The Feeling Brain 2008

HEAVY LIKE THE WEIGHT OF A FLAME! James Gabriel & R. Ernie Silvan

2010-02-17T11:22:00.000-08:00

As the audience enters the cubical-like theater space of LaMaMa, modern hip-hop beats fill the space with an uncanny explosion of words that reiterate the minimal black stage displaying only a guitar case and four small wooden squares. Ernie Silva enters the stage and with his guitar in hand, a wife beaters shirt and baggy jeans. The space is now filled with sirens and traffic noises, the tones of his quiet guitar play, and Silva is heavily panting in tone with the soft tunes; that stop in a sudden shift from internalized expression to the monologue that caries the piece for one and a half hours at a commendable speed. Like a rollercoaster of memories and emotions, Silva invites the audience into the tapestry of characters that have had a prominent role in the protagonist’s life. He begins with a interaction he had as a dishwasher, who is called out by his boss, for having more in his brain than what his ‘typical’ clothing tell of him. This first sequence ends in what characterizes the boxed in feeling of the main character: “You will never be better, you are just like them, you will never escape” says his boss in a heavy Middle Eastern accent. The manner in which Silva switches flawlessly from his younger self to the busy boss and other roles is amazing. He uses posture and voices to embody the multifaceted character range that accompany his journey in such brilliance that one might forget they are watching only one man. From the almost depressing first interaction, the protagonist settles down and tells us of his muse, the hope of his world, his guitar; Savannah, while citing Jimmy Hendrix in Woodstock, a metaphor for the ‘good old days’. Silva leads us thread by thread through the imagination, dreams and realities of his life, every time adding a patch of information that colors in the world right before our eyes, plainly through great acting. From his musical passion, he jerks away into his love of poetry through becoming Kerouac, and metamorphosing into Shakespeare and all of a sudden he delivers the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, acting out one of the most beautiful love soliloquies as both, the love struck Romeo, and the dreamy Juliet. From this place where everyone can relate, he pulls us into a much more personal memory, the interaction with his high older brother; who laughs at him for reading all that ‘shit’ and gives him three vibrant little dices. “That’s the real thing” says the brother, learn how to read these, stop reading all that crap is the message he receives from his role model. The story then pulls back into the philosophical realm of how knowledge makes you question everything, and everyone in the audience laughs at the painful truth that the more you know you know nothing at all; while the actor embodies the daily-news asking “what the fuck” is wrong with this world. From the outside world inward again; Silva tells us of the realities of growing up in old-school Brooklyn, using the color Orange as a simile for it being a hot place without warmth. He becomes a twelve year old again, showing us the childhood experiences of his brother’s overdose and him being the bearer of bad news. As the youngest son to a single mother who feels different but locked in, by obligation to where he is from and what that entails. The words of his former Boss ‘you are just like them’ role around in his head like the dice his dead brother left him with. Nevertheless the wind from the outside world is hauling at him, calling him away, and he becomes the American out-back. We are invited into the scary adventures of his brave choice to leave behind where he is from, what seemingly makes one who they are. As everything he knew disappears into the distance, the voices in his head get louder. Anxious of falling into the trap of self medication, he lives on the road with the gatherers and wanderers, his Savannah as his guardian angel, accompanying him. When our hero falls into the next boxed in existence of jail, we fear that this is one of those stories that do not have a happy ending, but there is hope in ‘Pandora’s box’. There is much to learn from this personal and vibrant story; I warmly recommend everyone to go and see what else this ‘box’ contains. And for certain everyone can find a thread to take home and internalize from this heart breaking, awakening most amazing story of one who left never to come back.

Kandel

2008-05-06T20:28:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Ardanowski

Feeling Brain

May 6, 2008

I am writing about Kandel for my conference project, so I was curious to read his article this week. I thought it was interesting how he noted that the growing field of psychopharmacology prompted the return to neurology in psychiatry. It was also thought provoking to read, “behavioral disorders that characterize psychiatric illness are disturbances of brain function, even in those cases where the causes of the disturbances are clearly environmental in origin” (p.460). Society, culture can cause disturbances in the way your brain actually functions. As he states, “all sociology must to some degree be sociobiology This emphasizes Kandel’s integration of neurology and psychology. The idea that learning can alter gene expression seems easy to conceptualize when I think about a fear response. When I think about dysfunctional behavior learning, for example narcissism or domestic violence, actually changing neurons and gene expression I am repeatedly wowed. It is really amazing to me to think that everything thing one does has a neural pathway that can be altered by learning. Kandel continues, “There can be no changes in behavior that are not reflected in the nervous system” (p.464). He also goes further to say that at times, these changes may not be detectable, but nonetheless they are occurring. I liked his questions at the end which would work well with my conference work, regarding the different schools of though regarding consciousness.

'Don't Cry, be a Man...it is Good for You!'

