Physiological Facets of Emotion

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Physiological Facet Of Emotion

New York University

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Background

The scientific study of the facial expression of emotion began with Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, first published in 1872. Among his many extraordinary contributions Darwin gathered evidence that some emotions have a universal facial expression, cited examples and published pictures suggesting that emotions are evident in other animals, and proposed principles explaining why particular expressions occur for particular emotionsвЂ"principles that, he maintained, applied to the expressions of all animals. But Darwin did not consider at any length when, how, and why emotional expressions are reliable or misleading. EKMAN (2003).

Allow me to revive an old idea about the mind. This idea is that the mind arises from, and is principally about, our sensory-motor interaction with the world. It is the idea that all our sense of the world, of space, objects, and other people, arises from our experience squeezed through the narrow channel of our sensation and action. This radical view is but, in many ways, an appealing one. It is only radical because it says that experience is the only thing that we directly know, that all our sense of the material world is built around the concept of explaining our subjective experience; not just that the mental is made primary and held above the physical, but that the subjective is raised over the objective.

What is Facial Action Coding System?

Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is the most widely used and versatile method for measuring and describing facial behaviors. Paul Ekman and W.V. Friesen developed the original FACS in the 1970s by determining how the contraction of each facial muscle (singly and in combination with other muscles) changes the appearance of the face. They examined videotapes of facial behavior to identify the specific changes that occurred with muscular contractions and how best to differentiate one from another. They associated the appearance changes with the action of muscles that produced them by studying anatomy, reproducing the appearances, and palpating their faces. Their goal was to create a reliable means for skilled human scorers to determine the category or categories in which to fit each facial behavior. The FACS Manual was first published in a loose-leaf version with video or film supplements in 1978. EKMAN, FRIESEN, HAGER, (2003)

An individual might for example, know that a certain action tends to be followed by a certain sensation, or that one sensation invariably follows another. But, these are its sensations and its actions. There is no necessary relationship between them and the sensations and actions of another individual. To hypothesize such a link might be useful, but always secondary to the subjective experience itself.

Emotions such as fear, anger, and surprise, respond to various external stimuli or events, represent psychological states that also disrupt the internal stability of the body.

Research

In learning about stress, the most important concept concerning great clinical relevance, is that the stress response can be both beneficial and detrimental to the organism. There are many complex factors that determine whether the organism's response to stress leads to adaptation and resilience (beneficial), or maladaptation and dysfunction. An appreciation of the concept of stress and its basic biological underpinnings is essential to the understanding of both health and disease processes.

Occasionally we experience something subjectively, but later we determine that it did not objectively happen. For example, we felt the room get hot, but the thermometer registered no change. In this view there is a reality independent of our experience. This would be easy to deny if there were only one agent in the world. In that case it is clear that that agent is merely inventing things to explain its experience.

Theories

There are not two kinds of things, the mental and the physical. There are just mental things: the data of subjective experience and hypotheses constructed to explain it.

The appeal of the subjective view is that it is grounded. Subjective experience can be viewed as data in need of explanation. There is a sense in which only the subjective is clear and unambiguous. "Whatever it means, I definitely felt warm in that room." No one can argue with our subjective experience, only with its explanation and relationship to other experiences that we have or might have.

The closer the subjective is inspected, the firmer and less interpreted it appears, the more is becomes like data, whereas the objective often becomes vaguer and more complex. Consider the old saw about the person who saw red whenever everybody else saw green, and vice versa, but didn't realize it because he used the words "red" and "green" the wrong way around as well. This nonsense points out that different people's subjective experiences are not comparable. The experience that I call seeing red and the experience you call seeing red are, related only in a very complicated way including, for example, effects of lighting, reflectance, viewpoint, and colored glasses. We have learned to use the same word to capture an important aspect of our separate experience, but ultimately the objective must bow to the subjective.

Darwin adopted an explicitly comparative perspective, examining emotion related vocal signals in a variety of species that included nonhuman primates, ruminants, domestic dogs and cats, and humans. BACHOROWSKI & OWREN (2008)

The appeal of the objective view is that it is common across people. Something is objectively true is it predicts the outcome of experiments that you