For every display emotion, there is matching machinery to read facial and body language. This machinery works without conscious thought. It produces its results as emotions in the observer. When a dog threatens to bite you, you feel fear. When a person shows sadness, you feel sad. When a person laughs, you also want to laugh. We call this "empathy."
I’m going to take the human emotions, and collect them into groups. This grouping turns out to be a helpful approach. Each group works together like a puzzle, with the emotions as single consistent pieces. We can see when a group is complete. We can fit the emotions we recognize into their correct group. We can also see how each group works, as a whole.
The emotional groups evolved over time as our species climbed up the social ladder. I’ll work from oldest group to most recent:
❂ The predator emotions help us hunt and capture prey.
❂ The defense emotions prepare us to detect and deal with predators and competitors.
❂ The sexual emotions drive us to find sexual partners.
❂ The family emotions let us talk to our parents and care for our offspring.
❂ The tribal emotions let us form small social groups.
❂ The social emotions let us form looser and larger social groups.
My breakdown comes to about fifty universal human emotions. All humans, with specific exceptions, feel these emotions and feel them in the same way. That is my hypothesis, in any case. I expected to find a much smaller set of universal human emotions. Yet as you will see these are distinct and precise. Often I’ve had to name emotions that we know, yet rarely verbalize.
Like all our mental tools our emotions have continued to evolve and shift over time. So while human rage and dog rage share a common ancestor, they have evolved in their own directions. I’ll explain the human experience.
The Predator Emotions
The predator emotions are what we feel when we stalk and prey on food animals. These are ancient and violent emotions. Some are taboo, even alien to most of us. We have to search for words to describe them. We rerouted these millions of years ago, as we started to develop our social instincts. You will recognize some from our daily rituals of eating.
Others are familiar from play. Watch children play hide-and-seek and you’ll see tame forms of obsession, euphoria, and glee. Play monster with a young child and you make caricatures of fury and bloodlust. Watch young men playing team sports or violent video games and you see the full range acted out in full. This is one reason people enjoy group sports. It lets players — and the crowd — express these emotions in a safe and accepted arena.
The predator emotions are:
❂ Hunger - the emotion of looking for prey. Hunger drives you out of your comfort zone. Your digestion slows. Your vision and hearing gets sharper and you focus on distinguishing prey from threats. You feel the need to move, yet you are careful to stay invisible. You walk without haste, and keep your posture relaxed. Your breathing is regular, slow.
❂ Obsession - the emotion of stalking a prey. Your digestion speeds up. Your hearing and vision fixate on your target, and exclude everything else. You crouch and stay hidden. You move towards your target, trying to appear as innocent as possible until the last minute. Your adrenalin starts to rise. Your memory starts recording in high resolution.
❂ Euphoria - the emotion of chasing a fleeing prey. Your hearing switches off and your vision tunnels in on your target. Your breathing and heartbeat accelerate. Blood flows to your muscles, and glucose feeds into your blood. Your eyes widen, your mouth opens, and you bare your teeth.
❂ Glee - the emotion of seeing your prey stumble. You feel a kick of pleasure and adrenalin. You exhale hard. Your body prepares to move in for the capture. Blood flows to your arms and face. You bare your teeth and open your mouth. The muscles around your eyes compress, to protect them. Glee looks like the ancestor of happiness.
❂ Fury - the emotion of attacking your prey. Your sense of pain switches off. Your vision narrows to a tunnel, and your eyes narrow to reduce the risk of damage. If you could move your ears, they would fold back. You exhale hard, to tighten your chest muscles and reduce the risk of a broken rib. You focus on capturing and immobilizing your prey. As you catch it, you feel intense bursts of pleasure that push you on.
❂ Bloodlust - the emotion of killing your prey. You feel an orgasmic climax of pleasure as you taste blood. Your lungs and heart are still working hard to purge your system of waste products from the chase. Your arms and hands and jaws clench. You still make no sound except a low groan. You’re focused on keeping your prey captive while you kill it. Your digestive system starts to prepare for food.
❂ Gluttony - the emotion of eating your prey. You feel more paranoid than usual. You are vulnerable to competitors looking for a free meal. If it is possible, you move your meal to a safe location. You lick your lips, glance left and right. Your eyes are wide. Your saliva glands are working full speed. Your digestive system is in full swing, expecting a full belly. When it is safe to eat, you focus on your food.
❂ Satiation - the emotion of having eaten enough or too much. Your saliva glands switch off, and you reject the remains of your meal, if any. You look around for others to share with. You adopt open body language, and relax. Blood flows to your digestive system. Your arms and legs are limp.
❂ Blocked - the emotion of a failed hunt or chase. Your body relaxes and all systems go to neutral. You withdraw to a safe place and replay your memory over and over. You look for what went wrong. You imagine different "what if" scenarios, and rehearse them mentally.
Maths Murders
In most people the predator emotions do not, even under threat of death, focus on fellow humans. In hand-to-hand warfare, most soldiers will not kill[79]. They aim to miss. They run away when they can. They provide cover and mass, to intimidate the other side. Much of the military machine works just to train this majority to aim their guns in the right direction.
This majority does shift gears when their families and homes are under threat. To save our relatives or children from an armed and violent stranger, most of us will aim to kill. Yet we do this without the predator emotions. Instead, we feel the defensive emotions I’ll explain in the next section.
Some of us, a small minority, feel only these emotions and no others. So the emotions work at their original full power. More, they focus on fellow humans rather than on food. This minority are the psychopaths. It is the predator emotions that drive psychopaths in their hide-hunt-attack-capture-consume behavior.
We all feel the predator emotions at some level. The key differences are degree and direction. Do you live for the pleasure of the kill? And do you hunger for breakfast, or for power over others?
Yet this does not mean all psychopaths engage in physical violence. Violence and murder is risky business. In normal circumstances the risks of exposure and retribution far outweigh the emotional rewards. A healthy psychopath amygdala shudders at the thought. It keeps the predator emotions focused on business, politics, and private life. Sane psychopaths aim to die from old age, surrounded by grandchildren. In this respect, Mallory is just like anyone else.