Sources of citations and evidence on which the text is based are mostly clear from the References. Where this is not so, these notes indicate sources, and further thoughts.
Prologue
1. This picture is of my eldest granddaughter. Photographs not unlike this are employed in Baron-Cohen et al.’s (2001) Mind in the Eyes Test, a widely used measure of empathy and understanding others.
2. Semir Zeki said this in a talk entitled “Neuroaesthetics” at a 2011 symposium entitled “Reading mediated minds: Empathy with persons and characters in media and art works,” at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Creation, Content and Technology.
Chapter 1. Conscious and Unconscious
1. Plato’s metaphor of the cave comes from The Republic. His book on how we are unconscious of mathematical truths, and how they can be led out of us, is Meno, in which a slave boy solves Pythagoras’s theorem about the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of squares on the other two sides.
2. Plato’s Protagoras.
3. Whitehead (1979), p. 39.
4. See for instance Ellenberger (1970).
5. Biographies of Freud: Clark (1980), Gay (1988).
6. Oatley (1990).
7. Decker (1991).
8. Freud (1905), p. 146.
9. Freud (1905), p. 150.
10. Clark (1980), p. 285.
11. For a while, if psychology were mentioned, people would think psychoanalysis was being referred to. It even became a theme in Hollywood, for instance with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, in which a man played by Gregory Peck has a guilt complex, thinking he has murdered someone. He is tended by an analyst, played by Ingrid Bergman, who falls in love with him. Among principal current “Freud debunkers” (citation in online blurb) is Crews (2017).
12. Freud & Breuer (1895), p. 231.
13. It’s been found that children who have been treated negatively, and less favorably than a sibling, are at greater risk for both psychological and physical illness: Jenkins, McGown, & Knafo-Noam (2016).
14. Hafiz (circa 1380): “With that moon language.” These are the first seven lines of a translation by Daniel Ladinsky, from The Gift (1999), cited with the permission of Daniel Ladinsky.
15. Morton Hunt (2007), p. 142.
16. Biographies of Helmholtz: Koenigsberger (1906), Hall (1912).
17. Helmholtz was not only eminent in physiology; he was the founder of the science of perception, and he also became influential in physics. One outcome of his studies of muscle actions was a paper he published in 1847 on the law of conservation of energy: that energy can be transformed, but neither created nor destroyed. This was seen as a crucial advance in understanding the universe.
18. Helmholtz (1866), p. 11.
19. Oatley, Sullivan, & Hogg (1988). See also Gregory (1997).
20. See Oatley (2013a). The Great Train Robbery was written and directed by Edwin Porter (1903).
21. My translation, emphasis in original; Taine (1882), p. 13.
22. Martinez-Conde et al. (2013).
23. The finding by Arnold et al. (2007) that young cows show the same reaction as human infants implies that the pattern of the visual cliff and the response of avoiding it are evolutionarily acquired. For people who are persuaded by this kind of argument, no inferences are made, and no inferences are needed. In chapter 5 we will come to further versions of this argument by the behaviorists.
Chapter 2. The Sad Case of Phineas Gage
1. Randerson (2012). See also Azevedo, Herculano-Houzel, et al. (2009), Herculano-Houzel (2016).
2. Biography of John Harlow: Macmillan (2001).
3. Harlow (1868/1993), p. 281.
4. Harlow (1868/1993), p. 277.
5. Macmillan (2001).
6. Cannon (1931) argued that emotions arise in lower regions of the brain, and can be inhibited by higher regions, that is to say the cortex. MacLean (e.g., 1993) proposed that the principal seat of emotions is the lower region that he calls the limbic system, whereas rationality arises in the cortex. In this book a different idea is developed: of humans as inherently social, and that rather than being regarded as primitive, emotions manage what is most important to us: our relationships with other people. See chapters 3, 14, and 18.
7. McCabe and Castel (2007) discovered that people found that reasoning about a neuroscientific issue was more convincing when it was accompanied by a picture of a brain than when it was not.
