A Partial (and Speculative) Reconstruction of the Biological Basis of Emotionality

Mason and Capitanio (2012) offer a developmental systems perspective in which basic emotions are not natural kinds that exist in brains before they are modified by experience, but neither are basic emotions so shaped by experience that they can be called cultural artifacts. Instead, they consider basic emotions to be predictable biopsychological outcomes of an interaction between early emerging sensory-motor schemas and expectable environments. Over time, similar component–environment transactions are coddled together into multifaceted, affectively charged response patterns. In their view, basic emotions are “basic” not because they are “in the genes,” but because they are healthy and species-typical outcomes of this ontogenetic process.

One puzzle that their article does not answer is what, if anything, would count as a basic emotion? They veer away from the Darwinian notion that basic emotions represent homologies across the mammalian line, in favor of basic emotions representing uniformities within a particular species (what they call “species-typical”). It is not clear if states such as guilt and shame could therefore be considered basic in humans because they are species-typical. In another sense, if reactions to food and interpersonal attachment count as basic emotions as they suggest, then perhaps by “basic” they mean any species-typical affectively charged response to an evolutionarily important feature of an environment. Many psychologists would suggest that affective responses (subjective feelings) are only part of the conventional concept of an emotion (Oatley, Keltner, & Jenkins, 2006; Russell, 2003). Furthermore, not all affectively charged states may be “full emotions,” especially if one accepts the view of the core affect theorists that core affect is an ever present background state of the body. Quite likely the states that psychologists call basic emotions form only a part of what Mason and Capitanio are attempting to reconstruct.

Another point deserving of exploration is the concept of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. As used by Mason and Capitanio, this concept is similar to Scarr’s (1992, 1993) notion of the average expectable environment, which she borrowed not from Bowlby (1969), but from another psychoanalyst, namely, Heinz Hartmann (1958). Like other theorists who were inspired by Darwin to consider adaptation, both Bowlby’s and Hartmann’s concepts share the problem of relying on “just so stories” to identify what is average. With the simplest, early emerging schemas, one might be able to accurately identify which broad features of the environment are salient in the construction of normal developmental trajectories. As variation among individuals increases and functional schemas become tuned to more complicated features of environments, however, identifying which aspects of our current environments are those to which we were designed to respond to by evolution requires considerable speculation (e.g., is the mother in the nuclear family structure the “expected” environment?). Such speculation may not offer an empirically adequate basis for identifying basic emotions. A similar problem confronts claims about evolutionarily healthy and unhealthy emotional development. Knowing what counts as dysfunctional requires understanding what counts as normal psychological function, but detailed information about the evolutionary history of psychological capacities is not readily available (Richardson, 2007; Zachar & Kendler, 2010).

Another interesting feature of their model is that the coherence possessed by these affectively charged states is to be found at the functional level. If functional refers to a pattern of organization among the basic biological components, and that patterning is not reducible to information in the underlying components, it raises the possibility that the information from the environment is the important difference maker (i.e., the key casual factor, pragmatically).

Depending on what level of function we are discussing, some version of social construction could also emerge in such a model. We are designed by evolution to be sociocultural organisms in a way that amoebas are not, so scientists could likely articulate a biologically informed epigenetic account of how cultural variation arises in emotionality. For example, different experiences of grief across cultures (e.g., wailing and moaning vs. crying silently) have an element of socially prescribed roles, but some of those cultural variants are also expressed automatically rather than intentionally (Averill & Nunley, 1988). The specific opportunities that different cultures offer for grieving, and how grieving comes to become somewhat automatic, likely have an epigenetic component. If so, then social rules can also become written into biology and part of what we inherit is out there in culture. It may be a little over the top to put it this way, but from such an epigenetic perspective, the social construction of emotional experience and behavior is a biological process.