• Streetlight
    9.1k
    The classical view of emotion holds that emotions are natural states which we simply 'feel' and then subsequently 'express': one feels, viscerally, anger, which one then expresses by stomping a foot, clenching a fist, or having a yell. This is a view of emotion which has begun to be challenged by recent studies, which instead posit that emotions - or at least specific emotions, like anger, shame, happiness, and sadness - are conceptual reterojections which we attribute or impute to bodily states which are not 'in-themselves', sad, happy, angry or whathaveyou.

    (To paraphrase William James somewhat: we don't stop our feet because we are angry - we are angry because we stomp our feet: although it's a bit more complex than that).

    At stake in this is the status of emotion: is it an 'origin' - a brute biological given that is simply 'activated' in certain circumstances - or is it instead a 'result' - a bio-social 'production' that helps orient one's actions and is the outcome of an evaluative process? It's this latter view which I want to outline and discuss here.

    The basic idea behind this second view of emotion is that emotion is two-pronged, as it were. At the 'base', biological level, what is 'immediately' felt is a kind of generic, non-specific 'affect', which simply indicates both intensity (heightened or dull feeling - 'urgency' of affect) and valence ('good' or 'bad' feeling, something threatening or rewarding). The second step in the 'production' of emotion however, is an evaluative one - a matter of categorising this initial affect (as sadness, as anger, as joy...), a categorisation which takes place on the basis of a range of bio-cultural considerations. To quote Lisa Felman Barrett - on whose work this thread is based - on this:

    "Conceptual information about emotion can be thought of as “top-down” and core affect “bottom-up” constraints on the emerging experience of emotion. The idea is that conceptual and affective processing proceed in parallel, with the processing in each limiting, shaping, and constraining the way in which the brain achieves a single coherent “solution”—an instance of experienced emotion that is organized into a coherent interpretation and action plan that suits the particular goals of the individual and constraints of the context. All this occurs in the blink of an eye. The result is an emotional episode that people experience more or less as a gestalt." — Feldman Barrett - Solving the Emotion Paradox

    There are heaps of interesting consequences that follow from this, but I just want to start with discussing two: (1) - Emotion is action-oriented. To be 'angry' is to have made an assessment - not entirely conscious, but not entirely non-conscious either - that anger is the appropriate/most-useful way to address a particular situation: yelling and displaying aggression might be useful as a response to a bully.

    (2) The second interesting consequence - the one I'm most interested in here - is that emotions (qua concepts) are differential. Anger may be invoked (or evoked, rather) in a range of different situations, none of which may have anything in common. The concept - and emotion - 'anger' does not possess an 'essence' which is simply expressed univocally, but is instead a varied set of behaviours that can be 'used' for various purposes. In Barrett's words: Packets of conceptual knowledge about anger will vary within a person over instances as context and situated action demand. No single situated conceptualisation for anger need give a complete account of the category anger. There is not one script for anger, but many".

    Importantly, emotions, as differential, require that emotions are learned: they are a skill, which we learn to employ in one way or another, sometimes well, sometimes badly, sometimes to no effect. To end with another quote: ""conceptual knowledge about emotion constitutes expertise about how to deal with your own internal state—experienced as “an emotion”—and the situation or event that you believe caused that emotion in the first place. In this sense, emotion categorization is functional."

    Anyway, I could go on and on with other implications, but I'll stop here for space and see how, if at all, discussion develops.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    At stake in this is the status of emotion: is it an 'origin' - a brute biological given that is simply 'activated' in certain circumstances - or is it instead a 'result' - a bio-social 'production' that helps orient one's actions and is the outcome of an evaluative process?StreetlightX

    As is obvious, all emotions are reactions, reactions to something i.e. emotions, to the extent that I'm aware, are always caused. It's my belief that certain reactions should occur with a minimum of delay to prevent catastrophic consequences. The well-known flight or fight response will vouch for that in the clearest way possible. Evolution, if true, would ensure that these life-critical reactions get our immediate and undivided attention and how better to do that then with emotions. Emotions, as Feldman Barrett claims, are assuredly based on some rational evaluation but what was/is being evaluated is a matter of life and death and thus evolution short-circuited the process, shifting the burden of, what is ultimately, survival from the time-consuming prefrontal cortex (rational) to the fast-acting limbic system (emotional).

    There is definitely more that can be said.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    As is obvious, all emotions are reactions, reactions to something i.e. emotions, to the extent that I'm aware, are always caused.TheMadFool

    On the account given here, this is exactly the wrong way to look at things. Or at least, it is only half the story. As a matter of conceptual evaluation, emotions are not simply reactions to stimuli, but involve a degree of intentionality which cannot be reduced to causality. This is why emotions are a skill - a matter of learning. To quote Barrett again on this exact topic: "Core affect [what I referred to above as 'generic affect'] is caused—it represents the state of the person in relation to the immediate environment (in philosophical terms, this is its intension), but “cause” and “aboutness” are not equivalent. [However], when we identify our core affect as being about something, it becomes intentional, and the experience of emotion begins."

