Joseph J. Campos, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley
An interview with Eric Walle (November 2017)
Joseph Campos is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology and Professor in the Graduate School in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a co-founder of the International Society for Research on Emotion, and past President of the International Society for Infant Studies. He has published more than 120 articles and chapters on emotion, emotional development, and developmental transitions, such as the onset of self-produced locomotion. Campos’ research advocates for appreciating the underlying function of emotions, referred to as functionalist emotion theory, and emphasizes the study of emotion in interpersonal contexts.
What was your childhood like, where did you grow up, what did your parents do, what was your family like? What were those early years like for you and your family?
They were all interrelated and powerfully effected by World War II. My first 5 years were spent in the Dominican Republic and we were a typical Dominican, middle-class family. My father was in the importing/exporting business, and that business was involved with Japan and Czechoslovakia. So, he couldn’t have picked two worse countries. With the opening of WWII that ended. Moreover, during the beginning of WWII my father was in New York being treated for ulcers. When WWII began, U-boats were hanging around the Cape Hatteras area, which was the way that ships went from New York City to Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic. The end result was that my poor mother had to survive by selling samples of the goods that my father had in storage as part of his business.
Finally, he and my mother were able to gather enough funds to fly when airplane flights began between Brazil and Miami with a stopover in the Dominican Republic. And so, we flew. We were one of the early passengers to go to Miami from the Dominican Republic. Then we took the train to New York City and our family shifted from middle class in the Dominican Republic to working class in New York City. My mother, who wasn’t working in the Dominican Republic, became almost like the prototypical Jewish immigrant working in the garment district of New York City. She was called a cutter and had to mold fabric and cut it. And she worked her butt off. My father tried to re-establish his import/export business, which was very profitable in the Dominican Republic, but he couldn’t get it off the ground in NYC. So, I grew up in a tenement. As a matter of fact, if anyone wants to see the block was that I grew up in was in the opening scenes of Westside Stories; when they showed the tenements and the playgrounds that had covered in cyclone fencing, that’s exactly what I grew up in.
And you know you asked what was my reaction going to New York City as a 5-year-old and I have two that I can vividly remember. One is that I thought all the people in the United States spoke gibberish. And the second was that where we initially lived didn’t have a refrigerator, so you had to put the milk on the sill outside the window. And one of the interesting features of leaving a quart container of milk there was that every so often in the course of opening the window you knocked the container over. It never hit anyone in the head, thank God, but quite a few people were surprised to see this white bomb explode in front of them as they walked down the street. So those are the two important memories.
But I also trace my interest in emotion to two experiences I had that first year in New York City. One had to do with extreme embarrassment. I was learning to read in English and the first-grade teacher goes around and says, “Okay, it’s your turn to read pages 4, 5, and 6.” And when it came to my turn, I encountered a word that I could not identify. And a kid behind me whispered the word, except that it was the F-word and it burst the class into laughter and made the nun who was the first-grade teacher furious at me. And I will never forget my emotional reaction to that explosion.
The second experience was being absolutely furious at the school because I got left back when I was in first grade; I was left back! I was furious! And I think it affected me profoundly trying to understand emotion. And it also motivated me to prove that I could cut the mustard. And subsequently, year in and year out, I became the number one student in each class I was in, without exception.
I’m curious about your ambitions as a child. It sounds like you struggled initially with those early years in the US.
My ambition as a child was to become a teller in a bank because I thought that that was as close as I would ever get to having piles of money in my hand. I kid you not! My father at one time was a bank manager, so I had the banking connection. But I had no other aspirations than to be a bank teller.
When did that change? Were you always curious in terms of science?
I had the curiosity of a piece of granite. No, I was not curious. I was very fortunate because having done as well as I did academically, I received a 4-year scholarship unexpectedly to Manhattan College, which is a college run by the religious order had educated me all along. So, I went to college instead of becoming a bank teller and that made all the difference in the world. That was just a serendipitous chance. I didn’t even know that this high school had a 4-year scholarship to college. I didn’t even know what a college was.
I think you had a question in there about did your ethnicity affect you? And it sure did!
Yeah, both in terms of your schooling, as well as your career.
Well, the schooling first. When I got out of school I would walk home with everyone else. And when it was my turn to peel off to go back to my apartment building, the kids would say, “Well, enjoy your rice and beans dinner.” And they said that with the utmost contempt, which, of course, profoundly affected me.
And the other thing is that because I really started to excel academically; that was something that you did not do in those days. Mediocrity was rewarded! Oh, if you were a brain, you were the source of scorn and contempt. But fortunately, I was very good at athletics and playing cards. Everyone assumes that growing up in a tenement in New York City must have been terrible… in fact it was fantastic! It was fantastic because you just went out. You didn’t have play dates; you just went out and saw a whole bunch of kids and said, “Do you want to play box ball? Do you want to play stick ball? Do you want to play stoop ball? Do you want to play football?” And you know there weren’t enough cars to be in the way, so it was fantastic. So, sports were very important for me. It was very exciting and it was also interesting because the police would come by and confiscate your sticks because stick ball was associated with broken windows. So, you had that thrill of violating the police.
