Looking at Emotions From a Different Angle

Last week I had an experience that most of us know all too well. My partner had plans to go out with co-workers for happy hour and ended up staying out till about 11:00. Since she rarely drinks and expressed a great deal of reservation about going out anyway, I expected her to be home when I got home from a meeting at 8:30. I was puzzled at first but assumed that she would be home shortly and tried to let it go, but when she wasn’t home at 9:00 and hadn’t called, I got angry and could feel tinges of jealousy creeping in. And when I got angry, memories of having been betrayed in the past by people who were supposed to love me started playing on the screen in my mind along with thoughts like, “Well, last week she met a friend for a beer after work while I was at class and came home more bubbly and excited and happy than I’ve seen her in a while” and “We really haven’t connected lately; maybe she’s thinking of jumping ship.” Both of these thoughts, of course, reinforced the thoughts and memories that were playing in my head about betrayal.

Even more frustrating was the fact that I could not talk myself out of these thoughts. I would have rational thoughts like, “Maybe she got too drunk to drive” (a strong possibility because she really doesn’t drink very often, has a low tolerance and doesn’t like to drive for at least an hour or two after having a beer), and “Maybe she’s just having fun and lost track of time.” I could hold on to these thoughts for a few moments, but then, I’d think, “But why hasn’t she called?” and the anger would start again. In “Emotions Revealed,” Paul Ekman explains why, from a psychological and physiological perspective, I got stuck in this anger mode.

Ekman encapsulates 40 years of research and exploration that he has done of the psychology and physiology emotions based on facial expression into an accessible and easy to understand book. “Emotions Revealed” provides something for everyone interested in emotions from the novice to the counselor to the scientist, providing a history of research on emotions, scientific evidence for his arguments and practical tips on how to use this information.

Ekman begins by describing his cross-cultural research on facial expressions and convincingly argues that emotions are rooted in our biology, noting that there are seven emotions -- fear, surprise, sadness, anger, contempt, disgust and enjoyment -- that have universal expression. Emotion, he argues, is a physiological and behavioral response that occurs when we sense that something that will significantly affect our welfare is happening. Harkening back to Darwin’s work on the evolution of emotions, Ekman maintains that what triggers our emotions is due both to evolutionary factors and personally learned experience. Further, Ekman explains that emotional responses cause a sort of tunnel vision so that we can only take in and use information that supports the emotion that we are experiencing. In my situation, I sensed that I was being betrayed and/or abandoned (my learned experience), and that sense lit my anger like a match and I rejected all other information that would put out that fire.

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