    Part of what is at stake here is calling into question any simplified - much too simplified - distinction between 'emotions vs rationality'. There is a rationality specific to emotions, in strong sense that emotions are not simply 'caused' but also partake of an inferential economy. Worth quoting another paper of hers two, especially with respect to your recent interest in brains:

    "As an animal’s integrated physiological state changes constantly throughout the day, its immediate past determines the aspects of the sensory world that concern the animal in the present, which in turn influences what its niche will contain in the immediate future. This observation prompts an important insight: neurons do not lie dormant until stimulated by the outside world, denoted as stimulus->response. Ample evidence shows that ongoing brain activity influences how the brain processes incoming sensory information and that neurons fire intrinsically within large networks without any need for external stimuli. The implications of these insights are profound: namely, it is very unlikely that perception, cognition, and emotion are localized in dedicated brain systems, with perception triggering emotions that battle with cognition to control behavior. This means classical accounts of emotion, which rely on this S->R narrative, are highly doubtful" (Barrett, "The Theory of Constructed Emotion", my bolding).
  • schopenhauer1
    10.9k
    "As an animal’s integrated physiological state changes constantly throughout the day, its immediate past determines the aspects of the sensory world that concern the animal in the present, which in turn influences what its niche will contain in the immediate future. This observation prompts an important insight: neurons do not lie dormant until stimulated by the outside world, denoted as stimulus->response. Ample evidence shows that ongoing brain activity influences how the brain processes incoming sensory information and that neurons fire intrinsically within large networks without any need for external stimuli. The implications of these insights are profound: namely, it is very unlikely that perception, cognition, and emotion are localized in dedicated brain systems, with perception triggering emotions that battle with cognition to control behavior. This means classical accounts of emotion, which rely on this S->R narrative, are highly doubtful" (Barrett, "The Theory of Constructed Emotion", my bolding).StreetlightX

    How early does she think that emotions are constructed? Is it something that is learned very young and then is relatively fixed, or in her view, is it something that we continually construct as we encounter new situations and compare it to what we have seen, causing rough patterns around emotional response?
  • ztaziz
    91
    In some manner it is both classical and new views. You are sometimes overwhelmed by bio. The pallate of emotions is strict, which leads me to this conclusion. It's not that we cant have complex or abstract emotions. Our environment shapes our emotions to be mostly common emotions.
  • Colin Cooper
    14
    "Importantly, emotions, as differential, require that emotions are learned: they are a skill, which we learn to employ in one way or another, sometimes well, sometimes badly, sometimes to no effect." StreetligthX

    I believe we are "programmed " with emotions , to survive and thrive . The fact that we learn how to use these emotions in different ways as we mature , even twist emotions , to get what we want , still comes down to the same thing . To Survive and thrive . Emotions is a way that the subconscious mind controls . I do not believe we actually have much "Free will" . The battle between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind in our evolution , past , present and in particular the future is a very curios thing .We create laws and punishment to punish the selfish and aggressive , the thief's and greedy . But just about all criminal actions are based on the "Human Programme" we are all Build with , there subconscious mind is merely doing what it has always done , we are very selfish when the going gets tough . Yet our conscious mind says this is wrong and we must fight it . So what is going on ? Battle of the minds , conscious vs subconscious ? Emotions being the front line . Is this were we get the concept of good and evil ? I am really interested to see what evolution has in store for us , the more we learn and understand , the more we will evolve
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    I believe we are "programmed " with emotions , to survive and thrive . The fact that we learn how to use these emotions in different ways as we mature , even twist emotions , to get what we want , still comes down to the same thing . To Survive and thrive . Emotions is a way that the subconscious mind controls . I do not believe we actually have much "Free will" . The battle between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind in our evolution , past , present and in particular the future is a very curios thing .We create laws and punishment to punish the selfish and aggressive , the thief's and greedy . But just about all criminal actions are based on the "Human Programme" we are all Build with , there subconscious mind is merely doing what it has always done , we are very selfish when the going gets tough . Yet our conscious mind says this is wrong and we must fight it . So what is going on ? Battle of the minds , conscious vs subconscious ? Emotions being the front line . Is this were we get the concept of good and evil ? I am really interested to see what evolution has in store for us , the more we learn and understand , the more we will evolveColin Cooper

    This is a very good example of exactly the opposite of the account relayed in the OP.
  • Possibility
    2.8k
    Someone from this forum put me onto Feldman Barrett’s book ‘How Emotions Are Made’, for which I am most grateful.

