Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings

In contrast to Professor Frey, he believes that tears are all about communication; they let other people know that you’re upset, information which might ultimately benefit you. Crying could be a powerful way of telling another person that their ‘harmless’ teasing has in fact touched a nerve and that they should stop. It also signals to those around you that you need their sympathy or help.

After Julia and her fiancé split up she was walking along the street sobbing uncontrollably when a stranger approached her offering help. Because she was crying so much she couldn’t answer and shook her head. Tears provide such a strong message that they can even elicit help from strangers. Cornelius believes the failure of the laboratory studies to demonstrate benefits from crying is due to the fact that during the experiments nobody receives any comfort from another, so they haven’t gained any help by crying and therefore don’t feel any happier afterwards.

Think of the kinds of situation where you tend to cry. When Randy Cornelius asked people to do this the occasions most often cited were the death of a friend, the end of a relationship, watching a sad film or poignantly happy events like a wedding. Now think back to the last time you actually did cry. Here it was a slightly different story. Tears tended to follow arguments or rejection or feelings of loneliness or inadequacy. Cornelius believes helplessness might be the key reason we cry; we feel we can’t do anything to change the situation, so we cry. Or to put it another way, we can’t do anything more for ourselves, so we need other people’s help and it’s crying which signals the seriousness of our situation. Babies cry in order to get the attention and help they need. Perhaps adults are doing the same.

the quintet of the astonished

In the second exhibition room at the National Gallery in London there are three cool cream benches, lined up one behind the other. We sit and watch in silence, apart from the inevitable occasional cough. On the wall in front of us there’s a life-size photograph of five people standing in two rows – a man and a woman at the front, and three men behind them. Although they are close together they don’t look at each other. Three of the people are staring at the same place in the middle distance. The woman has her arms crossed in front of her chest, one hand on top of the other. Slowly her left fist clenches tightly. This isn’t a photograph after all. The people are moving, very slowly. The woman looks angry, yet despairing. Who is she gazing at? She opens her mouth and her shoulders rise. She is trying to control her emotions but still looks tortured with distress. What terrible thing could she be watching? Has she just seen the man who killed her child? Behind her shoulder, a man has his eyes closed while he smiles in beatific joy. His face is full of contentment, a sublime, holy contentment. The man at the front screws up his face in misery. Is he calling out? His hand moves up in front of his chest. He is distraught. Is he the husband of the distressed woman? He doesn’t even glance at her; he seems to be in his own world of agony. Another man has his hand on the woman’s shoulder, but despite her distress he is almost smiling. He looks proudly happy. He could be watching his child playing a musical instrument. How could he be so happy when two of the others are so distressed? The woman’s bottom lip starts to jut out in anger. Her hands are clasped together so tightly that the veins on her forearms stand out making dark shadows down her wrists. The tortured man continues to cry out. The man next to him puts his hand on his shoulder but takes no notice of his distress, continuing to stare into the distance. The moving photograph is in a frame and is lit like an old master. Light falls on the faces and there are dark shadows in the folds of their clothing. However, this isn’t an old master. It’s an artwork by Bill Viola called The Quintet of the Astonished.

It takes fifteen minutes for the emotions to play themselves out on the screen in slow motion. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but not because two of the people are so distressed. We know they are actors playing a part for the artist to film. The reason the film is discomforting is that you yearn for them to comfort each other. The man in religious ecstasy is so close behind the woman that at some points it’s almost as though he’s inhaling the smell of her hair and smiling in appreciation. They stand so close together that they are touching, but they never interact or even make eye contact. The man who is enjoying himself turns towards the distraught woman and puts his hand on her shoulder, but while you long for him to look into her eyes and show her that he’s there for her, he continues to smile instead. You find yourself wishing that if no one else is going to help the two tortured people, they could at least turn to each other and suffer together, but they are destined to suffer alone. The fact that it is so painful to watch these people standing so close and yet ignoring each other’s emotions shows us something fundamental about emotions – that they are an exceptionally strong form of communication. Crying in the presence of another is so powerful that it is unbearable to watch if that display of emotion is ignored.

