This document discusses different perspectives on emotions and their relationship to knowledge. It explores whether emotions are obstacles to knowledge or ways of knowing. It outlines theories of primary emotions and social emotions. It also examines the James-Lange theory and Cannon-Bard theory of emotions. Examples are provided of how emotional attachment may have driven scientific and artistic geniuses. The document suggests reason and emotion exist on a continuum and are difficult to truly separate.

1. Emotion

2. Do these emoticons really represent emotions?

3. Introduction
• We are going to include emotion as a way
of knowing. Do you think we are right to do
so? Are emotions obstacles to knowledge
rather than ways of knowing?
• There is good reason to think that without
using emotions we would be unable to
make any decisions or gain knowledge

4. Primary Emotions
• The word ‘emotion’ comes from the Latin
‘movere’= to move
• It includes: feelings, passions and moods (all of
which are external representations of internal
sentiments)
• Psychologists generally agree that there are
only 6 primary emotions that are common to all
cultures
Can you recognise them in the following robot photos?

11. Primary Emotions
• Happiness
• Sadness
• Fear
• Anger
• Surprise
• Disgust

12. Social Emotions
• These are offshoots of the primary
emotions and include:
– Ambition
– Contempt
– Gratitude
– Guilt
– Jealousy
– Pride
– Shame
– Sympathy

13. Plotting Emotions
Where would you place each of the primary emotions on this graph?

14. The James-Lange Theory
William James Carl Lange

15. The James-Lange Theory
• Suppose you are walking in the woods
and you see a grizzly bear. You begin to
tremble your heart begins to race and you
feel sick in the pit of your stomach.
• If you could somehow get rid of the
symptoms: the trembling, the increased
heart rate and the sickness – what would
happen to your emotion (fear)?

16. The James-Lange Theory
• The theory suggests that emotion is just
an inward projection of physical symptoms
• If you can control the symptoms, you could
therefore suppress the emotion
• What do you think this suggests about
situations where you are able to create the
physical symptoms?

17. The Cannon-Bard Theory
• The James-Lange Theory is now
largely discredited
• Most psychologists now suggest
that the reverse is true: physical
reactions are produced by the body
in response to the emotion itself Walter Cannon Philip Bard
• This is proposed by the Cannon-Bard Theory
• However, there is some evidence that we CAN change our
emotions by creating physical symptoms in our bodies
• For example, practitioners of a form of yoga called Hasyayoga
believe in laughter therapy

18. Can emotions be an obstacle to knowledge?
• Perception
– Percy Sledge - 'When a Man Loves a Woman'
• Reason
– Louis Theroux and the most hated family in America
• Language
– BBC journalist looses it with Scientology Spokesman

19. Emotional Response
Is your emotional response different for each painting? Why is this?

20. Rationalisations
• A famished fox saw some
clusters of grapes
hanging from a vine, She
resorted to all of her
tricks to get at them, but
wearied herself in vain,
for she could not reach
them. At last she turned
away, hiding her
disappointment and
saying “ Those grapes
are sour and not as
sweet as I thought”
– Aesop’s Fables
In an emotional state, many people manufacture bad reasons for justifying something

21. Irrational Decisions
How should we conceptualize this rational consumer whom all of us
know and who some of us are, who in self-disgust grinds his
cigarettes down the disposal swearing that this time he means never
again to risk orphaning his children with lung cancer and is on the
street three hours later looking for a store that’s still open to buy
cigarettes; who eats a high calorie lunch knowing that he will regret it,
does regret it, cannot understand how he lost control, resolves to
compensate with a low-calorie dinner, eats a high-calorie dinner
knowing he will regret it, and does regret it; who sits glued to the T.V.
knowing that again tomorrow he’ll wake early in a cold sweat
unprepared for that morning meeting on which so much of his career
depends; who spoils the trip to Disneyland by losing his temper when
his children do what he knew they were going to do when he resolved
not to lose his temper when they did it?
Tom Schelling, Nobel Laureate and Professor of Economics

22. Stoicism
• The Stoics were a group of philosophers in Ancient Greece
who advocated apathy
• This means a way of life in which nobody is troubled by
emotion and therefore is able to meet all the problems of life
in a calm and untroubled way

23. Questions
• Do you think Stoicism would really lead to
a calm, happy, untroubled life?
• What kind of mood do you think you need
to be in to make rational judgements and
decisions?