And then after you played two or three games after school, you sat on the stoop and played cards well into the evening, and I was good at cards. We played a game called casino, which I don’t know if it exists anymore, we played bridge, and a variety of poker games. We didn’t play for money, but we played for chips.
Interestingly people did not go into other people’s apartments. I think I went only 2 to 3 times in my life to a friend’s apartment. We just played out in the street. But it was fantastic. I never felt like I was bored. I never felt like I was underprivileged. On the contrary, growing up in New York City was actually fun and I missed it when I left New York.
Another thing that affected my interest in emotion – I was always very interested in sports. I’ve been a Giants fan since 1949! Listening to games was really funny to me: why would you give a shit about whether your team won or lost? So, I became curious about that. One of the great highlights in my life, ranking with my wedding day and the birth of our three children, was Bobby Thompson’s homerun against the hated Dodgers; the famous “shot heard round the world.” That was euphoria cubed. And I still, to this day, ask myself the question, “Why?” I didn’t make any money on it. I didn’t have personal goal, but you know it was definitely something that ultimately related to the importance of goals in creating the context for emotions.
Tell me about your time at Cornell? What was your experience like? What was your early research?
Well, I wanted to study emotion and went to Cornell to work with a man who had an international reputation for studying emotion from a Pavlovian view. Remember, those were the days of behaviorism. His name was Howard Lydell.
And two things. First of all, when I went to Ithaca from NYC I had the culture shock of my life! To go from a bustling metropolis that had the best of everything, the skyscrapers, the New York Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants (who were always #1) and the Giants football team, and then the theatre, symphony, and opera… all were tops. To go to this dinky little town of 25,000 people… I got on a greyhound bus and went back to New York City. That was my introduction to Cornell. I hated it. I despised it. And of course, I started going to classes only to find out that the teachers in the Psych Department at Cornell were selected for their pitiful teaching skills. I mean they were terrible! And I hated the classes.
But a student at Cornell, who eventually became my best man at my wedding, was two years ahead of me and he linked up with me and we’d go for walks and I told him about how much I hated Cornell. And just in talking to him I found out that he was a totally different person than I. And I liked the intellectual content of our discussions, so I decided that I’d give it a try. And slowly I grew to love Cornell. And also, it was a co-ed school – even though it was 3 to 1 men, it was hell of a lot better than the catholic schools that I went to which were 100 to 0!
So, the first study that I did was to test the hypothesis from Professor Lydell. And that was that goats waiting to be conditioned, in other words the period between a conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus of shock, was very stressful to the goat. In fact, according to Lydell, it was more stressful than the shock itself, and I said, “Well if its more stressful to expect the shock than to get the shock then why doesn’t the animal just learn to get it over with by bringing it about?” And that was the equivalent of my master’s thesis. The project was subsequently called, “Masochism in Modern Goats,” which was a play on a book on psychoanalytic theory that was very popular at the time, “Masochism and Modern Man.” And the goats actually did learn to bring about the shock earlier, which was a violation of the law of effect.
Did you actually have goats in the lab? I’m picturing you like a Shepherd.
Professor Lydell had what was called the Behavior Farm, which was in the town next to Ithaca. You took a bus to go there, walked up to the lab, and there were a bunch of goats. You chose your subjects out of this herd of goats. I would hook them up, measure their heart rate, and put on the electric shock device and record their behavior. That was my first publication.
And then on the day that I was supposed to take my qualifying exam, which was the first step for getting your doctorate and was really stressful, Lydell died that day. So, I was an orphan at work, as it were. I had nobody; there was nobody interested in emotion!
Finally, a year and a half later, somebody was appointed by the department who was from Illinois. He was interested in psychophysiology, which was the closest thing to emotion that you could get, and I started to work on psychophysiology. There I met another brilliant student, Gary Schwartz – he and I were real buddies and we were able to generate one idea after another. In fact, he and I were among the first to concoct the idea of operant conditioning in automatic functions and that laboratory did the first human studies on the topic. So that was how I got into the study of emotion.
My dissertation had to do with the physiological differentiation of emotional states. In those days, you gave your perspective to everyone in the faculty. James Gibson was one of them, and Gibson saw me in the hallway and said, “Hey Joe, I have something to tell you. You know, I read your perspective and all I got to say is you’re wasting your time. You’re never going to find what you predict.” And I was furious at him because, he was in perception; what the fungool did he know about emotion? But you know, he was right.
So now I’m a new PhD, but I always wanted to be a teacher. I always lusted to be a teacher at City College of New York, which at the time, was the number one school, undergraduate school, for creating future PhDs in the United States. It was the school where brilliant immigrant, first generation students went to school. And I wanted to get a job there. And I got an offer. I couldn’t believe it – that they would chose me to be a teacher. But, the bug… the research bug had hit me. And I thought about a post doc in New York City at Albert Einstein College of Medicine on psychophysiology. And I went to work there and I rejected the offer from city college. So, as a post doc at Albert Einstein there was an infancy laboratory – not that I participated in it – but I certainly heard about work on infants. And the topic was testing the psychoanalytic hypothesis about activity level and temperament. So, I got infused with an interest in infancy, as a post doc I never saw an infant.