    To address your two points:

    (1) - Emotion is action-oriented. To be 'angry' is to have made an assessment - not entirely conscious, but not entirely non-conscious either - that anger is the appropriate/most-useful way to address a particular situation: yelling and displaying aggression might be useful as a response to a bully.StreetlightX

    I’d like to see a quote from Feldman Barrett that directly supports your reference to emotion as ‘action-oriented’, because this description seems different to my understanding of her theory on constructed emotions. We reduce an interoception of affect into values of intensity and valence, which contribute to how we conceptualise an experience and make predictions about the world - including naming our antagoniser as ‘a bully’ and our affect as ‘anger’, which in our mind then justifies a response of yelling and displaying aggression.

    (2) The second interesting consequence - the one I'm most interested in here - is that emotions (qua concepts) are differential. Anger may be invoked (or evoked, rather) in a range of different situations, none of which may have anything in common. The concept - and emotion - 'anger' does not possess an 'essence' which is simply expressed univocally, but is instead a varied set of behaviours that can be 'used' for various purposes. In Barrett's words: Packets of conceptual knowledge about anger will vary within a person over instances as context and situated action demand. No single situated conceptualisation for anger need give a complete account of the category anger. There is not one script for anger, but many". One should hear in this Wittgenstein's idea that what defines any one thing is simply a set of 'family resemblances'.StreetlightX

    This one interests me as well. I have found the illustration of emotional concepts as amorphous relational structures of value differentials or ‘family resemblances’ to be relevant not just to emotions, but to many other concepts. That we construct, predict and test the majority of our concepts from infancy in relation to interoception of affect (consciously or subconsciously) also suggests the significance of perceived value and potential to our experience of reality, backed up by neuroscience.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    I’d like to see a quote from Feldman Barrett that directly supports your reference to emotion as ‘action-oriented’, because this description seems different to my understanding of her theory on constructed emotions.Possibility

    Will reply more substantially in a bit (dinner time), but a quick copy and paste:

    "In a sense, a situated conceptualization, because it is designed for action, provides you with a script to guide your future behavior in a specific context or situation. For example, across varied situations, different situated conceptualizations of anger will be computed. Sometimes it works to yell, sometimes to pound your fist, sometimes to cry or walk away, sometimes to hit. During a given act of conceptualizing core affect, the simulation can shape a person’s behavior in line with what has been experienced before in that sort of situation (or one very much like it). As a result, situated conceptualizations deliver highly specific inferences tailored to particular situations regarding what actions to take" (from "Solving the Paradox").
  • deletedusercb
    1.7k
    It seems to presume, this hypothesis, that any body state can be freely interpreted (via culture, habit, parenting...) to any of the labels. I doubt this. There are specific facial expressions and positionings, breathing patterns, postural changes, gestures associated with the different emotions. Unless what happens is non-specific bodily reaction, interpretation as Emotion X and then these specific bodily patterns are then added, I don't see why these patterns would repeat. You can wag the dog with people, as they do in Alba Emoting (a training that is used for example by actors, but also by people in other professions) to set an emotion going in a person. IOW if you put the body in a specifc pattern you will feel a specific emotion (in fact across cultures). Widen eyes, breath shallowly but rapidly, tilt the neck back and you will feel fear. (note I have taken the training but my memory is not at all perfect). And the details of the breathing, for example, get very specific, such as sharp inhales, but slower exhales and more. And mixed emotions are of course possible, where people have portions of different emotions, and this I also experienced.

    And we were not told what emotions we were being 'put into'. We were simply told to change our faces bodies and breathing in the following ways.....and we saw what happened. It was very, very rare that there was any disagreement about what emotion we had. In fact I only remember it with mixed emotions. And we came from a few different countries. IOW there seem to be specific physical patterns with each of the different emotions.

    So, I gotta say I don't think this hypothesis is correct.

    People can, I know from being a psychologist, misinterpret their emotions, especially if the emotion (in context or in general) is ego-dystonic. Since we were working without contexts and we strongly physicalized the emotions, in ways that are less easy to do in all sorts of social contexts) we rarely had trouble identifying them. But it certainly does happen that people can think they are sad when they are angry - some women have this pattern, especially if they are in traditional subcultures. But here what happens is there is a conversion. The anger arises, it is suppressed and then in reaction to that process (which is habitual, rapid and nearly unconscious) the person feels sad. And can also get some relief from the suppression of emotion by expressing sadness. So in a sense they are not wrong, though they haven't really expressed or notice their initial emotional reaction.

    That all said, I just don't buy the hypothesis yet.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    There are specific facial expressions and positionings, breathing patterns, postural changes, gestures associated with the different emotions.Coben

    Nope. [PDF]

    (Although the findings here surprised me too!).
  • deletedusercb
    1.7k
    Well, as said, it does not fit with my experience in the Alba emotion training at all. We should have been all over the place in our identification of the emotion, since there was no trigger - like someone being rude to us, or threatening us - so there were no cues as to what we were supposed to feel. The problem with the criticism in the article is it is looking at end products. Of course, given the extreme judgments of emotion in society coupled with individual patterns of suppression expression, you will not find easy to read after the fact 'signs'. But working in the other direction, wagging the dog you get consistent results. Because here you have, which you don't have in most social situations (and being alone, given our training, is still social/cultured), a more pure form of the physiological aspects of the emotion. Or in these groups we as a group won at the roulette wheel hundreds of times in a row betting on red.
  • neonspectraltoast
    258
    Analyze your emotions until you feel nothing but despair and see how happy you are.
  • ztaziz
    91
    Emotions are mental-environmental phenomena. There are emotional states, this is what we need to focus on.

