The Place of Emotions in Science

Thoughts underly our emotions. As psychologist Edith Packer (140) says, paraphrased, “When we are feeling something, we are thinking something.”
 
The opposite also is true—when we are thinking something, we are feeling something, which means we have emotions running through our minds whether we are aware of them or not.
 
Consciousness, to borrow a word from William James, is a stream, not separate compartments that can be shut off at will, though the evaluations that stand behind emotions can be repressed.
 
Scientists clearly have emotions, not just in their eureka moments of a major discovery, but in their typical workdays. Emotions are what motivate us.
 
When we acknowledge the presence of emotions in science, and scientists, we acknowledge that evaluations are present.  Behind every emotion the evaluation, as Packer argues, has two aspects, one universal that applies to all instances of a particular emotion, such as joy or anger, and one personal that includes all the concrete details of the moment when we have experienced the emotion.
 
Joy, for example, at the universal level means “I have achieved an important value.” Thus, “eureka”—or “I have found it,” the translation of the Greek—is a form of joy. The scientist’s personal evaluation—“all of my years of research have been worth it”—in the eureka moment might be expressed in behavior as energetic shouting and jumping up and down such that he almost knocks a beaker off the table. This would be a personal evaluation and experience that likely would last a long time in the scientist’s subconscious memories.*
 
It is this inner conversation or voice, as Packer describes personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge. Which means that knowledge, general or personal, is not “value-free” as the logical positivists for decades have insisted it must be.
 
Every emotion exhibits not just an evaluation, but also an action tendency, or urge to act. The scientist who, when young, is given a chemistry set for a birthday may later get excited in high school chemistry class and begin to think about a career in chemistry. Meeting and talking to professional chemists—a chemical engineer and a research chemist, for example—may help the young person solidify his or her career goals.
 
Going to work every day in an office or lab, after all, is motivated by our emotions of pleasure or pain we associate with the work.
 
Emotion is the driver of everything we do. Writers of both fact and fiction say they follow their emotions to come up with subjects, themes, and even the phrasing of sentences.  Many write “by ear,” more so than by the current rules of grammar and syntax.**
 
Whatever we have liked or disliked in our past, influences our present. Emotions contribute knowledge to our thought processes.  Those past emotions often are the sources of connections we make in the present, sometimes called creative insight, as well as guidance to follow particular lines of thought and experimentation.***
 
Repressed persons are also motivated by past emotions, though usually negative ones that they seek to avoid. Some who are repressed may appear in the present to experience no emotions.
 
A severely repressed scientist, for example, may exhibit a highly muted reaction to the eureka moment, such as a sober, unexpressive face and words that say, “This is good.” But the emotions, which means evaluations and values, are there at some level. Such a person is often desperately trying to avoid the error and appearance of the fallacy of the appeal to emotion.
 
Where does this fallacy come in to play? It is actually a simple notion that says it makes no sense to say or write, “It is true because I feel it.” This does not mean that we should not be motivated to become a scientist because of our emotions from the past or that we should not get excited over a eureka moment. It is indeed unfortunate that the repressed scientist does not jump up and down.
 
The point of the fallacy is that whatever emotions we have in the process of identifying a fact of reality, we must follow Aristotle’s laws of logic, especially the law of non-contradiction. Ayn Rand defines logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification.” Thus, in our work, we bring up our emotions to see if any of them are influencing our perceptions of reality.
 
If I am feeling that a leprechaun is on my desk instead of a glass of water, I assure you I am committing the fallacy. Or, consider the young man fired and jilted on the same day (in Individual Judgment and Introspection, 66–67); he feels that he will never find another job or lover. This is all the fallacy refers to, a feeling (in here) that contradicts the facts (out there).
 
Thus, scientists, I am quite certain, when coming up with a solution to a problem can, without guilt, go wild and crazy to celebrate!
 
 
* Another example: the universal evaluation of anger says, “An injustice has been done to me.” The personal evaluation would be the specific experiences of the moment when feeling anger at another person or institution.
 
** I have told students who could not come up with a term paper topic to “go with what grabs you,” meaning what your emotions are telling you. See this short essay on writing by ear and Ayn Rand (Kindle, 88): When writing, as opposed to editing, “you go by your emotions.”
 
*** For example, when researching my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I was pleasantly surprised to find a connection between Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Ayn Rand. They obviously do not agree with each other, but they nevertheless exhibit some similarities. See Linda Reardan, Emotions and Rational Values, chap. 4, for the fundamental explanation of how emotions contribute to thought.

