What Is Emotion?: History, Measures, and Meanings

by Jerome Kagan

In this sophisticated overview of human emotions, a widely respected psychologist and author addresses the ambiguities and embraces the controversies that surround this intriguing subject. An insightful and lucid thinker, Jerome Kagan examines what exactly we do know about emotions, which popular assumptions about emotions are incorrect, and how scientific study must proceed if we are to uncover the answers to persistent and evasive questions about emotions. Integrating the findings of anthropological, psychological, and biological studies in his wide-ranging discussion, Kagan explores the evidence for great variation in the frequency and intensity of emotion among different cultures. He also discusses variations among individuals within the same culture and the influences of gender, class, ethnicity, and temperament on a person’s emotional patina. In his closing chapter, the author proposes that three sources of evidenceverbal descriptions of feelings, behaviors, and measures of brain statesprovide legitimate but different definitions of emotion. Translating data from one of these sources to another may not be possible, Kagan warns, and those who study emotions must acceptat least for nowthat their understanding is limited to and by the domain of their information.

Genres: Psychology, Science

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 2007

About the author

Jerome Kagan was an American psychologist, who was the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, as well as, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
Kagan has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are predictive of certain other behavior patterns in adolescence. He did extensive work on temperament and gave insight on emotion.
In 2001, he was listed in the Review of General Psychology among the one hundred most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. After being evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, Kagan was twenty-second on the list, just above Carl Jung.

Reviews

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kagan questions the theorizing about emotions. He writes, for example, about Western language that forces us to artificially categorize an emotion as this or that when emotions are often a blending of several different responses to an event. He is critical of the common categorization of emotion as basic and secondary, with the latter being additive of the elementary emotions. Too often, positive and negative emotions he believes are not objective descriptions but subjective and value-laden expressions that reflect cultural biases. He also sees emotions as broader phenomena than those facial expressions listed by Darwin. All of this, stated at the beginning of his book, is good and he summarizes this healthy criticism by saying that he is not going to define an emotion until he’s spent some time on this subject. He first wants to lead his readers through the maze of thought and debate on this topic until, presumably, the answer about what is and what is not “emotion” becomes clear.

Just a few pages later, though, Kagan starts down a road that very quickly limits the discussion so that the reader’s understanding becomes impinged in two key respects. First, Kagan sees emotions as reactive to “incentive events” that come from the outside. For example, he refers to research findings that show Larry King modulating his voice to fit the status of his guests. If the person is a former President, like Clinton, King matches “his voice to that of his guests. But when King was interacting with individuals who had somewhat less eminence…the guests began to match their voices to his profile.” Well, here, Kagan sees “high status concerns” as an emotion of some sort but he leaves out why King or his guests react that way. In other examples, Kagan refers to “conditions that provoke,” but fails to say why the individual cares enough to be provoked.

Given this externalized source of emotions, it’s no wonder Kagan spends extensive effort to detail all the ways cultures and individualized experiences result in different emotional expression and why any definition of an emotion as an objectified entity is problematic. We are blank slates, formed by culture. As an example, he refers to Presbyterians who feel unworthy when they are not working and says they are reflecting their culture, as opposed to other cultures that don’t see “work” the same way. What Kagan does not dig into is why Presbyterians care about their culture. He just seems to assume that it goes with the territory and needs no further explanation.

Kagan separates human emotion from animal emotions, and this is a second way he delimits his subject matter. He argues that the continuity that Darwin saw between animals and humans was “in error,” largely because of the cognitive capacity of humans that makes our emotions something qualitatively different. So, right here, Kagan removes humans from the animal world and puts us into what Ardrey calls the Illusion of Central Position. We are an exception to the rest of the animal world and all of that. But where our fear, anger, love, and social needs come from, for example, are not explained. We know only that they don’t come from our animal past and we know, according to Kagan, that they have a high degree of cognitive involvement through an appraisal process. And, in fact, Kagan sees human emotions centered in the conscious mind, and this is how they are unique. Because animals lack Mind (in Kagan’s sense), they don’t, and can’t, appraise, so their emotions are necessarily something of an altogether different quality.