2008-05-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

In the emerging field of emotion regulation, it has been taught that our emotions can be modulated, hopefully only after are they expressed and finally determined. I think Gross has done a good job in separating the terms of what an emotion, an emotional episode and a mood are from each other. It clarifies the picture but it also disintegrates it.
Can one definition exist without the other? Isn’t the primal question of what is an emotion further alienated from us by now defining how such emotional processes might shape the primal impulsive emotion? Can the term emotion be separated from the social, psychological, biological processes involved in attaining the final response? From this social perspective, does the definition of emotion and emotional process not seem interchangeable?
Gross has suggested a wide range of definitions to why we need to regulate our emotions, what are the processes and their benefit for our healthy acclimation in a social setting. Our capacity to adaptive, conscious coping process is the base for understanding emotional regulation. Other then my assumption that ‘let your feelings be your guide’ is the evolutionarily smarter mechanism it turns out that actually ‘he who keeps a cool head prevails’. Emotional adaptational intelligence can be quite necessary for us, not only in the context of social order, but in concern of mental health. Gross has noted a few plausible problems that might occur if non-regulation occurs: “emotion dysregulation is associated with clinical problems…sustained physiological response exceeding metabolic demand and immune suppression.” This lets us assume we should not blindly trust our emotions, which might harm us more in the long run then the suppression of the emotion at stake in the moment. His definition: “Emotion regulation must be inferred when an emotional response would have proceeded in one fashion but instead is observed to proceed in another.” Soon we discover that this is problematic as we need to first know the emotion which we will regulate; that does not necessarily always happen consciously but rather adaptively, and we may blur the two together, the initial emotion and the regulated response. (I wonder: If ego defenses occur out of awareness, why the term then? does not ‘id defenses’ suit it much better?)
He then proceeds into detail of four processes of emotional regulation:
1. Situation selection occurs when you select consciously in what situations you place yourself in, so you may avoid encountering unpleasant emotions associated with such kind of situations.
2. Situation modification is an unwanted situation in which emotional response might be provoked and we try to alter the situation in order to distance ourselves from the unwanted emotion.
3. Attentional deployment means literally shifting your emotional attention away from the situation that calls forth the unpleasant emotion; in other words distracting yourself from reality by concentrating on different tasks or ruminating in a subsequent emotional reality.
4. Cognitive change happens in the process of bonding meaning to a precept, elevating it to an emotional experience. For example when things go wrong one should ‘think positive’ this would be a cognitive reframing of a plausible unpleasant emotional situation, in order to decrease the overall negative emotions.
Last but not least he mentions, response modulation, which is directed at the ‘aftermath’ in emotional regulatory processes and tackles the response in an emotion generative situations. Regulating our behavior and response to the emotion is perhaps the most common process that is tangible to us; it is directed at modulation and emotional response, the final stages of James’s still accepted formula of emotional response tendency. It seems as though we feel we can execute more power over what we put out into the world rather then what we take upon us, in terms of emotions, emotional regulation and responding. The goal of this system is mostly context specific, matching our response to the expected social pattern.
Beyond the self-noted problematic data assimilation through interview and questionnaire methods, which is untrustworthy, there are many other unanswered perplexities in regards to this model of emotional regulation. The fact that it is all according to a ‘process model’ (emphasis mine) makes me suspicious. What about the idea that each individual has their own individual model for how they experience and deal with emotions in social context. Don’t we tend to generalize in a subject so subjective as emotional regulation? We have focused on the unwanted negative emotions but what happens when people are placed in situations in which they have to regulate positive emotions? Is this still healthy? Can such alteration eventually lead to a genetic change in emotional responsiveness? Will we ever reach a place of constant balance of emotions? Is this favorable? What would individuality mean and how could it be expressed if we would be at perfect harmonic, emotional reactivity? The question if emotional harmony can exist, might be answered once we learn to listen to our emotions, without immediately acquiring meaning to them. These multi-regulatory processes confined to a process-oriented approach is ought to bring us closer to understanding emotion regulation but I wonder if it really will, rather constrict us to a pattern, a diagram which makes a lot of sense and in a way seems oversimplified to me.
After Gross has spread the umbrella and clarified general formulation, social context of normal modes for regulation. We are invited through social neuroscience to look into the lens of specified disorders looking at structural detail and differences between individuals. The two papers are bound together through the idea that behavioral disorders are in turn the greater outcome of deregulation of emotions. By focusing on disorders it gives a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and contributes in our understanding of what a healthy mind requires in social adaptation.
Individuals as said, differ not only in efficiency of mechanisms, but in the amount of specific mental activations when such processes as emotional regulation should take place. People with behavioral disorders might have salient parts in their emotional regulatory mechanisms. Could one understand this idea through people that experience a ‘fit’ (= an uncontrollable emotional burst), individuals who in that moment cannot regulate their emotion, as the neural mechanisms are maybe unavailable?

Mikal Shapiro

2008-05-04T21:19:00.000-07:00

I suppose it is only appropriate that in the final weeks of conference work, we would be studying emotion regulation. What better way to learn how to manage the end-of-year pressures? For example, according to Lerner et al., subjects expressing anger and disgust versus fear in response to stress-challenge tasks exhibited lower cortisol responses and blood pressures. The lesson here: Frustrated with schoolwork? Don’t get scared… Get pissed! It’s better for your health (Lerner et al, p. 258). I find it particularly funny that the “annoying” tasks used in the above experiment were math-related problems--recalling the arithmetic we were instructed to calculate during a presentation on memory (and the ensuing fear-filled facial expressions). It’s interesting to note that in the Lerner et al article, anger is associated with a greater sense of control over a stress-filled situation and is thus related to optimism; the stuff of progressive social uprising? Vive la Revolution!
When we discussed optimism in earlier readings, we discovered that feeling un-pragmatically positive could have negative effects on our ability to prepare and respond to real situations. Though this may be the case, “people often have positive illusions about themselves that maintain their mental health” (Cacioppo et al, pg. 106). Self-relevant processing (associated with m-PFC activation--a site related to moderating socially-appropriate actions and personality) often results in over-estimating our own abilities to the benefit of our actions. When we think we can do better than we really can, we often do better than we normally would (“Positive Illusions and Well-Being Revisited,” Taylor and Brown, 1994--this was cited in the Cacioppo et al article and I highly recommend it). “Realism” in our self-perceptions is not as important as a positive and consistent sense of “self.” Although the study of social neuroscience has in the past focused mainly on psychopathology, researchers “now pay greater attention to normative emotional regulatory processes” such as maintaining a solid sense of self as it relates to a larger community (Gross, p. 274). By developing a greater understanding of the biology behind socially relevant emotions (which emotions aren’t socially relevant?) and “healthy” emotion regulation, we can develop more clearly an understanding of the bi-directional communication between higher cognitive functions and deeper, less conscious processes of affectation. This understanding can, in turn, facilitate a more vital definition of the importance of emotions in our personal and social lives than psychology, philosophy, or biology can reveal alone. Reading articles about these cross-disciplinary approaches is inspiring, especially given the history of separation between the fields. Kandel’s article on the new directions of psychiatry reminded me of the fact that psychiatrists have suffered en masse from their own ego-driven defense mechanisms by “[spending] most of the decades of [psychoanalysis’] dominance… on the defensive” (p. 458). It’s amazing that he was encouraged not to read or do any research during his studies in psychiatry at Harvard!
Gross furthers the merging of disciplines by dialoging emotions in a way that allows other disciplines to participate in the conversation. By acknowledging the social, psychological and biological economics of emotional processes, he proposes that emotional “well-being may be most likely when we (a) regulate emotion antecedents so that we are emotionally engaged by those pursuits that have enduring value…” (p. 288). These “pursuits” are surely personally and culturally defined and depending on how and in which ways we spend our resources on them, we can either herald or negate (counter-intuitively) what gives our lives meaning. In developing a more sophisticated awareness of our emotional economics--biologically, psychologically, and socially--we can nurture Gross’ notion of a “cooperation between reason and emotion… helping us decide which battles are worth taking up and which to avoid” (p. 288) This kind of cognitive/emotion middle-road approach may pave the way for the multiple disciplines of social neuroscience to move forward with less contention--by contributing to a more inclusive, more effective feeling-brain language.

