There's a reason you feel that way

Marek Kohn

This review of Emotion: The Science of Sentiment appeared in The Evening Standard on 29 January 2001.

Science and sentiment might seem like illmatched bedfellows, but Dylan Evans would take that as a hopelessly Romantic view. The Romantics deemed the head and the heart to be opposites, in which they differed from the Enlightenment figures, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, whom Evans prefers as philosophical godfathers. His use of the term "sentiment", which meant in those days roughly what "emotion" does now, is a gesture in their direction.

The old Romantics held that each people had its own peculiar and fundamental spirit; nowadays their successors believe that different cultures can produce profoundly different ways of thinking and feeling. Ranged against them are the new Enlightenment forces, notably evolutionary psychologists, who insist that human nature is universal. They are working out lists of basic emotions to add to their inventory of human nature: most include joy, distress, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. According to Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the field, the facial expressions that go with these feelings are the same the world over.

They may, however, be elusive. Applying science to the myth of Oriental inscrutability, Ekman videotaped Japanese and American men while they watched film clips. Some of these were anodyne, while others contained high yuck-factor images, such as surgery or accidents. When a white-coated scientist sat in the room, the Japanese subjects smiled more and showed less disgust than the Americans.

BUT when the subjects were alone, both groups ran the same gamut of facial expressions. And slow-motion replays of the accompanied Japanese volunteers revealed the beginnings of these expressions on their faces, before they were suppressed in accordance with the rules that the Japanese had learned about the dis-play of emotion in the presence of others.

A showpiece like this demonstrates that science has a flair for exploring sentiment. Evans has strong material to work on, enabling him to fill this compact volume with a wealth of good sense backed by evidence. He is also noticeably less confrontational than other advocates of evolutionary psychology, even providing an example of an emotion peculiar to a single culture. But "being a wild pig", as the Gururumba people of New Guinea describe the condition, sounds like a behaviour rather than an emotion, and in any case not dissimilar from our own "act-ing the giddy goat".

The reasons behind emotions are sometimes readily explained. Fear makes you run faster; anger makes you a more convincing adversary. Others are less direct in their effects. Guilt, for example, may benefit those who suffer it by making them more trustworthy. Even unrealistic optimism can be useful: the optimist's chances of success may be slim, but the realist who abandons the pursuit has no chance at all. Overall, the science set out here rings satisfyingly true.

Perhaps, however, it's a little too satisfying. Evans devotes his final chapter to the prospects of computers with feelings, as if the science of human sentiment were all wrapped up. But the new Enlightenment has still only taken its first few steps into the forests of Romanticism.