Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Guiding participants to achieve the correct expression required some rather unusual coaching—“no, don’t flare your nostrils, instead wrinkle your nose;” “try not to flutter your eyes when bringing your eyebrows up and in” “as you pull your lips sideways, try not to grit your teeth.” Once participants had moved their facial muscles in a fashion that conformed to the required specific emotional expression, they held the expression for ten nerve-racking seconds. During this brief time Levenson recorded several measures of the autonomic nervous system activity associated with the facial expression, which were eventually compared to an appropriate control condition.

The prevailing view was that the ANS is too slow and diffuse to produce emotion-specific patterns of activation. In fact, it was this understanding of the autonomic nervous system that led Schachter and Singer to their vaudevillian study of epinephrine shots and anger and euphoria. The results from this first DFA study refuted this position. These findings would have caused James, a rather shy scholar, living in the shadow of his famous brother, Henry, to blush a little in this empirical confirmation of his controversial thesis. Large increases of heart rate occurred for fear, anger, and sadness, but not disgust. This makes sense given the parasympathetic involvement in digestive processes, which slow the heart down. More subtle was that finger temperature was greater for anger than fear, suggesting that our hot and cold metaphors for anger (“hotheaded”) and fear (“cold feet”) arise out of bodily sensations. During moments of anger, blood flows freely to the hands (perhaps to aid in wringing the necks of adversaries), thus increasing the temperature of fingers and toes. During periods of fear, the veins in the arms and legs constrict, leaving much of the blood supply near the chest, which enables flight-related locomotion. It is fair to say, and many critics have, that these distinctions are not the kind of emotion-specific physiological signatures that James envisioned, but these data are certainly a step in that direction.

Levenson and Ekman subsequently packed their physiological equipment up and conducted a similar study with the Minangkabau, a matrilineal Muslim people in West Sumatra, Indonesia. The physiological distinctions between disgust and fear and anger (disgust involves the slowing of heart rate) and between fear and anger (finger temperature is hotter for anger than fear) were once again observed. This result suggests that these linkages between facial expression and autonomic physiology are universal, or at least evident in radically different cultures. And in other research adults aged sixty-five and above show attenuated ANS responses during the DFA, suggesting that, with age, people can more readily move in and out of different emotional states. This parallels studies finding that, as people age, they report experiencing more freedom and control during emotional experiences.

James’s unusual thesis inspired other studies of the ANS—of the blush that sears the face, of tears, of goosebumps that ripple down the spine, of the swelling feeling in the chest. These studies reveal that our emotions, even those higher sentiments like sympathy and awe, are embodied in our viscera. As this line of inquiry shifted to the ethical emotions, emotions like embarrassment and compassion, a more radical inference waited on the horizon—that our very capacity for goodness is wired into our body.

THE MORAL GUT

 

Please read the following passage aloud to people whose moral intuitions matter to you. You might try your family while noshing at the dinner table, old friends reclining in asymmetrical repose around the campfire, or your colleagues sitting around a meeting table, pert and ready. At the conclusion of the passage ask whether they think the person in the passage should be punished or not:

A man goes to the supermarket once a week. On each visit he buys a packaged chicken. He takes it home, draws his curtains, and then has sex with the chicken carcass. He then cooks the chicken and eats it by himself.

 

What do you think? Lock the person up? Prevent him from coaching little league? Put the individual in handcuffs at the first sight of smoke rising from his barbecue in his backyard? Just ignore this unsettling oddity of his personal life?