8. Panksepp (1998), p. 309.
9. Preston has gone on to investigate the relation between empathy and altruism; see, e.g., Buchanan & Preston (2016).
Chapter 3. Understanding Our Ancestors, Understanding Our Emotions
1. Biography of Darwin: Bowlby (1991).
2. In their fascinating book, Gruber & Barrett (1974) have transcribed and commented on Darwin’s notebooks entitled “Transmutation” and “Mind and Materialism.”
3. Leakey & Lewin (1991), p. 16.
4. Bowlby (1991), p. 411.
5. Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions, second edition of 1890, p. 13.
6. Gribbin & Cherfas (2001); White et al. (2009).
7. Hublin et al. (2017). Later emerging human universals include language (see chapter 6), cooperation (see chapter 14), and art (see chapter 17).
8. Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions, second edition of 1890, p. 18.
9. A comprehensive book on facial expressions, which includes both Ekman’s proposals and analyses by dissenting researchers, is Fernández-Dols and Russell (2017).
10. Ekman (1992).
11. Ekman & Friesen (1978).
12. Bartlett & Whitehill (2010); Lewinski et al. (2014). These systems, however, are likely soon to be superseded by a method devised by Kang Lee (2016) which uses normal video recording and, by a method called transdermal optical imaging, detects blood flows beneath the skin of the face. These images indicate much more accurately than visible muscle movements what emotions a person is experiencing. See also Zanette et al. (2016).
13. Ekman (2009).
14. Baum (2009). The series aired from January 21, 2009 to January 31, 2011. Not on currently.
15. In 2014, a year before he died, Frijda attended the International Summer School in Affective Sciences, in Geneva, at which Andrea Scarantino said: “We are all neo-Frijdians now.” An extension of the paper Frijda gave in Geneva is Fridja (2016), and Scarantino’s comment is on p. 209.
16. Oatley & Johnson-Laird (2014).
17. Oatley & Duncan (1994).
18. Oatley (2009); Oatley & Johnson-Laird (2011).
19. The interpersonal nature of much of our emotional life is discussed in Ethics, by Spinoza (1661–1675), and by Reid (1818), who wrote of emotions that they involve “principles of actions in man, which have persons for their immediate object, and imply, in their very nature, our being well or ill affected to some person.” More recent work on shared emotions is found in Krebbs (2011).
20. This and the subsequent quotation are from Erasmus (1508), p. 29. It is likely that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream after reading Praise of Folly; in his play, an emotion is induced by Puck dripping the juice of a “little western flower” into a sleeper’s eyes. When the person wakes, she or he falls in love with the first person she or he sees, and finds words appropriate to the emotion (see Oatley 2001).
21. See also van Kleef (2016).
Chapter 4. Individual Differences and Development
1. Wolf (1969).
2. The term Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and the concept of its measurement were invented by William Stern (1914).
3. Biography of Binet: Fancher (2009).
4. Recounted in English by Flavell (1963).
5. Biography of Piaget: Evans (1973).
6. Kamin (1974); Fancher (1985).
7. Kamin (1974), p. 27.
8. Cited by Kamin (1974), pp. 23–24.
9. Kamin (1974), p. 27.
10. Terman & Merrill (1937), p. 34.
11. The title of Herrnstein and Murray’s book comes from the Gaussian distribution, which has the shape of a bell. It’s the most common distribution of naturally occurring characteristics, e.g., people’s heights, or temperature on a certain day of the year in a particular place, and it is fundamental to the science of statistics.
