Basic science of emotions

"Scientific" here refers to that detached view of things that often ignores the personal
experience and compromises understanding empathy by using obscure technical terms and
phrases. This is all for the sake of clarity and precision and does not always signify a general
cold attitude of the author.

For some people a "science of emotions" is a bit of an oxymoron (like "black light" or "Microsoft
Works") and you could ask why you would ever want to have a science of emotions. Emotions
are supposed to be subjective intuitive guides to the most vital matters in life, so why would
you want to spoil that with estranging language and detached points of view?
Well - what you want is not always what you have and even if a life guided in the right
directions by inner feelings and intuitions is an ideal a lot of people will find that they are
either very confused about their intuitions or that their intuitions regularly lead them into
painful experiences.

There sometimes is a need to supplement your intuitive guidance with some evidence based
plans and a more objective understanding of yourself and others.
The following is my sincere attempt to scrape together what i have found important in this
respect. The sources are very varied but my basic understanding of the matters stem from the
esoteric psychology of Alice Bailey and the semiotic (theory of signs) of Charles Sanders
Peirce.

An emotion is your mind taking a situation as an icon of an experience.

This definition is the core scientific understanding of an emotion and I will try to go into
enough details about the terms used to give you a basic understanding of the dynamic
involved. I should warn that this involves a crash-course in semiotics - something which isn’t
really advisable.

You should note that the basic relation is triangular: An emotion is the relation between a
situation, an experience and an (iconic) interpretation. In another slightly misleading phrasing
an emotion is the hypothesis that the situation present to the mind is another example of a
certain kind of situations. "This situation is like when....". Certain words and phrasings will
make you interpret: "Oh - I guess I have failed again". Or "He is trying to flatter me". The
situation is seen in a certain light or interpreted in a certain matrix. Which matrix is very
significant and there is a great variety of possible matrices pending on your experience and
you disposition. The specific chosen matrix will influence the quality of emotion, the action-
urges and conscious understanding of the situation according to the guiding past experience.
The emotion is from a semiotic point of view a hypothesis that this situation can be best
treated as an instance of X, where X is either a composite of several like experiences or a ideal
version of a specific experience. Only the term hypothesis is somewhat misleading in that this
is commonly understood as something explicit and verbalised, whereas the inference in an
emotion will be "sensed" and only rarely verbalised.

You should note that what you normally would call a hypothesis always have this exact form:
Some situation is taken to be like an experience in some evident aspects and
perhaps/hopefully in some not so evident aspects as well. What the hypothesis adds to a
situation is a somewhat credible but not at all certain suggestion about some otherwise unseen
aspects of the situation.

The tentative diagnosis of diabetes takes a variety of symptoms as a case of diabetes and
predicts that a blood-sample will show a lack of insulin, showing that there is a general failure
in insulin production.

The emotional "diagnosis" of a unpleasant situation takes a variety of signs as a case of

"personal failure", predicts that all important tasks will be compromised by "personal failure"
and prompt for some reaction deemed fitting (suicide or isolation). In many cases the
unpleasant situation will no longer be taken as suggestive of personal failure but as proof. This
is by all means bad science.

The central dynamic to all this is the establishment of an iconic reference, a likeness, between
the present situation and some experience. This dynamic is variable by both the "library" of
experiences drawn on and the logic or habits of thought that guide the establishment of a
"likeness" or iconic reference between events. I will cover both aspects, but first I should try to
give a general introduction to the iconic sign as a backdrop for the later analysis.

Last edited by tagfat on Thu Sep 09, 2004 11:46 am; edited 3 times in total

The Icon
The Christian icons are graphic depictions of the Christ just as computer icons are pictures of
some objects. In semiotics the term icon has a more general meaning: an icon is a sign which
signifies by being like something in any way possible. A bust is an icon, but so is a painting, a
drawing, a map, a diagram or a chart. All signs that signify by use of its own form is an icon.

Most icons are "silent" in the sense that they do not make any explicit reference to any object
and you do not normally se them as referring to anything. The typeface of what you are
reading, the colour of the room you are in, the music that you are listening to and someone’s
dialect are such self-contained icons that only very implicitly refers to a certain quality of mind.
Your tone of voice is also one such an icon but here it is more obvious that there is some kind
of reference to a quality of mind.

