GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
scientists mapped anger: For a superb review of the science of the six states Ekman drew our attention to, see: Lench, Heather C., Sarah A. Flores, and Shane W. Bench. “Discrete Emotions Predict Changes in Cognition, Judgment, Experience, Behavior, and Physiology: A Meta-analysis of Experimental Emotion Elicitations.” Psychological Bulletin 137 (2011): 834–55.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
restore our standing: Tangney, June P., Rowland S. Miller, Laura Flicker, and Deborah H. Barlow. “Are Shame, Guilt, and Embarrassment Distinct Emotions?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (1996): 1256–64.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Sensing that there is more: Barbara Fredrickson was the first to note this bias in the science of emotion, its focus on fight-or-flight states like anger, disgust, or fear, to the neglect of the positive emotions. Fredrickson, Barbara L. “The Value of Positive Emotions.” American Scientist 91 (2003): 330–35.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“the emotional brain”: LeDoux, Joseph E. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
the secrets of love: Gottman, John M. Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
moral issues of our times: Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. Haidt, Jonathan. “The Moral Emotions.” In Handbook of Affective Sciences, edited by Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. H. Goldsmith, 852–70. London: Oxford University Press, 2003.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
cultivating our “emotional intelligence”: Mayer, John D., and Peter Salovey. “The Intelligence of Emotional Intelligence.” Intelligence 17, no. 4 (1993): 433–42.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“an age of emotion”: Dukes, Daniel, et al. “The Rise of Affectivism.” Nature Human Behaviour 5 (2021): 816–20.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
survival-of-the-selfish-genes view: In the late twentieth century, evolutionary thinking and the science of emotion were shaped by Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene hypothesis, and its privileging of the gene as the unit of analysis and assumptions that humans have evolved competitive, self-serving traits that led to the reproduction of those selfish genes. This thinking produced a self-preservation bias in my field: emotions are about individual survival. In the twenty-first century, evolutionary thought shifted to the group and culture as the units of analysis. Discoveries of the cooperative tendencies of young children; our universal inclination to share; our instinct to attach, belong, and be tribal; and the neurophysiology of empathy, contagion, mirroring, connection, compassion, and exploration were revealing a new lens upon human nature: we are a hypersocial species who accomplished almost all survival-related tasks, from the raising of vulnerable offspring to the provision of food, in collaborative, often altruistic groups. Groups that collaborate well and build a sense of shared identity, this reasoning would advance, are more likely to prevail and survive. And culture—the system of beliefs and practices that unite individuals into community—is an ever-evolving repository of shared knowledge and experience, a collective mind that enables us to adapt together to the challenges and opportunities in our natural and social environments.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
articulate a definition of awe: Keltner, Dacher, and Jonathan Haidt. “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Aesthetic, and Spiritual Emotion.” Cognition & Emotion 17 (2003): 297–314.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
We read treatments: Kaufman, Scott B. Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. New York: TarcherPerigee, 2020.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
mobs whipped up by demagogues: Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. (Based on 4th German ed., various translators.) Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
perceived threat also flavors experiences: Our thinking was grounded in part in neuroscience: upon detecting threat, a small, almond-shaped region of the brain known as the amygdala revs up your body’s fight-or-flight response and, if activated during awe, should blend fear into the experience. For an excellent review of this fight-or-flight physiology, see: Rodrigues, Sarina M., Joseph E. LeDoux, and Robert M. Sapolsky. “The Influence of Stress Hormones on Fear Circuitry.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 32 (2009): 289–313. For recent thinking on the amygdala, see: FeldmanHall, Oriel, Paul Glimcher, Augustus L. Baker, NYU PROSPEC Collaboration, and Elizabeth A. Phelps. “The Functional Roles of the Amygdala and Prefrontal Cortex in Processing Uncertainty.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11 (2019): 1742–54. In terms of threat-based awe, Amie Gordon found that when awe does involve perceived threat, it feels less good, increases your heart rate, and diminishes your well-being. In this and other work, we find that threat-based awe amounts to about a quarter of our experiences of awe. Gordon, Amie M., Jennifer E. Stellar, Craig L. Anderson, Galen D. McNeil, Daniel Loew, and Dacher Keltner. “The Dark Side of the Sublime: Distinguishing a Threat-Based Variant of Awe.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 2 (2016): 310–28.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Perceptions of threat: Nakayama, Masataka, Yuki Nozaki, Pamela Taylor, Dacher Keltner, and Yukiko Uchida. “Individual and Cultural Differences in Predispositions to Feel Positive and Negative Aspects of Awe.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 51, no. 10 (2020): 771–93. For an excellent treatment of this respect-based, fear-colored awe in Japan, see: Muto, Sera. “The Concept Structure of Respect-Related Emotions in Japanese University Students.” Shinrigaku Kenkyu 85, no. 2 (2014): 157–67. https://doi.org/10.4992/jjpsy.85.13021. PMID: 25016836.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Emotions are like stories: I really owe this thinking to Keith Oatley. Keith is not only a world-class cognitive scientist and leading theorist in the science of emotion but a prizewinning novelist as well. Out of his love of literature and study of emotion, he has made the case that emotions have storylike structures. Oatley, Keith. Emotions: A Brief History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.