Finding the self in self-transcendent emotions.

E motion research has something in common with a drunk searching for his car keys under a street lamp. ‘‘Where did you lose them?’’ asks the cop. ‘‘In the alley,’’ says the drunk, ‘‘but the light is so much better over here.’’ For emotion research, the light shines most brightly on the face, whose movements can be coded, compared across cultures, and quantified by electromyography. All of the ‘‘basic’’ emotions described by Paul Ekman (1) and others (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust) earned their place on the list by being facevalid. The second source of illumination has long been animal research. Emotions that can be reliably triggered in rats, such as fear and anger, have been well-studied, down to specific pathways through the amygdala (2). But emotions that cannot be found on the face or in a rat, such as moral elevation and admiration, are largely abandoned back in the alley. We know they are there, but nobody can seem to find a flashlight. It is therefore quite an achievement that, as described in this issue of PNAS, Immordino-Yang, McCall, Damasio, and Damasio (3) managed to drag an fMRI scanner back there and have given us a first glimpse of the neurological underpinnings of elevation and admiration. To bring some order to the study of emotions, psychologists have proposed various schemes, mostly categorizations of ‘‘cognitive appraisals,’’ the quick analyses of the meaning of an event that are said to trigger the rest of the emotional response (4). One such scheme (5, 6) for the moral emotions proposes a 2 2 contrast. Moral emotions are usually evaluations (good or bad) of a person, and that person can be the self or another person. Table 1 shows the 4 cells that result from this contrast, along with the main emotions that fall into each cell. Next to each emotion word is the number of journal articles found in a recent search of the PsycInfo database. The most dramatic feature of Table 1 is that research on negative moral emotions is 15 times more common than research on positives. Another noteworthy feature is that, even on the ‘‘praiseworthy’’ side, the only 2 emotions with 40 articles are both closely linked to the self: pride (‘‘I did well and think others think so too’’) and gratitude (‘‘I like people who do good things for me’’). Can it really be the case that we do not have emotions about the virtues and excellences of others, except to the extent that they help us or bond with us? Are there any emotions that transcend self-interest? Yes, there are: elevation and admiration, as well as compassion, which we will not focus on here because it is not new; it has long been a topic of psychological discussion (7) and is now a major area of neurological work as well (8, 9). [We note, however, that compassion is often mislabeled as ‘‘empathy.’’ Empathy is the ability to take another’s perspective and then feel what the other feels, whether that be joy, sadness, or