12. Selzam et al. (2017).
Chapter 5. Stimulus and Response
1. Pavlov biography: Todes (2014).
2. Cohen (1979) and Boakes (1984).
3. Watson (1925), p. 15.
4. Cohen (1979), p. 175.
5. Cohen (1975), p. 185.
6. Cohen (1975), p. 185.
7. Bjork (1997); Skinner (1938, 1976).
8. Slater (2004).
1. Chomsky (1959).
2. As one might expect, there are people now who want to argue that Chomsky had it entirely wrong. In 2016, Tom Wolfe, famous for his 1975 essay on the New Journalism, has proposed that not only was Chomsky completely wrong, but so was Darwin. Also in 2016, Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello published a better-informed article that is critical of Chomsky’s idea of an inborn language acquisition device.
3. Tomasello (2008).
Chapter 7. Mental Models
1. Bartlett (1932), p. 65.
2. Bartlett (1932), p. 75.
3. The term “schema” was also used for implicit theory by Jean Piaget. See Flavell (1963).
4. Bartlett (1932), p. 201.
5. Bartlett (1932), p. 213.
6. Memory analogies are discussed by Roediger (1980).
7. Loftus & Doyle (1987).
8. Bartlett (1932), p. 20. Now, also, a movement is beginning in psychology to understand people’s sense of meaning in life; see for instance, King et al. (2016).
9. Bartlett (1946), p. 109.
10. Johnson-Laird (1983, 2006).
11. See Johnson-Laird (1983, 2006), Friston et al. (2016).
12. Zangwill (1980), p. 12.
13. Dunbar (2004), p. 162.
Chapter 8. The Digital World
1. Hodges (1983) and Copeland (2012) are both good biographies of Turing and his work.
2. Wittgenstein (1922), Tractatus (4.01).
3. Hodges (1983); Johnson-Laird (2006).
4. Turing (1950) pp. 434–435.
5. Hsu (2002).
6. Gardner (1985), p. 17.
7. Gardner (1985), p. 28.
8. Gardner (1985), p. 29.
9. An important computationally based theory was given by Marr (1982); see also Oatley, Sullivan, & Hogg (1988).
10. The most important conversational program from early years of artificial intelligence was by Winograd; see, for example, Winograd (1983).
11. LeCun, Bengio, & Hinton (2015); Hinton (2015).
12. See Lewis-Kraus (2016) for a non-technical history of the development of Google Translate; also see Schuster et al. (2016).
13. Stephen Hawking (2014).
14. Bacon (1605).
15. Mendelson (2016), p. 34.
16. This issue is taken further in the epilogue.
Chapter 9. You Need Your Head Examined
1. Parssinen (1974); van Wyhe (2004).
2. Boring (1950), p. 56.
3. McCrea & John (1992).
4. Ormel et al. (2013); Smillie (2013).
5. There have also been at least 15 studies of people keeping diaries of what they do over periods of days and weeks, and these agree quite well with the personality traits that derive from questionnaire measures; see Fleeson & Gallagher (2009).
6. Costa & McCrea (1996), p. 369.
7. Henry James (1884), p. 405. A recent book on the philosophy and psychology of the idea of character is Fileva (2017).
8. Keith (1988).
9. Shostrom (1966).
10. Magai and Haviland-Jones (2002), p. 57.
11. Magai and Haviland-Jones (2002), p. 90.
12. Proust (1919), p. 470, my translation.
13. Hassabis et al. (2014). In a study of inferences in the opposite direction, Küfner et al. (2010) found that it was possible to infer personality characteristics of people from stories they wrote.
14. Browne et al. (2016).
Chapter 10. Mental Illness, Psychosomatic Illness
1. Scull (2015), p. 562.
2. Scull (2015), pp. 425–426.
3. Kreitman et al. (1961).
4. Scull (2015), p. 381.
5. Angell (2008), p. 1069.
6. Kirsh (2009b), p. 80.
7. In those days, the work could not find a publisher, and its authors were vulnerable. Jahoda and Lazarsfeld published their book anonymously in 1933. The 1971 version is an English translation.
8. Meta-analysis is a method in which a range of studies is grouped together, and a statistical analysis is performed to find the mean and variance of all the results.
