Emotions and the Failure of a Nation
Every nation should strive to have a positive emotional profile.
Nations with positive emotional profiles grow stronger. Negative profiles destroy nations.?
The emotional profile has more impact than a nation’s laws and regulations. Emotional profiles drive a nation’s behavior.
Nations give different weight to different emotions.?In every nation, a group of those emotions plays a dominant role.?An emotion of great importance in one nation may play a much lesser role in another.?The influence various emotions have on the nation’s behavior creates its emotional profile.
For a great nation, a positive emotional profile is a blessing.?Good things just happen.?There are high levels of trust.?Economies function more efficiently.?People are calm, happy, and take pride in what they do.?They cooperate with one another to achieve positive goals.
Negative emotional profiles drag nations down.?People are driven by fear, anger, anxiety, and envy.?They become disillusioned. It’s hard to have hope if no one cares about you.
Nations expend a disproportionate amount of energy on solving problems using laws and regulations to achieve their goals.?Shaping emotions has a bigger payoff.?
Seemingly all of Washington is fixated on passing laws and making regulations that will force its citizens to behave in responsible ways.?But anxiety, anger, crime, hate, prejudice, envy, and polarization still thrive.?A positive emotional profile has the potential to eliminate much of this social distress.?Yet we continue to spend billions and invest time in electing officials who attempt to solve these problems using the machinery of government. There are Cabinet positions devoted to the treasury, interior, agriculture, commerce, labor, etc. but none focused on our national emotional profile.?We leave the job to volunteers.?
Churches, civic organizations, business groups like the Business Round Table and Chamber of Commerce, community groups, and business and civic leaders frequently spend energy on improving our emotional profile.?But as a nation, we are underinvesting even though doing so would yield big social and monetary payoffs.
Positive emotional profiles create trusting nations.?A study by Deloitte estimated that a 10% increase in trusting people raises the national GDP by 0.5% and if 50% of Brazil’s population trusted most people, the economy would grow 2.2% faster.[i] There are numerous other economic payoffs as well.?Positive profiles are associated with reduced mental healthcare costs.
Our negative emotional profile is dragging down our great nation.?Fear, anger, anxiety, guilt, shame, and envy dominate.?Those emotions drive mistrust, polarization, unhappiness, frustration, and conflict.?They undermine our ability to agree on common goals and to work together to achieve them.?Compare our emotional state today with the happy times following World War II.
Things started badly, but America survived the Great Depression (1929-1939).?It went on to brilliant victory over the fascist scourge in World War II.?Then it thrived in the postwar prosperity boom (1946-1973).?Incomes increased, people moved from crowded cities to healthy suburbs, they bought homes, cars, and appliances, and they built the highways to take them to where they wanted to go.?They agreed on common goals.?People were happy. Everybody liked Ike, the affable President, Five Star General, and World War II hero with a fatherly image. Not everything was perfect, but things were very good.
The dominant emotions of the time were pride, awe, hope, admiration, calmness, sympathy, and happiness. The positive emotional profile coevolved with the economic boom.?The boom made us feel better about ourselves and experience positive emotions.?Those positive emotions fueled the optimism that helped to build the economy.?The positive emotional profile helped to make a great nation even greater.
Paul Thagard has observed that different nations have different typical emotions.?He has provided a list of the perceptions of dominant national emotions in 31 countries.?Finland was characterized by perseverance, England by a stiff upper lip and carry-on, Korea by han defined as regretful and sorrowful, Japan by ganbaru (tenaciousness), and Portugal by saudade (nostalgic melancholic longing).[ii]
We misunderstand emotional systems.?We underinvest in making them work for us.?If we better understood them, we could better sculpt them to support our needs.?A good place to start is to look at what creates emotions and why we have emotions in the first place.
Emotions are extremely complex.?Since we cannot get fine-grained cellular access to the neural pathways in the brain, there is much we do not understand about them.?There is general agreement about many of their aspects but not scientific consensus.?According to Wikipedia, “Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure.”[iii]
In 1972, Paul Ekman published his list of the six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.?The list has been expanded.
It is a testimony to our lack of appreciation of emotions that as recently as 50 years ago, Ekman could achieve notoriety by identifying the six basic ones.
There is now, general agreement that there are 27 emotional categories.?We have assigned an emotion name to each category but not all lists agree on the names. ?There is general agreement.?Table 1 lists the 27 emotions.
Each one of these emotions is associated with a neurological pathway in the brain. Our emotions are embedded in our genes.?Evolution provided mankind with emotions to ensure its survival.?Fear and disgust are the most obvious examples.
Fear can be triggered by any of our five senses.