If the purpose of tears is to communicate your sadness so that others will help, there is just one problem: people often cry on their own and report feeling better afterwards even though they have received no comfort from others. Moreover people often deliberately seek privacy if they want to cry. It has been suggested that even if you cry alone, you’re using yourself as an audience. You might give yourself comfort by sympathising with yourself, agreeing that you have the right to feel unhappy about your situation in the same way that a friend would.

It is possible that the opposing theories of Professor Frey and Randy Cornelius are in fact compatible. Perhaps we gain some relief from expelling the toxic by-products of stress in addition to communicating our distress and receiving comfort from others.

If crying can be beneficial, this raises the question of whether never crying, like the Professor of Tears himself, could be harmful. In the Western world there has long been an idea that if you suppress your tears you will do yourself physical damage. Back in 1847 Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in the poem ‘The Princess’,

Home they brought the warrior dead;

She nor swooned nor uttered cry.

All her maids, watching said,

‘She must weep or she will die.’

It has been suggested that suppressing the emotions could increase a person’s chances of developing cancer, heart disease or high blood pressure. Related studies tend to focus on emotions in general and often anger in particular, rather than crying. However, in one study people were instructed to watch films while suppressing their tears and laughter. This was found to increase heart rate, so in theory if this behaviour pattern was repeated over many years a person’s health could be affected. Nevertheless, you are unlikely to be in situations where you are suppressing tears many times every day, so not crying probably only makes a difference to your health if you are suppressing all your emotions all of the time.

In eighteenth-century France collective tears were seen as enjoyable and compassion was expected from others, but by the nineteenth century suppressing tears was seen as evidence of self-control. A social dictionary of the time describes tears as ‘water too often ill-employed, for it remedies nothing’. When attitudes towards crying have been researched in more recent times, findings using questionnaires contrast sharply with the results of experiments held in the laboratory. In questionnaires women tend to say that they feel sympathetic when someone else cries, whereas men report feeling awkward or even manipulated. Women in particular seem to be accused of ‘turning on the waterworks’. Men report believing that it is inappropriate or a sign of weakness for a man to cry, but in laboratory experiments where people are actually crying the results are rather different. When a man cries after watching a sad film, both men and women consider him to be more likeable, while the weeping women are disliked for their tears. So although men may not like the idea of other men crying, when actually faced with it, they do not judge them. Perhaps men consider that if a man is crying his feelings must be profound and so he should taken seriously.

If crying succeeds in communicating our feelings then once again sadness is revealing that it does have a purpose. The family seeing off the woman with the linen jacket in my airport story, eyes wet with tears, would be signalling their sorrow. While that parting would be reflected in their brain chemistry, they would in fact be strengthening their bonds with the woman who was leaving. She would be able to see how much they cared, in a way they probably wouldn’t usually show her.

Although we don’t tend to think of it as a pleasant emotion, sadness is probably one that we are stuck with and although the value of sadness is hard to see, particularly when we are feeling sad, it might be an emotion with wisdom after all; an emotion which forces us to slow down, consider our plans and maybe change them. Sadness provides a light and shade in our emotional life. At the same time the outward signs of sadness like a down-turned mouth and that most potent but still mysterious communicator of sadness, tears, can bring us closer to those around us by signalling to them that we need them.

Three Disgust (#ulink_54a402b5-c0ad-53cf-a116-a1682b786a50)

The audience sits in silence in a converted warehouse in East London. Although it’s a cold November night, waiters further up Brick Lane stand outside on the street, trying to persuade passers-by to choose their particular curry house. But in the warehouse eating is the last thing anyone would want to do. Out of 2,000 people who tried, these are the lucky 300 who succeeded in getting tickets. A few watch anxiously as a man comes onto the stage wearing the curious combination of a black Fedora hat and surgeon’s scrubs. His name is Professor Gunther von Hagens. After a short introduction his assistants wheel in a long, sheet-covered lump on a trolley. The professor draws back the white cover to reveal the dead body of a man with skin which looks as though it could be made from plastic. The professor walks over to a side-table on which is a silver tray lined up with implements, ranging in size from the smallest knife to a hacksaw. He selects a scalpel, turns back to the body, leans over the man’s breastbone and puts the blade into contact with the skin. He presses down firmly and slices down through the skin. The audience wince as one, imagining the knife cutting through their own flesh. Surprisingly there’s no blood, just a slow trickle of thick orange liquid, like the orange congealed fat left behind in a roasting tin. This is the first public autopsy to be held in Britain for 170 years and in addition to the live audience, millions are watching on television. Professor von Hagens explains that he’s making what’s known as a Y-cut, slicing across the chest and down the centre of the torso. The man died at the age of seventy-two after drinking two bottles of whisky a day and smoking heavily for years. As the chest is opened the skin is peeled back on either side of the cut to reveal layers of fat. The heart and lungs are extracted and carefully placed in silver dishes lined up on the side-table. Like waiters at a banquet, assistants stand in a line nearby, ready to pass a dish when required for the next body part. Eventually just one dish remains empty. It’s time for the brain.

