The classical view of emotions:
1.
Emotions have a distinct fingerprint,
neurones, physiology, facial expression
2.
Emotions are hardwired into us and handed
down by evolution as they help us survive
a.
Therefore, emotions are universal across and
within culture
3.
Emotions are a brute reflex in opposition
to rationality
But:
Century of research hasn’t produced any emotional
fingerprints.
Physiological response: wire up someone’s face, get them to
experience an emotion, result is varied. You can experience anger without a
rise in blood pressure, fear without any activity in the amygdala.
Theory of constructed emotions: Brain predicts a situation
as emotional and how the body should cope with it. Some of the behaviours are learnt in its
society and from its previous experiences of self and others.
People feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own
ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel
anxious.
The classical view says emotions
1.
Have a distinct facial expression
2.
Have a distinct physiological
characteristic
A primary inspiration for this idea is Charles Darwin’s book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
There are 42 muscles in the face.
Eckman did tests: actors produce certain facial expressions
that most represent certain emotions.
Then the test subject is given emotional words to pick the
one that fits, this then was used to show that emotions have distinct facial
expressions. This worked around the world so showed this was universal .
Then they used a face expression reader, FMG: facial electro
myography. Then participants were shown a film to provoke an emotion, then you
check their facial features. So, if they show a distinct facial pattern and
only show that with a certain emotion then you have an emotional fingerprint. However,
the tests only show you could distinguish pleasant from unpleasant.
Problem with the match emotion to emotional picture of
actor portraying stereotypical emotion, plus they are priming the answer
by asking which emotion bests fits.
In recognition, it seems context is more important than
facial recognition, if you had babies in a context and you grafted their face
on from a different context, people always recognised their correct emotion
according to the context, not the facial expression.
Situations seems to be like the sky: its varied, moving
and unique. So, a situation where you need to tell your partner you are gay
before you hear it from someone else, and you have recently been in angry
confrontations with your partner as several
emotional hues. Fear (hurting husband) , urgency\Fear(he hears it first from
me), expectancy (finally I can be truthful), resentment and anger (from the ongoing
angry interchanges.
There aren’t singular emotions.
Fear of spiders, a truck running you over, being
humiliated, in a horror movie, on a roller coaster all feel different and will
have a different expression. Fear isn’t one thing its many different things
Likewise, is it ever the case you could just feel one
emotion
You never just feel one emotion :Fear of spiders may have
shame with it.
Fear of a truck running you over may have anger with it.
Fear of being humiliated might have loneliness with it.
Fear in a horror movie might have pleasure with it.
Fear on a roller coaster might have excitement with it.
There are stereotypes for each emotion in terms of facial
expression, but cartoon expressions are rarely if ever seen.
Facial expressions have meaning for other people and that
meaning is constructed out of body language, behaviour, social situation,
cultural expectation.
A stereotypical expression is used to teach emotions, and
used as a shorthand e.g. emojis, cartoons etc, but this isn’t how emotions are
generally expressed they are situational specific and idiosyncratic to a point.
We cannot claim, with any reasonable certainty, that each
emotion has a diagnostic facial expression.
Eckman: stereotype expression and primed answers
Facial sensors only differentiate pleasure\no pleasure
The main test to “prove” facial expression relate to
emotions was done by actors, imitating a stereotype of an emotions facial
expression and people were given emotional words to label them, they then
showed a good correlation but If no emotion words were given in the tests then
the description agreement weakened, likewise if they used sensors to measure
facial responses then all you could measure was pleasure no pleasure not
specific emotions, or if you got observers to facial expressions again they
couldn’t reliably match emotion to facial expression.
What the original tests showed were emotional stereotypes
which we are taught at school but rarely exist in the world, we were pre fed
emotional words to choose the best again the answer was biased.
The same emotion has a range of physiological responses.
Gold standard test: Eckman measured body, skin conductance,
muscle tension, ANS provokes emotion, sees correlation between emotion provoked
and physiological response. They evoked emotions by getting participants to
hold a facial pose from a basic emotion. This then is considered to trigger the
same emotion. This is the facial feedback hypothesis. So, what the study showed
was that an “emotion” produced this way, changed their physiology, but it
didn’t show there was a distinct fingerprint, such that you could read a person’s
physiological effects and tell their emotion.
The physical difference that studies could use to
distinguish two emotions, weren’t replicated between studies, and one emotion
would have a range of different physical responses.
There have been 4 significant Meta analysis all of which
show there is no distinct physical footprint.
If you provoke an emotion in people, there will be a great
variety of responses.
An emotion is not a thing but a category of instances,
and any emotional category has tremendous variety.
An emotion is whatever best prepares your body for action in
that situation. The emotion is a social
reality, a family of goal orientated outcomes, where anger for instance is the family that
seeks justice to injustice, dealing with threat with aggression.
An emotion is a preparing you for action in a situation.
Situations are complex, made up of familiar components in novel ways
There are many classifications of basic emotions e.g. anger,
vengeful, irritated, aggravated, outraged
Emotion categories are population concepts. This is
to say anger as a concept is a population of instance of different concepts and
of different instances of anger. Whilst there are similarities and there can be
defined an abstract common denominator or even average there is no reason why
any instance can have this
What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a
stereotype.
Amygdala was linked to fear in 1930s by kluver and bucy, as
monkeys without one would approach previously feared objects. Also, with SM
with amygdala damage, they tried to elicit fear, car horns, scary things but
couldn’t, also tried skin conductance test which indicates fear response but
couldn’t get it, she also couldn’t identify the emotion in others, from
stereotype cards. They tried fear learning, i.e. associate fear with a prompt
but nothing. But then they found out how to do it, SM could perceive fear in
body movement and postures and hearing fear in voice, and by breathing carbon
dioxide rich air, when she panicked.
This has been replicated and people with amygdala damage can feel
fear, so amygdala is not sufficient to feel fear.
Again, there was a twin’s study on people with urbach-wiethe
(damage to amygdala). Again, one twin was like SM, fear deficit but would
respond to embodied fear and carbon dioxide. The other twin had a normal fear
response. From the twin study there are multiple ways to create fear in the
brain and not just with the amygdala.
Degeneracy means “many to one”: many combinations of
neurons can produce the same outcome.
Test in Feldman’s labs: show arousing pictures, have people
describe similar examples of arousal and have different parts of the brain
light up.
Core systems: a part of the brain will have many usages.
It’s not the case that every part of the brain can do
everything. Rather most neurones are multipurpose much like eggs and
flour in the kitchen.
In FMRI tests amygdala only fired with fear pose picture and
person looking directly into camera.
The amygdala produces activity during novel situations Feldman
in 2008 experiments
So, amygdala isn’t the fear centre of the brain, rather
it responds to novelty of which fear is one source of a novel situation as they
are rare, and indeed above the amygdala stops firing when there is habituation.
Meta analysis spanning 20 years. 100 studies, divided brain
up into small areas, voxels, whilst areas were statistically significant in
responding to emotions, they didn’t just respond to one, nor did they respond
in all events, so only 40% for the amygdala with fear. Indeed every “emotional”
area of the brain, amygdala, limbic system seems involved with non-emotional
events like reading.
