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What Triggers Emotions in Humans?

What Triggers Emotions in Humans?What are some examples of things that trigger emotions? Getting stuck in traffic? Being hungry? Watching the news? How your partner squeezes the tube of toothpaste (yes, this is one of my pet peeves!)?

Most emotion scientists believe that emotions are triggered by how we evaluate events.

These events include not only what happens around us, but also thoughts and feelings in our heads, because those thoughts and feelings can themselves trigger emotions.

Appraisal Theories of Emotion

This evaluation process is known as appraisal, and over the decades there have been tons of research that have led to many different appraisal theories of emotion. Although there are differences among them, these theories generally state that there are different emotions are triggered (or elicited) by different ways we appraise or evaluate events, and that different emotions are triggered by different appraisals.

Cross-cultural research on emotion has contributed a wealth of information about many domains of emotion.

In my last blog on understanding anger, we discussed about how that body of research has informed us about what is known about emotion antecedents and appraisals.

Learn tips and techniques on how to better manage your emotions!

Join us for our LIVE webinar on March 25, 2021! More info here.

What are Antecedents?

Stomach, Health, Diet, Dessert, Eating, Belly, Sugar

Antecedents are the specific events that people identify to trigger emotions.

Those include things like what are at the top of this blog – getting stuck in traffic, being hungry, watching the news, or the toothpaste fiasco. But as mentioned just above, antecedents can also include thoughts about the future, memories about the past, and even one’s current emotions.

Universal, Psychological Themes

Research has demonstrated that, despite many differences (and similarities) in the specific types of events that trigger emotions in us, there are universal, psychological themes associated with each of the seven universal emotions – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

A psychological theme is the basic, most elemental way in which our minds process and evaluate any event in terms of what the event means to us psychologically. These themes are mostly concerned with our welfare.

The fact that there are universal, psychological themes associated with basic emotions means that the same underlying, psychological themes trigger the same emotion in all humans around the world, regardless of differences in race, culture, nationality and any other demographic characteristic.

In that last blog (hopefully it was helpful for some to deal with their anger episodes), we learned that the universal, psychological theme that triggers anger all around the world is goal obstruction. That is, regardless of whatever the specific event is, if the event is appraised or evaluated in our minds as “goal obstruction,” that appraisal would trigger the emotion of anger.

In the same way, each of the other basic emotions are associated with a universal, psychological theme that triggers it all around the world.

 

Quick Descriptions of Themes for the Other Basic Emotions

Contempt – Moral Superiority

Contempt is the emotion that is elicited when our minds appraise something or someone as beneath us.

 

Disgust – Contamination

Disgust is triggered when our minds appraise something that is dirty, rotten, offensive, or contaminated.

Read how anger, contempt and disgust fuel hostility

Fear – Threat

Fear is triggered when our minds appraise something as threatening, or potentially threatening, or sense of self. The sense of self that is threatened can be our physical self as well as our psychological self.

Happiness – Goal Attainment

Achieving our goals triggers happiness (which makes happiness sort of the opposite of anger, not sadness).

Sadness – Loss

Loss of a loved object or other person elicits sadness.

Did you know? Children as old as 12 have difficulty telling the difference between genuine and fake sadness from facial expressions. Read more here.

Surprise – Novel Objects

Surprise is triggered when something is new. Interesting, surprise tends to be the briefest emotion because things are not new to us for very long.

Where do emotion appraisals come from?

I believe that they are part of our innate emotion system, which we have inherited as part of our evolutionary history.

Having this system and this set of appraisals and psychological themes was helpful in that evolutionary past to ward off threats, fight for food, obtain and keep mates, build families and communities – basically to survive.

Moreover, they helped us humans to survive in many situations that required an immediate response or action. Emotions and the appraisal system helped us respond in those situations with minimal conscious awareness.

For example, what do you think would happen if you started drinking spoiled milk and had to think through the risk-benefit ratio of doing so once you perceived the nasty taste?

By the time you thought that through, you would have ingested that spoiled milk and it would be in your system, along with all the other contaminants in there, which would obviously make you sick and/or even bring about death. That wouldn’t be good for survival!

Thank god we don’t go through such time consuming, risk-benefit calculations for many events that have implications for our health or safety. Those with that system survived and remain here today; those without that system were selected out of existence by nature.

The appraisal process is fast! Extremely fast!

And for good reason. It is so fast that scientists still don’t have an accurate accounting of exactly how fast it is (although we have good guesses!). Thus, changing the appraisal process is very, very difficult.

In actuality, we’re all constantly scanning our environment for possible emotion triggers. Much of time, we appraise events and they don’t trigger an emotion; that is, they are not evaluated as possibly requiring an immediate response from us in order to survive. In fact, some may say that our contemporary human life is pretty cushy, where emotions hamper more than they help.

