This issue focuses on the complex issue of the evolution of emotion. How one views the evolutionary history and adaptive functions of emotions will have a profound impact on one’s views about the nature of emotions, about the function of specific emotions, and about the evaluative and normative dimensions of emotional experiences. It is therefore of great importance to construct a multi-disciplinary overview of this topic.
Our first feature article is by Randolph Nesse, Foundation Professor of Life Sciences, and Founding Director of The Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University, who has published widely on evolutionary psychiatry and medicine and emotional disorders. In this article he argues that quantitative studies of emotions suffer from a problem he calls ‘tacit creationism’, which is the idea that emotions are assumed to be aspects of designed machines and as such can be readily defined and differentiated in terms of their number, nature and function. As such, he claims, these studies offer a too simplistic picture of emotions, which ignores the fact that they are “organically complex systems whose structures and functions are radically different from those of machines”.
Our second article is by Courtney Crosby, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Austin, Texas, and David Buss, Professor of Psychology at the same institution, who is an expert on the evolutionary psychology of ‘negative’ emotions. Their paper addresses the question of what adaptive challenges sexual disgust might have evolved to solve, in the process noting important differences in sexual disgust between the sexes, and complex interactions between sexual disgust and other emotions. Identifying six core dimensions of sexual disgust, the authors discuss evidence that suggests it might be directed towards multiple domains, including pathogen transmission, incest avoidance, harm avoidance, reputational damage, and the loss of valuable resources or mates. In light of this, the authors propose some directions for future research.
Daniel Kelly, Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, contributed our third article. His research focuses, amongst other things, on moral psychology and evolution, and in this piece he explores the psychological foundations of norm-guiding behaviour. He suggests that normative motivation picks out a distinctive category of mental state – a psychological natural kind that occupies a middle tier in the hierarchy of the human mind. This mental state, he claims, has important connections to emotion and affect, and is crucial to explaining important moral and social dimensions of human behaviour.
In their different ways, each of these articles points to connections between the evolutionary history of emotions and their various normative or social functions. Each also raises methodological issues, problems underpinning empirical emotion research, and suggestions for further inquiry on this fascinating topic.
ISRE Spotlight
Our Spotlight feature highlights the research of Jozefien De Leersnyder, Research Professor at the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on emotional experience from a cultural psychological perspective and in this piece she gives an overview of several important questions she has pursued, namely: whether the emotional patterns of immigrant minorities can change upon repeated exposure to and engagement in the majority context; whether people would benefit from being emotionally similar to others in their cultural context; and how emotional fit may come about in intercultural interactions. Her programmatic research on these topics is applicable to a range of important contemporary social issues, providing evidence for a deep and dynamic socio-cultural shaping of emotional experience.
Announcements
We would like to note that this year Carolyn Price stepped down as Co-editor of Emotion Researcher. She was an excellent collaborator (and wrangler of articles) as Co-Editor and has our sincere thanks for her service to this publication. Relatedly, we are fortunate to announce that her position has been taken up by Cain Todd. Cain is excited to be taking over from Carolyn, particularly as his own work on emotion and other topics that bear on emotion has become increasingly interdisciplinary. He is very much looking forward to using future issues to explore the many faces of emotions and emotion research.
We would also like to apologize for the delay in publishing this issue of Emotion Researcher. Rest assured that we plan to get back into putting out 3-4 issues each year. Indeed, we are already working on the next issue of Emotion Researcher, which will cover the topic of Emotion and Memory.
Finally, we are always on the lookout for suggestions of emotion scholars to interview for an issue of Emotion Researcher. While we were, unfortunately, unable to fulfill this segment in the present issue, we fully intend to continue the tradition of featuring renowned scholars of emotion in subsequent issues. If you have someone in mind who you think may have an interesting professional and personal story to share, please do not hesitate to contact Cain & Eric by email.
In closing, we hope that all of you are managing to stay healthy and safe in these unusual times. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we prioritize our shared scholarship on emotion with an emphasis on the interdisciplinary, international, and collaborative spirit on which ISRE was founded.
Warmly,
Eric & Cain
Cain Todd is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Lancaster University (UK). His research covers a wide range of issues centring on emotions and evaluative experience, most recently the phenomenology and objectivity of emotional experience and the role of attention and imagination therein. His co-edited collection Emotion and Value (OUP) was published in 2010, and his new monograph Aesthetics and Emotion (Bloomsbury) will appear in 2021.
Eric Walle is an Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of California, Merced. His theoretical writings emphasize the functions of emotions, particularly in interpersonal contexts. His empirical work examines emotional development, principally in infancy and early childhood, as well as how individuals perceive and respond to emotional communication.