9. As well as studies by Sandell and his group, two studies by Huber et al. 2013a, 2013b) show positive effects of psychoanalytic therapy as compared with other forms of therapy. Also Leichsenring and Rabung (2008, 2011) have found in meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials that longer-term psychoanalytic therapy afforded better outcomes than shorter therapies. In another meta-analysis, however, Smit et al. (2012) found that although it did better than no therapy, psychoanalytic therapy was no better than some other forms of therapy.
10. Gloaguen et al. (1998).
11. There is now a large literature on the positive effects of mindfulness meditation on its own, or in conjunction with other forms of therapy, for depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic stress. See for instance Segal et al. (2002); Gu et al. (2015); Gotink et al. (2016). Kok & Singer (2016) have found that different kinds of mindfulness meditation have different effects.
12. The study by van Niel et al. (2014) found that people who had four or more adverse childhood experiences “were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, 7 times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs,” p. 549.
13. Marucha, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Favagehi (1998).
14. E.g., Gouin et al. (2012).
15. Pennebaker, Zech, & Rimé (2001).
Chapter 11. fMRI and Brain Bases of Experience
1. Starr (2015), p. 14.
2. Starr (2015), p. 23.
3. Starr (2015), p. 82.
4. Bartels & Zeki (2004), p. 1164.
5. See also Chatterjee & Vartanian (2016), and Kandel (2012).
6. Zeki (2004), p. 189.
7. Vessel et al. (2013), first sentence of the second paragraph in the section headed “Intense aesthetic experience.”
Chapter 12. Feeling within the Self, Feeling for Others
1. Piccolino (1998).
2. The study of neurons sensitive to orientation of line segments was by Hubel and Wiesel (1962). In a recent study of single neurons and visual recognition in monkeys, Chang and Tsao (2017) have discovered neurons involved in the recognition of faces. They fire with displacements from average face shapes, in different orientations, from points such as the tip of the nose, the corner of the lips, and so on.
3. Singer (2015). Tania Singer is Professor and Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.
4. There is evidence that studying economics may encourage self-centeredness and discourage cooperation; Frank et al. (1993).
5. Singer (2015).
6. Beckes et al. (2013), p. 676.
7. This study can be seen as part of a movement to understand empathy in a positive way. But the movement is becoming controversial. Paul Bloom has written Against empathy, in which he argues that empathy can sometimes be harmful; instead we should enter a state of compassion. The idea of compassion is important, but we can imagine Bloom writing his next book called Against action, because sometimes what we do is wrong.
8. Controversies about the implications of mirror neurons are discussed by Ocampo and Kritikos (2011). A book-length argument against mirror neurons as having a role in explaining language and social cognition is by Hickok (2015), who fell in love with mirror-neurons and then fell out of love with them. See also Arbib (2015).
9. Sato & Yoshikawa (2007).
10. Donald (1991). The human proclivity for dancing is a further indication of the social importance of mirror-based mimicry.
11. The 1949 film was directed by Carol Reed, and written by Graham Greene.
Chapter 13. In Affection and Conflict
1. Gruber & Barrett (1974), p. 289.
2. Goodall (1986), p. 594.
3. Weisfeld (1980).
4. Nishida et al. (1992).
5. Goodall (1986), p. 144.
6. Boesch et al. (2007).
7. Sherif & Sherif (1953), p. 252.
8. Sherif & Sherif (1953), p. 257.
9. See Bergman Blix (forthcoming).
10. Sibley & Alquist (1984).
11. Green et al. (2010).
Chapter 14. Cooperation
1. Franco et al. (2009).
2. Warneken & Tomasello (2009). If you Google “Warneken Tomasello videos” you can see several examples of babies’ altruism in recognizing others’ plans, and helping the others to complete them.
3. Tomasello (2014), pp. 4–5.
4. Tomasello (2011).
5. Larocque & Oatley (2006), pp. 255–256.
6. Further evidence of this, including cultural differences in Canada and Italy, was found by Grazzani-Gavazzi & Oatley (1999).
