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Prof. Nico Frijda |
Emotions, health & illness: An interview with Prof. Nico Frijda
Mirande van Leuven and Mirjam Klein
Wassink, Utrecht University
On May 25 1998, Prof. Nico Frijda gave the opening keynote lecture
at the Second Dutch Conference on Psychology and Health. The title of his
lecture was 'The nature of social emotions and the social nature of human
beings'. In an interview following his lecture Prof. Frijda gave additional
comments on the role emotions play in health and disease and the social
nature of emotions.
You started your lecture by saying that you were not sure whether it
could be seen as a contribution to this conference, although you are sure
that emotions do play a significant role in health. Could you explain to
us how emotions are involved in health and disease?
My idea was that, naturally emotions have to play an important role
in health behavior. All kinds of unhealthy behavior often provides us with
positive feelings, and although may be unhealthy in the long term, it is
difficult to stop this behavior. Nevertheless, many health behavior theories
are like the theory of planned behavior: emotions do not play a role in them. This only appears to be
so, because when you ask yourself "what is
the purpose of this behavior?", you almost immediately find that it has
to do with emotions. The same applies when you look at the way people evaluate
the effectiveness of behavior; emotions do play a role. This led me to
think that, although I do not know much about the relation between health
and emotions, it seems evident that emotions do play an important role
in health and health behavior. So, I decided to give this lecture
and to say something about the role I think emotions play in health behavior.
In my lecture I mentioned, I think a very good example, safe sex. We all
know that we should practice safe sex, but at that particular moment our
mind is too busy with something else. Well, this shows that it is evident
that emotions are involved in health behavior.
You are talking about the role emotions play in health behavior and
in changing behavior. If you want to change behavior into more healthy behavior, you should take the emotions into account. But what can you tell
us about the role emotions play in illness?
Well, I was thinking about that when I was writing my lecture. The
meaning of illness is of course mainly based on emotions. I would like
to give an example, not about illness, but about pain. One of the most
famous experiments I know in that area, is an old experiment by Turskey
and it involves the experience of pain. The experience of pain depends
on the meaning you give to it, which concerns are at stake. Well this is
especially true for illness. When somebody is chronically ill, what does
this mean for his feeling of self-worthiness, what does it mean for his
social interactions and what does it mean for his functioning in general?
These relations are of course often very complex. I think that the relation
between health, illness and emotions is very strong, although I have no
idea about the research that is being done in this area.
We feel that not much attention has been paid to the relation between
emotions and health and illness. Could you explain to us, why emotions
are not or at least not much being investigated in the field of health
psychology?
Well, there is one big problem in the field of psychology in general
and that is that there is not much communication between the different
subdivisions of psychology. Beside the emotion-biologists, I do not think
that many researchers work with emotions and know how to 'unfold' emotions.
Health psychology, which is mainly based on the theory of attitudes, does
not have a tradition of finding relations with emotions. It is amazing
that in this line of research, to my knowledge, attitudes to for example
'butter' are seen in the same way as, for example, 'attitudes towards life
and death'. The attitudes are positive or negative or more or less intense,
but the concerns and emotions that are involved in these attitudes have
not been discussed.
You say that it is not possible to investigate, for
example, attitudes
without taking into account the emotions that are involved. What can you
tell us about coping and the distinction between emotion focused coping
and problem focused coping? Is it possible to look at the problem and the
emotions separately?
I think that problem focused coping is very difficult to define.
Behavior, which Lazarus would think of as problem focused, could easily
be seen as part of the emotions that are involved. When, for example, somebody
insults me and I hit him, it could be seen as problem focused coping, but
emotions are of course involved. That is why I think it is very difficult
to make the distinction between emotion focused and problem focused coping.
Well, this distinction between events and emotions is a very essential problem. I myself always say there is an event and this event is
evaluated,
but it is not possible to talk about events in a reasonable way without
taking the evaluations into account. I wrote an article once, in which
I stated that emotions constitute a process over time which is more complex
than having an observation followed by an evaluation of that observation,
which results in an emotion. It is more like a self-reinforcing circle.
A beautiful example of this process is when you bump your head against
the kitchen cupboard and what do you do? You hit that kitchen cupboard
very hard. What is it that makes you so angry? The poor kitchen cupboard
has not done anything wrong. When you want to unfold the situation you
have to say: you hurt yourself, you feel powerless against that pain, you
look for an aspect of the situation that might be seen as responsible for
that pain, the kitchen cupboard or your roommate who left the cupboard
open. This is a process over time in which an important part of the evaluation
is being determined by the emotion. At this point you can see that the
distinction between emotion focused coping and problem focused coping does
not apply anymore. I hit the cupboard because I need to cope with the pain,
with the humiliation of being so dumb. This example shows that the level
of analysis of emotions should be more complex than a few linear processes.
First of all, you have to take many factors into account and you have to
try to describe the process by a non-linear dynamic system approach. This
means that if you want to predict the emotion outcome of a situation, there
is, first of all, no simple way to do that. You have to take an enormous
number of factors into account and that is why a prediction is very difficult
and very often not even possible. This does not mean that people are
unpredictable,
or not liable to rules, but that these rules are so complex that it is
difficult to predict behavior. This is precisely why I think working in
this field is so much fun.
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