The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  This is not to say that all perception is thoughtlike; Rock specifically cited the waterfall illusion as explicable in low-level neural terms. But most facts about motion perception and other kinds of perception seemed to him to require high-level processes. Unconscious inference, as in our use of texture gradient cues to sense distance, is only one of them.84 Description that results in interpretation is another. In the ambiguous old hag–young woman figure by Boring, what one sees is not the result of simply recognizing an image but of describing to oneself what a particular curve is like: like a nose or like a cheek. Many perceived forms or objects are not instantly recognizable; recognizing what they are comes about through such a process.85

  Perception also often calls for problem solving of one sort or another. One hardly thinks of perception as the solving of problems, but Rock marshaled a considerable amount of evidence—much from earlier studies by others, some from his own original experiments—to show that in many cases we seek a hypothesis to account for what we see, weigh that hypothesis against other possibilities, and choose the one that seems to solve the problem of making sense of what we see. All of this usually takes place in a fraction of a second.

  One example: In a laboratory phenomenon known since the time of Helmholtz, if a wavelike curved line is passed horizontally behind a slit, as in the above figure, most observers first see it as a small element moving up and down, but after a while some of them will suddenly see the sinuous line moving at right angles to and behind the aperture. What produces their altered and correct perception? Rock found that one clue they use is the changing slope of the line as it passes the slit; another is the end of the curved line, if it comes into view. Such clues suggest to the mind an alternative hypothesis—that a curve is moving past the slit horizontally, rather than that a small element is moving up and down. This hypothesis is so much better that the mind accepts it and sees the line as it really is.86

  FIGURE 38

  Anorthoscopic perception: The dot moves up and down but the mind figures out what is happening.

  Rock summed up his theory as follows:

  On a theoretical level, at least according to the theory presented here, both perception and thought entail reasoning. In some cases, generalizations or rules are arrived at in perception by induction. These rules are then used deductively as premises from which inferences are drawn. Perception in some cases can be characterized as the result of creative problem solving, in the sense of searching for the grounds (or internal solution) from which a specific interpretation follows. Perception entails decisions, just as does thought. Operations that culminate in perceptual experience are of the same kind that characterize thinking.87

  Where does all this leave us?

  We have seen two richly detailed bodies of information deriving from two basic ways of explaining visual perception: the cognitive, thought-like approach and the neurological, stimulus-based approach (and perhaps, but to a lesser extent, a third one, Gibson’s “ecological” or “direct perception” theory). But these accounts of perception are not contradictory but complementary; each describes a part of the full reality. To employ a well-worn metaphor, you can describe what is happening when you type at your computer in terms of the program you are using (Word, WordPerfect, and so on); or you can describe it in terms of what takes place in the microprocessor, circuits, monitor, and other parts of the hardware. So it is with human perception: Both the cognitive and the neurophysiological approaches are sound; we can consult either one or both, depending on what we want to understand.

  With so long and rich a history of studies of the cognitive aspects of perception, plus the dramatic and abundant recent findings of cognitive neuroscience, it is not surprising that the emphasis of today’s perception researchers is less on grand theory or even midrange theory than on special and rather fine-tuned topics. Any recent copy of APA’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance makes that obvious; here, for instance, are a few titles from the April 2006 issue of that journal:

  “On the Surprising Salience of Curvature in Grouping by Proximity.”

  “Memory for Where, But Not What, Is Used During Visual Search.”

  “Sequence Learning and Selection Difficulty.”

  “Speeded Old-New Recognition of Multidimensional Perceptual

  Stimuli: Modeling Performance at the Individual-Participant and Individual-Item Levels.”

  “Eye Movements and Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Investigating the Subordinate-Bias Effect.”

  “The Beneficial Effects of Additional Task Load, Positive Affect, and Instruction on the Attentional Blink.”

  But we need not concern ourselves further with this level of research. We have seen enough to know that perception, despite its remaining puzzlements, is now a relatively developed area of psychological knowledge. We know a great deal more about perception than has been known up to now—but also know that far more remains to be known. For as Michael Gazanniga and Todd Heatherton sum up the situation, “the big puzzle that occupies the minds of modern psychological scientists is unraveling the nature of the connection between electrochemical activity within the neural circuits and the complex information processing that culminates in our perception of the world.”88

  Or to put it simplistically: How do our neural processes become us?

  * Since most of the psychological research on perception has concerned vision, we will bypass the other senses.

  † In this chapter we will touch only lightly on cognitive neuroscience but come to grips with it in a later chapter.

  * Some perception researchers attribute the reversal effect to neural satiation (the retinal neurons become fatigued with one image and the other replaces it). But this does not explain why we can switch images at will.

