It is not overly controversial to propose that we often have unexplainable moods. There are days where, without explanation, life becomes much more difficult to endure, and your efforts feel meaningless. And other days you wake up with excitement to put forth great efforts, and no number of obstacles shake your enthusiasm for life. This inexplicable fluctuation is a common feature of emotion. Emotion seems to always have this background element.
What we call mood may be thought of as background emotion. When we normally hear “emotion” we think of the fury or passion that causes us to act out of character or in irrational ways. Background emotion tends to, as the name implies, exist subtly as the lens that we see the world. Background emotion is the motivational disposition in which we go about our days. It is the gloom or shine of the weather that arts use to portray the inner space of the main character.
Why is background emotion important? It may not be an obvious decision maker, but we do know that it can change the overall patterns of our actions. Perhaps that means that your background emotion can affect your life more than any sudden emotions. It is not our impulsive action, but the long-term dispositions that determine our life trajectory.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”
Annie Dillard in The Writing Life
Background: Nature of Awareness
How does something reside in the background of our minds? I have written another article on this in the context of general consciousness and awareness. This is where working memory contributes to the overall understanding and interpretation of the present situation. In terms of emotion, it is similar. Just as working memory uses context to determine the meaning of a perception, background emotion uses broad needs and goals to interpret the motivational meaning of an event or object.
Background emotion is the motivational representation of a narrow or broad situation-objective relationship. The situation can range from long-term, existential to a present, local situation.
On the other hand, emotion (in the foreground) narrows itself on an objective to be acted upon. The foreground of perception is something that calls to be acted on. The foreground of action is to deal with the situation at hand. The background remains a diffuse mode of being.
“There is a continuous alternation as to which “part” of the organism stands in the foreground – and which in the background. The foreground is determined by the task the organism has to fulfill at any given moment, namely, by the situation in which the organism happens to find itself and by the demands with which it has to cope.”
Kurt Goldstein in The Organism
The background feeling is almost always essential for the interpretation of foreground emotions. Very rarely do we have an emotional reaction without an attitude going into the emotional situation. One can easily recall the times when you acted harshly to someone that, when in a better mood, you act kindly towards.
Only the most clear-cut and strong motivational events can affect us regardless of our mood. To drive this point home, Goldstein argues that even reflexes are not isolated stimulus-response relationships. They too require a background. There are no one-to-one causal relationships in such a complex system as the human organism. So, it would be suitable for emotional situations to be interpreted as such by a background disposition for emotion.
“It really seems beyond discussion that practically nowhere can a simple stimulus response relation, corresponding to the strict reflex concepts, be directly observed. Such a claim could be defended only if one construes the reflex as an abstraction from very involved facts.”
Kurt Goldstein in The Organism
What Makes up a situation
If background emotion is the motivational representation of a situation, broad and narrow, what is it that makes up that situation? What is an emotion without a clear object?
Striving to a goal, or wanting, or being nervous, or irritable all contain the components of an emotion. The only difference is that there is nothing precisely to do to get towards the goal, nothing to consume, nothing in particular to be nervous about, and nothing that is irritating. All that is there is a sensitivity towards opportunity and threat to the goal.
For instance, if you are walking in the woods at night, you have a clear sense of fear, but there is no thing that you are afraid of. But the heightened sense of fear makes you afraid of little noises and movements.
In our highly social existence, the situation is often very likely to be a social one. You may not notice how your behavior changes between a situation where you are subtly intimidated or one in which you are confident. There is no precise object to these states, but they change emotionality according to broad event and states of mind.
Included in this situation is the subtleties of the body’s conditions, creating a general attitude towards the world without any striking noticeability. These follow many unconscious pathways, thus making their objects unknown, yet we can interpret the signals from the body as part of our background emotion.
No Control Over the Background
One of the main features of these background emotions, since they do not have clear and distinct objects, is that they are apparently outside of our control. In fact, this is a main feature of the background emotion. There is no clear and conscious cause to be aware of (even if in reality there is a cause).
A cause can be made up, then as it influences direct action, it comes to the foreground. The stick that cracks nearby in the dark woods becomes the object of emotion or action. In this example there would be nothing to do about the fear because it has no precise object, you cannot control the fear. However, in this example, the foreground probably would broaden all the way to the forest itself, and your actions would be directed towards escaping it. As soon as control is somehow perceived, there is an object in the foreground.
But that does not remove the background emotion; it simply unifies it with a narrow objective.
Martha Nussbaum suggests something even deeper about this fact. She thinks that because we have emotional stock in something, we must have an attachment to something we cannot control.
“Once one has formed attachments to unstable things not fully under one’s own control, once one has made these part of one’s notion of one’s flourishing, one has emotions of a background kind toward them.”
Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought
The fear of death, which is said to silently haunt our lives, can be considered a background emotion. Since death is inevitable there is no object to which we can actually avoid. We then have a background fear that interprets our actual actions to attempt to deal with that fear.
Appraisal and Gaining Control
There are a number of ways we can take control over a particularly oppressive background feeling. Mostly background emotions exist only as general ways we see all objects, but in the case where the background emotion draws too much attention, we become apt to create an object or scapegoat for the way we feel. This is commonly seen as projection. You may get mad at an innocent person, because you feel like you cannot control your amorphous irritation. In that case you have not actually gained control over your situation.
Any time you act on the emotional state, you are assuming an object out of the ambiguous situation. If you can define the object that is causing your background emotion, and render it controllable, then your action become oriented towards a meaningful objective.
The problem is that there is always an element of uncontrollability and any cause of emotion is ambiguous. We never know for sure if it is the irritableness of the object or our own irritability that is the true cause of the emotion. In any case which we want to stop or relieve the feeling, we must act as if something is controllable, even if it is an illusion. Often this is all it takes to feel better, even if it is the wrong choice.
For example, if you feel depressed, sometimes exercise helps, but that assumes that the problem is a chemical one. If the depression is a reaction to a lacking social life, the exercise may help but the situation that causes the depressed state will still exist.
Giving reason to how you feel is not an obvious task, and in fact, sometimes it is foolish to try. Stoicism suggests that background emotion, without a clear controllable object is not to be concerned with. But we cannot act on anything without that background uncontrollability that is resolved by a subjective controllability. The question then becomes what is the grounds for acting as if something is within your control?