That is interesting because you’re so often linked with developmental psychology, but you really didn’t get into studying child development until later in your academic development.
I got into child development when I got a call from Denver and they said, “We got an opening on infant psychophysiology and we would like to interview you.” I remember going into the bathroom so that I could talk in private so that I could tell them, “You know, if you want someone in psychophysiology, I’m your man. But if you want someone in infancy, I don’t know an infant from an aardvark.” And as it turned out they invited me anyway. I hated the thought of going to Denver because I hated snow; I imagined Denver was the southern part of the North Pole, which it’s not.
So, I went there fully expecting to spend a nice weekend in a strange city and then say no. But they did something brilliant. They let us use a car for free over an extended weekend, and Rosemary and I went into the Rocky Mountains, and wow. If ever there was a seductive means for getting someone to sign on the employment chart, that was it. Both Rosemary and I fell in love with the Rocky Mountains. It turns out that Denver’s climate is very weird. It’s very mild… Fluctuated by blizzards. They offered me the job right there that Tuesday afternoon, right as we got back from the Rockies. The department chair offered me the job right then and there.
But then I had to actually teach a class in infancy and that was horror. It was absolute horror! I couldn’t think of anything! I do not know how I managed to survive that first year.
Tell me about starting out as an assistant professor. What was your life like at the time? What struggles did you face getting your research off the ground?
Oh! You should have heard what the students would tell me. They were essentially my age – I was 27 and they would say, “Joe, I don’t know how you can pass yourself off as a professor of infant development when you and your wife haven’t even had a kid yet.”
But I was fortunate. The person who I was sort of replacing had a laboratory that was a former grocery store. They had essentially taken out the shelves of the grocery store and built booths for testing infants and that became the infancy laboratory. And it already had the equipment there. We had a form of transportation called the baby buggy that went from the University of Denver campus in southeast Denver to northwest Denver where the laboratory was located. And the lab was also across the street from the catholic charities place where infants were awaiting adoption from shortly after birth to six months.
Perhaps most importantly, the department paid for a research associate and I wound up working with Charlotte Henderson. She was the most significant person in my professional life. She was tremendous because she was superb at getting babies, testing, and being supportive. She was an older adult supportive of me… I mean I was a little kid! I looked so young! I went to the library to check out a book and I would have to show them my grads cards because they wouldn’t believe that I was a professor. I really did look very, very, very young. I probably looked about the typical age of a college senior and I was 27. And so having her as a right-hand person was very important because mothers are suspicious of letting their kids be handled by someone who didn’t seem to be any older than their kid.
But the most important benefit of them all was that I was about 1 out of 5 people who started the experimental study of infant development. Before then there would be an occasional experimental study but nothing systematic. The only people who studied babies systematically were physicians who were interested in taking the age of norms. And what I found was that the field was wide-open! There was hardly any literature, so you didn’t have to keep up with the literature. It was just wonderful to have a field entirely for yourself.
One thing that the graduate program at Cornell did was to show you the significant issues in the field. So, it was easy to identify significant issues to study in the infant because generally those issues had been studied with animals, but in the mid-60s people realized that the human being is not a more complicated cat dog or rat or even an ape. And so, infancy was the royal road to understanding the origins of phenomena.
When you don’t have competition, it means that anything you choose to do has an impact. One of the first dissertations that I supervised had to do with the role of the father and attachment figures. We did a study for a dissertation that showed attachment to the father as well as to the mother. However, the mother was typically preferred if you had a choice between the mother and father. That study was accepted by Boyd McCandles, and he accepted it without even sending it out for review (Cohen & Campos, 1974). And this is what I mean: when you don’t have competition, you’re bound to have an impact when you hit upon something that clashes with people’s opinions. Working with infants was a Godsend. Meanwhile, had I been in psychophysiology, I would have spent my time figuring out whether to use this kind of paste or that kind of paste in order to accurately measure the electrodermal response.
So it sounds like the infancy work pushed you more towards studying behavior rather than physiology.
Well initially my method of choice was physiological response. And I did an awful lot of studies on the psychophysiology of the infant. But eventually, as I learned more about babies, I started to have more trust in the behavior than in the psychophysiology, so I left psychophysiology behind.
One of the topics you’re well known for is social referencing, and particularly social referencing in infancy. However, you have told me that you initially struggled getting that research accepted for publication. Can you share some of that experience?
Well, that research is really founded on my early findings that there is developmental shift on the visual cliff. Everybody thought that the visual cliff was a phenomenon, and that babies would be afraid of heights from the get-go. And thanks to Bonnie Bunsen, an undergraduate, who said that my ideas sucked, we found that there was a developmental shift between 5 and 9 months of age towards fear of heights. It took a lot longer to confirm that, but that study was ready for publication in January of 1970. But what happened was that people did not believe the results. They said, “all you’re showing is that heart rate deceleration means fear in the young baby and that changes the heart rate acceleration later on. So, go fuck yourself.” I submitted to four journals and all four rejected it. The fourth submission had a review from someone who was very helpful. He said, “You know, I think this paper is sufficiently original that I would submit it to Science.” So, I did submit it to Science and they accepted it (Campos, Langer, & Krowitz, 1970). What it taught me is don’t believe the asshole reviewers because they have their biases.
