Complex social emotions like “shame” or “xenophobia” may indeed be human-specific; we certainly don’t have good ways to elicit them in animals, and (at the time of the book but probably also today) we don’t have well-validated neural correlates of them in humans either. In fact, we probably shouldn’t even expect that there are special-purpose brain systems for cognitively complex social emotions. Neurotransmitters and macroscopic brain structures evolve over hundreds of millions of years; we should only expect to see “special-purpose hardware” for capacities that humans share with other mammals or vertebrates.
…We have a repertoire of probably hundreds of human-universal “innate behaviors”. Examples of innate behaviors presumably include things like vomiting, “disgust reaction(s)”, “laughing”, “Duchenne smile”, and so on.
Different innate behaviors are associated with specific, human-universal, genetically-specified groups of neurons in the hypothalamus and brainstem.
These innate behaviors can involve the execution of specific and human-universal facial expressions, body postures, and/or other physiological changes like cortisol release.
These innate behaviors have human-universal triggers (and suppressors). But it’s hard to describe exactly what those triggers are, because the triggers are internal signals like “Signal XYZ going into the hypothalamus and brainstem”, not external situations like “getting caught breaking the rules”.
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Separately, we also have a bunch of concepts relating to emotion—things like “guilt” and “schadenfreude”, as those words are used in everyday life. These concepts are encoded as patterns of connections in the cortex (including hippocampus) and thalamus, and they form part of our conscious awareness.
Emotion concepts typically relate to both innate behaviors and the situation in which those behaviors are occurring. For example, Ekman says “surprise” versus “fear” typically involve awfully similar facial expressions, which raises the possibility that the very same innate behaviors tend to activate in both “surprise” and “fear”, and that we instead distinguish “surprise” from “fear” based purely on context.
…the relation between emotion concepts and concurrent innate behaviors is definitely not 1-to-1! But it’s definitely not “perfectly uncorrelated” either!
Emotion concepts, like all other concepts, are at least somewhat culturally-dependent, and are learned within a lifetime, and play a central role in how we understand and remember what’s going on.
Shame and xenophobia are obviously emotion concepts. But do they have any straightforward correspondence to innate behaviors? For xenophobia, I’d guess “mostly no”—I think there are innate behaviors related to responding to enemies in general, and when those behaviors get triggered in a certain context we call it xenophobia. For shame, I dunno.
Also, shameless plug for Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch, in which I attempt to reverse-engineer the set of “innate behaviors” related to human compassion, spite, and status-seeking.
I more-or-less agree; shameless plug for my post Lisa Feldman Barrett versus Paul Ekman on facial expressions & basic emotions related to that. In particular, summary of what I believe (from §2.3):
Shame and xenophobia are obviously emotion concepts. But do they have any straightforward correspondence to innate behaviors? For xenophobia, I’d guess “mostly no”—I think there are innate behaviors related to responding to enemies in general, and when those behaviors get triggered in a certain context we call it xenophobia. For shame, I dunno.
Also, shameless plug for Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch, in which I attempt to reverse-engineer the set of “innate behaviors” related to human compassion, spite, and status-seeking.