Emotions arise from firing neurons, but no neurons are
exclusively dedicated to emotion.
You can’t stimulate an emotion by stimulating a certain
neuron or network of neurons.
Very difficult to measure emotions
1.
Affect subjective
2.
Heart rate influence by a variety of things
3.
Emotional stimulus may stimulate other emotions,
and you can’t trigger excessive emotion as its immoral
Facial EMG studies demonstrate that people move their facial
muscles in many ways, not one consistent way, when feeling an instance of the
same emotion category. Large meta-analyses conclude that a single emotion
category involves different bodily responses, not a single, consistent
response. Brain circuitry operates by the many-to-one principle of
degeneracy: instances of a single emotion category, such as fear, are
handled by different brain patterns at different times and in different people.
Conversely, the same neurons can participate in creating different mental
states (one-to-many).
People with damaged amygdala’s do experience fear
Amygdala responds most to novelty
Neurones are multi-purpose
The brain has a degeneracy function, many different
neural connections can have the same outcome
Very difficult\impossible to measure emotions
An emotion is not a thing but a category of instances,
and any emotion category has tremendous variety.
Emotions are categories of diverse instances much like the
word cat. You can distinguish an emotion from another emotion, you can define
it by the stereotype and the goal of it, but even so it can have a unique
fingerprint.
If your brain doesn’t understand something, it can fill in
the gaps so that it does. For instance, a partial silhouette of a bee, doesn’t
make sense but after you know it’s a bee, your brain fills in the gap and you can’t
not see a bee.
Brains fill in gaps, the other side of a dice, the sense
of motion, the fact we see upside down. Move closer or further away from an
object and it seems that we are closer not it is bigger.
No matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or
experience yourself constructing the image. We needed a specially designed
example to unmask the fact that construction is occurring.
The process of the brain constructing is called
simulation, when the brain is missing something, it needs to make sense of an experience.
Simulations happen regularly but not obviously in perception and obviously and
regularly in imagination and memory.
Simulations are your brains guess of what’s happening in the
world.
Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch,
taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.
A simulation brings past similar experience to a current
situation, this is what it was like. Likewise, it brings expectation of what I
think it will be like, given this context, and how it was before. It also
brings a cross sensory response to it. It will bring thoughts and emotions too.
So, simulation prepares your body for the potential change
given the experience that is happening.
So, your concept “bee” has all these aspects in it. Bee also
connects out with other cognitive networks, countryside, mother etc.
Whilst concepts can blend into to each other, for instance
hills and mountains, they still sharply define against other concepts, e.g.
hills and lakes.
Your concepts are a primary tool for your brain to guess the
meaning of incoming sensory inputs.
So sound waves form music or speech dependent on the culture
grown up in . Likewise, chemicals are turned into tastes and smells that are
conceptually connected.
You brain also uses concepts to make meaning from concepts
inside your body.
So, one input says an aching stomach can be interpreted as
hunger, nausea or mistrust dependent on the context, dinner table, flu season
or courtroom.
So, you can interpret interoceptive data as being an
emotional concept. Of course, your interpretation might be wrong, or not as
right as you think. So, you might have a knot in your stomach which you might
interpret as disgust, and whilst its true you feel disgusted, you might also
notice that you feel hungry and that you are feeling a bit unwell.
Theory of constructed emotions=In every waking moment,
your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions
and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion
concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.
Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a
passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions.
From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and
prescribes action.
Classical emotion theory says emotional reaction are
triggered
Constructed emotion theory says emotions are constructed based
on internal and external sensation.
The theory of construction of human experience dates to
Heraclitus
We share emotions as we share a culture, in different
cultures you can get different emotions. Again, we share a common culture in
terms of being human so there are some shared emotions cross culturally.
Social construction: social values and interests
construct our experience
Psychological construction: we have base building blocks to construct our
experience in the world, which then construct thoughts\emotions
The brain is changed by epigenetics and by plasticity.
The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of
all three flavours of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges
the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it
considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And
from neuro-construction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain.
The brain can produce many different instances of a
particular emotion. It can also reuse parts from one emotion in another. The
parts that are used to construct an emotion create something new in their
combination and this can only be understood by engaging with all of it. In the
same way that when you bake the interplay of ingredients produces something new
by their interaction, e.g. bread and crustiness wasn’t in any of the
ingredients.
Emotions as emergent out of the combination of core
ingredients. So, what are the core systems?
Core systems as interoceptive system? Emotions affective
quality out of emergent properties
Chemical reactions transform both sides into new things, so
you can’t take the product and reverse engineer it, think about bread. So, to
understand you need to understand the context and the interactions. This is holistic thinking.
The context, the interactions.
Holism, emergent properties, and degeneracy are the very
antithesis of fingerprints.
Emotions as crustiness the emergent properties out of
adding flour and yeast.
So, when you bake bread, there are the ingredients, the
process and the context (humidity, yeast in air, temperature etc)
Neurones as many to one=degeneracy and one to many one
neurone can be involved in many different processes.
Emotions have social reality, like the concept’s money, or
justice. Likewise, if you interpret your fast beating heart as anxiety
enough times then it has an effect, you can reinterpret more easily in that
way, you will have feelings and thoughts about anxiety, oh oh, this is
going to be hard work. As you perceive
being anxious then this can have effects on the rest of your internal systems,
your immune system your digestive system, your blood pressure.
So, as you interpret interoceptive feelings\external events
as an emotion then you create an instance of emotion which has a unique
experience.
So, there are emotional category words like anxiety, sadness
etc. Then there are all the instances that get interpreted as these which are a
diverse population.
So, thinking of emotions as social realities sees them
interpreted, and constructed.
The antithesis of this, is to talk about an emotion being
triggered (it was there waiting to be created), having an emotional reaction
(it happened to you without agency).
With a social reality, you can ask if two people agree with
the interpretation, if the interpretation is like a social norm, but not to
work out objective criteria and if there is a match: big difference.
Emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed, they are
made by us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our
own emotional experiences.
It is unintuitive though as emotions seem to happen to us,
we perceive them in others, there seems no construction.
The brain simulates, it fills in the blanks to make meaning
(motion, Kanizsa square, moving towards or away from an object the object
doesn’t increase in size, rather we feel like we are nearer to it)
Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a
passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions.
From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and
prescribes action.
Emotions are simulations that help us make predictions as
to how to relate to the world ,based on internal and external events.
When we have a fast-beating heart, we can interpret it as
anxiety, and then have anxious thoughts and this can trigger other anxious
physical symptoms that we have\or believe we have with anxiety.
The emotion is an emergent property like the crustiness
of bread, that comes from the interpretation of internal and external events.
You need context to understand a facial configuration ,
someone screaming, in pain, in jubilation? You must understand a concept, and
the context to be able to apply it.
The Eckman tests
1.
Actor pretends to feel an emotion and displays a
caricature of it
2.