    Your motion in environment, produces different amounts of energy in your mind, and you feel emotion more diversely, emotions are tracked falsely in the OP if you think happiness is just a spell, when it is rather states, that is people saying they're happy when they're not. People claiming to have full control.

    However, it is activated, it's just not a spell but a state, so it is recognised in people's motion.

    He is in a state of happiness right now - he is just he. It can be thought, you can conceive a feeling.
  • Hanover
    12.9k
    As a matter of conceptual evaluation, emotions are not simply reactions to stimuli, but involve a degree of intentionality which cannot be reduced to causality. This is why emotions are a skill - a matter of learning.StreetlightX

    Maybe I've misunderstood what you're getting at, but these are my thoughts from what you've presented:

    The baby emerging from the womb cries, I suppose because it's a new environment. Maybe it's cold, maybe it's scary. I really don't know. I do know he wasn't taught to cry and he never learned to cry. I also think there must be a moment in everyone's life when they experience a new emotion they hadn't previously felt. There is the feeling of love, of heartbreak, of loss, of disappointment that occur in our lives as new. When were they learned? What of the emotions of physical pleasure, like those from sex, from drugs, from an adrenaline rush, none of which are learned, but which simply occur under a specific set of external stimuli?

    Animals have emotion as well, so I can't think that my dog decides to be angry at the person walking by my house, but he just is. He can be taught not to act on his impulse and to actually attack the neighbor, but the emotion itself seems very reactive.

    What you say is contrary also to the way we think of intentionality. The idea of the "cold blooded" killer, being the one who acts not in the heated rage of emotion, but is calm and collected and decides to murder, is the one who receives the greater punishment.

    I have trouble getting beyond the idea that emotions are primary They are what motivate us to act. Without emotion, we would all just stand still, not wanting anything and having no motivation at all. In fact, emotion means literally to move (as does motive, motivate, to be moved to action, etc.). If emotions are not primary, then what is making me want to want so that I am motivated to want? How can they therefore be a skill?
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    How early does she think that emotions are constructed? Is it something that is learned very young and then is relatively fixed, or in her view, is it something that we continually construct as we encounter new situations and compare it to what we have seen, causing rough patterns around emotional response?schopenhauer1

    She doesn't talk a great deal about developmental aspects in the papers I've read so far (perhaps she does more in the book - @possibility?), but she gives a very rich account of the various aspects of bodily life that play a role in the formation of emotion-concepts. I know I've done alot of quoting without putting things in my own words, but she puts it so well that I'm obliged to!:

    "A category of knowledge, like anger, develops as sensory, motor, and somatovisceral features are integrated across instances and settings where instances of the category are identified and anger labeled. Sensory information about the object that is in the focus of attention (e.g., visual information about the person you are interacting with, auditory information about his or her voice, as well as that person’s relation to you in this instance), somatovisceral information about your core affective state (i.e., your current homeostatic state), motor programs for interacting with that person, and for regulating your own core affective behavior, associated with unpleasant, high-arousal states (e.g., facial movements, body movements, loudness of the voice), as well as the label anger (provided by yourself or others), and so on, bind together (via conjunctive neurons) to form an instance of anger.

    Said more simply, properties that are pointed out by parents (or other speakers) or those that are functionally relevant in everyday activities will bind to core affect to represent anger in that instance. As instances of anger accumulate, and information is integrated across instances, a simulator for anger develops, and conceptual knowledge about anger accrues. The resulting conceptual system is a distributed collection of modality- specific memories captured across all instances of a category. These establish the conceptual content for the basic-level category anger and can be retrieved for later simulations of anger.
    — Feldman Barrett, 'Solving

    So there's this rich integration across various bodily layers and throughout the whole developmental history of an organism, mixed in with socio-cultural influence (she writes alot on how language serves to individuate emotion) in a way that's both biological and extra-biological which I find incredibly appealing. The most appealing thing to me about this account - which is what I really want to talk about, TBH - is the idea that emotions can then become 'detached' from their 'core affective response' and become, in a way, autonomous:

    "A simulation of anger could allow a person to go beyond the information given to fill in aspects of a core affective response that are not present at a given perceptual instance. In such a case, the simulation essentially produces an illusory correlation between response outputs". (FB)

