"The Evolution and Social Construction of Emotion "

ABSTRACT:

Disputes between theories of emotion have frequently been compared to the parable of blind men encountering different parts of an elephant and coming to blows over what the animal is truly like. The parable is particularly apt when evolutionary theories of emotion encounter theories that treat emotions as aspects of culture. This paper compares the ways in which three current approaches to the evolution of emotion deal with the well-documented influence of local, cultural factors on the development of an adult 'emotional phenotype'. The best known of these theories is Paul Ekman's account of a small number of stereotyped, pancultural 'affect program' responses or 'basic emotions'. Since its inception, this account has given a major role to culturally variable 'display rules' in determining the actual expressions that result when one of the pancultural responses is triggered. Another group, the Evolutionary Psychology movement, argues that a much larger fraction of the human emotional repertoire consists of specialized responses that have evolved relatively independently of one another. Each response is designed to cope with a specific, recurrent challenge in ancestral environments. The Evolutionary Psychologists suggest that the evolved developmental program of the organism will often be designed to produce different phenotypes in different developmental contexts. This idea creates a role for culture in the development of the evolved emotions. Finally, some social transactional theorists of emotion place their models in an evolutionary context. This last group argues that evolution would be unlikely to produce a range of specific emotional responses. Instead, humans have evolved a range of signals of possible future action and an ability to improvise 'emotional responses' made up of these signals. The emotional behavior that results is a function of patterns of social interaction and differs extensively across time and culture. Among the more radical possibilities opened up by this final approach are that public emotion types do not correspond one-to-one to types of internal motivational states, and that the function of emotions are less to express motivational states than to manipulate expectations about future behavior. In this paper, I assess the prospects of all three approaches as research strategies that will allow emotion theorists to integrate evolutionary and cultural perspectives on emotions and emotional behavior.
 

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