Emotional words are given as a choice
3.
Cross countries people pick the same answers
Forced choice is multiple choice, we are already telling the
answerer this is an emotion, you pick which one. You are therefore priming the
answer as the answerer looks to interpret the facial configuration emotionally.
The Eckman tests proves that we emotions are universal, but
actor is showing prototype, not actuality, (they don’t feel it)
The answers mean that people can best select an emotional
word, not that they recognise emotion, you shouldn’t need any emotional words
as a cue.
Challenges
1.
Take out multiple choice and say put in the
emotional word to the picture
a.
Agreement weakens 58%
2.
Take out the emotional word, and say describe
what this person is feeling
a.
Agreement weakens still further
3.
Do these two people share an emotion
a.
42%
4.
Get participant to repeat the word anger over
and over, to reduce their ability to use the concept=> two angry faces
a.
36%
5.
Semantic dementia, can’t access concepts, sort
faces into similar emotions
a.
They could only differentiate valence, i.e.
pleasure and unpleasurable, attract\repel
Young children do the same, they can differentiate by
valence but not by emotional category up until 4ish, when they start to develop
emotional concepts.
Himba tribe Namibia should have sorted pictures into 6
piles, but they sorted them into different piles with different
characteristics.
Smiling was only related to happiness post the 18th
century.
If you remove the emotional concepts from the Eckman tests
then it makes a difference, which if emotions are accessible without our
concepts, because they have a fingerprint or experience, shouldn’t make a
difference. So, get the participant to repeat an emotional word before the
test, or take out the emotional words’ multiple choice, which is really a
forced choice, as it is saying there is an emotion here, which emotion out of
this choice is it.
Pleasure and displeasure: valence and how activated you feel
calm or agitated: arousal.
Simple pleasant\unpleasant feelings come from interoception,
which is the affective representations of your internal systems , which include
your homeostatic ones, your immune, endocrine, your organs, your nociceptive
system.
Interoception is one of the core ingredients of emotion.
Neurones in your muscles lay dormant until stimulated.
The brain is different, neurones are always stimulating each
other: intrinsic brain activity. This activity is structured, there are
collections of neurons that consistently fire together: intrinsic networks,
they operate degeneratively in that, there is the overall function that the
network aims at , and different neurones can enable this.
Intrinsic activity accounts for your internal systems, the
physical ones breathing, digestion etc, then the cognitive ones daydreaming,
chattering mind, and simulations so predicting what will happen in the world.
intrinsic activity is accomplishing, besides keeping your
heart beating, your lungs breathing, and your other internal functions working
smoothly. In fact, intrinsic brain activity is the origin of dreams, daydreams,
imagination, mind wandering, and reveries, which we collectively called
simulation in chapter 2. It also ultimately produces every sensation you
experience, including your interoceptive sensations, which are the origins of
your most basic pleasant, unpleasant, calm, and jittery feelings.
Simulations are made on the basis of stimulus, past
experience, future desires, the past experience and future desires shape the
current context, so if a person is hungry, they will have a perceptual bias
towards food and will treat cues with a bias towards food.
The brain makes predictions of what will happen, then it
gets internal systems ready for this.
So, it might predict being hungry, then might start gastric
juices readying for digestion.
The purpose of the predictions is to keep you alive and well
and work at a microscopic level. Through
predicting the brain constructs your perceptual world, what is figure and what
is ground.
So, as you think of an apple, then your brain will simulate
an apple in a variety of ways, its colour, taste, etc. Which then can lead to
the variety of ways you might want to interact with it.
When you are in a supermarket you see what looks like an
apple, which allows you to predict the pleasure of eating it, and you engage
the chain of behaviour towards this, buy it, transport it etc.
Based on prediction of experience then the brain initiates internal
and external action, what speed heart, and whether to move the arms.
If your brain were merely reactive it would be too
inefficient to keep you alive. If you had to check everything out rather than
predict and assume what things are, that would be information overload
So, based on low input there might be high prediction, then
you get an event happening that might refine the prediction.
So generally, there is intrinsic predictive activity that we
aren’t aware of, then there are events in the world that refine a part of those
predictions.
There is prediction and correction of your mental model of
the world.
You have a visual cortex in your brain that contains a
mental map of your visual field. However, only a small amount of the input for
that area come from the eye.
Predict=>Simulate=>Compare=>Resolve error
If there’s is a prediction error, then either the prediction
can be altered, or sensory input can be filtered to maintain the prediction.
To get external movement of your body, you must change
internal systems. So as your brain predicts you need to move, then muscles and
systems will get activated. In doing this this change your interoceptive
experience.
As there is an interoceptive change then there is a mental
prediction: I’m just about to run, or I’m running alternatively there can be an
emotional prediction, I’m anxious.
Interoceptive network uses the whole brain, but to simplify
it has two general parts with distinct roles.
One part of it controls the internal environment, so speed up heart
which are the body budgeting regions. The second part is the primary
interoceptive cortex which relate to the affect.
So, one part of the interoceptive network predicts the needs
of a change in internal systems (body budget) and then there is the prediction
of what it will feel like.
So, there’s a prediction of what will happen in the world,
and a simulation, this in turn leads to a prediction of what needs to happen
internally (e.g. fight or flight) and a prediction of how that will feel, so
anxious, low valence, high arousal. Then
I guess in turn a prediction of how the body will respond to feeling anxiety!
So, there is one part of interception which is affective,
this is a combination of what is happening internally and what is expected to
happen. Then there is the prediction of what will happen, e.g. internal motor
change.
What are my bodily needs (control +resource)=what’s
currently happening + what I think is going to happen.
What do I feel like =interoceptively, what’s currently
happening + what I think is going to happen.
The budgeting sense of interoception, is to work out what
your needs are and to adjust the controls accordingly.
The affective sense of interception is how are we doing in
terms of control, well then this feels like pleasure. The arousal aspect is how
much effort do we need to put into adjusting control or managing resources. The valence would seem to indicate that we are
not making predictive error, and we are budgeting well, and that the internal homeostatic systems are
in balance, sleep, digestion etc.
All the previously thought emotional areas of the brain are sensual
and cognitive prediction centres , which predict to regulate your body budget.
When you predict that you are going to need sudden energy
then your kidneys release the hormone cortisol, or you may change how you are
breathing. Change in internal events change your interoceptive affect, although
you don’t perceive this precisely.
So, your interoceptive network controls your body budgets
your energy resources, and represents your internal sensations, all at the same
time.
Your predictions for action, can involve you not moving, so
if you think you are going to be verbally challenged by someone this can be
understood as threatening and therefore there is a release of cortisol to
support extra energy.
So, the body’s control system changes depending on what it
thinks you are going to do, fight, flight etc
Relationships with caring other people also regulates your
body budget as you think they will look after you in difficult times, so it
becomes easier for you to face painful situations.
So, you have interoceptive affect, which might be low
pleasure high arousal which I guess is a sign to look for a way to address the
low pleasure and quickly. So, I may be
tired, so sleep, or hungry so eat.