social neuroscience

2008-05-04T17:09:00.000-07:00

Lily Thom
This week’s readings examined some of the ways that neuroscience might contribute to psychiatry and the emerging interdisciplinary field of social neuroscience. Cacioppo et al make an argument for neuroscience’s ability to contribute to our understanding of mental disorders. I thought the work effectively strikes a balance between social and biological factors and gets at the heart of how inextricable these two forces are in determining human behavior. They give an impressively extensive overview of neuroscience findings, which was very exciting because now we really have a context for how all these findings fit into what we have learned this semester.
Kandel’s look at interdisciplinary possibilities is very critical of the psychiatric side of the field, particularly because of its roots in psychoanalytic theory. However, Kandel does a good job of explaining the historical reasons why psychoanalysis split with biology and showing that this is not a predestined or natural divide for these fields. He emphasizes that this schism occurred in part because neural findings at the time were just not advanced enough to contribute to Freud’s emerging model in a meaningful. Yet with our current understanding of the brain and genetic expression Kandel proposes some ways in which the fields might find common interest. It’s interesting to imagine how Freud’s model of the mind might be different if he had access to the findings Kandel discusses. On the other hand, neuroscience’s model of the mind may also look different without Freud’s contributions on conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind.
Gross’ discussion of emotion regulation focuses on many distinctions between different aspects of emotional experience. I was intrigued by this comment: “I prefer to think of a continuum from conscious, effortful, and controlled regulation to unconscious, effortless, and automatic regulation (275).” Especially in light of the findings about unconscious emotion, I think that this is a helpful model. I think this speaks to LeDoux’s model by acknowledging a range of interactions between feelings and conscious appraisal. What do others think?
Lerner et al study the differences between indignation (anger and disgust) and fear in response to “annoyingly difficult stress-challenge tasks.” They found that fear displays were positively associated and indignation displays were negatively associated with cardiovascular and cortisol stress levels. They distinguished between indignation, as a situation-specific response and dispositional hostility as a stress disorder with comorbidities. Thus, it seems that in certain situations anger is an adaptive response that can mediate stress. This made me think back to a study that arose in my presentation about parent-child discussion of emotion. The study (Miller and Sperry, 1988) illustrated a difference in expressions of anger between inner-city, single working-class mothers and upper-middle class parents. For working-class mothers, anger was an important tool to teach children who needed to learn to face challenging situations throughout life. Lerner at al explain that indignation can confer a sense of control. This seems to allow the angry study participants to externalize the stressful, annoying aspects of situations rather than internalizing stress or blaming themselves. This may be a truly important skill for working-class people who may face unfair, discriminatory or dehumanizing situations on a daily basis. Interestingly, anger and indignation are usually a fundamental part of movements for social change and civil rights struggles. Perhaps this is because those emotions infer on oppressed people that sense of control that Lerner at al mention. However, Lerner et al point out that adaptive use of indignation may easily approach chronic hostility and its accompanying health disorders.

april 30th, 2008

2008-04-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

Kaila McIntyre-Bader

April 30^th, 2008

Throughout this week’s readings, I noticed that mirror neurons seem to be neuroscience’s current Messiah. The excitement they are causing and the weight scientists are putting on them is remarkable. It seems that mirror neurons just may help bring us a step closer to figuring out the seemingly impossible problem of consciousness.

Social cognition is a way of sharing experiences and a view of the world that depends on the exchange of signals and is highly beneficial to survival. The chameleon effect was mentioned in a couple of the articles, and it was interesting to read about such a common phenomenon being described in such scientific terms. “When we interact with someone we often mirror each other’s movements and mannerisms. We are unaware of this mirroring, but when it occurs it creates the feeling that we have good rapport with each other- the chameleon effect. Interestingly, the rapport associated with the chameleon effect may be destroyed if we become aware that we are being imitated. Instead we may feel we are being mocked”(Frith and Frith, 2007). This reminds me of many occurrences in everyday social life. How many times have you watched or experienced two people getting to know each other, initially mirroring each other to show enthusiasm and engagement, but later on becoming irritated by that person for picking up too many of their mannerisms? This idea also sparked a question in my mind about the innateness of self-absorption. Are humans generally Narcissists? Does mirroring make us feel we have good rapport with another person because they are reminding us of ourselves? Or how much of it is being comforted by the familiar? Lately I’ve been noticing examples of the contagiousness of facial expressions and body postures everywhere I go.

Frith and Frith also bring up social referencing, and reflect on how we use other people’s emotional reactions to learn about novel situations. Infants tend to avoid touching a toy if the mother shows fear, but if she is showing pleasure it will explore it. But there are some reactions that seem to be programmed in the brain. “Infant monkeys who had never met a snake… rapidly acquired fear of snakes when observing a model in a video being afraid of a snake. In contrast, they did not acquire fear of a flower even after 12 trials of observation. By it’s evolutionary history the brain is pre-prepared to learn archaically threatening stimuli.”

I found the apparent innateness of prejudice and racism to be slightly startling. Several of the articles commented on an experiment in which the subjects were shown black faces and the fear reaction that came with it. I found it particularly interesting, though, that “consciously held attitudes about race are often at variance with our implicit prejudices, and there is evidence that we try to suppress these rapid automatic responses” (Frith and Frith, 2006). The amygdala response to these black faces was reduced when the faces were presented for longer, and there was increased activity in the areas of frontal cortex concerned with control and regulation. While I’m not sure about how I feel about this implicit reaction to a face of a certain skin color, I do find it fascinating that making alliances with fortunate groups of people is an evolutionary benefit, thus we may tend to harbor negative feelings toward the disadvantaged. But how does this work with empathy? What is the balance between survival of the fittest and being capable of feeling sorry for a group of people because we can see their point of view and want to help them?

I would love to discuss in class the difference between empathy for those we know and those we don’t know, and the processing for empathy for positive and negative emotions, as well as non-human or robotic empathy. The experiments with eye gaze and robots is crazy. Do we try and access things’ mental states if we know they aren’t the same as we are?

Apparently sometimes we do. Abstract shapes such as triangles can be made to move about in such a way that views will readily attribute emotions, desires, and false beliefs to them. This reminds of a stage in childhood development and magical thinking. I definitely remember giving my forks and spoons personality traits. (Is that weird?)

I also found the idea of awareness of self is really aware of self as others see us intriguing. How much of what we believe about ourselves is internal, and how much is it affected by how others perceive us?

I particularly enjoyed the ending of the “How we predict what other people are going to do” article: “It is likely that almost all our speculations will turn out to be wrong…”

Rejection

2008-04-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Ardanowski

Feeling Brain

4-28-08

“Why Rejection Hurts” was really interesting. The idea of social rejection and physical pain sharing neural mechanisms was intriguing, especially if you consider it in an evolutionary context, as the authors explains. Eisenberger and Lieberman suggest that human infants are dependent on their mother for an extended time, thus experiencing pain if socially separated from her would be an adaptive mechanism to prevent the negative consequences of maternal separation.

