the rand-mcnally atlas of emotion

 
       There have been attempts by philosophers and psychologists to both determine what the primal emotions are, and to some extent, map them into two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. Although we perceive through sight, hearing and mental images that are often three-dimensional, it is beneficial to conceive of two-dimensional analogs to further understanding of certain concepts. This has been our method of communicating images of three-dimensional events since the first cave drawings in our pre-history. Language on the other hand, especially non-descriptive language, can convey concepts with no dimensionality or abstractions. Mankind has evolved to the point in abstract thinking and the manipulation of images, to be able to convey non-dimensional abstract concepts in two and three-dimensional forms. Think of the abstract expressionists ability to evoke emotionality in their works using planes of color or line. Mathematician and statisticians make plentiful uses of graphs and plots to bring calculations into a two-dimensional world to further understanding and often to discover new correlations. Thus we can use two-dimensionality to simplify complex interactions, emotions and concepts. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words. 

 
Emotional Soup

The Rand-McNally Atlas of Emotion

Yin and Yang and the Five Phases

A Bit of Ancient History

        Surely, a work of art can be produced that conveys emotionality such as Munch’s painting The Scream and most of us will feel the emotion of fear that this painting elicits. Many works of art can produce a mix of feelings, an ambiguity of fear and love and anger. These are not maps to our emotional landscape but works that draw out our emotions, and not the same emotions in all of us, thus subjective to the viewer. But then our feelings and emotional states are highly subjective, putting psychologists into fits trying to form objective standards. They are inconsistent from person to person and from culture to culture. A primary task is to identify which emotions are universal or primordial and then how to they affect on another or interact or perhaps mix. This is made more difficult by the fact that two or emotional states can exist simultaneously. For instance, we can be sad but we can also feel a bittersweet sadness, which implies some pleasure in the sadness or visa versa. Consider also the difficulty in assessing any individual’s emotional state due to an individual’s ability to express their feelings and variable personal definitions for emotional states. Clearly, we have had to rely on language to convey our feelings to one another and our self-held definitions can vary widely from person to person. Consider how different people can conceptualize ‘remorse’ and how it can differ from culture to culture. How many of us can truly distinguish succinctly between the feelings of disgust and contempt? Also, should we distinguish between emotions and feelings?

     Actually, there is no definitive consensus of what constitutes a feeling or emotion among neurobiologists, psychologists and philosophers. Indeed there is no consensus and very little evidence as to what consciousness is, how it arises and how it interacts with our neural networks. Neurobiologists identify emotions with physiological states and feelings as being our subjective or mental projections of those emotions. Clearly emotions can produce chemical changes in hormones and neurotransmitters in the body, induction of the sympathetic nervous system causing changes in heart rate and blood pressure, and responses of facial muscles. But can emotion be separated from feelings entirely or are they integrally linked in an emotional field and inseparable?

     Neurobiologists have shied away from the study of emotions until fairly recently, but psychologists have attempted qualify and quantify the emotional background of the mind. Rene Descartes, the philosopher who so influenced our materialistic and causal understanding of the world, suggested six primary emotions: admiration, love, hate, desire, joy and sadness. You may notice that there are actually three emotive states with opposite affectations: love-hate, joy-sadness and desire-admiration. Obviously, there is a spectrum of emotions missing from this list such as fear, anger, anxiety and worry.

     Descartes in the 17^th century revolutionized the methodology of knowledge acquisition and was one of the most important thinkers of the European Enlightenment. He began his meditations on knowledge assuming that the entire universe could be a lie created by the devil and subsequently refused to believe in anything, a radical skeptic. This brought him to the oft-quoted realization Cogito, ergo sum (I think therefore I am). In other words, he existed because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be thinking. This led to the debunking of long-held traditional thought in favor of individual subjective truth. From this philosophical underpinning, the precepts of modern thought, now called Cartesian, would spring, including the predominance of method over practice and skepticism in knowledge. This ushered in the modern era of scientific investigation and modern realism. This was reinforced by Newton’s discoveries in physics. One of the unfortunate theories of Descartes that has followed the progress of man and medicine through time is his division of the mind as totally separate from the body and that the emotions of any individual were only due to the character of the individual.

