Suzanne Ardanowski
Feeling Brain
Response to week 2 Jan 30, 2008
I now know what Elizabeth meant when she said that LeDoux makes his opinion clear in his writing. Fortunately for me it is an opinion I happen to agree with! Being a psychology student has inevitably brought me to the concepts of conscious and unconscious aspects of the human mind. Yet after reading about emotion, cognition, conscious, unconscious, culture, social race bias, how the human body physically responds to emotion, and how we can manipulate these variables to change behavior, my mind was really overwhelmed and amazed at the same time.
Like LeDoux, I am a believer in the unconscious. Studying lots of Freud last year contributed to my ever-growing conviction of the power and influence of the unconscious on human thought and behavior. I had never previously thought of cognition as being unconscious, but it is now obvious how some cognition must be unconscious, such as LeDoux’s example of how we form sentences without consciously thinking about it. However, he differentiates between the cognitive unconscious and the more Freudian dynamic unconscious (p.29). He also goes on to say how the field of psychology depends on this notion that people are often incorrect in their reasoning on why they behave and feel the way they do even though they wholeheartedly believe their explanation. He maintains, “consciousness will only be understood by studying the unconscious processes that make it possible” (p.34).
So this brings me to a question that fueled my curiosity to take this course. The movements in psychology to help people change their cognition, the way they think, have helped many people with many different disorders. From my understanding, 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, are based on cognitive thinking. While some may briefly delve into their dynamic unconscious, 12 step programs are predominately dealing with the now and changing behavior. The same is true of some current psychologists who focus on cognitive behavior therapy, getting people to change their attitudes, believes, feelings and behavior by changing their thinking.
My question is, if emotions are based in the unconscious, having a direct physical effect on the human body (as LeDoux suggests and I agree), then how do these cognitive therapies actually work? Do they really get down to the heart of emotions, or is it a bandaid, covering up the underlying emotion and focusing on behavior? Is this enough and as effective to truly help people function in a more “positive” way? LeDoux maintains that cognition does not effect the body as emotion does, so how can cognitive therapies not examine the unconscious given the fact that emotions effect the body so much? Are you training the brain to not be influenced by the emotion? It has been suggested to me that through cognition you are changing the neurochemical pathways in the brain, causing behavior change. Is this true? What about the idea that cognition can spur on emotions, such as people with obsessive-compulsive disorder or post traumatic stress disorder. There may an original trauma, but later there can be no immediate outside stimulus, but rather thinking that results in an emotional response. So does cognition really not effect emotion? Is the term “cognition” being used in different ways here?
The facial feedback on race bias article speaks to changing behavior in an unconscious way, opposite to the cognitive behavior therapist approach. Since emotion is connected is to a physical response, it is logical to me how this changes one’s emotion and consequently one’s behavior. This got me thinking how many different approaches have the similar trait of unconscious influence on the body through repetition and “practice.” This reminded me of what Lily was saying about the practice of yoga, and how Fulvio was talking about doing body work-these techniques can also induce behavior and/or emotional change, yet it is not totally conscious how this happens. Are all the techniques I’ve talked about basically reconditioning the brain, consciously or unconsciously?
The article “Pan-Cultural elements in Facial Displays of Emotion” made sense to me. I found it easy to believe that people from different cultures could recognize and agree on the emotions shown on the faces of people. It’s pretty amazing if you really think about how this appears to be universal. I do believe the reasons why people may feel different emotions is cultural and personal. When I was reading this article it also popped into my head how one may display an emotion on his or her face, but actually feel that they are presenting differently. The body can show an emotion but you are not consciously aware that you are exhibiting the emotion, which I think is pretty powerful.
6 comments:
I also found the connections between Freud's concepts of the unconscious and the more contemporary concept of the unconscious very interesting. Previously, I was unfamiliar with this differentiation between the dynamic unconscious and the cognitive unconscious, and after reading LeDoux it makes sense. The Freudian unconscious does not take into account the more everyday unconscious processes rather it strictly deals with the darker more emotionally charged suppressed feelings and fantasies. The cognitive unconscious accounts for what goes on in our minds that we are not always aware of. Like the conventions of speech and social conventions which occur to us without any conscious thought. Or, like reacting to stimuli before we know the full extent of the situation (sensing danger). This relates to the Eckman et al., reading, in that, the autonomic nervous system can alert the mind to its emotions. In other words, increasing physical reactions to a stimuli can increase the emotion and visa versa. This also ties into the manipulation of somatic responses in the Ito et al. study where the participants were induced to smile and the racial bias was reduced. This does seem to have some validity when debating the order of events in terms of stimulus, emotion, reaction. LeDoux went over a number of theories regarding this order, and this might be somewhat far fetched but keeping in mind Zajonc's idea of the separation of cognition and emotion is it possible that the order of events is different on an individual basis? In other words, could it be possible that everyone has a different or dominant way of processing emotion and subsequent ANS reactions?
The LeDoux reading and Suzanne and Maggie’s blog postings led me to think about the relationship between cognition and emotion and between the conscious and unconscious. I hope we will clarify our definitions of these terms in class. LeDoux summarizes many theories and findings that address the connections between cognitive and emotional processing. Ultimately he does not pit cognitive processing against emotional processing. He also rejects the idea that cognitive science can simply subsume what we learn about emotional processing. Rather, he writes, “emotion and cognition are best thought of as separate but interacting mental functions mediated by separate but interacting brain systems.”
