(Given that this was originally published in Men’s Health magazine, the targeted “you” in the piece is a heterosexual male. Generalize beyond that as needed.)
Here’s how it happens. You’ve done something piggish to your significant other, something stupid and selfish and insensitive. She’s pissed. So you argue. And you make things worse initially by trying to defend yourself.
Somewhere amid the heated exchange, you actually think about what you’ve done, consider it from her perspective, and realize, Jeez, I was a total jerk. You apologize. You make it sound as if you sincerely mean it. You actually do sincerely mean it.
She accepts your apology, does a “But don’t ever do that again” parting shot with a flair of the nostrils. You start to feel pretty pleased with yourself; got off easy this time, you realize. That flair of her nostrils has even made you think about sex. You eye the bedroom. Phew, sure glad that’s over with.
And then she suddenly dredges up some argument the two of you had about some other jerky thing you did years ago, the time you forgot to do X, or the time she caught you doing Y. It has nothing to do with the jerky thing you just did. You barely remember it. But she remembers every detail and is raring to go over it again in all its minutiae, just when the tension was dissipating.
What’s up with this? (And why have you done the same on occasion?) It’s not because she’s unconsciously trying to torpedo the relationship, or because she gets some obscure pleasure from fighting. It is simply that her limbic and autonomic nervous systems operate at different speeds.
Whah?
It all has to do with the psychologist/philosopher William James. Yes, your personal life is about to be improved by the insights of some nineteenth-century dead white male who gets university buildings named after him. James speculated about how the brain decides what kind of emotion we’re feeling. Something happens, your brain figures out its emotional response—anger, elation, arousal, terror, whatever. Then your brain tells your body how to respond—your heart races, you breathe faster, you get gooseflesh, you get an erection, whatever. These responses are controlled by something called the autonomic nervous system, which, as discussed earlier in the introduction to this third of the book, is involved in things that are automatic (that is, autonomic) throughout your body.
Makes sense. But James came up with a nutty idea that reverses the direction of all this. He believed that your body’s autonomic response, not your brain, determines the emotion you think.
In James’s view, your brain assesses the situation too quickly for you to be consciously aware yet of what you are feeling about it and rapidly kicks your body into gear with whatever autonomic response it is going to have. Your brain then canvasses your body to see how it’s reacting to the outside stimulus. So conscious emotions don’t shape your autonomic bodily response; your autonomic bodily response shapes the conscious emotion you feel.
Weird; seems ass backward, and it did to a lot of James’s contemporaries. But his ideas are turning out to be true in a lot of ways. Your autonomic nervous system may not quite determine the exact type of emotion you’re feeling, but it has tons to do with emotional intensity.
There’s all sorts of evidence for this by now. Studies on quadriplegics—people who are not only paralyzed but also get no tactile feeling from their body—show a strong blunting of emotion. The same goes for people with diseases that affect the autonomic nervous system. They have normal tactile sensations and experience pleasure, anger, and fear like anyone else. They just have no involuntary bodily responses to those emotions. If they’re afraid, for example, their hearts don’t race, their skins don’t get clammy. If saddened, they don’t cry. If angered, their muscles don’t tense up. And they feel less emotion than normal.
Experimental manipulations show this as well. If you force someone to make a certain emotionally strong facial expression over and over, he’ll start to feel an emotion that agrees with the expression. For example, depressed people who are asked to repeatedly make big, booming smiles usually begin to feel better. In an experiment done years ago before there were laws against this sort of thing, researchers secretly injected volunteers with adrenaline, the main hormone that mediates emotional arousal throughout the body. What happened? They experienced more intense emotions. When some of the subjects went into a waiting room with someone (secretly part of the experiment) who acted extroverted and gregarious, the adrenaline-juiced subjects became much more outgoing than did volunteers who were injected with only saline. When the adrenaline-injected subjects entered a room with an angry, abrasive person, they too became angrier than the control subjects did.
Perhaps the clearest example of James’s theory in action comes from one of the most common drugs prescribed, one used to control emotions. Suppose you are worried all the time—can’t sleep, can’t concentrate. A physician might prescribe an antianxiety drug for you, a minor tranquilizer. Meanwhile, across town, some jock who has gotten an injury just before an important game is getting these miserable muscle spasms. A physician might prescribe a muscle-relaxant drug. And amazingly, the muscle relaxant and the antianxiety drug are the same exact medication (something like Valium or Librium). Why does the same drug work for both problems? Because, à la William James, your brain is telling you you’re bat-shit crazy anxious because your tense muscles are telling that to your brain. Take some Valium, which works, most directly, to decrease muscle tension. Wait a few hours. Your life will still be just as awful as it was two hours ago—but thanks to that muscle relaxant, your body is so loose that you can barely even sit up straight. And somehow, you conclude, Well, if I feel like I’m like Jell-O…maybe things aren’t so bad after all. And you feel less anxious.
