When less is more
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
But is it really true that the stronger an emotion, the more intelligible it is?
An international research team comprised of scientists from the Max
Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, New York University, and the Max
Planck NYU Center for Language, Music, and Emotion (CLaME) has now discovered a
paradoxical relationship between the intensity of emotional expressions and how
they are perceived.
Emotions vary in their intensity. A person being attacked by a house cat may well feel fear; but certainly their fear would be even greater if a lion or tiger were attacking them. So our emotions differ in terms of degrees of strength.
But how does this
affect our ability to infer meaning from how an emotion is expressed? Research
on emotion has so far assumed that emotion expressions become more distinct as
their intensity increases. But there is little empirical evidence to support
this intuitive-sounding idea.
A team of researchers from Frankfurt am Main and New York have now systematically investigated the role of emotional intensity for the first time. They collected a multitude of nonverbal vocalizations, including screams, laughter, sighs, groans, etc.
These sounds all expressed different positive and negative
emotions ranging from minimal to maximal emotional intensity. They then
examined how listeners perceived these sounds differently depending on the
emotional intensity they expressed.
The team came to
a surprising conclusion: at first, as the intensity of the emotions increased,
participants' ability to judge them also improved, attaining a kind of 'sweet
spot' in perceiving moderate to strong emotions. When the emotions became
maximally intense, however, their legibility decreased quite drastically. Lead
author Natalie Holz of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
explains:
"Counterintuitively,
we found that maximally intense emotions are not the easiest to infer meaning
from. In fact, they are the most ambiguous of all."
And the paradox?
For extremely intense emotions, neither their individual categories, such as
surprise and triumph, nor valence, such as pleasantness and unpleasantness,
could be distinguished reliably; nor could they be classified as being more
positive or negative. Nevertheless, both the intensity itself and the state of
arousal were perceived consistently and clearly. Holz suggests a reason for
this:
"At peak
intensity, the most vital job might be to detect big events and to assess
relevance. A more fine-grained evaluation of affective meaning may be
secondary."
The research
team's article, just published in the journal Scientific Reports, makes clear that
emotional intensity is a dominant factor in the perception of emotion, but in a
far more complex way than previously thought. This poses a challenge to
prevailing theories of emotion. The study of emotional intensity, and of peak
emotions in particular, can enrich our understanding of affective experience
and how we communicate emotion.
