Such was the aim of Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer, the authors of this study. In the study, participants were led to believe that the experiment was examining the effects of a vitamin compound, Suproxin, on vision. Most germane to our present interests are the participants who received a shot of epinephrine (adrenaline), which increases blood pressure, heart rate, and the sweatiness of the palms, and who were not told of the effects of the shot. These aroused participants then found themselves in one of two contexts, which unfolded according to theatrical outbursts of a confederate (in cahoots with the experimenter) that would have made the Marx brothers proud. In a euphoria condition, the confederate, sitting across from the heart-palpitating participant in a small room, first crumpled sheets of paper up and attempted jump shots into the trash can. After announcing “I feel like a kid again,” he made a paper airplane and launched it into the air. He shot pieces of paper with a rubber-band slingshot, built a tower out of manila folders, and began shimmying with hula hoops left behind a portable blackboard.
In an anger condition a much different emotional drama took place. The confederate and the participant somberly completed the same five-page questionnaire. After questions about his childhood diseases, his father’s annual income, and psychiatric symptoms family members have presented, the confederate exploded. When asked how often he had sexual intercourse each week, and “With how many men (other than your father) has your mother had extramarital relationships?” (for which the lowest response category was “4 and under”), the confederate stomped out of the lab room, muttering about the idiocy of the study. Critical to the constructivists’ cause, those aroused participants in the euphoria condition reported being much happier than those in the anger condition. A similar physiological response—elevated fight/flight physiology produced by the epinephrine shot—could lead to radically different emotions depending on the interpretation prompted by the particular context. Constructivists around the world cheered.
This study undermined the very foundation of what would become the evolutionary approach to emotion—that the emotions are embodied in distinct, genetically encoded physiological processes universal to humans and shaped by our evolutionary past. Instead, it would seem that emotions can arise out of any physiological response, depending on the interpretation of that experience. The specificity of emotion—whether we experience shame, love, anger, or compassion—and the very nature of emotional experience are the products of culturally based constructive processes taking place in the rich associative networks of the mind.
To counter this ingenious study and its many implications, Ekman confronted a career-imperiling problem: how to measure emotions objectively. What sort of measure could be relied upon to capture fleeting emotional experiences as they stream by in our affective lives? Ideally, this measure could be captured as close to the experience as possible, and used in labs around the world. The most obvious answer is to ask participants to describe their experiences with words, as Schachter and Singer had done. Perhaps the most miraculous expressions of emotion are through words, as in this poem of love by E. E. Cummings:
which is the very
(in sad this havingest
world) most merry
most fair most rare
—the livingest givingest
girl on this whirlingest
earth?
why you’re
by far the darlingest
who (on this busily
nowhere rollingest
it)’s the dizzily
he most him
—the climbingly fallingest
fool in this trickiest
if?
why i’m
by much the luckiest
what of the wonder
(beingest growingest)
over all under
all hate all fear
—all perfectly dyingest
my and foreverless
thy?
why our
is love and neverless
Notwithstanding the wonders of words, they are inherently limited for studying emotion. The most critical limitation is their temporal relation to experience. When we tell someone how we feel with words, that report is a retrospective reconstruction of an experience. When you report on the delights and frustrations of a day, or your pleasures on a family vacation, or even how a play, art exhibit, or movie moved you, your report is filtered through your current feelings, your intuitive theories of emotional experience, social expectations about what is appropriate to talk about with respect to our inner emotional lives (for example, “how would a mover and shaker express herself here?”), and your personal style (are you prone to repression or dramatic emotional disclosures?). As memories of the emotional experience are dredged up through these filters and then materialize as a set of spoken words, much of the emotional experience remains in the evanescent present of the past, lost. On this, Linda Levine and George Bonanno have found in their research that when people report upon past experiences, be it a disappointing outcome in a presidential election or the death of a loved one, it is their current feelings and how they construe the emotional event that drive their reports of past emotions as much as or more than the original feelings being reported upon.
What was needed was the development of a measure of emotion that approaches the contradictions inherent in a Zen koan. What was needed was an objective, in-the-moment measure that would distill our subjective experiences into unambiguous, quantifiable measures that could be put onto paper and interpreted and debated by scientists. To capture the objective subjective, Ekman and Wallace Friesen devoted seven years, without funding or promise of publication, to developing the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), an anatomically based method for identifying every visible facial muscle movement in the frame-by-frame analysis of facial expression as it occurs in the seamless flow of social interaction. To do so, they boned up on facial anatomy. They trained themselves in the ability to move individual facial muscles (Ekman can roll his eyebrows from one side to the other, like a wave). To document the activity of the more remote muscles in their faces, they stimulated facial muscles layered deep below the surface of the skin with mild electric shock. They then translated how changes in facial appearance—new creases, wrinkles, dimples, bulges—are brought about by different muscle movements, and combinations of muscle movements, into an esoteric language of action units. Ekman and Friesen had given psychological science the first objective mea-sure of specific emotion that could be used in any lab around the world, and in almost any context, as long as the emotional behavior was videotaped and researchers were manic enough to take the 100 hours to learn FACs and the hour required to reliably code a single minute of behavior.
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