    This is akin to what the philosopher Adrain Johnson calls 'misfelt feelings' in which emotions can become in some manner misattributed or channelled in ways that go far beyond what is 'warranted' by any one particular lives situation. I have in mind all kinds of pathological phenomena like obsession, group hysteria, addition - perhaps love or lust - and so on.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    This one interests me as well. I have found the illustration of emotional concepts as amorphous relational structures of value differentials or ‘family resemblances’ to be relevant not just to emotions, but to many other concepts. That we construct, predict and test the majority of our concepts from infancy in relation to interoception of affect (consciously or subconsciously) also suggests the significance of perceived value and potential to our experience of reality, backed up by neuroscience.Possibility

    I edited out my reference to Wittgenstein's 'family resemblance' to fit in a bit more about emotions as skills, but I'm glad you caught it because I did because now I can talk about it :grin:. I think one of the great strengths of Barrett's approach is that it sheds light not only on 'emotion' but on the very idea of 'concepts' as well. In this I find it highly philosophical and not merely biological or psychological. To go back to the passage that really struck me (again, I only half-apologize for all the quoting but they all help round-out the picture I'm trying to relay in a piecemeal fashion):

    "Knowledge for anger is established via a distributed collection of context-specific memories captured across all instances of anger. From the perspective being developed here, this means that knowledge for anger is established by capturing context-specific memories for instances when core affect has been labeled as anger (such as when the category is being learned). A given emotion label (such as anger) is used to refer to a variety of instances. Core affect can be categorized as anger on the highway (when a person might speed up, yell, or shake a fist), in a boardroom (when a person might sit quietly), or on the playground (where a child might make a scowling face, stomp, or throw a toy). In each case, the situational context (both the physical and the relational context) will, in part, determine what behaviors will be performed, such that the context is an intrinsic element of any anger episode.

    ...On any given occasion, the content of a situated conceptualization for anger will be constructed to contain mainly those properties of anger that are contextually relevant, and it therefore contains only a small subset of the knowledge available in long-term memory about the category anger. The situation, then, will largely determine which representation of anger will be constructed to conceptualize a state of core affect, with the result that the experience of anger (or of any emotion) will be sculpted by the situation.... The meaning of a situation to a particular person at a particular point in time is related to the emotion that is experienced."
    — FB

    One of the really wild things about this account (for me) is that it can almost be 'translated' point-by-point into a Wittgensteinian account of concept-use in general. The idea being that concepts need not be defined by any universally instancing attribute, as it were, but that a concept can be drawn on and modified per case, with some components being deemed relevant, and others not, while still nonetheless retaining a certain nominal unity (this is anger; that is also anger - but there is no irreducible conceptual core' to which they both refer'). How a concept 'plays out' depends very much on what it is being put to use for. One might say: the meaning of emotions are their use.
  • christian2017
    1.4k
    The classical view of emotion holds that emotions are natural states which we simply 'feel' and then subsequently 'express': one feels, viscerally, anger, which one then expresses by stomping a foot, clenching a fist, or having a yell. This is a view of emotion which has begun to be challenged by recent studies, which instead posit that emotions - or at least specific emotions, like anger, shame, happiness, and sadness - are conceptual reterojections which we attribute or impute to bodily states which are not 'in-themselves', sad, happy, angry or whathaveyou.

    (To paraphrase William James somewhat: we don't stop our feet because we are angry - we are angry because we stomp our feet: although it's a bit more complex than that).

    At stake in this is the status of emotion: is it an 'origin' - a brute biological given that is simply 'activated' in certain circumstances - or is it instead a 'result' - a bio-social 'production' that helps orient one's actions and is the outcome of an evaluative process? It's this latter view which I want to outline and discuss here.

    The basic idea behind this second view of emotion is that emotion is two-pronged, as it were. At the 'base', biological level, what is 'immediately' felt is a kind of generic, non-specific 'affect', which simply indicates both intensity (heightened or dull feeling - 'urgency' of affect) and valence ('good' or 'bad' feeling, something threatening or rewarding). The second step in the 'production' of emotion however, is an evaluative one - a matter of categorising this initial affect (as sadness, as anger, as joy...), a categorisation which takes place on the basis of a range of bio-cultural considerations. To quote Lisa Felman Barrett - on whose work this thread is based - on this:

    "Conceptual information about emotion can be thought of as “top-down” and core affect “bottom-up” constraints on the emerging experience of emotion. The idea is that conceptual and affective processing proceed in parallel, with the processing in each limiting, shaping, and constraining the way in which the brain achieves a single coherent “solution”—an instance of experienced emotion that is organized into a coherent interpretation and action plan that suits the particular goals of the individual and constraints of the context. All this occurs in the blink of an eye. The result is an emotional episode that people experience more or less as a gestalt."
    — Feldman Barrett - Solving the Emotion Paradox

    There are heaps of interesting consequences that follow from this, but I just want to start with discussing two: (1) - Emotion is action-oriented. To be 'angry' is to have made an assessment - not entirely conscious, but not entirely non-conscious either - that anger is the appropriate/most-useful way to address a particular situation: yelling and displaying aggression might be useful as a response to a bully.

