March 1, 1999

Emotions

There are six basic emotions: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise and happiness.
What is basic about basic emotions? They are represented by facial expressions which are universally recognized.
Paul Eckman from UCSF, in the late 50s, went around the world taking and showing pictures of people expressing these emotions. He found that although each language has a different range of subtle emotions, such as chagrin, in every culture, people can recognize the expressions of the basic emotions. Eckman trained people to code for each of the 44 muscles in the face to do the study.
The phenomenon was also noticed by Darwin. This study shows that there is an innate, universal physiology of emotions, that emotions involve the brain and the body. Other examples: when you are angry, your skin temperature rises about .5 degrees; when you feel fear, your skin temperature falls about .5 degrees. That is why we become "boiling mad" and "frozen with fear." Some emotions are more basic than others and some emotions are combinations of basic emotions and more conceptual ideas. Thus, there are basic levels of emotion, which are encoded in the muscles.

Desire isn't included because it isn't manifested with the same facial muscles as the six basic emotions. Primates seem to have similar kinds of facial expressions corresponding to their emotions, but it hasn't been proven. Facial muscles do not seem to group into those for positive emotions and those for negative. The emotions are coded according to the basic level of the six basic emotions.

Basic Colors

The basic color terms in English are red, blue, yellow, green, brown, orange, purple, pink, gray, white, black.
The basic color terms are mono-morpheme; they are not based on a color of a thing in the world, such as gold, copper, blonde; they are not subsets of other colors, such as scarlet, which is a kind of red; and they are in general use.
Languages have from 2-12 basic color terms. Dani has 2, Russian has 12.
In the 1950s, it used to be believed that colors were arbitrary in the languages of the world. The assumption was that you couldn't predict the ranges of the world's different color terms.
Paul Kay and Brent Berlin did a study in which they asked where the boundaries of color terms were and also what colors from a color chart were the best examples of each term. They asked 100 anthropologists in the field to do the experiment. They found that the boundaries for different languages were all different, but the best examples are all the same. For instance, if a language has one color term which covers both blue and green, the best examples for that color will be central blue and central green alternately. Central blue and central green are the same hues chosen by English speakers as the best examples of blue and green respectively. Dani is a language which has two colors, warm (covering white, red, yellow and orange) and cool (covering black, blue, green and purple). Speakers of Dani chose central red, central white or central yellow as the best examples of the warm category and central blue, central black or central green as best examples of the cool category. Speakers might choose different central colors as best examples on different trials. Central orange and purple were not chosen as best examples.
There is some variability in the central colors which may be caused in part by gender difference. Men have 2 possible types of retinal cones responding to the wavelength of green, while women have 16, so there is some natural variability in color perception. In some cultures, certain colors may be environmentally very prominent (such as the color of a certain type of plant), and these colors may be chosen as best example of their category rather than the central color. It is important to remember that the basic colors are basic for human color perception; they are not necessarily basic when we are creating colors by mixing dyes or pigments.

Eleanor Rosch tried to teach Dani speakers two types of color systems, one based on the English system and one random system in which the color terms didn't necessarily include central colors. The Dani speakers easily learned the English system, but couldn't learn the random system. Why is this?
The focal colors are determined by the receptive fields of color cells in the vision system. In the visual system, color is determined by cones in the retina. Cones respond chemically to three ranges of light wavelengths, long, medium and short. The cones are connected to neurons which are further connected to neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus. In the lateral geniculate nucleus, there are neurons with center- surround receptive fields. These cells respond maximally to configurations of one color in the center and another color surrounding, for example a red center and a green surround, a green center and a red surround, a blue center and a yellow surround or a yellow center and a blue surround. A graph of the response curves of these cells is in the reader selection 3 from Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, p. 27.
Pure blue occurs when there is no response from red or green. This is not necessarily the peak of the blue response. The curves intersect at points. Where red and blue intersect, we perceive purple. Where yellow and red intersect, we see orange. Where red and white intersect, we see pink, etc.

Why is this interesting? It shows that there are universals of color; color isn't arbitrary. Also, this shows that color is not in the world. Colors are not individual wavelengths or collections of adjacent wavelengths. Color is not inherent in objects.
The color we perceive depends on the interaction between an object with reflectance, nearby reflectances, lightwaves, cones and neurons.

