become active, connecting to the cell assembly, and the emotional response springs forth once again.

While all of LeDoux's research has been on fear, he thinks there is no reason to believe it would be any different for anger or anguish. This fits my personal experience, and what I have observed in others, so I will assume that his findings generalize to the other emotions, perhaps even to emotions that feel good.* Our nervous system doesn't make it easy to change what makes us emotional, to unlearn either the connection between an emotional cell assembly and a response, or between a trigger and an emotional cell assembly. The emotion alert database is an open system, in that new variations continually get added to it, but it is not a system that allows data to be easily removed once entered. Our emotion system was built to keep triggers in, not get them out, mobilizing our emotional responses without thought. We are biologically constructed in a way that does not allow us to interrupt them readily. Let's return to my example of the near-miss car accident once again to see how LeDoux's findings help us understand what happens when we try to change what we become emotional about. Every driver has had the experience, when sitting in the passenger seat, of having her foot involuntarily shoot out toward a nonexistent brake pedal when it seems that another car is veering toward her. Hitting the brake pedal is a learned response to the fear of being hit by another car. Not only is the responsehitting the brake pedal learned, but so, too, is the trigger. Cars were not part of the environment of our ancestors; a car veering toward us is not a built-in theme but a learned variation. We learn it quickly because it is very close to one of the likely fear themessomething that moves quickly into our sight, approaching us as if it is about to hit us. While most of us will, when sitting in the passenger seat, involuntarily press down on a nonexistent brake pedal when we sense
*Not everything that makes us emotional is a result of conditioning, however. Frijda points out that some emotional stimuli have "little to do with having experienced aversive or pleasurable consequences accompanying a particular stimulus." Emotions result "from inferred consequences or causes. . . . Losing one's job, receiving criticism, perceiving signs of being neglected or slighted, being praised, and seeing norm violations [actions that contradict our dearly held values] are all quite indirectly or remotely connected to the actual aversive or pleasurable conditions that they somehow signal and that give them emotional life." I view these as all instances of variations that resemble the universal themes, even though some of them are distantly related.