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Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions
Biopsychologist Victor Johnston explores the origins of human emotions. Drawing on computer science, neurobiology, and evolutionary psychology, he argues that emotions are not an accident of nature, but are instead the basis of learning and reasoning, and help us to adapt to a complex, rapidly changing environment. In the process, he offers a new view of reality - what we see, hear, smell and feel is not an accurate representation of the world around us; rather, our feelings are illusions, shaped by millions of years of evolution.
220 pages, Paperback
First published April 8, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 17, 2018
Johnston argues for viewing emotions as biological events that enhance our likelihood of reproductive success through "hedonic manipulation" or hedonic amplification. Basically, emotions make those things that are good for us passing on our genes FEEL good, those that are bad FEEL bad so that we are more likely to respond to those situations in reproductively-productive (ha) ways.
This is a hard one for me to rate. On one hand, it felt very basic to read because this idea has now been around for a long time and is generally accepted as a good theory or possible explanation. On the other, was it more revolutionary when it was published? That would affect my rating. I'm just not invested enough to ferret out the answer.
Even though most of the ideas weren't new to me, many of the scientific bits were. Johnston goes into good biologic detail about processes in the brain and body, which I found fascinating and helpful. I will forget 95% of it because my brain doesn't like to hold onto details (they are not reproductively impactful so I have no hedonic reaction to amplify in order to seal them in my semantic memory!), but I feel like I have a better understanding of how our feelings and aesthetic judgments fit within our biology and our social lives. It's a relatively easy, quick read and worth it if you are so inclined.
This is a hard one for me to rate. On one hand, it felt very basic to read because this idea has now been around for a long time and is generally accepted as a good theory or possible explanation. On the other, was it more revolutionary when it was published? That would affect my rating. I'm just not invested enough to ferret out the answer.
Even though most of the ideas weren't new to me, many of the scientific bits were. Johnston goes into good biologic detail about processes in the brain and body, which I found fascinating and helpful. I will forget 95% of it because my brain doesn't like to hold onto details (they are not reproductively impactful so I have no hedonic reaction to amplify in order to seal them in my semantic memory!), but I feel like I have a better understanding of how our feelings and aesthetic judgments fit within our biology and our social lives. It's a relatively easy, quick read and worth it if you are so inclined.
March 26, 2022
The main takeaway from this book is that many of the attributes of the world that we ascribe to it are really adaptive constructs of our brains and not features of reality. Redness is our biological interpretation of the electromagnetic spectrum at around 700 nanometers, not a property of the electromagnetic wave in itself. However, It is functional. Ditto beauty and that sugar is sweet. It is a good book on evolutionary functionalism and it’s application to our feelings and our decision making process. Parts of the book get a little tedious. The author goes into great lengths to describe some computer programs based on Darwinian algorithms and with learning algorithms using feelings. An interesting read nonetheless.
As a side note, some may take offense to the interpretations of male and female reproductive selection as being too stereotypical. We are biological creatures, though it is also important to remember the context that in a new and changing current environment, some behaviors may no longer be adaptive.
As a side note, some may take offense to the interpretations of male and female reproductive selection as being too stereotypical. We are biological creatures, though it is also important to remember the context that in a new and changing current environment, some behaviors may no longer be adaptive.
September 30, 2015
Reads a bit like a textbook, and I wish it had a bit more about the evolution of specific feelings. But overall it was well done. It gave me insight into why we feel at a macro level even though my expectation was different. Learned a good bit.
It is dense tho
It is dense tho
July 1, 2026
I changed my rating on this book after revisiting Johnston. Not sure what I was thinking earlier. It was thirteen years ago, and I was fairly new to the subject. Might have been my negative reaction to kin selection and reciprocal altruism, by my confusion over his use of the terminology, and by the sometimes thick writing. Fortunately, I had copied some pages from his Why We Feel book (1999) and think that this is one of the better treatments of emotions that I've come across.
AI points emotion theory to Lisa Barrett's constructed emotions as the definitive guide. It is not, and it is an example of how AI wrongly frames a subject-matter. For emotion theory, this Johnston book is a good starting point.
Some of his points to highlight (my earlier review is below the three asterisks):
1. What we feel in regard to +/- (hedonic value) can be traced back to our need to survive and reproduce. This valence, as highlighted by feelings, is what gives us meaning. We look at the world and interact with it in terms of what is good or bad (or neutral) vis-a-vis our survival, well-being and reproduction (hence, preoccupation with sex). Without relevance in this way, in a practical way, the world means nothing, really, very much (which gets into existential angst and theories of boredom in a developed world, but this is a whole different topic). In this regard, Johnston writes that "We experience fear and love, anger and pain as a response to otherwise meaningless physical and social events."
