Katie Moeller
I found that this week’s readings provided me with a number of “aha!” moments, which I must say was refreshing as compared with the slew of questions that previous week’s readings have left me with. Not that I am now out of questions – those are still plentiful – but I find that the more we read, the clearer I become on what exactly is involved in tackling a question as large as “what is an emotion?” In particular I felt that this week’s material helped elucidate some important distinctions, namely between the experience of emotion and the expression of emotion, and between emotion and feeling.
Thus far I have been able to follow and accept many of LeDoux’s central ideas about emotion - that the theory of the limbic system is flawed, that there may be many emotional systems in the brain rather than one, that evolution is essential in how we examine the emotional brain - and I do appreciate his thorough explication of the various theories of emotion and how these interconnect and build off one another even as research continues to move forward. However, I have experienced his argument at times as misdirected, almost as if he wasn’t giving the reader all the information they needed in order to understand why he is so forcefully pushing particular points. I’ve been chalking this up to my general lack of knowledge about both the structures and theories of the brain, but this week I think I figured out that much of what LeDoux has been focused on has been necessary to lead into a specific discussion of the fear response which he explains in Chapter Five is what he really wants to use in order to attack the question of emotion as a whole.
Once he finally begins to discuss fear (around p. 128), LeDoux’s argument seems to gel, and it became clear to me that there is a reason he has been setting us up in this particular way with this particular information all this time. LeDoux asserts that fear is an excellent entry point for examining emotion because it is a profound part of our experience of the world, is linked to mental health, and appears in similar ways in both human and non-human animals. These justifications seem valid, and it was helpful to have them so delineated, but I was left feeling that placing the focus exclusively on fear has the potential to limit a greater discussion of the universal processes involved in emotion, mostly because fear seems to me to be so qualitatively different from many (most?) of the other kinds of emotions that can occur. Because fear has such direct evolutionary roots, I wonder how well we’ll be able to use knowledge of its underlying processes to inform our understanding of less obviously evolutionarily significant emotions, such as joy or embarrassment. I also wonder whether LeDoux will allow for the various ways that fear can manifest or be described by people, for example as anxiety, worry, or prejudice, or if he will instead stick to a more traditional view of fear as a response to a dangerous or threatening situation.
LeDoux makes clear that when he is attacking the topic of emotion, he is not primarily concerned with the feeling a person has when a particular emotion is activated. He makes this clear in his first chapter, and goes on in Chapter Five to elaborate on this, stating that feelings can only occur when an emotional response occurs in a conscious individual. The issue of feeling is not crucial for LeDoux because he is intent on the survival element of emotion, which does not depend on consciousness, as demonstrated by the similarity in fear responses across various species. While I find the ability to make these connections and to see such seemingly different animals respond to stimuli in such similar ways fascinating, I can’t help but be compelled by the human feelings that accompany the responses. Unlike LeDoux, I have a harder time writing them off because they seem to be such a fascinating aspect of the whole mystery of emotions.
For this reason, I very much appreciated “The Experience of Emotion” by Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, and Gross. In general this piece helped explain why the element of experience has for some time been all but removed from the study of emotion, and also why at this point it is both crucial and scientific to find a way to put it back in. Drawing on Searles’ biological naturalism, these authors argue that the experience of emotions can be best understood scientifically by the equal consideration of both a thorough description of the experience and the brain functions responsible for generating such descriptions. Unlike LeDoux, Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, and Gross see consciousness as essential piece of how emotions are mentally represented, and they outline Edelman’s idea of the “remembered present,” in which the brain works to constantly integrate information from the environment, the body, and from memory into a unified, conscious perception of each moment. The authors’ summary that “ an experience of an emotion is a state of mind whose content is at once affective (pleasant or unpleasant) and conceptual (a representation of the world around you,” (p. 386) made perhaps the most sense to me thus far of anything we’ve read in terms of the way that our past experiences combine with current stimuli and bodily responses to inform how we actually feel as we are moving around the world.
Of special interest to me is the way this particular view helps explain how the “knowledge about emotion,” (p. 386) which an individual brings to an experience of emotion affects how that person will characterize their feelings. This seems to have implications both for individuals over the course of time (conceptions of feelings may well change as experiences compound), as well as for the marked differences that can be found in the way that two people with different life experiences will characterize their feelings completely differently even when the circumstances of a triggering situation are the same or similar. Also fascinating to me was the idea of granularity, which refers to whether people view their experiences through a broad and generalized lens of affect or a focused and highly specified lens of emotion. Once again the wide range of ways in which individuals talk about and view their emotions is accounted for by a concept like this, though I was left with some questions about how and why people develop different levels of granularity. The authors make clear that verbal intelligence is not a factor, however they did not provide any other information about variation in granularity, and I was definitely left wanting to know more.