Icons and Symbols

One defining aspect of the icon is actually that it does not need any other signs for its
interpretation. In common language there is a bit of confusion of symbols and icons, so i
should point out that the symbols is defined as a sign that relies on some rule or habit for its
interpretation. Language is the prime example of symbols: Words and phrases can be limitless
suggestive - if you happen to know that particular language. "Rdgrd med flde" will only mean
something to someone introduced to Danish language. Icons on the other hand will never
require any predispositions for its interpretation. Music is universal because it relies on icons
only.

The Egyptian written language was to a large degree iconic, using icons of ideas and object as
letters. There are several modern iconic languages which combines the use of symbols and
icons. With a vocabulary of symbols signifying resistors, condensators and semiconductors you
can build icons of amplifyers and other electronic gadgets. The symbol for a transistor has an
iconic representation of the base, the emitter and the collector while the symbol for a resistor
(a zigzag line) is less clearly iconic in character. With a more obscure iconic reference you have
to rely more on habit of mind for interpretation and the sign becomes more of a symbol. I’m
sure that for the trained mind of a electronics engineer it would not matter at all if the
established symbol for transistors was totally arbitrary - say a crossed square - the iconic
reference is largely a leftover from the childhood of electronics. You can find similar traces of
iconic references in words like "bomb" or "hack".

There is a natural progression whereby words acquire meaning it didn’t have before. Electricity
means a lot more now than it did 100 years ago. While the essential meaning has not
changed, the practical implications understood by the word is so different in this time than
hundred years ago. The same goes for the word "bomb".

Icons on the other hand are eternal in their significance - the Monalisa and Bachs Magnificat
are unchanged after hundreds of years. I know that different directors will perform a
symphony in a slightly different way in his personal "interpretation", but that is besides the
point. A changing context will not mean a changed interpretation of a given icon, only a
different icon will make the difference.

The mystery of smell

It might be usefull to take a quick look at the use that mother nature saw for emotional
reactions and an emotional based motivation in the more advanced species. The more obvious
advantage is the possibility of "long distance reactions": If you can see a threatening situation
as just that - threatening - you can react accordingly, even if you are at safe distance in time
or space.
But I will suggest that the really significant advantage is the general ability to process stimuli
in the kind of virtual reality commonly refered to as abstract thinking.

Abstract here refers to something outside any sense-modality, so that any visual
representation would be abstract in relation to sound perception, i.e. you hear a well known
voice and "see a face" in your mind, even if you are just on the phone.

What has all this to do with smell? Well, even if it is not totally evident I tend to think that
there must be a very strong connection between the function of smell and the emotional
reactions that we have. Or rather that the latter is a updated version of the first.

Let’s go back in time to trias, the era when dinosaurs largely ruled the world and where the
first mammals evolved. Jeholodens were one of the early mammals, a long-tailed, quadrupedal
mammal, about 5 inches long. An insectivore, it had relatively advanced, grasping hands, but a
primitive pelvis and hind limbs. It may have had large eyes, and may have been nocturnal
(most active at night) which is significant.

A jeholodens

Being a mammal meant internal regulation of temperature instead of the reptiles and
dinosaurs primitive reliance on the ambient temperature. It meant that they could be active at
night when it was cold and when the hungry thecodonts would be "sleeping", or rather inactive
from hypothermia.

This meant that the world was largely theirs in the dark hours, but it introduced the slight
problem of navigating in complete darkness. In order to overcome this limitation early
mammals developed an acute sense of smell. The natural selection for variations more suited
to take advantage of the cold dark night would ensure that the early mammals got the needed
equipment. This makes it very likely that the early development of the mammalian brain had
nothing to do with more intelligence as such, but was a function of the evolving olfactory Bulb.

There is however one slight glitch in this theory: The sense of smell isn’t really very useful.
With visual information you can do a lot of analysis: the angular difference from each eye will
give you a clue to distance and the visual brain will actually give you a 3-dimentional derivate
from two different 2-dimentional representations in each eye. Similarly with hearing: The outer
ears are designed to distort the sound according to the direction its coming from and with
added phase analysis between the sounds in the two ears you will get a sense of room with at
least two dimensions represented clearly.