The prediction of what will change your body budget comes
from experiences from the past that
have done this, they are known as the affective niche .
The brain represents wavelengths reflected off objects as
vision, changes in air pressure as sound, from interception you get valence and
arousal.
Valence and arousal let you know how your body budget is,
debit or credit and how urgently do you need to respond.
Your affective niche is the objects and events that will
impact on your body budget in the current moment, these can be memories, words,
people in similar situations. Felt senses?
When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you
are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than
your experience of the world.
Affective realism: if I feel something, then it means
something about the world outside me.
A photo of a kitten isn’t pleasant nor a photo of a rotting
corpse unpleasant, these objects do not have these properties.
The argument is that pleasure\displeasure is an outcome of
your interoception.
Interoception, controls your internal system, based on budgeting
what it thinks can happen and what currently is. It produces affect which is a
combination of valence and arousal. Am in credit\debit and how urgently do I
need to act.
When I see a picture
of a kitten, I imagine being with a kitten and the pleasure that it could give me,
so I feel good, what makes me feel good is my imagining which is triggered by
the picture.
It’s quite a jump to say all feelings of pleasure are in the
interoceptive body budget.
Isn’t pleasure or displeasure saying you’re doing\not doing
what you need. Wouldn’t this be both your interoceptive budget and your
meaningful budget.
So, interception makes predictions of what will happen, in
the world, and how this will affect your body budget and what this will feel
like in terms of affect. When it finds its prediction is wrong it takes some
time to change the interoceptive systems.
Whenever you make a big deposit or withdrawal from your body
budget — eating, exercising, injuring yourself — you might have to wait for
your brain to catch up.
Your interoceptive sensations don’t always reflect the state
of your body they reflect your simulations of what you think is happening.
Helen S. Mayberg stimulates predictive part of the brain
(??) and brings immediate relief from chronic depression.
Whilst affect can be generated from your meaningful engagement
with the world, so ego pleasure if you like, a large chunk of it comes from
your internal systems.
The argument is that affect is in the driving seat
rationality a passenger (proof?).
So, the twist is that whilst I make predictions that affect
my body budget, also my current body budget affects my current affect which I
then believe represents the world, it is a good\bad thing to do means I have
pleasure\displeasure from my body budget.
You cannot be a rational actor if your brain runs on
interoceptive infused predictions, which would challenge the rational actor of
economics, of the judge in the law courts.
So, predictions are both made in so far as it affects us
interoceptively and are made based on our interoceptive affect.
Triune brain
Popularised by Carl Sagan in the dragons of Eden
Used by Daniel Goleman in Emotional intelligence.
The triune brain supports the view that there is rational
choice PFC and then there is emotional choice, limbic system, brain stem,
reptilian or mammalian brain.
However, humans don’t have an animal brain gift wrapped in
cognition.
Barbara Finlay editor of behaviour and brain sciences, says
all brain divisions are present in all vertebrates, there is degeneracy and multi-use,
brains evolve ,they reorganise as they expand to keep themselves efficient.
So interoceptive network looks to predict what will happen
this time, so it predicts what happens when my body was in this state, in this
situation
So, Feldman argues that interoceptive prediction is an important part of prediction and that
affect is the outcome of a prediction (well actual plus prediction). So, on one
hand the interoceptive “system” has a draw towards the pleasure and depending
on your style high or low arousal and this will influence how you predict.
However, there is also the process, the meaning making where
what is predicted is that which will carry forward things that are important to
you, conscious meaning, or carry forward your experience(implicit meaning).
Feldman argues that we construct a world to meet our body’s
metabolic demands, but this misses out meaning and value that we put on the
world.
Surely then our predictions are two-fold on the basis of
what will happen in the world, what will happen internally, and the connection between the two is the
meaning we have of external events, and our internal events, i.e.
hopes\dreams\fears etc.
Interception says we always feel affect and that this
contains a predictive element drawn from past experience. There is also motivation to move this system
to a better state, unpleasant to pleasant, or agitated to calm, which will lead
you to search out things to enable this in your perception, leading to your
bias.
Rainbows don’t have bands, we use concepts of colour and
draw together the similar and ignore dissimilar, what there actually is, is a
continuous spectrum of light that don’t form bands.
Likewise with speech, there is a stream of sounds, but we
hear discrete words, you categorise similarities in sounds to recognise words.
50% of words can’t be understood apart from in context.
As you turn your head, on a physics level what happens is
millions of pixels on your screen have
just changed, i.e. the light waves bouncing of all the points, so you should
see a blurry image as you move your head, but you don’t you just see a
different object. You see in terms of objects not in terms of light waves. We
use the concept of object to see.
So, perception involves continuous sensory signals that are
highly variable and ambiguous your brain fills in the missing details, finds
regularities, makes predictions, smooths things out.
Classical view of concepts is that they have necessary and
sufficient conditions. This leads to essentialism.
However, there are wide variants in instances of concepts
which then lead to a concept being represented by the prototype of the concept.
In emotion terms everyone knows the prototype, it turns up
in Elkhart studies, but it exists very rarely in real life.
Lawrence W. Barsalou argues concepts are goal focussed
population categories, i.e. have many various instances.
Goal based concepts are contextual, in that they relate to
the situation in which you find yourself. If you say in a fish and chip shop,
have you any fish, the guy would be unlikely to bring you a goldfish.
Concepts change dependent on the situation, to achieve their
goal
Objects can be part of different concepts dependent on their
function
Your concepts derive from your purpose therefore you cannot observe
the world and find concepts
So, concepts are created on the fly from a population of
instance from the past to best fit your goals in a particular situation, ok but
often you just reuse a concept fish in a chippy or a pet shop. I’m going to buy
a pet, get some lunch and I use the word fish that I have used before to do
this.
Emotions are goal-based concepts.
So, you use concepts to achieve goals, but how did the first
goals or concepts come, surely both presuppose concepts.
Emotions can have a variety of behaviours and experience to
be classified as a certain emotion what they share is the same goal in diverse
situations.
So, your emotion being happiness then the goal would be
getting pleasure out of your life goals, being accepted, achieving ambition,
finding meaning in life.
A newborn brain can learn patterns, a process called
statistical learning.
You are born with an ability to learn from regularities and
probabilities.
Babies distinguish what words go together and where the gaps
are.
Symbols that co-occur are interpreted to be part of the same
thing , then there’s a probability formed between one things occurrence and the
other. Again, how do things co-occur, doesn’t this presuppose the object.
Empathy
Young children assume other people share their preferences.
Age 16 months their ability to understand other people think differently to
them develops.
Expectation of others is trying to get their goals and
methods.
To learn a mental concepts, you need words. How are words
different from concepts??
Mental similarities: goals, intentions, preferences
Physical similarities: size, shape
Auditory similarities
Olfactory similarities:
Concept\word difference: Maybe concepts are multi modal, and
words aren’t? Or concepts relate to the experience of a something.
So, concept of dog, is the image\experience you get when you
think of a dog which is different to the words to describe a dog.