2. Of course, we do all sorts of things that are non-utilitarian in nature, like art and science and music. Arguably, these too have an evolutionary ground in the sense that they satisfy our need for stimulation and curiosity (to know) and provide self-reinforcing pleasure. But these rest on a Maslow-like hierarchy. They emerge once the more basic utilitarian needs are satisfied. In this regard, Johnston writes: Each momentary experience is merely a virtual representation that amplifies and discriminates between those aspects of the physical and social world that are biologically relevant. Our conscious mind imposes a structure on our experience of the world around us; it is certainly an illusion, but it is an adaptive illusion."
3. On consciousness, Johnston writes; "At this point in human history, no one knows the actual physical basis of consciousness but the specific details are not as important as the central proposition - that conscious experiences, like sensations and feelings, evolved because they dictated a dynamic organization of the nervous system that could prioritize experiences and distinguish between environmental events or circumstances that have had a real influence on biological survival."
4. On the nature v. nurture debate, he says that our genetic makeup (genotype) is the foundation that is expressed differently (phenotype), for some or most traits (including behavior) depending on the environment. Thus, we are products of our genetic makeup, our environment, and the interaction between the two. In other words, who we are is defined by three independent variables: genes per se, environment per se, and the interaction between the two. His formula is thus: Phenotype variance (i.e. who we are as selves) = G + E (GXE). The only possible quibble I have - I don't have the full book now, only selected pages - is that more info on the role of individual variation at the genotype level. This tends to get lost in evolutionary theory - with variation occurring just at the species level, not individual variation within the genetic program (Piaget, C.H. Waddington).
5. Helpfully, Johnston highlights three human adaptive strategies: Genetic (built in adaptive behavior), experience (learning from the past), and reason (end-means coordination for future behavior: if we do X, our end Y is the result.
6.. Experience and reason is where our species' creativity occurs, and this Johnston notes, is where free will pertains. We can choose what we do and how we do it. But Johnston also addresses the Schopenhauer question (Why do we do what we want to do?) by saying that we are free to do what we want to do. What we want to do are the evolutionary givens - our need to survive and reproduce, our need for nurture, our need to merge with a group (if alone, we die), and our need for sexual mates.
7. From what I can tell, Johnston does not put "needs" in the emotion category, but this is exactly why we move in the world - we seek what we need to satisfy our needs and we defend against threats and harms (and what annoys), including our need to be free to seek and defend. Interestingly, the four feelings he lists above (#1) are primary: We seek what we "love" and we avoid "pain." We defend ourselves via "fear" and "anger." Schopenhauer reframes this more clearly: We are moved to engage (seek from, defend against) the world by pain (needs, fear and anger). When successful, there is pleasure/relief; when there's failure there pain (fear, anger) remains.
***
The book repeats what has been said before about emotions and evolutionary theory - kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tit for tat and prisoner's dilemma, the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (traits evolved in response to particular situations in the evolutionary environment). There is some new information on beauty and a computer program (FacePrints) that I had not seen before.
The author confuses me on what he means by "feelings." He equates them with emotions ("our inner private feelings - emotions -") that leads a reader to wonder why there's a need for two terms to describe the same thing, particularly when others (e.g., Demasio) make an important distinction between the two. The author also says that, "In addition to emotions, a second category of inner feelings are elicited by sensory inputs..." that he calls "affects" so now the reader has emotions that may not be the same thing as "feelings," which in turn he refers to as "affects." Then he calls all feelings "emotions as well as affects," adding that all feelings come in "hedonic tones" (good and bad feelings about things). From "hedonic" the discussion of feelings gets more challenging. For example, Johnston writes that "...our feelings act like active filters, or what I call discriminant hedonic amplifiers, that define and exaggerate the reproductive consequences of environmental or social events associated with relatively minor fluctuations in reproductive potential."
Johnston repeats the more or less standard identification of primary social emotions that he then introduces as just simply "primary emotions" (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise), which triggers the question about whether these are or are not social. It's a fair question. Presumably, we can be happy for non-social reasons (we have food) and we get surprised when we meet an animal coming around the corner. The author says we got these primary emotions because of "commonly occuring events" in our evolutionary past but happiness, sadness, etc. are more or less general states of being and it's natural to wonder how these developed by "common occuring [specific?] events" as the author suggests.
The author says that children are happy when they get what they want but that begs the deeper question about what it is that they want and why do they want such things. For example, in his discussion of "secondary social emotions" (which Johnston defines as guilt, pride, and envy, but later he adds embarassment, shame and pride), why does a child care about what others think? Darwin suggests this is the evolutionary need to be part of the (tribal) group. If so, is that need an emotion?
