Around the same time, 1884, psychologist-philosopher William James took on the question “What Is an Emotion?” in the journal Mind.{55} James wrote that his interest was the human state when a “wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas.” James was not concerned with things like pleasing arrangements of sounds and colors. His treatise covers only feelings that stir the body, he said, and it seems safe to say that annoyance belongs under his umbrella.
One struggle in defining emotion is finding a way to include the changes that occur in the body, the brain, and the mind (the awareness of the feeling). Here is James’s solution: “Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.”
Translated: (1) We perceive something; (2) our bodies react—for example, heart rate goes up; we start sweating; we start running; and (3) our minds become aware that we’re experiencing an emotion. James sees emotions as the awareness of these reflexive bodily changes that occur when we perceive something. Carl Lange was developing a complementary theory around the same time—and what is now called the “James-Lange” theory of emotions was born. More than a hundred years later, scientists still reference this theory in emotion research.{56}
In the last fifteen years, the field of emotion research has been on the upswing. Scientists are not simply studying emotion but have again begun to develop theories about what emotion is.
Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, in his book The Emotional Brain, argues that emotions are different from feelings. “I view emotions as biological functions of the nervous system,” he wrote.{57} Emotions are the initial response of the brain to a perception, such as a loud noise or a snake in the road. LeDoux studies how rats process fear by tracing a fear-inducing signal, like a loud noise, from a rat’s ear through its brain.
In LeDoux’s preferred semantics, a feeling is the part that happens next. Feelings are a secondary reaction that is prompted by this initial brain response, the emotion. Feelings occur when we realize what is going on and start to sweat. While James sees emotions as the perception of changes in our bodies, LeDoux sees emotions as what happens initially in the brain and feelings as how our minds and bodies react to that initial brain change.
The two-stage process of emotion and feeling that James and LeDoux map out bears on the experience of feeling annoyed. It often seems as if you’re annoyed before you’re even aware of it. You first feel the bodily signs and symptoms—a flushed face, a rise in blood pressure, sweating, a quickened breathing rate—and then realize, “Oh, yeah, I’m annoyed!” In LeDoux’s construct, there would be an initial response in the brain—the emotion—and then that would set off a cascade of effects in the body and the mind, making us aware that we’re experiencing the “feeling” of annoyance.
Although scientists may be late to the emotion party, philosophers have been grappling with emotions for millennia, although annoyance is (again) conspicuously absent from the inquiry.
Ronald de Sousa, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, specializes in emotion but hasn’t thought much about annoyance. When asked to consider it, his first instinct is that annoyance is what philosophers call a “low-level emotion.” Full-fledged emotions, according to de Sousa, have an evaluative dimension. Take anger, for example: “In anger, you have a whole lot of thoughts about perhaps the moral badness or at least the personal badness of something that’s been done to you. If I’m angry at you, that means I actually think you did something wrong.” By comparison, if we feel annoyed, it’s because of something trivial, something that does not violate our moral standards.
Another characteristic of low-level emotion is that it’s hard to recreate it in your mind, says de Sousa—it exists only when you are experiencing the changes in your body. Higher-level emotions can be felt more abstractly. For example, you can be angry without feeling your blood pressure go up. Here may be a distinction between irritation and annoyance. Irritation seems to be confined to a sensation in the moment—a merely physiological response, as de Sousa describes. Annoyance, however, may be slightly higher level than de Sousa suggests, in the sense that it does seem possible for us to be annoyed generally with a situation, without feeling the bodily arousal of irritation.
Disgust may be an analogue to annoyance, says de Sousa. Researchers are learning that disgust—once thought to be primitive and low level—is not so simple. A study in Science by Hanah Chapman and colleagues looked at people’s facial muscles when they reacted to unpleasant things, from pictures of dirty toilets to the taste of a foul liquid to an unfair experience.{58} Dating back to Darwin, facial expressions have been used to characterize emotions. In this case, it turns out that people contort their faces in a similar way when they are in all three situations. A repulsive idea triggers the same muscle response that something physically repulsive does. The idea is that you can be morally disgusted.
When it comes to understanding annoyance, psychiatrist and psychology professor Randolph Nesse frames it this way: “The question I would ask you to consider about annoyance is, can you map it to some particular situation that has recurred over evolutionary time where it would have given an advantage?”
Nesse has written extensively about how emotional responses might be shaped by evolution. “All of these different aspects of emotions—physiology, subjective experience, cognition, behavior, facial expression, the whole bit—they’re all coordinated aspects of a response that’s useful in certain kinds of situations. This doesn’t mean that every emotion has a specific function. Lots of emotions have multiple functions, and there are plenty of overlaps between the functions of different emotions. The bottom line, I argue, is that organisms during the course of evolutionary history have encountered the same kinds of situations with the same kinds of adaptive challenges, over and over again. Those that have a capacity for a somewhat standardized coordinated pattern of responses get a selective advantage.”
For irritants—such as chemicals that bother our skin—the adaptive advantage is clear. Too much of an irritant can kill us. Having a mechanism in place to help us avoid them is good for our survival. When the irritant takes on a cognitive nature, however, could the negative feeling that results also be adaptive? “As we pursue a goal, if it’s all going well, we feel great,” says Nesse. “When we experience an obstacle, we feel frustrated. And I think this may be another emotion that fits pretty nicely into this scheme.”
No one in his right mind seeks out situations that will make him feel irritated—it’s not a positive feeling—but, according to Nesse, that doesn’t mean we’d be better off without annoyance. In fact, Nesse doesn’t think any emotions are bad, really: “Everybody assumes that something like annoyance is a bad emotion or we should minimize it because having it is bad. I don’t think so, any more than anxiety is bad or sadness is bad or anger is bad—they’re all good in terms of their usefulness when they are expressed to the right degree in the right situation.”