Season 3 Episode 5 - Sweet Spot of Grief

 

Persons suffering from excessive grief often seek relief by violent and almost frantic movements, as described in a former chapter; but when their suffering is somewhat mitigated, yet prolonged, they no longer wish for action, but remain motionless and passive, or may occasionally rock themselves to and fro. The circulation becomes languid; the face pale; the muscles flaccid; the eyelids droop; the head hangs on the contracted chest; the lips, cheeks, and lower jaw all sink downwards from their own weight. Hence all the features are lengthened; and the face of a person who hears bad news is said to fall. [Charles Darwin. opening of Chapter VII, EEMA] 

In this episode we discussed Chapter VII - Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, Despair. Although the title of the chapter covers a variety of emotions, we, following Darwin's lead, focused solely on grief. Darwin identified a group of muscles that are involved in creating the grief-stricken visage we are familiar in others. The inner ends of the eyebrows are raised, the outer ends depressed while the corners of the mouth are drawn downward. Overall the face takes on an elongated expression and the furrows in the brow take on an distinctive horse-shoe shape. 

In the podcast we discussed how the chapters we have read from Darwin's text Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals so far reads more like a field guide, with textbook description of the facial muscles involved in exhibiting the expressions, than a intellectual analysis of the adaptive value of the emotions. Sarah, so far, has not been impressed. We hope that will come later in the text. 

We all agreed that Grief is an emotion associated with loss and we explored in the podcast how universal is that view of grief and are there other emotions associated with grief that are universal? Sarah introduced us to a paper that examined how universal emotional concepts were in terms of linguistics and if there is similarity in emotional meaning across cultures. In seems that cultures in close geographical location share a greater similarity in meaning for identified emotions than cultures that are separated by distance. It seems that there are universal emotions but what feelings that are associated with those emotional states are varied and often culturally defined.

James questioned the adaptive value of adults exhibiting grief for the loss of non-related individuals. Sarah mentioned Neese's argument that we are expressing the loss of a known commodity - someone we have a strong relationship with that does not require accounting for altruistic behaviors - so their death is a loss felt as a loss of investment.   

The paper discussed was:

Jackson, Joshua Conrad, et al. "Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure." Science 366.6472 (2019): 1517-1522.

The opening and closing theme to Discovering Darwin is "May" by Jared C. Balogh.

The interlude music was from Hee Haw