    (2) The second interesting consequence - the one I'm most interested in here - is that emotions (qua concepts) are differential. Anger may be invoked (or evoked, rather) in a range of different situations, none of which may have anything in common. The concept - and emotion - 'anger' does not possess an 'essence' which is simply expressed univocally, but is instead a varied set of behaviours that can be 'used' for various purposes. In Barrett's words: Packets of conceptual knowledge about anger will vary within a person over instances as context and situated action demand. No single situated conceptualisation for anger need give a complete account of the category anger. There is not one script for anger, but many".

    Importantly, emotions, as differential, require that emotions are learned: they are a skill, which we learn to employ in one way or another, sometimes well, sometimes badly, sometimes to no effect. To end with another quote: ""conceptual knowledge about emotion constitutes expertise about how to deal with your own internal state—experienced as “an emotion”—and the situation or event that you believe caused that emotion in the first place. In this sense, emotion categorization is functional."

    Anyway, I could go on and on with other implications, but I'll stop here for space and see how, if at all, discussion develops.
    StreetlightX

    Just as if i got hit on the head with a baseball bat, we would all agree i suffered a negative emotion.

    I think what happens next is will i say to my self that i deserved (through stupidity or Karma) to get hit (sadness), or was the fact that i got hit someone elses fault (keyword fault) in which case i would feel anger.

    Sadness and anger are common to all people.

    Whether we feel sadness or anger is a matter of who we blame the negative situation on.
  • Possibility
    2.8k
    "In a sense, a situated conceptualization, because it is designed for action, provides you with a script to guide your future behavior in a specific context or situation. For example, across varied situations, different situated conceptualizations of anger will be computed. Sometimes it works to yell, sometimes to pound your fist, sometimes to cry or walk away, sometimes to hit. During a given act of conceptualizing core affect, the simulation can shape a person’s behavior in line with what has been experienced before in that sort of situation (or one very much like it). As a result, situated conceptualizations deliver highly specific inferences tailored to particular situations regarding what actions to take" (from "Solving the Paradox").StreetlightX

    Okay, I’m with you now. This also corresponds to @Coben’s issue. The internal affect is not the emotion: the conceptualisation is the emotion, which can just as easily be ‘evoked’ as such from actions and facial expressions as from interoception of affect. You’re not ‘feeling’ fear, you’re conceptualising fear as an emotion. The hypothesis is not that any body state can be freely interpreted - it’s that emotional concepts are not universally inherent or instinctual, but rather constructed from cultural experiences.

    But it certainly does happen that people can think they are sad when they are angry - some women have this pattern, especially if they are in traditional subcultures. But here what happens is there is a conversion. The anger arises, it is suppressed and then in reaction to that process (which is habitual, rapid and nearly unconscious) the person feels sad. And can also get some relief from the suppression of emotion by expressing sadness. So in a sense they are not wrong, though they haven't really expressed or notice their initial emotional reaction.

    That all said, I just don't buy the hypothesis yet.
    Coben

    I can relate to what you describe as ‘relief from suppression of emotion by expressing sadness’, but I disagree with your assessment. I’ve learned to recognise this seemingly involuntary flow of tears as a relief of tension (not suppression of emotion) - I’ve noticed that there is no negative affect associated with the reaction. I don’t ‘feel sad’ in these situations - although I used to think I felt sad because why else would I be crying - what I feel is relief. There is no ‘suppressed’ emotion - what you conceptualise as ‘anger’ can be a raised heart rate, flushed face and knotted stomach, which is the body readying to respond to an anticipated threat. That’s not necessarily an emotion that requires labelling, and it’s not necessarily ‘anger’ that needs to be expressed/suppressed.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    Maybe it's cold, maybe it's scary. I really don't know. I do know he wasn't taught to cry and he never learned to cry. I also think there must be a moment in everyone's life when they experience a new emotion they hadn't previously felt. There is the feeling of love, of heartbreak, of loss, of disappointment that occur in our lives as new. When were they learned?Hanover

    Insofar as they are new they can only have been learnt. That's what learning is. But let me try and answer more substantively. I can't address your whole post without going on forever, so let me stick to learning and development. To start with a neuronal fact: cognitively, learning takes place not by additive means but by subtractive ones. The brain learns by culling from the environment what is not deemed relevant, and habituates by selecting and picking out of an overabundance of 'stimuli' what is and is not needed to operate in some manner. To quote form Adrian Johnson (who is himself quoting the neuroscientists Jean-Pierre Changeux and Jospeh LeDoux) on this:

