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On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect
Language and culture are often seen as unique characteristics of human beings. In this book the author argues that our ability to use a wide array of emotions evolved long before spoken language and, in fact, constituted a preadaptation for the speech and culture that developed among later hominids. Long before humans could speak with words, they communicated through body language their emotional dispositions; and it is the neurological wiring of the brain for these emotional languages that represented the key evolutionary breakthrough for our species. How did natural selection work on the basic ape anatomy and neuroanatomy to create the hominid line? The author suggests that what distinguished our ancestors from other apes was the development of an increased capacity for sociality and organization, crucial for survival on the African savanna. All apes display a propensity for weak ties, individualism, mobility, and autonomy that was, and is today, useful in arboreal and woodland habitats but served them poorly when our ancestors began to move onto the African plain during the late Miocene. The challenge for natural selection was to enhance traits in the species that would foster the social ties necessary for survival in the new environment. The author suggests that the result was a development of certain areas of the primate brain that encouraged strong emotional ties, allowing our ancestors to build higher levels of social solidarity. Our basic neurological wiring continues to reflect this adaptive development. From a sociological perspective that is informed by evolutionary biology, primatology, and neurology, the book examines the current neurological bases of our emotional repertoire and their implications for our social actions.
- GenresSociologyPsychology
208 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2000
About the author
Jonathan H. Turner
79 books15 followersJonathan H. Turner is a professor of sociology at University of California, Riverside.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
December 10, 2013
I took another look at this book. Rather than edit my prior review, here is a second, fresh review (2026). It starts out negative but ends as a more than positive review.
From what I can tell, there are a couple of problems with what Turner puts forward. The fundamental dynamic in human emotions is the tension between our need to be individuals versus our need to be part of a group. From his evolutionary biology approach, he places the former as primary when our hominid ancestors lived in the African forests. When we emerged from there to the open savannahs, the importance of group life emerged, thereby setting up the tension between self-regarding and other-regarding beings. I think there’s a good argument that this tension preceded our primate heritage considerably, possibly dating back to our herd mammal origins.
Turner lists four primary emotions - based on what is commonly denoted as such based on the writings of others - as happiness, sadness, fear and anger. I’d agree with him that these are primary, but he sees these emotions as being triggered by external, positive or negative stimuli. We are happy with good stimuli; we are sad with bad stimuli, which prompts defensive anger or fear reactions to the negative stimuli. This is the second problem with Turner.
While this is a standard way of viewing emotions, it begs the Schopenhauer question as to why the self should be triggered by such stimuli. Turner’s schema works somewhat with negative stimuli. Clearly, we don’t want hostile things, and we defend ourselves against such via (in Turner’s terminology) fear-aversion or anger-assertion. But the more important point to make is that we are triggered because the motivation to protect ourselves lies inside. Without this inner relevance, a negative object or other would mean nothing in particular. This point is more implied than explicit, but it needs explicitly to highlight ourselves as defending and seeking beings.
With Turner’s happiness prong, the Schopenhauer question becomes more important. On Turner’s happiness prong, why do we respond to positive triggers? Though this part is unclear, I think Turner argues that group life makes us happy (as Darwin argued, group life is necessary for survival - for mutual benefit and protection). Turner has us as passive, responding beings who await incorporation into a group, whereas the reason for being triggered vis-a-vis positive stimuli (the group) is because we need the group for our own welfare.* Thus, we are proactive beings, driven by need. Need (and Spinoza’s desire) is what prompts us to subdue our individual needs in deference to the requirements of group life.
But these are minor criticisms compared to the rest of Turner’s work. Turner says that we are not like apes; we are apes. We are driven to be social beings via the various attunement emotions that merge us with our group (attachment, reciprocity/fairness, gratitude-loyalty; shame, guilt and embarrassment; pride that comes from adding value to the group).. These emotions are expressed primarily in non-conscious ways. They are subcortical. For an elaboration of what Turner is laying out, he refers to Goffman’s interaction rituals - the subtle, non-verbal, ways we interact with each other to as to not put others on their heels but also to ensure via face saving that we ourselves are not put into awkward situations (like embarrassment) that would diminish our place within the group.