An assistant holds the man’s head still, while von Hagens carefully cuts around the head from ear to ear, loosens the skin enough to slide his hands in behind it and peels back the skin to expose the skull. Taking a hacksaw, he begins grinding his way into the skull, explaining to the audience, as he cuts, that due to the skull’s three layers, this can take some time. When he hears a change in tone he knows he’s through. ‘I am about to take the brain out,’ he calmly announces, as though it’s a cookery demonstration. The brain comes away surprisingly easily. He simply picks it up and lifts it out without resistance, like a walnut out of a shell. Nobody in the audience speaks. Their brows furrow and they lift their hands up to their faces, covering their mouths and half-masking their eyes. They are experiencing disgust.

Although it is such a basic emotion, disgust is often forgotten; if people are asked to list some common emotions it’s usually a long time before disgust is suggested. Yet of all the psychologists I’ve met who research different emotions, those who study disgust seem to do so with a particular passion. They told me that they have learned one thing, however, and the same applies here: however fascinating disgust might be, if you want to enjoy your food it’s not a good idea to read about disgust while you are eating.

There is one way in which disgust differs from many other emotions: feelings of disgust always have a clear cause. You can’t wake up one day feeling generally disgusted in the same way that you might feel generally sad. There has to be an object of your disgust and, as we’ll see, it’s these objects which provide clues as to the purpose of this strange emotion.

The loos at the Glastonbury Festival are infamous. By the end of the weekend after thousands of people have used them, they get very full. The story goes that every year, on the last day of the festival the same trick is played on one very unlucky toilet user. A group of people wait until a man has locked himself into the cubicle and then they tip over the entire box so that the unfortunate inhabitant is trapped lying in the contents of the now emptied toilet.

Just hearing about this story may well provoke a physical response in you. It certainly would for the victim of the trick. Disgust is a particularly visceral emotion. It can make you shudder, salivate, feel physically sick, retch and, at its most extreme, vomit. The facial expression for disgust is particularly distinctive: the nostrils narrow, the upper lip rises high, the lower lip lifts and protrudes slightly, the cheeks rise, the brows lower creating crow’s feet beside the eyes and the sides of the nostrils ascend, causing the sides of the nose to wrinkle. When a person is disgusted other people can tell exactly what they are feeling from those sneering lips. This is the disgust face and it appears very early in life.

how we learn to feel disgusted

Disgust is one of the earliest emotions that we experience. From birth, babies show disgust at bitter tastes and as Charles Darwin noted the expression of disgust gradually becomes more frequent. He became fascinated with the development of emotions after the birth of his first child and decided to document his son’s emotional expressions. More than thirty years later he wrote a book on the subject, a book which is often overlooked today. Darwin clearly observed disgust on his son’s face at the age of five months – on one occasion in response to cold water, on another at a piece of ripe cherry. ‘This was shown by the lips and whole mouth assuming a shape which allowed the contents to run or fall quickly out; the tongue being likewise protruded. These movements were accompanied by a little shudder. It was all the more comical, as I doubt whether the child felt real disgust – the eyes and forehead expressing much surprise and consideration.’

Whether or not babies do feel the emotion in the same way as adults, by the age of three toddlers have learnt what adults consider to be disgusting. Although babies and toddlers will happily play with their faeces they soon discover that they shouldn’t, suggesting that they only learn disgust through social conditioning. This is reinforced by a study which examined fifty children who had grown up in the wild; none showed any signs of disgust at bodily products. However, toddlers tend to learn disgust at faeces particularly easily, leading some such as Val Curtis, who researches hygiene and disgust at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to suggest that we are born with a propensity to find certain objects disgusting; it’s far easier to convince children to be revolted by faeces than by sweets. Having said that, it is impossible to disentangle the influence of socialisation. Inevitably it would be difficult to train a child to believe that sweets are disgusting because other children would soon undermine this view, whereas disgust at faeces is reinforced by every adult or older child they meet.