The trouble with smell is that you can’t really do anything with it. Light moves in straight lines
and the eye will produce a perfect array representing the distribution in space of the sources of
the light. The molecules that are detected as smell, just hangs or drifts in the air. The one
thing you can do with smell is recognition. You can recognise a specific smell as that particular
smell. End of story.
This begs the question: If the start of mammalian brain-development was due to increased olfactory
capabilities, then what are those extra capabilities used for? Nature don’t waste energy, if there was a
larger olfactory Bulb developed, the there must have been a vital use for it.

It has been suggested that the olfactory Bulb became the site for imaginations: It is deep dark
night and some early mammal get wind of a suiting prey. What it needs to do is a bit of
hunting. Had there been light it would have had an easy translation between the visual
information and the adequate hunting behaviour. The visuals would be processed in 3D and
make a nice source for spatial navigation of the legs and teeth. If you now replace the visual
stimulation with smell you loose the link between stimuli and behaviour, a smell is not
suggestive of direction. It would seem that what the brain actually did in lack of visual was to
enhance the stimuli of smells with vivid imaginations of the scenario. If the hearing was good it
could support the virtual visual and give a bit of direction. But most importantly the stimuli
would be placed in a "space" where coordination of body movements would take place. The
smelled objects in this imagined space would have to have a pretty strong motivating effect as
well and this fits very well with the very strong instinctive reactions that we can have to certain
smells. If you have learned to loathe a specific smell by getting sick after eating say
asparagus, this loathe will be almost impossible to overcome, even if you know that you didn’t
get sick from the asparagus but from a virus you contracted.

So to summarize: Recognition of a specific smell as coming from a prey animal would lead to
strong arousal and keen motivation, it would conjure up a vivid "visualisation" of the prey in 3
dimensions, guided also by sounds, whatever visual perception was possible, and the
proprioceptive feedback from the moving legs. Any specific significant smell would be
recognised based on experience and trigger a huge motivated response.

This would all be a curiosity in natural history if it wasn’t for one significant aspect: Given that
this worked so well for smell, why not try the same trick based on other senses? Why not take
any significant sign - be it visual or auditory - and make it trigger an appropriate (based on
your personal experience) response? Any such general ability would come pretty close to what
we understand as our emotional reactions and I think that this gives a great set of clues to
what normal emotional function is like and how to deal with it.

Now there is a lot of speculation in this theory - a lot of things could turn out not to be the
case in reality - but that is not so important. The central point is to get a sense of the dynamic
involved in interpretation of significant signs in the environment and the ways that imagined
space plays a role in the process of aligning present stimuli with past experience. The way that
experience based imaginations will serve as a guiding matrix for any significant sense input.

The common icon

Pure icons are extremely rare if they exist at all. The point is not that what is normally
considered icons also have symbolic or indexical properties, but rather that what is normally
considered object, event and experiences have an iconic aspect which is extremely useful for
the human mind. The basic definition of an iconic relation is that the icon resembles its object.
What should be noted is that all objects actually resembles themselves, which is only to say
that no matter what other ways an object signifies it will always have a certain set of iconic
properties. Just as any object, say a can of soup can be used for its normal purpose, it can also
be drawn or painted. The icon thus produced will share a set of iconic properties with the can.
Those properties are no less iconic when residing in the can than when residing in the painting.
What is different is that in a painting we will be likely to view the iconic properties as the most
interesting, while most people would perhaps be more interested eating the soup.

Andy Warhol: "Campbell's Soup"

Peirce stresses the importance of the icon in our normal communications:

"The only direct way of directly communicating an idea is by means of an icon; and every
indirect method of communicating an idea must depend for its establishment upon the use of
an icon. Hence, every assertion must contain an icon or a set of icons, or else must contain
sign whose meaning is only explicable by icons “[2.272]

So where do we find those icons? There are three different types of icons:

Images are representing mere qualities (i.e. the colours of the can of Soup),

Diagrams are representing dyadic relations of the parts of one thing by analogous relation in
their own part (i.e. a diagram of an electronic circuit).

Metaphors are representing the meaning of a sign by representing a parallelism in something

else. Metaphors are the really interesting icons in that they use symbols as their basis, but
essentially conveys an icon. A set of known meanings are used to convey the icon or "paint the
picture".

To understand something is to have a icon present the predicate of the assertion.