In the case of fear, our senses alert the amygdala to an alarming sight, sound, taste, or smell. The signal is passed on to the hypothalamus which triggers our fight or flight response. Stress hormones such as cortisol are released. The amygdala alerts the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.[iv]
Life’s first emotion was disgust.?Behavior associated with disgust even exists in life forms without brains.?Bacteria will bias their random walks to move away from toxic environments.[v]
In the 1860s, Charles Darwin suggested that disgust served an evolutionary purpose.?He hypothesized humans prone to revulsion had better chances of survival and passed on those genes to their offspring.[vi] ?Humans are disgusted by bad smells given off by feces, dead rotting animals, hazardous waste sites, and poor air quality.?Staying away from those things increases our chances of survival.?The disgust pathways in our brains are also activated by the social activity we find repugnant and threatening, enabling us to avoid those situations.
The survival aspects of other emotions are less obvious.?They are there to promote prosocial behavior.?They support human herds.
The brain’s frontal lobe plays a role in emotions involved in interpersonal relationships and social situations such as gratitude, satisfaction, anger, jealousy, pain, and sadness.[vii]
We know very little about the biological roots of anger.[viii] ?Scientists have been able to turn mellow mice into aggressors by electrically stimulating an area called the ventromedial hypothalamus.?Researchers think those same circuits may be involved in angry behavior in humans.[ix] ?Shared anger promotes prosocial behavior by getting groups to work together to confront challenges.
Humans experience two types of awe. Positive awe is driven by aesthetic experiences and negative awe by threats.?Both awe experiences deactivate the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG).?Positive awe is associated with increased functional connectivity between the MTG and the anterior/posterior cingulate cortex, which are associated with the aesthetic reward process. Threat-awe is associated with increased functional connectivity between the MTG and amygdala, which detects and processes threat stimuli.[x]
Our emotional pathways are not entirely determined by genetics. They are shaped by experience, social values, and exposure.?An alert that might cause a muted fear response in an average individual may trigger extreme fear and anxiety in a sufferer of PTSD. Social norms define much of what is shameful behavior and hence when and how we experience shame.?An LGBT individual might feel well accepted in San Francisco and experience extreme shame in other parts of our country.
APS Fellow Bernard Rimé, an emeritus professor of psychology at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, has found that individuals react to events by sharing their emotions with others.?This social sharing of emotions has been linked to increased social belonging, positive affect, and prosocial attitude.[xi] ?Research at the Santa Fe Institute has found that shame, guilt, pride, regret, joy, and other visceral reactions play a central role in sustaining cooperative relations.?The researchers have explained the role prosocial emotions play in evolutionary success.[xii]
Mae West’s observation about sensory pleasure was that “Too much of a good thing is wonderful” but nature had a more basic agenda.?It put sensory pleasure and the other twenty-six emotions there to ensure our survival.
Table 1 presents our nation’s current emotional profile.?The emotions are listed in order of their dominance or influence.?There is a great deal of subjectivity associated with the list but there is also a modicum of data that supports the ranking.?The Table has three categories of emotions.?Dominating emotions have the greatest influence on our behavior.?Less experienced emotions are ones that play important roles in creating an emotional profile but that have declined in importance. Stable emotions are ones whose impact has not changed much in recent years.
Emotions have also been labeled as positive and negative. Negative emotions do not necessarily have negative consequences.?Fear, a negative emotion helps us to avoid being eaten by a tiger. Similarly, positive emotions do not always lead to good results.?Positive emotions are sometimes created to pursue evil goals.
Everyone treasures family photos and the nostalgia they trigger.?But nostalgia has many uses.?Strongmen and forceful leaders leverage nostalgia in promises to revive a past that never was or a pure identity that never existed.[xiii] ?Viktor Orban, Hungary’s autocratic leader, is leveraging nostalgia to strengthen his position and fight emigration.?Hitler leveraged nostalgia.
Emotions just don’t happen.?They are activated by our senses— a loud unexpected noise sets off a fear response, a beautiful view of snow-capped mountains puts us in a state of awe, and news we take in with our eyes and ears about the Capitol Riots might trigger anger, disgust, pride, or fear.?
The national emotional profile is determined by the emotions that are activated and the ones that are suppressed. In the past, the normal flow of things activated a large portion of our emotions.?That proportion has been in sharp decline. Increasingly our emotions are being activated by individuals and institutions to serve their needs.?The internet and the tools available in virtual space have driven down the cost and increased the efficiency of activating emotions.?This has greatly expanded business and social opportunities.?The news and targeted communication have become the dominant mechanisms for triggering emotions.