Now in terms of social referencing, people used to think up until the 1970s that you could not measure emotion with precision. And even if you could measure it with precision; it didn’t matter because emotion did not affect behavior. But no one had done any research on how emotions influence behavior. So, we figured that if facial expressions are such a powerful indicator of emotion, shouldn’t it be a powerful regulator of behavior? And that’s what we did on the visual cliff. But nobody believed at the time that emotions could impact behavior, and that was a fundamental criticism. And so they kept asking for more emotions than the original study had, or asking what happens if there is no depth on the visual cliff? And this and that, and the other thing… Each one of those studies took a really long time to do and synthesize with the earlier studies.
So, the study was originally completed in 1981 and it was not published until 1985 (Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985), and you know how it was published? A reviewer wrote to the editor and said, “I refuse to comment on this paper. It is way overdue for publication. People are now citing this paper and doing follow up work on social referencing. And yet the mother paper was never allowed to be published.” And the paper was accepted as a result of that reviewer’s comments. That’s how most visual cliff studies published in 1970’s and the social referencing paper were published – despite reviewers. The whole purpose of the study was to show that emotions can regulate behavior; that was the original purpose. In fact, the mother article was published on a limb and was about infant social cognition and emotions as behavior regulators.
So, I was a rookie professor, my first venture into publishing something with infants and I get that slap in the face over and over and over again. It took a lot of guts, as I think back on former me, to submit it to Science. And I can’t tell you the euphoria I experienced when the paper was accepted. I’m shocked about myself because I didn’t have any confidence in myself. Remember, I came from a non-academic background, I was the first one to go to college in my entire family and I only went to college by accident. And it was luck, luck, and luck! Because it was luck that I did well in school. And it was luck in having a four-year scholarship – my parents never could have afforded to send me to college. And it was luck that I went to Cornell.
Can you tell me about the progression from going from Denver to Illinois and then from Illinois to Berkeley?
Denver was at the top of its game in developmental psychology. In 1984, it was tied for #1 with Minnesota for impact in developmental psychology. Denver had a history of taking students who were good and making them into first rate researchers, turning out first rate studies. That is what made Denver so strong. I had a 4,400 square feet laboratory and I could do research on so many different areas because there was no problem with one study getting in the way of another study. I had Charlotte Henderson who was helping coordinate everything. It was fantastic, but Denver ended up in financial difficulties and the university was going to sell the building with my 4,400 square feet lab. If I was going to have to move my laboratory, I said to myself, then I’m going to move to go somewhere else.
Once I threw my hat in the ring I had job offers, and I favored the offer from Illinois for two reasons. First, Illinois was where I wanted to go as a graduate student. Second, my post-doc advisor, who I owe so much to, came from Illinois. So, it was a place that I thought very highly of and I loved the research that they did.
However, Illinois had so much strength at the time in developmental psychology that I felt like the .300 hitter who was sitting on the bench. There was no room for me to play an essential role. That was a weakness with my stay when I was at Illinois. When I learned that Berkeley was looking for a position for the Head of Institute of Human Development, I didn’t reply. They kept coming after me and eventually I said “Well, okay. Let me throw my hat in the ring after all.” The rest is history.
I’m curious, arriving in Berkeley you were coming to a place that’s often referred to as a hot-bed for emotion researchers. Did that transition impact your research? Were there any discussions that were influential in your theory and research of emotion?
The very reason that I decided to major in psychology was a paper that I read in a course in experimental psychology called “Subception.” It was a paper written by Dick Lazarus on unconscious processes and classical conditioning on emotion. I absolutely loved that paper. I loved reading about Dick Lazarus’ work in his 1966 book (Lazarus, 1966) and his work on what is now being used on studying emotion regulation. I loved Dick Lazarus’ work but I never studied with him.
It turned out that my first teaching assignment was with Lazarus and Phil Cowan. And the three of us had – without knowing each other – such a similarity of approach to the topic of emotion that there was there was tremendous affinity. And then Dick took an early retirement and he was a bit down in the dumps; he lost his role. And I said, “You know what your problem is Dick? You aren’t using your strength. Instead of having teaching, why don’t we have a weekly seminar in which we’ll discuss articles of emotion, invite whoever wanted to come and go as they will with one proviso: that you are forbidden to have anyone read your papers.” And that’s what we did for 12.5 years together, and that was a significant event.
In the meantime, the Social Area started to hire one emotionologist after the other. So, the department that consisted of Bob Levenson and Dick Lazarus, and then joined by me, had emotionologists coming out the ears. My job was to make emotional development into a powerhouse and build up Berkley’s reputation and productivity. Both things were accomplished.