The ACC is involved in the emotionally distressing “components” of physical and social pain. I thought the use of the word “component” was interesting; couldn’t they have used the word “feelings”? It also was amazing to me that one could feel pain, but not experience the sensory “feeling” of pain. “Patients who have undergone cingulotomies for chronic pain report that they are still able to feel the pain but that it no longer bothers them [6], highlighting the ACC’s role in the distressing, rather than the sensory, component of physical pain”.

The authors also suggest another way to think about self-esteem. They suggest that self-esteem is linked to one’s level of social connectedness. It was particularly interesting how even if one was consciously aware that they were not being excluded, although it did appear that they were, the ACC was activated. This implicit exclusion highlights the idea that we may have lowered self-esteem, even though we consciously think otherwise. If a situation resembles rejection, no matter what we may tell ourselves, our self-esteem may suffer (Box p.295).

The studies showed that an enhanced sensitivity to physical pain correlates with sensitivity to emotional pain. The last few sentences of the article mentions anti-depressants link to alleviating psychological and physical pain. I always thought that prescribing antidepressants for physical pain was due to the idea that if people psychologically felt better, than they would feel better physically in a cause and effect type way. However, this article suggests that the neurology is actually connected, thus providing more neurological support for the practice of prescribing such medication for physical pain.

Social Neuroscience

2008-04-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

Kevin Goldstein
Week 13: April 30th: Social Neuroscience

This week’s readings on social cognition illuminate many of the topics we have addressed this semester; as we have already concluded, in charting human emotional life we are charting human social life. Central to these readings is a reorientation of cognitive neuroscience toward the interpersonal, a great example being Rizzolatti’s mirror neurons coupled with the chameleon effect. The notion that there exist neurons which are stimulated equally by actions either performed or observed has immense implications for a species. As Ramachandran argues, this mimetic predisposition could have fueled the big bang in human evolution some 40,000 years ago; at the very least, sudden innovations would have become sustainable very quickly.

More generally, mirror neurons decenter the concept of the autonomous, perceiving subject, placing the emphasis instead on self-in-relation-to others (Frith and Frith). In a sense, perceived action (when the agent is conspecific) is initiated action; this necessarily touches on empathic reasoning—putting oneself in another’s shoes—and similarly, to aesthetic perception—catharsis and other emotions, especially when observing a drama. Naturally our sociality cannot be separated from our creativity, our great capacity to learn and innovate. As Blakemore, Winston, and Frith (2004) explain, “there is increasing evidence that a large portion of the human motor system is activated by the mere observation of action” (217). How extraordinary that perceived events in space can initiate a motor response—indeed, that observation is fundamental in this operation!

In the case of the chameleon effect, we largely unintentionally mimic social partners, unconsciously establishing good rapport. The chameleon effect is representative of a range of human signals which both affirm self-other relationships and sustain a mutually perceived reality. I was reminded of Donald Winnicott’s notion of transitional objects in child development. In short, anything from toys to words can constitute objects of mutual contemplation—very often as play objects—between the developing child (starting at around one year of age) and caregiver, aiding in the process of self-construction. As Frith and Frith (2007) explain, “a major function of social cognition in humans is to allow us to create a shared world in which we can interact” (R727). Both unconscious and conscious gestural and linguistic signals do not merely serve to exchange information, but to establish and sustain human relationships through a mutually understood paradigm.

Frith and Frith (2007) continue their review by delving into the question of consciousness and social cognition: “Rather than being private, conscious experiences are represented in a form that can be shared by others, thereby creating the common ground for culture” (R720). Bringing us back to the discourse of emotions, can we say then that what defines the “feeling” as a phenomenological event is precisely its communicability? Even a linguistic construct built around a nebulous “emotion” has real social value. For example, how we choose to construct social displays and thus manage reputation—to the extent that we can—, what signals we express, can engender palpable affective responses in those around us.

Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004) conjecture that the common neural alarm system between physical and social pain, which has its origins in the mammalian youth’s (and especially Homo sapiens) especially long ontogenesis, has produced a lifelong need for social connections and distress when those connections are severed. Such conjecture is intriguing, though ultimately it would seem sociality is evolutionarily advantageous not merely in childhood but throughout one’s lifetime. The need for human connection can arguably be traced back to the concept of reciprocal altruism. Nonetheless, this feature of social behavior is not simply a life-long series of minute business transactions, but as we have seen time and again, is entrenched in an affect-rich network of interpersonal associations.

Empathy

2008-04-27T20:16:00.000-07:00

Molly Moody

This week’s readings were startling in clarity and comprehensibility. While doing research for my conference paper, I had decided that empathy was a complicated and controversial subject. However, each of this week’s articles brings forth a refreshing point of view by connecting obvious human social behaviors and empathy. Frith’s “Social Cognition” article is a brilliant guide to a foggy subject. One topic the paper mentioned that I found most interesting was the “chameleon effect”:

When we interact with someone we often mirror each other’s movements and mannerisms. We are unaware of this mirroring, but when it occurs it creates the feeling that we have good rapport with each other.

As I read this quote I become hyper-aware of every fashion trend, every dance move, and every piece of slang I have acquitted myself with in this past year alone. Does this camaraderie-producing effect explain why people love the electric slide so much? Did I start using Northern colloquialisms like “mad” and “wicked” to better bond with my Pennsylvania-raised roommate?

More questions are raised by Qui’s article, “Does it Hurt,” when researchers must use their own empathy to determine a newborn’s susceptibility to pain: How do you measure pain and consciousness in a nonlinguistic creature? As we’ve seen from many of our previous readings, neuroscientists use verbal communication to gauge the intensity of emotions in humans. This specific paper questions methods for gauging pain and consciousness in premature, incommunicative babies.

Sharing is Caring

2008-04-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

Molly McDonough
4.30.2008

The readings this week were a great way to sum up some of the things we have been discussing in class and a nice review after Aidan and Oliver’s presentation on aesthetics. They were dealing with the aesthetics of art, but art is a division (or diversion) of everyday life, making aesthetics a central theme in our making of daily decisions. This may be in part why I found the first reading Social Cognition in Humans, Frith and Frith (2007), so fascinating. The way we treat people is based on what they look like and how they present themselves. We are able to know if we find someone trustworthy in less than 100 milliseconds. I found this all very interesting and completely applicable to every day life, but my question is whether or not we are aware of looking untrustworthy? If so why not try to help that reaction? I am not talking about attractive versus unattractive, I’m referring to things we wear or facial expressions we choose to have to put up a certain façade.

