Emotion

Emotion: experience caused by a difference between observations and expectations

Defining emotion is hard because emotions are both fundamental to what it is to feel human and seem to be out of our control. They feel like they happen to us while also being an important part of who we are. At first, this seems like a contradiction. How can they both be part of us and also happening to us? Can a definition help us to think about emotion in a way that resolves this conflict?

We often think of emotion as being primitive, as something that humans have been experiencing as long as we’ve been humans and probably even before that. It’s difficult to imagine that apes don’t feel some of the emotions we do. But humans also have the capability for higher thought, and we can sometimes override or control our emotions. In some sense, emotions are an older part of being human, and that makes me wonder if they’re an important foundation of how our minds work or if they could just be leftover evolutionary baggage—something we don’t need any more but haven’t gotten rid of yet.

Dictionary definitions don’t give us a lot of help because they usually rely on a list of examples (such as joy, sorrow, fear, hate, and love) but don’t try to define the limits of the list. And the definitions of individual emotions are often circular—happiness means feeling pleasure, pleasure means feeling happy, and so on.  Instead, I’d like to try to imagine what emotions were like for the earliest humans, long before life was as complicated as it is today, when humans were first just evolving into our modern form. What kinds of emotions would they have felt? What purpose, if any, would those emotions have served?

Anatomically modern humans are about 200,000 years old. That’s when our ancestors first started to look like us. And behaviorally modern humans are thought to be about 50,000 years old. That’s when we first started to act like us, with the emergence of behaviors like art and more complex tools. Try to imagine what life was like for these early humans. Even though their lives weren’t as complicated as ours, it’s hard to believe that they didn’t feel the same emotions that we do. And what would’ve triggered those emotions? Things like returning to your family, finding some good food, getting hurt, or losing someone. Eventually, they’d have been able to draw pictures of the things that made them feel these emotions and have abstract thoughts about what caused them. The circumstances and the way they expressed themselves would have been different, but we’d probably recognize most of their emotions. What do the causes of their emotions and the causes of our emotions have in common?

Something that humans have always been very good at is making predictions. Whether it’s predicting that we’re going to need milk tomorrow morning, so we should stop by the store today, or predicting that it’s going to be cold in the cave tonight, so we should collect wood on the way home to build a fire, predictions are important to a lot of our behavior. Even though we’re making lots of big and little predictions throughout the day, we’re often not even aware of them—we do it naturally and unconsciously. Most of these “predictions” we can just think of as expectations, they’re just the automatic pattern matching that happens in our brains, the bigger predictions we can think of as a chain of these basic expectations strung together.

We don’t often get emotional about most of the expectations or predictions we make day to day, but then, of course, sometimes we do. Imagine you’ve come home and realized you’re out of milk or didn’t bring back firewood for the cave. Now you have to go back out and get some. You might be a little annoyed or even upset if it was a cold and rainy night. What triggers that emotion isn’t initially making the prediction, the emotion happens when the prediction was forced to change because your expectations didn’t match observations. You’d predicted a nice warm fire, but now you realize that isn’t going to happen, you realize you have to go back out in the rain, and now you’re expecting to come home soaking wet and cold instead. Our experience is constantly filled with expectations and we usually don’t thinking about or notice them. But when reality is suddenly different than what we expected, that’s what triggers a feeling or emotion. There’s lots of ways our expectations can be forced to change and lots of emotions that can be caused by those changes.

What causes happiness or joy? Water isn’t anything special unless we’re thirsty—then it tastes great. A cool drink on a hot day can make us happy. It’s not the water itself that triggers our emotion, it’s the way it changes our outlook. We were expecting things would stay about the same, but something changed to make us predict something better, and we feel happy. Or we were thinking things were about to get worse, but a bad thing was avoided, so we’re happy. Even if the eventual outcome isn’t good, it’s enough for it to be better. We can apply that same kind of logic to a few basic emotions and try to see what kinds of changes in predictions could trigger each one. Emotions are complex, but here are some rough ideas of how some specific definitions could look:

• Joy or happiness is caused when things look like they’ll be better than expected.
• Anger come from things looking worse than expected due to someone or something specific. It’s a feeling with a personified target.
• Disgust is a particular feeling that things are going to get worse in a way that will spread or contaminate.
• Sadness is when our outlook changes for the worse.

If an emotional response is the result of a changing prediction, then the number of predictions we can make and how complicated they are will determine what kinds of emotions we can have and how varied they can be. Emotions are ways to attach meaning or feedback such as pain or pleasure to changes in complex scenarios and to experience that feedback immediately. That way we can learn during the process, as soon as our predictions change, instead of having to wait for the final results to play out.

Once humans learned to form complex concepts, write, and talk, we could suddenly communicate much more complicated ideas. Predictions could change faster, and so could emotions. When our technology got better, we started making bigger changes to the world around us and the scope of what we could affect got much bigger. An early human who foraged for food all day and didn’t find anything might predict they would be hungry—their outlook for the next couple days would be a little worse. But once we had invented agriculture we could make predictions about the food we were growing that would affect us for months into the future, and predictions like that are very important and can change by huge amounts. It could mean the difference between entire families having plenty of food for the rest of the winter or starving.

We’ve been behaviorally modern humans for about 50,000 years. It took 40,000 of those years for us to invent agriculture, and it’s been just a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms between then and now. Over the last 10,000 years—since we started farming—the pace of our technology change has increased dramatically. In a lot of ways, we’re probably made to be great foragers or farmers. We think far enough ahead out to plan for the seasons but can also predict day to day changes. The basic emotional responses that our ancient hominid and ape (and even mammal) ancestors had were useful tools for tracking and reacting to the changes in predictions that would’ve affected a farmer 10,000 years ago. Today we can trigger those same emotions by playing a farming game on our phone. We find ourselves in environments and situations we simply haven’t had time to evolve for. We have many more interactions with people and institutions than our ancestors, and those interactions trigger a complex array of emotions that affect our goals and behavior. Having a definition to understand these emotions can be a tool to understand when they’re improving our lives and when they’re just sending us conflicting signals that were appropriate for a world we don’t live in anymore, situations where we have to rely on our intelligence instead.