Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

hundreds of studies have discovered that the muscle configurations that Darwin described for many emotions: For summaries of the research on the universality of emotion recognition in the face, see Hilary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady’s definitive reviews. Elfenbein and Ambady, “On the Universality and Cultural Specificity of Emotion Recognition: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 128 (2002): 203–35, and “Universals and Cultural Differences in Recognizing Emotions,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 12 (2003): 159–64.

RATIONAL IRRATIONALITY

 

Had I read Nobel Prize-winning economist: Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

The commitment problem has two faces: See also Frank, Passions Within Reason; R. M. Nesse, “Evolutionary Explanations of Emotions,” Human Nature 1 (1990): 261–83.

The very nature of emotional experience: One of the founding figures in the study of emotion, the Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda, was one of the first to observe that emotions, while being inherently subjective, feel absolute, as if based on non-negotiable truths. Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and “The Laws of Emotion,” American Psychologist 43 (1988): 349–58.

The potent pangs of guilt help us repair our dearest relations: Guilt is a source of many pro-social actions. See T. Ketelaar and W. T. Au, “The Effects of Guilty Feelings on the Behavior of Uncooperative Individuals in Repeated Social Bargaining Games: An Affect-as-Information Interpretation of the Role of Emotion in Social Interaction,” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2002): 429–53. June Tangney and Rowland Miller have also done definitive work on the more pro-social character of guilt, and how it differs from a close relative, shame. J. P. Tangney, “Assessing Individual Differences in Proneness to Shame and Guilt: Development of the Self-Conscious Affect and Attribution Inventory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59, no. 1 (1990): 102–11; “Moral Affect: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (1991): 598–607; “Situational Determinants of Shame and Guilt in Young Adulthood,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18 (1992): 199–206. Tangney, R. S. Miller, L. Flicker, and D. H. Barlow, “Are Shame, Guilt, and Embarrassment Distinct Emotions?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (1996): 1256–64.

Emotional displays provide reliable clues to others’ commitments: For an analysis of truthfulness and deception in the signaling of nonhuman species: John R. Krebs and Nicholas B. Davies, An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), chap. 14, and “Animal Signals: Mind Reading and Manipulation,” in Behavioral Ecology, 2nd ed., ed. Krebs and Davies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 380–402. Paul Ekman has offered precise statements about which muscle movements are the reliable indicators of an accompanying emotional state. See Ekman, “Facial Expression and Emotion,” American Psychologist 48 (1993): 384–92.

leads to actions that enhance the welfare of others: N. Eisenberg et al., “Relation of Sympathy and Distress to Prosocial Behavior: A Multi-method Study,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 55–66.

Robert Frank reasoned, in a synthesis of Schelling’s insights and Ekman’s methodological labors: Frank, Passions Within Reason.

It involves the pulling in and upward of the inner eyebrows, and has been shown: N. Eisenberg et al., “Relation of Sympathy and Distress to Prosocial Behavior.”

Emotions, Martha Nussbaum argues: Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9–88; See also Abu-Lughod and Lutz, Introduction to Language and the Politics of Emotion.

It may have been his somatic oversensitivities that led James to publish his radical thesis about emotion: William James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9 (1884): 188–205.

“My thesis”: William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1890/1999), vol. 2, 449–50.