Bachevalier & Reber: Emotion

Jocelyne Bachevalier & Dierdra Reber
Cultural and Neuroscientific Perspectives on Emotion

The CMBC’s second lunch seminar of the fall semester brought together Dr. Jocelyne Bachevalier (Psychology) and Dr. Dierdra Reber (Spanish and Portuguese), Emory scholars from markedly different disciplines who share common interests in the study of emotion. Despite their differing approaches, the presentations by the two speakers – who represent the fields of affective neuroscience and cultural criticism, respectively – converged on a number of unifying themes, many of which came up in audience members’ subsequent questions. In this commentary, I’ll highlight these points of convergence and offer some additional food for thought (or food for feeling, if you will).

In her opening remarks, Bachevalier stressed the adaptive role of emotion for survival, but noted that only recently has empirical research on affective processes become widespread. Advances in operationalizing such processes, previously regarded as too subjective to be studied systematically, have led to a dramatic increase in neuroscientific research on emotion, including the use of nonhuman primate models. As described by Bachevalier, early research on emotion in nonhuman primates relied primarily on the lesion method to gain insight into the functional neuroanatomy of emotion. Focusing on the region of the brain known as the amygdala, researchers found that lesions to this area in rhesus monkeys produced drastic changes in affective behavior. Among the resulting symptoms, collectively referred to as Klüver-Bucy syndrome, are visual agnosia (the inability to recognize familiar objects) and hypoemotionality (diminished affect, with aggression replaced by docility). Bachevalier observed that a key problem with lesion experiments is that they necessarily involve damage not just to the amygdala, but also to connective fibers from the visual cortex (which may explain the recognition deficits). Avoiding this confound, Bachevalier’s research isolates functions specific to the amygdala by injecting drugs that selectively kill amygdala cells, leaving other fibers intact. Using this method, Bachevalier has shown, contrary to earlier findings, that amygdala damage results not in an overall dampening of emotional responses, but rather in an inability to modulate emotion, whether positive or negative. For example, animals with amygdala damage may show both excessive hostility and a heightened tendency to seek out positive stimuli. Thus, Bachevalier’s research has clarified the critical role of the amygdala in adequately and appropriately triggering emotional responses.

In contrast to Bachevalier’s empirical approach to investigating emotional experience, Reber focuses on the cultural meaning assigned to emotion. In her opening remarks, Reber suggested that there has been an epistemic shift in recent years toward the privileging of body over mind in characterizing how we experience and interact with the world. According to Reber, the current cultural landscape – as evidenced through various forms of media – promotes the apprehension of experience via feelings rather than via the tools of reason. For example, in illustrating Christ’s life primarily through vivid depictions of brutality, the film The Passion of the Christ relies on eliciting emotional responses in viewers rather than engaging their analytical capacities. Indeed, several viewers reportedly suffered heart attacks in the movie theater as a result of their strong emotional reactions to the film. Reber described several other examples of this use of emotion to rouse public sentiment, including George W. Bush’s politics of fear and the McDonald’s “i’m lovin’ it” advertising campaign. These and other observations led Reber to conduct an interdisciplinary examination of emotion’s rise in cultural prominence. Evidence for this trend comes from advances in understanding the neural bases of emotion, greater focus on the role of emotion in politics and decision-making, and the development of alternative ways of characterizing cultural experience that do not rely exclusively on verbal language. Reber suggested that a key factor in the shift toward a more affectively driven culture was capitalism. The notion of the invisible hand, originally coined by the economist Adam Smith to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace, stands in contrast to the more hierarchical, taxonomic qualities associated with reason and rationality. The fall of the Soviet Union and the triumph of capitalism, Reber asserted, opened the door to valuing affective experience, and the notion of thinking through feeling, at a broad cultural level.

