Q&A: Jenefer Robinson

Jenefer Robinson spent more than twenty years working on the issues discussed in her book

Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art

. As she discusses her research and theory, she demonstrates why the result was worth the wait.

Q:

The book has been praised for “exemplary clarity,” and you’ve said you wanted to avoid being overly esoteric. Why?

A:

Well, it’s about something that interests lots of people who aren’t academics. Emotions to a large extent govern our lives, and almost everybody is interested in the arts, whether reading novels, watching movies, or listening to music, so it would be a shame if what I wrote wasn’t accessible to as many people as possible.

Q:

You hope, in part, to illustrate the “symbiotic connection” between science and the humanities. In doing so, you developed a new theory of emotion based on the latest empirical work in psychology and neuroscience. Explain.

A:

Most psychologists and philosophers studying emotions think it’s a mistake to draw sharp distinctions between cognition and emotion. They think emotions involve lots of cognitive activity, such as believing and judging. I can’t logically be angry, for example, unless I believe that I’ve been injured in some way, and I can’t truly be afraid unless I judge that I’m in some kind of danger. But in fact, psychologists and neuropsychologists have discovered that emotions can occur too fast for the cerebral cortex to be involved at all. It seems that we respond instinctively to what really matters to us or our loved ones. So I suggest physiology plays a much more important role in emotions than cognitive theories acknowledge: an emotional response is a physiological response that’s automatically induced by something very important to our survival or well-being.

Q:

How does this apply to our involvement with the arts?

A:

Well, ever since Plato, it’s been common to think that the arts have some special relation to the emotions: music, literature, and visual arts are all supposed to express emotions – maybe the artist’s emotions – and they’re all supposed to arouse emotions in people who engage with them. Now that we know more about what emotions really are, this becomes something of a puzzle. Why is it so great to have a physiological response to artworks – weeping at the movies or sweating as you read a detective novel?

Q:

So why must artworks evoke emotions?

A:

It’s not so much arousal of emotions that’s important, as the way that a truly great novel or painting gets us to reflect about our emotional reactions. The best novels and movies don’t just get us to emote; they teach us something by getting us to emote.

Q:

In discussing why emotional response is crucial to understanding important realistic novels, you used Ethan Frome as an example of required high school reading you would omit because it contains “virtually nothing for the average 15-year-old American to relate to his or her own experience.” Are you suggesting that students’ personal lives should be primary criteria for selecting literary texts?

A:

No, not at all. The point is that emotional responses are physiological and happen automatically when we sense something of real significance is happening to us or one of our “group.” Unless a novel can somehow hook us emotionally, we won’t want to read it. The “hook” can be anything. It doesn’t have to relate to immediate experience, and there may be kids who are hooked by Ethan Frome, but for most, it’s going to be a stretch. As I say in the book, it’s about “being old and lonely and sick and miserable in what must seem like a far-off land at a far-off time in history.”

Q:

You also discuss the relation between emotion and music. How does it arouse emotion, and why do listeners often respond to it differently?”

A:

Music is a problem for cognitive theorists because when music with no words makes us sad or happy, there’s nothing to be sad or happy about; we don’t suddenly believe that something bad or good has happened to us. I think it arouses emotions in different ways, but one of the most fundamental is physiologically, and we interpret this as emotion. People do tend to agree that a piece is sad or happy, but they don’t agree on very specific descriptions. Some will think the sad piece is nostalgic and others that it’s forlorn. That’s because they interpret their physiological changes in different ways, depending on the contexts they bring to music.

Q:

The content of the book is so rich that providing an overview is almost impossible. Maybe the best conclusion is to ask what you have planned for the next twenty years.

A:

I may be dead or nodding in my rocking chair in twenty years, but meanwhile I want to write a book just about emotion theory, which goes into more detail about how emotions function. After that I want to write more about how reading great literature can influence our emotional responses to ethical situations.