    "Apropos neurology, Changeux's theory of learning reflects what LeDoux characterizes as the “use it or lose it” doctrine of neural “selectionism.” According to this doctrine, the initial “exuberance” of an infant‟s neural networks—there are more synaptic connections present in early stages of development than will be needed later by the more mature organism—is pruned down through “subtraction,” through the exchanges between organism and environment determining which connections will be used (and, hence, will be kept) and which ones won‟t be used (and, hence, will be allowed to wither away). Changeux describes this selectionist process as “the epigenetic stabilization of common neural networks”" — Adrian Johnson - Affects Are Signifiers

    This account of learning can be placed into productive consonance with Barrett's own account of emotion as a matter of conceptual evaluation upon 'core affect' (what I referred to as generic affect) [a note to set the language straight: Barrett distinguishes between affect on the one hand, and emotion on the other - the two are not the same, and 'emotion' can be understood to be the 'end result' of a evaluation upon affectivity]. Anyway, as I was saying, in these terms, the emergence of a 'new emotion' can be understood to be subtractive: to have an emotion is to pay attention to this, rather than that aspect of experience - which itself largely forces or at least impels certain evaluative contexts, in ways that can be wholly novel.

    This is just what 'evaluation' is: emotion is evaluative, it's production (as heartbreak, as love, as loss) is a response (a 'solution' in Barrett's terms) to a mixture of environment and history which informs it (ignoring what does not - subtraction). This is exactly in line with Barrett's account of the emergence of a 'new' emotion. Here she is, writing about her daughter leaning how to emote anger:

    "I try to imagine how my daughter, Sophia, might have learned emotion concepts when she was an infant, guided by the emotion words that my husband and I spoke to her intentionally. In our culture, one goal in “Anger” is to overcome an obstacle that someone blameworthy has put in your path... If my hypothesis is correct, she learned statistically to associate these diverse body patterns and contexts with the sounds “an-gry,” just like associating a squeaking toy with the sound “wug.” Eventually, the word “angry” invited my daughter to search for a way in which these instances were the same, even if on the surface they looked and felt different. In effect, Sophia formed a rudimentary concept whose instances were characterized by a common goal: overcoming an obstacle. And most importantly, Sophia learned which actions and feelings most effectively achieved this goal in each situation.

    In this way, Sophia’s brain would have bootstrapped the concept “Anger” into its neural architecture. When we first used the word “angry” with Sophia, we constructed her experiences of anger with her. We focused her attention, guiding her brain to store each instance in all its sensory detail. The word helped her to create commonalities with all the other instances of “Anger” already in her brain. Her brain also captured what preceded and followed those experiences. All of this became her concept of “Anger."... If I am correct, then, as children continue to develop their concept of “Anger,” they learn that not all instances of “Anger” are constructed for the same goal in every situation. “Anger” can also be for protecting oneself against an offense, dealing with someone who acted unfairly, desiring aggression toward another person, wanting to win a competition or to enhance performance in some way, or wishing to appear powerful
    — FB - How Emotions Are Made
    (my bolding).

    So novelty is not opposed to learning. In fact, as I began with - novelty and learning are inseparable.
  • christian2017
    1.4k
    tell us more expert.chustavo

    there alot of people who read books on this forum. If you would like to talk to someone who reads books you won't have to look hard on this forum. Reading a book doesn't make someone an expert.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    The internal affect is not the emotion: the conceptualisation is the emotion, which can just as easily be ‘evoked’ as such from actions and facial expressions as from interoception of affect. You’re not ‘feeling’ fear, you’re conceptualising fear as an emotion. The hypothesis is not that any body state can be freely interpreted - it’s that emotional concepts are not universally inherent or instinctual, but rather constructed from cultural experiences.Possibility

    Yeah, it's important not to conflate this with a kind of 'voluntarist' account of emotion where I can simply feel whatever I want whenever I want. In fact, the context-senstitivity of emotion on this account should militate very strongly against that reading: insofar as emotions are supremely context-sensitive, not just any emotion can follow from any situation. 'Sad' moments impel the production of sad emotions, frightening ones impel the production of fearful emotions (I also prefer the word 'production' here rather than Feldman's 'construction' precisely because the latter has a bit too strong of a voluntarist ring to it) - although they do not mechanically 'determine' which emotions follow. Everything hinges on developmental history, emotional habits, the singularity of context and so on.

