Elevation, a New Emotion Defined

Years ago,  I remember a George Carlin comic bit when he played a news anchor announcing the discovery of a new color.  I laughed out loud at the utter ridiculousness of the notion, yet I was completely charmed.    I felt the same when I read about the discovery of a new emotion.

Now emotions can be subtle states for which there just aren’t words in English.  Take mudita for example.  Mudita is the Buddhist word for sympathetic joy or happiness in another’s good fortune.  I think we all felt mudita when we heard that the largest powerball lottery was won by a group of hard-working, but scrabbling workers at a meat-packing plant in Nebraska.  Each of the workers, about half of them immigrants, walked away with $15 million.

We all have taken pleasure in someone else’s misfortune especially those who are flying high and who seem to set themselves up.     Think of the glee many people felt when Martha Stewart was indicted.   That’s schadenfreude.  We use the German word because we have no other.

Sometimes a new emotion reflects a real change in the world.  Seemed strange to me, but  I learned boredom apparently never existed prior to 1760.    There was the sadness and gloominess of melancholy, of course.  And there was acedia,  one of the seven deadly sins.  Acedia is often translated as sloth or laziness, but it’s much worse.  It’s a spiritual torpor, a complete indifference to the practice of virtue.  Or as people say today -- whatever.

So what accounted for the emergence of boredom?  1760 was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the tedium of factory work.   Before then people survived on their land by doing what had to be done and by making themselves what they needed.  Once in the factory, they were on machines making the same things over and over again.  Boredom was a necessary new word to describe the feeling of that tedium.

Back to the discovery of new emotions in this day and age.  

In 2001, the American Psychological Association unanimously awarded its $100,000 John Templeton prize to a young assistant professor of psychology at the University of VA, Jonathan Haidt, for his work in defining elevation.     Briefly defined, elevation is the feeling triggered by witnessing acts of human moral beauty or virtue.

Haidt started in graduate school by studying its opposite, disgust because his advisor specialized in the psychology of eating.   We are hard-wired to feel disgust at rotten food, dead bodies, putrid garbage, anything that’s full of dangerous bacteria or parasites.   Disgust is contagious.  We’re disgusted at anything that touched anything disgusting or at seeing someone eating something disgusting.  

Haidt in an interview said he discovered that people, when asked what they found disgusting, replied hypocrisy, racism, cruelty and betrayal.  Disgust had also become a social and moral emotion as

we seem to place human actions on a vertical dimension that runs from our conception of absolute good (God) above, to absolute evil (the Devil) below. This vertical dimension is found in many cultures -- for example, in Hindu and Buddhist ideas that people are reincarnated at higher or lower levels depending on their moral behavior in this life.

Social disgust can then be understood as the emotional reaction people have to witnessing others moving "down," or exhibiting their lower, baser, less God-like nature. Human beings feel revolted by moral depravity, and this revulsion is akin to the revulsion they feel toward rotten food and cockroaches. In this way, disgust helps us form groups, reject deviants, and build a moral community.

Then one day, Haidt looked up.

I had never thought about what emotion we feel when we see someone move higher on the vertical dimension, acting in an honorable or saintly way.

But once I began to investigate, I saw a whole new set of emotional responses that were triggered by virtuous, pure, or super-human behavior. I have called this emotion "elevation" because seeing other people rise on the vertical dimension, from evil to goodness, seems to make people feel higher on it themselves

tells

Myself and three guys from my church were going home from volunteering our services at the Salvation Army that morning. It had been snowing since the night before and the snow was a thick blanket on the ground. As we were driving through a neighborhood near where I lived I saw an elderly woman with a shovel in her driveway. I did not think much of it when one of the guys in the back asked the driver to let him off here.

The driver had not been paying much attention so he ended up circling back around towards the lady's home. I had assumed that this guy just wanted to save the driver some effort and walk the short distance to his home (although I was clueless as to where he lived). But when I saw him jump out of the back seat and approach the lady, my mouth dropped in shock as I realized that he was offering to shovel her walk for her.

I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed.

    ---

My spirit was lifted even higher than it already was. I was joyous, happy, smiling, energized. I went home and gushed about it to my suite-mates, who clutched at their hearts.

Haidt  defines elevation as that warm, uplifting tingling feeling in your chest that you feel when you see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage or compassion.  Elevation makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself.

He  says

Feelings of elevation seem particularly capable of fostering love, admiration, and a desire for closer affiliation with the doer of the good deed.

Like disgust, elevation is contagious.  When an elevation story is told well, it elevates those who hear it.  It makes them lighter, more energized, and more playful while opening them up and turning their attention outwards to other people.  

Haidt says that powerful moments of elevation, experienced first or second-hand, sometimes push a mental “reset” button, wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, optimism and a sense of moral inspiration.

A couple of weeks ago, I read Christine Baldwin's book Storycatcher.  I liked it a lot and even wrote about it in the power of story.       Today, I discover what really stuck was an elevation story she told.

Christine was traveling in Scotland, staying in a bed and breakfast, when she heard about a terrible car accident.  An American schoolteacher was killed when a truck going too fast around a curve tipped over and crushed him in his rental car.

The next day  as she pieced the story together listening to people talking onthe local bus she noticed how stirred  people were.  Apparently there was a woman driving right behind the schoolteacher.  Let’s call her Mary.  When the crash happened, Mary skidded and stopped her car to run, without any consideration of danger to herself, to the crashed vehicles.  She checked first on the truck driver who was shaken but okay.  Then Mary ran to the man in the squashed car and stayed there until the authorities came.

She was very calm as she told them the man was dead and gave them details about the crash.  Mary asked that her name be kept private but she wanted to know how to contact the man’s family.  She wanted to tell them he did not die alone.

The bus driver told Christine that he knew Mary and knew that her father was killed in a car crash 10 years earlier when he was vacationing in France.  Mary made a vow then that if God ever gave her the chance to help a stranger, she would do what she wished had been done for her father.  She would be the arms of an angel.

When I read the story, I was very moved by Mary’s courage and compassion.  Being the arms of an angel for someone dying alone and in pain is something I never thought about, but now, because of that story, I can imagine myself doing that.   

That’s the special power of an elevation story.    Many years later, it ripples outward in time, pushing us upward in a spiral of expanding possibilities to do good.

If you’ve experienced a moment of elevation or heard about one, pass it on.  Use the power of story.   It will do more good than you can imagine.