The intensities of felt shame and of various motivations of shame (hiding, lying, destroying evidence, & threatening witnesses) vary in proportion to one another, & to the degree to which audiences devalue the disgraced individual

Are Emotions Natural Kinds After All? Rethinking the Issue of Response Coherence. Daniel Sznycer, Adam Scott Cohen. Evolutionary Psychology, June 1, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/14747049211016009

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: emotion, valuation, response coherence, adaptationism, culture

Discussion

We asked if response coherence in shame can be observed in the general case where input variables to the shame system are specified minimally. We observed internal coherence: Five shame responses—felt shame and the motivations to hide, to lie, to destroy evidence, and to threaten a witness—in general covaried with one another in direction and intensity from one event (scenario) to the next. This is in line with the internal coherence that has been documented in some (but not all) of the previous research on response coherence in emotion.

In addition, we observed two novel patterns of response coherence predicted from an adaptationist framework: external coherence and cross-cultural coherence. Regarding external coherence, five shame responses in the individual in general covaried in direction and intensity with the devaluation expressed by audiences from one event to the next. We observed internal and external coherences within the United States and India. And regarding cross-cultural coherence, five shame responses in one country in general covaried in direction and intensity both with the five shame responses and with audience devaluation in the other country from one event to the next. Importantly, the intensity of the motivation to communicate reputationally damaging information to other people—a response that involves arousal—failed to correlate positively, and in fact correlated mostly negatively, with the intensities of audience devaluation and with the five shame responses across events. This is expected if the internal, external, and cross-cultural coherence observed here reflects the operation of a shame orchestrator. But this is not expected if response coherence in emotion stems from low-level affective variables such as arousal. Of course, the alternative evaluated here (communicate event) is but one of a large set of possible alternatives involving arousal. Thus, future research is needed to test against additional alternatives involving arousal, as well as valence and culturally-variable emotion concepts.

Adaptationist thinking suggests that the hallmark of emotion is the capacity to adaptively orchestrate multiple adaptations. And that response coherence is incidental to adaptive orchestration. Evidence on response coherence—whether positive, null, or negative—is therefore not dispositive of whether or not emotion programs are natural kinds. Notwithstanding this critical point, evidence on response coherence can be of value. Data on incidental phenomena are valuable as raw data after all, and anomalies (in affective science, inconsistent observations of response coherence across studies, for instance) can catalyze scientific progress (Kuhn, 1970). The present findings go beyond internal coherence, however. That shame responses can cohere between cultures and also externally, matching in intensity the devaluation expressed by audiences (i.e., matching in intensity the adaptive problem hypothesized to have selected for shame), suggests that shame, and perhaps other emotions (Sznycer & Cohen, 2021; Sznycer, Sell, & Dumont, 2021), are functionally specialized adaptations.

An alternative account, one that is consistent with the theory of constructed emotion, is that the cross-cultural coherences observed here were imparted by the English concept of “shame” and not by a shame neurocognitive system. This is plausible, considering that our stimuli were presented in one and the same language (English) both in the United States and in India, because emotion words have meanings that are more similar in language groups that are closer in linguistic space (Jackson et al., 2019). Similarly, the US–India similarities observed here may have stemmed from culturally-specific concepts or schemas with which people interpret their own affect in shame (see Barrett, 2014). These concepts may be similar across industrial societies such as the United States and India even when they are idiosyncratic of industrial societies; and so these concepts may be shared by our American and Indian participants even when these concepts are not universal. However, we note that previous research has shown cross-cultural commonalities in the feeling of shame across 15 small-scale societies with highly diverse subsistence bases (e.g., horticulture, pastoralism, fishing) and speaking highly diverse languages, including: Igbo, Icé-tód, Nepali, Tuvan, and Mongolian (Sznycer, Xygalatas, Agey, et al., 2018). This suggests that the cross-cultural coherences among multiple shame responses that we observed here may have been driven by an evolved shame system. Nevertheless, further inquiry is needed to determine how generalizable the present findings are across different cultures, ecologies, and language-groups.

Further research is also needed to determine whether the patterns of coherence observed here generalize to other discrediting actions and personal characteristics, to the reactive (vs. prospective) operation of shame in response to actual discrediting events, to the various cognitive, behavioral, and physiological responses that shame appears to control (other than the motivations studied here), and to responses measured within-situations and within-individuals (see Mauss et al., 2005; Reisenzein, 2000). In addition, further research is necessary to know whether and how patterns of response coherence are modulated by a host of situational variables that are relevant to shame (e.g., co-presence of an audience, characteristics of the audience, actual responses of the audience) but were not studied here.

It is important to reiterate that the kinds of comprehensive tests that are necessary to corroborate or deny the hypothesis of adaptive orchestration (for shame or for other emotions) have, to our knowledge, not been conducted yet. We suspect that mapping emotion decision trees systematically and comprehensively will be challenging. Shame, for instance, is likely to be sensitive to many input variables and to implement many contingencies. Moreover, high-order interactions between input variables are expected. The simple (hypothetical) conditional appease (or blame or threaten) when others have seen your disgraceful action, but not when they haven’t seen you might be conditioned further by additional external and internal variables. For example, when others have seen your disgraceful action, active shame responses might be delivered in general. But there might be exceptions. Active shame responses might not be delivered when you have been seen if the individuals in the audience are few or have low physical formidability or status or if they are known to lack strategic information to grasp the true meaning of the disgraceful action.

The ontological status of emotion—perhaps the primary point of contention in the affective sciences (see, e.g., Adolphs & Anderson, 2018; Barrett, 2019; Barrett et al., 2019; Cowen et al., 2019; in press; Lange et al., 2020; Lindquist et al., 2013; Mobbs et al., 2019; Scarantino, 2015; Scherer, 2009)—remains an open question. Nevertheless, the present findings suggest that adaptationism is a promising framework to elucidate emotion.