Linda Besner is a writer based in Toronto.
What if the glass is neither half-full nor half-empty? What if the glass is simply a glass with a certain amount of water in it – an amount of water that connotes neither negative nor positive feelings? This glass says nothing in particular about the good or evil nature of the larger world, and offers neither a value judgment about past events nor a prediction of whether the future will be better or worse. The glass, and the water it contains, are neutral. They are simply there.
Theorists have long argued about whether humans can be this type of glass. Not just in terms of avoiding bias in decision-making, but in terms of our basic internal composition. Do we experience an affective state that could be described as “neutral”?
We tend to be uncomfortable with any schema that suggests non-binary responses to the world. When I attempt to locate a neutral emotional state in myself, I’m not sure where or even how to look. How do you recognize a state that is mostly characterized by being unremarkable? The English language has a constellation of words circling this concept of a feeling that is neither negative nor positive. We may describe ourselves as feeling indifferent, detached or impartial. But many of these descriptors carry a slight negative valence. When I consider what it would mean to feel “indifferent,” I hear the suggestion of a lack of sensitivity – that I could easily look away from the suffering of others. It seems slightly inhuman.
But some recent research suggests that neutral feelings – feeling “no preference,” or “whatever,” or “meh” – are both more widespread and more important than previously believed. Neutrality is a lack of strong feelings – maybe we should be examining why we expect ourselves and others to operate consistently in a realm of violent passions.
“The point is, we do not live in a neutral world. Our experiences are always emotionally loaded and we make use of those experiences,” wrote the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (author of Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain) in 2003. At the time, the idea that emotion underlies everything we do – that we don’t operate in a sphere of calm, cold logic, but rather are constantly churning with emotional responses – was gaining ground. The dichotomy between reason and emotion goes back to pre-Socratic philosophy, and, historically, rhetoric has tended to focus on how best to prevent base emotion from interfering with reason’s lofty work. The assertion that emotion is not distinct from thinking, but integral to and inextricable from cognitive processes, has more recently become fundamental to how we understand what it is to be human. In 2007, research psychologist Carroll Izard put it this way: “there is no such thing as an affectless mind.”
Under this rubric, a neutral affective state – feeling nothing – is impossible. But what if neutrality is a feeling? In 2019, a team of researchers headed by Karen Gasper, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, made a case for the serious consideration of neutrality as a meaningful affective state. “What if feeling neutral is not the literal absence of affect,” they wrote, “but rather the presence of neutral affect?” In this interpretation, neutrality isn’t just the absence of positive or negative feelings – it’s a third emotional state that is neither good nor bad.
Dr. Gasper cites a body of research that has participants reporting their neutral emotions in response to various prompts. In 2015, a team led by the Swiss psychologist Andrea Samson used a series of short films to elicit emotions in 411 subjects. The research team selected film clips that they agreed could make a person feel good (a baby dancing to music), bad (a skateboarder breaking his arm) or mixed (a bride texting during her marriage ceremony). Then they added a series of clips that seemed neutral: the view over New York’s Grand Central Station; a man explaining his hiking plans; two girls brushing their teeth. Participants were then asked to rate the intensity of their good, bad and neutral responses. The clips that aroused the most passionate feelings of neutrality were of a worker sorting packages on an assembly line and a boy drinking a cup of tea.
But even if neutral feelings exist, why would they matter? Dr. Gasper’s team argues that because our emotions offer us cues as to how to respond to what is going on around us, neutral feelings offer important information: namely, that nothing of immediate importance is happening. “It seems like it would be of paramount importance to know what one does not have to concern themselves with,” the researchers write. Neutral affect could act as an aid to identifying and prioritizing meaningful information, and sifting out that which does not require action.
Of course, people are not always right about what requires their attention. In a different paper, Dr. Gasper found that Americans who had “neutral” feelings about COVID-19 in 2020 were more likely to vote for Donald Trump.
It’s not surprising that the notion of “neutrality” should make many of us instantly suspicious. Claims of neutrality have long underwritten profoundly biased systems. Mechanisms and institutions that govern our lives – police, courts, media, schools, hospitals – are, theoretically, supposed to be impartial. Yet closer examination of these entities tends to reveal familiar partialities: outcomes tend to favour dominant groups over marginalized ones.
Even neutral colours aren’t exactly neutral. In his 2000 book Chromophobia, David Batchelor argued that Western culture has a deep-seated fear of colour. “Colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological,” he wrote. A preference for beige is associated with refined manners – quiet, easy to live with. A folded-hands sort of colour. WASP-y. Upper class.
I find myself second-guessing the list of “neutral” videos Andrea Samson showed her subjects. Should I have a more highly inflected set of emotions in response to Grand Central Station? After all, if I think a bit more about it, positive and negative facts about its existence are within easy reach. Positive: it’s the setting for a key scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Negative: it’s built on land from which the Lenape were violently displaced. Positive: Beaux-Arts architecture. Negative: extremely crowded.