Communication is primarily non-verbal. It is gestalt-like and gestural where messages impart a good deal of information simultaneously. Language is secondary to this form of communication. Language builds on and extends this communication mode, but it is heavily constrained by its sequential and linear expression. Communication taps into the non-conscious drivers of behavior, which is where Freud’s observations pertain, except that Turner argues that some of the drivers are so deep that there cannot be repression because troubling drivers are not raised to the level of consciousness. As a related point, Turner is clear that communication in social life always reflects an underlying value that traces back to merging with the group and maintaining viable group life. In this way, he ties mind and body together. There is no Descartesian division (Descartes Error per Demasio) between mind and body.
The power to conform to group life has both an innate and “social construction” element. Like language, the individual is endowed with the need and capacity to merge with the group. That innate part is then filled by the moral codes of the group. Each group has its own normative structures that dictate in specific terms how conformity (solidarity) is to be maintained.
Turner doesn’t emphasize enough the role reciprocity plays in group life, the solidarity of which can be maintained only when everyone helps out the other and favors are returned. The flip side of reciprocity is the role of deceit that masks self-serving behavior and thus violates reciprocity. Turner also downplays dominance hierarchies, saying, if I read him correctly, that these were selected out. I think dominance tendencies exist loud and clear and such are entirely consistent with his thesis that the underlying tension in ape societies, including our own, is between the need to be social members in good standing and our need to watch out for our own interest. And, as a final point, Turner approaches his subject matter as if we are expressing species-wide traits. In general, this is correct. There is this tension between the need to be a self and the need to be a social self. But there is Darwinian variation, and there is Turner’s point about relative intensity of traits (high, medium and low), which suggests that some may be more self-oriented than others, and some may be more other-regarding that others.
*The group makes us happy. This in turn is reinforced via self-sanctioning secondary emotions of guilt and shame, which are negative sanctions, and pride and gratitude, which are positive sanctions. These thus keep us in the group as members of good standing. We conform to group norms and make amends when we deviate from them.
***
2013 Review:
Turner goes back to our transition from the tropical forests of Africa to the continent's open savannas and argues that our essential emotional makeup derives from that place at that time. In the forest environment, there were "loose ties and individualism" but this was not particularly adaptive in open spaces that required cooperation for hunting and defense. Life here needed a full suite of attunement emotions to overcome our strong individualism and to create group solidarity. We developed important bonding rituals and the capacity to signal what we wanted and didn't want through emotional cues. We gave off signals and we read the emotional states of others in gestalt-like fashion. We were first and foremost a visual species, and remain so today, Turner argues. Verbal communication was and is secondary. Rational thought builds upon our emotion structures, which tag thoughts and experiences with value. A good part of our emotional makeup is deeply subcortical which controls social interactions,often without being accessible to consciousness.
Turner's discussion of the emotions that were developed as a result of this early history is the weaker part of this book. He boils down the endless lists of emotions put forward by many other theorists and arrives at what he refers to as the main emotions mentioned by most: happiness, sadness, anger and fear - acknowledging that these are generic categories that include many variations, primarily relating to intensity. This list seems a bit arbitrary and the connection to Turner's theory about our emotional development from our earlier primate days is not so evident. After all, these four emotion categories seem to apply pretty well to all animal life: When all goes well, there's happiness at some level. When not, sadness, again at some level. When defending, fear and anger in all their animal variations do the work. It seems more likely that what Turner is identifying here is an overarching emotional makeup that applies to all of animal life. Turner then discusses various blends of these emotions that seemed more confusing than not, probably because I did not see the strong connection to his theory about our emotional development from the African savanna days. Turner also consistently refers to emotional responses and this is confusing. If we react emotionally to cues coming from others, they are also expressing their emotions as well - emotion states and emotion-based actions - as the initiator of the reactions.