The Difference between Emotion and Attitude

For many decades social psychologists (1; 2, chap. 1) have viewed attitudes as the central concept that explains motivation. Where do emotions fit in?
 
The two are similar, yet different.
 
Emotions are automatic, psychosomatic responses to evaluations about objects, persons, or events that we judge, based on past knowledge and values, to be beneficial or harmful (Independent Judgment, p. 63).
 
“The firing of a gun can hurt me,” I might be thinking, “and the bang outside sounded like a gun. That makes me afraid and my heart race and my breath shorten.”
 
Four components to this experience are the fact judgment, “the bang was a gun”; the evaluative judgment, “the gun can hurt me”; the emotion, “I am afraid and need to hide”; and the physiological reactions of a racing heart and shortened breathing. Note that the emotion of fear generated a tendency, need, or urge to act and that the fact and value judgments each can be either true or false; the bang may in fact have been the backfire of an automobile.
 
Although the judgments about guns were learned earlier in our lives, they are not something we even think about on this occasion. The emotional reaction happens in a split second. The source and cause of this experience is subconscious.
 
Attitudes are settled, enduring composites of beliefs, evaluations, and action tendencies about some object, person, or event. Beliefs are fact judgments about what we believe to be true. Evaluations are positive or negative judgments about what we think is beneficial or harmful. And the action tendency is what it sounds like: a tendency, need, or urge to act.
 
Note that both emotions and attitudes are responses to something or someone and that we can feel emotions and hold attitudes about all kinds of things and people, including ourselves.*
 
Note also that emotions are integral parts of our attitudes—the beginning moment, actually, of what may become a new or developing attitude—that express our positive and negative reactions to what we have the attitude about.
 
In years past, to continue the above example, we may have formed an attitude toward guns through experiences of shooting them or from reading what many have said about them.
 
Both emotions and attitudes are in our minds and are not behavior, but they do explain and motivate behavior. We must choose to act on the felt tendency, need, or urge before action can take place.
 
Both concepts are what Ayn Rand would call (chap. 4) concepts of consciousness, not concepts of the external, material world, as the concept “gun” is.
 
Concepts of consciousness, such as thought, reminiscence, imagination—as well as emotion and attitude—are identified by the actions of consciousness, the contrasting psychological processes, that distinguish one from the other.
 
Thought, using Rand’s words (pp. 32), is a “purposefully directed process of cognition” and emotion is “an automatic response proceeding from an evaluation of an existent.” Reminiscence (my words) is the power to preserve and recall a thought, emotion, or experience and imagination is the ability to create and project in our minds how something or someone might be different.
 
The mental process of forming an attitude is the accumulation over time of emotional experiences, observations, and thoughts about something or someone such that the experiences and beliefs become established and lasting, often in conscious awareness.
 
We have attitudes but experience emotions is a familiar way of differentiating the two mental processes.
 
My attitude toward guns is that I love them, especially since I had positive experiences of shooting them as a kid. I have that favorable attitude toward guns and have held it for a long time. I am quite aware of the attitude.
 
The bang outside my house, however, might confuse or scare me, depending on how I evaluate it in the present. I know that cars can backfire, that firecrackers can make bangs like guns, and that I do not like criminals staging shootouts in my neighborhood. All of this might go through my mind in the split second that the bang has occurred.
 
The difference between emotion and attitude is that the emotion has a trigger, time-bound, that we perceive and react to immediately. The attitude is a lingeringly favorable or unfavorable expression, built up over time, and is something that we can even have a leisurely discussion about, such as should we be pro-gun or anti-gun?
 
The emotion calls for and sometimes produces action without our stopping to think about it. The attitude does not necessarily call for action, though it may.
 
Ayn Rand’s point about concepts of consciousness is that they are formed the same way concepts of the existential world are formed, except that we focus on the mental or psychological actions that distinguish one process from another.
 
After observing (i.e., introspecting) many instances of similar mental processes, we isolate the one we are interested in and omit its content and intensity to arrive at its essential distinguishing characteristic.
 
Emotions are instant reactions, attitudes are lasting, though neither is changeless. Both contain a wide variety of content and can be either extremely intense or not so intense.
 
Both can and do explain and motivate behavior.
 
Social psychologists are right that attitudes are central motivators but they could spend more time examining emotions as a crucial component and source of our attitudes.
 
 
* “Feeling” often refers to our experiences of physical pleasure and pain (or even of warm or smooth), whereas “emotion” refers to our experiences of psychological joy or suffering. Many times, however, the words are used as synonyms, as I often use them, or as in this case as a verb, “to feel an emotion.”

