Why Do Humans Actually Have Emotions? - Chris Williamson with Dr Laith Al-Shawaf

Dr Laith Al-Shawaf is an evolutionary psychology researcher and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at UCCS. Humans have a wide range of emotions. But why do we feel anything at all? Why do we actually have emotions and how did they come about? Expect to learn why humans evolved to have emotions, whether some emotions are more basic than others, evolutionary explanations for joy, anger, disgust, envy, awe, happiness and much more…

The Adaptive Function of Emotions

• Emotions are adaptive and serve a function, contrary to the long history in psychology and philosophy of viewing them as irrational forces that cause trouble.
• Each emotion has an evolved function tied to survival or reproduction, or goals tributary to them, such as navigating status hierarchies, building friendships, and repairing relationships.
• Examples of functions include:
  • Fear protects us from danger and helps us escape.
  • Disgust protects us from pathogens and contamination.
  • Anger helps us negotiate with people who are treating us poorly or blocking our goals, essentially saying, "treat me better or I will impose costs on you or withhold benefits".
  • Romantic love serves to bond two people together in a pair bond.
  • Envy is useful in navigating status hierarchies.
  • Guilt functions to repair relationships where we have harmed a valued person.
  • Sadness functions to solicit aid from loved ones and helps one withdraw, conserve resources, and recalibrate if stuck in a non-working situation (e.g., a bad job or marriage).
• Emotions advocate for our interests in the broader sense, which includes survival, reproduction, building networks of kin and friends, and having loving relationships; it is not meant in a purely selfish way.

The Emotion Paradox and Maladaptive Outputs

• There is an "emotion Paradox": emotions are adaptive, useful, and necessary for basic tasks of survival, but they also cause great distress, lead us astray, are involved in psychological disorders, and often seem shortsighted.
• Emotions evolved to promote adaptive action, not to help us feel good or to be maximally accurate ("veridical").
• Even "negative" emotions (e.g., fear, disgust, shame, jealousy) are just as functional and adaptive as "positive" emotions; they evolved to help us survive and reproduce, not to make us happy.
• An emotion system can be adaptive overall, even if individual outputs are maladaptive (e.g., anxiety being overactive or anger misfiring).

Emotions as Coordinating Mechanisms and Modes of Operation

• Emotions are more than just the feeling state or subjective experience; they are complex information processing instantiated in the nervous system.
• An emotion acts as a coordinating mechanism or mode of operation, orchestrating a cascade of changes in the body and mind (attention, physiology, memory, behavior) in service of solving the adaptive problem at hand.
• For example, when experiencing fear, attention narrows to the danger, digestion and reproduction are suppressed, energy is shunted to muscles for escape, and memory activates to make escape routes salient.
• The feeling state is typically the most salient, consciously accessible, and valenced part of the emotion, causing people (including psychologists) to overly identify the emotion with that feeling.

Anxiety and the Smoke Detector Principle

• Our anxiety system is hyperactive and overreactive, which is explained by the smoke detector principle or error management theory.
• The brain, like a smoke alarm, is intentionally built to be biased toward false alarms (detecting a threat when none exists, which is a minor nuisance) to avoid the catastrophic error of failing to detect a real threat (which could be deadly).
• This hyperactivity is not a "bug" or pathology but an adaptive feature designed to be maximally safe, not maximally accurate. Understanding this underlying logic can take the "sting out of anxiety" by normalising the experience.

Shame, Guilt, and Reputation Management

• Shame functions primarily to prevent status loss and social devaluation in the eyes of one's peers. It prevents behaviours that would cause reputational loss, prevents information about such behaviours from getting out, and encourages appeasement if the information is released.
• The degree of shame one feels closely tracks the degree of social devaluation that others would impose for that trait or behaviour, a correlation that holds across cultures.
• Crucially, one can feel shame even when innocent and aware of their innocence, as long as they believe others are devaluing or rejecting them. Shame is fundamentally about perceived social devaluation, not culpability.
• Guilt is distinct from shame; it focuses on repairing a specific relationship with a valued person after transgressive behaviour.
• The extreme pain felt from social exclusion (e.g., ostracism, solitary confinement) indicates that reputation and acceptance by peers were essential for survival in ancestral environments.
• The flip side of shame is Pride, which encourages behaviours and traits that bring social valuation and respect, and the advertising of those traits to the group. Pride, like other emotions, can undershoot or overshoot, causing friction when overexpressed.

