Just ask the parents of children with Williams Syndrome: see www.williams-syndrome.org.
This questioning found galvanizing expression: It’s hard to overestimate the influence of Robert Frank’s superb book on thinking about emotion, morality, and cooperation. In elegant and provocative arguments, Frank has made the case for the wisdom of the moral emotions, emotions like gratitude and love, and how these emotions are a bedrock of cooperative communities. Robert H. Frank, Passions Within Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).
economists Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt found that 71 percent of the allocators offered the responder between 40 and 50 percent of the money: Fehr and Schmidt, “A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (1999): 817–68.
Does material gain make us happy?: These findings as well as many others that speak to the rise of materialism in contemporary U.S. culture are summarized in David Myers, The American Paradox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
Look at the table below, adapted from: Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (New York: Pantheon, 2004).
Does money make us happy?: D. G. Myers, “The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 56–67.
what makes us happy is the quality of our romantic bonds, the health of our families, the time we spend with good friends, the connections we feel to communities: For superb summaries of the many benefits of healthy relationships, as well as the costs of impoverished relationships and isolation, see R. F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 117 (1995): 497–529; M. Argyle, “Causes and Correlates of Happiness,” in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Edward Diener, and Norbert Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage, 1999), 353–73; Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
there are more words in the English language that represent negative than positive emotions: James A. Russell, “Culture and Categorization of Emotion,” Psychological Bulletin 110 (1991): 426–50.
These empirical facts led many in the field to the view that positive emotions are in reality by-products of negative states: Sylvan S. Tomkins, “Affect Theory,” in Approaches to Emotion, ed. Klaus Scherer and Paul Ekman (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984), 163–95.
My hope is to tilt your jen ratio to what the poet Percy Shelley: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Longman, 1999).
DARWIN’S JOYS
Darwin’s: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1872/1998).
Perhaps most important to Darwin, the book met with modest smiles of approval from his wife, Emma: Janet Browne’s brilliant two-volume biography of Darwin reveals the at times ambivalent stance Emma Darwin took with regard to her husband’s revolutionary scholarship. Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
anatomist Sir Charles Belclass="underline" Browne, Power of Place, 364.
One of the clearest signs of dominance: For some of the most systematic work on power and nonverbal display, consult the work of John Dovidio. Dovidio et al., “The Relationship of Social Power to Visual Displays of Dominance between Men and Women,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 233–42. Judith Hall and her colleagues have also provided a definitive review of the different behaviors that accompany displays of power. J. A. Hall, E. J. Coats, and L. S. LeBeau, “Nonverbal Behavior and the Vertical Dimension of Social Relations: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 6 (2005): 898–924.
One prevailing metaphor of emotion: George Lakoff has done superb work on the different metaphors of emotion. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Zoltán Kövesces, Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Paul Ekman put Darwin’s universality thesis to a simple empirical test: The original report of Ekman’s study is found in the following: Ekman, E.R. Sorenson, and Wallace V. Friesen, “Pan-Cultural Elements in the Facial Displays of Emotions,” Science 164 (1969): 86–88. The critiques of this study are best summarized in James Russell’s assessments of the data on the universality of emotion recognition in the face: J. A. Russell, “Is There Universal Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression? A Review of Methods and Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 102–41. This critique focuses on several questions. The most important is whether people in different cultures would label Ekman’s faces in similar fashion if allowed to use their own words, rather than using the words or scenarios provided by an experimenter. The answer is yes. See J. Haidt and D. Keltner, “Culture and Facial Expression: Open Ended Methods Find More Faces and a Gradient of Universality,” Cognition and Emotion 13 (1999): 225–66.
The data gathered in this study would pit two radically different conceptions of emotion against one another: For an excellent summary of social constructionist accounts of emotion, see Keith Oatley, “Social Construction in Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 342–52.
An evolutionary approach took shape as Ekman started to publish the findings from this first study: For an early evolutionary account of the emotions, see John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments,” Ethology and Sociobiology 11 (1990): 375–424. R. M. Neese, “Evolutionary Explanations of Emotions,” Human Nature 1 (1990): 261–83. For a more recent summary of such thinking, see D. Keltner, J. Haidt, and M. N. Shiota, “Social Functionalism and the Evolution of Emotions,” in Evolution and Social Psychology, ed. Mark Schaller, Jeffrey A. Simpson, and Douglas T. Kenrick (New York: Psychology Press, 2006), 115–42.
Emotions at their core are concepts, words, and ideas that shape, and are shaped by, discourse practices such as storytelling, poetry, public shaming, or gossip: Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has done brilliant work on how emotions are embedded in social discourse and constructed in those social practices. In her work on Bedouin culture, she documents how emotions like embarrassment and modesty are constructed in patterns of dress, poetry, and gossip. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz, Introduction to Language and the Politics of Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
The Inuit were never observed to express anger: J. L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
In the critical study: Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen, “Pan-Cultural Elements.”
Perhaps the chorus of critiques arose because Ekman’s data may have been reminiscent of the claims of Social Darwinism: For an enlightening history of Social Darwinism, read Stanford historian Carl Degler’s work. Degler, In Search of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).