Beyond the Basics: The Evolution and Development of Human Emotions
The suggestion that at least some emotions are modular captures a number of our intuitions about emotions: they are generally fast responses to a stimulus, they are involuntary, and they are easily distinguished (at least in most cases) from one another; we simply know that, for example, anger feels different than fear. Candidates for modular emotions are usually the so-called "basic" emotions – anger and fear are good examples of these. Defenders of emotion theories that focus on basic emotions, such as Paul Ekman in psychology and Paul Griffiths in philosophy, emphasize the advantages of theories that stress the evolutionary continuity of emotional expression and link emotions to the activity of neural circuits that are similar in human beings and other animals.
In this paper, however, I will examine arguments for the discontinuity of emotions in human beings, as compared with other animals. Owing to a combination of cultural practices and neuroanatomy, both our emotional "wiring" and our emotions are unique. Moreover, contrary to the claims of evolutionary continuity noted above, the evolutionary processes that culminated in this uniqueness also have important consequences for the extent to which emotions can be said to be modular. In making this case, I will begin by outlining Griffiths' "psychoevolutionary theory" of emotion and his application of Fodor's (1983) work on modularity to emotion. I will then suggest that, at least in human beings, the "basic" emotions that are the topic of Griffiths' work are not so basic, after all. Drawing on work on psychological development during infancy by Allan Schore and by Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker, as well as work on the cognitive consequences of human brain evolution by Terrence Deacon, I will show [End Page 73] that the neural circuits underpinning Griffiths' modular "affect-programs" may not be as independent as a module is usually held to be. In the last two sections of the paper, I will return to the issue of modularity and suggest that what remains of the modular nature of emotions can also be explained with reference to the evolution of the central nervous system and that, in fact, even the modularity of emotions in nonhuman animals is limited. If my account is correct, then the psychological differences between human and nonhuman emotion reflect biological differences that are simply the most recent step in a long evolutionary process.
I. The Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion and the Modularity of Affect-Programs
Griffiths proposes his psychoevolutionary theory as an alternative to the cognitive conception of emotion, which he saw as dominating philosophy. On this cognitive account, Griffiths notes, emotions are held to be judgments that are made on the basis of the propositional attitudes held towards the object of emotion. According to Griffiths, "[t]he philosophical cognitivist claims that it is a necessary condition of fearing something that you believe it to be dangerous, and desire to avoid the danger" (Griffiths 2003, 257). He points out that not only is this account not sufficient to explain emotion (and that additional criteria that have been suggested to supplement the beliefs and desires seem rather ad hoc), it is actually not even necessary. The existence of irrational emotional responses, in which, for example, we fear something without believing it is really dangerous, shows that there is something seriously wrong with the cognitivist theory of emotions.
The psychoevolutionary theory that Griffiths proposes as a replacement is radically different from the cognitivist theory, and Griffiths is quite honest about the price that will have to be paid in adopting it. Whereas cognitivism takes as its starting point our everyday talk of emotion and the range of emotions that we describe ourselves as experiencing, on the psychoevolutionary theory the types of emotions that are allowed is restricted to those that can be cashed out in biological terms, specifically, in terms of neural circuits and of the expression of emotional behaviour. As...