So, hooray for Professor James; the intensity of the emotions you feel is shaped by what autonomic events are going on in your body at the time. But what’s this have to do with your girlfriend raking you over the coals for something that happened years ago, when it seemed your fight was over?
The key is the differing speeds with which your brain and the rest of your body operate. Suppose you’re walking in a crowd. Someone bumps into you from behind, really hard, bashes into your instep. Asshole, you think, turning to snarl at them. You see the dark glasses and cane—Oh, he’s blind, that’s why he bumped into me, not a big deal. A thought turned on and off in two seconds.
Another example: You’re playing racquetball, and your thoughts are changing many times a second—Move to the left; he’s going to angle it; no, he’s not; reach out far; twist it to the corner. Your emotional evaluations, something controlled by a part of the brain called the limbic system, are changing at that sort of speed as well—Man, I’m playing well; damn, he’s going to blast it past me; I stink; wow, amazing, I’m totally awesome at this; argh, no, I’m not…
Your limbic system moves and switches gears almost instantly. But, critically, the autonomic parts of your body move like a freight train; they build speed gradually and take a long time to come to a stop. Adrenaline is secreted, your heart speeds up, your sweat glands get activated. And after the thoughts that prompted these changes have come and gone, it takes a while for adrenaline to clear from your bloodstream, for your heart to slow down, and so on.
So you’ve done that jerky thing, and she’s pissed. This is a cognitive event for her—her cortex is thinking, This was not appropriate behavior on his part. This is an emotional event for her—her limbic system is ruminating, He’s a jerk and I’d like to strangle him. Pretty quickly, this also turns into a bodily event for her as her autonomic nervous system triggers her heart to race and her muscles to clench in fury.
Finally, you apologize. And, as a cognitive event, it’s over with. The neuronal pathways involved can reverse pretty quickly. But the bodily responses are still chugging along. And here the ghost of William James comes to ruin the scene you had in mind as a result of that hot nostril flair. She knows that it is resolved—you apologized. But if that heart is still racing, if all the other autonomic baggage is still going like crazy, it doesn’t yet feel as if it’s resolved. And the mind fills an explanatory vacuum: Well, I know he apologized, but since I still feel agitated, there must be something else that I’m upset about. Ah, I know, it’s that insensitive thing he did three years ago…what a jerk. And she’s off and running.
Naturally, there’s a sex difference to make things worse. Consider sexual arousal, which is also regulated by the autonomic nervous system: on average, men get aroused faster than women, and when it is all over with, women stay aroused longer, which explains why afterward she wants to hear you say whispery things, when all you want is to find a place that delivers Chinese food this time of night. And while it’s not as well studied, it appears as if under all kinds of nonsexual circumstances, the autonomic nervous system recovers back to baseline more quickly in men than women. So while men are perfectly capable of doing the “Just when we thought the fight was over with, out comes the pointless rehashing of some event from decades ago,” women are probably more likely to.
So what do you do about this? How are we going to market the William James Self-Help Relationship Guide? Obvious. Try to counteract that locomotive of an autonomic nervous system with a mind of its own. How to do it? Obviously not so easy. Well, there are all sorts of clunky time-out tricks to try: before you can answer, you have to take a deep breath or stop and count to ten. Make a rule that you must argue sitting down (this will slow down the flow of adrenaline). Or use cognition as ammunition: discuss this autonomic arousal business with her so you can both short-circuit the phenomenon: “Hey, are we having a William James moment here?”
Relationships can be contentious enough without your glands suckering you into inventing problems that don’t exist.
NOTES AND FURTHER READING
William James and his ideas run through any introductory psychology textbook, while the workings of the autonomic nervous system run through any introductory physiology text. The role of autonomic arousal in maintaining cognitive arousal was discussed (in the context of aggression) in Zillmann D, “Cognition-excitation interdependencies in aggressive behavior,” Aggressive Behavior 14 (1988): 51.
The whole subject of the foibles of relationships between the sexes prompts me to recommend an amazing book (which has nothing to do with physiology, but instead focuses on how communication style typically differs between genders, often with disastrous results): Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand (New York: Morrow, 1990), which should be required reading for all newlyweds.