Mental similarity can be made from wildly different object
air, see Fei Xu, who got infants to make mental similarity with wildly
different things but expected some similarity. So, words mean similarity to
other instances dissimilarity to things that aren’t an instance.
So, humans can be shown objects that differ across the five
senses but have psychological similarity
Anger:
Someone\thing has blocked my access to something I am
entitled to entitlement
Someone is threatening something that is important to me:
threatening
Someone is not doing something they should be doing: acting
unfairly
Young children show affect related concepts
pleasant\unpleasant up to 3-4 months, they don’t develop adult like concepts e.g.
anger, sadness until 3, younger children use emotional words interchangeably to
mean bad.
Some of the evidence comes from careful testing of children
in the lab, which suggests that they don’t develop adult-like emotion concepts
like “Anger,” “Sadness,” and “Fear” until around age three. Younger children in
Western cultures use words like “sad,” “scared,” and “mad” interchangeably to
mean “bad”; they exhibit low emotional granularity, just like my graduate
school test subjects for whom “depressed” and “anxious” meant nothing more than
“unpleasant.”
Emotional concepts develop over time
An emotion has a beginning, a middle and an end.
The beginning is a trigger, so mummy walked into the room,
Then there is the middle the emotion which contains the
goal, I am happy to see mummy and has affect.
Then there’s the consequence of meeting the goal. I smile
and mummy gives me a hug
There are different emotional words in different cultures,
reflecting different concepts and different constructs. For instance, Russians have 2 forms of anger
one at a person, one at a society\culture. Greece has 2 forms of guilt one a
lesser form, one a greater form. Japan has amae which means to want to be
looked after by an authority figure mum. There is no equivalent in English
So now knowing the concept, knowing the beginning, middle
and end event of an emotion, then when you have a triggering situation, with a
certain goal, then you might expect the middle events to come too.
To create new concepts then concepts are
added=>metaphor!!! But still how do we pattern to get the first concepts?? So,
we might have the experience of schadenfreude, but until the concept comes, you
might have a passing experience without noticing it, you might have it without
emphasising it, so you don’t notice it. A concept then provides a filter to engage
with experience in a certain way, then as you have the concept you can pay
attention to the world in a certain way, and it lights up!!
Some emotional concepts e.g. Gezellig, describe a situation
not an internal state. So Gezelling means a way of experiencing oneself in the
world as cosy togetherness with another.
Alexithymia: don’t experience emotions rather experience
bodily affects instead.
Everything you do and perceive is linked to your body
budget. Therefore, concepts must be linked to your body budget.
This is a big statement. So concepts might have an
interoceptive affect but also may have a psychological pay off, so if you think
about doing things that are important to you, say being friendly, then that
might make you feel good and that you can look\after be looked after, which can
affect your interoceptive system, but you might feel good about doing what is
important to you, and being efficacious, i.e. how you see yourself, behave to
yourself etc changes because of this mental achievement.
Your memory and concepts are built around not only the
thing, e.g. dog, but also how will dog make me feel, how will it affect my
interoceptive budget, when should I use dog, much the same as with food.
Concepts allow you to predict, concepts are populations of
instances, so in a situation a prediction is made based on the stimulus of what
will happen, and concepts are used to describe this. The predictions come from previous
experienced events be they actual or virtual and the best prediction wins. The
prediction can be on both what physically will happen, psychologically will
happen, emotionally will happen
Emotions are goal-based concepts that are predictions of the
current stimulus plus past experience
When I see a snake in the forest, I feel fear and run.
Construction says, I’m walking through the forests, one
prediction is this is scary, I see something that looks like a snake, I think
this is going to be a fearful situation that is going to need me to run, my
interoceptive system starts scanning for danger, preparing to run, quickening
the breathing.
So how did I learn to run when afraid? Being demonstrated by
other people, focusing would argue that we know how to live, a plant follows
the sun, it is part of its process. Similarly with ducks they know to follow
the mother, and puppies know to crawl and suckle. How do these get constructed?
Well Feldman would say we don’t have emotional concepts
until 3 or 4. We do know about pain\pleasure, so I guess there would be more
like an animal. Something frightens,
causes displeasure, want to reduce the displeasure and can do that by moving
away, or finding someone strong. We have attachment behaviour before we are
four which is non conceptual, and non-constructed in its earlier instances.
So, when the adult constructs fear, they can predict a scary
situation, see what looks like a snake, sees that this is going to cause
displeasure and a need to escape (this is part of the hedonic system) feels a
beating heart, then this is fear.
One way to work with constructed emotions, is that emotion
is not completely constructed. We have some base responses, approach pleasure,
avoid displeasure, seek care when hurt etc. However, as adults we firstly do
have a diverse population of instances that makes an emotion, and we learn
these in our culture. Then when we perceive an external context and an internal
context, from our interoceptive response then we classify it as an emotion,
this we are doing in a predictive sense as to what we are going to need to do
and how this is going to affect our body budget. We then start interpreting the
situation on our best guess, that we are having a certain emotion.
The prediction of an emotional concept also includes the
goal, so I feel angry, and I want to stop the person doing the unfair action.
I guess the prediction of emotion is more interested in the
motoric side if it is interested in the interoceptive response, although past
experience is also going to be experienced so there is an amplification effect
of previous affect.
Your brain categorises a situation, making a prediction,
based on past experience, to get the best fit to what is happening to achieve
your valued goals.
Adults have a spotlight of attention, babies have a lantern
of attention, bright but diffuse.
A baby learns statistically things that go together are more
likely to go together in the future. So associative and operand conditioning.
The brain needs to be efficient, the solution to this
challenge is that the cortex represents concepts so that similarities are
separated from differences.
So, there’s a sense that you get brain storing class
information, straight lines and angles, then applies the two when it sees a rectangle
, the brain separates statistical similarities from sensory differences.
Thing is this make the brain like a computer, so it has a
list of classes with their attributes, and then perception are objects. This
seems suspect as through history the metaphor for the brain has always been our
highest achievement, hydraulics of Freud.
The other thing that’s weak with this is the hidden
observer, the argument is that light waves bounce off objects and the
frequencies that are reflected come into the eye, optical nerve and then brain
and are seen as colour. Who sees? Who experiences colour, do you not need a
person in the brain who sees.
Likewise, these break experience down from objects to parts,
but how do they reconnect?
Concepts aren’t stored in the brain, rather you get a set of
predictions in a certain situation based on past experience. But what is it that connects past experiences
to the current one, what is it that enables the similarity of statistical
learning, surely that is a concept and must “live” somewhere, in the same what
that you hold the basic summary concepts like line and angle.
Concepts are the same as predictions, so if you predict that
shaggy thing in the distance is a dog, your concept is that you predict a
certain family of dog interactions. Yeah, she seems to assume objects to get
this working.
A prediction is the application of a concept, so you derive a concept from past experience and
its similarity to the present and its predictive value.
So, you make a prediction, and you get sensory input. The
sensory input is understood based on class and instance, where you unpack the
detail against the class, it’s a straight line at a 90degree angle.