We are so aware of others and their affect on us, but what about our affect on ourselves? I think the physical reaction to the way we look affects every aspect of our behavior. This doesn’t seem to coincide with Frith and Frith’s view that the awareness of self is described as awareness of self as others see us. How can we be different enough to be unique, and yet the same enough to be accepted?

This brings me to similar questions I had regarding the Frith and Frith (2006) How we predict what other people are going to do. In this paper they again address trust. Trust is intertwined with verbal and non-verbal communication. In the Hirschfield et al. experiment 2.2.4 (pg. 39) a situation of group stereotypes is conflicted with personal dispositions. It’s hard for me to determine whether or not this is a beneficial experiment because if a lot of young children’s mother’s cook, then they might choose the woman. If their father’s cook; they might choose the man, regardless of the individual question.

Our need for interpersonal relations is strange when it really comes down to it. Frith expresses that when we trust someone we are inclined not only to like their friends, but to dislike their enemies. Do we dislike the enemy because we are experiencing the bad feelings through our friends? I think this is another way of living through observing other’s experiences without having to get as emotionally involved. Then it brings the question of whether or not it can even be referred to as an experience of ours without the emotional attachment.
Although we can predict certain things about others, like whether or not our family will disappoint us by being late to some soccer game, the unpredictability of knowing is what leads to the way we mirror others and the need to share. I sometimes wonder why people can become so physically distraught with grief. Maybe it’s because through that depression, lack of nourishment, or sleep at some level we are trying to become a part of another’s experience.

Emotions are the joker...

2008-04-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

Katie Moeller

I’ve been finding that over the past few weeks there’s been a slight shift in our readings which I’ve found quite exciting; it seems that at this later stage in the course, having spent significant time building a base knowledge of emotional processes and the brain systems they involve, we are now in a better place to focus on some of the more “real world” applications of the basic concepts we’ve been piecing together. It’s almost as if many of the “but what about…” questions we’ve been asking as we’ve been looking at the bigger picture of emotions are now being given center stage. I find this to be not only satisfying but also important for my own ability to utilize all of what we’ve learned to help explain the everyday goings-on of our emotions, and what the greater system actually looks like “in action” i.e. when confronted with any of the million situations we might encounter as we move through the world.

This week’s topic of social consciousness provided just such an opportunity to think about how our emotions work in specific circumstances, and since interactions (and relationships) with others occupies a fairly large percentage of most of our daily lives, these seven articles had a lot of ground to cover. One of the concepts that many of the readings touched on, and that seems key to our understanding of social interaction is that of mirroring. In “Social Cognition in Humans,” Frith and Frith (2007) identify the exchange of signals as the essential core of human interaction, and they distinguish between the unconscious, automatic versus the conscious, deliberate processing of these signals. Mirroring illustrates the former; when interacting, both individuals will tend to align their movements and gestures with that of the other person without even noticing this is taking place. Interestingly, in mirroring this not noticing aspect is key, as the feeling of good rapport built by this unconscious alignment can be damaged if one or the other person becomes aware of imitation and ends up feeling mocked.

I find it fascinating to think about all the ways in which we are constantly adjusting ourselves to one another in our social interactions, especially in light of other reading and thinking I’ve done about anxiety. Though I don’t think anxiety came up specifically in any of this week’s materials, I found the ideas about unconscious signal exchange between individuals to be consistent with my own experiences of how anxiety can feel in a social situation. For me, anxiety has at times acted as a kind of (annoying) inner voice that constantly narrates the moments of an interaction with another person, in a sense “calling out” all the signals that perhaps should be taking place unconsciously but in the anxious individual are being deliberated and monitored consciously instead. It’s no wonder that anxiety can be viewed as socially maladaptive – as Frith and Frith (2007) point out, when signal exchanges between two people are brought to awareness, there is the potential to end any feelings of rapport that were in the process of being built.

Though not specifically delineated in any of the articles, it seems likely that a hyper-consciousness of the social interaction on the part of one of the participants would in turn have an inhibitory or negative effect on the other person. In “How We Predict What Other People Are Going to Do,” Frith and Frith (2006) describe facial expressions and body postures as “contagious,” (p. 40), and cite evidence that the simple act of watching someone else be touched on the face activates our brain as if we ourselves are being touched. Although I think it might be difficult to tell in the moment that an interaction we are having with someone is being affected by our own or the other person’s anxiety (because everything is happening so quickly and seemingly automatically), the idea of mirroring indicates that when one person is having difficulty relaxing enough for the unconscious alignment and exchange of signals to take place, the interaction itself will not result in the same type of rapport-building as it could.

Somewhat related to the ways in which mirroring enables us to exchange signals and get on the same social “page” as others, the idea that we acquire information and learn about our world through our social interactions with other was raised this week. I find this idea most interesting when applied to children taking emotional cues from their parents or other adult caregivers, as Frith and Frith (2007) point out in “Social Cognition in Humans.” The authors state that “generally speaking, if the mother shows fear, the infants will tend to avoid touching the toy, but if she shows pleasure, they will explore it,” (p. R725).

I found myself discussing just this phenomenon with a fellow preschool teacher recently, as I was pondering over how to help one of the little boys I work with to have an easier time transitioning into school in the morning. He is two and a half, and has been coming to the group since September, but even now, in our eighth month of school, he has mornings where he cries hysterically when his mother drops him off. While this isn’t entirely developmentally inappropriate, I talked a lot to my friend about how anxious his mother seems to be about the whole situation, and how much her mood in the mornings seems to affect him. Some days when she brings him in, she casually chats with other parents and then slowly eases out of the room, but some mornings – and often the times when he has the most trouble – she is very focused on his transition, and does lots of prompting to try and get him involved in school so he won’t be upset. In a basic way, it seems that the more fearful his mother is of the morning transition, the harder time he has, which is entirely consistent with Frith and Frith’s (2007) assessment that people, and especially children, use other people’s emotional reactions as signals or sources of learning about how they themselves should react to a particular stimulus or situation.

While there are dozens of other points of intrigue I could write about from the articles, and real life examples I can think of to go along with them, there were a few questions that came up for me as I moved through the social consciousness materials that I wanted to raise here for possible discussion. Firstly, I am interested but somewhat confused by the definition of self-esteem and the relationship between self-esteem and social rejection posited by Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004) in “Why Rejections Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social Pain.” While I am clear on the idea the authors present that social pain may overlap with physical pain in order to help us avoid social isolation (particularly early on in life when we are so physically dependent on the care and attention of others for survival), and while I agree that self-esteem is traditionally linked with “positive psychological health,” (p. 295), I am not sure I agree that self-esteem can be entirely defined by one’s perception of oneself as either included or excluded by a social group. Although social rejection clearly does have an impact on our self-concept, doesn’t our own assessment of self, or more specifically of our performance have something to do with it? In the example given, research participants reported lower self-esteem when they told they were being excluded from a game of catch even by a computer program, not just when there were other human participants involved. I guess my question about this example is whether the reports of lower self-esteem might be linked to being denied to opportunity to perform, or achieve, rather than just to the denial of social inclusion.

