organisms advocate for their interests.

"Anger is a device for negotiating with others who haven't placed enough value on our welfare."

• Anger functions as a mechanism to demand better treatment from others.

"Organisms without emotions would be stupider than us, not smarter."

• Emotions, including anger, are crucial for intelligent action and decision-making.

• Second-order emotions are emotions about emotions, such as frustration with one's anxiety.
• Understanding the purpose of primary emotions can reduce the intensity of second-order emotions.

"If you understand why the hedonic treadmill exists, it makes total sense; you no longer need to be pissed at yourself for feeling it."

• Comprehending the underlying reasons for emotions can diminish self-reproach related to those emotions.

• Shame is about perceived devaluation by peers, not necessarily about actual wrongdoing.
• Reputation management is crucial due to the evolutionary importance of social acceptance.

"Shame is not about being culpable about having done something wrong necessarily; it's about falling in status in the eyes of your peers."

• Shame is linked to social status and perception rather than actual guilt.

"Reputation and acceptance by your peers would have meant the difference between surviving and not surviving in the environments that we evolved in."

• Social acceptance was vital for survival in evolutionary history, explaining the intense feelings associated with reputation.

• Positive emotions like love are often understudied but serve essential social functions.
• These emotions facilitate bonding and cooperation, crucial for survival and reproduction.

"Romantic love and parental love are universal emotions that evolve to serve a very clear function, one of them being pair bonding, the other one being raising and protecting offspring."

• Love and other positive emotions play a significant role in forming and maintaining social bonds.

"Emotions pervade all aspects of human life and everything we do."

• Emotions are integral to human behavior and psychology, influencing a wide range of activities and interactions.

• Pride and shame are interconnected emotions related to social valuation.
• Pride involves engaging in activities that enhance social standing and promoting them.
• Shame is about hiding actions that could lead to social devaluation.

"Pride and shame can be thought of as sort of flips of each other; one of them about engaging in stuff that helps with social valuation and advertising it to the group, shame about not engaging in stuff that results in social devaluation."

• Pride and shame function as social regulatory emotions, influencing behavior based on perceived social value.

• Disgust acts as a protective mechanism against pathogens.
• Sexual arousal can be dampened by heightened disgust responses.
• The pandemic may have influenced sexual activity due to increased pathogen concerns.

"We do know from research that if you experimentally disgust participants, their desire for sexual variety and novelty goes down."

• Disgust can reduce interest in sexual exploration, particularly in pathogen-dense environments.

• Spandrels are byproducts of evolution, not directly evolved adaptations.
• Some human traits and behaviors may be spandrels rather than adaptations.

"Spandrels are sometimes called byproducts, and it's the idea that not everything in the human mind or body is an adaptation that evolved for a reason."

• Understanding spandrels helps differentiate between evolved features and coincidental byproducts.

• Belief in religion may be a byproduct of hyperactive agency detection.
• Humans often perceive agents in the world, even when none exist.

"Some thinkers have said that may be relevant to religion because when you see the thunder and the flood and the famine, you may think there's an agent behind these things."

• Hyperactive agency detection can lead to attributing natural events to supernatural agents.

• Aggression may have evolved for adaptive reasons but can lead to murder as a byproduct.
• Parental love mechanisms might fail, resulting in higher rates of violence toward stepchildren.

"Famously, evolutionary psychologists proposed that murder and other kinds of killing are essentially byproducts of a failure of mechanisms of parental love to activate sufficiently."

• Understanding the byproduct nature of murder can inform discussions on violence and aggression.

• Speaking language is an evolved adaptation, while reading and writing are cultural innovations.
• The ease of learning spoken language contrasts with the difficulty of learning written language.

"We have an adaptation for speaking and comprehending spoken language, but written language is a more recent evolutionary and cultural innovation."

• The distinction between speaking and writing highlights the evolutionary processes behind language development.

• Emotions are adaptive systems evolved to solve specific problems.
• Emotions can misfire, leading to maladaptive outcomes.

"Each emotion in and of itself seems to have evolved for a reason and seems to be geared toward solving a problem."

• Understanding emotions as adaptive systems allows for better management of emotional responses.

• Emotions should not be overly vilified or accepted; a nuanced approach is needed.
• Evaluating the function and usefulness of emotions in specific instances is crucial.

"Replacing that blanket good or blanket bad approach with a case-by-case nuanced approach where I try to look at each emotion and think why it's there and what its function is."

• A nuanced approach to emotions helps in making informed decisions about their management.

• There is value in embracing emotions alongside rational thought.
• Understanding cognitive biases does not eliminate emotional responses.

"Trying to think about the wisdom that does come up, trying to sort of embrace, get the cerebral horsepower cognitive to tune that down a little bit."

• Embracing emotions can lead to a more balanced and informed perspective on decision-making.

• Adaptive mechanisms may produce maladaptive outputs in certain contexts.
• The distinction between system adaptation and individual behavior is important.

"The neurocognitive mechanism in the bird's brain that produced that is super adaptive because by engaging in that error sometimes it doesn't have to engage in the more catastrophic error."

• Recognizing the adaptive nature of mechanisms can provide insights into seemingly maladaptive behaviors.