So, based on sensory input from external or internal a
variety of predictions (concepts) are made.
Originally sensory input was made into multi-sensory summary so that
there is efficient compression, so we store generic summaries and notice the
difference e.g. lines and angle. These summaries are still predictions but very
generic ones. They are then used to understand incoming sensation which is
combined with what is generally the same, i.e. base concepts plus differences.
Predictions then are made based on similarities with the
current situation from past situations, this creates neural networks and again
is using the base concepts plus historic concepts to predict the current
situation. The sense of concepts here is a predictive what may happen. This can be confirmed against actual input and
a correction made if the prediction is wrong
However, there is also what I want to happen (psychological wants:
values, desires, physical wants: interoception,
) So I may be looking for food as I’m hungry so as much as there is a filter of
prediction of what is happening, there is an interactive sense of me wanting
something. The prediction then must work
two ways, what externally is going to happen, what internally I need to happen,
so I am predicting hunger as I feel my stomach-ache. But also, can I say I
predict my value-based needs?
So that’s one thing about Feldman, she makes humans passive,
controlled by interception, controlled by the sensory input they receive (even
though they construct them into concepts), she has taken out the active sense
of carrying forward, desire, values etc.
Due to the predictive nature of the brain, how it simulates
and corrects what “is” happening, this gives the sense of why emotions feel
like they happen to you (but why wouldn’t when we think have a sense of it
happening to us, well it does sometimes just not all the time).
So, our desires are prediction, I predict I am hungry, I
predict wanting to fix the boiler.
So, Feldman says I predict what will happen in the world,
and then use this to predict what changes will need to happen interoceptively
and therefore what I’m going to need to do (speed up heart, I’m going to need
to run) so the interoceptive network will be running based on other
predictions. She also seems to be saying that how things will be for me based
on prediction will be the outcome of my current interoceptive state against
this new state. So, I am currently cold and predicting snow, then I will be even
colder.
Also, there are many predictions, which get refined, the
more precise your concept the more efficient.
Your brain must decide what is noise and what is significant,
so we have attention, in the same way that babies have lanterns of we have spotlights.
Your attention helps you to say what you pay attention to and how, so look at
the letters and read them left to right. I guess it’s the control network, our
attention that might include looking for what we want, we are paying attention
on purpose to achieve certain ends.
Major brain hubs are the control network (PFC?) and the
interoceptive network.
To make meaning is to go beyond the information given, given
all the sensation what is noise what should be paid attention to, then how
should we pay attention to it, what sense should we make of it.
There is no sound without perception, no vision, no smell
Sound we interpret from changes in air pressure
Light we interpret from the wavelengths that bounce off
objects
As we hear a sound we interpret air pressure changes, then
we think that it’s a certain type of sound, this activates related networks to
the object, about what this means.
Naive realism says our experience is in the world, affective
realism says our affect is in the world, if it feels scary there is something
to be scared about.
Social reality needs a collective intentionality, i.e. a
group of people who agree on the concept and how it functions. We need to be
able to symbolise and therefore use language, so you can abstract a non-perceiver
independent quality to make similarity
Communication by words, by objects (wedding ring), by
gestures, by action.
Mental inference: what are the beliefs, intentions and goals
of another.
Concept is the knowledge that you can have without words, e.g.
baby navigates opaque box, therefore has the concept of this. This is strange
this is propositional knowledge, but a baby has procedural knowledge.
Emotion concepts:
·
Make meaning
·
Prescribe action
·
Regulates your body budget
·
Communicate to others
·
Social influence: If I’m angry then you need to
stop
The consequence is that you can’t measure emotions, all you
can look to do is get consensus on it, the person who is having the experience
is well placed, but they can be wrong. The consequence of this is huge for RCTs that
want to measure emotions.
Emotions are passed down through generation by
socialisation, brain development, language development.
Each generation helps the brain wiring of the next.
Culture wires your brain, makes connections based on social
reality.
Russian rainbows have 7 colours as they have 2 versions of
blue.
Cultural relativity in emotions
Denmark: hygge
Papa new guinea Liget
Russian Tocke (spiritual anguish)
Portugal Saudade spiritual longing
Utka Inuit’s have no concept of anger
Tahitians have no concept of sadness
Western cultures see emotions as within people,
however other cultures see them as being between people. Mainly around south
sea islands.
The English language is not an objective tool with
which other things can be investigated rather it is heavily theory laden, what
being is, what emotion is etc.
Classical view:
“Emotional Reaction” and “Facial Expression” and
“Emotion Circuit in the Brain.”
Social construction:
“Interception,”
“Prediction,” “Body Budget,” and “Social Reality.”
You predict, construct and act ( but there is also
experience in here that Feldman loses)
Feldman believes there is an objective physical world, and
that there is a socially constructed world that are either pure mental
constructs, e.g. emotions, money, or conceptual constructs like flower, weeds
etc which base themselves on the physical world i.e. plants.
There is then due to the brain’s predictions and social
reality a connection between the idea, say
an emotion and the world due to the brain wiring. Also, social realities have
physical affects, e.g. lower social class are reacted to differently. So social
realities can either have a physical basis or physical effects.
Responsibility and emotions, so as an adult you are
responsible for the emotional learning and experiences that you have, so
spending time with angry people, watching angry demonstrations on movies…etc.
The constructed aspect of say anger
I see myself in a situation associated with feeling angry
I determine the severity of it by comparison to past events
From this intensity of anger, I receive several memories
from the past about what will happen (predictions)
I prepare my body to do some of these things, I’m going to
shout, bang things etc
I pay attention to the world in a certain way
Certain beliefs get activated, it is wrong to do x, I must
stop y etc
You aren’t responsible for having your concepts, you are
responsible for continuing to act on them.
I then do them, it’s almost as I’m predicting and paying
attention in a certain way then the action comes out.
So, one way to keep concepts going is to repeat them, focus on
them, argue based on them, act on them.
So, we need not carry all our biological information with
us, how to create rockets, language etc, rather it gets created socially\culturally,
it is stored in our culture and passed on via it.
The human brain evolved to create different kinds of human
minds, adapted to different environments. We don’t need one universal brain
creating one universal mind to claim that we are all one species.
How come we have an essentialist view of emotions?
Darwin wrote that we have emotions passed down from
generation to generation as they are wired in specific parts of our nervous
system and therefore every emotion has an essence or indeed has a cause. He
wrote this in the expression of emotions in man and animal.
Emotional essentialists: Pinker, Eckman. Emotions have an
essence, a fingerprint, a subcortical region.
Essentialists can also believe the brain appraises, then
triggers the appropriate emotion.
Essentialism argues that perception can reveal distinct
boundaries in nature, for socially constructed realities.
Darwin started emotional essentialism, but it runs in the
face of his evolutionary theory which challenged the essentialism of the time,
into population thinking and variety.
Prior to this species had essential forms given by God, or forms and
variety from that was deviant\defective.
Deviations from the ideal were by error, accident or malice. Variety can provide functional advantages and
a testing of, and a development of the
species. Variety is experiment.
Darwin’s theory of evolution is survival of the fittest,
variety is finding out who that is, so there are no species essences.
Population thinking is based on variation, whereas
essentialism is based on sameness.
William James, father of psychology was used to promote
emotional essentialism although this is a misinterpretation. He argued each
instance of emotion has a distinct fingerprint in the body, but he is cited as
saying each emotional category has a distinct fingerprint.
John Dewey helped sew this confusion, he wrote a theory of
emotions on James’s work, he joined Darwin’s essentialism with James’s anti
essentialism.
Essentialism is difficult to overturn as it is intuitive,
and it relates to our conceptual structure, how are you I am x, that is a ball,
hitting a ball causes it to move. We speak essentially. Essentialism fits with Newton,
people like simplicity. It’s hard to disprove essentialism, you can always
argue you didn’t look hard enough, or our tools aren’t strong enough. So, its
logically impossible to prove as false.
Scientists can then devote themselves to a search for
essences.
The catch is a word
allows you to notice sameness between diverse instances but then says the
sameness is within the object rather than your act of categorisation.
So, for Darwin evolution spawns’ variety and an instance of
different variants of species within a population where only the fittest
survive, but then has fixed parts of ancestry in our brain (reptile, mammal)
that our rationality controls. The
strange thing is that our behaviour isn’t evolutionary, our emotions evolved, and
they are fixed and carried forward which is inconsistent with his
So emotional essentialism derives from Darwinism who was an
anti-essentialist.
The classical view says we inherit our emotional systems
from previous evolutionary incarnations, and these can get triggered under
certain circumstance to produces certain responses, but we have rationality to
manage this. This also relates to
duality of mind and body with the world outside you and emotions inside you.
The Darwin argument is evolution is survival of the fittest
and there is population variety and that parts of the history of our evolution
are kept with us, so for instance our tail bone.
You could argue that parts of our emotional system are like this
vestige of a previous version of us, but Feldman argues that Darwin moves
biological essentialism to population thinking, so from design by religion to
variety of the chance of evolutionary development, but he leaves the emotional
system as an essential system, but then he also leaves the pulmonary system.
The Expression book embodied essentialism:
1.
Humans and animals share the essence of emotions
2.
Emotions seek expression in our face and body
and are outside of our control
3.
They are triggered by the outside world.
However, Darwin argued that emotional expression was in some
part only understandable from its evolutionary origin, e.g. baring teeth or
hair bristling.
So, Darwin thought our emotional system served functions for
previous species, but he is used to argue they currently serve evolution
functions.
Allport modified Darwin’s views to say emotions weren’t
functional ancestrally and a current vestige but rather we have them as
children as vestigial but then we develop their evolutionary functional nature.
Darwinian background , with the adaption of Allport and Dewey,
let the brain to be seen as an evolutionary outcome that has current
evolutionary purpose and distinct functions can be found in distinct place, e.g.
Broca “found” the area for speech, amygdala for fear, the triune brain theory.
He saw the limbic system as having a distinct function
although wider than the seat of emotions that it is now used for. The limbic system was said to be the interface
between the brain stem with the reptilian natures, and the higher functions of
human rationality. It was said to house the emotions, which are a halfway house
between reptile and human. In short, the stem\limbic\PFC hierarchy shows
Darwinian evolution in action.
No single brain area is dedicated to emotion
Plato divided the brain up into
Rationality
Passions
Appetites
Heraclitus said we construct perception in the moment.
Plato’s view still around but we call the perception,
emotion, cognition. Freud called them id, ego and superego. Triune brain names
them , reptilian, limbic system and neocortex.
Our brains are developed mostly by nurture, there is a
bootstrapping mechanism, to combine ideas, to statistically learn, to
engage\respond with pleasure and pain, but then on top of that there is
epigenetics that turns on genes via the environment, there is behaviour that
rewires the brain, what fires together wires together.
Essentialists say first God created the brain with its
specific parts, then evolution.
Constructionists first say the environment developed the
brain then culture.
We are neither biologically nor culturally determined. We
are neither biologically nor culturally determined.
Behaviourism is the outcome of not being able to measure
emotions, so they measure the before and the after of an experience, and
emotions get relegated to the 4 fs.
The cognitive revolution sees the mind as working like a
computer, and therefore the brain as having its distinct modules. There were two theories of emotion the basic
emotion theory, and the appraisal theory of emotions.
So, the summary is:
There have been no emotional essences found, i.e. facial
expression, physical reaction. The Eckhart studies are discredited because he
primes the persons response with an emotional word and gets actors to fake
prototype emotions. If you take out the emotional
words from the study, they are very weak.
The electro facial studies again are very weak.
When physical reactions are studied then whilst the body
responds emotionally but large meta-analysis of 22000 don’t show any
physiological agreement.
Other theory of emotions is this
There is great variety in how we describe instance of
certain emotions, that go with different behaviour, physiology and purpose.
These are culturally constructed, and this is why we have different emotions
between countries Liget for instance. The fact we have similar ones is because
we face similar problems.
The argument goes that we have some basic bootstrapping
abilities as babies, know pain\pleasure and have varying levels of arousal, and
have interoceptive awareness. Then on top of these we are taught emotions which
are goal-based concepts, e.g. escape, seek retribution etc, and will contain
interoceptive information.
Our brains are predictive creatures, we can see it in action
with incomplete pictures, see our vision isn’t pixilated and that we see motion
but all we have is static pictures from two cameras and our brain. Likewise,
the upside-down glasses. They need to be predictive as we wouldn’t have time to
see what’s happening and then react, we would be dead long before we realised
it was a lion.
We are taught emotional concepts (without which we don’t
experience the emotion). We then in a situation predict what is happening based
on the input, internal and external. One of these predictions might be an
emotion. We predict based on the input, past experience, current needs. We correct our prediction when we compare it
with what’s happening. Although our prediction, alters what’s happening as it
changes how we are paying attention, and when you pay attention to the world it
lights up in different ways.
There is no neural, facial of physiological fingerprint of
emotion.
Neural: amygdala discredited for fear as it only lit up in
novel fear situations, i.e. when the person was looking to camera. Meta studies
again don’t show any agreement for which brain area relates to what emotion
Facial: Eckman’s study floored, take away the seeding and it
doesn’t work
Physiological: Meta studies for 20000 don’t give agreement.
Rather the brain has 1 to many and many to 1 functions,
degeneracy and multi-use. So, it has some core systems which can get reused for
different activities. Likewise, the same function, emotion, cognition etc, can
be produced neurally in many ways. There
aren’t specific areas for brain function, rather neural pathways are created in
relation to experience (fires together, wires together)
Doing things, which affect your interoceptive systems can be
pleasant\unpleasant. Feldman argues every time you do a physical act for your
body budget then this will be pleasant\unpleasant.
Your interoceptive network needs to be calibrated to your body’s
needs or you won’t feel so good.
Chronically mismanaged budgets, i.e. the prediction between
what you need and how your system is running, will lead you to feeling
miserable.
So calm is a matched body budget, and interoceptive systems.
