# Evolving emotions

**Published by:** [Adrian Ho](https://paragraph.com/@adrianho/)
**Published on:** 2023-02-16
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@adrianho/evolving-emotions

## Content

For me, an essential part of realizing human potential post-AI is an intentional evolution of our emotions. I mean this in the sense that we must develop emotional responses that fit the threats and opportunities presented in tomorrow’s world if we are to thrive and decide in it. This is challenging on a number of fronts because that would require the intentional re-training of emotions and we understand very little about emotions and even less about how they can be learned. Describing the complexity of emotions David Matsumoto at San Francisco State University says:But emotions are not just feelings. The universe of affective phenomena includes emotions, but also moods, some personality traits, some psychopathologies, and well- being. Emotion, therefore, is one class of affective phenomenon. To me, emotions are transient, bio-psycho-social reactions designed to aid individuals in adapting to and coping with events that have implications for survival and well being. They are biological because they involve physiological responses from the nervous systems, and prime skeletal muscle activities. They are psychological because they involve specific mental processes required for elicitation and regulation of response. And they are social because they are often elicited by social interactions, and have meaning to those interactions.The interplay between and relative importance of biology, psychology and social appears to drive the majority of literature on emotions. The believers in a biological and psychological basis for emotions would point to findings like the one documented recently in the Atlantic article - A ‘Distinctly Human’ Trait That Might Actually Be Universal:Researchers can’t yet say that disease-driven disgust is definitely universal. But so far, “in every place that it’s been looked for, it’s been found,” says Dana Hawley, an ecologist at Virginia Tech. Bonobos rebuff banana slices that have been situated too close to scat; scientists have spotted mother chimps wiping the bottoms of their young. Kangaroos eschew patches of grass that have been freckled with feces. Dik-diks—pointy-faced antelopes that weigh about 10 pounds apiece—sequester their waste in dunghills, potentially to avoid contaminating the teeny territories where they live. Bullfrog tadpoles flee from their fungus-infested pondmates; lobsters steer clear of crowded dens during deadly virus outbreaks. Nematodes, no longer than a millimeter, wriggle away from their dinner when they chemically sense that it’s been contaminated with bad microbes. Even dung beetles will turn their nose up at feces that seem to pose an infectious risk.However, this same article also supports the camp who believe that emotions are primarily a social construct:But disgust can also be learned. Clémence Poirotte, of the German Primate Center, and Marie Charpentier, of the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier, have found that certain mandrills—the blue-and-red-faced monkeys of Rafiki fame—are more cagey about grooming sick family and friends, while others hardly mind. Those tendencies, Poirotte told me, seem tightly tied to families’ maternal lines, a hint that the monkeys are inheriting their hygienic habits from their moms. We humans seem to learn similar lessons in childhood: Prior to preschool age, many kids aren’t all that bothered by the sight or smell of poop. It’s their parents who seem to drill that aversion into them, and cement it for life.I wrote previously about the search for a new way of being and cited research on emotional contagion and coherence. This suggests that there are social mechanisms for emotional regulation that are separate from tools for individual emotional regulation. In their paper The cultural evolution of emotion, authors Kristen A. Lindquist , Joshua Conrad Jackson , Joseph Leshin , Ajay B. Satpute and Maria Gendron list 4 different dynamics that affect the social creation of emotions:Emotions are cultural artefacts that are sensitive to forces of attraction. Our first claim is that emotion categories are culturally transmitted artefacts, not unlike human languages, beliefs, behaviours, technologies, art forms and social systems.Emotions are cultural artefacts that are socially learned. Models of cultural attraction might explain why there are emotion categories with similar themes across many human groups.Environments shape emotion transmission. Building from the claim that emotion categories are cultural artefacts that are transmitted via social learning, our next claim is that the social and ecological environment influence their transmission. As in biological evolution, cultural evolutionary models consider the surrounding social and ecological environment to be a significant source of variability that predicts which cultural artefacts are transmitted.Transmission biases change emotions. Our fourth claim is that emotion categories might change through the act of transmission. Just as genes mutate because of DNA copying errors during cell division, cultural artefacts might mutate and shift as they are passed on through vertical or horizontal transmission.(Individualism is a predominantly Western ideology. I think this partially explains the over-reliance on self-regulation of emotions as the primary way we handle crises. It certainly explains why the social cultivation is given so little attention.) The 4 dynamics above start to give me ideas for how we might progress.We need to develop an emotional vocabulary that is distinct and separate from the semantics of our communications. We’ve largely relied upon body language and neural synchronization to convey emotions. Today, these messages aren’t delivered through digital media or are compressed too much to render them meaningless. As a Brit, I remember being horrified by the American habit of saying: “that’s funny” after laughing at something. I even more horrified to say we probably need to do this more and about more kinds of emotions.We need to redesign physical, in-person experiences to put emotional communications ahead of informational communications. Information-transmission and informational-collaboration to arrive at new informational outputs and ideas are not hugely impacted by more digital work and communication environments. But emotional transmission and coherence are almost completely excluded. (When we describe “creative output” we are almost always talking about the informational-content of an idea, not the emotional content of an idea. This is why I don’t believe creative ideas are getting worse as more people collaborate remotely - however I do believe that our emotional enrichment from the act of creativity is suffering.)We need to be able to think more concretely and pragmatically about the dimension of neural synchronization “that is associated with emotional contagion.” Rather than having this be a chance occurrence, is it instead something that we can design for? Research has shown that synchronized body movements, social interactions and neural synchronization are all related. How can these - and the above objectives - be more fully integrated into environments and placemaking?But beyond these tactical responses, I wonder how emotional development can be placed at least equal to (if not above) intellectual and physical development? How can “emotional engineering” be given as much attention as “prompt-engineering?”Subscribe

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