Two nights ago, I started read a new book, How Emotions Are Made. In the first chapter, the author writes:
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It was in graduate school that I felt my first tug of doubt about the classical view of emotion. At the time, I was researching the roots of low self-esteem and how it leads to anxiety or depression. Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.
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“Hello,” I said. “I never thought about it that way. This anxiety/depression distinction sounds valuable. Better note that down for the future. Maybe I can apply it in some sales copy.”
I got out my notebook and started to write this idea down. “Numerous experiments showed that…”
But something bothered me. It was that phrase, “first tug of doubt,” higher up in the passage. So I scanned on down the page in the book. And sure enough:
It turns out that in spite of strong belief and “numerous experiments,” this idea about the roots of anxiety and depression is not reproducible.
In fact, 8 subsequent studies designed to reproduce this well-trodden distinction all reproduced the opposite result.
In some people, a failure to live up to one’s own ideals produced neither depression nor anxiety. In others, it produced both depression and anxiety. Never just the one the theory predicted. Same with a failure to live up to standards set by others.
This isn’t just a one-time failure to reproduce a specific result. Rather, it seems to be a new understanding of what emotions are in general.
Apparently, there’s a new science of how emotions are made and what they really are.
It’s not five core emotions like you may have seen in that Inside Out Pixar cartoon. And it’s also not the fixed and familiar smiley/frowny/cry-ey emojis we all know and respond to.
Rather, emotions are something complex, unique, and unpredictable, at least in the way they manifest themselves in our behavior, faces, and bodies. It’s taken us 100+ years of scientific study of emotion to tease out this counterintuitive result.
Whatever. I’m getting too inside baseball. My takeaway for you today is simply this:
Nobody really wants to hear about the complexity, the uniqueness, the unpredictability. Even the scientists, except for a few bad apples.
Instead, we all want the immense, pretty much unfathomably complex nature of the universe reduced to a few rules of thumb, certainties, slogans. And whenever we come across a new one of those, we say,
“Hello. Never thought about it that way. Sounds valuable. Better note that down for the future. And maybe let’s see what else this guy is selling…”
That’s my free advice for you for today.
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