The author echos what other evolutionary theorists believe, that every feature of our body exists because of its survival value. On the question of why our faces are as they are, Johnston says that we have large bushy eyebrows set close to the eye on a protruding brow ridge" because it provides "an effective method for excluding sweat from the eye sockets as well as providing protection from an overhead sun." Is it really true that many of our fellow primates died because they did not have large busy eyebrows?
The best line in this book was his footnote in the back when he writes that "Without feelings - affects and emotions - the world around us is a meaningless conglomerate of energy/matter...." I also liked his comment in the preface that "The human brain did not evolve to accurately represent the world around us; it evolved only to enhance the survival of our genes." I like the author's opening discussion that is critical of dry cognitive science (human brain as a "general-purpose computer") and wet cognitive science ("that the conscious attributes of mind, like sensations and feelings, are a product of the physical and chemical organization of the brain"). The problem with the former, Johnston argues, is that it does not take into account emotions/feelings/affects. The problem with the latter is that it does not develop and explain how such feelings came about. The author comes at his subject from the perspective of "evolutionary functionalism" - the survival function that our emotions played in the past. That is a valuable perspective as long as one is open to the possibility that even this approach has shortcomings.
AI points emotion theory to Lisa Barrett's constructed emotions as the definitive guide. It is not, and it is an example of how AI wrongly frames a subject-matter. For emotion theory, this Johnston book is a good starting point.
Some of his points to highlight (my earlier review is below the three asterisks):
1. What we feel in regard to +/- (hedonic value) can be traced back to our need to survive and reproduce. This valence, as highlighted by feelings, is what gives us meaning. We look at the world and interact with it in terms of what is good or bad (or neutral) vis-a-vis our survival, well-being and reproduction (hence, preoccupation with sex). Without relevance in this way, in a practical way, the world means nothing, really, very much (which gets into existential angst and theories of boredom in a developed world, but this is a whole different topic). In this regard, Johnston writes that "We experience fear and love, anger and pain as a response to otherwise meaningless physical and social events."
2. Of course, we do all sorts of things that are non-utilitarian in nature, like art and science and music. Arguably, these too have an evolutionary ground in the sense that they satisfy our need for stimulation and curiosity (to know) and provide self-reinforcing pleasure. But these rest on a Maslow-like hierarchy. They emerge once the more basic utilitarian needs are satisfied. In this regard, Johnston writes: Each momentary experience is merely a virtual representation that amplifies and discriminates between those aspects of the physical and social world that are biologically relevant. Our conscious mind imposes a structure on our experience of the world around us; it is certainly an illusion, but it is an adaptive illusion."
3. On consciousness, Johnston writes; "At this point in human history, no one knows the actual physical basis of consciousness but the specific details are not as important as the central proposition - that conscious experiences, like sensations and feelings, evolved because they dictated a dynamic organization of the nervous system that could prioritize experiences and distinguish between environmental events or circumstances that have had a real influence on biological survival."
4. On the nature v. nurture debate, he says that our genetic makeup (genotype) is the foundation that is expressed differently (phenotype), for some or most traits (including behavior) depending on the environment. Thus, we are products of our genetic makeup, our environment, and the interaction between the two. In other words, who we are is defined by three independent variables: genes per se, environment per se, and the interaction between the two. His formula is thus: Phenotype variance (i.e. who we are as selves) = G + E (GXE). The only possible quibble I have - I don't have the full book now, only selected pages - is that more info on the role of individual variation at the genotype level. This tends to get lost in evolutionary theory - with variation occurring just at the species level, not individual variation within the genetic program (Piaget, C.H. Waddington).
5. Helpfully, Johnston highlights three human adaptive strategies: Genetic (built in adaptive behavior), experience (learning from the past), and reason (end-means coordination for future behavior: if we do X, our end Y is the result.
6.. Experience and reason is where our species' creativity occurs, and this Johnston notes, is where free will pertains. We can choose what we do and how we do it. But Johnston also addresses the Schopenhauer question (Why do we do what we want to do?) by saying that we are free to do what we want to do. What we want to do are the evolutionary givens - our need to survive and reproduce, our need for nurture, our need to merge with a group (if alone, we die), and our need for sexual mates.
7. From what I can tell, Johnston does not put "needs" in the emotion category, but this is exactly why we move in the world - we seek what we need to satisfy our needs and we defend against threats and harms (and what annoys), including our need to be free to seek and defend. Interestingly, the four feelings he lists above (#1) are primary: We seek what we "love" and we avoid "pain." We defend ourselves via "fear" and "anger." Schopenhauer reframes this more clearly: We are moved to engage (seek from, defend against) the world by pain (needs, fear and anger). When successful, there is pleasure/relief; when there's failure there pain (fear, anger) remains.
