Our Ancestors Had Feelings
We all have emotions. And they consist of several elements. First, we usually have a conscious awareness of our emotions: when we are happy, we know it. Second, emotions typically affect our physical state: we show how we feel on our faces, in our voices, even in our posture; given the role emotions play in social networks, these physical manifestations are especially important. Third, emotions are associated with specific neurophysiological activity; if you are shown a scary picture, the flow of blood to structures deep in your brain instantly changes. Finally, emotions are associated with visible behaviors, like laughing, crying, or shrieking.2
Experiments have demonstrated that people can “catch” emotional states they observe in others over time frames ranging from seconds to weeks.3 When college freshmen are randomly assigned to live with mildly depressed roommates, they become increasingly depressed over a three-month period.4 Emotional contagion can even take place between strangers, after just ephemeral contact. When waiters are trained to provide “service with a smile,” their customers report feeling more satisfied, and they leave better tips.5 People’s emotions and moods are affected by the emotional states of the people they interact with. Why and how does this happen?
We might consider another question first: Why aren’t emotions merely internal states? Why don’t we just have our own private feelings? Having feelings is surely evolutionarily advantageous to us. For example, the ability to feel startled is probably good for us in situations where we need to react quickly to survive. But we do not just feel startled, we show that we are startled. We jump or shriek or curse or clench, and these actions do not go unnoticed. They are copied by others.
Given the organization of early hominids into social groups, the spread of emotions served an evolutionarily adaptive purpose.6 Early humans had to rely on one another for survival. Their interactions with the physical environment (weather, landscape, predators) were modulated or affected by their interactions with their social environment. Humans bonded with others in order to face the world more effectively, and mechanisms evolved to support this bonding, most obviously verbal communication but also emotional mimicry. The development of emotions in humans, the display of emotions, and the ability to read the emotions of others helped coordinate group activity by three means: facilitating interpersonal bonds, synchronizing behavior, and communicating information.
Emotions and emotional contagion probably first arose to facilitate mother-infant pair bonding and then evolved to extend to kin members and ultimately to nonkin members. Emotional contagion fosters interaction synchrony. At the level of mother-child pairs, emotional contagion may have prompted mothers to be more attentive to and protective of their babies when their babies needed attention. Indeed, we are sadder when our family members are sad than when strangers are sad. There is an advantage in coordinating our moods with those to whom we are related.
Eventually this type of synchrony in mood or activity may have been beneficial for larger group activities, such as warding off enemies or hunting prey. If you are trying to coordinate a hunting party, it helps if members of the group are all upbeat and fired up. Conversely, if you are part of a group and someone in it appears afraid, perhaps that person has seen a predator that you have not seen. Quickly adopting his emotional state can enhance your prospects for survival. Indeed, it is thought that positive emotions may work especially well to increase group cohesiveness (“I’m happy; stay with me”) and that negative emotions may work well as communication devices (“I smell smoke; I’m scared”).
Emotions may be a quicker way to convey information about the environment and its relative safety or danger than other forms of communication, and it seems certain that emotions preceded language. What emotions lack in specificity compared to oral language, they may make up for in speed. You can tell whether your spouse is mad at you very quickly, but having her explain it to you may take a good deal more time (especially if she insists that you guess why she is mad before she tells you). You can walk through the door at home at the end of the day and immediately know whether the environment is safe or dangerous, and that is quite a trick our ancestors bequeathed us.
Of course, rapidly coordinated emotions are not always a good thing. If you come home and are in a bad mood, your partner will often detect it long before you resort to the more laborious process of explaining why you are in a bad mood. And before you have a chance to explain, she might already have caught your bad mood, which may lead to an argument and a downward spiral.
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