In one way or another, we always seem to strive for success. We strive for a sense of "well being" - of feeling good. We seek health and exuberance. We also find success by reaching any personal goal. Such goals can include supporting or nurturing loved ones - family and friends. Supporting one's personal beliefs such as one's religion, country, and way of life are other common goals. As we strive for any of these, we frequently say that we "want" them. Fundamentally, we succeed by nurturing and obtaining what we "want" whether it be a wonderful home, a dynamic career, a loving family, or a closer relationship with our spiritual God. What is "wanted" is effectively "the goal" to be achieved. Achievement of "what is wanted" (achievement of the goal) is being successful.

On a slightly different tack, success can also be avoiding the "pitfalls" of life - avoiding misery, disease, and death. We do not "want" any of these. Avoiding any "unwanted" thing whether loathesome, disgusting, or harmful can be deemed successful, too. Success is not only achieving whatever is valued or "wanted", but it is also avoiding whatever is aversive and "unwanted".

Failure, on the other hand, is the lack of success. It is misery and being overwhelmed by obstacles and adversaries. Failure is the destruction of health and happiness, the misfortune of disease and pain. Death, of course, is the ultimate failure.

So, what's the point? The point is that in our own minds seeking success and avoiding failure is the central theme of life. All that jazz about the hypowhatever and the sympathetiwhazzits just doesn't seem relevant to our everyday lives. Our lives appear framed in other terms such as success and failure, winning and losing, happiness and despair. No matter what we do, no matter how grand or small the endeavor, we always have some objective, some goal, some "want" that we seek to successfully achieve. But with the goal comes the possibility of failure which we try to avoid in our quest for success. This is the omnipotent theme of our lives.

Despite our quest for an idyllic existence, the environment can be harsh, and achieving happiness has been a hard struggle. As threats by the environment challenged our ancestors, they had to choose how and where to direct their limited resources. Their time, effort, and valuables could be used to overcome external threats or be used to enhance their inner well-being. However, maximizing both was impossible. Over the eons of time, those who stretched their resources to overcome external threats were rewarded - they survived. Those who squandered their resources eventually succumbed to the pressures of natural selection. The key to survival has been feeding precious resources into successful behaviors and withdrawing them from useless or destructive ones - hence the maxim, emotive energy rises to success and falls from failure.

For the survivors, the cost of stretching limited resources was "stress." The internal energy to overcome external threats must come from somewhere within, and the grand, fulfilling feeling of life was the only available donor. The survivors overcame dangers by withholding precious energy from parts of their inner selves and diverting it instead toward alertness, concentrated thought, and effective action - frequently anxious and extreme action. Only through temporary, partial self-sacrifice could the survivors tip the balance of natural selection in their favor. The existence of stress lives on with us today as a legacy of how demanding natural selection can be.

Yet, with each success by our ancestors, when the immediate threat was overcome, self-sacrifice was no longer needed and concentrated thought, action, and stress lessened. At such times, a sense of well-being returned to the body as the sacrificed inner body returned to a balanced energy flow. Today, just as with our ancestors, we sense this balanced flow as being pleasant. If the flow is strong and vibrant, we even call it euphoric. This, too, is the legacy of natural selection. As we overcome obstacles, we are allowed to return to and bask in the ultimate feeling - the vibrant and fulfilling feeling of life.

Hedonic Scale

Antonio Damasio points to this through his statement:

"At their most basic, emotions are part of homeostatic regulation and are poised to avoid the loss of integrity ... emotions of all shades eventually help connect homeostatic regulation and survival 'values' to numerous events and objects in our autobiographical experiences." (Damasio, 1999. pg. 54-55)

Victor S. Johnston further builds upon this barometric scale idea through his "hedonic tone" theory:

"The most important characteristic of all feelings - emotions as well as affects - is that they come in two different hedonic tones, positive and negative. No feelings are neutral, for the presence of hedonic tone - pleasantness and unpleasantness - defines feelings ..." (Johnston, 1999. pg. 61-62)

"... the intensity of an emotion ... can be so dramatic that we often describe emotions by different names when they are really just different degrees of the same emotion. Happiness, for example, runs from contentment to joy to ecstacy, while degrees of sadness may be described as discontent, unhappiness, grief, or even depression." (Johnston, 1999. pg. 86-87)

"The hedonic dimension of feelings can be envisaged as a scale ranging from an extremely pleasant or positive pole, to an extremely unpleasant or negative pole. All feelings, in addition to their unique qualitative natures - like disgust, pain, pride, happiness, or sadness - are accompanied by shifts along this common hedonic dimension." (Johnston, 1999. pg. 96)