    The only this I would alter somewhere with respect to what you've said is that yeah - one conceptualized fear as an emotion and then subsequently, one really does feel fear as a result. The conceptualization and the feeling are inseparably bound.
  • chustavo
    9
    alright brother i admit my defeat, but blaming without knowing the cause will not help you.

    but why i enter into this arguement ? since i dont wish to enter into the arguement. ( expert )
  • praxis
    6.5k
    The classical view of emotion holds that emotions are natural states which we simply 'feel' and then subsequently 'express': one feels, viscerally, anger, which one then expresses by stomping a foot, clenching a fist, or having a yell. This is a view of emotion which has begun to be challenged by recent studies, which instead posit that emotions - or at least specific emotions, like anger, shame, happiness, and sadness - are conceptual reterojections which we attribute or impute to bodily states which are not 'in-themselves', sad, happy, angry or whathaveyou.StreetlightX

    I had to reread How Emotions Are Made about three times in order to wrap my head around this new view.
  • christian2017
    1.4k
    alright brother i admit my defeat, but blaming without knowing the cause will not help you.

    but why i enter into this arguement ? since i dont wish to enter into the arguement. ( expert )
    chustavo

    i agree.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    Widen eyes, breath shallowly but rapidly, tilt the neck back and you will feel fear. (note I have taken the training but my memory is not at all perfect). And the details of the breathingCoben

    A note on this - this is, in a way, exactly what follows from the kind of account given here (hence my quick reference to William James in the OP: emotion follows from action - it is a product, a result, not an origin). Where, perhaps, there is disagreement here is on the next step. On the account here there is no one-to-one mapping of action to emotion - the same action can be evaluated to correspond to different emotions. I can't speak too much about Alba emotion training - this is the first I've heard of it though it sounds really interesting! - but perhaps it is precisely because all that context is missing - the 'cues' - that you always seem to get the same result. You're holding context stable, so it makes sense that what follows is also stable. But if emoting is context-sensitive, then adding those cues ought to be able to modify the emotion felt. So I'm not sure what you've written - although fascinating - counts as a counter-example. It may even count as evidence for it.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    I had to reread How Emotions Are Made about three times in order to wrap my head around this new view.praxis

    I haven't yet read the book - it's been sitting on my shelf for the last however many months and I only have the discipline to read one book at a time - but the papers seem to do a pretty good job at relaying her position. In a way I've been pre-disposed to her view because of my particular philosophical background - I fact I came across it after discussing similar themes with @fdrake here and subsequently totally geeked out when I realized it said what I was only vaguely gesturing at in incredibly clear and far more substantiated manner than I could have dreamed of.
  • Possibility
    2.8k
    How early does she think that emotions are constructed? Is it something that is learned very young and then is relatively fixed, or in her view, is it something that we continually construct as we encounter new situations and compare it to what we have seen, causing rough patterns around emotional response?schopenhauer1

    Her view is that it’s something we continually construct as we encounter new situations - but that as adults we try to avoid prediction error, and in doing so avoid opportunities to refine our concepts.

    She does go into a fair amount of detail in demonstrating how the infant brain efficiently constructs concepts similar to video optimisation for YouTube: separating similarities from differences in how it represents sensory information (as patterns of firing neurons).

    For example, the visual system represents a straight line as a pattern of neurons firing in a primary visual cortex. Suppose that a second group of neurons fires to repent a second line at a ninety degree angle to the first line. A third group of neurons could summarise this statistical relationship between the two lines efficiently as a simple concept of ‘Angle’. The infant brain might encounter a hundred different pairs of intersecting line segments of varying lengths, thickness, and colour, but conceptually they are all instances of ‘Angle’, each of which gets efficiently summarised by some smaller group of neurons. These summaries eliminate redundancy. In this manner, the brain separates statistical similarities from sensory differences.
    In the same manner, the instances of the concept ‘Angle’ are themselves part of other concepts. For example, an infant receives visual input about her mother’s face from many different vantage points: while nursing, while sitting face to face, in the morning and the evening. Her concept of ‘Angle’ will be part of her concept ‘Eye’ that summarises the continuously changing lines and contours of her mother’s eyes seen at different angles and in different luminance. Different groups of neurons fire to represent the various instances of the concept ‘Eye’, allowing the infant to recognise those eyes as her mother’s eyes each time, regardless of the sensory differences.
    As we go from the very specific to increasingly general concepts (in this example, from line to angle to eye), the brain creates similarities that are progressively more efficient summaries of the information. For example, ‘Angle’ is an efficient summary with respect to lines but is a sensory detail with respect to eyes. the same logic works for the concepts ‘nose’ and ‘Ear’ and so on. Together, these concepts are part of the concept ‘Face’, whose instances are yet more efficient summaries of the sensory regularities in facial features. Eventually, the infant’s brain forms summary representations for enough visual concepts that she can see one stable object, despite incredible variation in low-level sensory details. Think about it: each of your eyes transmits millions of tiny pieces of information to your brain in a moment, and you simply see ‘a book’.
    — Lisa Feldman Barrett, “How Emotions Are Made”
  • Possibility
    2.8k
    The only this I would alter somewhere with respect to what you've said is that yeah - one conceptualized fear as an emotion and then subsequently, one really does feel fear as a result. The conceptualization and the feeling are inseparably bound.StreetlightX

    This is where the language can get confusing. We say that we ‘feel’ the affect as well as the emotion, but they’re not identical - we interact with them in different ways, at different levels of awareness.
  • praxis
    6.5k


    I guess the older view was really embedded for me, plus I'm not too bright.
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