Two Types of Knowledge: General and Personal

General knowledge, that is, book reading, school learning, and the ability to cite or quote sources at will, does not by itself make us interesting or even a really knowledgeable person.
 
Personal knowledge does, though it often is not even considered knowledge.
 
Our emotions evoked by general knowledge and more particularly our personal reactions to, and experiences with, all aspects of our lives give us personal knowledge that no else possesses.
 
In Independent Judgment and Introspection, I make passing reference to these two types of knowledge. I also discuss Edith Packer’s distinction (pp. 226-38) between universal and personal evaluations when identifying emotions. Personal evaluations constitute a significant part of our personal knowledge.
 
Consider two quotations from my book that summarize general and personal knowledge:

To survive and flourish, humans require general knowledge, or education, in the form of concepts and principles to guide their choices and actions. Each individual, in addition, requires specific knowledge, or a set of concepts and principles unique to his or her experience, to direct action to the achievement of health and happiness (p. 54).
 
Systematic bodies of concepts and principles constitute our sciences; specific bodies of concepts and principles, unique to our own experiences, constitute our personal knowledge (p. 73).

General knowledge comes largely from others; it is essentially our education broadly construed, not just what we learn in school. Personal knowledge, which includes the general, is what we have experienced over the years and makes us who we are as individuals.
 
Personal knowledge comes first. It is what we begin acquiring early in life, and continue to acquire throughout. It starts developing before we can speak, perhaps even in the womb, in reaction to pleasureful and painful experiences. The pleasure-pain aspects of these experiences provide the foundation of our emotions, and the emotions we associate with concrete experiences in childhood and youth influence how healthy and happy we will be as adults.
 
Personal knowledge, as a result, might also be called experiential knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge based on the objects, persons, events, and even ideas we come in contact with, or rather, experience firsthand.
 
When we learn to talk, we form concepts and elementary, childlike principles, such as “all animals that walk on two legs are human beings,” which is to say at this point we are beginning to form universals that constitute the basis from which we go on to acquire general knowledge. The principles are called “childlike” because they may not agree with what a more knowledgeable adult might say.
 
General knowledge is what we learn from older people, initially our parents, siblings, and others around us. More importantly, it comes from teachers and books.
 
General knowledge is our education and does not stop, one would hope, after receiving high school or college diplomas. It is the systematic bodies of concepts and principles that constitute our sciences, both basic and applied, and we learn and remember the portions of each that are relevant to our lives.
 
General knowledge becomes part of our personal knowledge when it is individualized to our interests and goals.
 
Personal knowledge indicates who we are as unique, individual human beings and forms the basis of our personalities, our distinctive ways of thinking and acting. Much of our personal knowledge is specific to concrete objects, persons, and events, such as a ball bouncing and rolling (seen as a young child), a recent performance of a Brahms symphony, or the practical competence of changing a tire on the family car.
 
Personal knowledge is not universal in the way general knowledge is, though it can become general if, say, we continually increase our general knowledge enabling us to write a book about Brahms symphonies or the repair of certain automobiles. Most of what we do with our personal knowledge is apply the general we have learned previously (1, 2).
 
Personal knowledge is a collection of experiences—with parents and other relatives; with school subjects, teachers, and classmates; of the time we learned how to ride a bicycle; of happy and sad times at summer camp; and, as an adult, of work, family, and leisure. Throughout life.
 
The application of knowledge, whether general or personal, is not an emotion-free process.
 
All knowledge contains evaluations, universal and personal, and those evaluations are what produce our emotions.
 
Every emotion, as Edith Packer has written (1, pp. 226-38; 2, 151-53), expresses a universal evaluation that is present in all instances of that one emotion. For example, quoting Packer,  joy says “I have achieved one of my most important values” and anger says “an injustice has been done to me.”
 
Behind every emotion and its universal evaluation, we have our own personal experience of the emotion that draws a correct or incorrect conclusion about the experience. For joy: “I got into my first choice of school and feel like dancing around the room!” For anger: “The teacher said I’m no good at math—I’m never going to like or trust teachers.”
 
It is these inner conversations or voice, as Packer describes the personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge.
 
The quantity of general knowledge that we each hold obviously varies from person to person, as does its quality, that is, its degree of truth or falsity. But the variation in personal knowledge is even more diverse, as we all come from different backgrounds, family cultures—and experiences. Which is to say, we’ve all felt diverse emotions throughout our lives, which essentially is what gives us unique personalities.
 
Personal knowledge is what makes us and other people interesting—happy or sad, funny or obnoxious, caring or mean.
 