You are a founding member of ISRE. Can you share a unique perspective on what led to the forming of the society and what was it like early on at meetings and interactions?
Well, remember the huge shift in the zeitgeist about emotion? That took place in the 1970s. Zeitgeist is the right term to use because this was something that was seen in lots and lots of fields in philosophy, in neuroscience, in social psychology, and somewhat less so in developmental psychology. Across the board there were these changes, but they were disorganized. And Paul Ekman, Klaus Scherer, Ricky Davidson and I met frequently for one reason or another. And the four of us more or less coalesced into a solar system where we thought it would appropriate to have a society, the purpose of which was to foster the integration of research and emotion. And the crucial point for me is integration. They needed somebody who was good at talking to sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and so forth. Whether by reason of already reaching capacity in their own work, Klaus and Paul were not inclined to take on the role of the major organizer, and Ricky Davidson was very junior at the time. And so I was asked to become the Executive Organizer, and I was very excited by it because my view of the society was to use my connections to tap into the interests of the NIH in studying emotion. My vision was to establish a society that not only met bi-annually, but a society that created spin off meetings that fostered new directions and that also met regionally. And so long as I was the Executive Officer, I founded 5 different regional meetings. This is going to sound a little bit archaic in the year 2018, but one was to study the topic of cognition and emotion in the Rocky Mountains. It was a fantastically successful meeting having anybody and everybody that had any relation to cognition and emotion independent of discipline. There was another meeting on emotion and aging at the study of behavioral sciences, which at that time was a revolutionary idea – so far ahead of its time that it flopped. We had one to do with temperament that was held at Clark University. And there were others as well, and the point was for ISRE to be the sporting ground of new directions of research.
What were those early biannual meetings like? Were they relatively small?
They were exciting because it consisted of introducing members of these different, autonomous, celestial bodies to one another. We learned an awful lot. Of course, in future meetings after we had learned what others had done, that excitement abated somewhat. The first meeting was at Harvard. I submitted a grant application that was shot down. But after talking to the head of the behavioral sciences program we got a contract that fully funded our travel expenses. There was an executive committee and a very good one. Excellent people on it. They suggested individuals’ names and then after debating on them, the group decided to extend an offer of charter membership. We had something like 80 charter members. They were charter members for free, for life, so they had no reason to turn us down. It was a very exciting period in my life.
It’s always fun to hear stories of what those early days were like. Are they any instances that you can recall from the first couple ISRE meetings?
One early memory was work presented by Candice Perch that examined neurotransmitters. At the time, very few people outside of psychopharmacology thought about neurotransmitters. So, she opened up that area of interest in her talk and was a highlight of the meeting.
But more broadly, I had never been to a meeting in which there were people from so many different countries – France, the UK, Italy, China, Japan – it was unbelievable. I would say that the cohesion that took place as a result of that first meeting opened up the possibility of emotion research that was cross cultural and international. Not necessarily following the footsteps of Paul Ekman in his cross-cultural work, but more modest that led to the work we did in our lab on collaboration with Harriet Oster and Linda Camras on facial expression and basic emotion in Japan, China, and the US. That cohesion fostered our work and I’m sure the work of others.
Very exciting, too, is the opportunity to meet different people, like Bob Solomon. He’s a philosopher of emotion whose ideas were similar to the emerging cognitive appraisal approaches of Phoebe Ellsworth and Dick Lazarus. And again, the excitement resulted not so much somebody telling you this is the way things are; it was just in having people come together whose ideas rang true to you but were different.
It was very exciting. There was a lot of creative and constructive tension. And the people were not afraid to talk to each other, so we had anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists of all persuasions able to talk to each other. The period between 1984 and 1988 was a period of great intellectual excitement in ISRE. And I think ISRE has been partly responsible for, if not for creating but certainly maintaining, that excitement and making that excitement cross-national and interdisciplinary.
You brought up some aspects relating to your own thinking of emotion. I was hoping that you could lay out and describe your functionalist theory of emotion. Especially because there may be people who may not be as familiar with that theory. What does the functionalist theory say about emotion, how does it compare and contrast with other emotionalist theories, and what do you see as its merits or limitations?
Yeah, as a matter of fact, it’s interesting you should bring up limitations. The functionalist theory of emotion emerged from discussions I had with Karen Caplovitz Barrett in writing a chapter of socioemotional development in the Handbook of Child Psychology (see Campos, Barrett, Lamb, Goldsmith, & Stenberg, 1983). We were trying to figure out what to say about what was essential about emotion. And it was a major transformation of thinking where initially we thought emotion depended on the self, but the more we thought of it the more we realized that emotion had to be relational. It is not the study of the presentation of an event and then measuring the consequences of the presentation in the responses of a person. The construal of the event mattered. And at that time, Ira Roseman wrote his dissertation and helped create a basis for moving into what would become appraisal theory of emotion.