I cannot help thinking about how much cultural ideas factor into our understanding and imagination of how humans work. I see echoes of the cognitive/emotion binary in the ideas of mind/body, head/heart, and conscious/unconscious. The idea of an “emotional brain” in itself really challenges long-held cultural ways of organizing the human experience. The more we understand about the brain the more we can integrate reason and passion, as LeDoux argues. Many of the studies LeDoux cites on the unconscious challenge our idea that people are wholly aware of and in control of their cognitive processing. It will be interesting to see how more attention to emotional processing may change our current framework for cognitive processing.
I am also intrigued by this binary between the conscious and unconscious, or the cognitive and emotive processes of the brain. LeDoux’s argument concerning the emotional unconscious as a biological function of the nervous system barely mediated by a relatively weak tissue of conscious awareness certainly makes sense from the standpoint of artistic expression. The constant melancholy of the verbal arts is that of articulating the emotional field through language—frequently conceived of, slips or no slips, as literally the mouthpiece of consciousness. This struggle is what leads to idiosyncratic discourses such as metaphor and, one step further, an idealized, non-conceptual language. The author highlights why in this context introspective accounts often offer specious insights; in short, consciousness has a hard time of it rather articulating the unconscious, even though it functions in the most prosaic of circumstances. Nonetheless, that we share universally an emotional unconscious, and what’s more, a sort of universal grammar of emotional communicative behaviors, is a heartening notion indeed.
At the same time, LeDoux does not posit a pure dichotomy between the emotional and logical facets of the brain, as lily emphasizes. He delineates a certain counter-operation in response to the “not-so-benign” unemotional treatment of emotions as mere cognitive processes. Indeed, notions of the cognitive-conscious versus emotional-unconscious have more to do with the Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of self than, dare we say, scientific exactitude.
I'm also interested in the ideas that Lily has brought up about the (perhaps) false dichotomy between cognition and emotion. We found in the James article a rather bold statement that the "cognition" of emotion is entirely dependent on bodily reactions that actually precede the experience of feeling emotion. Ledoux discusses this claim but seems to believe that this description does not set emotional cognition apart from non-emotional cognition. In a sense, all cognition is predicated on a physical response in our bodies that is then registered by the brain. Isn't all the research on 'appraisal' and 'unconscious affect' just another investigation of James' theory of emotion. It seems his ideas were just awaiting validation by the scientific community.
“Ahab never thinks, he just feels, feels, feels”
(The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux, Souls On Ice, P.22)
What is ironic, is that in Moby-Dick, Ahab is an obsessive thinker, he cannot let go of the idea of the white whale, which eventually drives him to madness. It is interesting to me this quote was chosen to open the second chapter. The first seeming irony became meaningful as I understood the connection between thinking and feeling, and the idea that every emotion begins in the mind rather then as in the ancients idea of “the soul”.
If so, are emotions indeed social constructions? Are they part of our innate evolutionary ‘built-in’ mechanism, in other words instinctual? Or learned and acquired throughout life as we experience it? Or a combination of both, we give meaning in language to our emotional instincts?
“Are you training the brain to not be influenced by the emotion?”
Are we really in control of our mind or is our mind in control of us?
I think it is exactly here where the text means to tell us that the brain has this unconscious quality to either have an emotional effect on the body and so we can feel it. Or to stop the perceived situation from reaching the ‘soul’ as self protection not to feel and store the emotional weight in the unconscious.
Is this, as you said, why people can go through traumata’s and actually believe they never happened. Can the brain completely control our consciousness? Do we decide unconsciously that a certain emotional weight is to much for us to handle? Then of course we might ask what consists of the ‘I’, the self, our emotions/cognition?
Is it not a little scary to think of that “minds might in principle even exist without bodies”? (p.28, Souls On Ice, The Emotional Brain)
And how come psychotherapy can ‘tickle’ out these hidden emotions, where do we store them, how can we bring them forth from unconsciousness to consciousness?
“The body can show an emotion but you are not consciously aware that you are exhibiting the emotion, which I think is pretty powerful.”
I think so as well, and the other way is amazing to me also, that sometimes we can experience an emotion without ever having the body react to it.
The more I read the more I find myself questioning my own beliefs regarding emotion and its origin. Just as I feel like something is becoming clearer, I’ll be presented with a new theory and quite convincing support for it. The readings to me were like mystery novels; I couldn’t put them down. I just kept flipping pages with a kind of “then what!?” mentality, hoping the real definition of emotion and the final explanation of the link between our physical and mental selves would be in the next chapter. I’m finding myself becoming more and more frustrated with the seemingly arbitrary definitions of words like “emotion” and “serviceable.” It’s incredibly difficult to talk about these concepts when the ideas are so weighted and everyone has his/her own personal take on the matter.
Darwin refers to “serviceable” gestures and expressions, and how many of them are now unnecessary and even “ludicrous.” For some reason this reminds me of vestigial organs or bones, and how evolution can render some things useless yet they still stick around. Like others, I’m struggling with the second principle in the Darwin reading.
The LeDoux reading in particular has me completely enthralled. Each study or experiment that he mentions is fascinating. For some reason the Stuart Valins heart rate experiment stuck with me even days after doing the reading. His idea that “it is the cognitive representation of the physiological arousal, not the arousal itself, that interacts with thoughts about the situation in the generation of feelings” seemed well displayed by his subjects. The fact that they judged the women that had been associated with the high heart rate sounds more attractive, even though their actual heart rate was not high during exposure to the pictures, made Valins conclude that “in order for physiological activity to contribute to an emotional experience, the activity has to be represented cognitively.” I don’t know how I feel about the role of cognition in emotion because I can’t separate the two in my mind, but it is an interesting (and slightly humorous) experiment.
Post a Comment