Emotional Rollercoaster

A Journey Through the Science of Feelings

by Claudia Hammond
HarperCollins FourthEstate, March 2005
432 pp.

Why do we feel better after a good cry? What might the length of your earlobes have to do with jealousy? In the last decade there has been an explosion of research on the emotions in an attempt to answer exactly these sorts of questions. Claudia Hammond takes nine universal emotions in turn and looks at the science behind them, combining the latest theories and discoveries from neuroscientists and psychologists with everyday human experience.

In a highly entertaining and thought-provoking journey through the science of feelings, Emotional Rollercoaster asks how the brain and body interact to produce emotions, and what, if anything, we can do to harness them. The possibilities are far-reaching, from finding the perfume that make lovers fall at your feet to learning to cheat a lie detector. With the help of scientists, artists, therapists, philosophers and even the faithful prairie vole, Claudia Hammond examines the physiological and sociological origins of emotions. The journey, via airport departures, a laboratory in Philadelphia dedicated to inducing disgust and a hair-raising bungee jump in New Zealand, offers answers to the questions affecting all of us who ride the emotional rollercoaster every day.


Reviews:

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
Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings
by Claudia Hammond
417pp, Fourth Estate, £15.99
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.
• Dylan Evans is the author of Placebo: Mind over Matter in Modern Medicine (HarperCollins)
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,6121,1430585,00.html
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SUSAN MAUSHART

Second that emotion

May 14, 2005
IT seems scientists are finally discovering what the rest of us have long suspected: that when it comes to human emotion, a girl can’t take anything lying down. And, at the risk of provoking some cheesy lesbian twin fantasy, that goes double when gender is involved. Based on the data, for example, the conclusion that men experience sexual jealousy more keenly than emotional jealousy once seemed inescapable. But then so did Pentridge Prison in broad daylight and my last marriage.

Clinical studies show that when a man is asked to imagine his partner being sexually unfaithful, his heart-rate accelerates rapidly. When he imagines an emotional infidelity, on the other hand, the response is much more moderate.
The accepted explanation for all this has always been that males are "hardwired" to go bonkers when their partners . . . well, go bonkers. But new research shows how false this degraded view of male behaviour really is. In fact, it’s not anger that makes a guy’s blood boil when he pictures His Woman with some faceless creep – it’s lust. He doesn’t want to murder the bastard. He wants to watch him. Kinda makes you want to run out and channel-surf, dunnit, girls?
British broadcaster Claudia Hammond’s new book Emotional Rollercoaster is full of such tales from the crypt we call the human heart. A joyride of a read, it examines the nine primary emotions – from disgust, anger and fear to sadness, guilt and hope – that sooner or later complicate all human experience, up to and including the present author’s last date.
And speaking of my relationship history, why do we get a thrill from that which repels us? One theory holds that disgust is nothing more than an adaptive response to anomaly, for many things that are repugnant in one context (for example, the nuptial bed) are perfectly acceptable in another (eg, a sashimi platter).
In Philadelphia, there is an entire museum – The Mutter – devoted to historical displays of disgustingness, from two-headed cattle to horned housewives. These days, thankfully, such circus-style freak shows are a thing of the past. We’ve got Channel Ten for that now.
Hammond shows that much of what we thought we knew about human emotion is deeply flawed or plain wrong. Consider the belief that passionate love cools, while companionate love grows longer and stronger over time. In fact, the latest evidence shows that neither type of love lasts. In the end, you’ll have no sex at all and you couldn’t care less.
There. Don’t you feel better already?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15263466%5E17063,00.html


About the author:
Claudia Hammond was born in 1971 and has a degree in applied psychology and a Msc in health psychology (after winning an Economic and Social Research Council studentship competition). She regularly presents her own distinctive series on Radio 4 including "Brain Waves", "Raging Hormones", "The ABC of Vitamins" and "Sense the Difference". She lectures part-time in psychology for the Open University and her research in health psychology has been published. She is a frequent contributor to the Guardian and Independent.