The Law of Closure
In the preceding sections, I have discussed the lawful determination of emotional reactions, mentioning the determinants of situational meaning, concerns, apparent reality, change, and momentum. Emotional response itself, too, has its lawful properties~ which ~an be subsumed under the law of closure." Emotions tend to be closed to judgments of relativity of impact and to the requirements of goals other than their own. They tend to be absolute with regard to such judgments and to have control over the action system.
It may be, according to the law of change, that the causes of emotion are relative ones, relative, that is, to one's frame of reference--emotional response does not know this relativity and does not recognize it. For someone who is truly angry, the thing that happened is felt to be absolutely bad. It is disgraceful. It is not merely a disgraceful act but one that flows from the actor's very nature and disposition. Somebody who has acted so disgracefully is disgraceful and thus will always be. The offense and the misery it causes have a character of perpetuity. In strong grief the Person feels that life is devoid of meaning, that life cannot go on without the one lost. Each time one falls in love, one feels one never felt like that before. One dies a thousand deaths without the other. Every feature or action of the love object has an untarnishable gloss for as long as the infatuation lasts. In the presence of strong desires--think of trying to lose weight, stop smoking, or get off drugs~one feels as if one will die when they are not satisfied and that the pain is insupportable, even while one knows that the pang of desire will be over in a minute or two. Verbal expressions of emotions tend to reflect this absoluteness in quality and time: "I could kill him" or "I cannot live without her."
The closure of emotion is manifest not only in the absoluteness of feeling but also in the fact that emotions know no probabilities. They do not weigh likelihoods. What they know, they know for sure. Could it be that your friend is meeting someone else? Your jealousy is certain. Could it be that your partner is an inattentive person? Your anger is certain. Does she love me? Love now is certain that she does, and then is certain that she does not. When jealous, thoughts of scenes of unfaithfulness crop up, and one suffers from images self-created. It is the same for the delights and the anxieties of love. Love is consummated l0 times before it actually is, and, when one is uncertain whether the loved one will be at the rendezvous, one prepares the reproachful speech over the telephone in advance.
The absoluteness of feelings and thinking is mirrored by what people do. They tend to act upon this absoluteness. The primary phenomenon of emotion, one may argue, is what can be called the "control precedence" of action readiness (Frijda, 1986). The action readiness of emotion tends to occupy center stage. It tends to override other concerns, other goals, and other actions. It tends to override considerations of appropriateness or long-term consequence. Control precedence applies to action as well as to nonaction, to fear's impulse to flee as well as to grief or despair's lethargy. It applies to single actions, such as shouting or crying, as well as to the execution of longterm plans, such as when passionate love makes a person neglect his or her obligations. It applies to attentional control (Mandler, 1984). It also applies to the information processing involved in action preparation and execution, where it shows in the effects of emotion on performance-- activating under some conditions and interfering under others.
Closure, or control precedence, may well be considered the essential feature of emotion, its distinguishing mark, much more so than autonomic arousal or the occurrence of innate responses such as crying or facial expressions. The notion of control precedence captures in some sense the involuntary nature of emotional impulse or apathy, its characteristic of being an "urge," both in experience and in behavior.
The law of closure expresses what I think is the major, basic, theoretical fact about emotion: its modularity (Fodor, 198 l). Emotion can be considered the outflow of a module serving the regulation of activity for safeguarding the satisfaction of the individual's major goals or concerns. Modularity is the conception that best accounts for the central properties of emotional response hinted at in this section (see Frijda & Swagerman,. 1987).
The Law of Care for Consequence
Emotion is not always as absolute as just sketched. Emotions do manifest deliberation, calculation, or consideration. Infatuation can be stingy, and anger can be prudent. However, I argue, closure and absoluteness reflect the basic modular shape of emotion. The manifestations of that basic shape may run into opposite tendencies, though, that stem from the law of care for consequence: Every emotional impulse elicits a secondary impulse that tends to modify it in view of its possible consequences. The major effect is response moderation. Its major mechanism is response inhibition.
Presence of a tendency toward moderation or inhibition of response--that is, presence of emotion control-- must be considered a ubiquitous fact of emotion. Its ubiquity, and thus the validity of the law, paradoxically is evident in those rare instances when control power fails, as happens in blind panic or anger, with neurological interferences such as temporal epilepsy (Mark & Ervin, 1970) or experimental decortication (Bard, 1934), and under toxic influences like those of alcohol. Normal fury or passion, however violent, is nonetheless controlled. In anger, one rarely smashes one's truly precious objects. When madly in love, one still waits to get home before consummating. Something snaps when going from there to frenzy, to blind impulse.
The law of care for consequence, too, is a law of emotion. Control, in large measure, is an emotional response. Anxiety--rigid anxiety, freezing--in fact is its most complete expression; the drying up of emotional freedom before critical onlookers is a more moderate version. Like other emotional responses, control is elicited or maintained by stimuli. The stimuli for control are the signals for possible adverse consequences of uninhibited response such as retaliation, reprobation, or miscarriage of plans. The notion that inhibition is triggered by anticipation of adverse response consequences, of course, comes from Gray (1982).