7. The original paper from which Dunbar developed his work on the social brain hypothesis is Aiello & Dunbar (1993). Data and proposals in the paragraphs that follow this one are from the work of Dunbar (2003; 2004; 2014).
8. Dunbar, Marriot, & Duncan (1997), p. 235.
9. Zeldin (1998).
Chapter 15. What Is It about Love?
1. Lynn Hunt (2007).
2. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham became life-long partners. Among their books is Freud and & Burlingham (1943); see also Midgley (2007).
3. Bowlby (1951), p. 11.
4. Bowlby (1969).
5. Holmes (1993).
6. Ainsworth (1992).
7. Bretherton (2000).
8. See, for example, Freud & Breuer (1895).
9. Bretherton (1990).
10. A striking version of this kind of truth was told to me by a famous research psychologist who, when he was six or seven, was picked up and stood, by his father, on top of a tall chest of drawers and told to jump into his father’s arms. “No,” said the boy, “I don’t want to.” But his father persuaded him. The boy jumped and the father let him fall to the ground. “There,” said the father. “Don’t ever trust anyone. Ever.”
11. Waters, Merrick, Treboux, et al. 2000.
12. Hamilton (2000).
13. Weinfield et al. (2000).
14. Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins (1999).
15. Hatfield & Rapson (2006), p. 227.
16. Hazan & Shaver (1987).
17. Williams (1922), pdf version, p. 3. (http://www.deborahward.co.uk/pdfs/velveteenrabbit.pdf)
18. Winnicott’s book, in which he discusses this issue, is Playing and reality (1971).
19. Winnicott (1953), p. 90.
20. Winnicott (1965). This issue was raised in chapter 1, in the discussion of Karen Horney’s case of her patient, Clare.
Chapter 16. Culture
1. Geertz (1989).
2. Biography by Bowman-Kruhm (2011).
3. From the foreword of Mead (1928), pp. xiv–xv.
4. Mead (1928), p. 260.
5. Mead (1928), p. 157.
6. See Munafò et al. (2017).
7. Vygotsky (1930), p. 25.
8. Ibbotson & Tomasello (2016).
9. Nelson (2015), p. 173.
10. Lutz (1988), pp. 16–17.
11. Lutz (1988), p. 112.
12. Lutz (1988), p. 200.
13. Pavlenko (2005).
Chapter 17. Imagination, Stories, Empathy
1. Dunn (2004), p. 1.
2. Goffman (1961), p. 26.
3. Goffman (1961), p. 41.
4. Oatley (2009).
5. Havelock (1978), pp. 42–43.
6. Luria (1976), pp. 108–109.
7. Luria (1976), p. 116, table 8. See Olson (1994) for a general introduction to the psychological effects of literacy.
8. Dias et al. (2005), p. 552.
9. A book called The Undoing Project, about Kahneman and his friend Tversky and their research, is Lewis (2016).
10. Oatley (2013b).
11. Vanhaeren et al. (2006).
12. Bowler et al. (2003).
13. Chauvet et al. (1996).
14. Anonymous (1700 BCE).
15. The earliest parts of the Bible are translated and discussed by Rosenberg & Bloom (1990).
16. See the account of Lord (2000), who describes twentieth-century oral telling of tales, and of Powell (2002), who suggests that the first written language with both vowels and consonants, Greek, came into being to take dictation from the Iliad.