Romantic Love and the Commitment Problem

• Love helps solve the commitment problem: without love, a purely rational calculation would often favour cheating to gain immediate benefits, as humans tend to be future-discounters.
• Love works by pulling the costs of cheating from the future into the present, making an individual feel guilt and compelled not to cheat right now, thus cementing the pair bond and altering the rational calculus.
• It is suggested that you want a partner who loves you for non-rational reasons, as listing rational criteria makes their commitment fragile if they meet someone who scores better on those criteria in the future.

Uncommon Emotions and the Basic Emotions Debate

• The common list of "basic emotions" (joy, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, fear) is somewhat arbitrary, based on historical findings about universal and universally recognisable facial expressions.
• An evolutionary perspective suggests that emotions without a universal facial expression (like Envy or Regret) are not necessarily less fundamental; the decision to signal an emotion depends on the costs and benefits of signalling it to others.
• Emotions like romantic love, guilt, and gratitude, which are universal and functional, are often excluded from the "basic" list without strong theoretical justification.

Happiness and the Evolutionary Mismatch

• Happiness is elusive for several evolutionary reasons.
• The hedonic treadmill (returning to an emotional baseline shortly after an accomplishment) is adaptive, not pathological. Ancestors who quickly sought the next goal would have outcompeted those who permanently rested on their laurels.
• Unavoidable competition for mates, status, and resources naturally generates unhappiness.
• Emotions evolved for survival and reproduction, not for happiness.
• Evolutionary mismatch (ancestral adaptation versus modern environment) contributes to distress. Modern life with atomised kin groups, sedentary jobs, poor diets, and constant exposure to unrealistically successful individuals on social media creates a "vicious cocktail" contributing to rising sadness, depression, and anxiety.

The Value of Understanding Emotional Logic

• Understanding the underlying adaptive logic of emotions can provide solace, especially for those high in the personality trait Need for Cognition (enjoying understanding and explanation).
• This understanding helps resolve the cognitive dissonance between an emotion feeling irrational and knowing it serves a deeper purpose, reducing self-flagellation and distress (second-order emotions).
• The absence of emotions makes us less capable of intelligent action, not more. Patients with brain damage to emotional centres (e.g., the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) struggle to make even trivial decisions because they lack the slight emotional preference that helps resolve choices.
• A nuanced approach should be adopted: neither blanket vilification nor blind trust of emotions. Instead, one should assess each emotion on a case-by-case basis to determine if it is currently serving its function or if it is maladaptive and needs cognitive reframing or regulation.

Emotions and Byproducts (Spandrels)

• Not everything in the human mind or body is an adaptation; some things are spandrels (byproducts)—side effects of other evolved mechanisms.
• An example of a postulated spandrel is belief in religion/gods, which may be a byproduct of hyperactive agency detection (a tendency to perceive agents in the world, even when none are present, as a safer error than missing a hidden threat).
• Written language is theorised to be a byproduct of mechanisms evolved for spoken language, which explains why reading and writing require significant formal education, unlike speaking.
• Even killing (e.g., murder) has been hypothesised to be a byproduct of aggressive mechanisms being over-triggered, or a failure of normal parental love mechanisms to activate sufficiently.

Chapters

00:00:00 Why Do We Have Emotions?
00:06:37 How Our Emotions Advocate For Us
00:14:02 Emotions From an Evolutionary Perspective
00:20:54 Are Some Emotions More Basic Than Others?
00:25:02 Why We Experience Fear & Surprise
00:28:34 How Shame is Adaptive
00:36:47 Why Anxiety is So Prevalent in Modern Society
00:44:59 Explaining the Trait of Need for Cognition
00:54:14 Feeling Emotions About Emotions
01:03:49 The Difference Between Envy & Jealousy
01:08:33 Emotions That Aren’t Really Adaptive
01:16:26 How Laith Applies His Work to Daily Life
01:32:55 Where to Find Laith