Kay Milton is a professor of social anthropology and director of an anthropology research network. Her research interests include environmental and ecological anthropology. She has authored several books on topics related to environmentalism, emotions, and environmental policy in Europe. The document then discusses theories of emotions, including their biological and social aspects. It explores ideas of basic emotions, how emotions evolved for coping with situations, and the relationship between emotions, perception, and memory.

1. Kay Milton
• Professor of Social Anthropology
is Director of the Anthropology
research network in the School of
History and Anthropology
• Her research interests include
environmental and ecological
anthropology

2. Kay Milton
• Distinct works:
 Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring
the Role of Anthropology in Environmental
Discourse
 Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology
 Loving Nature
 Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of
Feeling
 Protecting the Periphery: Environmental Policy in
Peripheral Regions of the European Union

3. Enjoying Nature
Naturalness of Emotions
• Emotion
• A process w/ two main components: changes that take
place in the body and the subjective experience of
those changes (William James)
• A complex state of the organism, involving bodily
changes of a widespread character and on the mental
side, a state of excitement or perturbation, marked by
strong feeling, and usually an impulse toward a definite
form of behaviour (Drever)
• A complex process w/
neutral, neuromuscular/expressive, and experiential
aspects (Izard)

4. Enjoying Nature
Naturalness of Emotions
• Primary or Basic Emotions
– Some emotions that are part of our natural
inheritance
– Some emotions appear to exist in all cultures and in
some non-human animals; some are associated w/
the characteristic facial expressions and that some
appear to carry survival advantages (Ortony & Turner)
– Evidence is provided by neuroscience (Panskepp)
– Different emotions appear to be processed by
different genetically determined systems in the brain
(Damasio)

5. Enjoying Nature
Naturalness of Emotions
• Emotions have evolved to enable us to cope
w/ specific situations. Common present-day
emotional responses to particular things are
the result of our ancestors’ repeated exposure
to these situations. (Tooby & Cosmides)

6. Enjoying Nature
Biophilia and Domain Specific Emotions
• Biophilia
– Love of life or of living things (Soulé)
• Biophilia Hypothesis (E.O. Wilson)
– Biophilia
• Used to refer to responses, not just to living things but to a
broader category of phenomena w/c is ‘life and lifelike
processes’
• Used to indicate a ‘tendency’ or a ‘need’ to ‘focus on’ or
‘affiliate with’ these phenomena
• Emotional affiliation b/w human beings and other organisms

7. Enjoying Nature
Emotion, Perception, and Memory
• Neisser’s Model of Perception
1. The perceiver anticipates receiving particular
info from their environment.
2. Their anticipations guide their exploration of
that environment and alert them to what it
affords.
3. The info they pick up influences their future
anticipations.

8. Enjoying Nature
Emotion, Perception, and Memory
• (Izard) ‘Interest’ is the main emotion involved in
the production of knowledge.
• Emotions can be seen as learning mechanisms.
They enable info to be picked up and they
influence the ways in w/c that info is
retained, interpreted and used. It also implies
that emotions do not necessarily give us the
truth.
• Knowledge unbiased by emotion cannot exist, for
it is emotion that enables the development and
use of knowledge.

9. Enjoying Nature
Emotions in their Social Setting
• Emotions of others affect us in two significant
ways:
1. It enables us to learn through direct perception.
2. The emotions of other affect our own by directly
inducing them. Psychologists have observed that
the emotional intensity of an experience
increases when that experience is shared.