Emotion: A Very Short Introduction

This layman's guide to the emotions is a delightful walking tour through the gardens of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, not to mention popular culture. Author Dylan Evans proposes the thesis that emotions are an evolutionary necessity that plays an important role in ensuring human survival. He demonstrates his thesis with anecdotes and illustrations. Though it delivers some intellectually rigorous material, this is not an intellectually rigorous book. It is more of a long, agreeable, rambling monologue. We highly recommend it to those who would read it primarily for pleasure, and secondarily suggest it as a useful overview of the evolutionary role of emotions. Its ample bibliography can guide those who are interested in exploring the subject in greater depth.

One of the most fascinating characters of modern popular culture is Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan alien on the original Star Trek series. Spock got the Vulcan freedom from emotion in the non-human half of his genes. It sometimes made it difficult to get along with him; he never got jokes, for instance, and was fascinated by what went on around him, but never amused. Because he had no emotions, he made all his decisions with cool rationality, and because he wasted no mental energy on emotions, had had a superhuman degree of intelligence, insight, and logic. Examining Spock's emotionless state is one of the themes in _Emotion: The Science of Sentiment_ (Oxford University Press) by Dylan Evans, a short, witty review of the current scientific and evolutionary views on emotion. Spock could not have evolved in any environment we are familiar with. For instance, fear is a beneficial emotion, helping animals react swiftly. Animals incapable of feeling it would not last long. Emotions, contrary to the opinion held by philosophers through the centuries, are not a drain on intellect, but help it.Most researchers would include fear, disgust, joy, distress, anger, and surprise in a list of basic emotions. Darwin himself thought that there was a universality of human emotions shared by all cultures, and that this was evidence that humans had evolved together and then the races and cultures had separated. However, this view was not generally held until fairly recently; it was supposed that just as your culture teaches you language, it also teaches you what emotions are part of your world and how to display them. Not true; experiments in the 1960's showed that a remote tribe that had never seen western media could match pictures of faces to the proper emotion, and in reverse, Americans could recognize the emotions being shown by tribal members who were asked to display fear, anger, etc. Emotions, at least some of the basic ones, are indeed universal and part of our genetic rather than cultural heritage.All in all, Emotions have gotten a bad press, for centuries. _Emotion_, a valuable small primer, helps set the record straight, with amusing examples and fascinating explanations of the experiments that have helped make the role of emotions plain. The lesson is driven home repeatedly: emotions are good for us, they help (not hinder) rationality, and they are there because natural selection has used them to get us around a dangerous, unpredictable world.