The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us

Emotions Are Not Noise in the System but the System’s Primary Intelligence

Heather Lench assembles an edited volume that does something rare in academic affective science: it takes the “function” in “function of emotions” with dead seriousness, treating it not as a rhetorical gesture toward evolutionary plausibility but as an empirical research program. The core thesis—that discrete emotions evolved to coordinate cognitive, physiological, and behavioral responses to recurring adaptive challenges—sounds like standard evolutionary psychology until you notice what it displaces. It displaces the centuries-old assumption, still operative in CBT manuals and popular self-help alike, that emotions are primarily problems for rationality to solve. Fear is not an obstacle to clear thinking about threat; fear is the clear thinking about threat, reorganizing attention, memory retrieval, and action readiness in ways that deliberative cognition alone cannot match. Anger is not irrational aggression; it is a recalibration of perceived injustice that restructures social negotiation. This framing puts Lench’s contributors in unexpected conversation with James Hillman, who argued in Emotion (1960) and throughout his later work that emotions carry “survival value and reveal some truth about reality,” that they are not aberrations but presentations of the world’s qualities informing our bodies and spirits “how to be, what stance to take.” Where Hillman grounded this in mythology and phenomenology—calling desire, rage, fear, and shame “echoes of the world’s soul”—Lench’s contributors ground it in reaction-time studies, decision-making paradigms, and longitudinal data. The convergence is not accidental. Both traditions recognize that treating emotion as epiphenomenal or disruptive is itself the pathology.

The Positive-Negative Distinction Is the Real Cognitive Distortion

One of the volume’s most consequential moves is its systematic dismantling of the hedonic binary. Contributors demonstrate that so-called negative emotions—sadness, anger, fear, disgust—produce measurable cognitive benefits in specific contexts: sadness enhances systematic processing and reduces gullibility; anger promotes risk-taking and creative persistence when obstacles are tractable; fear sharpens threat detection with astonishing specificity. Conversely, so-called positive emotions can impair performance: happiness breeds heuristic shortcuts and overconfidence in situations demanding analytical precision. This is not contrarianism; it is the empirical consequence of taking function seriously. The alignment with Marie-Louise von Franz’s typological analysis of feeling is striking. Von Franz insisted that “any feeling can become negative when it is mishandled,” and that even “the most peculiar and condemned” feelings—betrayal, sadism—“can become sources of insight and appropriate behavior in the hands of a superior feeling function.” Her distinction between feelings and the feeling function that evaluates them maps onto Lench’s distinction between the hedonic tone of an emotion and its functional consequence. The inferior feeling function, in von Franz’s account, produces not bad feelings but undifferentiated feelings—“displaced feelings, tears at the wrong time, wry jokes, peculiar attachments”—precisely because the evaluative capacity has gone underground. Lench’s empirical program suggests a parallel mechanism: when we categorize emotions by valence alone, we lose access to the functional information they carry, and the result is precisely the kind of affective disorientation von Franz describes.

Regulation Is Not the Goal—Legibility Is

The volume’s most provocative implication concerns emotion regulation, the dominant paradigm in clinical affective science. If emotions function to solve specific adaptive problems, then the therapeutic imperative to regulate them downward—to reduce intensity, reappraise content, suppress expression—risks destroying information. Lench and her contributors do not abandon regulation entirely, but they reframe it: the question shifts from “how do I feel less of this?” to “what is this emotion doing, and is the situation one where its functional profile serves me?” This is a hermeneutic turn within experimental psychology, and it resonates powerfully with Hillman’s archetypal therapy, which sought not to abreact or suppress emotion but to “return personal feelings to the specific images that hold them.” For Hillman, “the body of desire, the face of fear, the situation of despair” each demanded individuation—not management but legibility. The parallel is precise: Lench’s functionalism asks the clinician to read the adaptive logic of an emotion before intervening; Hillman’s imaginal psychology asks the therapist to see the archetypal image within the affect before interpreting. Both refuse the therapeutic reflex that Hillman satirized—“one could expect Job’s friends or the companions of Jesus in Gethsemane today to step forward with a tranquilizer.”

Where the Empirical Stops and the Imaginal Begins

The volume’s limitation is also its integrity: it remains rigorously within the experimental paradigm, measuring emotion’s effects on decision-making, memory, social cognition, and health. It does not ask what emotions mean, only what they do. This is where the depth psychological tradition becomes not a competitor but a necessary complement. Hillman’s insistence that “emotion always has some survival value and reveals some truth about reality, but this truth is symbolic, not merely sociological or biological” marks the exact boundary that Lench’s volume respects but does not cross. John Beebe’s reading of von Franz—that “if you don’t censor feeling because it is bad thinking, you can suddenly think in a very different—and much more exciting—way”—names the experiential reality that functionalist research documents without fully inhabiting. The empirical literature tells us that anger reorganizes cognition toward approach-oriented problem-solving; it does not tell us that rage, as Hillman wrote, “is actually internalized or frustrated outrage” with “a social intention” that “leads us into the fray, into community engagement.” The functionalist and the archetypal accounts need each other. Lench’s volume matters for the depth-psychologically informed reader precisely because it provides the evidentiary scaffolding for a position that Hillman, von Franz, and Blake intuited: emotions are not the dark horse to be whipped or sedated but the reins themselves—the connective tissue between psyche and world. No other single volume in contemporary affective science makes this case with such disciplined specificity, and no reader serious about the psychology of feeling can afford to treat the empirical and the imaginal as separate conversations.