Unfortunately, personal evaluations associated with the many emotions we have had in our lives are precisely what most of us are not aware of and have not been taught to identify. Nor have we been taught how to change mistaken evaluations.
 
General knowledge by itself can be thought of as a sort of sterile academic content in our brains. Personal knowledge makes us engaging—or repugnant.
 
Personal knowledge is what gives meaning to the expression “variety is the spice of life.”

Chance Emotional Generalizations and Introspection

An emotional generalization is an emotion experienced in several or many similar situations that becomes a subconscious conclusion influencing our subsequent choices and actions. It is not formed by explicit conceptual identification and is therefore a “chance” occurrence.

Emotions, which exist in both humans and higher animals, are psychological counterparts of physical pleasure and pain. The process in infants and animals to generalize emotional experiences occurs automatically, but humans in later life, preferably beginning in toddlerhood, can use conscious thought to control part of the process, to make and identify generalizations and correct mistaken ones.

Most of us, unfortunately, leave our generalizations from emotional experiences to accident or circumstance, not explicit conceptual identification.

For example, a toddler who is yelled at by his father and called bad names for spilling a glass of milk may feel fear, anxiety, and hurt for the way his father reacted to the objectively harmless event.

The boy likely cannot name the emotions he has just experienced or determine why he feels what he feels, although he is presumably aware that his reaction is to his father’s response to the spilling of the milk. He feels pain and the threat of pain, drawing negative conclusions about himself. This is a one-time experience.

If similar situations of being yelled at and called names arise in the future, not just involving his father, but also his mother, other relatives, and teachers, the boy’s subconscious mind may generalize, having repressed the origin of the feeling, and draw the subconscious conclusion—what Edith Packer (chap. 1) calls a core evaluation—“I can’t do anything right. I must be careful around other people.”

As the boy grows older and becomes an adult, he may experience the same emotions to yelling and name-calling even when the sounds are not directed at him but nevertheless are within earshot.*

This scenario can be observed in higher animals, such as a dog who as a puppy was abused by a male owner through yelling and hitting. The puppy experiences painful feelings that become stored and associated with males, especially who yell and hit. When moving to a new family, the puppy and adult dog may still react fearfully and defensively when meeting the new, but kind, male owner and other males in the household or neighborhood. The dog may also run out of the house whenever a human voice is raised.

Emotional generalization in the higher animals is essentially how their behavior is guided.

The difference between the higher animals and humans is that we can identify the nature and cause of our emotions and correct the ones that are out of context and based on false underlying premises.

This is an important component of what the capacity to reason in humans means. Through introspection we can identify and regulate our cognitive mental processes by conceptualizing them, that is, putting words to them, as opposed to bouncing from one chance emotion to another.

The skill of introspection is what we all need to learn and practice and, especially, is what needs to be taught to children when they are young, probably as soon as they begin to speak.

Introspection is what psychotherapists—whether or not they acknowledge the validity of introspection in science—encourage their patients to learn in order to resolve the psychological problems and conflicts they are suffering.

Introspection in children, if it were taught, would go a long way toward preventing the development of many unfortunate problems and conflicts.

Emotions are psychosomatic responses to a situation—a person, object, or event—that presuppose a previous perception of what is factual about the situation, along with an evaluation of the facts. Either can be true or false. “That bang,” for example, “was a gunshot [fact], which constitutes a threat to me [evaluation]. As consequence, I feel fear.”

The emotional reaction is automatic, but every emotion rests on implicit, often subconscious, judgments of fact and value. It is the fact and value judgments that can be identified through introspection and changed. As it turns out, the bang was the backfire of a car [corrected fact], which does not constitute a threat to me [corrected evaluation]. This knowledge corrects my mistaken judgments. As a result, the emotion of fear disappears.

Conceptualization is the tool needed to identify the facts and values that stand behind all of our emotions. Introspection is the method by which we use the tool. Unfortunately, neither has been taught to us, certainly not in childhood, and, if at all, minimally in adulthood.

Without knowledge of how to introspect, we are left at the mercy of chance emotional generalizations, many of which we have formed unaware (subconsciously) in childhood and adolescence and which essentially determine and control our adult lives. Chance, unexamined emotional generalizations are what lead us to think that we are helplessly determined by our genes and environment.

The best advice here is Edith Packer’s (p. 278): “If parents and schools could teach children the connection between thoughts and emotions, if they could teach a child that when he feels something, he’s really thinking something—so that the child would learn to ask himself, ‘What am I thinking when I experience this emotion?’—it would be invaluable.”