As children develop, their responses to disgust become more sophisticated. Imagine you go into a room where you’re given a glass of clean, fresh water. You drink some water and then you’re asked to spit into the glass before taking another sip. Would you do it? It is your own saliva after all and only moments before it was in your mouth. Then you’re given a fresh glass of water and a dead, but sterilised, cockroach is held in tweezers and dipped into the water. There’s nothing physically wrong with the drink in either case but when university researchers gave people these tasks most wouldn’t do it. At the age of four children will happily drink up, but by seven, like adults, they don’t want to. Before this age they might not possess the complex thought processes which would allow them to see contamination in the same (admittedly at times irrational) way as adults. An understanding of contamination requires the ability to follow a long chain of events. In order to feel repulsed by the idea of licking an object which has fallen on the floor, you need to consider that somebody who had previously stepped in dog faeces would have a dirty shoe which then touched the floor, thus contaminating the food, and finally you. By the age of seven or eight children’s thinking skills have developed to an extent where they can not only follow this chain, but can use disgust to their advantage with ploys such as licking the last biscuit and then offering it to their squirming sibling with the words, ‘Go on – eat it then!’

the disgusted brain

The fact that the facial expression for disgust is so striking reflects the significance of our ability both to convey disgust and to detect it in others. If one person tastes contaminated food everyone else needs to know to stay away from it. The disgust face is so central to this communication that the brain has a specific mechanism for detecting disgust in others. Mary Phillips and her colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry in London asked volunteers to lie in a brain scanner while they were shown photographs of people displaying facial expressions of either disgust or fear. Cleverly, Dr Phillips set them the task of deciding whether the photograph was of a man or a woman in order to distract them from focusing on trying to identify the expression. Despite the fact that the emotion expressed was irrelevant to the task, the scan nevertheless demonstrated activity in different parts of the volunteer’s brain depending on whether the person in the photograph looked frightened or disgusted.

Deep inside the brain there’s a walnut-shaped area called the amygdala which has tended to be thought of as the seat of all the emotions but with disgust this proved not to be the case. Instead, two areas of the brain are stimulated by disgust – the basal ganglia and the anterior insula, which are both very old parts of the brain in evolutionary terms. People with Huntingdon’s disease have difficulty recognising expressions of disgust which is logical since Huntingdon’s damages the basal ganglia. Extraordinarily, even carriers of the Huntingdon’s gene who do not yet have symptoms of the disease have a reduced capacity for spotting the expression of disgust.

If you were to take a brain and peel back the temporal lobe or side of the brain and look deep inside, behind the ear, you would find a large pyramid-shaped structure known as the insula, a name derived from the Latin for island. The front of this pyramid or anterior insula is the area which responds when we taste strong flavours like salt. This neural link between disgust and taste is intriguing because it lends weight to the idea that disgust exists to protect us from contaminated food. The fact that disgust is found in such an old part of the brain might explain why it is an emotion which is so hard to overcome even when you know there’s no reason to find something disgusting. Even infants who have been born without functioning cerebral hemispheres show expressions of disgust at bitter tastes. This type of instinctive disgust involves no thinking, reflected in the fact that the insula is not associated with brain regions involved in thought and reasoning. This suggests that our brains are hard-wired for us to learn about disgust.

individual responses to disgust

Although we all experience disgust at some time, the strength of the feeling can vary considerably. When Paul Rozin, a world authority on this emotion, measures sensitivity to disgust he finds at one end of the scale people who would be happy to eat live locusts, while at the other end there are people who are not prepared to blow their nose on a brand new piece of toilet roll due to its association with dirty toilets. Women tend to be at least 10-20% more sensitive to disgust than men and that sensitivity also changes over the lifespan, peaking in the teens and tailing off gradually towards old age. From an evolutionary perspective it has been argued that disgust decreases with fertility because a person no longer needs to keep themselves or their offspring healthy in order to continue the species. However, it could be simpler than that; perhaps we become inured to supposedly disgusting sights through caring for dependants. Moreover, as people reach adulthood they gradually worry less about other people’s perceptions, so you might expect a corresponding reduction in the fear that other people might find you or your behaviour disgusting.

