CHAPTER 5-1  
         THE NATURE AND PROXIMATE CAUSES OF OUR FEELINGS

      Philosophers have understood for centuries that self-
comparisons determine feelings.  Self-comparison is the link 
between cognition and emotion1 -- that is, between what you think and what you feel.  
     Comparison and evaluation of the present state of affairs relative to other states of affairs is fundamental in all planning 
and businesslike thinking.  The relevant cost in a business decision is the "opportunity cost"-- that is, the cost of what else 
you might do rather instead of the opportunity being considered.  Comparison is also part of judgments in all other endeavors.  
When someone remarked "Life is hard", Voltaire is reported to have responded, "Compared to what?" 
     Indeed, comparison-making is central to all our information processing, scientific as well as personal: 
               Basic to scientific evidence (and to all
          knowledge-diagnostic processes including the
          retina of the eye) is the process of comparison
          of recording differences, or of contrast.  Any
          appearance of absolute knowledge, or intrinsic
          knowledge about singular isolated objects, is
          found to be illusory upon analysis.  Securing
          scientific evidence involves making at least
          one comparison.2

     An Oriental proverb illuminates the centrality of comparisons in understanding the world:  A fish would be the last to 
discover the nature of water.   
     Just about every evaluation you make boils down to a comparison.  "I'm tall" must be with reference to some group of people; 
a Japanese who would say "I'm tall" in Japan might not say that in Dinkaland in Africa.  If you say "I'm good at tennis", the 
hearer will ask, "Whom do you play with, and whom do you beat?" in order to understand what you mean.  Similarly, "I never do 
anything right", or "I'm a terrible mother" is hardly meaningful without some standard of comparison.  
     The psychologist Henry Helson put it this way:  "[A]ll judgments (not only judgments of magnitude) are relative."  Without a 
standard of comparison, you cannot make judgments.3      
     Comparisons are crucial tools for effective daily living.  
But comparisons involving the self also give rise to feelings, 
our subject here. 
     This is the mechanism which causes good and bad feelings:  
Whenever you think about yourself in a judgmental fashion--which 
most of us frequently do--your thought takes the form of a 
comparison between a) the state you think you are in (including 
your skills and capacities) and b) some other hypothetical 
"benchmark" state of affairs.  The benchmark situation may be the 
state you think you ought to be in, or the state you formerly 
were in, or the state you expected or hoped to be in, or the 
state you aspire to achieve, or the state someone else told you 
you must achieve.  This comparison between actual and 
hypothetical states makes you feel bad (or good) if the state in 
which you think you are in is less (more) positive than the state 
you compare yourself to.  
     We can write the comparison formally as a Mood Ratio:

   Mood  =  (Perceived__state__of__oneself)           
(Hypothetical  benchmark  state)  


     If the numerator in the Mood Ratio is low compared to the 
denominator--a state of affairs which I'll call a Rotten Ratio--
your mood will be bad.  If on the contrary the numerator is high 
compared to the denominator--a state which I'll call a Rosy 
Ratio--your mood will be good.  
     The comparison you make at a given moment may concern any 
one of many possible personal characteristics--your occupational 
success, your personal relationships, your state of health, or 
your morality, for just a few examples.  Or you may compare 
yourself on several different characteristics from time to time.  
     Only with this Self-Comparisons Analysis can we make sense 
of such exceptional cases as the person who is poor in the 
world's goods but nevertheless is happy, and the person who "has 
everything" but is miserable; not only do their actual situations 
affect their feelings, but also the benchmark comparisons they 
set up for themselves. 

                        THE BAD FEELINGS

     Bad feelings arise when bad events occur and cause thoughts 
of negative self-comparisons which you do not shut off.  Some 
people are better than others at coping emotionally with the bad 
external events by managing their minds and their interpretations 
of these events in such fashion that the bad feelings are short-
lived and the pain is relatively mild, whereas others suffer 
longer and more intensely in response to similar events.  
     This traditional joke highlights the nature of the feelings 
mechanism:  A salesman is a person with a shine on his shoes, a 
smile on his face, and a really lousy territory.  So imagine 
yourself a saleswoman with a lousy territory.  The objective fact 
causes the pain, the keystone of bad feelings. 
     You might first think:  I'm more entitled than Charlie to 
that good territory in Titusville.  You then feel anger, perhaps 
toward the boss who favored Charley.  If your anger focuses 
instead on the person who has the other territory, the pattern is 
called envy.   
     You might add:  I'm going to be stuck with this territory 
for life.  You then feel fear.  If you are unsure whether you 
will have that territory for life, and you have some hope that 
you will escape it, the nature of the fear you feel is called 
anxiety.  If you expect the future event for sure, the fear is 
called dread.   One is anxious about whether one will miss the 
plane, but one dreads the moment when one finally gets there and 
has to perform an unpleasant task.      
     Perhaps you add:  There is no way that I can ever do 
anything that will get me a better territory, because Charley and 
other people sell better than I do.  Or you think that lousy 
territories are always given to women.  If so, you feel sad and 
judge yourself to be worthless, the pattern of depression, 
because you have no hope of improving your situation. 
      Apathy occurs when the person responds to the pain by 
giving up goals; the saleswoman says "The hell with it; so I'll 
just never make a decent living".  This gets rid of the pain, but 
when this happens, the joy and the spice go out of life.    
     One can distinguish many finer shades of the bad feelings.  
For example, Willard Gaylin classifies as forms of anger:  
"Irritation, annoyance, rage, resentment, fury, pique, and 
impatience" (1979/1988, p. 114).  And there are related states of 
bad feeling such as guilt, shame, and boredom.  I shall, however, 
concentrate on anger and sadness (and the more general state of 
depression).
                        THE GOOD FEELINGS

