Understanding human emotion is both important and at the same time challenging. This applies equally to daily life and to its scientific understanding. We all feel a range of emotions and observe changes in our behavior as our emotions change. The regulation of emotions has great clinical significance, especially for certain populations, including those impacted by disabilities or traumatic experiences. One common view of emotions is that certain events occur in our lives that result in our feeling certain emotions, which then influence our behavior. We may be admonished to control our emotions by expressing them, letting them out, getting in touch with them, and so on. Such understanding and controlling of our emotions will, in turn, allow us to behave in more socially effective ways. Another view is that our emotions are a product of what we do. We start yelling and thereby feel enraged, we run and feel afraid. By controlling what we do, we can control how we feel. For example, counting slowly to 10 will prevent us from getting angry. Each of these approaches has its roots in early psychological theories of emotions that still, in various forms, influence our practices today.
Recently, however, a new understanding is emerging from behavioral and neuroscience investigations into emotions. Data from one meta-analysis of over 220 experiments (Siegel, et al., 2018) indicated that there was no common neural or other physiological response correlated with any single emotion. Additionally, the strategy of reading facial expressions as a sole indicator of emotion has also become questionable. The data on the apparent universality of the ability of people to classify emotions based on facial expressions has been shown to be largely a procedural artifact (Barrett, 2017) and culturally biased (Gendron et al., 2014).
Fortunately, a biobehavioral approach has emerged from research that at once recognizes that we all feel a range of emotions, but that does not require those emotions to be discreet internal events. Instead, converging approaches from neuroscience (Barrett, 2017) and the consequential contingency analysis of behavior suggest emotions are not consistent internal states, but instead occur as a function of environmental context (Skinner, 1957, 1963, 1965, 1971; Goldiamond, 1979, 2022; Layng, 2006, 2017).
Our lab is investigating the application of a contingency analysis of emotions as emotional concepts and instructional design methodology to develop programs to teach emotion recognition.
References
Barrett, L. F. (2017a). How emotions are made. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Goldiamond, I. (1979). Emotions and emotional behavior: A consequential analysis and treatment, audiotape, Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, NY: BMA Audio Cassettes Publisher.
Goldiamond, I. (2022). A programing contingency analysis of mental health. Routledge.
Layng, T. V. J. (2006). Emotions and emotional behavior: A constructional approach to understanding some social benefits of aggression. Brazilian Journal of Behavior Analysis, 2(2), 155-170. http://dx.doi.org/10.18542/rebac.v2i2.810
Layng, T. V. J. (2017). Private emotions as contingency descriptors: Emotions, emotional behavior, and their evolution. European Journal of Behavior Analysis, 18(2), 168-179. https://doi.org/10.1080/15021149.2017.1304875
Siegel, E. H., Sands, M. K., Van den Noortgate, W., Condon, P., Chang, Y., Dy, J., ... & Barrett, L. F. (2018). Emotion fingerprints or emotion populations? A meta-analytic investigation of autonomic features of emotion categories. Psychological Bulletin, 144(4), 343. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000128
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts
Skinner, B. F. (1963). Behaviorism at fifty. Science, 140(Whole No. 3570), 951–958. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.140.3570.951
Skinner, B. F. (1965). Science And Human Behavior. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. Knopf/Random House.