  FIFTEEN

  The Emotion

  and Motivation Psychologists

  Fundamental Question

  If you were to stand on the bank of some quiet estuary of a Long Island bay on a spring day, you might be lucky enough to see a female muskrat swimming desperately and uttering anguished yelps as a male muskrat paddles furiously after her. (He invariably catches her, or perhaps she invariably allows him to.) If you were to sit on a deserted Long Island beach in spring, you might see a male sea gull furiously chase away a female gull who was sidling up in hope of a bite of the crab he is pecking at, but a week later you’d see him allow her to snatch a piece, and a week or so after that actually put a morsel into her beak. (A day or two later he will mount her, with her acquiescence.)

  As far as one can tell, these creatures never wonder why the other acts as he or she does or why they themselves act as they do. It is only human beings who ask, “Why do we do what we do?”—perhaps the most important question we ever ask ourselves, and the fundamental question of psychology.

  Primitive peoples had a variety of answers: Human behavior is governed by spirits, magical spells, the eating of particular parts of certain animals, and so on. The semiprimitive Homeric Greeks were only a little more sophisticated; they thought the gods put ideas and impulses directly into their minds. But the Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. made a historic leap: they attributed human behavior to internal forces—bodily feelings and thoughts.

  They regarded those two sources, however, as opposed. Plato, for one, held that we are ruled by our appetites except to the extent that reason shows us the better way and that the will achieves a balance between the two forces. The idea that the passions—desires and emotions by which we are passively driven—are evil and that reason is good was to dominate Western ideas about behavior throughout the centuries, influencing thinkers as dissimilar as Paul, the great apostle of Christianity, and Spinoza, the supreme rationalist. Here is Paul lamenting the power of the passions:

  For the good that I would I do not; but the evil that I would not, that I do.

  Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

&n
bsp; I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present within me.

  For I delight in the law of God after the inward man:

  But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

  —Romans 7:19–23

  And here, seventeen centuries later, is Spinoza introducing his analysis of “human bondage” (the fourth part of his Ethic):

  The impotence of man to govern or restrain the passions I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master, but is mastered by fortune, in whose power he is, so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he sees the better before him.

  Although Paul and Spinoza advocated different ways of controlling the passions—Paul through salvation by means of faith in God’s grace, Spinoza through the use of reason and knowledge—both saw them, if uncontrolled, as causing humans to behave badly.

  Aside from the conflict between reason and the passions, philosophers were never much interested in the influence of the passions on behavior; they were far more concerned with the workings of the intellect and the sources of knowledge. When they did discuss human behavior, it was generally in the context of moral philosophy—how we ought to behave—rather than the causes of our behavior. The psychology of the passions received only perfunctory notice before the modern era; Descartes, as we saw, did little more than name six primary emotions and interpret a number of others as combinations of them.1 And although Spinoza dealt with the passions in some detail, he did so in austere, logical terms that convey no sense of their power or of emotional experience. Love, for instance, he defined as “nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an external cause” and hatred as “nothing but sorrow with the accompanying idea of an external cause.”2

  The first person to scientifically explore the influence of the emotions on behavior was not a psychologist but the great naturalist Charles Darwin. In 1872, more than a dozen years after the appearance of his historic Origin of Species, Darwin published an intriguing minor work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he argued that emotions evolved because they lead to useful actions and increase a creature’s chances of survival. Fear, anger, and sexual excitement produce, respectively, escape behavior, counterattacks on any enemy, and the propagation of the species. Human emotions, Darwin maintained, are derived from their animal precursors and have similar values and expressions. The baring of fangs by the wolf becomes the sneer of the human being; the bristling of an animal’s body hair in anger or fear to make itself look larger becomes the angry human’s hair standing on end, outthrust chest, and aggressive stance.3

  But despite Darwin’s eminence, most early scientific psychologists avoided the topic of the emotions. (William James and, of course, Freud and other psychoanalysts were notable exceptions.) Nowadays, because of the broad acceptance of psychotherapy, many people think of the emotions and the behavior they beget as the major concern of psychologists, but during the first half of the twentieth century, says Ernest Hilgard in his history of psychology in America, there was a “peculiar lack of interest among academic psychologists in the great emotional themes of literature and drama.”4

  This was the result of their naïve efforts, in those decades, to be as rigorously objective as physicists, with the result that they considered reports of subjective states, including feelings or emotions, to be outside the bounds of science. From the time of Thorndike’s experiments with cats in puzzle boxes until midcentury, researchers sought to link behavior to observable physiological states, such as hunger, thirst, or pain, not to subjective states, such as the emotions.