The fact that involuntary emotion control itself is an emotional response implies that the other laws of emotions apply to it, notably the law of apparent reality. One cannot at will shed restraint, as little as one can at will shed anxiety or timidity. Emotional spontaneity is a function of how the environment is perceived to respond. Environmentally induced inhibition is illustrated by audience effects like the one just mentioned, familiar from examinations or auditions and from social facilitation research. Opposite, disinhibitory effects are found in the surprising emotional responsiveness, the increase in susceptibility to weeping and sexual excitement, in groups that are sympathetic toward such impulses. Therapy groups, sensitivity training groups, and meetings in sects like those led by Baghwan Rajneesh illustrate what is meant. The point is of much more relevant consequence because it provides a basis for explaining certain aspects of mass behavior. According to deindividuation theory (e.g., Zimbardo, 1970), mass enthusiasm, mass ecstasy, and mass violence are consequences of decreases in selfmonitoring and of focusing attention on a leader and a common objective. These mass phenomena, in other words, result from a decrease in control due to the absence of stimuli that signal adverse response consequences and to the presence of stimuli that signal approbation of unhampered impulse expression.
＠＠＠＠＠段落矯正中
The Laws of the LightestLoad and the Greatest Gain
Emotion control is not dictated entirely by external cues, or, more precisely, to the extent that it is dominated by external cues, those cues themselves are, within limits, at the subject's discretion. One can focus now upon this, then upon that, aspect of reality. One can complement reality with imagination or detract from it by not thinking of particular implications. The construction of situational meaning structures, in other words, offers leeway for emotional control that has its origins within the object himself or herself. Situational meaning structures can be chosen in ways that decrease emotional intensity, prevent occurrence of emotion, or make events appear more tolerable or more pleasing. The situational meaning structure that dictates emotion, in accordance with our first law, is in part shaped and transformed by its own expected outcomes and consequences. Transformation follows various principles. One of these can be phrased as the law of the lightest load: Whenever a situation can be viewed in alternative ways, a tendency exists to view it in a way that minimizes negative emotional load. "Negative emotional load" refers to the degree to which a situation is painful and hard to endure.
Defensive denial is commonplace and has been widely described (see Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). The many ways to minimize emotional load, however, merit emphasis; mechanisms exist to ensure it at different levels of the process by which meaning structures are constructed. Denial, avoidant thinking, and entertaining of illusionary hopes operate at almost the conscious, voluntary level (see Weisman's, 1972, concept of "middle knowledge"). People often claim that they had always known that their illness would be fatal, that the loss they suffered would be permanent, or that the malfunctioning in the nuclear plant was dangerous, their earlier denials notwithstanding. Note that such knowledge does not prevent the denials from being resistant to correction, presumably because the load reduction they effect is so considerable.
Other mechanisms of load lightening operate at a much more elementary level. This applies particularly to the mechanisms that transform one's sense of reality and block the occurrence of hedonic appreciations. What I am referring to are the mechanisms of depersonalization, the occurrence of the sense of unreality, the veil over emotional feeling. Depersonalization occurs under all conditions of shock, severe trauma, severe threat, and severe pain. It has been described contingent upon accidents, serious loss or failure, torture, and sexual abuse (e.g., Cappon & Banks, 1961).
Denial and depersonalization are by no means the only ways in which load minimizing operates. The interplay of emotion and cognition can take many shapes that often are, for the subject, as difficult to recognize as they are difficult to bear. Examples are provided by the pccurrence of painful emotions that, there are reasons to suppose, replace still more devastating ones. Sometimes, for instance, people entertain a "worst case hypothesis," preferring the apparent certainty of a disastrous prospect over the uncertainty of a future unknown. They convince themselves, for instance, that they are suffering from fatal illness in order to shield themselves from the possible shock of being told unpreparedly. An even more complex interplay is found in the cognitive strategy that leads people to view themselves as responsible when in fact they have been victims of arbitrary maltreatment. The guilt feelings that, paradoxically, are so common in victims of sexual or other child abuse appear to serve to retain the view that adults are dependable and right in what they do. These guilt feelings are the lesser price to pay compared to the utter despair and disorientation that would otherwise follow. They permit the victim to see sense in a fate that contains none (Kroon, 1986).
