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Relations of homology between higher cognitive emotions and basic emotions

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Abstract

In the last 10 years, several authors including Griffiths and Matthen have employed classificatory principles from biology to argue for a radical revision in the way that we individuate psychological traits. Arguing that the fundamental basis for classification of traits in biology is that of ‘homology’ (similarity due to common descent) rather than ‘analogy’, or ‘shared function’, and that psychological traits are a special case of biological traits, they maintain that psychological categories should be individuated primarily by relations of homology rather than in terms of shared function. This poses a direct challenge to the dominant philosophical view of how to define psychological categories, viz., ‘functionalism’. Although the implications of this position extend to all psychological traits, the debate has centered around ‘emotion’ as an example of a psychological category ripe for reinterpretation within this new framework of classification. I address arguments by Griffiths that emotions should be divided into at least two distinct classes, basic emotions and higher cognitive emotions, and that these two classes require radically different theories to explain them. Griffiths argues that while basic emotions in humans are homologous to the corresponding states in other animals, higher cognitive emotions are dependent on mental capacities unique to humans, and are therefore not homologous to basic emotions. Using the example of shame, I argue that (a) many emotions that are commonly classified as being higher cognitive emotions actually correspond to certain basic emotions, and that (b) the “higher cognitive forms” of these emotions are best seen as being homologous to their basic forms.

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Notes

  1. Interestingly, given the significance of the challenge, there has been little response or acknowledgment from mainstream advocates of a functionalist account of mind. This seems due, in significant part, to the fact that the challenging view has typically been presented in books or articles ostensibly about specific psychological traits, especially emotions, rather than as a more general position in itself.

  2. Though see (Matthen 2000, 2002, 2007) for a discussion of some other psychological categories.

  3. Griffiths has since repudiated the term ‘higher cognitive emotion’ as misleading, choosing instead to call such emotions ‘complex emotions’. I will use his old terminology in this paper, both because it better captures the distinguishing features with which I am concerned, and because it is better established and somewhat less vague than ‘complex emotions’ for those who are unfamiliar with Griffiths’s particular, technical definition of the latter term.

  4. Griffiths appears to have softened this conclusion in his recent work (Griffiths and Scarantino 2009; Griffiths 2003, 2004a, b). Nevertheless, I will largely focus on the sharp distinction between BEs and HCEs as drawn by Griffiths in his earlier work. I emphasize this starker version of the distinction because (a) Griffiths has not explicitly disavowed the view, or directly discussed its relation to other trends in his more recent work, (b) we still find some clear assertions of the strong distinction in his recent work, and, in any case (c) the distinction has been widely taken up by others in the emotion literature, and hence has a kind of life of its own. I think that the views I offer are actually suggested by some strands of Griffiths's (and Scarantino’s) recent work.

  5. I challenge the developmental basis for a sharp BE/HCE distinction, as articulated in Cognitive Developmental Theory, in a separate paper (Clark 2009b).

  6. Two caveats about this conclusion: First, Griffiths explicitly presents his analysis as ‘interest relative’ and does allow that it may be more useful and appropriate (perhaps even essential) to group BEs and HCEs together for the purposes of theories other than empirical psychology (e.g., moral or aesthetic theories). Nevertheless, the distinction that he draws does have implications for the way that emotions are treated in these other types of theory. Second, as noted above, while the early Griffiths more strongly downplayed the scientific value of general functional or ecological theories, in his more recent work he seems to have offered such theories himself, explicitly presenting them as a means of capturing some of the commonalities between BEs and HCEs. Here he seems to focus more on the complementary relations between functional and homological classification than in earlier work, though he doesn’t specifically address this issue.

  7. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.

  8. I will not argue directly for this more general claim here, though I do take it up elsewhere (Clark 2009a, b). For present purposes, I merely present the evidence for a physiological component to HCEshame as a possible counterexample to the dominant view.

