What Causes Feelings: A Question For Psychology?

A central interesting question about people is “what causes us to have certain feelings?”  For example, what kinds of situations cause anger?  Anxiety?  Happiness?  While we all have some rough ideas about these (such as “anger is caused by someone being a jerk”, “anxiety is caused by danger”, or “happiness is caused by getting something you want”), when it comes to more comprehensive answers, (to my knowledge) we just don’t know.

For example, what causes the most happiness?  Being respected by people in your social circle?  Having a family?  Not having to worry about money?  A great sex life?  Adventure?  While it’s true that we all have opinions on this, what do we know from a scientific perspective?  Do we have any more than just people’s one-off thoughts on this?

Current state of our knowledge about these questions

In my experience (having read many psychology books and just completed a Master’s degree in psychology), psychology as a science has a long way to go in exploring these questions.  While it’s true that we certainly do know some things about happiness, anxiety, and anger — actually, we know quite a lot — it’s also true that most of what we know is bits and pieces here and there.  We know this fact about anger (such as “expressing anger actually makes us feel more angry”) or that fact about happiness (such as “people who write down three things they are thankful for are slightly happier than those who don’t”).  But what we don’t seem to know is… the big picture.

In a world in which we know so much about so many things — from the detailed behavior of subatomic particles to the characteristics of millions of animal species — we sometimes forget that there are some things that even “the experts” don’t know.  I would argue that “the experts” don’t know the (big picture) answers to questions like “what makes people happy?”, “what causes one person to be attracted to another?”, or even “how can I reduce my anxiety?”

Because these questions are so important, my own opinion is that it is worth trying to come with our best scientific guesses about the conditions that cause different feelings, and that this should be one of the central tasks of the science of psychology.

What would answers to these questions look like?

Ultimately I think we’ll have answers in terms of different systems of the brain.  But I also think that common-language descriptions like “believing people like you” or “feeling like someone competent is taking charge” about the causes of feelings will be useful.

How would we test our theories?

The most rigorous way to test our theories would be to run experiments, including neuroscience experiments, as well as behavioral or social psychological experiments (putting people in different situations and having them rate their emotions, for example).

But given the complexities and slow progress necessarily involved in such thorough testing, I am also an advocate of augmenting these rigorous methods with more informal ones, including putting theories in practice in your own life and seeing what seems to work.