The Function and Structure of Emotion

Functions of Emotion. Findings showing that primary emotional motor patterns are embedded in perceptual and cognitive processes have important implications for the functions and structure of the psychological system producing emotional behavior. The communicative and motivational properties of emotion are two that stand out.

Emotional communication and social regulation. Darwin suggested that the function of most expressive behavior is to communicate action-readiness to conspecifics. Expressions communicate readiness to fight (anger), to flee (fear), to avoid a harmful substance (disgust), to withdraw (depression), to share pleasure (joy and love), and to take in, imbibe, and/or attend to an event (interest).

Emotional communication is the glue that bonds infant to parent, and unchecked infant expressions of distress can ignite abuse. Despite the common view that emotions represent sources of irrationality and dysfunction, other theorists since Darwin also have emphasized the adaptive value and organizing function of emotion.

Ethologists observing animal behavior in the wild and anthropologists and sociologists observing behavior in humans have identified the many ways in which emotional communication creates in-groups and out-groups, provides internal structure in organizations and face to face groups, and moderates the flow of interpersonal behavior in dyadic interaction.

Fear vocalizations in chimpanzees communicate the presence of enemies to other members of the local clan, allowing all to escape predation. Sadness, with its depressive postures and self-abnegating cognition, and fear, with its associated flight, defend against attack from higher-status members of the tribe; aggressive anger establishes who is lord. The importance of emotion in regulating social behaviors is consistent both with the appearance of emotional expression early in infancy and with the intimate connections between expressive responses and cognitive processes.

Most of the perceptual events that activate emotional reactions early in life are interpersonal, for example, infant and parental smiles, infant distress signaling parental assistance, and selfawareness as the basis for self-referential emotion. Affectively based commitments to institutions and lifetime partners in later life involve yet more elaborate integrations of multiple primary emotions with complex cognition. Emotional communication therefore requires the integration of affective and cognitive processes.

Emotional motivation Emotions have an energizing or activating role in behavior, and they seem to instigate movement toward or away from environmental stimuli. This function calls on systemwide resources for the support of overt action. Thus, neurotransmitters of the central nervous system that are linked to specific emotions are involved in complex chains of neurochemical activity for marshaling the sugars needed for energy expenditure.

Emotions contribute more to motivation, however, than the mere energizing of behavior: They direct attention to specific cues, define particular goals for action (person to attack vs. person with whom to share resources), and shape coping procedures (i.e., thoughts and actions to meet these goals). This emphasizes once again the importance of the network of perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes associated with emotional behaviors.

The Structure of Emotion. A variety of frameworks have been suggested to integrate the array of issues we have covered. Those that seem best able to manage this task postulate a hierarchical mechanism underlying the creation of emotional activity. The primitive, innate primary expressions of emotion that are elicited by specific environmental stimuli form the base of the hierarchy.

The repeated elicitation of these primary emotions connects them with a wider range of eliciting cues (smiles of a particular parent) and with varied responses on the output side (reaching to be held). This history creates schematic structures that enrich the primary affects, connecting them to an increasingly wide range of stimuli and behavioral responses.

Because schemata develop prior to the availability of a rich verbal system, much schema development involves nonverbal motor learning and this system remains automatic and subject to limited volitional control. A consequence is that control over emotional behavior is a central problem for managing life’s adversities and temptations and is central to contemporary developments in psychotherapy.

Emotional life also becomes increasingly complex and mature through the integration of multiple primary affects in schematic structures. Reflective melancholy, pleasure linked to sadness about a valued but lost past, emerges from combinations of previously separate primary affects and their specific schematic structures.

And just as cognitive growth and the awareness of self allow for the onset of emotions of shame and guilt in infancy, affective changes in later life and in response to chronic illness involve major cognitive shifts in the self system and alterations in the biological substrate underlying the primary affects at the base of the emotion hierarchy.