  9. Except where context indicates otherwise, I will use the word ‘adaptive’ in this paper to include both traits that have evolved by natural selection as well as traits that currently play a positive role in the survival and reproduction of an organism (e.g., exaptations), but have not (yet) been selected for as primary or secondary adaptations in the strong sense. For many of the traits I discuss, it is not empirically clear whether they have been selected for or not, and I want to leave the question open. This usage might be better captured by Gould and Vrba’s term ‘aptive’ (Gould and Vrba 1982), but since their terminology has not achieved widespread use, I will stick to the loose sense of ‘adaptive’.

  10. Many of these shame-related physiological responses are also associated with “stress” more generally, and one might object that they are merely a general response to “threat”, of which shame is only a particular instance. There is, however, evidence that some of these effects are selective to shame. Even as general markers of stress, however, their co-option by the shame response appears to be a herterochronic insertion of an earlier physiological response to injury into a socioemotional context, which casts them in a different light (see below).

  11. Regarding the paradoxical sounding “homologies of function”, a number of authors have convincingly argued that in order to avoid conflating homological and analogical (functional) reasoning in discussing such relationships, “function” must be construed either in the sense of “activity function” or as “causal-role function”, rather than as adaptive function (in any of several senses) (Ereshefsky 2007; Love 2007). In what follows, I intend my use “function” to be read in this way. This includes the relevant social functions, so that in describing the social functions of shame, I am simply recounting the roles that it plays in a social “economy” or “system”, whether these be adaptive or not. Despite the fact that I and the authors cited above have clearly discussed shame in terms of its purported adaptive functions, this claim is not necessary for my argument, and would just cloud the issues. Many of these functions are likely to also be adaptive functions of one sort or another, but that is another argument.

  12. Component theories of emotion may be better equipped to deal with such divergences of levels and constituent parts than are discrete emotion theories. Component theorists argue that rather than trying to identify sets of discrete emotions, we should instead focus on the dissociable components and subcomponents that go into the construction of emotion, and the ways in which these components can recombine to form distinct affective states (Scherer et al. 2001).

  13. I owe the suggestion that I explore the possibility of serial homology in this context to Alan Love.

  14. As noted by an anonymous reviewer, the fact that the serial homology approach would preserve the distinction between BEs and HCEs raises the question of whether this would in the end amount to the same thing as Griffiths's disunity thesis, i.e., that there are two distinct shame mechanisms that function independently. My response is that while this might support a disunity thesis, it would not be Griffiths's disunity thesis. The distinction would be between two homologues (and not between, say, two analogous traits), which would license defeasible inferences to all sorts of deep commonalities between them.

  15. Interestingly, in their latest work on emotions, Griffiths and colleagues have attempted to narrow the divide between BEs and more complex emotions with respect to their degree of sociality, by construing (at least the expression of) both kinds of emotions as involving inter-personal ‘Machiavellian’, or ‘transactional’ aspects which are highly sensitive to social contextual cues, in both humans and nonhuman animals (Griffiths and Scarantino 2009; Griffiths 2003, 2004a, b). In part this is an argument that many of the social processes associated with HCEs may not be as complex (and hence not require as much ‘higher cognition’) as has been assumed.

  16. If this is indeed the case, what are we to make of the fact that multiple BEs have developed intoHCEforms? This suggests a common systematic mechanism underlying these instances, such as modification resulting from integration within higher cognitive functions, rather than a collection of independently emerging modifications, a possibility which deserves further investigation.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, Craig DeLancey, Paul Griffiths, Alan Love, Bence Nanay, Kim Sterelny and Michael Stocker for their comments and suggestions. Previous drafts of this paper have been presented to the members of the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science ‘Biology Interest Group (BIG)’, and the 2008 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, where audience members provided many helpful questions and suggestions.

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Clark, J.A. Relations of homology between higher cognitive emotions and basic emotions. Biol Philos 25, 75–94 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-009-9170-1

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