Maggie Fenwood
Week 12
This week’s readings were particularly interesting because they address subtle distinctions between unconscious and conscious processes of assessing the amount of pleasure that we experience and how we perceive these experiences concretely. I thought that the Gilbert article addressed this issue and I was also surprised at his findings. It seems that the perception we have of the relationship between intensity of emotion and duration is not in actuality what happens. It is interesting to put this in a neural context because it seems to explain a lot. Because our brains have a mechanism for dealing with ‘intense hedonistic states’ that can relieve some of the intensity we can recover more quickly from them but we are not consciously aware of it. As such, Gilbert’s studies showed that people “mistakenly expect more intense states to last longer than less intense states” (p. 12). That was unexpected for me but it makes sense when considering the idea of holding a grudge for something minor or even harboring resentment for something big, the reaction doesn’t last as long as we expect because our body regulates for it. Similarly, Berridge and Winkielman (2003) emphasize the unconscious process of emotion in their article that explores the way in which ‘liking’ is mediated by specific brain systems. It is true that even something as simple and liking something can sometimes arise without any conscious effort. Berridge and Wikielman reference Zajonc’s work on unconscious emotions in that are activated independently of consciousness.
This also seems to connect to an unconscious element that is addressed in the Sweeny et al. article. The idea that people shift from optimism and adopt a negative expectation in order to prepare themselves for an unfavorable outcome doesn’t seem to be something that we are totally conscious of. Rather, as they describe in the paper, “a shift from optimism best serves the goal of preparedness by directing thoughts and actions toward assessing and responding to changes in the local environment.” (p. 302). Thus, our changing outlook is influenced by our environment and perhaps a superstitious belief that we can actually “jinx” ourselves by having too much of an optimistic outlook. This points to another important aspect of optimism which is the amount of control that we can have of an undesirable outcome. In other words, we are more likely to adopt an optimistic attitude if we feel like we have more control over the outcome. This is similar to the idea of ‘incentive salience’ in Berridge and Robinson’s article which is a motivational rather than an affective component of reward, in the sense that the sensory information about an outcome within the environment can determine our motivations.
The experiments that Berridge talks about concerning ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’ in which people are shown happy and angry faces and then offered a beverage to drink. There was a subliminal manifestation of their emotion shown through their desire to drink even though they did not exhibit any conscious emotional reaction when they were shown the pictures themselves. So, Berridge comes the conclusion that this “dissociation of emotional reaction from conscious feelings suggests that unconscious dissociations among underlying pleasure ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’ components might also occur without being felt” (p. 2). This seemed to be a big part of this week’s reading, the idea that we can feel without being aware of the emotion that is creating the feelings. So, while we are conscious of our perception of a situation this does not always mean that we are conscious of our emotional reaction to it.
4 comments:
I think the reading this week made some very interesting assessments of the work on unconscious emotions. First of all, Berridge and Winkielman tested the relation between subliminal affective states and physiological response, which a few people have mentioned so far. Although the authors did not fully investigate this aspect of unconscious emotions, I thought the experiment raised very interesting questions about psychosomatic "disorders" and the underlying emotional stimuli that might cause such phenomena.
I thought the conclusions of the Gilbert et. al. article, as well as the Sweeny et. al. and Schacter and Addis articles on optimism raises quite a few questions surrounding emotional expectations that can change over time. Both processes had elements of unconscious emotional evaluation or assessment involved, although the authors again did not explicitly label it as such. However, in the Sweeny et. al. article, for example the authors describe a college senior's increased pessimism surrounding future employment as such: "seniors may have interpreted increasing anxiety about the job market as evidence that their original expectations were too high" (p. 303). This may be more directly related to how Berridge and Winkielman describe Zajonc's "free-floating anxiety." However, I think the processes of unconscious stimuli are present in both examples of optimism/pessimism and the longevity of distressing events reported in Gilbert et. al.
There was lots of great stuff in this week's reading. I found myself making a lot of "huh" noises and reconsidering ideas and thinking of concepts in ways I hadn't before. Each article provided me with a new and interesting perspective, but a couple things stood out to me. I feel like the "wanting/liking" distinction is a conversation every developing young intellectual has, but I'd never thought of it in the way Berridge describes it. He writes, "If the electrodes caused 'wanting', a person might well describe a sudden feeling that life was suddenly more attractive, desirable, and compelling to pursue. They might well 'want' to activate their electrode again, even if it produced no pleasure sensation. That would be mere incentive salience 'wanting'-- without hedonic 'liking.'" This is an awesomely simultaneously clarifying and confusing part of the article. Also interesting is the woman implanted with an electrode who compulsively stimulated her electrode at home, "neglecting personal hygiene and family commitments." Reminds me of drug use.
Another thought provoking statement is in "The Optimistic Brain" article. The authors reveal, "Optimism is sometimes negatively correlated with academic achievement." I'd love to know more about this. Is it because some of us "optimistic" students are constantly putting off work, knowing that we WILL get it done and it will all be FINE, even if that means pulling an all nighter right before it's due? Or are there some underlying variables, like maybe an optimistic student tends to be more social. Interesting.
Kaila, what you bring up about optimism is really intriguing, and I was actually wondering the same thing.. It seems to me that the former reason you present is probably the one more likely to occur. This would be an interesting question to mull over and discuss in class.
I think some of these readings should be mandatory in every class, and Maggie, you did a great job of summing them up. This idea of a 'pleasure gloss' is so interesting because it isn't about what caused the pleasure, it's about the events that take place AFTER the pleasure has already been 'caused'. It's kind of like getting drunk, everything about being drunk and in a state outside of the self feels so good that you forget getting sick, you gloss over the worst part, the part that doesn't make it worth it because the beginning stages of feeling tipsy, feel so good. This is similar to the reference made towards being a drug addict. Bad is bad, but the good could be out of this world.
This whole business of conscious and unconscious emotion is tricky. What about dreaming? Does dreaming then exist in our unconscious or our subconscious? In the experiment done by Berridge, the subjects unconsciously drink more or less based on which emotion each face expressed in them, which evoked an underlying pleasure, but I'm still not sure if it can just be separated into the 'wanted' vs. the 'liked'.
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