A counter view is that all animal life, must “appraise” a stimulus as something to seek, to avoid, or to ignore as not relevant. Without such an appraisal, the animal, very simply, dies. The problem is that Kagan equates “appraisal” with consciousness whereas most appraisals, including a good part of our own, are non-conscious. The body, in effect, has a mind of its own. We pick up signals without involving consciousness because they are “in the air.” Sending and picking them up involves a full suite of “attunement” emotions and it is this animal-like capacity that makes us good at being human.*

When viewed from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, the source of emotions is inside. We have needs (food, sex, merger with group, love, security) and we need to defend against threats and harm. Need (and “anti-need”) is why we care about external “incentive events” (objects we need, objects we don’t need), and why we act and react. Though these basic needs are invariant, some are more or less automatic; others are more subject to cognitive involvement. Some are immediate; others are more about moods. Need and anti-need provide the internal motive force that is missing in Kagan.**

Mind doesn’t motivate per se, but it does tell us how to satisfy our survival needs. Those needs are the same as the rest of life, illustrating the fundamental continuity of all of life. Kagan’s “Mind” complements and supplements this process by telling us how to meet these needs. We may initially fear a stimulus, but mind provides context (information) that alleviates or substantiates that fear. Mind sorts through conflicting emotions and regulates our behavior to satisfy higher-priority needs. Or, we join groups because that’s an evolutionary imperative (Darwin’s tribalism-the group is essential for individual survival), but each group formulates its own codes (mores) about what constitutes being a group member in good standing. This, it seems, is what Kagan is discussing in his description of the wide variation in emotional expression.

*Kagan rightly criticizes those evolutionary biologists who attempt to explain each and every factor of human behavior in terms of survival value. But he goes too far when he charges that the evolutionary quest for “inclusive fitness” is all about competition and self-advancement at the expense of the whole. That’s one half of our evolutionary background. The other half is our social and cooperative nature, supported by an extensive array of social emotions, which leads us to be good group members because group life was essential for our survival. That was Darwin’s observation about our tribal nature and it was Aristotle’s observation way before that (“man” is a social animal), and it can be argued that a good part of humanity has the capacity to extend these cooperative features to non-group members, and even to non-human life.

**Importantly, Kagan does not make a distinction between need that prompts behavior (action, reaction; Schopenhauer’s “pain”) and the satisfaction of need (Schopenhauer’s pleasure states in all of its variation¬-happy, joy, content, relief, etc.) that comes from successful behavior (seeking, defending).

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty damn dense book. Every footnote is simply one or more references (sometimes as many as ten!) in support of a dense summary of research findings, philosophical works, or other material in support of Kagan's argument. The titular question is not answered. But in the process of admitting that we have no good answer, Kagan systematically demolishes various simplistic trends in contemporary psychological thought, providing a perspective of thoughtful, nuanced skepticism that is sorely lacking in many.

Ultimately a rewarding if unsatisfactory and unsettling read.

[Eric Oliver · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a terribly disappointing book. I was looking for something comprehensive for a seminar on emotions. Kagan covers a lot of material but his presentation is often incoherent and jumps among ideas and references without any clear presentation of central ideas. It's often like reading a stream of consciousness rant on various subjects. Here's a brief example of two sentences at the beginning of a chapter section:

"Wolfgang Koehler, whose William James lectures at Harvard University in 1934 were title "The Place of Value in a World of Facts," restated the significance of the contrast between good and bad. But the behaviorists, loyal to logical positivism, ignored his message, and Quine, one of the most respected philosophers of the past century, believed that these evaluative terms had no claim to objectivity because their referents were too varied." (p. 114)

Nowhere later is either Koehler or Quine mentioned nor even their ideas. And this is how he introduces the subject of "The Centrality of Evaluation."

This is simply horrible writing and Kagan expects his readers to suffer through hundreds of pages of it. There are little bits of insights buried amidst the incoherence but one really has to root them out.

Ugh.

[Ed · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seemed more about what emotion is not. Much of it is a critique of the limits of scientific studies of emotion. What I came away with was a confirmation of my opinion that for clinical purposes and for living in general rich narrative descriptions of people's lives are more interesting and useful that talk about such reifications as "anger," "fear" etc.

[Russ · Rating 3 out of 5]

for my 560 paper