These are small criticisms. He puts forward a thoughtful thesis and this is a thought-provoking book. Turner says we are not like apes. We are apes. His discussion of attunement emotions and non-verbal communication, and the development of these as a result of environmental pressure is excellent. In putting forward his thesis, he challenges his profession and other professions as well. In this regard, Turner writes: "Some of the obvious shortcomings of our current models of interaction that stem from the failure to be evolutionary sociologists are: the widespread view that thinking is covert speech; the overemphasis on speech as the paramount process during the course of interactions; the view of self as a verbal and cognitive construct; the failure to ask why humans need to use rituals in the first place; the view that human interaction is guided by just a few master emotions; the overemphasis on feeling as the conscious experience of emotion over the subcortical; unconscious dynamics of emotion; and the view that the human actor is rational and instrumental over its affective and emotional dimensions. I could carry this list on for several pages....We cannot simply cede this area over to other disciplines; these kinds of evolutionary questions are central to microsociology"
From what I can tell, there are a couple of problems with what Turner puts forward. The fundamental dynamic in human emotions is the tension between our need to be individuals versus our need to be part of a group. From his evolutionary biology approach, he places the former as primary when our hominid ancestors lived in the African forests. When we emerged from there to the open savannahs, the importance of group life emerged, thereby setting up the tension between self-regarding and other-regarding beings. I think there’s a good argument that this tension preceded our primate heritage considerably, possibly dating back to our herd mammal origins.
Turner lists four primary emotions - based on what is commonly denoted as such based on the writings of others - as happiness, sadness, fear and anger. I’d agree with him that these are primary, but he sees these emotions as being triggered by external, positive or negative stimuli. We are happy with good stimuli; we are sad with bad stimuli, which prompts defensive anger or fear reactions to the negative stimuli. This is the second problem with Turner.
While this is a standard way of viewing emotions, it begs the Schopenhauer question as to why the self should be triggered by such stimuli. Turner’s schema works somewhat with negative stimuli. Clearly, we don’t want hostile things, and we defend ourselves against such via (in Turner’s terminology) fear-aversion or anger-assertion. But the more important point to make is that we are triggered because the motivation to protect ourselves lies inside. Without this inner relevance, a negative object or other would mean nothing in particular. This point is more implied than explicit, but it needs explicitly to highlight ourselves as defending and seeking beings.
With Turner’s happiness prong, the Schopenhauer question becomes more important. On Turner’s happiness prong, why do we respond to positive triggers? Though this part is unclear, I think Turner argues that group life makes us happy (as Darwin argued, group life is necessary for survival - for mutual benefit and protection). Turner has us as passive, responding beings who await incorporation into a group, whereas the reason for being triggered vis-a-vis positive stimuli (the group) is because we need the group for our own welfare.* Thus, we are proactive beings, driven by need. Need (and Spinoza’s desire) is what prompts us to subdue our individual needs in deference to the requirements of group life.
But these are minor criticisms compared to the rest of Turner’s work. Turner says that we are not like apes; we are apes. We are driven to be social beings via the various attunement emotions that merge us with our group (attachment, reciprocity/fairness, gratitude-loyalty; shame, guilt and embarrassment; pride that comes from adding value to the group).. These emotions are expressed primarily in non-conscious ways. They are subcortical. For an elaboration of what Turner is laying out, he refers to Goffman’s interaction rituals - the subtle, non-verbal, ways we interact with each other to as to not put others on their heels but also to ensure via face saving that we ourselves are not put into awkward situations (like embarrassment) that would diminish our place within the group.
Communication is primarily non-verbal. It is gestalt-like and gestural where messages impart a good deal of information simultaneously. Language is secondary to this form of communication. Language builds on and extends this communication mode, but it is heavily constrained by its sequential and linear expression. Communication taps into the non-conscious drivers of behavior, which is where Freud’s observations pertain, except that Turner argues that some of the drivers are so deep that there cannot be repression because troubling drivers are not raised to the level of consciousness. As a related point, Turner is clear that communication in social life always reflects an underlying value that traces back to merging with the group and maintaining viable group life. In this way, he ties mind and body together. There is no Descartesian division (Descartes Error per Demasio) between mind and body.
