Emotion and motivation

That an emotion shows in the body is old knowledge. In his Canon of Medicine, finished around 1025, Ibn Sīnā treats lovesickness as an illness. The sufferer grows hollow-eyed, his pulse turns uneven, and often he will not say whom he loves. Ibn Sīnā gives a way to find out. Keep a finger on the pulse, he writes, and have many names said aloud. At the right name the pulse changes sharply and loses its rhythm. The same can then be done with streets, houses and trades. He adds that he has tried the method himself.

More than a century later the Persian writer Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī told the method as a story, in which Ibn Sīnā cures a young prince by finding the district, the street, the house and at last the name of the girl he loves. The story may be embroidered. The method is in the Canon.

Are the expressions of emotion learned, like words, or inborn? In the late 1960s the psychologist Paul Ekman took photographs of posed faces to the Fore, a people of the New Guinea highlands who had seen almost nothing of the outside world. He told them short stories, such as “her child has died”, and asked them to pick the face that fitted. They chose much as Americans did, except that they mixed up fear and surprise. Ekman concluded that six basic emotions have universal expressions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. Disgust is the wrinkled nose and curled lip. Surprise is the briefest, gone in a few seconds as the mind works out whether the news is good or bad.

The claim is now disputed. Ekman’s method offered a few faces to choose between. When researchers have let remote peoples sort faces freely, the agreement has been much weaker.

Common sense says that you see a bear, feel afraid and then tremble. In 1884 the American psychologist William James turned the order round, and the Danish doctor Carl Lange argued the same a year later. In their view the body reacts first, and the feeling of fear is your sensing of that reaction. You are afraid because you tremble. The idea is known as the James-Lange theory.

The physiologist Walter Cannon objected in the 1920s. The body’s reactions, he pointed out, are slow, taking a second or more, while a feeling comes at once. They are also much alike in fear, in anger and in excitement, too alike to tell a person which emotion to feel. Cannon and his student Philip Bard proposed that the brain sends out two signals together, so that the bodily reaction and the feeling arise at the same time, neither causing the other.

If bodily arousal is much the same from one emotion to the next, something else must decide which is felt. In 1962 Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed that an emotion needs two ingredients: arousal in the body, and a label that the mind attaches to explain it. A pounding heart with the thought “that dog is loose” is fear. The same heart with “she said yes” is joy. This is the two-factor theory.

In their experiment, volunteers were injected with adrenaline, which sets the heart racing, and not told what it would do. Left with an actor who clowned about, they tended to catch his high spirits. With one who grew angry, they tended to turn angry too. Volunteers warned what to expect were moved less. The effects were small and later repeats gave mixed results, but the idea that feeling depends on reading one’s own body has lasted.

A sudden threat changes the body within a second or two. The heart speeds up, breathing quickens, the pupils widen, and blood is sent to the large muscles and away from the gut. In 1915 Walter Cannon named this the fight or flight response: the body making ready to confront a danger or to run from it.

Two systems carry the alarm. The first is a branch of the nerves that run the body’s inner organs without your having to think about them. It is called the sympathetic nervous system, and its job is to rouse the body for action. Its partner, the parasympathetic system, calms the body afterwards. The second is chemical. Sympathetic nerves reach the adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys, and these pour the hormone adrenaline into the blood. Adrenaline reaches every organ at once and keeps the alarm going.

Adrenaline is made for emergencies that are over in minutes. If the threat lasts, a second hormone takes over. Within minutes the adrenal glands release cortisol, which keeps the body on alert and puts sugar into the blood for fuel. That serves for an afternoon, but stress can last months.

In 1936 the physician Hans Selye reported that the body meets every kind of severe strain in one way. He had subjected rats to cold, injury, forced exercise and drugs of many kinds, and each time their bodies changed in the same three ways: swollen adrenal glands, shrunken immune organs and bleeding stomach ulcers. He described three stages. In the alarm stage the body’s defences dip before they rally. In the stage of resistance it holds a high level of defence, at a cost. If the strain goes on, it reaches exhaustion, when its reserves are spent and illness follows.

Why does anyone do anything at all? The oldest answer in psychology starts with the body. The body works to hold its inner conditions steady: its temperature, its water, the sugar in its blood. This steady state is called homeostasis, a word Walter Cannon coined in 1926. It works like a thermostat. When a reading drifts from its set point, the body acts to bring it back, and the action cancels the drift that caused it.