Ultimately, a little variation in our individual sensitivity to disgust doesn’t seem to matter and it’s unclear whether the most sensitive people do succeed in avoiding disease more successfully than others. An extreme excess of feelings of disgust can result in an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) involving strict washing routines and lengthy rituals. A person might wash their hands in a precise order, even cupping water in the hand and splashing it over the taps to avoid recontamination when they turn the taps off. These rituals can become so time-consuming that they are disabling. A person might spend every morning scrubbing the kitchen to ensure that it’s definitely germ-free and, in time, might become unable to leave the house because nowhere else is sufficiently hygienic.

The American movie mogul Howard Hughes became so obsessed with the avoidance of germs that he employed staff whose job it was to keep him from contamination. He devised precise rules such as using at least fifteen tissues to open the cabinet where he kept his hearing aid. Before handing him a spoon his servants had to cover the handle in tissue, seal it with tape and then wrap a second tissue on top. His obsession with dirt ruled his life, eventually leading him to live as a recluse.

While researching the way the brain processes disgust, Mary Phillips wondered whether the people with this particular type of OCD might show differences in brain activity. She scanned the brains of people with and without the disorder whilst they looked at a series of pictures that most people would find disgusting, such as photos of filthy toilets and mutilated bodies. In amongst these she added some photos which only those with washing obsessions would be likely to find repulsive – a plate covered in tomato sauce, an unmade bed. The results were striking. The insula was activated in everyone when they saw the disgusting pictures, but it also lit up in people with OCD when they saw the harmless pictures of domestic untidiness. What we can’t tell from this experiment is which came first. Do the people with OCD have an overactive insula, causing them to feel the same degree of revulsion on seeing a dirty plate that the rest of us might feel when we see a dead animal? Or is it the other way around? Is the person so anxious about dirt that this is reflected in their brain activity? Dr Phillips’ forthcoming study might bring us closer to the answer. She’s planning to study people’s brains before and after treatment for OCD. Once they have recovered, the activity in the insula should, in theory, reduce. However, this still won’t tell us why the problem started or whether the insula can simply go wrong by itself.

One curious finding was that people with OCD also have trouble spotting expressions of disgust in other people. This is surprising because you would expect those with a particular sensitivity to disgust to be alert to other people’s warnings that there’s something disgusting nearby.

An over-sensitivity to disgust might also be implicated in some phobias. When people have irrational fears an element of disgust is sometimes involved. To compare a mild phobic situation with one of more rational fear, while the thought of a large spider makes me shudder with horror, the idea of being stranded, dangling from a rope on a steep mountainside does not make me feel revolted – although it does make my heart beat faster. And intriguingly, it has been found that people with a phobia of blood respond not with a fast heart rate as they would in other situations that scare them, but with the slowed heartbeat you would expect with disgust. Research has found that people who are afraid of spiders do tend to be at the higher end of the disgust sensitivity scale – with those more likely to be horrified at the idea of sharing a bottle of water, for example. In one experiment Peter De Jong from Maastricht University talked people through three scenarios. In the first you had to imagine you were a care assistant whose job it was to go into a room where an elderly man was vomiting, clean him up and change his shirt. As soon as you have finished he is sick again. In a second scenario you had to picture yourself descending some stairs into a cellar to fetch a bottle. Spiders’ webs hang from the ceiling and you duck as a web touches your face. You see a spider lowering itself down on a string and then feel something touch your neck. When you take a bottle out of the crate, you disturb a large spider which runs across your hand. The third situation was more pleasant; you are simply waiting to meet a friend at the station. During this guided imagery the experimenters recorded the extent to which each person moved their levator labii superioris – the sneering muscle which indicates disgust. It was found that the people who were phobic about spiders found the spider scenario the most disgusting. You might have expected them to be afraid, but instead their facial expressions showed disgust. Strikingly, spider phobics also scored higher on a scale measuring general sensitivity to disgust. It seems that spider phobia might actually highlight a fear of contact with something disgusting.