Why can you imagine or dream in color? Because the colors are not in the world; they are characterized by patterns of neural activity in the brain.
The brain also has a lot of top/down processing, descending fibers into the lateral geniculate nucleus. When we imagine, neurons in the primary visual cortex are activated by what you're thinking about. Similarly, when we dream about moving, the motor cortex is very active, even though we are not physically moving. Some people have a deficiency in their ability to inhibit actual movement during dreaming, so they thrash about and move around during dreaming. Top/down processing is also seen in context effects in which we interpret perceptual input differently depending on what you're thinking about. For instance, the interpretation of a picture which can be interpreted one way or another will be influenced by context. Anytime we interpret input, the result is a combination of the perception and the other firing in the brain.

Do blind people have no concept of color? Congenitally blind people don't have the same notion of color as sighted people. But they do have some of the same ideas. For instance, blind people do know that color is a surface property and that it has to do with reflected light.

What are mental images? Some people have vivid images, or conscious images. Other people have unconscious images in which they do not "see" the image, but can answer questions about it. This phenomenon shows up in language. For instance, take the phrase "to keep someone at arm's length." If we illustrate this phrase with our bodies, we will put our arms out horizontally in front of us at about chest height.
Why do we do this? Because we are imagining a situation in which there is someone physically in front of us, facing us. We are using our arms to keep that person physically apart from us. We know this because, even though the idiom is about social and emotional distance, we use the metaphors that social and emotional harm is physical harm and that intimacy is physical closeness. We use the image of holding someone physically away from us plus the metaphors to understand and reason about this idioms. This is an "imageable idiom." Idioms were previously thought to be arbitrary in meaning. Some of them are, such as "by and large," but some idioms are structured by an image. A lot of abstract meaning is based on sensory motor understanding.

Where are mental images formed? They are formed in the visual cortex.
Blind people still have mental imagery and still use the visual cortex. Studies have been done in which sighted people were asked to imagine an image, such as the letter A, mentally rotate it a certain number of degrees and press a button when they were finished rotating the image. The further they were asked to rotate the image, the longer is took before they pressed the button. The same results were found for blind people, who were asked to perform the task with a Braille letter. In another experiment, people memorized a treasure map and were told to imagine walking a distance on the map and press a button when they finished. Again, the longer the distance on the map, the longer it took before they pressed the button. The same results were found with blind people for this experiment as well. Blind as well as sighted people have image schemas which characterize features of the spatial structure of a situation.

Brains have areas in the prefrontal cortex in which there are connections between the motor and visual systems. In this area there are larger scale neural networks which characterize complex actions which have logics and inferential structures.

What do color and emotion have to do with basic level categories? What are the properties of basic categories? We can get a gestalt perception of them and we have motor programs which we use with them. These properties both have to do with how you interact with things in the world and with the brain. These properties are not "in the world." Would you expect to have basic level movements? Actions such as walking, running, throwing, grabbing, pushing, etc. are basic level movements. Moving is a superordinate category and sauntering is a subordinate category. We would also expect to find basic body movements around the world, which result from the interactions between the body and the environment. Some movements may be basic in some cultures and not in others, for example, squatting is more common in other cultures but not in American cultures. The body, however, determines the class of actions which can be basic movements. In the brain, the concepts of movement, color, etc. involves the parts of the brains which are also involved in physical movement, perception of color, etc. It turns out that metaphor is a basic mechanism for mapping from what the body can do to abstract concepts.

Image schemas

What is a spatial relations concept? Above, below, through, under, around, etc. Are these the same in other languages? No, they are very different, even in languages similar to English, such as Dutch. In some languages, the entire system is different. For example in Mixtec, the system of spatial relations is based on bodily projections, so "The cat is sitting under the tree" would be expressed as "The cat is sitting the tree's foot." The image schema structures what is seen in the situation. For instance, what is involved in "on"? Physically "above," contact and support. For "on the wall", the concepts of contact and support apply, but not physically above. So prepositions, such as "on" are made of different components, primitive image schemas. The components are universal. They ways they are put together vary tremendously.

The components don't exist in the world. For instance, what are the components of the concept of "in." There is a container, or bounded region in space with a boundary, interior and exterior. There also has to be a landmark, located in the interior and landmark, which is the container, as in "the water is in the bottle."
Also, there is a force dynamic structure in which the container exerts force on the item located at the interior. For instance, the bottle keeps the water from falling out.
Also, the interior of the container is highlighted. So the container schema, the landmark/trajector assignment and the force dynamic structure are all involved in the concept of "in." The concept of "out" uses the same container schema as "in" but it highlights the exterior, and the trajector is located at the exterior.
Schemas such as container, contact, source-path-goal, balance, front, back, etc. and force dynamics are universal, but they are combined in different ways by different languages.