JFH'P+_[3{EG0Professor 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%qz7a4|L
[N/L w5hV)i,S+f0I 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.
T Vze-t9i(s*E%zO0Another 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.心理学空间]]4H;kKE;SK3B
rPS BGJ0We 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.
B3?0]!a{R8PL,F/V[0And 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.
`.Huh6h%u3s$|0Dan Sperber talks about a culture where the men put butter on their heads in the summer. And it kind of melts and that's part of--one of the things that they do or--you talk about a culture that believes in spirits or that trees can talk. You say you're studying it and they say, "Oh, that's interesting. I wonder why they believe that?" And you use that as a way to look at more general facts that exist even in our culture. You use the fact that we don't take the exotic for granted as a way to motivate the scientific study of things we do take for granted.心理学空间%H3W'uPu0KY{N;u.f
stJO'L0And this is, of course, true more generally. This was the point in the William James quote when he talked about things that are natural to us and noticed that some very odd things are equally natural to other species. And it's true, I think, in particular when we talk about things like the love we have for our children. So, one way to look at the love we have for our children scientifically, isn't to look at it head-on, because the love we feel towards our own children feels sacred, it feels special, but look at it in other species. And so, one of the nicest illustrations of this is the Emperor penguin, which was--which--whose childcare and mating practices were dramatized in a wonderful movie called "March of the Penguins." And this is interesting because they had this incredibly elaborate and quite precarious system of generating and taking care of offspring.
So, I want to show you a brief clip of the movie to illustrate some parts of this. What they do at the beginning, which is not--which leads up to this, is they take a very long trek from the water to their breeding grounds. Their breeding grounds is--are protected from the wind and they're on a firm piece of ice so they could hold the whole pack. They do the breeding there and it's there that the eggs are created. So, this is where the movie begins at this point. [clip playing]心理学空间[3i-ett PL