The power to conform to group life has both an innate and “social construction” element. Like language, the individual is endowed with the need and capacity to merge with the group. That innate part is then filled by the moral codes of the group. Each group has its own normative structures that dictate in specific terms how conformity (solidarity) is to be maintained.
Turner doesn’t emphasize enough the role reciprocity plays in group life, the solidarity of which can be maintained only when everyone helps out the other and favors are returned. The flip side of reciprocity is the role of deceit that masks self-serving behavior and thus violates reciprocity. Turner also downplays dominance hierarchies, saying, if I read him correctly, that these were selected out. I think dominance tendencies exist loud and clear and such are entirely consistent with his thesis that the underlying tension in ape societies, including our own, is between the need to be social members in good standing and our need to watch out for our own interest. And, as a final point, Turner approaches his subject matter as if we are expressing species-wide traits. In general, this is correct. There is this tension between the need to be a self and the need to be a social self. But there is Darwinian variation, and there is Turner’s point about relative intensity of traits (high, medium and low), which suggests that some may be more self-oriented than others, and some may be more other-regarding that others.
*The group makes us happy. This in turn is reinforced via self-sanctioning secondary emotions of guilt and shame, which are negative sanctions, and pride and gratitude, which are positive sanctions. These thus keep us in the group as members of good standing. We conform to group norms and make amends when we deviate from them.
***
2013 Review:
Turner goes back to our transition from the tropical forests of Africa to the continent's open savannas and argues that our essential emotional makeup derives from that place at that time. In the forest environment, there were "loose ties and individualism" but this was not particularly adaptive in open spaces that required cooperation for hunting and defense. Life here needed a full suite of attunement emotions to overcome our strong individualism and to create group solidarity. We developed important bonding rituals and the capacity to signal what we wanted and didn't want through emotional cues. We gave off signals and we read the emotional states of others in gestalt-like fashion. We were first and foremost a visual species, and remain so today, Turner argues. Verbal communication was and is secondary. Rational thought builds upon our emotion structures, which tag thoughts and experiences with value. A good part of our emotional makeup is deeply subcortical which controls social interactions,often without being accessible to consciousness.
Turner's discussion of the emotions that were developed as a result of this early history is the weaker part of this book. He boils down the endless lists of emotions put forward by many other theorists and arrives at what he refers to as the main emotions mentioned by most: happiness, sadness, anger and fear - acknowledging that these are generic categories that include many variations, primarily relating to intensity. This list seems a bit arbitrary and the connection to Turner's theory about our emotional development from our earlier primate days is not so evident. After all, these four emotion categories seem to apply pretty well to all animal life: When all goes well, there's happiness at some level. When not, sadness, again at some level. When defending, fear and anger in all their animal variations do the work. It seems more likely that what Turner is identifying here is an overarching emotional makeup that applies to all of animal life. Turner then discusses various blends of these emotions that seemed more confusing than not, probably because I did not see the strong connection to his theory about our emotional development from the African savanna days. Turner also consistently refers to emotional responses and this is confusing. If we react emotionally to cues coming from others, they are also expressing their emotions as well - emotion states and emotion-based actions - as the initiator of the reactions.
These are small criticisms. He puts forward a thoughtful thesis and this is a thought-provoking book. Turner says we are not like apes. We are apes. His discussion of attunement emotions and non-verbal communication, and the development of these as a result of environmental pressure is excellent. In putting forward his thesis, he challenges his profession and other professions as well. In this regard, Turner writes: "Some of the obvious shortcomings of our current models of interaction that stem from the failure to be evolutionary sociologists are: the widespread view that thinking is covert speech; the overemphasis on speech as the paramount process during the course of interactions; the view of self as a verbal and cognitive construct; the failure to ask why humans need to use rituals in the first place; the view that human interaction is guided by just a few master emotions; the overemphasis on feeling as the conscious experience of emotion over the subcortical; unconscious dynamics of emotion; and the view that the human actor is rational and instrumental over its affective and emotional dimensions. I could carry this list on for several pages....We cannot simply cede this area over to other disciplines; these kinds of evolutionary questions are central to microsociology"
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