* I hasten to add that not every child will react the same way to this father’s behavior. A rare child might say to himself, “What’s the big deal? I didn’t do anything wrong. Father is being ridiculous.” My example is not of environmental determinism, but of a serious influence that hampers many a child’s healthy development. The father needs to learn how better to relate to his son.

“Men of Hard Science” and the Denial of Animal Emotions

In a previous post about psychiatry I put the phrase “men of hard science” in scare quotes to contrast these alleged experts with the more sensible and scientific kindness movement of nineteenth century mental health. In all fields, the “hard science” culture, which today of course includes some women, gospelizes philosophical materialism and the “if it’s not quantitative, it’s not scientific” approach to intellectual rigor.

It also preaches that ascribing human traits, such as consciousness, thoughts, or emotions, to the likes of dogs and cats is unscientific anthropomorphism, because materialism precludes the use of such terms when describing animal (or human) behavior. And “anthropomorphism” is used as a club to disparage anyone who uses such language.

Jeffrey Masson, Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst* turned bestselling author of books on the emotional life of animals, challenges the “hard science” approach to biology. Indeed, he points out in When Elephants Weep (p. 33) that women for many years were considered by their male colleagues to be too emotional, and therefore more likely to be anthropomorphic, to work directly with animals.

Yet none other than Charles Darwin and, more recently, Donald Griffin and Jane Goodall have championed the scientific study of animal consciousness and Goodall (Elephants, p. 3) has defended anecdotal evidence, that scorned lay technique “hard scientists” would never touch.**

The anthropomorphism charge stems from our alleged inability to know “with certainty” what goes on inside an animal mind. We don’t even know, the hard scientists say, if animals feel pain when they are being shocked or locked in isolation from all other animals and humans.

But it is an unjustified leap to conclude that we can know nothing about the contents of an animal’s consciousness and therefore require all descriptions of behavior to be mere responses to external stimuli. For example, if a lay person were to say that a dog is feeling left out and wants attention, the “proper” scientific jargon of hard science would be: the dog “is performing the submissive display of a low-ranking canid” (Elephants, p. 31).

Behavioristic reasoning such as this can be pushed to a solipsistic extreme by saying that all we can really know with certainty is the contents of our own mind, not that of other human beings or animals.  And torture of humans, which fortunately no hard scientist today would agree to, can be justified on grounds that no one can know with certainty whether the victim is really feeling pain when whipped and stretched on the rack (Elephants, p. 39).

The term “with certainty” above is in scare quotes because it is both a redundancy and an equivocation; probable knowledge, which we can obtain by observing and interacting with animals, is a percentage of certainty, so any knowledge we have is certain knowledge, just not one hundred percent certain. To know anything, even as a probability, is to know it with certainty.

And one of those interesting ironies of probable knowledge, Masson points out, is that animals may sometimes be zoomorphic in relation to their human companions, such as the cat that deposits a tasty morsel of gopher innard under the lady of the house’s desk (Elephants, p. 44).

The bottom line of the anthropomorphism argument is not that some people improperly ascribe human qualities to animals. It is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the “hard scientists” who use animals to test hypotheses about human pain and depression (Dogs Never Lie about Love, p. 20). And more significantly, but not surprising to those who work in the academic world, it is the cowardice of those scientists who secretly believe that animals have emotions, but will never say so in their published work and may even criticize those who do (Never Lie, p. 17). Courage and “hard science” do not necessarily go together.

The further contradiction of the hard scientists—and tragedy and disgrace—is their failure to examine and acknowledge the similarities the human animal shares with its lower brethren. It is this failure that allowed mad doctors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the insane as wild beasts and, as a result, chain and beat them because animals were assumed not to feel pain.

Little progress, unfortunately, has been made today among the “men of hard science.”



* Masson became director of the Freud Archives in 1980. While in that position he discovered unpublished letters that shed light on Freud’s repudiation of his 1890’s seduction theory. Masson subsequently wrote The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, arguing  that Freud lacked moral courage to stand up to professional indifference and cultural hostility to his claims of sexual abuse as the cause of patient hysteria. Children at the time were viewed as considerable distorters of the truth and respectable males, especially fathers, were beyond reproach. Masson’s payment for his courage and independence to publish these letters and his book was to be fired from his job and dismissed from all psychoanalytic societies.

** The validity of anecdotal evidence in science rests on the assumption that universals exist. A good scientist using sound epistemology needs only two or three observations, not a probabilistic sample of 500, to make a generalization. See In Defense of Advertising, pp. 153-58.