     Pleasurable feelings occur when good things happen and you 
allow them to produce thoughts of positive self-comparisons.  
Some people find perverse ways to close their minds to these good 
feelings, sometimes by denying that the good things are good, or 
that they exist.  Sometimes they do this because of the 
superstitious fear that enjoying the happy event will bring on 
the retribution of the evil eye.  Sometimes people deny good 
things because they don't want to make the appropriate response 
of thanks to other people. 
     Mania is the feeling that arises when the comparison between 
the actual state of affairs and the benchmark state seems to be 
very large and positive, and is usually accompanied by the person 
believing that she or he is able to control the situation.  Such 
a comparison is especially exciting if the person is not 
accustomed to positive comparisons.  Mania is like the wildly-
excited reaction of a deprived kid who has never before been to a 
Christmas party or a professional basketball game.  When thinking 
about an anticipated or actual positive comparison, a person who 
is not accustomed to making positive comparisons about his life 
tends to exaggerate its size, and be more emotional about it, 
than are people who are accustomed to comparing themselves 
positively.  
     Requited youthful romantic love fits nicely into the 
framework of self-comparisons.  A youth in love ( say, Shelley) 
constantly has in mind two deliciously positive elements -- that 
Shelley "possesses" the wonderful beloved, and the messages from 
the beloved that in the eyes of the beloved Shelley is wonderful, 
the most desired person in the world.  In the unromantic terms of 
the mood ratio, this translates into the numerator of the 
perceived actual self being very positive relative to a range of 
benchmark denominators that Shelley compares him/herself to at 
that moment.  And the love being returned -- indeed the greatest 
of successes -- makes Shelley feel full of competence and power 
because the most desirable of all states -- having the love of 
the beloved -- is not only possible but is actually being 
realized.  So there is a Rosy Ratio and just the opposite of 
helplessness and hopeless.  No wonder it feels so good!  
     It makes sense, too, that unrequited love feels so bad.  The 
youth Shelley is then in the position of not having the most 
desirable state of affairs one can imagine, and believing 
her/himself incapable of bringing about that state of affairs.  
And when one is rejected by the lover, one loses that most 
desirable state of affairs which the lover formerly had.   The 
comparison is between the actuality of being without the 
beloved's love and the former state of having it.  No wonder it 
is so painful to believe that the love affair really is over and 
nothing one can do can bring back the love. 
     Good feelings can also occur as a consequence of events that 
are originally perceived as painful.  The positive feelings arise 
when the person is hopeful about improving the situation--
changing the negative comparison into a more positive comparison, 
and actively striving to do so.  For example, the saleswoman 
might think:  "I can, and will, work hard and sell so much of our 
product that the boss will give me a better territory."  In that 
state of mind you feel a mobilization of your capacities toward 
attaining the object of the comparison, which produces a pleasant 
excitement 
     Or you may think:  I only have this lousy territory another 
week, after which I move to a terrific territory.  Now you are 
shifting the comparison in your mind from a) your versus 
another's territory, to b) your territory now versus your 
territory next week.  Hence you feel a positive anticipation. 
     Or still another possible line of thought:  No one else 
could put up with such a lousy territory and still make any sales 
at all.  Now you are shifting from a) the comparison of 
territories, to b) the comparison of your strength with that of 
other people.  Now you feel pride. 
                             SUMMARY
     You feel bad when a) you compare your actual situation with 
some "benchmark" hypothetical situation, and the comparison 
appears negative.  You feel good when the comparison appears 
positive.  The particular sort of bad feeling you experience when 
you think about a self-comparison depends upon what you expect 
will happen and what you think you can do about the situation you 
believe you are in; the same is true of various good feelings. 

                            FOOTNOTES 
     1"Emotion" refers to not only feeling but also the 
biolphysiological state.  Gaylin says: "'Feeling' is our 
subjective awareness of our own emotional state" (Gaylin, 
Willard:  Feelings: Our Vital Signs, New York: Harper and Row 
Perennial, 1979/1988). 
     2??? 
     3Harry Helson, Adaptation-Level Theory (New York:  Harper 
and Row, 1964), p. 126 
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