Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work
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Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work By Simon ...

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According to Milton, her model is saved from being an exclusively biological one because in it emotions are not innately fixed but are susceptible to change through learning.

Other aspects of the model she proposes reveal it to be perhaps not exclusively biological but nevertheless utterly unsocial—in several important respects. One of these has to do with the vestment of emotions in the person well prior to culture, well prior to sociality. But when is there such a time? When is a person ‘out of culture’, where, or perhaps who, can one be to avoid the social? Are emotions then, in Milton’s model, hardwired? And if they are, does biology precede the social?

While Milton (2005) acknowledges the importance of emotions in social situations, she finds it ‘difficult to accept the view that emotions are primarily and fundamentally social’ because ‘they operate so often outside social situations’ (p. 199). Milton proceeds then to list several instances in which she feels emotion, by herself:

I find, for instance, that I am more inclined to display some emotions more strongly when alone than when someone else is present. If I watch an emotionally moving film on my own, I cry freely and unselfconsciously, but if there is someone else present, even someone who knows me very well, I try to stifle such reactions … Then there is the fact that emotions are often induced by non-social things. The nature conservationists whose work I studied get emotional about birds, insects and landscapes. I also get emotional about these things, whether or not there is anyone else present. So I would suggest that, while emotions are absolutely central and fundamental to relationships, the converse is not the case. Emotions do not depend on social situations; they arise and operate outside these contexts as well. (p. 199).

But sociality is not the same as interpersonal exchange, which is really what Milton is discussing in her example above. Perhaps what is most striking about the examples Milton provides is their very sociality, and they are social even without the physical presence of another human being.