"Two simple hypotheses arise ... first is that sensory feelings evolved in response to those environmental events that have consistently presented opportunities or threats to biological survival in ancestral environments ... second, behaviors followed by positive feelings are facilitated, whereas behaviors followed by negative feelings are inhibited." (Johnston, 1999. pg. 67)

"Just as with the motor learning mechanism, we can generate innumerable variations of hypotheses until our emotional value system deems a particular outcome to be favorable. We call such activities thinking or decision making, and it is these cognitive operations that dominate our conscious mind." (Johnston, 1999. pg. 118)

By defining Johnston's Hedonic Scale, it now becomes possible to design a system which accounts for decision and emotional processes. One of the best ways to understand any abstract concept is through a model or diagram. I have a model built from the Johnston's Hedonic Scale which I call the Emotive Emotive Energy Behavioral Diagram (EEBD). Though it is a 3-dimensional model resembling a steel drum or "pan" (examples at www.rhythmicalsteel.com) the essential facets of the EEBD can be effectively portrayed by 2-dimensional (2D) views such as the side view in Figure 1 below. In addition to the Hedonic Scale, the other major components of the Emotive Energy Behavioral Diagram include the Action Curve, the Efficiency Space, and the Emotional Bowl.

Figure 1.

The idea of a linear "scale" of emotions with positive and negative elements has its roots in a statement by humanist Abraham Maslow, who adroitly postulated in his landmark book, Motivation and Personality, that the "... human being is a wanting animal ... (and those) wants seem to arrange themselves in some sort of hierarchy of prepotency." (Maslow, 1970, p. 7)

The concept of a linear scale congealed in Victor Johnston's book, Why We Feel where Johnston represented emotions "as a scale ranging from an extremely pleasant or positive pole, to an extremely unpleasant or negative pole." To measure the relative degee of positive or negative feeling along the scale, I will use Maslow's term, "want." In other words, positioning along the Hedonic Scale will show items as being "wanted more" or "wanted less" relative to other items marked along the scale.

Everything around us can be graded according to our personal hierarchy of "wants," our personal set of values. If you have ever used words such as like, dislike, good, bad, desire, aversion, interest, concern, love, hate, and a plethora of others which we intuitively recognize as being positive or negative in nature, then the concept of the Hedonic Scale should be familiar to you. Many people have their own words for it: "my list of priorities," "my goals," "my strengths and weaknesses," "my likes and dislikes," "good and bad." These various terms are all encompassed by the "Hedonic Scale" which is just a new name for a common belief held by virtually everyone.

The understanding of "want" is "a desire to obtain or seek." If you want a new home, you try to obtain it. You seek it. If you want new clothes, again, you seek them by sewing them yourself or by going to a store and buying them. You "seek" knowledge at this very instance by reading, presumably because you "want" knowledge. As a general rule, we SEEK things we WANT. If we want it, if we deem it as "positive" or needed, we go for it. We buy it. We make it. We save it. We spend our precious human energy resources (time, effort, and money) gaining what we want.

Not everything, though, is wanted to the same degree; some are wanted more than others. For food, at this very moment, a steak may be preferred over chicken, even though chicken is frequently desired. Similarly, for shelter, a ranch style home may be preferred over a classic two-story home. Even "apples and oranges" comparisons are possible when using the term "want." Truly, a person can compare and choose an apple over an orange or the other way around. Similarly, given a choice between a new car and a trip to Hawaii, most people could make a decision one way or the other; the car would have a higher "want value" than the trip or vice versa. We can do this mental magic because every idea or concept of mind carries a dynamic potency which falls into a personal hierarchy of wants. From this hierarchy, we make all of our decisions. Each list is personal, each list is different. This unique list is the basis of the Hedonic Scale (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 2.

Undesirable or "negative" things also fall within a hierarchy on the Hedonic Scale. Paying taxes is typically "unwanted." So is going to jail. However, given a choice between paying taxes or going to jail, most people choose the former. As much as each of us may wish to avoid paying taxes, jail is usually much more aversive. Consequently, jail is unwanted more than taxes and falls lower on our hierarchy. Thus, just as "seek" couples naturally with our understanding of "want," the notion of "avoid" is the natural adjunct to "unwant." The more "unwanted" anything is, the more we avoid it. In general, we AVOID things which are UNWANTED. Where the positive end of the Hedonic Scale represents things which are wanted, the negative end represents things which are unwanted.