A second question I had was regarding prejudice and bias, which also came up in many of the articles. The general consensus seems to be that our top-down processes of social cognition do give us the ability to control and modify the more automatic emotional responses we have to “untrustworthy” or feared categories of people, responses which more than one article argues are in fact adaptive (and unavoidable?), even if they are socially undesirable. What I wonder, I guess, is why so many people are still compelled to express these prejudices and biases outright when in general as human beings we have the capacity to understand that it is not particularly socially acceptable or desirable to do so. Although it seems reasonable that our biases would show up in some of our more automatic behaviors and actions, what Frith and Frith (2006) argue is that we do have the capacity, at least in social situations, to control the expression of our responses when we know our original reactions are prejudiced and unfounded. They write, “Increased amygdala activity is a largely automatic response to people of other races. However, this activity too can be modulated by conscious, controlled processes associated with frontal activity,” (p. 43). So why don’t we always do this? Why do people continue to make racist, sexist, etc. remarks and judgments out loud when they have the capacity not to? I am fully aware there may not be an answer to this question, but it’s a particularly important issue to me and I am always interested in understanding more about why we as humans - as societies - are so capable of making radical, positive change in some aspects of our collective existence, and not in others.

A Social Consciousness

2008-04-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

Tessa Noonan

The Feeling Brain

4/30/08

Having done quite a bit of research on social consciousness, particularly on mirror neurons in relation to autism, I found the back and forth dialogue between the articles to be very interesting. In particular, the different ways in which the authors conceived of self-consciousness in relation to the social world. Frith and Frith (2007) end their paper with a suggestion that "awareness of the self might be more accurately described as awareness of the self as others see us" (p. R730). This idea clearly incorporates strong influences of social signals, as discussed in the paper, and social feedback; the link between social signals and individual consciousness is invaluable here.

Ramachandran makes a similar evolutionary argument, putting mirror neurons at the forefront of much cognitive development for humans. However, he does bring up an example which seems to reverse the directionality the the Friths propose: in relation to anosognosia patients, Ramachandran supposes that in order to make a judgement about another's movements you must be able to virtually simulate the corresponding movement within your own body and brain. Because people with anosognosia deny their own paralysis, they also subsequently deny the paralysis of others as well. Although mirror neurons still establish a connection between two individuals by assessing the likeness of their situations, Ramachandran's theory originates with the central subject, as opposed to the social world.

I also found Eisenberger and Lieberman's article on physical and social pain to be fascinating in its results and its implications. Not only do physical and social pain overlap in their brain processes, but they can in fact complement or supplement each other. Eisenberger and Lieberman claim that enhanced sensitivity for one type of pain accompanies a similar enhanced sensitivity for the other type, but also that increased social support decreases both social and physical pain (chronic ailments, during cancer, following heart surgery, and during childbirth). Again, the idea that input from the social world can so drastically change our consciousness, even of something so seemingly basic as the pain levels within our own bodies, is truly amazing.

These ideas began applying themselves in Adolphs article, as he was discussing a woman who had suffered damage to her amygdala and could not properly identify emotions in faces, particularly fear. The experimenters isolated the eyes as the area with which she had the most difficulty, because she did not spend time looking at them. I first wondered if the damage to her amygdala prohibited her from forging emotional connections with others because she had a lowered susceptibility to emotions herself, and thus could not even identify them on another's face. However, once the experimenters told her to look at the eyes of the face, she could easily identify fear, meaning that she had some internal guide for what fear looked like. This example brings up many perplexing questions, including whether or not the amygdala gives us certain proclivities for finding and addressing emotion within the social world, so we are still able to "feel" it to some extent. Adolphs of course also addressed the question of autism, and whether there are similar issues behind the inability to make eye contact and thus lack of emotional identification. The fact that other areas of the brain can compensate for certain disadvantages is certainly incredible as well, and another example of its ability to evolve and adapt.

Thoughts about Pessimism & ACC

2008-04-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Ardanowski

Feeling Brain Post

4-22-08

I immediately wanted to read the article titled “Is Optimism Always Best?” because it has always bothered me when people criticize others for being “pessimistic.” I’m not saying that it is particularly comfortable to be around pessimistic people, but I have always felt that there must be a reason why one would behave in such a way. The author’s opinion that “optimism and shifts from optimism serve a similar goal: the need for preparedness” offers a logical reason for such behavior. Preparedness is defined as “a goal state of readiness to respond to uncertain outcomes.” If one feels pessimistic, then we can deduce that they feel anxious, and feel the need to perhaps minimize to avoid feeling disappointed or caught off guard. This is not necessarily a “bad” or “negative” thing. I also thought the idea of pessimism being linked to magical thinking was interesting in a cultural sense. We do often avoid talking optimistically about something for fear of “jinxing” the outcome. Research also shows that people tend to shift from optimism when the outcome is very personal and/or mostly out of their control. It would be interesting to see if a study like this has been conducted in other countries, because I do think optimism/pessimism is, to some extent, learned. Both are necessary, but balance seems to be the key.

I really enjoyed reading the “Fool me once, shame on me-fool me twice, blame the ACC” because it really got me thinking about addictive and compulsive behavior. The study showed that the monkeys with the ACC lesions could change their behavior on a single trial, but could not sustain their new response, despite the fact that the reward was connected to the new response. The authors note that changing behavior in response to changing rewards could be a separate process from consolidating behavior to a new strategy. I can definitely see the correlation to addiction, and helps explain why people continue to do things that they know are not good for them or lack rewards. However, with unhealthy addictions, aren’t there immediate rewards, but long-term losses? I guess this should still motivate people to change their behavior. However, concepts such as impulse control, pleasure seeking, relieving anxiety, and chemical dependency are also important to consider when discussing addictions and compulsive behavior. This study clearly speaks to how the brain can continue to behave according to old patterns and illustrates how difficult change is. The specific discovery that the ACC is connected to depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, and addiction opens many doors for treatment. Have they found that the ACC in humans is impaired in some way, thus contributing to these disorders? If so, in what way is it impaired?

