Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Apr-Jun;19(2):14747049211016009.
doi: 10.1177/14747049211016009.

Are Emotions Natural Kinds After All? Rethinking the Issue of Response Coherence

Daniel Sznycer  1 , Adam Scott Cohen  2
Affiliations

Are Emotions Natural Kinds After All? Rethinking the Issue of Response Coherence

Daniel Sznycer et al. Evol Psychol. 2021 Apr-Jun.

Abstract

The synchronized co-activation of multiple responses-motivational, behavioral, and physiological-has been taken as a defining feature of emotion. Such response coherence has been observed inconsistently however, and this has led some to view emotion programs as lacking biological reality. Yet, response coherence is not always expected or desirable if an emotion program is to carry out its adaptive function. Rather, the hallmark of emotion is the capacity to orchestrate multiple mechanisms adaptively-responses will co-activate in stereotypical fashion or not depending on how the emotion orchestrator interacts with the situation. Nevertheless, might responses cohere in the general case where input variables are specified minimally? Here we focus on shame as a case study. We measure participants' responses regarding each of 27 socially devalued actions and personal characteristics. We observe internal and external coherence: The intensities of felt shame and of various motivations of shame (hiding, lying, destroying evidence, and threatening witnesses) vary in proportion (i) to one another, and (ii) to the degree to which audiences devalue the disgraced individual-the threat shame defends against. These responses cohere both within and between the United States and India. Further, alternative explanations involving the low-level variable of arousal do not seem to account for these results, suggesting that coherence is imparted by a shame system. These findings indicate that coherence can be observed at multiple levels and raise the possibility that emotion programs orchestrate responses, even in those situations where coherence is low.

Keywords: adaptationism; culture; emotion; response coherence; valuation.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure. 1.
Figure. 1.
Scatter plots: Intensities of shame-relevant responses as a function of devaluation, by country. Note. Each point represents the mean devaluation rating and mean shame-relevant response rating regarding one scenario. Ratings of devaluation, shame feeling, hide, lie, destroy evidence, threaten witness, and communicate event were given by different participants. N on which the correlations are based = number of scenarios = 27. United States data: panels A–F; India data: panels G–L.
Figure. 2.
Figure. 2.
Correlations between ratings of devaluation and ratings of shame feeling, hide, lie, destroy evidence, threaten witness, and communicate event, within- and between-countries. Note. (A) United States correlations (white shapes). (B) India correlations (black shapes). (C) Correlations between devaluation in the United States and shame-relevant responses in India. (D) Correlations between devaluation in India and shame-relevant responses in the United States. N on which the correlations are based = number of scenarios = 27. Ratings of devaluation, shame feeling, hide, lie, destroy evidence, threaten witness, and communicate event were given by different participants. ***p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Adolphs R., Anderson D. J. (2018). The neuroscience of emotion: A new synthesis. Princeton University Press.
    1. Ahmed W., van der Werf G., Minnaert A. (2010). Emotional experiences of students in the classroom: A multimethod qualitative study. European Psychologist, 15, 142–151.
    1. Al-Shawaf L., Conroy-Beam D., Asao K., Buss D. M. (2016). Human emotions: An evolutionary psychological perspective. Emotion Review, 8(2), 173–186.
    1. Al-Shawaf L., Lewis D. M. (2017). Evolutionary psychology and the emotions. In Zeigler-Hill V., Shackelford T. K. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of personality and individual differences (pp. 1–10). Springer.
    1. Al-Shawaf L., Zreik K. (2018). Richard Dawkins on constraints on natural selection. In Shackelford T. K., Weekes-Shackelford V. A. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of evolutionary psychological science (pp. 1–5). Springer.

LinkOut - more resources