Boston Magazine has a profile of
psychology professor Lisa Barrett. She is billed as the most prominent
psychologist who has sought to challenge Paul Ekman’s long-standing “finding” that
people around the world identify (and perhaps experience) a few “basic
emotions” in roughly the same way. Like Barrett, I have always found Ekman’s
theory of the universality of basic human emotions (which has propelled him
into academic and consulting stardom) implausible and “cartoonish.” My
intuition is that individuals in different cultures tend to have different patterns
of emotional reactivity and concepts. To Barrett, though, this view would also be
too constraining.
Instead, Barrett posits that “emotions themselves
don’t have their own places in the brain or their own patterns in the body.”
She claims that, in reality, “each of us constructs them in our own individual
ways, from a diversity of sources: our internal sensations, our reactions to
the environments we live in, our ever-evolving bodies of experience and
learning, our cultures.” And one implication of this line of reasoning (for
which Barrett thinks she has supporting evidence from her own experiments)
should be obvious: “If our emotions are not universal physiological responses
but concepts we’ve constructed from various biological signals and stashed
memories, then perhaps we can exercise more control over our emotional lives
than we’ve assumed.” In other words, we are free to construct the emotional
lives and personas we want to be; and if we don’t, we have no one else to
blame. As Barretts puts it quite memorably, “you are the architect of your own
experience.” How nice that the pro-choice liberal ideology pronounced (a bit
prematurely) as the definitive social paradigm marking the true “end of
history” still has such neat empirical support. (Perhaps Ekman though he was
providing that, too, but – as I mentioned – his vision was too constraining for
the self-determining/constructing individuals Barrett thinks we all are – and
should be).
Barrett’s hopeful message reminded me of a curious
passage from Becoming Who We Are, a
recent book by another psychology professor, Mary Rothbart. She describes the
way pioneering Soviet psychologist Ivan Pavlov once attributed to his
experimental dogs basic traits similar to the four ancient temperamental types.
He had the harshest assessment for the “melancholic” animals who “developed
conditioned responses only with difficulty, and were easily disturbed by
distracting stimuli,” and were “most
likely to develop experimental neurosis.” In Pavlov’s own words, these hapless dogs “never fully adapt themselves to
the conditions of life, are easily broken, [and] often and quickly become ill
or neurotic.” If they could only read, and absorb Barrett’s
idea that the choices they make have lasting consequences for their emotional
wellbeing, their problems (and Pavlov’s, as he found working with them a
nuiscence) would have been reliably resolved.
So, is the kind of experimental psychology practiced
by Professors Barrett credible social science? Perhaps, if you adopt the
definition of “science” promoted by “policy analyst” JimManzi. In his book, Uncontrolled, he urges social scientists
and policy makers to adopt a strictly “experimental method” and focus on “utility”
– finding what works or is useful in various areas, as opposed to the lame old
project of “finding truth.” Never mind that this is, incidentally, the only
kind of “science” permitted in Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World – in the name of lasting peace and universal
happiness. Huxley might have had all sorts of quirky anxieties (and, by the
way, he was a drug addict) – but, of course, we now should know better.