  Between the discomfort of such physiological states and the resulting behavior, however, there must be some directing mechanism or force. If not, why should hunger lead to prowling and seeking, or sexual desire to courting behavior, rather than to random agitated movement?

  In the early years of the last century, psychologists were content to say that the behavior prompted by a physiological need or state is specified by instinct. This simplistic answer said nothing about how an instinct operates at the psychological level and offered no psychological condition that could be experimentally investigated. But in 1908 the psychologist William McDougall suggested an explanation and developed it more fully in 1923. A creature aroused by a physical need is in pursuit of a known goal, and its behavior is therefore purposive or motivated; the psychological impetus that results in the behavior, motivation, is a condition that can be experimentally manipulated, measured, and studied. A new field of psychology was launched.

  Although human activities ranging from buttoning one’s shirt to writing a sonnet are motivated, psychologists of the behaviorist era limited themselves chiefly to studying motivation in the laboratory rat. In that relatively simple animal, they could create basic physical needs like hunger that were quantifiable in terms of the hours or days of deprivation, and could easily and objectively measure the behavior produced, primarily prowling and maze running.

  With the advent of the new cognitivism in the 1950s and 1960s, mental processes again became a legitimate field of study, and some researchers began investigating motivation and emotion in human beings. But for some years, most of the attention of cognitive psychologists was on “cold cognition” (information processing, reasoning, and the like). Only within the past twenty-five years or so has it turned more toward “hot cognition” and how it is related to motivation. Not until 1988 could Ross Buck of the University of Connecticut, a leading figure in motivation and emotion research, proclaim, “Psychology has rediscovered emotion,” and it was only in the 1990s that emotions actually resumed a place on center stage of psychological enquiry.5

  (Unfortunately, emotions and motivations are somewhat like a scrambled egg—yolk and white are both present but impossible to separate. Emotions or the physiological states that arouse them are often what power motivation (for instance, infatuation motivates the infatuated one to actively pursue the desired one), while motivation often generates emotions (one driven by ambition to rise in the political world may develop envy or even hatred of his or her competitors). The two phenomena are frequently discussed and researched as if they were separable, although the separation is arbitrary and unrealistic. But the problem is not ours to solve; our concern is the story of psychology, so let us see what happened when emotion and motivation became a subdiscipline of that emerging science.)

  Either because this was so recent a development or because the subject is so heterogeneous, emotion researchers and theorists found it difficult to agree on a definition of what they were studying. Ordinary people have no such difficulty; even a child of three knows what he means when he says he is happy, sad, or afraid—it’s how he feels. But research psychologists were looking much deeper; their definitions of emotion included causes, physiological concomitants, and consequences, and may strike the layman as ponderous and abstruse. An example:

  Emotions are changes in action readiness which have control precedence (which interrupt or compete with alternative mental and behavioral activities), changes caused by appraising events as relevant to concerns (hence giving rise to positive or negative feelings).6

  But neither this nor any of the dozens of then-extant professional definitions of emotions was generally accepted by psychologists. As the authors of one journal article commented in 1984, “Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition.” Even in 2004, long after emotion had re-emerged as a key topic in psychology, the editor of a book of research articles on the subject said, in his introduction, “There is, at present, no consensus about what the emotions are… [or] any good single definition of emotion.”7

  And although most psychologists said that there is a handful of basic emotions and that the many others are derived from or related to these, there was no agreement as to what the basic emotions are. Some experts included “desire,” others did not; some included “su
rprise,” others specifically excluded “startle,” which most people would consider a form of surprise; most psychotherapists used “affect” to mean either conscious or unconscious emotional states, but some academic psychologists said that sensory likes and dislikes are affects, emotions are not.

  Seeking to filter out the essentials, in 1984 Robert Plutchik, a noted emotion researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, asked volunteers to rate a long list of pairs of emotion-related words in terms of their similarity. Factor-analysis of their ratings showed which emotions had the greatest degree of overlap with others and thus were the most central. Plutchik concluded that there are eight basic emotions: joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. Other common emotions, he found, are milder or stronger versions of these; for example, grief is sadness at an extreme, and pensiveness is sadness at a low level.8 It’s as good a list as exists, yet though it has often been cited, it did not become the standard among emotion researchers—nor did any other such list.

  And there was not yet—nor is there today—a generally accepted theory of the emotions. Some theorists stress the causes of emotions, others their behavioral consequences; some say emotions consist of visceral states, others of higher mental processes, and still others of autonomic and central nervous system phenomena. The proliferation of theoretical ideas is typical of a science in its early, exploratory years; by 1985 one report said that there were roughly a hundred distinguishable theories of the emotions and that even when similar ones were grouped, there were still eighteen groups or types of theory.9