[lbo-talk] Obama's stimulating vagus

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Dec 5 11:22:36 PST 2008


[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



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