Angry commentators on talk radio like Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson on Fox News have played a significant role in making the nation angry.?But the greatest impact is occurring in virtual space.?
In virtual space, the consumer’s mind, habits, and location are an open book. Not only can facial expressions be read but technologists are learning how to determine a user’s emotion at the time the interaction is taking place.?This has enabled providers to target information at users of great interest and that will motivate them to respond.?Those tools are now available to individuals, greatly increasing the probability an emotional activation will go viral.
Using these tools, individuals and institutions can efficiently build large audiences by spreading fear, anger, anxiety, and conspiracy theories.?Negative emotions are widely used instruments for advancing one’s causes. They also create numerous business opportunities.??
The widely discredited Alex Jones used these tools to create a conspiracy theory business empire. His Infowars website spread wild conspiracy theories and fake news.?His most audacious claim was that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a “giant hoax” carried out by actors who oppose the Second Amendment right to bear arms.?
Jones sold $165 million of dietary supplements and survival gear over a three-year period. He promoted colloidal silver toothpaste as a cure for the coronavirus and water filtration products to save the public from chlorine.[xiv] ?Unfortunately for Jones, InfoWars’ parent company was forced into bankruptcy when the courts awarded almost $50 million in damages to the Sandy Hook parents.[xv]
The economics of activation are shaping the nation’s emotional profile.?They have helped to make fear, anger, and anxiety dominant in our profile.
By taking a deeper look at some of our emotions we can gain a better understanding of how things shape our emotional profile.
Amusement—Surprisingly, amusement has become the country’s dominant emotion.?We are amusing ourselves to the detriment of society.?
Consider the fact that the average American spends a little over 13 hours per day on activities that must be confined to the physical world like sleeping, eating, and physical work, and 11 hours per day on the job, in leisure activities, and being entertained--all activities that can be impacted by virtual space.[xvi] One study estimated that American adults were spending 7.5 hours per day on digital media.[xvii] A continual stream of new applications provides users with attractive opportunities to amuse themselves.?These applications get better at commanding a user’s attention.?Daily users spend 51 minutes on Instagram, 74 on YouTube, and then along came TikTok which will hold users’ attention for 95.?It is easy to envision amusement numbers climbing in the years to come as existing applications are improved, virtual headsets create ever more realistic experiences as our bodies become adorned with Internet of Things devices.
The social isolation driven by covid has been an important contributing factor to the time we spend amusing ourselves.
Our fixation on amusement is driven by other emotions.?We amuse ourselves with fear and anger.?
Too much amusement undermines the functioning of social institutions, and families, and saps time from important social endeavors like learning and community involvement. Life is better with moderate amounts of entertainment, but family life suffers when we spend all our time staring at our phones interacting with virtual environments rather than talking to one another.
Anger and Fear—Americans are worried and disillusioned.?There are lots of reasons. In the past, hope sustained many Americans. Today 63% no longer believe in the American dream.?White men and women are disappointed.?They view the American dream as dead, see America’s role in the world as not what it used to be, and are concerned that life has not worked out as well as they expected.?Some now perceive themselves as part of a persecuted minority especially since whites are forecasted to no longer be a majority population in the country by 2024.[xviii]
We live in an angry country.?Anger has been on the rise for the past 20 years.?In 2001, 8% of Americans told Pew research they were angry with the federal government and by 2013 the number had tripled.[xix] ?By 2016, the number had grown to 80%.[xx] ?A 2016 survey by NBC News of people who were exposed to news found that 88% of Americans got angry once a week and 68% at least once a day.[xxi]
Many people blame the news for stoking peoples’ fear and anger.?The most often cited example is Fox News. ?But that is only part of the problem. Charles Duhigg has observed, “When we scrutinize the sources of our anger, we should see clearly that our rage is often being stoked not for our benefit but for someone else’s.”[xxii]
As discussed above, the efficient tools we have in virtual space for activating fear and anger have turned their activation into opportunities.?Political leaders, on both the left and right, have stoked fear and anxiety among Americans to serve their political agendas.?Many benefit emotionally and financially from spreading fake news.
If we are going to reduce the level of fear and anger in our society, we will have to deal with its economics.
Anxiety—Since 2000, the number of individuals suffering from mental health issues has been on the rise.?Anxiety increased from 5.12% in 2008 to 6.68% in 2018 among adult Americans.[xxiii] ?Anxiety is a factor in depression and suicide.?Depression increased significantly in the U.S. from 6.6 percent in 2005 to 7.3% in 2015. The rise was most rapid among those aged 12 to 17, reaching 12.7% in 2015.[xxiv] Suicide rates increased by 33% and were responsible for more than 47,500 deaths in 2019.
Undoubtedly, numerous factors contributed to these increases.?Covid has played a role, but the increase was going on long before covid.[xxv] ?Americans are anxious about their safety, health, finances, and government.?One survey found a five-point increase in anxiety on a scale of one hundred between 2017 and 2021.[xxvi]
There are numerous studies indicating a high degree of correlation between the heavy use of social media and various forms of emotional disorder. Several studies have been able to identify instances where the heavy use of the internet has increased the level of emotional distress.?
Facebook has been studying the impact of Instagram on mental health since 2019.?Their studies found that “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” and that “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”?Among Instagram users, 25% of teenagers who reported feeling “not good enough” said the feelings were triggered by Instagram.?On Facebook users are surrounded by the perfect and patched up perfect and find themselves constantly engaging in a comparison race with the ideal—a perfect formula for destroying self-esteem and increasing anxiety.
High levels of anxiety have negative social and economic consequences. Anxiety undermines trust. It is hard to trust any person or institution if you constantly feel threatened by it. Social institutions, businesses, and government struggle in low-trust environments.
Guilt and Shame—We have become a nation riven by guilt and shame. Guilt and shame have become favored tools of those attempting to reduce discrimination, racial inequality, and suppress what some consider noxious political and social views.?
Guilt and shame have different effects when they are used to control the deviant behavior of a small minority or trying to drive large groups to behave differently.?Shaming the behavior of a student who violates the honor code is a good way to reduce cheating.
When one shames the behavior of large groups, the shaming often triggers fear, anger, and anxiety.?When that happens, the shamed group might take action against the shamers or end up with greater feelings of antipathy towards the groups the shamers are trying to protect.?Shaming motivates the Proud Boys’ attacks on Black Lives Matter events.
The challenge for our country is to build a more positive emotional profile.
Government does have an important role to play.?If the economy is failing, crime is running rampant, and hard-working people can’t make ends meet, it is virtually impossible for a country to have a positive emotional profile.
There are actions our government needs to take to address the failures of the free market and income inequality to restore the American dream.?The focus here is on emotions and those issues will not be addressed here.
But addressing the dream issues is not enough to create a positive emotional profile. We must take other actions.?A good place to start is by addressing the economics of amusement, fear, anger, and anxiety.?We must make it more expensive to activate and experience those emotions.?
In the past twenty years, the cost of one-to-many communications and the cost of distributing information and entertainment has dropped to near zero.
Those services have very high economic value and have been dramatically underpriced.?When things get mispriced, they get abused.?The spreading of fake news was underpriced and that made it possible to turn spreading fake news into a profitable business.??
Twenty years ago, the cost of one-to-many communication was large and controlled.?If you wanted to talk to lots of people you had to spend money on advertising and doing things like mailings.?If chose to use mass media, you had to make it by the editors.?Today, communications are virtually free.?It cost almost nothing to send an email. There were also large costs associated with distributing information.?Now consumers can download it or view it on a website virtually free.
If we want to change the economics of amusement, fear, anger, and anxiety, we are going to have to make activating and experiencing them more expensive.?Communication in virtual space must be made more expensive.?
The ability to precisely target communications has made activating fear, anger, and anxiety extremely efficient.?The targeting makes use of volumes of personal information compiled by internet providers.?If users owned their personal information and it could not be used to target them without their permission, the merchants of fear would lose one of their most valuable resources.
The other things that could be done are soft things.?We educate students about government and how laws shape behavior, but we do not provide them with similar information about emotions and their management.?Leadership could help as well.?They should make less use of negative emotions in their efforts to motivate behavior.?They should use positive emotions like pride, hope, and sympathy to motivate behavior.?
There is no need to Make America Great Again.?It is already great. ?It could be made better if it had a positive emotional profile. We need to Make America’s Emotional Profile Great Again by dumping guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, and anger.
We need to make pride, hope, and happiness our dominant emotions.
__________________________________________________________________________
Bill Davidow Site? |?Twitter ?|?Facebook ?|?Medium ?
[vi] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/gross-why-humans-are-hardwired-to-feel-disgust
[xiii] https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/fintan-o-toole-other-countries-yearn-for-the-good-old-days-not-ireland-1.4725723
[xxiv] https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/depression-rise-us-especially-among-young-teens
[xxv] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7040e3.htm
You might find this interesting https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Learn-Navigation-Moods-Acquisition/dp/0692801790/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3UT136YRO4LPS&keywords=gloria+flores+mood&qid=1663095702&sprefix=gloria+flores+mood%2Caps%2C116&sr=8-1