[Lots of cool stuff on affective science, the history of rhetoric and collective emotion]
Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008 Slate.com
Obama in Your Heart: How the president-elect tapped into a powerful -- and only recently studied -- human emotion called "elevation."
By Emily Yoffe
For researchers of emotions, creating them in the lab can be a problem.
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of
California-Berkeley, studies the emotions of uplift, and he has tried
everything from showing subjects vistas of the Grand Canyon to reading
them poetry--with little success. But just this week one of his
postdocs came in with a great idea: Hook up the subjects, play Barack
Obama's victory speech, and record as their autonomic nervous systems
go into a swoon.
In his forthcoming
book, Born To Be Good (which is not a biography of Obama), Keltner
writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates
our vagus nerve, causing "a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the
chest and a lump in the throat." For the 66 million Americans who voted
for Obama, that experience was shared on Election Day, producing a
collective case of an emotion that has only recently gotten research
attention. It's called "elevation."
Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of
philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional
state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long
focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an
explosion of interest in "positive psychology"--what makes us feel good
and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who
coined the term elevation, writes, "Powerful moments of elevation
sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of
cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism,
and a sense of moral inspiration."
Haidt quotes first-century Greek philosopher Longinus on great oratory:
"The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but
transport." Such feeling was once a part of our public discourse. After
hearing Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, former slave
Frederick Douglass said it was a "sacred effort." But uplifting
rhetoric came to sound anachronistic, except as practiced by the
occasional master like Martin Luther King Jr. or Ronald Reagan. And now
Obama.
We come to elevation, Haidt writes, through observing others--their
strength of character, virtue, or "moral beauty." Elevation evokes in
us "a desire to become a better person, or to lead a better life." The
58 million McCain voters might say that the virtue and moral beauty
displayed by Obama at his rallies was an airy promise of future virtue
and moral beauty. And that the soaring feeling his voters had of having
made the world a better place consisted of the act of placing their
index fingers on a touch screen next to the words Barack Obama. They
might be on to something. Haidt's research shows that elevation is good
at provoking a desire to make a difference but not so good at
motivating real action. But he says the elevation effect is powerful
nonetheless. "It does appear to change people cognitively; it opens
hearts and minds to new possibilities. This will be crucial for Obama."
Keltner believes certain people are "vagal superstars"--in the lab he
has measured people who have high vagus nerve activity. "They respond
to stress with calmness and resilience, they build networks, break up
conflicts, they're more cooperative, they handle bereavement better."
He says being around these people makes other people feel good. "I
would guarantee Barack Obama is off the charts. Just bring him to my
lab."
It was while looking through the letters of Thomas Jefferson that Haidt
first found a description of elevation. Jefferson wrote of the physical
sensation that comes from witnessing goodness in others: It is to
"dilate [the] breast and elevate [the] sentiments ... and privately
covenant to copy the fair example." Haidt took this description as a
mandate. Since it's tricky to study the vagus nerve, he and a
psychology student conceived of a way to look at it indirectly. The
vagus nerve works with oxytocin, the hormone of connection. Since
oxytocin is released during breast-feeding, he and the student brought
in 42 lactating women and had them watch either an inspiring clip from
The Oprah Winfrey Show about a gang member saved from a life of
violence by a teacher or an amusing bit from a Jerry Seinfeld routine.
About half the Oprah-watching mothers either leaked milk into nursing
pads or nursed their babies following the viewing; none of the Seinfeld
watchers felt enough breast dilation to wet a pad, and fewer than 15
percent of them nursed. You could say elevation is Oprah's opiate of
the masses, so it's fitting that she early on gave Obama her
imprimatur. And that for his victory speech was up front in Grant Park,
elevation's moist embodiment, feeling so at one with humankind that she
used a stranger as a handkerchief.
The researchers say elevation is part of a family of self-transcending
emotions. Some others are awe, that sense of the vastness of the
universe and smallness of self that is often invoked by nature; another
is admiration, that goose-bump-making thrill that comes from seeing
exceptional skill in action. Keltner says we most powerfully experience
these in groups--no wonder people spontaneously ran into the street on
election night, hugging strangers. "We had to evolve these emotions to
devote ourselves into social collectives," he says.
When you start thinking about mass movements, all those upturned,
glowing faces of true believers--be they the followers of Jim Jones or
Adolf Hitler--you don't always get a warm feeling about mankind.
Instead, knowing where some of these "social collectives" end up, the
sensation is a cold chill. Haidt acknowledges that in "calling the
group to greatness," elevation can be used for murderous ends. He says:
"Anything that takes us out of ourselves and makes us feel we are
listening to something larger is part of morality. It's about pressing
the buttons that turn off 'I' and turn on 'we.' "
Even at its most benign, elevation can seem ridiculous to outsiders.
Think of how Obama's opponents love to mock his effect on people.
During the campaign, if your chest was contracting while all about you
chests were dilating, you may be a Republican. If you were unmoved by
Obama, watching your fellow citizen get all tingly, even fall into a
faint (too much vagus stimulation, and you're going down), was
maddening. "Other people's reverence seems unctuous and sanctimonious,"
says Keltner.
Obama himself seemed aware of the dangers that too much elevation might
pop his candidacy like a helium balloon hitting a power line.
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer described Obama's canny
strategy to make his rhetoric more pedestrian for the final months of
the campaign.
While there is very little lab work on the elevating emotions, there is
quite a bit on its counterpart, disgust. University of Pennsylvania
psychologist Paul Rozin has been a leading theorist in the uses of
disgust. He says it started as a survival strategy: Early humans needed
to figure out when food was spoiled by contact with bacteria or
parasites. From there disgust expanded to the social realm--people
became repelled by the idea of contact with the defiled or by behaviors
that seemed to belong to lower people. "Disgust is probably the most
powerful emotion that separates your group from other groups," says
Keltner.
Haidt says disgust is the bottom floor of a vertical continuum of
emotion; hit the up button, and you arrive at elevation. This could be
why so many Obama supporters complained of being sickened and nauseated
by the Republican campaign. Seeing a McCain ad or Palin video clip
actually felt like being plunged from their Obama-lofted heights.
Disgust carries with it the notion of contamination, which helps to
explain the Republicans' obsession with Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, and
Jeremiah Wright and their frustration that more voters didn't have a
visceral reaction that Obama had unforgivably sullied himself by
association with these men. But this time, elevation won. And expect
that on Inauguration Day, even if the weather's frigid, millions will
be warmed by that liquid feeling in their chests.
2008 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC