Molly McDonough
2.10.08
I want to believe feelings are as simple as John Searle’s explanation of emotional experience. The theory of biological naturalism allows emotions to be explained in an unemotional way. Experiences of emotions are based on first person points of view, so we take what we know of our emotions and explain them the best we can, based on our experience. It’s a natural process, like digestion. Emotions are a tool for communication that can be explained by neuronal activity. We need emotions as a way of communicating our physical state with those around us, allowing basic emotions to be unconscious. All of the readings come together clearly to explain the spectrum of emotional experience. Not the spectrum of different emotions, or basic emotions, but a spectrum for understanding.
In the article, ‘The Structure of Current Affect: Controversies and Emerging Consensus’, Barrett refers to the bipolarity of positive and negative affects. We can’t feel pleasure and displeasure at the same time, just as we can’t be positively and negatively affected when only one emotional experience is taking place. I think this is really interesting, because we can’t explain either pleasure or displeasure without talking about the opposite of the other. This goes back to the first day when we were asked, ‘what is an emotion?’ I couldn’t explain an emotion without making it a metaphor, or explaining what it is not.
I think LeDoux might be exploiting fear by continuing to use it to explain emotions. I really enjoyed this chapter, his most positive writing so far, but I don’t know why he keeps boiling everything down to fear. It’s an unconscious emotion; something that just happens and it’s only after it is passed that we realize we were in ‘fear’, that we were ‘afraid’. I know this is a simplification, but why fear? What am I missing?
LeDoux introduces Plutchik’s 8 Basic Emotions and his theory of basic and derived emotions. I think this really ties into behavior and the struggle that I have with defining emotions separately. The combination of different emotions leads to a certain behavior. LeDoux then moves to describe the way emotions are perceived in other cultures and how emotions can be a state of mind. I would automatically think that an emotional state of mind would have a negative connotation to it, when really it’s learning to be in a ‘certain place’, in a ‘certain frame of mind’ that has to do with the way we display our emotions to eventually deal with them. Sometimes I wish we didn’t have the words to try and express how we feel.
I found ‘The Naked Face’, to be the most enlightening reading we have had on emotions so far. Not only was Gladwell able to summarize what we have been reading and discussing but the concept of reading faces is so interesting! If there is such a science to reading faces, why aren’t more people learning about it? When John Yarbrough doesn’t shoot the kid because he instinctively knows the kid isn’t going to shoot him, at what point are our emotions our own? Why can’t we see someone else reading our emotions and in the flash of doing the opposite, just go right ahead with what we were going to do? This got me thinking about cliff jumping, bungee jumping, sky diving, suicide and situations that we are in complete control of until they take place and all control is lost. Is it doubt, and the feeling of opposition that pushes us over the edge? Is there a greater example of bipolarity; fully controlling something to the point of losing it? Is it possible to be more able to read others emotions than our own? Did Yarbrough know the kid wasn’t going to shoot sooner than the kid knew?
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“but why fear?”, I truly think you are not missing any point; it is though fear that could be the primary, evolutionary negative emotion from which all the rest aroused. Whereas love on the other hand would seem to be that from which all the positive emotions arise. Evolutionary speaking we had fears for our existential protection—I think today there are other ‘façade-emotions’ which could be boiled down to fear as well—As you mentioned the effects of opposite emotions, most do probably not co existing but each induces and gives meaning to the other. The same I think of fear and courage, one could not be without the other, we need to overcome fear to experience courage. And again as said these are the words we give to our expressions, in other words our rationalized feelings. For example what is courage if not a rational decision to overcome ones fears and in today’s terms it could be self actualization, which is vital for a capitalistic society to survive.
I also loved the Gadwell’s account!
I appreciated his vivid and human descriptive manner which stimulated my imagination to see the physicality of the individual in question, this helped especially as he was talking about very small facial changes. It is indeed fascinating and most tangible to us so far, in trying to understanding the correlation between the emotional body and mind. The idea of the expressive face having “a mind of its own” is at first perplexing and then I remembered looking at my friend who tried to open a bottle cap with his teeth; he tried really heard and as I looked at him I clenched my own teeth although I had no bottle in my mouth. This is something that happens all the time to people, when they intensely observe someone do a very strong facial expression without even realizing they will copy that notion. How peculiarly interesting.
And in regards to individuals such as Paul Ekman, who are indeed admirable, yet I can’t help but wonder if he himself can conceal the facial expression he is conscious of in others; or are these slight shifts and changes in response to emotion still uncontrollable to him, but only revealed? Maybe because of the specialty and meticulousness of this field most people aren’t qualified on a scientific level.
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