***
The book repeats what has been said before about emotions and evolutionary theory - kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tit for tat and prisoner's dilemma, the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (traits evolved in response to particular situations in the evolutionary environment). There is some new information on beauty and a computer program (FacePrints) that I had not seen before.
The author confuses me on what he means by "feelings." He equates them with emotions ("our inner private feelings - emotions -") that leads a reader to wonder why there's a need for two terms to describe the same thing, particularly when others (e.g., Demasio) make an important distinction between the two. The author also says that, "In addition to emotions, a second category of inner feelings are elicited by sensory inputs..." that he calls "affects" so now the reader has emotions that may not be the same thing as "feelings," which in turn he refers to as "affects." Then he calls all feelings "emotions as well as affects," adding that all feelings come in "hedonic tones" (good and bad feelings about things). From "hedonic" the discussion of feelings gets more challenging. For example, Johnston writes that "...our feelings act like active filters, or what I call discriminant hedonic amplifiers, that define and exaggerate the reproductive consequences of environmental or social events associated with relatively minor fluctuations in reproductive potential."
Johnston repeats the more or less standard identification of primary social emotions that he then introduces as just simply "primary emotions" (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise), which triggers the question about whether these are or are not social. It's a fair question. Presumably, we can be happy for non-social reasons (we have food) and we get surprised when we meet an animal coming around the corner. The author says we got these primary emotions because of "commonly occuring events" in our evolutionary past but happiness, sadness, etc. are more or less general states of being and it's natural to wonder how these developed by "common occuring [specific?] events" as the author suggests.
The author says that children are happy when they get what they want but that begs the deeper question about what it is that they want and why do they want such things. For example, in his discussion of "secondary social emotions" (which Johnston defines as guilt, pride, and envy, but later he adds embarassment, shame and pride), why does a child care about what others think? Darwin suggests this is the evolutionary need to be part of the (tribal) group. If so, is that need an emotion?
The author echos what other evolutionary theorists believe, that every feature of our body exists because of its survival value. On the question of why our faces are as they are, Johnston says that we have large bushy eyebrows set close to the eye on a protruding brow ridge" because it provides "an effective method for excluding sweat from the eye sockets as well as providing protection from an overhead sun." Is it really true that many of our fellow primates died because they did not have large busy eyebrows?
The best line in this book was his footnote in the back when he writes that "Without feelings - affects and emotions - the world around us is a meaningless conglomerate of energy/matter...." I also liked his comment in the preface that "The human brain did not evolve to accurately represent the world around us; it evolved only to enhance the survival of our genes." I like the author's opening discussion that is critical of dry cognitive science (human brain as a "general-purpose computer") and wet cognitive science ("that the conscious attributes of mind, like sensations and feelings, are a product of the physical and chemical organization of the brain"). The problem with the former, Johnston argues, is that it does not take into account emotions/feelings/affects. The problem with the latter is that it does not develop and explain how such feelings came about. The author comes at his subject from the perspective of "evolutionary functionalism" - the survival function that our emotions played in the past. That is a valuable perspective as long as one is open to the possibility that even this approach has shortcomings.
June 4, 2026
5 stars simply because I found this book in my school library as a teenager and it altered my brain and how I look at life forever lol. Very cool book.
April 14, 2012
Aplicação da teoria da evolução, alia descobertas da anatomia, psicologia e funcionalidade do cérebro humano para explicar como os sentimentos ativam determinadas áreas mentais - especialmente de recompensa e repulsa - e traz a representação de símbolos para dentro da mente, inversamente ao mundo externo povoado de radiações eletromagnéticas e reações químicas sem sentido intrínseco e invalidando outras hipóteses como a da equalidade do funcionamento do cérebro e computador. Sustenta que os símbolos só adquirem significado quando filtrado pelos sentidos e decodificado por sentimentos e uma racionalidade moldados por muitas eras que fizeram perdurar somente os genes que maximizavam a sobrevivência e perpetuação da espécie, mas dentro de uma sociedade. Aparentemente um modelo completo e que não deixa falhas, e explica como e porque temos sentimentos e como raciocinamos, não baseados em lógica, mas nestes mesmos sentimentos. Longe de ser um estudo simplesmente frio e calculista, apresenta conclusões que podem ser comparadas às filosofias da existência e embeleza ainda mais a condição humana por ir um passo à frente de entender como funcionamos e mostrar como um universo sem simbolismos, que não é bom ou mau, mas simplesmente é, só adquire sentido na presença de um ser vivo.
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