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Started reading
May 7, 2020
Emotions are thus thought to be a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality.
This kind of internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilization. It helps define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast.
More significantly, the classical view of emotion is embedded in our social institutions. The American legal system assumes that emotions are part of an inherent animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts unless we control them with our rational thoughts.
And yet . . . despite the distinguished intellectual pedigree of the classical view of emotion, and despite its immense influence in our culture and society, there is abundant scientific
evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attach electrodes to a person’s face and measure how facial muscles actually move during the experience of an emotion, they find tremendous variety, not uniformity.
You can experience anger with or without a spike in blood pressure. You can experience fear with or without an amygdala, the brain region historically tagged as the home of fear.
Now imagine that you’re in a doctor’s office, complaining of chest pressure and shortness of breath, which may be heart attack symptoms. If you’re a woman, you’re more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and sent home, whereas if you’re a man, you’re more likely to be diagnosed with heart disease and receive lifesaving preventive treatment. As a result, women over age sixty-five die more frequently of heart attacks than men do. The perceptions of doctors, nurses, and the female patients themselves are shaped by classical view beliefs that they can detect emotions like anxiety, and that women
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