But when something happens that may require an immediate response, the emotion system kicks in, appraising events and other stimuli extremely rapidly and turning on the emotion system in order to act. Just think about a time that you may have been on a sidewalk and abruptly heard a car or bus coming at you.

What about culture and emotion?

Now, although the underlying psychological themes associated with each of the basic emotions are universal and innate, culture still plays an important role in how we adapt our emotion system for daily use.

Yes, there are some events that universally trigger the same kinds of emotions – spoiled milk, snakes, feces, etc. – all kinds of things that are associated with survival regardless of culture.

But cultures also facilitate our learning to associate our innate emotion systems in culture-specific and individually different ways. That’s why the same event can trigger very different emotions in different people – because they have learned to associate different appraisals for those events in their upbringing.

So the next time you think about an emotion, think about not only the specific event that you think triggered it, but the underlying, psychological theme with which your mind evaluated that event.

That’s the real trigger of the emotion.

The post What Triggers Emotions in Humans? first appeared on Humintell.

Understanding Anger

Understanding Anger Ever regret about how you dealt with anger in the past? We all have. In this blog, I’d like to share with you one thing I have learned from decades on research on emotion, that may be helpful for you.

What is anger?

When we think about potentially destructive emotions, we often think about anger. And for good reason.

Anger is probably the most common emotion that we have that leads to feelings of regret later. Now, I don’t believe anger is inherently a “bad” emotion; getting angry can result in some good in our lives and in society. Anger, and all other basic emotions, exist for a reason.

In our evolutionary history, being angry (and disgusted and afraid and sad, etc.) was functional for us. That is, anger, as all other basic emotions, helped us deal with problems in our lives and in our environments in order to survive. In our evolutionary past, emotions like anger were important in order to deal with many life struggles. All our emotions allowed us to handle incredibly difficult events that required us to think with minimal conscious awareness.

Emotions have helped us deal with birth, death, finding food, fighting for mates and resources, and everything else required for living for eons. Anger, and all other emotions, have helped us deal with all these problems of living. Put another way, if we didn’t have anger (and the other emotions), we wouldn’t be here in the first place.

Or more precisely, those individuals that did not have emotion systems in them were selected out of existence by nature, as part of natural selection.

Anger and Regret

anger-painBut sometimes our anger gets the best of us, and we become angry and later regret having become angry.

Here are three reasons why we later regret having become angry:

  1. Anger was an inappropriate reaction to the situation.
  2. Anger was the appropriate reaction to the situation, but we expressed it too intensely.
  3. Anger was the appropriate reaction to the situation, but we expressed our anger in a way that harmed someone else.

I’d like to focus on that last reason why we may regret our anger. That last one – expressing anger in ways that hurt or harm others – is particularly problematic because it often (not always) happens unnecessarily. This may be true of not only loved ones, family and friends, but also of strangers.

You only hurt the ones you love?

Here’s why this occurs. When we are emotional, one thing that occurs is cognitive gating. When triggered, emotions channel our senses, perceptions, and minds to let in certain things and block out others. In the case of anger, when we are angry, our sensory system gets very sensitive to signals of anger in our environment.

This makes perfect sense, because one thing the emotion of anger does is to recruit an organized system of bodily responses that helps prepare us to fight.

In doing so, our minds are unconsciously on the lookout for signs of anger in others, because we want to know who else is ready to fight in order to be aware of potential threats. So we become hypervigilant to other signs of anger in others.

But what does that do to an interaction?

That means that when we get angry and express that anger, we are hypervigilant to signs of anger. Others can pick up our signals of anger themselves, easily and unconsciously. Those perceptions, in turn, trigger anger in them, who then express that anger themselves.

We, who are already hypervigilant to anger signals, pick up those signals and this further fuels our anger, and we express more. And then they pick up those angry signals, get even more angry, and express even more.

This anger exchange cycle continues really quickly so that even after a few short seconds, people are arguing, and sometimes fighting, because they are both angry, while the original issue that started everything in the first place has been forgotten.

What to do?

Fortunately, research on what are known as emotion antecedents and appraisals can help in this regard. I was very lucky to be involved with this area of emotion research early in my career, working with some of the most well-known scientists on emotion appraisals and antecedents. Decades of emotion science has led to many appraisal theories of emotion, which are well accepted theories about how emotions are elicited.

Most scholars accept that emotions are triggered by some kind of appraisal process in the mind. That is, when an event occurs, our minds evaluate (appraise) the event. Some events trigger emotions, some don’t. How is that determined? That’s what appraisal theories do. They provide guidelines of what’s going on in our heads to trigger certain emotions.