Perhaps the most obvious connection between the two speakers’ presentations was the emergence of interest in affect across different fields. Bachevalier noted that early research in neuroscience privileged “cold” cognitive processes, and that it was not until much later that the role of affect in continually (and often unwittingly) modulating such processes (“hot” cognition) was appreciated. Similarly, one of Reber’s main points was that capitalism enabled a redefinition of emotion, previously regarded as chaotic or uncultivated, into positive terms. This change in characterization led to the valorization of emotion as a primary way of conveying meaning across a wide range of cultural forms. For example, as suggested by an audience member, social movements were once regarded as driven by reason, but when people no longer saw themselves as fundamentally rational beings (as in the movements of the 1960s), emotion became the catalyst. Reber cited the characterization of current popular protests across the world as movements of “indignation” as evidence that we are perceiving and analyzing social action in emotional terms.

One interesting issue raised in discussion was the idea that the study of emotion may inevitably, and perhaps paradoxically, require the tools of reason. For example, neuroscientists use systematic, quantitative methods to break down affective processes into specific components, and literary critics often describe emotion with language far removed from the vividness of affective experience. While Bachevalier pointed to the difficulty of separating emotion from cognition in scientific research, Reber suggested that the humanities may allow for greater variation in the language used to describe emotion, including the approach of purposefully avoiding conclusions and causal links as an alternative to rational discourse. Nevertheless, the methods primarily used to study emotion may serve the essential purpose of distancing researchers from their own emotions. Given that emotional signals can influence behavior even outside of awareness, it may be necessary for all disciplines to have precautions in place to avoid bias. As someone interested in the evocative power of language, I find it particularly noteworthy that language’s inability to capture our rich affective experience may be precisely what facilitates progress in the scholarly understanding of emotion.

Tamasi & McCauley: What Is Language?

Susan Tamasi & Robert McCauley
What Is Language?

Last spring, Dr. Susan Tamasi (Linguistics) and the CMBC’s own Dr. Robert McCauley co-taught the CMBC-sponsored undergraduate course Language, Mind, and Society (LING 301), a required course for the Linguistics major and the joint major in Psychology and Linguistics. On the first day of class, students were asked to complete a short writing assignment, tackling the question “What is language?” Fittingly, this question also served as the launching point for discussion when Tamasi and McCauley reunited for the CMBC’s first lunch seminar of the fall semester on Thursday, September 22. Following opening remarks from each speaker, student and faculty attendees across a range of disciplines offered their own insights on the nature of language. In this commentary, I’ll highlight some of the key issues raised in the speakers’ presentations and in the lively group discussion that ensued, while also weaving in my own thoughts and reactions.

In her opening remarks, Tamasi noted the difficulty of coming up with any single definition of language. Various definitions offered by students in LING 301 focused on language’s role as a biological construct, a reflection of thought, a transmitter of information, and a marker of social identity, with some arguing that these characteristics render language a uniquely human trait. Tamasi suggested that defining language may not simply be a matter of combining all of these characteristics; rather, there may be some additional, perhaps intangible, property yet to be identified that captures what language is at its core. The fundamental nature of language, Tamasi went on to suggest, cannot be identified merely by examining individual languages, nor by focusing exclusively on the structure of language apart from how it is used by individual speakers and communities.

McCauley’s opening remarks centered on defining language as an abstract concept, or system, akin to the study of religion, as opposed to individual religions. Drawing on his perspective from the philosophy of science, McCauley suggested that explanations of systems are most fruitful when they are mechanistic; that is, when they define the parts, their organization, and their contributions to the operation of the system. Chomsky’s conception of language as primarily a system of thought, rather than a medium of communication, lends itself to such mechanistic analysis (even if Chomsky himself has not pursued that end). According to McCauley, psychological accounts of language have the benefit of localizing the mechanisms underlying language to a physical substrate, namely the brain, with advances in the study of cognition in turn contributing to our understanding of language. McCauley also characterized language as one of several maturationally natural systems, defined in part by their significance in addressing the basic problems in life, their comparatively early appearance in development (within the first two decades of life), the automaticity with which they are engaged, and their lack of dependence on culturally distinctive support.