But the functionalist approach differs in many ways from appraisal theory. First, it does not say that emotions are in the service of one’s concerns and motivations. We did not think that motivation was the only source of this person-event relation because we looked at it from the standpoint of social referencing work, and what we studied there was the missing half of what Ekman was studying. Ekman studied how people recognized or made attributions about emotion. We studied how the visual expression made a difference in the behavior of others. And so, we thought that the social signals of others were every bit as primary as the needs – something that Dick Lazarus and I argued at length. The second difference of a functionalist approach is hedonics. In other words, people are motivated to have emotional reactions in the presence of hedonic events – pain and pleasure. This was a throwback to the original approach to emotion, but it was a forgotten aspect of emotion in the 1980s. And lastly, from attachment theory came the very important idea that emotions, in part, result from one’s past interactions with others.
And so, the difference between a functional approach and a classic appraisal approach has to do with the addition of these three other primitives: the social signals, the hedonics, and the past history. Those were not given any major play in appraisal theory. I see the functionalist approach to be a branch of the appraisal theory, but unlike appraisal theory it is committed to studying what difference does a person-event transaction make in the behavior of the individual. Studies of emotion beforehand tended to be studies of attribution of facial expressions, as if that was the most important thing to do. And to this day that’s what people; they give people questionnaires, but they don’t really try to study the people. Real people in real situations with different person-environment relations, yet the physical nature of the person and the event in the environment can be the same. The functionalist approach tries to correct that by studying the person-event interaction. And some of the research in our lab, not all of it, but some, is an instantiation of the functionalist approach even though some appraisal theorists would have assimilated it into their own dossier of phenomenon. I don’t have any difficulty with functionalism being called appraisal theory, but it’s different from appraisal theory in significant ways.
What are five articles or books that have been influential on you?
Ekman, P., Friesen, W., & Ellsworth, P. (1972). Emotion in the Human Face. New York: Pergamon.
I consider this book to be the equivalent of Chomsky’s book criticizing behaviorism in 1957 and producing the psycholinguistic revolution and the book by Ulric Neisser that produced the cognitive revolution in 1967. This book launched the Emotion Revolution that continues unabated to this day. It is beautifully written, convincingly argued, and corrective of the inferential and methodological errors that led researchers to conclude that emotion could not be measured with specificity. One weakness is the lack of acknowledgement of Ellsworth’s contribution to the volume.
Frijda, N. (1986). The Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
This book is what I turn to when I need inspiration about the study of emotion. It is startlingly original, thorough in correcting misimpressions about the nature of emotion and theoretically profound. It is a trailblazing book, but one that suffers from terrible editing by the publishers.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and Adaptation. New York: Oxford University press.
This book is the masterpiece of the author of Appraisal Theory. It has the clearest explanation anywhere of the difference between cognition and appraisal which proved to be very different processes. Its description of patterns of appraisal that produce different emotions is subject to considerable debate and some sections such as its treatment of esthetic emotions are weak and other sections such as culture and emotion are also subject to debate. However, it is much more legible than Frijda’s book.
Sloboda, J. A. (1985). The Musical Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Music undeniably generates emotions, sometimes powerfully so. Yet, there are few persuasive attempts at explaining the processes by which music generates affect. This book gives the most persuasive and thorough treatment of this ineffable topic I have encountered and poses challenges to both Ekman and Appraisal Theory approaches.
Scherer, K. R., Schorr, A., & Johnstone, T. (Eds.). (2001). Appraisal processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. New York: Oxford University Press.
This is an excellent compendium of generally well written reviews of the facets of Appraisal Theory. It is equaled, but not exceeded in thoroughness in my experience.
Joe, I’m curious – as an emotion researcher, do you feel that researchers have gotten lazy in wanting to use questionnaires rather than the more elaborate and dramatic experimental paradigms used previously?
Yes.
How’s that for a cogent answer?
Haha. Well, one of the things I wanted to ask you was what are some aspects of emotion that you feel need to be studied more or have been studied in inappropriate ways? What directions should future researchers adopt? What paradigms or philosophies of science are important for the field?
Well, I am immediately reminded of a contribution I made with you, Audun Dahl, and Alexandra Main regarding the study of emotion regulation (Campos, Walle, Dahl, & Main, 2011). You all did a lit search and discovered that some 88% of the studies on emotion regulation, perhaps the most central topic in the field as of today, were conducted with a single person in a solitary context. That the most important aspect of emotion regulation is not can you suppress your emotion, but can you suppress your emotion in a way that is relevant to your interaction with another person and that enables you to have a more successful interaction with the other. You cannot study emotion regulation meaningfully by studying a single person, in a single room with physiological sensors attached to the individual. You can have physiological sensors the way Bob Levenson uses them, but like Bob Levenson study the couple or the small group. And that I think is what’s needed. Not more individual contexts – contexts when the individual is interacting with no other human being. That is a major implication that you all pinned beautifully with that graph in the Emotion Review article.
Are there other topics for research? You mentioned that emotion regulation seems to be you know in vogue right now. Are there particular topics you’ve always felt have gotten short shrift or warranted greater attention than they have received?