Some of the corrections are behaviour. When the body runs short of water you feel thirst, and thirst is unpleasant enough to send you looking for a drink. An inner tension of this kind, arising from a bodily need and pushing you to act, is called a drive. Drinking ends the thirst, and the relief teaches you to repeat it. In 1943 the psychologist Clark Hull built a whole theory of motivation on this.

Drives explain eating and drinking. They do not explain why people ride rollercoasters or sit examinations. Here the useful idea is arousal, how alert and stirred up you are, from half asleep at one end to panic at the other.

Arousal helps, up to a point. A sleepy runner is slow off the blocks and a bored student takes nothing in. But past a moderate level it gets worse again: the hands shake and the mind goes blank. Plot performance against arousal and the line climbs, peaks in the middle and falls, a hump known as the inverted U.

The idea goes back to a 1908 experiment by Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, who trained mice with electric shocks of different strengths. Their sharper finding is often forgotten. The harder the task, the weaker the shock under which the mice learned it fastest. A difficult job is best done calm.

In 1943 the American psychologist Abraham Maslow set out a wider picture of what moves people. Human needs, he proposed, form a hierarchy, a ranked order in which the lower needs press hardest and must be largely met before the higher ones are strongly felt.

At the bottom are the physiological needs of the body: food, water, warmth and sleep. A starving person thinks of little except food. Next comes safety: shelter, health, a life that can be counted on. Above safety comes belonging, the need for family, friendship and love. Then comes esteem, the need to be respected and to respect oneself. At the top Maslow placed self-actualization, his name for becoming all that one is capable of being.

Maslow never drew the famous pyramid. It was added in 1960 by a consulting psychologist writing for managers.

Maslow’s hierarchy is one of the best-known ideas in psychology and among the least tested by its author, who drew it from clinical observation and from the lives of people he admired, not from experiments. Looked at again, both its top and its order needed mending.

Maslow first described self-actualization, the fulfilling of one’s own potential, as the highest human need. In his last years he placed a step above it. The highest need, he now held, is self-transcendence: giving oneself to something greater than the self, such as a cause or the service of others.

The order did not hold either. A 2011 survey of people in 123 countries found that needs like those on Maslow’s list matter to well-being everywhere, but that people need not meet one before they gain from the next. A person short of food or safety is still the better for friends and respect.

People act for two kinds of reason. Some things are done for their own sake, because the doing is interesting or satisfying. That is intrinsic motivation. Other things are done for what they bring: pay, marks, praise, or escape from punishment. That is extrinsic motivation.

The two do not simply add up. In 1973 researchers at a Stanford nursery school picked out children who loved drawing with felt-tip pens. Some were promised a prize for drawing, a card with a gold star, and got it. Others got the same prize as a surprise, and a third group got nothing. A week or two later the pens were put out again. The children who had drawn for a promised prize now spent about half as long drawing as the others. The reward had turned play into work. This is called the overjustification effect: an outside reason crowds out the inner one.

What happens in the brain when a goal pulls at you? Much of the answer involves dopamine, a chemical that certain nerve cells deep in the brain release as a signal to other cells. It was long called the pleasure chemical, and the name is misleading.

In the 1990s Wolfram Schultz recorded from these cells in monkeys that were given sips of juice. At first the cells fired when the juice arrived. Once the monkeys had learned that a light came on shortly before the juice, the cells fired at the light and no longer at the juice. Dopamine was marking the promise of a reward, not the enjoyment of it. Other experiments point the same way. Rats with almost no dopamine still show that they like a sweet taste, but they will not seek it out. Dopamine has more to do with wanting than with liking.

Emotions arrive unbidden, but what is done with them can be trained. The scholar Abū Zayd al-Balkhī, who died in 934, wrote a book on the health of the body and of the soul. He sorted the soul’s troubles into four kinds: fear and anxiety, anger, sadness, and obsessive thoughts. His advice was to prepare in calm times. Keep healthy thoughts ready in the mind, he wrote, as a household keeps medicines ready for a sudden illness, and bring them out against a distressing one. Modern cognitive therapy works in much the same way.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, set the standard in a well-known hadith: the strong man is not the one who throws others down in wrestling, but the one who controls himself when he is angry.