Emotions And Jameses

I recently had the pleasure of seeing James Acaster perform his new show, Hecklers Welcome, on his short US tour. He started the show with a story about his first open mic, when, just before going on, the barkeep told him that fear and excitement were physically the same. The whole show was about him taking 15 years and some therapy to realize that that was a lie. I understand the need to simplify things for comedic effect, but, pedant that I am, that one really got to me. I would have been well within my rights to heckle, but I didn’t want to undermine the whole premise of the show.

Saying fear and excitement are physically the same is like saying that flying and sitting are physically the same. It’s more like nonsense than a lie. Just because you sit on flights doesn’t mean the two are even in the same category. Sitting is a body position while flying is travelling by air regardless of whether you’re seated, flapping your wings, or swimming the breaststroke. Similarly, there are many different ways to be excited and only some of them involve fear. It’s easy to tell if you’re sitting or excited, but you usually need more context to tell whether you’re flying or afraid.

Semantics aside, the barkeep’s insinuation was that there are two distinct emotion, fear (negatively valenced) and excitement (nervousness, anticipation, positively valenced), and that James could convince himself he felt good rather than bad simply by knowing that his body couldn’t tell the difference. I have heard this same motivational trivia in various forms over the years, and I would conjecture that the origin of this game of pseudoscientific telephone is the James-Lange Theory proposed by John Dewey: yet more evidence that it’s more important to be first and interesting than to be right. The theory posits that physiological changes precede emotions. The famous example involves a bear, but you can instead imagine a friend asking why you’re crying. When you tell them you’re crying because you’re sad, they tell you that no actually, you’re sad because you’re crying. You needn’t have been at the show to know how this strategy worked for James. He had many successful years and breakdowns.

Even assuming the James-Lange theory is true, this would be bad advice because the theory implies that each emotion has a unique physiological signature. Also, it would be a pretty bad sign if we could easily convince ourselves out of negative emotions because often they exist to protect us from real danger.

Thankfully, Lisa Feldman Barrett offers a much richer theory: the Theory of constructed emotion. Rather than physiological state determining emotion, it is one factor along with social concepts and context. The Wikipedia article’s color analogy is so good that I’m going to use it too. In color perception, physical state would be the wavelength of light hitting your retina, but the color you call that is just as much determined by whether you think the sea is blue or wine dark and by context (i.e. what color that object usually is, how it’s illuminated, and how it’s in shadow The same way some people can distinguish between white, cream, and eggshell, others can distinguish emotions at a finer resolution. It’s not obvious that identifying your own or others’ emotions should be similar, but I’m going to claim it is because third-person emotion is also highly context-dependent. Under this model, we could say that just before a show, James feels bad, physiologically. Given that he’s about to say lots of vulnerable things on stage and there are lots of ways that could go wrong for anyone with a sense of shame, it makes sense to be afraid of those outcomes. He knows about at least two emotions (fear and excitement), and all evidence points to fear being the one he’s feeling right now.

Now, I’m not James Acaster’s therapist (maybe one day, fingers crossed), but even this richer model of emotions is a little academic and doesn’t offer much practical guidance.

I have this stupid, half-baked inside joke with myself about the first humans that popped into existence not understanding their physical needs and just being confused about why their stomach hurt and their mouths were dry until presumably by trial and error they figured out they needed to eat and drink. Since this frog was dead on arrival, I hope you won’t mind my dissecting it. If it were funny, it would be because the hunger pangs are so closely linked with the desire to eat, that the thought of someone not understanding it is absurd.

(It’s especially weird to think that this literally is the case for infants. Babies come with no concept of their physical needs, only whether they are currently feeling good or bad. I’m sure it takes a lot of data to link up the feelings of “hunger” and “ought to eat food”. A friend once speculated to me that it’s probably for the best that babies have bad memories because it must be painful to grow as much and as fast as they do. I think the same applies emotionally. In fact, William James (of the James-Lange Theory) famously called the world babies inhabit a “blooming, buzzing confusion”.)

As absurd as it is to consider for a simple feeling like hunger, it is the norm to not understand how to deal with more complex emotions like fear, anxiety, boredom, loneliness. The version of the barkeep’s advice that I’m more familiar with goes, “if you’re afraid of public speaking, that just means you really care about it going well.” I think this is marginally more helpful than the version that James got. Instead of denying what you’re feeling, it encourages you to direct it towards a positive result. On the other hand, I’m afraid to free solo El Cap. Of course if I did it I would want it to go well, but I would rather not do it at all. For people who ride rollercoasters and watch horror films, thrill-seeking is the whole point, but I would argue that for everyone else, there must be some positive motivation behind the fear whether it be keeping your job or being the center of attention.