For me one big issue is music. There’s probably no single event – I’m using the word event as a stimulus complex in this case – that can so reliably elicit emotion as can music. Appraisal theorists like Dick Lazarus say, “Oh, well that’s just because the music reminds you of a present encounter you had in Paris with your lover” blah blah blah. And that is partly true, but it misses much of the boat. No one that I know of, with the exception of Sloboda, has really articulated the importance of studying the relation between musical generation as an event and then the emotional reaction of the individual. I think that there lies a major challenge for appraisal theorists and discrete emotion theorists. You’re not going to get far studying discrete emotions by playing music. Yet, I would say interview 100 undergraduates and ask them how important is music for feeling emotion and I would say 90-95% of them would say music. And yet we don’t study it. So, I would say that is a gigantic gap. A fertile gap, and a challenging gap because I think that appraisal theory has gone far but not far enough.
What do you mean by that?
That they have ignored phenomena that don’t readily fit into an appraisal context. Because I do not think that music fits an appraisal context. Some aspects do, but not all. And that’s it. Music is very rich in how music generates emotion. Sloboda has done a superior job in his book, The Musical Mind (1985), in trying to disentangle what aspects of music are related to what aspects of emotion. There’s a little corollary that may come as a surprise to you. For years I have poo-pooed the importance of feeling. And I still believe that feeling is not the core of emotion, but it’s a facet and an important facet. I think that we’ve got to struggle with the issue of how feelings are generated. By feelings I don’t mean physiological arousal; I’m talking about the context of consciousness.
How do you think researchers can study that?
We study how salt, sugar, and vinegar lead to different sensations from the tongue, so we have made some progress on that, but we haven’t with regards to feelings. It’s too complicated. But we eventually do have to struggle with it, and the people who have struggled with it do not have much of an impact. So, if you’re going to examine a topic that is novel, then I think that one candidate choice would be examining pharmacology and the study of feeling. And that of course subsequently leads to the question of what are the bounds between feeling and behavior? But that’s a separate and more complicated issue. Let’s take it one step at a time.
So, I’ve just given you what I consider to be weaknesses of not just the functional approach but appraisal approaches and discrete emotion approaches that say nothing about these topics, though at least appraisal theorists can try to make some statements.
This is very interesting for me to think about because you’ve typically stressed to downplay the role of feeling. But I think that you’re right in the sense that it’s downplayed because it’s difficult to understand and to study.
Also, that it’s secondary to more fundamental processes like the event-person relationship.
But it’s interesting that its secondary for researchers, because I would say if you talk to the man on the street it’s probably primary for what they conceptualize emotion to be.
Right. And you know I only know one treatment of feeling and that’s the book by Laird in 2007, which is well done; it’s a good book. But it it’s a glancing treatment of feeling; it’s William James revived. And William James’ theory – don’t get me started! He has misled the study of emotion terribly. I don’t think feeling is as essential as people make it out to be, but it is a facet, just like facial expression, vocal expression, gesture, even the selection of words. We don’t study how emotion involves the facet of feeling. And I think that is an omission; if we are trying to reconstruct a diamond that facet would be missing. So, you wouldn’t have a very pretty diamond. It’s not a change in my thinking, but it certainly a change in the direction of steering of the emotion ship.
Are there any articles or studies that you or others have written that you feel deserved greater attention by researchers in the field?
Well, you know, at the risk of being classified as a neo dinosaur, the clear answer for me is the work of John Dewey. In the same issue that William James (1894) wrote one aspect of his theory, the Psychological Review, Issue 1, Volume 1, John Dewey (1894) took a very opposite view. That view of John Dewey and a follow up paper he wrote in Volume 2 of Psychological Review (Dewey, 1895) together are totally ignored. I rarely see it cited anywhere. And yet, it contains the core of appraisal theory. I think that represents, in my judgement, a significant omission in the education of emotionologists. Because everyone reads William James, or at least about William James, but there was a contrary article written that essentially challenged William James centrally, and that was the work of John Dewey. Those two papers, I think, are the ones that I would say should be part of the education of anybody in emotion.
In terms of individual papers, I’ve been doing a lot of reviewing recently and the paper you published 4 years ago (Walle & Campos, 2014) on the ability of the infant to detect authentic emotion signals in the other has not been cited. Yet, it’s central in the thinking, or lack thereof, of papers I’ve been reading. So, that one is a recent example from 2014. We still don’t know if others would try the same thing or find different methods in which the findings are challenged, but nobody’s going to challenge something without citing the work.
Are there any studies that you did that were particularly memorable or fun but people may not immediately think of when they think of your work?
Oh, there’s a lot! There’s a lot of those! And they’re very timely. We did several studies on discrete emotions. One study published in 1979 was designed to test aspects of discrete emotion theory (Hiatt, Campos, & Emde, 1979), and discrete emotions theory came out quite well. In 1983 there was a study that I did with Craig Stenberg on anger in 7-month-old infants (Stenberg, Campos, & Emde, 1983). That paper was important because it led to a study that I published with Stenberg in 1990 (Stenberg & Campos, 1990). It was a very important paper because it showed that anger was more than just a facial expression. That was the beginning of the study that emotions can be manifested in many different ways — equipotentiality. Maybe because it was published in a book it has not been cited despite the fact that it should be cited by people writing about discrete emotions theory. That study confirmed aspects of discrete emotions theory. And the reason that that 1990 study is so important is that it revealed that the emotion of anger can be manifested in a lot more ways than just the face. And that for us was a pivotal shift.