Cross-cultural research on emotion antecedents and appraisals has shown that there are relatively few cultural differences in the specific types of events that trigger emotions in us. Of course when an event only occurs in one culture, it can’t trigger emotions in another. But by and large the same types of events can trigger emotions all around the world (which is very interesting in its own right). Unsurprisingly, many emotions are triggered in social situations in all cultures.

Most importantly, the research has suggested that basic emotions are associated with universal, psychological triggers that underlie event appraisals. That is, regardless of what the specific event is, there are certain elemental psychological themes that bring about emotions. And with basic emotions, the same elemental psychological themes trigger emotions all around the world. That’s an amazing thing, and provides another basis for understanding emotions all around us, despite cultural differences. It’s another reason why emotions are a universal language.

With anger, the universal psychological theme that triggers anger all over the world is…. (drum roll….)

Goal obstruction.

That is, anger is the emotion that is triggered when our goals are blocked or obstructed. This makes sense also, because when our goals are blocked, anger helps prepare our bodies to fight in order to removal those obstacles.

Obstructions are usually not people; they’re actions, or more precisely the results of actions.

If you get angry about how the tube of toothpaste is rolled, for instance, the obstruction is the way the toothpaste is rolled, not the person who rolled it. Thus, in a strict sense we should be thinking about how to deal with actions or their results when we become angry.

Anger Management

The problem is that when something occurs to trigger anger in us, we are quick to associate the obstruction with the person who did the action that resulted in the obstruction.

That is, we personalize the anger by blaming the person and not the action; we blame the person who rolled the toothpaste. But in doing so we are misplacing the actual trigger, because the anger trigger is the obstruction, not the person who caused the obstruction.

For example, when your spouse does something to irritate you (irritation is part of the anger family; see here for our blog on emotion families), we are quick to blame the person (spouse) when in fact we should be focusing on the obstruction itself (such as how to roll the tube of toothpaste).

Blaming the person would lead to our expressions of anger toward the person when in fact we could and should be directing our angry energy to the obstruction (how to come up with solutions to rolling a single tube of toothpaste), not the person. Or better yet, we might want to consider why the goal was so important to us in the first place, which may lead us down a different path altogether involving some interesting self-reflection.

Blaming people and not actions is how we can get into a destructive cycle of angry reactions towards others, like I discussed above.

If we can reframe our thinking to the obstruction and not the person, we can focus our discussion on solving the obstruction while maintaining relationships, not harming them.

How do you control anger outbursts? Of course, needing to know that one can reappraise the situation when you’re angry requires you to be aware that you’re angry in the first place. That’s all about emotion regulation.

For our tips on how to do so, check out our recent blog on our #1 tip to manage our emotions.

 

The post Understanding Anger first appeared on Humintell.

How Many Emotions Are There?

One of the biggest misunderstandings about the 7 universal facial expressions of emotion is that people think that means we have only seven emotions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, facial expressions of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise are universally recognized and expressed. But humans have many other types of emotions as well. These include pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, triumph, worry, hate, love, jealousy – the list of emotions goes on and on.

A dilemma about emotions

This poses a dilemma. On one hand, decades of science have demonstrated that there’s a special category of emotions known as basic emotions. As we have discussed previously, different scholars classify different emotions into their list of what’s “basic.” We use universal, observable, nonverbal signals in the face as our criterion for classifying emotions as basic, which is why we believe there are 7 basic emotions. Other scholars have other approaches. Basic emotions are not necessarily better; they’re just different.

On the other hand, a quick search of emotion words will reveal that there are hundreds of emotion-related words in English. And this is true in all other languages as well. We can relate to all those emotions lists; they’re all important to our everyday social lives.

So how can we reconcile this dilemma?

Well, things are not as disparate as they seem. Most theories of basic emotions suggest that basic emotions (however you define them and whichever emotions you classify as basic) serve as the elemental building blocks for all other emotions that we have in life. There are important differences among these theories, and they have all generally received a lot of scientific support. And they all

serve as the base platform by which other emotions in everyday social life emerge.

The process goes something like this:

Baby Emotions

  • As infants and young children, all humans come to the world with their building blocks of basic emotions.
  • As we develop our cognitive skills and engage in a fully social life, with complex social situations, multiple actors and multiple actions, we have emotional reactions that leverage the basic building blocks we start with.
  • Because these emotional reactions are occurring in a deeply embedded context, those emotional reactions are linked together to that context, including all of its linguistic and semantic meanings.

Because humans have the amazing capability known as language, we are able to create an emotion word – a label if you will – for these specific cognition-context-emotion combinations. Words, after all, are symbols of things in its world a culture deems important to it. Having these symbols (words) makes communicating about them much easier than without them.

