Fasten your seatbelts

Dylan Evans is impressed by Claudia Hammond's warm and witty investigation of the passions, Emotional Rollercoaster

Saturday March 5, 2005
The Guardian

Buy Emotional Rollercoaster at the Guardian bookshop

Emotions are the very stuff of life. They are what make life worth living, or too painful to endure. When we look back at the significant events in our lives, we tend to recall the highs and lows, the extreme points of passion, when we ascended to the heights of ecstasy or descended to the depths of despair. At times, however, the "emotional rollercoaster" can get rather dizzying, and it is then that we can profitably slow down and contemplate our weird psychology.

The rollercoaster metaphor gives Claudia Hammond the title of her lovely book about emotion. And though it is subtitled "A Journey Through the Science of Feelings", there is much more than just science here. As she did on the Radio 4 programmes on which the book is loosely based, Hammond leavens her account of the latest scientific research with plenty of other material drawn from art, philosophy and her own everyday experiences.

Even without such seasoning, the science reported here would be more interesting than most, for we are not dealing with test-tubes, but with human feelings. Predictably, scientists have devised some bizarre ways to investigate this field. Whereas an artist might approach the subject by, say, writing a love song, the scientists in Hammond's book prefer to give people plastic turds (to investigate the emotion of disgust), or to set them frustrating tasks (to research anger). The results of such experiments are not always predictable, but one does wonder how much the scientists add to the already rich picture of human emotion that artists have put together over the past few thousand years.

Does it really matter, for example, that feelings of joy are mediated by dopamine rather than by any other neurotransmitter? To someone designing a new psychiatric drug, that information may be of great importance, but outside the narrow field of pharmacology it is utterly trivial. Of much more importance is the overall impression to which all the trivial facts contribute - namely, that our emotions are no more ethereal than anything else in our minds or our bodies. They are just as material as our bones, though composed of different molecules. This unsettling thought hovers constantly in the background of Hammond's book, and adds a slightly unnerving feel to the rollercoaster ride on which she takes us.

With such a huge range of facts at her disposal, Hammond inevitably makes some errors. She seems unaware, for example, that the so-called "Hawthorne effect" has long been discredited, although it must be admitted that she is far from being alone in this respect. The Hawthorne effect refers to the idea that workers who think they are being singled out for special attention will tend to increase in productivity. While this is intuitively plausible, it has never actually been proven. As John Waller and others have shown, the original experiment (carried out at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Chicago in 1927-32) was so badly flawed and wilfully misinterpreted as to be completely worthless.

Such rare mistakes, however, are vastly outweighed by the wealth of fascinating observations. The no-nonsense structure means that, whereas many scientific textbooks tend to scatter comments about specific emotions across the whole book, each chapter in Hammond's book deals with one particular feeling. This approach is refreshing, and allows you to read the chapters in any order.

That said, it is good to see the first chapter dedicated to joy for, as Hammond notes, positive emotions have received much less attention from scientists than negative ones. The final chapter focuses on hope - another emotion that has been somewhat neglected. Hammond reports some intriguing studies that suggest hope may strengthen the immune system, leading optimists to recover from surgery more quickly than pessimists, and to feel less pain. It is my hope that science writers will take a leaf out of Hammond's book and learn to treat their subjects with the humour, sensitivity and warmth that here emanate from every page.