John B. Watson at the beginning of the 20^th century approached emotion from a behavioral point of view and believed there existed three primary emotions: love, fear and rage⁴. Watson derived his opinion from conditioning experiments on rats and infants, some of which were ethically questionable. His was a Pavlovian angle of emotions and again the landscape seems quite bare. Continuing in this behavioral bias, J.R. Millenson,  in 1967, identified three dimensions of emotions, terror-anxiety, pleasure-elation and anger. He believed all the subtleties of feelings arise from these.⁵ The behavioral point of view or theory stipulates that all behavior, including emotional behavior results from either reinforcement or avoidance and that emotions are a byproduct of evolutionary development that allows an organism to choose behaviors that are rewarding or to avoid behaviors that are punishing. Thus the basis of this understanding of emotion is pure stimulus – response.

     In the later part of the 20^th century, an alternative psychological theory was advanced that was related to developments in computer systems and advances in artificial intelligence. This theory introduced the importance in cognition in the development of emotions, so-called “cognitive psychology”. Here there is a relationship between physiological states of arousal and cognitive attempts to either overcome or cope with situations. Further adaptations of this point-of-view have married the concepts of evolution, biology and cognition. C.E. Izard has related the basic human emotions to changes in expression or activities that cross cultural boundaries. They are identified as: interest, surprise, enjoyment, disgust, distress, shame, anger, fear and contempt.⁶  Paul Ekman, also using facial expression as a guide to basic emotions identified these emotional states that are universal: surprise, amusement, anger, contempt, joy, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, fear, guilt, pride in achievement, relief, sadness, satisfaction, sensory pleasure and shame.⁷  Paul Griffiths’ research  indicated that there are basic emotions evident in facial coding that are similar for all cultures around the world: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise and joy. With higher cognition, complex emotions develop such as envy, jealousy, and resentment.⁸ Thus we have in the realm of psychology and philosophy a wide range of views as to what are even the basic emotions and how or why they are produced.

     Most of the attempts to situate emotions on a two dimensional plane have been to achieve a tool for quantifying and qualifying emotional states for research purposes. Thus, many of the two-dimensional models require a potency or intensity level along a spectrum of affect, such as a scale from hate to love on one dimension and intensity of feeling on another. Some argue that positive and negative emotions are on separate dimensions altogether.

     One model that has been proposed by James Russell and his collaborators⁹ posits two dimensions, one of positive or negative and one of the activation level. The multitude of emotional states would occur plotted at a point somewhere in the area of these axes. Here is a two-dimensional model envisioned by Russell:

Russell (1999)

     Presumably, in this model, one would want to live on the right side of the graph and avoid the left side. This graph, however, offers no therapeutic relationships between emotive states and offers no reliable way to position certain primary emotional states such as anger and fear.

     David Watson and Auke Tellegen revised this model to include different axes, that of negative and positive with a spectrum of intensity¹⁰. From Watson (1999):

Watson (1999)

     In this model, you would want to make camp in the upper and left part of the graph. Again, the criticism of Russell’s graph pertains to Watson’s.

     In 2001, Robert Plutchik devised an emotional chart based on the color wheel.¹¹ Plutchik’s diagram is three-dimensional and can be folded up into a dredle shape. Emotions are mixed as colors are mixed and intensity is represented by the saturation of color. It is quite like the diagram used in Five Phase Theory, in that emotions have relationships to one another. One can locate the emotion one is feeling at the moment and view the spectrum of intensity in that range of color. Whereas, this map is a great improvement over previous attempts to visualize the emotional soup and provides some relationship information within emotional states, it does not adequately offer a representation of a vehicle from getting from one emotional state to another. It is like a map of a country with all its mountains and rivers and cities, but no roads to aid in navigation. Here is Plutchik's diagram:

Plutchik (2001)

3.                          Balz, Albert G. A. (1952). Descartes and the Modern Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.

4.                          Watson, J.B. (1930)  Behaviorism. (Revised Edition) Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

5.                          Millenson, J.R. (1967)  Principles of Behavioral Analysis.  McMillan and Co.

6.                          Izard, C. E. (1977) Human Emotions. New York: Plenum Press

7.                          Ekman, Paul  (1982) Emotion in the Human Face. New York: Cambridge Press

8.                          Griffiths, Paul E. (1997) What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Pschological Categories. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press

9.                          Russell, J.A. & Carroll, J.M., (1999) The phoenix of bi-polarity – Reply to Watson & Tellegen. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 611-617

10.                          Tellegen, A & Watson, D. (1999)  Issues in dimensional structure of affect: Effects of descriptors, measurement error, and response formats: Comments on Russelll and Carroll Psychological Bulletin, 98, 219-235

11.                      Plutchik, R. (2001)  The Nature of Emotions American Scientist, 89 (4); 344-350