Over the last several years, the study of implicit bias has taken the world by storm. Implicit bias was even mentioned by the then candidate, Hillary Clinton, in a presidential debate in 2016. She went on to claim that implicit bias can have deadly consequences when Black men encounter law enforcement (for example, see Correll et al., 2002; Correll et al., 2007; Eberhardt et al., 2004). The controversy over police shootings of Black men and women has only intensified as evidenced by public outcry over the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 and increasing public support for the “Black Lives Matter” movement and its calls for liberty, justice, and freedom (Cohn & Quealy, 2020). These current events are but one reason why the study of implicit bias has so captivated the attention of the larger public: reducing it seems to have the potential to solve real-world problems. One idea is that if police officers were made aware of their implicit bias or participated in training workshops to reduce implicit bias, then perhaps fewer Black people would end up dead, arrested, or disproportionately sentenced to receive the death penalty (Baumgartner et al., 2014; Eberhardt, 2020).

In the last two decades, neuroscience studies have suggested that various psychological phenomena are produced by predictive processes in the brain. When considered together, these studies form a coherent, neurobiologically inspired program for guiding psychological research on a variety of topics, including implicit attitudes and their relation to behaviors.

In this chapter, we discuss the hypothesis people help to regulate each other’s bodies (for better or for worse), and this is a main mechanism through which culture wires a human brain. Cultural transmission prepares the developing brain and body to meet recurrent demands within a particular cultural context, thereby supporting the development of an internal model that is sufficiently tuned to specific environments. In this way, a human brain becomes wired to run a model of the world that will control the body in an efficient, predictive manner. Our approach provides an empirically inspired account of how a human brain becomes a cultural artifact.

In current psychological discourse, it is fashionable to talk about emotions as “embodied” phenomena. At first glance, this idea is not novel. Historically, almost all psychological theories of emotion have proposed that emotional reactions are constituted by the body in some fashion. Some suggest that changes in the body cause changes in the mind; others suggest the opposite, or that the body and mind interact to produce an emotional response. Amid theoretical differences, these theories use the common metaphor that the body and mind are separate and independent forces that can act upon one another in an emotional episode. Current embodiment theories of the mind challenge this assumption by suggesting that the body helps to constitute the mind in shaping an emotional response. This view has novel implications for understanding the structure and content of the conceptual system for emotion, as well as for defining what emotions are and how they are caused.

In the present chapter, we explore a more modern embodiment view of emotion. First, we discuss how the Cartesian “machine metaphor” underlies much theorizing about emotion, as we situate an embodied view of emotion in its historical context. Our historical review is not intended to be comprehensive but rather to illustrate how emotion theories to date have conceptualized the role of the body and mind in emotion.

Theoretical and methodological advances in psychology, physiology and medicine have led to rigorous examinations of the role of affect and emotion in health. In this chapter, we review the role of negative and positive emotions in health research and then discuss some of the most prominent measures currently used to measure mood in this research. We conclude with specific recommendations for the measurement of mood and emotion in the context of studies of physical health. Across different samples and studies in health psychology, there is little variation in mood assessment procedures. As a consequence, we focus our discussions primarily on the cardiovascular system, with a shorter discussion of relations between cancer and mood.

Negative emotions and health

Much of the research that examines the relation between mood and health addresses the impact of negative or unpleasant affect. Although the experience of negative affect is generally adaptive in preparing the body for fight-or-flight, it can have adverse consequences when the body is continually taxed. In particular, researchers have focused on how particular experiences of negative affect (e.g. anger, anxiety and depression) have emerged as important risk factors in health (see Gallo & Matthews, 2003; Kubzansky & Kawachi, 2000).

Anger

Several studies have reported on the negative health consequences of anger on cardiovascular responses (e.g. Kawachi et al., 1996), particularly in relation to incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD). Hostility appeared to be a greater risk factor than smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol (Chaput et al., 2002).

Over the past decade, researchers have begun to examine how people think about and construct their knowledge of close relationships. Little agreement exists about the nature of representations of relationship knowledge, although many theorists have proposed general definitions using concepts such as relational schemas (Baldwin, 1992, 1995; Miell, 1987; Planalp, 1987), internal working models (Bowlby, 1973; Collins & Read, 1994), prototypes (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Fehr & Baldwin, 1996; Klohnen & John, 1998), lay relationship theories (Fletcher & Thomas, 1996), interpersonal schemas (Safran, 1990), interpersonal scripts (e.g., Baldwin, 1992; Stern, 1985; Tomkins, 1979), and stories (Murray & Holmes, 1994; Sternberg, 1996). While these concepts differ somewhat in their underlying assumptions about the nature of the representation (for reviews, see Baldwin, 1992, 1995; Singer & Salovey, 1991), they are similar in two respects. First, relationship representations are thought to consist of well-organized, elaborated abstract knowledge about the self, others, and the interaction between the two that is derived from direct experiences. Second, relationship representations are assumed to be organized in some hierarchical fashion, including superordinate, abstract generalizations (e.g., “My mother is loving”) at the higher levels and specific information (e.g., “She takes care of me when I'm sick”) at the lower levels (e.g., Baldwin, 1992; Planalp, 1987).

The notion that women are more emotional than men is entrenched in our cultural beliefs and consistently supported by research on sexlinked stereotypes (e.g., Birnbaum, Nosanchuk & Croll, 1980; Fabes & Martin, 1991; Fischer, 1993b). Men and women typically report differences in their general emotional experience, such as overall emotional intensity or expressivity (Grossman & Wood, 1993; Johnson & Shulman, 1988), as well as in the experience and expression of specific emotions (Birnbaum et al., 1980; Fabes & Martin, 1991; Shields, 1984). This stereotype is particularly evident in the literature on anxiety and depression, the emotions which are the topic of interest in this chapter. In general, women are believed to be more susceptible to and more expressive of anxious and depressed feelings than are men. The closely related emotions, fear and sadness, are often described as prototypical female emotional responses and seem to be central to the emotion based stereotype of men and women (Fabes & Martin, 1991; Shields, 1984).

Anxiety and depression can be defined as emotional states or as clinical syndromes. Although a number of studies have focused on sex differences in the clinical syndromes (e.g., Kessler, McGonagle, Zhao, Nelson, Hughes, Eshelman, Wittchen, & Kendler, 1994; Nolen- Hoeksema, 1987, 1990; Robins & Regier, 1991; Weissman & Klerman, 1977, 1985), this chapter focuses on sex differences in anxiety and depression as emotional experiences. Therefore, it is not our intent to provide a comprehensive review of the clinical literature on anxiety and depression, but we will refer to the clinical literature when it is relevant for understanding sex differences in anxiety and depression as emotional states.