Sylvia's Journal

I am reading a book about how emotions are constructed that has pulled the foundations of what I knew from underneath me. The book is challenging everything I knew to be true about the universality of emotions. It has me look back, with some embarrassment, to things I did in the past few decades during workshops in various African and Asian countries, testing people’s abilities to become more ’emotionally intelligent,’ and learn to recognize and name the inner emotional states of others based on, allegedly, universal facial expressions. 

There was the assumption that the major 5 or 6 major emotional states (happy, sad, angry, disgusted, surprised, etc.) were the same everywhere in the world. Now I learn that the American psychologists who invented and then replicated the experimental designs that led to the conclusion of universality of emotions were wrong. Once the American/western biases were removed from the experimental methods, the author and her research assistants were not able to replicate the results, not once, not twice, not any time.

As I was listening to the scientist explaining why she first came to question the initial hypothesis of the universality of emotions, and then developed a new theory, I found myself arguing with the methods and conclusions that dismissed the old theory. And then I caught myself. I was not quite willing to let go of something that I had taken for truth. Such things are painful. But then I realized that this new theory did explain something that for decades had not made sense to me: why was it that people in Ouidah (Benin) who consider the Python a sacred animal were not scared the way I was of that animal. The snakes even curled around the rafters in people’s houses according to the temple master (who then curled an enormous snake around my neck like a shawl).

My beliefs about the universality of human emotions have, until now, informed the stories I am telling myself and others about emotions and feelings. [By the way, if you Google ‘what is the difference between emotions and feelings?’ you will find the very first few entries contradicting each other – this should have given me a hint!]

Once I got over my initial indignation (‘how does she dare to question my Truth!’), and listened a bit more carefully as she explained her new theory of ‘constructed emotions,’ I realized I had much to learn from this cognitive neuroscientist who knew a whole lot more than I did about how our brains work. The annoyance stemmed from having to admit to myself that what I thought I knew something about, I actually knew very little about. A setback, this late in life!

My  attitude of ‘I-know-this-for-sure’ has been challenged consistently these last 2 months. The things I learned about COVID-19 from, what I considered credible sources, turned out to be on shaky grounds, each truth being superseded by newer truths at regular intervals. What I (and so many others) thought to be ‘for sure’ about the virus has consistently been superseded. In the beginning of March I still thought:

• It’s just like the flu
• It’s only dangerous for old and fragile people
• If you are not showing symptoms you are not sick
• You can’t pass it on if you are not sick/don’t have symptoms
• As long as you cough and sneeze into your elbow you are good
• The virus can’t live outside the body
• Small kids and young people aren’t at risk
• We just have to social distance for a while and then we can go back to normal, etc.

Looking back there are so many things that, had I known, I might have done differently, done more of or less of. The same is probably true for millions of other people like me. Had we known ‘for sure’ – we probably wouldn’t have been in the pickle we are in now.

It goes to show how hard it is for (real) scientists to actually know something for sure (I am not including fake scientists who cherrypick their data). Even if scientists claim that something is for real, their assertions depend entirely on how they go about testing their theories. This leaves me with the question, how do we ever know ‘for-sure?’