In recent centuries, many psychologists have considered the question ‘where do feelings and emotions come from?’. So do social psychologists. They wonder how one develops feelings, how one expresses them, and how one responds to other people’s feelings – among other things. Of course, many more questions have been asked by social psychologists, but the result remains that the jury is still out on where exactly emotions come from and what exactly their effects are. This article therefore provides an overview of what is already known about it.
Warning: difference between emotions and moods
As the introduction already described, this article examines the social-psychological interpretation of the issue surrounding feelings. It is important that we first make a classification of feelings, which many social psychologists also make:
- Attitudes: one’s evaluation – positive or negative – of another thing, person or idea. Example: you find this article rather boring and dull.
- Emotions: A feeling – often strong or intense and not too long – that often causes us to experience excitement and many thoughts. Example: you are watching a horror film and experience the emotion ‘tension’ (or boredom, in the case of some horror films…).
- Mood: You experience this – often in the longer term and with much less rapid changes such as emotions – when you have a less sharp, but more ‘unfocused feeling’ that is not focused on a specific goal (think of the film or this article, in the previous examples), which is also often not too intense. Example: In the fall I always feel a little sad, without any real reason for it.
Well, now that we have completed that three-way division, we can delve deeper into the origins of feelings .
Feelings: which of the three?
Most of what is described below applies mainly to emotions; scientists have often come up with other theories for attitudes and have not ventured into the vague concept of moods. But in general, feelings as such have been examined, and not the specific attitude/emotion/mood parts. This is partly because these three concepts are actually incredibly closely linked. That might make sense, if you look at the following example:
I’m walking through my living room and see a very large spider (which makes me absolutely hysterically afraid). My attitude towards the spider in question is therefore a mix of disgust and fear – so I can confidently label it as ‘very negative’. My emotion is strong and intense and focused on one particular object: the spider. My mood, a longer process, is ruined for the rest of the morning.
This intertwining of the three concepts of attitude, emotion and mood sometimes makes it difficult for researchers to determine exactly what the origins of each are. Ergo, research into the origins of feelings focuses on feelings, usually emotions – and not on one partial aspect.
Experience of culture and learning
It makes sense that culture and learning have a major influence on feelings. Fortunately, this has also been confirmed by science. By comparing cultures around the world, we now know that there are certain patterns of feeling, experience and expression that occur universally. However, important cultural differences do exist, so the cultural influence may not be very prominent.
Perhaps even more powerful is people’s capacity to learn. In the past, three major theories have been postulated to explain this (click on the titles for articles that elaborate on the specific theories):
- Classical conditioning: when we associate a certain feeling with a situation that often occurs with that feeling. That sounds a bit abstract: imagine hearing a bell every time you get a tasty snack. Over time you ‘associate’ the bell with good food, and you spontaneously feel like eating when you only hear the bell. This is almost exactly the test that the inventor of classical conditioning – Ivan Pavlov – used to condition dogs, and it also works very well if you have an ice cream shop nearby.
- Operant conditioning: when we learn through rewards and punishments. Example: every time you eat an ice cream you taste the delicious flavor. This rewards you, so you eat more ice cream. The opposite often happens with Brussels sprouts…
- Learning through observation: Fortunately, we can also learn by watching other people fall and get up, or be punished or rewarded. Imagine: as a small child you saw your big sister/brother eating Brussels sprouts and making a dirty face. Here you learned that Brussels sprouts were nasty, without having to eat them yourself (unfortunately, your mother usually disagreed).
Proximate contributors
Sounds technical, and there is no good Dutch translation available for what social psychologists call proximate contributors (I therefore call them direct triggers), but what it comes down to is the following: people are more or less automatically triggered by certain direct triggers. For example, think of a ball flying towards you. This triggers a startle response in most (healthy) people. An instinct.
Another direct cause for feelings is your own physiological state (physical state). A well-known experiment goes like this: take a pen between your teeth as if you were a dog biting a bone. Keep that up for a while. You will feel happier, at least happier than if you had held the same pen with the end in your mouth, pursing your lips as if you were going to whistle. The cause: your feelings respond to your physical condition. In the first condition (bone in mouth), your facial muscles were in a state that is the same when you smile. Your brain interpreted your physical state as: there is laughter, so we will experience a positive feeling. The opposite happened with the pursed mouth: your brain associates this with looking sad, ergo negative feelings (this experiment has received a lot of criticism, but the central idea remains that our feelings are often influenced by what we perceive of our environment/physical condition). find out).
A third reason for feelings may lie in the counterfactual thinking effect, roughly translated as anti-factual thinking. It works very simply, when we think about what we could have had, this automatically affects our emotions. Suppose you win a silver medal: you could have had the gold medal! Ergo, you feel less happy. Unlike the bronze medalist, who compares himself to all the losers; he/she ended up on the podium nicely. Ergo, you feel happier. So, in terms of your own feelings, it is better to win bronze than silver. But winning gold is of course the best. The point is that your immediate environment often provides the comparisons you will make. If you have a lousy day, a small windfall can make you happier. If you have a great day, the windfall will hardly be noticeable.
Conclusion
Feelings, attitudes, emotions and moods can therefore be influenced by many factors. Our learning behavior has a major influence. In addition, your physical state (e.g. smiling mouth), your immediate environment (e.g. flying objects) and directly available comparisons (winning silver or bronze). What has the most influence depends from person to person (are you an optimist or pessimist, for example) and from situation to situation (how urgent/threatening is the flying object and how heavily have you been conditioned in previous times?). No wonder social psychologists do not yet have a final answer to the origins: they probably won’t find one very soon. But there are plenty of suggestions, as described above.
From now on, when you’re in a bad mood, you might want to consider which of these factors had the most influence on your feelings. Although they are there, and you cannot simply ignore them, feelings are not always completely justified