Social Emotions: Behavioural Consequences of Calibrating and Blocking Human Affective Responses
About the Project
Emotions evolved because they serve a function: they make us act in ways that statistically increase our social and reproductive success. For example, pain makes us withdraw from stimuli that cause tissue damage, fear keeps us away from danger, and parental love makes us care for our offspring. Furthermore, to be effective at increasing fitness, emotions need to be adaptively calibrated to socioecological situations.
New technologies let us block or suppress our evolved emotions, and many pharmaceuticals – including over-the-counter medicines – blunt people’s emotional reactions. If emotions evolved because they make us behave adaptively, then blunting those emotions may be detrimental. By analogy: fever helps the body fight off infection, so fever-reducing drugs ease our symptoms but ultimately prolong infections – they block our body’s defense. Similarly, blocking our evolved emotions may prevent us from acting in an ecologically “appropriate” way (i.e., one that is adaptively tailored to our situation).
My research program will examine the physiological and behavioural consequences of blunting our evolved emotions. Acetaminophen – a popular over-the-counter drug for physical pain relief – also reduces people’s social pain and their emotional reactions to negative and positive stimuli. I propose two lines of research using acetaminophen to blunt other kinds of mental pain, including the pain of losses and social sanctions, as well as positive emotional experiences.
My first research line investigates the downstream consequences of interrupting the pain-signal pathway using acetaminophen. Blocking pain should reduce empathy, pain from infidelity, and anger at cheating, consequently making people less willing to help others, less jealous, and less punitive, respectively. Blocking pain should also make people less responsive to social sanctions and losses, such that they learn to avoid negative behaviours more slowly, resulting in more persistent selfishness and gambling. My second line of research will use acetaminophen to reduce the uplifting emotional reaction to seeing others act altruistically (“elevation”). By blunting people’s emotional reaction to others’ altruism, it should make them feel fewer somatic and motivational sensations, give less money to others, rate altruists less positively, and be perceived more negatively by others.
This research will give key insights into the function of the pain-pathway in responding to social cues, how the physical and social pain systems interact, and fundamental learning processes. By manipulating emotional experience without manipulating the situation, this research can help resolve debates about the nature of emotions, such as how emotional reactions interact with and update pre-existing sentiments and attitudes. Moreover, this research will provide crucial insights about how acetaminophen – used by many Canadians daily – impacts people’s everyday decisions and behaviours.