AFAIK, humans are the only kind of animals that exhibit the emotions of grief and sadness. What are the origin of these emotions?
Really? I think I’ve seen videos of monkeys that exhibit behavior characteristic of grief and sadness (like when they have a stillborn baby or something.) Sorry, I can’t cite it, but I think it was some PBS nature show or something, and it was a while ago, so my memory may be warped.
I’m also under the impression that rabbits can exhibit sadness, especially when it’s a bonded pair and one rabbit dies. I got this impression from www.rabbit.org, so if the site if full of it, then I apologize.
My fairly unqualified guess would be that humans form emotional bonds with others, be they romantic, family, or what-have-you. The brain, via what we might call the “learning” process, arranges itself in such a way as to use these emotional bonds to boost one’s own sense of well-being. When the bond is broken, the brain suddenly experiences a dearth of whatever neurotransmitters were supporting your emotional state, and it simply takes time to upregulate receptor sites and the like, bringing your mood back up to baseline.
What’s the biological advantage to this? I would suspect that, either, (a) it acts through disuasion, telling you “hey, don’t break your emotional bonds unless there’s a damn good reason”, or, (b) that there’s no advantage to it; it’s simply the result of the biochemistry necessary to producing human emotion.
This mimics many other such states, in which a negative feeling prompts you to change your behavior and provide the necessary stimulation to achieve a positive or baseline feeling. Unfortunately, with something like a strong emotional bond, there’s no quick fix for this; you can’t simply eat a banana and fill the void, as it were.
That isn’t true. Read here for some current theories:
Off-the-cuff sociobiological and evolutionary explanations are a hobby of mine. I don’t intend that anyone think they are really scientific analyses or anything; all they are is proposals that are supposed to be thought-provoking, and I am as happy if someone disproves as I am if someone supports. Also, they are not usually very original, I borrow from a variety of sources which I don’t usually remember very well.
An evolutionary explanation for depression is that it is simply the human form of conditioned helplessness. I vaguely remember some depressing but informative studies in which various animals were subjected to painful electric shocks without being given anyway to avoid (maybe they were caged and shocked without any possibility of escape). These of course differ from the studies in which the animal has a choice: put shock wire around one bowl of food and the animals will learn to avoid that food source. The reponse they got from the studies I’m thinking of indicated that the animals would soon give up trying to escape the pain, and become lethargic. The explanation was that the animal, or evolution, saw no reason for the creature to waste energy. While an escape route might eventually become available, an animal that had been taught that it was useless would not consider it.
This is the animal equivalent of depression. Whether or not the animal is actually sad, we don’t know, for obvious reasons. With people though, depression is the unhealthy extension of grief and sadness. Acute grief can be a fairly healthy response. Here’s a parable. Let’s say there’s a family of five living near a savannah. They go out hunting for kudu and find a bunch of hyenas instead. They hyenas eat three members of the family and the other two escape with their lives and nothing else. Hungry and distraught, they lie listlessly in their homes for a week or two doing basically nothing. Eventually the tears dry up and they set out for a distant relative’s home since they are lonely.
Looked at in emotional terms, we could have a variety of reactions. Pumped-up macho types would say that the pair are a bunch of wimps and that they should “get back on the horse” immediately and go kick some hyena butt. Crying is for wimps and all that. (Four out of five hyenas agree that pumped-up macho types are the tastiest breed of human.) Others might say that a week or two is far too short a mourning period, and that the two remaining family members would be justified in weeping for many months over such a loss. How the hyena survivors are supposed to eat during the months of listless mourning is not directly addressed.
Obviously our emotional reactions are fallible. Looked at in biological terms, a week or two of near-paralyzing grief is actually a healthy reaction. The two can’t safely hunt kudu when there are a bunch of man-eating hyenas skulking around. On the other hand, human can survive weeks without food. Why shouldn’t they stay in a safe place until the predators have moved on? Their sadness keeps them from getting into trouble. Their loneliness impels them to join a group of people; many, if not most, human pursuits are more efficiently carried out by groups. Two people can’t always feed two mouths doing the same work which allows ten people to feed ten mouths.
Anyway, I can’t prove any of that, but I do find it a thought-provoking paradigm for many seemingly strange aspects of humanity.
Sadness and grief are debilitating emotions. A person beset by grief will be unable to find a way forward or out. All he does is sitting around and mope. In evolutionary terms, these seem to be liabilities.