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I agree with Katie that “The Experience of Emotion” article really answered a lot of my questions from the previous classes. Barrett et. al. really clarify the many layers that contribute to our experiences of emotion. Their framework directly addresses the fact that people can have vastly differing and individual emotional experiences, something that has been lacking from a lot of the readings. Barrett et. al. further develop the idea that cognitive processes and emotional ones should not be dichotomized. They show that perception is crucial to the processing of core affective feelings in the same way that it is central to visual perception. One’s conceptualization of affective states, emotional granularity and neural representations of the past all contribute to emotions. Thus, people’s conceptions of emotion are essential to the experience of emotion. LeDoux then argues that just because such conceptions are mental doesn’t mean that you can assume they are not biological, as he begins to show with fear as the example. Another layer to the experience of emotion is how emotions are perceived by others and how these relations, in turn, shape that experience. Malcolm Gladwell shows how attention to and interpretation of emotional expressions can be remarkably astute. Kevin’s posting about Freud made me think about how psychoanalysis is consistent with many of these ideas about the layers of emotional experience. Freud, like Gladwell, showed that careful attention to the body in relation to language could illuminate emotional experiences that may be hidden or full of contradictions.
Like Katie, I also had some aha! moments in the readings--perhaps because I could better relate to the phenomenology described. I can consciously experience the variations of expressions or relate them to my own past experiences. As physical as the neurochemistry is, it is still cognitively abstract and that seems to hinder my understanding of it—maybe a product of Steven Pinker’s “reverse engineering” thing (LeDoux p. 104)! When concepts such as “the remembered present” are proposed, it helps bridge the gap for me between the tech-y input/output of emotion experience and the everyday “coloring” of an individual’s pneumonic relationship to the experience. It feels like a more holistic idea.
In “The Structure of Emotion,” Barret and Wager validate that “every emotional event has neural correlates…” but that “emotion category-location correspondences are neither consistent nor specific.” How do we determine what emotions are “natural” and what are based on the culturally diverse language of “feelings?” As LeDoux illustrates in James Averill’s “wild pig” critique of emotion biology, some emotions may be products of culture and not of evolution but I don’t agree. I think we could find global correlates by studying the neurochemistry of these non-Westernized events (p. 115). In other words I agree with LeDoux and Ekman about maintaining the scientific integrity of basic emotions theory (p. 117) for I’m also wary of assuming an emotion in one culture does not occur in another just because the language or cultural constructs of emotional expression may vary. Elizabeth pointed out in one class that language is just another pneumonic device for more easily recalling something important to us. If one culture does not have a word for something, they may not be as “aware” of it because it is not as culturally relevant, but that does not mean that they don’t experience it on a subtler level. As “The Naked Face” illustrates, we can learn to detect subtler emotional currents, map them, and define them and according to “Listening to your heart,” this interoceptive awareness can also physically affect the emotion experience. In other words, we can learn to “feel” an emotion and that in turn can strengthen the affect.
In another vein of linguistics, I appreciate how Barrett and Russell meta-analyzed research with the intent to synthesize models which seem to vary only semantically. Although language can create “red herrings” when trying to formulate a cohesive methodology, I think it is also a legitimate way to initially begin scientific exploration. Later, this kind of linguistic meta-analyizing can lend consistency and validation to research and help direct future studies. I certainly look forward to next week’s readings.
I also really appreciated the "Experience of Emotion" article because it focused on the difficult task of attempting to discuss the individual experience of feeling. Finally, an article has mentioned the value in how one describes a feeling, and alludes to the fact that the way we talk about any given feeling is just as important as the feeling itself. I also really liked the term "remembered past" to define the mental representation of emotion - that is, the idea that the core affective feelings drawn from a psychological situation are perceived and categorized as a unified concept, which constitute this representation. At the same time, the stream of consciousness is such that these feelings are continuously changing in conjunction with the situation itself. Another thing I found interesting about this article was the suggestion that one's knowledge about (and experience with) various emotions affects the way in which that person perceives of that emotion. Does this mean that the categorization of emotion is not something entirely innate, but a process to be built upon as a result of the accumulation of individual experience?
EBJ posting Frances's comment
Like Katie, I found LeDoux's argument for using fear as a basis for understanding all emotions a bit of a challenge. I did find some reassurance in the fact that he states that "different emotions are mediated by different brain networks" (pg. 106) and that the only way to study emotions is one at a time. It seemed to me that here LeDoux is saying that emotions can not be studied cohesively but must be studied as separate from each other controlled by different systems. While he says the hope is to see "to what extent this knowledge can help us understand 'emotion' in the broader sense of the term," it seems to me that he is going to say that from his study of fear, there are things we can understand about emotions in general. If that was not the result of the book, his title would have to be something like "Fear in the Emotional Brain". I am interested to see how he makes this leap from fear to emotions in general.
I also wanted to make sure I was clear on the differences in feeling and emotion in relations to our studies thus far. My understanding is that we are using emotions in a sense that can be both conscious and unconscious and that feeling is that which we are aware of. If this is correct, I found Bechara & Naqvi's definitions interesting. "...emotions are what an outside observer can see; feelings are what the individual subjectively experiences." This seems to say that outsiders can view that which one is not aware of themselves. If this is the case, what are those things that are not observable to others, and we are not conscious of but have an affect on our unconscious life? Do such "things" exist?
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