unconscious "liking" versus emotion

2008-04-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

Molly Esp

Key words and themes this week were hedonics, pleasure, pain, reward, optimism, pessimissm, conscious, emotion, unconscious emotion, feeling, behavior, and decision making. This week's readings echoed last week's in references to decision making and emotion, although this week's focus became whether or not emotion can be unconscious and the affects of unconscious "emotion" on consciousness.
I tried to justify this argument on my own as I was reading by thinking of repression and denial as examples of unconscious emotion, but these didn't quite fit because it seems that in both these instances, there has to be a sort of acknowledgement of the emotion at some point in order to repress and deny it. My thoughts then shifted to the "Simple Pleasures" article by Kent Berridge, specifically to the pleasure experiment and whether or not this proved that emotion can be unconscious. I was not convinced since the article's focus was on biological stimulation. I suppose I should lay my bias out there and say that I suspect that I have constructed a view of emotion and feeling that relies on the acknowledgement and internalization of a stimulation. After this week's readings, I have discovered that I am skeptical of the use of "emotion" when talking about unconscious processes.
The readings obviously seemed to go against this view, evident through the experiments used and discussed. The article, "What is an Unconscious Emotion? (A Case for Unconscious "Liking")" summarizes some of the confusion surrounding whether or not emotion can be unconscious. On page 25, the conclusion states,

William James' (1894) theory defined subjective feeling as the essence of emotion. Yet he posited that conscious emotional feeling depended on a unconscious prior case, namely, the bodily reaction to the emotional stimulus. That immediate neurobiological behavior was automatic, but shared certain features with the conscious emotion it enabled, such as elicitiing stimulus and a valenced response. This Jamesian reaction seems to encompass several features of what we have called unconscious core processes of emotion.

I would agree with what is being said here, that unconscious processes are integral to the emotional experience. However, I would disagree that the unconscious processes, or "neurobiological behavior" is an unconscious emotion. It is all part of the experience, but the way I understand it, an emotion is a sequence of processes, including conscious recognition. The second paragraph of the conclusion writes,

Although the contemporary psychology of emotion has tended to emphasise the view of emotion as intrisically conscious, we propose that unconscious emotions also exist. To mediate unconscious emotion, there appears to be a subcortical network available to generate core "liking" reactions to sensory pleasures. In normal adults under some conditions, core "liking" reactions may influence a person's consumption behaviour later, without a person being able to report subjective awareness of the affective reaction at the moment it was caused. When the brain generates an affective response of which the mind is unaware, as we have described here, there exists a truly unconscious emotion.

The use of the word "liking" is very striking to me and I would agree with its use because to use emotion would be to eliminate the difference between unconscious and conscious. I think this is what I have a problem with. The inabiliy to "report subjective awaresness of the affective reaction at the moment it was caused" as an indication of unconscious emotion does not seem to be fair as it seems to me that the authors are signaling out one part of the emotional experience and calling it an entire process. To me, it seems that they are talking about one part of emotion, the unconscious, but in order to call something an emotion I think that there must be a form of conscious recognition, however fleeting and seemingly insignificant.
I found the readings on optimissm and pessimism to be interesting as well, particularly the argument that pessimism makes for more adaptable individuals because they anticipate negative circumstance. However, is it possible to decide your demeanor? Isn't this a combination of personality, environment, and experience? The studies were intriguing because it is generally thought best to be optimistic, but the articles proved that pessimism has its place too and may make someone more readily able to deal with changing circumstance.

unconscious pleasure

2008-04-21T09:53:00.001-07:00

Endira Ferrara

The most intriguing aspect of this weeks reading’s is the idea of unconscious emotion, and in particular relation to unconscious pleasure or dislike over a period of time. In examining Berridge and Winkileman’s suggestion that we do possess unconscious emotions, or that certain feelings may be activated by unconscious processes, it is interesting to note that this is clearly evident in our predictions about emotional experience over time.

For example, the Gilbert et. all study looked at feelings of distress or contempt and the researchers concluded that “people may sometimes recover more quickly from truly distressing experiences than from slightly distressing ones.” Participants expected that their feelings at the time of a distressful moment would be a clear indicator of the extent to which they would experience similar feelings some time later. Therefore, the longer these feelings would last is dependent upon the intensity of the feeling when it first occurred. However, results showed that in fact five minutes later participants felt less contempt, and for the partner rather than the nonpartner. When it comes to future events, we generally do not succeed in predicting how we feel. Berridge refers to the notion of implicit emotion with the possibility that “unconscious emotion is most generally expressed as an unconsciously caused emotion that is nonetheless consciously felt. (p.186)” In the case of predicted intensity of emotion, it is clear that participants in Gilbert’s study were not conscious of the cause of their feelings even though they were conscious of the feelings themselves.

Loewenstein discusses the knowledge of information about future events as directly related to how they will experience them. The idea is that information about an event itself causes either pleasure or pain before the event has actually happened. These anticipatory feelings that occur in this waiting process prove to have a huge impact on decisions that are made over a period of time. While economic theory states that generally people want to experience pleasant events more immediately while wanting to delay the experience of unpleasant ones, Loewenstein proposes that with the knowledge of information, people should want to prolong the pleasant event so as to make the pleasurable outcome more desirable or because the period of anticipation itself is pleasurable. They might want to experience distress sooner in order to get it over with.
In terms of the article concerning the benefits of optimism, it is also interesting to note our unawareness in the predictions for the emotional experience of future events. We experience more pleasure in anticipating future events when they are farthest in the future, possibly due to the fact that we unconsciously enjoy the period of anticipation and therefore adopt a hopeful outlook. Finally when the event is closer to occurring, we feel more pessimistic because we gain realization that we must prepare for it, and thus we adopt a more realistic outlook.

If it is true that we are not always aware of the fact that we find pleasure in the anticipation of future events nor are we aware of the extent to which we feel intensity of emotion in the future, then this may prove the fact that as Berridge concludes, “we do not have direct conscious access to core psychological processes that occur within pleasure.”

hedonics/reward

2008-04-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-04-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

Amy Fleischer
Hedonics/Reward

A theme of a previous class discussion was that we must understand consciousness in order to understand feeling. We ended that class with the idea that gaining greater cognitive control over our emotional processes allows us to make better decisions, and therefore it should be our collective aim. The following week, we discussed the implications of these findings for neuroeconomics– as well as evidence for the value of somatic feedback during decision-making. This week, we have come across another possibility that adds extra dimension to our understanding of how decisions are made: hedonics and reward. These theories dance around the assumption that we are motivated by complex emotions to experience pleasure.

Among other things, this week’s readings presents us with a case for non-conscious emotional experiences that may not be felt but serve to guide our behavior in powerful ways. Coincidentally, the very last article that I read, What is an unconscious emotion? The case for unconscious “liking”), served as a type of umbrella for the others. Below, I will try to draw out the themes of each paper as they relate to the one above.