The power of a word

That is, having these specific emotion word labels is really convenient (functional is the more scientific way to say that) because a word reifies a phenomenon in such a way so that we can all talk about it and communicate about it with and to others. Doing so greatly enhances and enables our communications, enhancing our sense of self and ability to coordinate socially with others. Over time, we create many emotion words in a language, but the actual emotions those words symbolize all leverage the same basic building blocks of emotion.

What about the “emotion wheel”?

Some people have suggested this process involves a mixing of the basic emotions to create unique emotions, like mixing basic colors of red, yellow and blue on a color wheel. But what I’m talking about is not exactly that.

What we’re talking about is unique cognition-context-emotion combinations, some of which may involve “mixing” or “blending” of multiple emotions, but some may not. This is different than “emotion mixing” like on a color wheel.

Specificity matters

Some emotion words are associated with specific types of contexts and actors. The emotion of “jealousy,” for example, suggests that there are three actors, person A, person B whom person A loves, and person C who is a rival for the affections of person B. Thus, many emotions may be associated with specific types of “scripts,” like scripts for a movie or play.

This thought has led many scholars in the past to create “script theories” of emotions, started by Silvan Tomkins and who many acknowledge as the father of modern emotion science. Script theories are important ways of understanding emotions in society, and thus the number of emotion words we have. But different scripts still leverage the same building blocks of basic emotions (just as blockbuster movies do, by the way).

What about culture and emotion?

Cultures differ in exactly how many words their languages have to refer to emotions. This is because cultures differ in what they believe are important enough to have a word that they can use to refer to a specific cognition-context-emotion combination.

  • Some cultures hypercognize about emotions; they create many emotion words.
  • Others hypocognize about emotions; they create less emotion words.

For example, scholars have studied and compared 124 or so emotion words in English to similar lists of words in other languages. I understand that Buddhist texts delineate thousands of emotion and emotion-related words. If true, that must mean that the specification of those states was important enough in that cultural frame to produce words for them.

But just because an emotion word exists in a culture but not another doesn’t mean that the emotions themselves or the situations to which they refer don’t exist.

Schadenfreude! And other examples…

The most well-known example of this is the German schadenfreude, which loosely refers to “joy in someone else’s misfortune,” which has no word equivalent in English. Many scholars have used the fact that the word schadenfreude exists in Germany but not elsewhere to suggest that that emotion doesn’t occur elsewhere, like in the U.S.

But that’s not true; just take a look at television shows such as America’s Funniest Videos, where audiences laugh at other people’s misfortunes. Just because that specific word doesn’t exist in English doesn’t mean that the phenomenon doesn’t occur. It does mean that for some reason in its cultural history, German culture believed that that phenomenon was important enough to reify it by having a specific word for it.

Or take the word sadness, which the famous anthropologist Levy noted did not exist in Tahiti. He did note, however, that sadness did in fact occur there, and that Tahitians cry at sadness eliciting events. It’s just that they didn’t have a specific word for it.

Emotion Categories

Regardless of the total number of emotion words in a language, research has demonstrated that they are all conceptually and empirically linked to a small number of base words.

For example, Phil Shaver, a very respected scientist, has demonstrated that emotion words in multiple languages essentially categorize into five categories in all languages:

  • Anger
  • Fear
  • Sadness
  • Surprise
  • Love

Note that four of the five map directly to the universal facial expressions of emotion. One could also argue that happiness is the building block to love. In fact, in his original work, joy was part of the base categories of words in addition to the others.

Here’s the emotion word tree from one of Shaver’s seminal research articles in this area:

Phil Shaver Emotion Word Tree

From: Emotion knowledge: Shaver, P., Schwartz, J., Kirson, D., O’Connor, C. (1987). Further exploration of a prototype approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1061-1086, p . 1067.

Emotion Families

In our line of work, we call the various trees and branches of emotion words “emotion families.” To us, anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise are all prototypical category names for a host of emotions that are all related to the category label. Many of the family members differ in intensity, from low to high.

The anger family, for example includes low intensity anger words like frustrated and annoyed to high intensity words like enraged and hostile, and everything in between. And then there are all the other words that build upon anger, like jealousy. They’re all signaled by the universal angry face, or parts of it.

The fear family includes all fear-related words from worry, apprehensive, stressed to horrified, mortified, terrorized. They all are signaled by the universal fear face, or parts of it. The same is true for all other emotions associated with the universal faces.

Can you name all the emotion words and map onto the universal faces?

Thus, even though there are “only” seven universal facial expressions of emotion, they do NOT refer only to seven emotions. They refer to a LOT of different emotional states, all of which utilize the same basic building block of emotion and are signaled by the same facial expression, or part of it.

Yes, there are still many other emotions that are not signaled in a unique facial expression. And there’s likely good evolutionary reasons why. But that also means that the ones that are signaled by the face are a very special set of emotions. And there’s lots of them, for good reasons!

The post How Many Emotions Are There? first appeared on Humintell.