No one talks about failures. Is there a study or paradigm that you attempted to do or thought it would work, and for one reason or another, it just didn’t?
Everything I have done has been a flop! Most every prediction I have made has turned out to be false. But in the course of doing the study, if you pay attention to the behavior of the baby, you will get something valuable. Consider the visual cliff. That was the very first baby study that I did. The whole idea was to get the baby to show heart rate acceleration at the very earliest testing opportunity – at 1 month of age. And it flopped! The baby didn’t accelerate, it decelerated. But what did that reveal? It showed that at 9 months it did accelerate. There was a developmental shift and the rest is history. It revolutionized our understanding of motoric processes in psychological development and it revolutionized our view of development of emotion, whereas fear in Watson’s theory was considered to be innate, here we’re finding it to hardly be innate where it should have been innate.
The other one is the social referencing study. We thought it would work and the baby didn’t do shit! Then one day I walked in and saw Jim Sorce and I said, “You know what the problem is? The babies aren’t gonna show any reaction to the face that you can measure because you have a 4-foot drop off. And they’re going to be afraid of that intrinsically no matter what the mother expresses. Shorten the drop off to ten inches.” And that was it. So, the first study was a flop, the visual cliff fear study was a flop, and as a matter of a fact I welcome flops because I think you can learn more from a flop than from a positive finding.
What are you up to these days? You recently retired from your formal faculty appointment at UC Berkley. How are you filling your time? What are your current interests? What do you look forward to doing?
Well, first of all I retired only a few months ago. It’s too early to tell. To this day I think that having a role to play is absolutely crucial. In retirement you lose a lot of roles. But as of right now I don’t see anything different than before. I’m still working on thinking and planning studies on psychological and motor development – number one. And number two, studies on emotion, broadly construed. Those continue.
What are the differences? The differences are from resulting from the loss of eyesight. Had I not fallen victim to aggressive glaucoma I would not have retired. In fact, I just finished teaching a pro seminar on emotion and it was difficult to teach, but it can be done. I’ve been very fortunate that UC Berkley, given all of its fiscal dilemmas, has graciously and generously contributed funds to help me continue to be a conductive researcher to the best of my abilities And I am eternally grateful to Berkeley for its support; they’re doing that for someone whose retired! That’s unheard of!
It sounds like you haven’t slowed down much at all! Are there any non-academic things that you’re looking forward to?
Well, I love watching movies and have been learning to use audible.com to enjoy books. But to be honest things are pretty much the same as before.
References
Barrett, K. C., & Campos, J. J. (1987). Perspectives on emotional development II: A functionalist approach to emotions. In J. D. Osofsky (Ed.), Handbook of Infant
Development (pp. 555-578). Oxford: Wiley.
Campos, J. J., Barrett, K. C., Lamb, M. E., Goldsmith, H. H., & Stenberg, C. (1983). Socioemotional development. Handbook of Child Psychology, 2, 783-915.
Campos, J. J., Langer, A., & Krowitz, A. (1970). Cardiac responses on the visual cliff in prelocomotor human infants. Science, 170, 196-197.
Campos, J. J., Walle, E. A., Dahl, A., & Main, A. (2011). Reconceptualizing emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 3, 26-35.
Cohen, L. J., & Campos, J. J. (1974). Father, mother, and stranger as elicitors of attachment behaviors in infancy. Developmental Psychology, 10, 146-154.
Dewey, J. (1895). The theory of emotion. Psychological Review, 2, 13-32.
Dewey, J. (1894). The theory of emotion. Psychological Review, 1, 553-569.
Ekman, P., Friesen, W., & Ellsworth, P. (1972). Emotion in the Human Face. New York: Pergamon.
Frijda, N. (1986). The emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
James, W. (1894). The physical basis of emotion. Psychological Review, 1, 516-529.
Hiatt, S. W., Campos, J. J., & Emde, R. N. (1979). Facial patterning and infant emotional expression: Happiness, surprise, and fear. Child development, 1020-1035.
Laird, J. D. (2007). Feelings: The perception of self. Oxford University Press.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University press.
Lazarus, R. S. (1966). Psychological stress and the coping process. New York, NY, US: McGraw-Hill.
Scherer, K. R., Schorr, A., & Johnstone, T. (Eds.). (2001). Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sloboda, J. A. (1985). The musical mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental psychology, 21, 195.
Stenberg, C. R., & Campos, J. J. (1990). The development of anger expressions in infancy. Psychological and Biological Approaches to Emotion, 247, 82.
Stenberg, C. R., Campos, J. J., & Emde, R. N. (1983). The facial expressions of anger in seven-month-old infants. Child Development, 54, 178-184.
Walle, E. A. & Campos, J. J. (2014). The development of infant detection of inauthentic emotion. Emotion, 14, 488-503.
