"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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