15
Zajonc showed that subjects subsequently preferred images which were ‘primed’ with brief (sub-
conscious) images of smiles to those primed with frowns. Bargh’s striking research showed, inter alia,
that subjects exposed to sentences containing words suggestive of age tended to walk more slowly after
exposure.
16
Dimberg et al found that observation of, e.g., smiling faces led to neural and muscular activity
associated with smiling, even when the images were not consciously perceived. Tartter showed that
smiling changes the shape of the human vocal tract, in ways increasing the mean frequency of
vocalisations. Vocalisations with high mean frequencies are generally characteristic of approval,
making this a fine example of both multiple determination and non-arbitrariness.
17
As is often the case (see Bates and Begnini 1979), these have imperative uses (e.g. ‘up’, ‘more’). It is of
interest that while laboratory trained apes act similarly, even encultured chimpanzees rarely move to
‘declarative’ forms of expression (e.g. ‘dadda’ ‘gone’).
18
We would be inclined to argue that this holds, albeit in different ways, in the production and
consumption of written texts, even typed ones, as well. Although we don’t make this argument here, we
draw some inspiration from Dennett’s remark: "Le Penseur's frown and chin-holding, and the head-
scratchings, mutterings, pacings and doodlings that we idiosyncratically favor, could turn out to be not
just random by-products of conscious thinking, but functional contributors (or the vestigal traces of
earlier, cruder functional contributors) to the laborious disciplining of the brain that has to be
accomplished to turn it into a mature mind" (1991: 225).
19
Evans (2002) is a useful recent attempt to clarify what he calls the search hypothesis of emotion, in
which he points out that claims to the effect that emotions solve the ‘frame’ problem trade on lack of
consensus about what that problem actually is, and also notes that we need a positive account of what
emotion is, in order to empirically investigate whether emotions really help constrain cognitive
searches.
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