But I may be simply responding to my society’s valuation of relatively highly marked emotional states. Emotion researchers who study cultural differences between affective experiences remark that in an individualistic culture like Canada’s, social expectations may encourage people to report – and even to feel – stronger positive or negative emotions more often (astonishment, elation, anger). In Japan’s collectivist culture, people are generally expected to moderate their emotions for the sake of social harmony, and people tend to report a higher frequency of (and higher preference for) more balanced emotions (calm, peacefulness, boredom). In recent years, emotion research has been moving past the East-West/individualist-collectivist binary. Latin America is generally regarded as a collectivist culture, yet the reported intensity of people’s emotional experience resembles or surpasses that of North Americans.
An interesting quirk of survey methodology across disciplines is how rating systems can be manipulated to emphasize or de-emphasize neutral feelings: it depends on whether you use a scale with an even or uneven number of points. Many online purchases or use of government services are followed by a feedback form asking me to rate my experience. When I am asked to assign a number score to my level of positive or negative feeling associated with, say, filling out a form or buying craft supplies online, I am often nonplussed. This activity wasn’t important enough for it to rise to the level of having been a good or bad experience. It was simply something that happened. If I am asked to rate my satisfaction with, say, a website, on a scale of 1 to 5, I can give my experience as threes across the board – by picking the halfway point, I can essentially convey a neutral experience. But if I have to rate my experience on a scale of 1 to 10, I am forced to shade my response in one way or another – 10 divides evenly, and with no middle option, I have to pick a response that is slightly negative or slightly positive.
There is some evidence that people will gravitate toward a neutral option if it’s offered, perhaps because declaring oneself neutral requires less cognitive effort than identifying degrees of positive or negative feeling (or agreement or disagreement). But then again, maybe people really do feel neutral more often than researchers – and user experience survey designers – like to think.
In contrast to the binary of good or bad, happy or sad feelings, Buddhist texts often explicitly characterize inner life as a triad. Human consciousness is composed of positive, negative and neutral vedanā – a term that can be translated as “feeling,” but which interpreters underline is more basic and involves less cognitive input than “emotion” (some psychologists distinguish between “basic emotion” and “emotion schema”). The neutral feeling is often described as a kind of balanced, equanimous tonality.
Part of mindfulness practice is actively cultivating feeling states that approach neutrality. A detached hedonic tone comes with concentration on something bland. In a 2017 article for the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Bhikku Anālayo wrote: “Usually, the felt sense of inhalations and exhalations will be of a neutral hedonic tone. This affective neutrality is precisely why normal breathing is usually not registered in the mind and why it takes intentional effort and training to stay aware of it; the breath on its own simply fails to attract our attention.” Paying attention to neutral experiences is rather difficult, as anyone who has attempted meditation knows – the mind tends to wander in search of greater stimulation.
Paying attention to neutrality – to a feeling that cues us to ignore the experience that provokes it – feels potentially like a contradiction in terms. Once I pay attention to a neutral feeling, have I transformed the feeling? I look again at the list of neutral video clips. A train arriving at a station; a group of people walking down a street; a woman explaining how to knit; a man sitting in a café and looking out the window. The blandness of these images in succession starts to gather an atmospheric charge – there’s something calm and beautiful about them, like the sound of a light rain. The positively and negatively emotionally charged clips are often dramatic: a boy attempts a backflip off a vending machine and hits his face on the concrete; a dog woofs along to a melody played on someone’s phone. They’re mini-narratives, often with plots and character arcs. They suggest individual experiences, set in specific places and times – one dog’s love of a particular song. The neutral clips are more mysterious; they aren’t stories so much as ambiguous moments. The characters don’t develop, and the action doesn’t resolve. In this sense, I find myself thinking of them as portals to the universal. Their very ordinariness becomes a meditation on existence itself.
A recurrent theme of a recent New Yorker profile of the novelist Joyce Carol Oates was her curious lack of strong emotions. “I probably have told you that I don’t have any strong feelings – I’m neutral,” Ms. Oates tells the journalist, Rachel Aviv. Ms. Aviv asks if there is any particular valence to Ms. Oates’s statement of her own neutrality. “Nothing,” Ms. Oates says. “I don’t have any feeling at all. Why would I have any feeling?”
It’s refreshing to consider this question. Not “what are my feelings,” but “why would I have any feeling?” Ms. Oates comments that she often feels pressured to have an opinion, and this is indeed a noticeable feature of our society. We are expected to express outrage and elation, disgust and pride, in measures that may well surpass our actual experience of these emotions. Certainly, the amount of time it may realistically take to arrive at an informed opinion about sensitive topics is too long for most people to maintain a neutral affect.
My favourite idea in the affective research I have read is an offhand comment on the seemingly hard-wired nature of one basic emotion: interest. “Interest is apparently operative at birth,” Dr. Izzard remarks. We are born interested, eager to learn about the people and things that make up our world. If neutrality is akin to boredom, interest is a kind of pleasure, but one which shares neutrality’s quality of being a state “in between.” Perhaps focusing less on high negative and positive emotions, and paying more attention to the hedonic instincts nudging us to be interested, and to learn, would ultimately result in a society that feels better for all of us.