Is ‘being emotional’ irrational?

Cue Mariah Carey’s Emotions

On the one hand, emotions are often present when irrationality is, too. Children get angry and hit their siblings or peers. That rarely, if ever, accomplishes what they really should have wanted–paradigmatic irrationality. Anger and irrationality correlated. We feel lonely and seek the company of our exes, even though we’re fairly confident that we cannot have a healthy long term relationship with them, thus investing time in something we know will not return much for the investment. But was our irrationality caused by the emotion or something else? All kinds of examples of coupled emotion and irrationality abound. But that does not mean that the emotions cause irrationality. The only intuitive reason to think so is that the emotions were present. But so were any number of other internal and external factors. Furthermore, emotions are often present when only rational behavior is present; for instance, upon the death of a loved one, we get sad about the loss. Nothing seems irrational about that. No matter what you believe about death or the afterlife, if you ever have the misfortune of missing a loved one because you cannot see nor talk to them, you’ll know that it’s a painful experience–for you if no one else. Perhaps sadness is not the only rational reaction but it looks like one of them.

If we feel emotion during such a broad range of contexts, perhaps emotions are such pervasive features of experience that they are necessary but not sufficient for either rationality, irrationality, or both; emotions are omnipresent or nearly omnipresent in the human domain and therefore little if any thought or behavior can occur without them.

Besides anecdotes or thought experiments, why believe that emotions are so prevalent? According to Schachter and Singer’s (1962) two-factor theory of emotion, in order for someone to experience an emotion (Kassin, 2017, 3-1d), he has to experience a change in his physiological baseline (“arousal”) and a cognitive interpretation of that arousal. In the greater emotional literature, that physiological baseline has more precisely been called the autonomic nervous system (Bestelmeyer et al., 2017, 1351). According to the National Institutes of Health, the autonomic nervous system is “a component of the peripheral nervous system that regulates involuntary physiologic processes including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and sexual arousal. It contains three anatomically distinct divisions: sympathetic, parasympathetic and enteric” (Waxenbaum et al., 2021). Since the circadian rhythm, if nothing else, varies all day in a roughly 25.1 hour cycle (Schacter, 2018, 141), we must be experiencing emotions all day (and in fact all night) if the variations involve autonomic output, unless we stop interpreting the changes in baseline. Is autonomic output one of the processes that flows according to the circadian rhythm? It seems so but don’t take it from me; in an editorial for the American Heart Association’s Hypertension and citing a study in dogs, Dr. Italo Biaggioni says “The autonomic nervous system itself follows a circadian pattern, which is apparent when measuring sympathetic outflow directly or through plasma catecholamines” (2008, 797). The remaining question for two factor theory is whether human autonomic response fluctuates in the same ways that it does for dogs (Biaggioni seems to think so, as his editorial is about humans) and, if so, whether and how we interpret these fluctuations in experiencing emotion.

What to think, then, about the idea that emotions “organize, rather than disrupt, rational thinking” (Keltner, 2015)? That is right to the same extent that it is right that emotions organize irrational thinking. That is not trivial to say–if you are like me, it is not always obvious that emotions are underyling your minute-by-minute experience–although it may be biased. Organizing connotes putting things where they ought to be. Predicating organization of emotions, then, makes them a beneficent protagonist in our lives. But let’s recall that, if the above sources are sufficient information, emotions are around so often that it’s hard to attribute them as the cause of any thought or behavior good or bad any more than saying “people are the cause of good behavior” or “the earth causes people.” Less like a protagonist, emotions seem like a structure or a feature of it; they are almost like a building or place in which thought or experience takes place, or the lights in that building. A better word than “organizing” might then be “structuring” and, in fact, that’s the language the authors of the New York Times article use in their keynote PNAS publication where they expound their major finding, that there are precisely 27 emotions with which people respond to videos (and that we have no evidence and some counterevidence for 7 we previously believed to exist) (Cowen & Keltner, 2017, E7902). A control find applied to their entire articles shows that they use the root word “structure” to modify emotional experience 15 times and “organize” to modify it at most 6 times, though it seems like “organize” really modifies “label,” rather than “experience.” This is not to quibble. The authors likely know the language well; having worked in an editorial office myself, I can say who knows why “organize” is what made it into the New York Times article. (My guess is that time constraints caused them to focus on aspects they deemed more important. It is also plausible that an editor changed it. However, it is certainly possible that the connotation is intentional and an overreaction to antiquated views of emotions as categorically irrational.)