Pleasure is the adaption to the current interoceptive need.
Body budgets are affected by not ruminating, gratitude,
touch, no inflammation!! WTF how ??
Improve emotional granularity ,improves emotional prediction
and gets greater accuracy between prediction and body budgets needs
Learn new words:
Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions,
predictions regulate your body budget,
The problem with rumination and worry is that these are part
of a prediction of what will happen, so you experience them, so it affects your
body budget, you prepare for\experience pain.
Likewise, the more you ruminate\worry the more this becomes
part of your repertoire, of how you see the world.
Gratitude and appreciation can also be helpful as it primes
you to see more of them in the world.
Discomfort as problems with your body budget. Suffering as
its personal, there’s a failure with yourself or the world that’s causing your
suffering.
So, things that can help:
1.
Increase emotional granularity
2.
Improve your general well-being, which impacts
on your body budget
3.
Engage less with rumination\worry and more with
gratitude\appreciation
4.
Move your body, if you have more glucose than
you need, then burn it off
5.
Change your scenery, it will change your context
and therefore predictions.
6.
Recategorize
a.
your physical sensations into a more granular
description
b.
your emotions into helpful, scared, to excited
7.
Understand that you as an essential self is a
fiction, this will reduce suffering
a.
Use awe
b.
Use perspective to gain insignificance.
You can suffer if you have sleights to your ideal self, its
virtue, wisdom, achievements etc. But if you see the self as transient,
reconstructed based on current goals, then you could reduce these essentialist
aspects of yourself and therefore the
pain, when they are challenged
When you suffer, is this because there is a threat to your
social reality of yourself?
Success or failure are just aspects of constructing your
fictional social reality of self.
In a constructionist mindset you need to be a good
communicator for other people to understand how you are feeling, in an
essentialist mindset the onus is on the person who has the emotion
LFB argues against the classical view of emotions. This is
broadly that emotions are distinct “things” that live inside us, which have
essences.
The standard argument is that they have physical
essences, facial expression
essences and they come from certain
areas in the brain. The other argument
is that emotions are universal, found in all countries in the world by default
of being an innate part of humans.
First, to argue against the essentialism of emotions in
facial expressions she debunks Eckman’s research which is a cornerstone of this
argument. She shows that his research primes his participants with emotional
words and uses stereotypical expressions which don’t exist in the real world.
Research that uses a person experiencing an emotion (rather than an actor) with
a question that says something neutral such as what is this person
experiencing, shows very little ability to identify emotions.
Likewise with bodily responses the best that can be done is
to identify pleasure\aversion.
The brain that has distinct areas that are responsible for
emotions amygdala for fear for instance, and the limbic system for emotions
more generally. However recent research shows that you can feel fear without an
amygdala. Secondly the idea of the limbic system being the centre of emotions
seems to trade on the theory of the triune brain theory. This theory was
created by the visual commonality between human, reptile and mammalian brains.
Now that there are more scientific tests, they can see that parts of the brain
that look similar, can have very different functions and things that look
dissimilar can have similar functions. So, a visual
similarity\dissimilarity tells you
nothing.
LFB argues that firstly the brain functionality is
degenerate, i.e. one part of the brain can produce many different effects. So,
our experience of fear can be produced by many different parts of the brain.
She also argues that emotions are best understood as
population concepts. Like a population concept such as “dog”, there are many
different types of dogs. So, for any emotions e.g. anger, there are many
different varieties of it, how it feels, how you act, your facial expression.
On one level you can see population instances at work by all the different ways
people would describe their anger, in feeling, cognitive, somatic and behavioural
ways. Secondly as the relationship between human and situation is what creates
the anger, e.g. driver cuts in front of me in the car, or politician does
stupid thing etc etc, then the diversity of the situations that can provoke
anger, leads to the diversity of angry feelings.
One central aspect of LFBs thinking is that the brain is a
predictive animal. Her argument is that predicting reduces energy to do things,
and indeed if we had to react, rather than predict the world, then sports that
involved a ball wouldn’t exist as you need to predict to be able to respond in
time. Indeed, using that principle many human activities, walking, and driving
by example would likewise be impossible.
Another central tenet she has is that within the prediction
lies simulation. In other words, we predict what is going to happen and we
simulate all the parts that we don’t experience, so for instance we think a bus
is a 3-dimensional object, so we simulate the back of it that we don’t see. Likewise,
if we see what looks like a snake moving in a bush, we will simulate our vision
of that even if it turns out just to be the wind. We simulate so often, filling
in the blanks of our expected story that it has become second nature, such that
we don’t realise we are doing it. We see movement but we are seeing still
pictures in each eye. We see depth but again we just have two pictures from the
eye and extrapolation. We see an angry
person, but they are thinking hard and frowning whilst they do it.
So just to take stock, we have emotions that don’t have
instances but are population concepts, created by many parts of the brain. We
have a brain that predicts and simulates.
The connection of the two then leads to the question of
where emotions come from, and what their purpose is. Tehe purpose of emotions
and the concepts that underpin them is to predict well. The aim of the
prediction of a concept is to make sense of the situation and what needs to
happen, and to prepare the body for that before it enters the situation. The
same is true for emotions although generally they require quicker response than
for emotions. So, the concept “cake” might lead the body to prepare to eat, or
the concepts “scary big brown bear” which lead to the emotion fear, might
prepare the body for escape.
So where then to the population concepts of concept and
emotion come from. Well, that will be us, humans, they are social realities.
A social reality is something we humans agree on, and then
has some reality, for instance money. The only reason money has value as
because we all agree on it, it is a social reality.
There are many other social realities, countries, languages,
art, concepts to name but a few.
So together we come up with ideas to make our lives easier,
or richer, and once everyone agrees on it, it becomes a social reality and has
substance.
With emotions then we interpret an external situation, and
our internal situation, our interoception of our affect, and out of the two we
create a population instance of an emotion e.g. being angry at your boss but
not being able to show it, which you aim is the most helpful response to the
current situation.
LFB take the essentialist classical view of emotions, and
indeed concepts and makes them into a social reality.
The effects of this in the treatment of mental health would
be widespread if these ideas were taken on by the public and by the profession.
We would have to get rid of the current questionnaires, e.g.
how many times in the last week have you felt nervous, anxious or on edge. This seems to see anxiety as a thing, rather
than a population instance.
Secondly with therapy clients, if they took this on, then
the conversation might move from I have\suffer from anxiety, to I am creating
this instance of anxiety to best help with this situation. This could open the
door to engaging and understanding the feeling they have, and the situation
they are in, that it’s a response to.
This would seem to give them more power then over their emotions, not
things that happen to them, but things that they construct, even though it
might be via a social reality, but as such they then have some power to change
it.
I guess also there would be work therapeutically in terms of
noticing incorrect predictions, how they are handled, I got it wrong and
ignored it, made it seem like it was a different outcome etc.
Likewise, medication SSRI’s anxiolytics and the like would
seem to be redundant as all they do is mask the symptoms of emotions and
doesn’t deal with the causes.
