Professor Paul Bloom: So what we're doing today is continuing on the theme of emotions. "Emotions" is a two-part lecture and we're continuing along certain themes.心理学空间*Ag9QT_M`u
I want to begin by responding to a question which was raised in the last class concerning smiling and nonhuman primates. It was a very good question. The issue was: we know that humans have different sorts of smiles to convey different sorts of information. The question was, "do nonhuman primates, like chimpanzees or gorillas or gibbons, have the same many sorts of smiles?" So, I contacted the world's expert on smiling, who did not return my e-mails. So, I contacted the second world's expert on smiling who told me that the answer is "no," that primate--nonhuman primate smiles actually correspond almost entirely to appeasement smiles. They're "don't hurt me" smiles. They're equivalent to the "coy smile" that we saw on humans. But that nonhuman primates do not use smiles for greetings; there's no equivalent to the "greeting smile" or "Pan Am smile"; nor do they use them as genuine expressions of happiness. There's no equivalent to the "Duchenne smile." That's as far as I know. If the world's expert gets back to me and says something different, I'll keep you posted.心理学空间6p0e/psT)p:o
z7ER8~6]s$?0Another thing. Going back to the beginning theme of the class, what we started--just to review, we talked about the different functions of emotions. And then we talked about smiling and facial expressions. And then we turned to some--to a nonsocial emotion, the case of fear. And then we shifted to social emotions. And we talked about social emotions towards kin and the special evolutionary reasons that would lead them to evolve. And as we were ending, we were talking about the relationship between an animal and its children, particularly in cases like humans and birds and mammals where there tends to be a close relationship with our children.
We invest in quality, not quantity. I might produce very few children in my life. And my evolutionary trick then is to focus very intently on them and make sure they survive. If I were to produce 100 children, I could stand to lose a few, but if I just produce five in my lifetime or two or one, they become very precious to me. And so, the story of the evolution of a species like us involves a long period of dependence and deep, deep bonds between the parent and the child. And that's part of what I talked about, how parents respond to children.心理学空间U{)[I7k;c(RU
And I want to begin this class by giving an illustration from a documentary about parental response to children, but I want to give it in a species that's not us. And here is why. I'll explain why with an analogy. I have a friend of mine who studies the psychology of religion. He studies why people hold religious beliefs. And he tells me that when he's talking to a non specialist, somebody not in the field, he doesn't ever tell them, "Yeah, I'm really interested in why people believe in the Bible or why people light the candles on Sabbath or why people go to church" because these are religions that people around here hold, and if you tell people you study them they'll sort of be puzzled, "why would you want to study something like that" or offended. If you want to talk about the psychology of religion to an audience like this, what you do is you start with the exotic. So, you start by talking about people who put butter on their heads.心理学空间"dkf8D/r$jh_