24. Can emotions help us to gain knowledge?
• A study was carried out by the psychologist
Antonio Damasio on a brain damaged patient
who had suffered an injury to the part of his
brain responsible for emotions.
• The patient’s life fell apart because he lost the
ability to make rational decisions
• Damasio speculated that emotion helps us to
come to rational decisions by narrowing down
the available options

25. Emotions as a source of energy
• It is difficult to get involved in something if you don’t have
the energy
• This is true in many fields of work: art, writing, science,
maths...
• Involvement generally comes from “emotional
attachment”
• However, this does not mean that emotion is a source of
knowledge (although we have already labelled it a WAY
of knowing)

26. Charles Darwin
• Darwin´s only real interest in life
(apart from his family) was the
natural world
• He spent 20 years thinking about
his findings before he finally
published “On the Origin of
Species” in 1858
• He spent the last 20 years of his
life doing experiments with
plants and earthworms with his
son Francis
• Could he have achieved this
without emotional attachment?

27. Joseph Heller
• Joseph Heller began work on
Catch 22 shortly after he
returned from the war himself
• He didn’t finish it until 20 years
later
• It was published in 1961
• He managed to use themes
from the Iliad, The Odyssey,
Shakespeare, The Bible...

28. Michelangelo
• Michelangelo spent 4 years
sculpting his statue ‘David’

29. Marie Curie
• Marie Curie was the first
person to win 2 Nobel Prizes
• She died in 1934 after
working with radioactivity for
over 30 years
• It later transpired that the
anaemia that killed her was
caused by her exposure to
radiation (she used to carry
her test tubes around in her
pocket)

30. Beethoven
• Beethoven began composing
when he was still a child
• He started losing his hearing
in his twenties (maybe as a
result of lead poisoning)
• He wrote most of his greatest
works when he was stone deaf
including ‘Eroica’ and his 3rd
to 11th Symphonies

31. Genius
• All of these people are considered
geniuses in their fields
• We associate genius with ease of
producing complex works
• But without emotional energy, maybe true
genius can never be achieved
– “ Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety
nine percent perspiration”
Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

32. Are reason and emotion related?
• Your textbook suggests that it is difficult to truly
separate reason and emotion and they therefore exist
on some kind of a continuum:
• This continuum suggests that emotion and reason are
somehow opposing. But that is not really true either.
Emotion (or types of emotion) can be more ‘rational’ at
some times than others perhaps.
Emotion Reason
http://edrontheoryofknowledge.blogspot.mx/2013/02/emotion-and-reason.html
http://edrontheoryofknowledge.blogspot.mx/2009/12/reason-and-emotion.html

33. Reason and Emotion
• Aristotle was one of the first to suggest
that reason and emotion are related. He
observed that:
– “Anyone can be angry – that is easy. But to be
angry with the right person to the right degree,
at the right time, for the right purpose and in
the right way – that is not easy”

34. Emotion and Rationalism
• Even though we can rationalise our
emotions now, there is still a problem in
‘switching them off’
• For example, how easy would you find it to
eat a chocolate bar shaped like a dog poo,
or drink apple juice from a perfectly new
and clean bed pan?

35. Using Emotion
• It has been suggested that some people are
better at reading emotions (and body
language) than others
• Some people unconsciously (or perhaps
consciously) mimic others’ body language in
order to appeal to their emotions
• It has been suggested that Adolf Hitler had
this chameleon-like quality

42. Or is this perhaps reading too much into people’s expressions in old photographs?

43. Animal Emotions
• Do you think animals possess emotions in
the same (or similar) way to humans?
• Some scientists suggest that while animals
have feelings (even animals closely related to
us), only humans can truly have emotions
• Others think that our closest relatives can be
said to possess emotions

44. Animal Emotions
• Two brothers (Keisho and Alf) were reunited at a UK
safari park after 2 years apart. Their keepers
thought they might not even recognise each other
• Do you think the following photos suggest they are
experiencing joy at seeing each other?
• Do our own emotions cloud our judgement and
make us anthropomorphise animal behaviour?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOWnXJW9LjI