17. Mar & Oatley (2008); Oatley (2016).
18. Garcia Marquez (1981), p. 324.
19. Chekhov (1890).
20. Yarmolinsky (1973), p. 395.
21. Shakespeare (1623), p. 1455.
22. Hunt, L. (2007), p. 216.
23. Hunt, L. (2007), p. 224.
24. Hunt, L. (2007), p. 20.
25. Hunt, L. (2007), p. 39.
26. Hunt, L. (2007), p. 39.
27. Richardson (1740), p. 23.
28. Hunt, L. (2007), p. 58.
29. Eliot (1871–1872), p. 243.
30. Proust (1927), pp. 257–258, my translation.
31. Non-replications of short-term experimental effects of improving empathy by reading short stories, published by Kidd & Castano (2013), have been reported by Dijkstra et al. (2015) and Panero et al. (2016). Overall, results that include those over shorter, medium, and longer terms have shown increases of empathy and theory-of-mind with reading fiction. These have been reviewed by Oatley (2016) and Oatley & Djikic (2017). Meta-analyses of associational effects have been performed by Mumper & Gerrig (2017), and of experimental effects by another group (as yet unpublished). Both meta-analyses show small, but significant, effects of reading fiction on improved empathy and theory-of-mind.
32. Fong, Mullin, & Mar (2013).
33. Kierkegaard (1846), pp. 246–247.
34. Barthes (1975), p. 4.
35. Stock (2007), p. 136. A psychological hypothesis offered by Zillmann (1996) is that we are disposed to like fictional characters who act well, and to dislike those who act immorally.
36. Obama & Robinson (2015), p. 6.
37. Black & Barnes (2015); Bormann & Greitemeyer (2015).
Chapter 18. Authority and Morality
1. Biography: Blass (2009).
2. Milgram (1963), p. 374.
3. See Munafò (2017).
4. Haslam et al. (2016).
5. Among those who have denounced Milgram’s experiments on ethical grounds has been Perry (2013). More balanced is Carol Tavris in her 2013 review of Perry’s book. Tavris concludes that the subject and conclusions of Milgram’s experiments are still important psychological findings, and important for us to think about.
6. The story of this outrage is told by Åsne Seierstad (2015).
7. See, for instance, Browning (2017).
8. See, for instance, Nussbaum (1986) and Sherman (1997).
9. Also developing, now, is a psychology of the law, and how legal judgments are made; see, e.g., Moroney (2011).
Chapter 19. Creativity, Expertise, Grit
1. Winnicott (1971), p. 65.
2. Csikszentmihalyi (1990), pp. 39–40.
3. This and other quotations in the same paragraph are from Csikszentmihalyi (1990), p. 53.
4. Miller (1956).
5. Ericsson has published many articles on expertise, for example Ericsson (1996), Ericsson & Lehmann (1999).
6. Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer (1993), p. 392.
7. Scholz et al. (2009).
8. Ericsson (2016); Macnamara, Moreau, & Hambrick (2016).
9. See also the biography of Curie by Goldsmith (2005).
10. Oatley & Djikic (2016).
11. Einstein & Infeld (1938), p. 95.
12. Collingwood (1938), pp. 109–110.
13. Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, Darwin (1839); Darwin’s note-making, Gruber & Barrett (1974).
14. Poincaré (1908), p. 33 and pp. 36–37.
15. James (1907), pp. 322–323.
Chapter 20. Consciousness and Free Will
1. Homer (762 BCE), p. 55.
2. Snell (1948), p. 31. A psychological exploration of these issues is by Jaynes (1976).
3. Homer (762 BCE), p. 55.
4. Williamson (1995).
5. Page (1955), p. 136.
6. Snell (1953), p. 47.
7. Snell (1953), pp. 17–18.
8. Mesquita & Frijda (2011), pp. 782–783.
9. Glannon (2015).
10. This kind of measurement relies on priming, a process that has become controversial because results are not always replicable; Yong (2012).
11. Baumeister & Masicampo (2010), p. 955.
12. Baumeister & Masicampo (2010), p. 945.
13. Various factors can, however, militate against carrying out intentions. Sheeran & Webb (2016).
14. Doris (2015).
15. Donihue & Lambert (2015).
16. Eliot (1871–1872), p. 781.
1. Popper (1962) has rightly insisted that looking for evidence that might refute a hypothesis is more important than looking for evidence to confirm it.
2. See Munafò et al. (2017).