Emotion is a core element of expressive action — both in the conception and creation of new work, and in all of the collective human effort that brings that work into the world. We often pretend that emotions are appropriate and essential to the artistic work and experience, while the business side of that work can and should be cool, rational, and considered.
And yet, that’s bunk.
Emotion is inextricable from human experience — on stage or off stage, in the creative space or around it. And claiming that you or anyone can make decisions or take action absent of emotion is a persistent and rather perilous delusion.
Instead, as evolving neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology are discovering, emotion is a part of the human biological and social systems that make sense of the world so that we can act in it. Says a chapter from the Handbook of Emotions (Tooby and Cosmides 2013):
…it has become apparent that there is no clean dividing line in the brain between regions underlying emotion and cognition, and there is no evidence for a single unified ‘system’ that drives emotion…
Emotions are an element of our body’s affective appraisal process, that pulls our focus to some external input or internal sensation that may be important, and prepares our body for what might come next – even before conscious and cognitive appraisal shows up. As Tooby and Cosmides state it, rather provocatively:
…an emotion is a bet placed under conditions of uncertainty: It is the evolved mind’s bet about what internal deployment is likely to lead to the best average long-term set of payoffs, given the structure and statistical contingencies present in the ancestral world when a particular situation was encountered.
That “bet” commits our body to a range of changes — from physiology, including facial expression, to other motor response to chemical changes and even to modifications of an array of brain functions. That bet can be expensive to our limited body budget, but those who bet most successfully lived to reproduce.
We often shorthand this reality as “fight or flight,” but that’s just one extreme instance of our sensory and emotional systems framing our thinking and driving our action.
According to Jenefer Robinson, the sequence tends to follow this path (Robinson 2005):
An affective appraisal draws attention to something in the environment significant to me or mine and gets my body ready for appropriate action. Then immediately cognitive evaluation kicks in, checks the affective appraisal to see if it is appropriate, modifies autonomic activity, and monitors behavior.
The challenge is that many or even most of these entanglements of sensation, emotion, decision, and action are evolutionary, not contemporary. As Tooby and Cosmides write:
…to the extent that there is functional organization in the human psychological architecture, it was created by, reflects, and is explained by the operation of natural selection among our ancestors.
Of course, lived experience, social learning, and culture inform the “bets” our body makes. And our conscious thinking plays a role, as well, although usually arriving after the bet is made. Still, our emotions are deeply informed by what was a danger to ancient humans (and pre-human primates). And even though complex human societies began about six thousand years ago, natural selection had millennia before that to write the underlying code.
What might an arts manager do with this insight? For one, lighten up about rational choice and emotion-free behavior in yourself and in those around you. It’s not a thing. For another, notice your own emotions as they frame and inform your behavior. The bet may have already been placed when your conscious thinking shows up — you may already be rising to anger, preparing for defense, or gathering for escape. But you can still decide whether or when to double down on that initial bet and take action.
SOURCES:
- Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables.” In Handbook of Emotions, Third Edition, edited by Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, Third edition., 114–37. New York: The Guilford Press, 2008.
- Russell, James A. “Affective Appraisals of Environments.” In Environmental Aesthetics: Theory, Research, and Application, edited by Jack L. Nasar, 120–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
- Robinson, Jenefer. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Andrew, my friend Ray Mickevicius, psychologist and leadership trainer, used to call this “God’s Cosmic Joke”: Before any stimulus is accessible to our higher reasoning functions, it has passed through the Lizard Brain, where we have already decided whether to flee it, fight it, [make love to] it, or eat it.
And, yes, acknowledging this phenomenon — in ourselves and in others — is critical to effective decision-making, whatever its context.
Thanks, Jim. It is a bit of a cosmic joke, since so much management is based on the pretense that reason, rationality, and detachment are leading players.
Thank you for your continuing insights: I say frequently that we’re in the “Meaning” Businesses. I agree that we’re also in the business of creating/trading/enhancing emotions. Maybe the degree should be in arts/emotions administration.
Thanks Jerry. Although I wonder if the emotions are “administrating” our thinking selves. They’ve already made decisions before we even think we’re deciding.
So interesting. And sadness signals fear, or loss of valuable possibility? And joy signals to go forward and embrace the possibility? I know in “acting” we find that watching the results of emotion aren’t as powerful as watching the struggle to contain the emotion. The story of Sir Tyrone Guthrie admonishing the actress playing Ophelia, “Silly girl, you’re feeling it. Your job is to make me feel it.”
Thanks, Lance. I don’t know that there’s a clear and consistent “signal” for each emotion. But I do agree that there’s a fascinating exploration about feeling something as an actor and animating an audience member to feel.
I guess I was referring to the “fight or flee” pattern. The brain is alerted to making the heart beat faster, the adrenalin to flow, I wonder why tears form, lips quiver, crying occurs. I forget who the actor was – Stanislavski? – who wrote in his diary that in the carriage, on his way to his mother’s funeral, he noted the physical reactions he was having and marking them mentally to recreate when needed for a role.
Great, and yes! It’s interesting to decipher what, exactly, evolution was selecting for as our sensory and emotional systems mutated over time. From the (limited) reading I’ve done so far, there seem to be two systems at work – one is “affective appraisal,” the sensory “bet” the body makes without our conscious awareness, the other is “cognitive appraisal,” the assessment by our “thinking” systems about what’s actually happening and how we might adapt or reverse the bet. So much more to learn and think (and feel) about.
Thanks so much for the additional comment!