One issue that came up in discussion was how these criteria apply in cases of so-called feral children (e.g., “Genie”), those who grow up isolated from human contact from a very young age and who consequently are unable to develop normal language abilities, among other cognitive skills. If language does not depend on culturally distinctive support, it might seem that such children should be able to acquire language, certainly once discovered and exposed to the social world. According to McCauley, however, invoking “culture” in such cases may be overly grandiose; what feral children lack may be reduced simply to the opportunity to interact with one other conspecific. Although interactions between individuals must be critical to the typical development of language, they constitute culture in only its most minimal sense. McCauley’s point is that there is nothing special about the social interaction necessary for acquiring language, only that it must be present in some form. While parsimonious, this line of reasoning does not address the question, what is culture? At what point does a particular type of experience become distinctively cultural rather than merely providing the “bare bones” of culture? For ethical reasons, it has often been regarded as impossible to isolate the social ingredients essential for acquiring language, but perhaps greater understanding of the cognitive mechanisms supporting various social phenomena may shed light on what types of social experience are necessary versus merely ornamental.

Another discussion point concerned the extent to which language is unique to humans. Non-human animals certainly have communication systems (and some have even been successful at acquiring sizeable vocabularies), but Tamasi suggested that equating such systems with human language assumes that the principal function of language is to communicate information. Instead, Tamasi stressed, we must take seriously the structural complexity of language at multiple levels (e.g., phonological, morphological, syntactic, etc.), which allows for the coordination of thought and a level of generativity unseen in other communication systems. But do such systems possess a hidden complexity that we cannot recognize simply from observable behaviors? Perhaps, but while we cannot zoom in on the structure of such systems directly, there is one place we can look: the brain. We might posit that the “waggle dance” of the bee, which serves to recruit other bees to forage in the same area, is incredibly complex, but it is unclear how the neural system of the bee could support such complexity, particularly given that we now have some understanding of how properties of human language like recursion are neurally instantiated. As McCauley noted, knowing where to look for the mechanisms underlying language offers a methodological opportunity to understand the nature of linguistic complexity. This opportunity may be wasted if we insist on parity across species.

Interestingly, however, many linguists assume parity across individual languages. Although one language might be regarded as more complex than another in some aspect of its structure (with consequences for how easily such structure is learned), languages are assumed to be equally complex overall because they all serve the same purpose. But if languages are defined by their complexity, this argument seems circular. If some recently discovered language was found to be less complex overall, we would have to conclude that it was not in fact a language (or, alternatively, that its complexity had yet to be discovered). I wonder if it would benefit the field to abandon the notion that there are necessary and sufficient features for language, given the observation from cognitive science that it is virtually impossible to define necessary and sufficient features for anything, whether it be chairs, games, or ideas. Acknowledging a continuum of complexity in language would not render the construct “language” meaningless; it would merely suggest that there is no clear distinction between what counts as a language and what doesn’t. Of course, given that language has often been viewed as a window into the mind, abandoning the parity assumption might open another can of worms by implying an extreme form of linguistic relativity, or cognitive differences among speakers of different languages. Nevertheless, recent research indicates that there is no simple one-to-one mapping between language and the conceptual system (e.g., Malt et al., 2011; for a review, see Wolff & Holmes, 2011), suggesting that differences in linguistic complexity do not necessarily entail analogous cognitive differences.

One important aspect of what defines language seemed to be missing from the lunch discussion: the world. As cognitive scientists have noted, the world is richly structured, with inherent discontinuities in how properties are distributed. For example, concrete objects like dogs and tables form more coherent perceptual bundles than relational notions typically encoded in verbs and prepositions (e.g., throw and in). This structure constrains which components of meaning are encoded in language more generally and also serves as a standard of comparison when considering semantic variation across languages. Recent evidence suggests that universal properties of human perceptual experience may lead to a conceptual space largely shared across languages, with different languages partitioning the space differently. Our understanding of language may be enriched by considering the complex interactions among mind, world, and society that give rise to this fundamental human capacity.

References

Malt, B. C., Ameel, E., Gennari, S., Imai, M., Saji, N., & Majid, A. (2011). Do words reveal concepts? In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2884-2889). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Wolff, P., & Holmes, K. J. (2011). Linguistic relativity. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2, 253-265.