Choleric

The present-day problem of entrepreneurs coming up with schemes to automatically measure human emotion at scale and speed through the use of digital technology is a manifestation of an ancient tendency. The growth of an Emotion AI industry, in spite of the lack of plausible evidence that digital algorithms can meaningfully process human emotion, is just the latest outgrowth of a longstanding desire to reduce our subjective feelings to the stuff of scientific data.

Over two thousand years ago, the Greek physician Hippocrates came up with a psychological model in which emotional tendencies were based in the proportions of particular bodily fluids, which he called chymos, a word that is translated in our own time as humor. There were four humors, associated with the four elements. Hippocrates further linked these four humors to emotional states.

The conceptual system looked something like this:

This chart is a simplification of the emotional tones associated with the four humors, but then, the psychological types Hippocrates and his followers came up with seem foreign to the way that we think about emotional states in our own time. Phlegmatic people were supposed to be caring, and yet in a general way, sympathetic and yet unwilling to share their own emotions, a combination of traits that seems strange to most of us. This strangeness is a reminder that emotions are culturally constructed, not universal biological responses.

Nonetheless, there are those who still follow the old Greek point of view. Some regard the symptoms of illness themselves as a kind of emotion, but with the practical purpose of manipulating human behavior in the direction of healing.

For the last week, with the breakthrough of the coronavirus phenomenon into full-blown social crisis on a global scale, I’ve been working on a new project, under the title Business in the Time of Coronavirus. The title is an iteration of the name of a novel written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.

I was inspired by the way that Marquez was able to play with the ancient idea of a link between disease and emotion. Cholera, in the novel, isn’t just a gastro-intestinal malady that can lead to physical death. It’s representative of a way of looking at the world, a kind of emotional assertiveness that can be very attractive, and yet, can also lead to the raging excess of war.

The word cholera comes from the Greek word for the yellow bile, the humor that is associated with deadly intestinal distress. It’s a cousin of an emotional word, choleric, which refers to the frame of mind that is ambitious, domineering, courageous, and cruelly furious. A choleric person is on fire, for good and for ill.

Considering Love in the Time of Cholera, I wondered what the emotions associated with COVID-19 might be. Not being in the reductionist Hippocratic school, I decided to pursue an open-ended, qualitative study of the experiences of people dealing with the social impact of the spread of coronavirus. Given that much of the impact of the crisis is seen in the tumultuous world of business, with careening stock markets and marketplace panics, I decided to focus on the emotional experience of people trying to continue to work in the business world even as the shock of social distancing cracks the very foundations of commerce.

If you’re in the world of business, and you’d like to share your experience of dealing with the coronavirus crisis, please hop on over to Business in the Time of Coronavirus, and get in touch.