The ideas of "seek" and "avoid" in regards to values, or variants thereof, including "approach" and "withdrawal," are nothing new. The root of these are many including statements by Elizabeth Duffy (1962, p.5), Magda Arnold (Ellis, 1962, p. 44-44), Nathaniel Branden (1969, p. 64), Albert Bandura (1977, p. 58-59), Robert Plutchik (1980, p. 156), Richard Restak (1988, p. 110), and many others. Any of the pairings (seek/avoid, approach/withdrawal, approach/avoid, etc.) is appropriate, and you may freely exchange one pair for another without affecting this theory. However, one distinguishing point between "seek" and "avoid" was best described by McClelland, et al.:

"... approach and avoidance must not be understood simply as 'going towards' or 'away from' a stimulus in a spatial sense. Thus 'rage,' when it goes over into attack, is an 'avoidance' response, even though it involves 'going towards' something. Avoidance must be defined in terms of its objective - to discontinue, remove, or escape from a certain type of stimulation ..." (McClelland, et al., 1976, p. 35)

The next logical question might very well be, "What about the middle of the Hedonic Scale?" Much of what we encounter daily is of little or no consequence to us, and the middle portion covers this. For instance, I suspect you do not covet a few twigs strewn in your neighbor's yard, but you likely do not fear them either. If a new house is seen as positive and jail as negative, then twigs on the neighbor's lawn is inbetween and of "zero" concern (of no value). We use "indifference" to describe our feelings since we feel neither attraction nor repulsion (neither want nor unwant). Effectively, we are "neutral" toward it. We IGNORE anything of NEUTRAL value. The more indifferent we are toward something, the closer to the middle of the Hedonic Scale we go.

Figure 2 is an example of an Hedonic Scale ("stood on end" for convenience) and marked with a few items along the scale. The most desirable items are near the positive end. Items then grade downward in value toward the neutral middle and continue to grade downward to more aversive items including the most repulsive ones at the negative end of the scale. Yet, this is just a sample, and your personal scale of values may differ dramatically. You may dislike steak because you are a vegetarian. You may like laundry because you own a string of successful laundromats. Thus, steak and laundry will be reversed on your personal scale. Any of the others may switch as well, but regardless of how you organize your preferences, you will ultimately end up with a hierarchy of values - a linear scale of wants.

Please note that "want" as a term was selected because it tends to be the most flexible and most readily understood term. Other terms such as "need" fall prey to inconsistent or limited usage. For critical issues such as food, "need" and "want" interchange easily, but when looking at casual but desired things, such as a vacation souvenir, the appropriateness of "need" disappears. We may claim that we "want" a souvenir mug or T-shirt, but do we really need it? Chances are, most of us would deny a dire need for mementoes. Where "want" still applies, "need" no longer does.

The term, "want," also seems to work effectively at any point on a hierarchy of things either sought or avoided. This flexible usage is important because "want to," "like to," "need to," "must," and all other similar terms must reduce to one common denominator - energy. Nature is not encumbered by language nor culture nor convention. It speaks in energy. It lives through energy. Its hierarchies are expressed by energy. If we show any preference in a decision, that preference must be based in energy where the energy potential of one idea supercedes that of another. And so it is with "wants," "needs," "musts," "desires," "drives," "values," - call it what you will, all are made of the same stuff, the same biological currency, the same resource. As the cliche corrupted from Shakespeare goes, "a rose by any other name is still a rose," and the rose in this case is energy. Whether described as "want," "like,", "need," "must," or whatever, we use these terms to compare items or concepts and make decisions based upon the results of the comparisons. It is the hierarchy allowing us to make comparisons that is important, not the terminology. Using "want" as the ubiquitous term for any value helps to emphasize the common and single denominator of energy as the basis of the hierarchy.

Even though at any point in time our values form a hierarchy, be assured that the Hedonic Scale is dynamic, too. Because we are constantly gaining experience every day of our lives, our wants may change from moment to moment. Perhaps you may have been enamored with a particular car since childhood, and it has been high on your Hedonic Scale. However, after owning the car and finding it to be a "lemon," your value of the car may drop dramatically and the car will be unwanted in the future. Indifference may change as well. As twigs in your neighbor's yard accumulate, they may create an eyesore, or worse, a fire hazard which will change your attitude toward them. The twigs will move to a lower level on your scale by moving from "indifference" to "unwanted." The Hedonic Scale accepts this dynamism and only indicates that if frozen in a snapshot of time, our values will form a hierarchy of wants.

With the Hedonic Scale established, we now have a mechanism for evaluating anything in terms of "good" or "bad." Value judgements and prioritization can be performed. Even "personal preferences," "hunches," "gut feelings," and "intuition" now have a common frame of reference. Though we may not know why, in any decision, something inside will point the way with a "good" or "bad" feeling. This "something" is the personal Hedonic Scale inside each of us responding to the environment (both internal and external).

Once a scalar reference is acknowledged, the immediate follow-on issue becomes "intesity." We all intuitively recognize that some emotions are stronger than others, and the EEBD could not be complete without a reference for it. Emotional intensity is represented within the EEBD by the "Action Curve" ...

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