However, that is not to say that one need not calibrate his emotions; there is at least some evidence that emotional dissonance with your context can hinder your comprehension of that context (Niedenthal, 2007, 1002). I have exaggerated a bit there–what the referenced study shows is that when you carry your body as if you were feeling a particular emotion and that emotion is incongruous with the emotional tone of an interlocutor, you comprehend less of what the speaker is saying (1002). Perhaps–and that is a big perhaps–that is true more generally, such that you ought to match your emotional behavior to that of the context you’re in, in order to comprehend it. To be clear, that does not mean that your emotions always or even often mislead you. Just that if your emotions are inappropriate for what is going on in your life, you might have a hard time comprehending what is going on. Recall that the two-factor theory of emotion gives you some agency over what emotions you’re feeling–if you interpret what they are. So, attend to your changes in physiological baseline and interpret well and you should be good to go. Again, that is a generalization based on research about people conversing with one another and may make an assumption or two. The research in this area is ongoing.

As far as society is concerned, I’m really not sure what most people believe about emotions. The phrase “don’t be so emotional” echos in my mind but I don’t recall where I heard it. That phrase, of the imperative verb tense, implies that one ought not be emotional, which probably means something like he or she shouldn’t base his or her thoughts or behavior on emotion. In Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 hit single Good 4 U, she muses upon introspection that “maybe I’m too emotional.” So there does seem to be a belief among at least some in society that one can be not just emotional but too much so. However, in light of the research I’ve referenced, it’s not clear what “being emotional” is, other than being human. How could you avoid that?

Citations

Bestelmeyer, P.E.G., Kotz, S.A., & Belin, P. (2017). Effects of emotional valence and arousal on the voiceperception network. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017, 1351–1358doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx059 https://watermark.silverchair.com/nsx059.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAr8wggK7BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKsMIICqAIBADCCAqEGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMkOXUsoHAmj7I02GPAgEQgIICcoNY-bnQoH51iOdnpw5w-n_kM6f6uD7ovXqZDTdLSFznQcOFZbppSQ11-2_R69YCf5rPGA2ctvm6k-bNYxnbbfXFl46k6rEGpT0GeWB5ZtKsEzXG-O6bYoEjEUZDaDFpsFzS3EZiXm1qJpxcCTnvgANp4G7Hl6ZNQMb8desBSBMM3i7WFsWIjTCAJ5v6R9ayeeHixUNwlDkhV7yWMiAWFJw_0UQIKTS8WxsMU3sVE9ctucceeaN9QUVNWCBLFDqf9KPiXZ0lCJBPgmbIoEyslzpskwzBSjE7IxJw1tI_QEz5DLHKQu7mLhDlyShl6vq0Vqm5_M4pTOXW7Mg7DNMW1YsCxfG7zrbF5bu3_C1DXgg04wj7Vkq2uH-evtd3j4Ly2QFk7R_MmDc3bIiDbRqZ_ET4oV7bczepyaepakQosGlt27sd9rWAaQCxkAyw8hrNX07MnCOMi_ib6PKg44PRwfc2WVPLqy_6DDPkb9uCqkgVolnH8CZ_-sDLK-iAChexYrKoOLzwnV0hwh_SuozFmm1cKqh5EnbfOba6xXqfVWB7jHa4sFvvAKgTtCV0cgdW8TOAio8AZe0Gol7JpdD-XX3yGm9ny0bfyKuE9tN7aHjz-qrfOefgM_v3DhNrTbGyTtyOj36FllsjMTApcB5srZcu6p1Ebp9vn0CCZFOcH4t5yBN70jb2Cii15tLmob7Wv-4yPqHrrlQgr3IkAijjNemDDT2rBEhVK3Z0Mh9Uou1695DtpRKHqa8MCg_tvzd3r428lrkStHgO_qIchna9p3JEp5djd9Yd8xTIiF403RT7aVf42gTehBV7hhtQYx6mFLBn [Accessed 23 July 2021]

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