What Can Darwin (Still) Teach Us about Emotions

This is episode #10 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 27th of January, 2022. My invited speaker today is Dr. Daniel M. Gross, Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine, where he is also Campus Writing & Communication Coordinator.  Daniel has been working on emotions-in-the-world for over two decades. His approach starts with his home discipline of Rhetoric – once understood as the art of moving souls by way of the passions – which he then mines for the sake of some pressing questions: How do we understand collective political emotions like gay pride, or the angry white male? Are emotions limited to human beings? And what do we do with fights over which model of emotions should prevail, — for example, a bio-physiological model that might help us recognize the face of a terrorist at the airport, or a humanities model that helps explain things like how "terror" becomes an unevenly shared experience in the first place? Working sometimes with Stephanie D. Preston of the Michigan ecological neuroscience Lab, he has pursued answers to these questions in published works that include The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (2007), and Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion between Science and the Humanities (2017).

Of course, we had to start the conversation with rhetoric and emotions, both important aspects of human experience. We then slightly shifted focus to Darwin and his view of emotions and sensations. We could not help connecting the discussion to Ekman’s categories of emotions, with specific reference to empathy and sympathy. Daniel shared his view on the current research practices in emotion research in the context of lab-controlled experiments vs. studies on emotions in the wild.

In the second part of the show, we debated on how well can computers (ever) be able to detect human emotion vs. how good humans are at knowing what other people really feel. We closed with ethical implications of such technologies. Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- Rhetoric and emotions
- (back to) Darwin on emotions and sensations
- Empathy vs Sympathy
- (back to) Ekman’s categories of emotion: the good, the bad, and the ugly
- Research practices on emotions: emotions in the lab vs. emotions in the wild
- Some methodological recommendations for emotion studies
- An interdisciplinary approach to emotion research
- Technology: the role of Emotion AI in shaping our emotion and sensory awareness, and practices of emotion research in the next decade (or so); How well can AI (ever) be able to detect human emotions vs. how well are humans at this task

Note: Books and papers mentioned:

Gross, Daniel M. (2006). The secret history of emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to modern brain science. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226309934.001.0001

Gross, Daniel M. (2017). Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion between Science and the Humanities. DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226485171.001.0001

Gross, Daniel M. and Stephanie D. Preston. Darwin and the Situation of Emotion Research. Emotion Review 12(3), 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073920930802