The law of the lightest load blends into the law of the greatest gain: Whenever a situation can be viewed in alternative ways, a tendency exists to view it in a way that maximizes emotional gain. Emotions produce gains that differ from one emotion to another. Anger intimidates and instills docility. Fear saves the efforts of trying to overcome risks. Guilt feelings for misdeeds done confer high moral standing. Grief provides excuses, confers the right to be treated with consideration, and gives off calls for help. Often, when crying in distress or anger, one casts half an eye for signs of sympathy or mollification. Anticipation of such consequences, it can be argued, belongs to the factors that generate one particular situational meaning structure rather than another, and thus brings one particular emotion rather than another into existence. The mechanism involved is transparent. One focuses, for instance, on the idea that another is to blame in order to permit emergence of an anger that makes the other refrain from what he or she is doing. The mechanism operates in jealousy, and the coercive effects perpetuate much marital quarreling. Even if the pains of jealousy may not originate in the wish to prevent the partner from being unfaithful, that wish strongly sustains jealousy; it does so particularly when the partner yields and gives up part of his or her freedom of action. Who would wish to make one suffer so? Here, too, certain painful emotions appear to result from something resembling choice--choice of a painful emotion over a still more painful one. That process in fact is rather general. Grief upon loss, for instance, tends to be willfully prolonged, not only because it provides excuses but also because it keeps the lost person nearby, so to speak. When grief is over, true loneliness sets in.
Concluding Remarks
The purpose of this article was to show that the study of emotion has advanced to a point that a coherent account of emotion can be given. The account is one that fits reasonably well into the framework developed for other domains, such as those of cognitive processes and motivation. A further purpose was to show that emotions are governed by laws. Emotions emerge and manifest themselves the way they do because lawfully operating mechanisms dictate response. We are subjected to these mechanisms and obey the laws.
Clearly, humans are not entirely and blindly subjected to these mechanisms. Not even all of human emotion is dictated by the emotion laws. One can seek occasions for certain emotions and avoid other ones. One can willfully supplant the situational meaning structure of a given event with prospects of the future and with those considerations of long-term gain or loss that represent the voice of reason. One can exert voluntary emotion control and substitute deliberate action for impulsive emotional response. It is not clear, though, how the relationship and difference between the two modes of action control--control by situational meaning structure and impulse, and by deliberate intent--are to be viewed. There is a current distinction between automatic and controlled processing. It is not evident, however, that this distinction illuminates the present context more than did the old distinction between Emotions and the Will (Bain, 1859) because the major problem is their opposition and, on occasion, persisting conflict, as manifest in emotion's control precedence. Perhaps the concept of an emotion module ready to intrude on top-level control, as suggested earlier, comes closer to how the relationship should be conceptualized.
Even if not subjected blindly to the laws of emotion, still we are subjected to them. When falling in love, when suffering grief for a lost dear one, when tortured by jealousy, when blaming others or fate for our misfortunes, when saying "never" when we mean "now," when unable to refrain from making that one remark that will spoil an evening together, one is propelled by the big hand of emotion mechanism. I would like, in conclusion, to return to the issue touched on in the beginning of this article: the opposition one may feel between the lawfulness of emotions and the sense of personal freedom. Note, first, that there is comfort in the notion of the lawfulness of emotion and in one's participation in the laws of nature that that notion implies. It is the comfort that resides in the recognition of necessity generally. I mentioned previously the law of comparative feelingm emotions are proportional to the difference between what is and what is deemed possible. Recognizing necessity where there is necessity, where nature limits one's control, can considerably decrease emotional load. More important, there is, I think, no true opposition between lawfulness and freedom. Personal freedom, wrote Spinoza (1677/1955) consists in acting according to one's own laws rather than to those imposed by someone else. Second, as I hinted at earlier in this article, neither is there a fundamental opposition between Emotion and Reason. It may be argued that reason consists of basing choices on the perspectives of emotions at some later time. Reason dictates not giving in to one's impulses because doing so may cause greater suffering later. Reason dictates nuclear disarmament because we expect more sorrow than pleasure from nuclear war, if not for ourselves then for our children, whose fate fills us with emotion. The only true opposition is that between the dictates of the law of apparent reality, which tend to attach to the here and now, and the anticipations of later emotions, which tend not to be so dictated and thereby lack emotional force.
It is here that the laws of emotion and reason may meet and where both emotion and reason can be extended so as to make them coincide more fully with one's own laws. Following reason does not necessarily imply exertion of the voluntary capacities to suppress emotion. It does not necessarily involve depriving certain aspects of reality of their emotive powers. On the contrary, our voluntary capacities allow us to draw more of reality into the sphere of emotion and its laws. They allow us to turn the law of apparent reality into a law of reality, that is, to let reality--full reality, including long-term consequences--be what determines emotion. They allow one's emotions to be elicited not merely by the proximal, or the perceptual, or that which directly interferes with one's actions, but by that which in fact touches on one's concerns, whether proximal or distal, whether occurring now or in the future, whether interfering with one's own life or that of others. This is accomplished with the help of imagination and deeper processing. These procedures, as I have suggested, can confer emotive power on stimuli that do not by their nature have it. They can extend the driving forces of emotion to the spheres of moral responsibility, for instance. The laws of emotion can extend to the calls of reason as much as to those of immediate interests.
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