In Parsing Reward, by Barridge and Robinson, the effects of subliminal messaging is used to illustrate the differences between affective “liking” and motivational “wanting” (507). The authors suggest breaking down what seems to be a single experience (seeking pleasure) in order to examine various consequences and dissociable neural substrates. The paper states, “if implicit reward is separable from its subjective feelings, […] then core reward processes might be more amenable to objective measurement” (508). This language echoes a type of mechanistic metaphor of the brain, wherein a human organ is made of isolated, interchangeable parts like the modern car. Of course, the picture is not entirely bleak because motivation is further complicated by attention, learning, and cognition.

The Pleasures and Pains of Information describes the veritable Information Age in which we live– where scientists assert that abstract information has very concrete values in terms of how it is perceived in the brain. This article also points to a topic that was raised at the end of our last class: the relationship between language and materiality. A related question might be: at what level/s do we extract utility from information? Is it while we predict what could occur as a result of new knowledge or is it only after we have experienced the effect of what we’ve learned? What follows is the ability to form “motivated” beliefs or to process information in a biased way (705). Here, we are faced with many implications of presenting information.

In the Peculiar Longevity piece by Gilbert et al., the amazing thing about people is that we can imagine or “envision” alternatives to the present situation, enabling us to discover consequences of an event without actually having to experience it (3). This interesting article is about the region-b paradox, which concludes that intense states abate more quickly than mild ones (2). Among several things, it points to the fact that outside observers may feel more intensely negative than a victim for reasons that exceed logic; this finding is especially relevant to the discussion of unconscious emotion.

Another major issue raised in this week’s readings is, again, how we categorize emotional events in tandem with sophisticated neuroimaging techniques. Using more and more detailed information, we make maps of the brain in order to know more than we can feel. Various levels of awareness combine to form interactive systems that demonstrate how we process information and make decisions based on that information. We also act
on what we feel, but how much do we really know about our motivation?

In The Optimistic Brain, Schacter and Addis attempt to sketch out specific locations (or routes) for optimism and, by default, provide another possible physical correlate to depression (1346).

Within almost all of the readings, framing emerges as a device that is used to color information. [As an aside, I recommend “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know your values and frame the debate” (a guide for progressives) by cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff– just to see how he explains why conservatives in America are controlling dialogue when they frame the issue of the estate tax as “the death tax”, for example.] Several other articles also reintroduce valence as means to categorize emotion. The paper that asks, in its title, “Is Optimism Always Best?” draws some seemingly obvious conclusions. That people should hope for the best and prepare for the worst is an old adage; and although it may not provide the same degree of complexity attempted in this theoretical discussion, it is often used to suggest the virtue of being prepared. Again, this article re-frames a familiar topic (optimism) in a way that shakes up the divide between positive and negative expectations. Among the “future directions” listed at the end of this study is whether or not children learn about the utility of shifting from optimism through experience or “increased cognitive abilities”; however, these two are not such separate options because the former can clearly cause the latter (305).

At the very least, common themes of feeling-as-information (186) and the interrelationship of affect and cognition (190) are latent within the longer paper by Berridge and Winkielman concerning unconscious emotion. There are many more relevant connections as this text raises so many questions about emotional processes in the brain. Luckily, the authors recognize that it is not an all or none situation- and that emotions can occur consciously and unconsciously in various parts of the brain- even if normal structures/functioning is disturbed.

Finally, I really liked the Peculiar article because it approaches the complexity of emotions and shows how love and hate can go hand-in hand– even if just for a brief moment. It also provides some interesting questions for how to manage crisis intervention, such as when to intercede.

Hedonics

2008-04-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

Oliver Edwards

I noticed a very strong connection, both between the readings for the last two weeks, and between this subject matter and that of my conference project. In studying the neural substrates of addiction and their correlative explanations in the realm of philosophy and neuroeconomical theory, I have come to some interesting but slightly chilly conclusions. Much of what governs what we ‘want’, and thus how we behave, is severely detached from what gives us pleasure and from how we want to behave. I think Berridge and Robinson, two authors who have provided much of my conference material, do a very nice job of outlining this somewhat counter-intuitive notion. First of all, they have to demonstrate that it is possible to experience an unconscious, or implicit, emotion.

Beginning, as we did in our own course, with James, Berridge questions the Jamesian assertion that all emotions are consciously felt. He runs us through a series of arguments that support the notion that unconscious emotions do not exist. He then proceeds, however, to demonstrate through an elegantly simple experiment, that our affective states can indeed change our behavior without conscious awareness. I had trouble with the experiment at first, but have decided that I think he makes his point quite strongly. The subliminal exposure to happy faces seems to have undeniably caused a Jamesian, physiological, change in the body that, although not explicitly recognized by the subject, subsequently changed the subject’s behavior. I wonder, was everyone else convinced as strongly as I was by the experiment?

In the end, Berridge gives James the credit he deserves by recognizing that James perhaps just had a different definition of emotion. He was referring more specifically to the ‘feeling’ of emotion, a distinction that we have learned to make over and over throughout our course discussions. More and more, with the advent of much more sophisticated understanding of the neural substrates of ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’, we need to examine the many facets of hedonics and ‘parse’ them out as Berridge says. He stresses that there are at least three psychological processes involved in hedonics: learning, subjective pleasure, and the motivation to act. Though we normally conflate the three, Berridge demonstrates well the need to understand them separately. Perhaps understanding the neural substrates of the three, something we cannot quite do in detail yet, will contribute to a more clear-cut distinction in our minds.

I found the article on perceived hedonic duration fascinating, but also shocking in a way I don’t quite understand. It demonstrated in a more concrete, everyday manner, the phenomenon that Berridge describes. In much of our daily lives, especially in the social realm, we are governed by our implicit desires and motivations. I think much of the inadequacy some of us have felt in attempting to describe emotions like love speaks to this phenomenon. Why are we more likely to forgive those that we love. While the study seems to demonstrate that they hurt us less because we love them, couldn’t it also be that we ignore the hurt because implicitly we ‘want’ them even when we don’t love them.

We also see a similar phenomenon in the two discussions of optimism. While instinctually we all probably feel that optimism is the healthy, beneficial response to all of life’s variegated situations, the first paper especially demonstrated that is common and also beneficial for a person to become more pessimistic directly before an expected event. This shed a lot of light for me on the question of why these implicit emotional responses seem to be evolutionarily selected. Do we have a prejudice towards conscious emotions simply because we are aware that they give us pleasure. Just as we have seen with LeDoux’s assessment of fear responses, organisms may need to experience ‘wanting’ subconsciously simply because it is more efficient. Similarly, although pessimism is certainly unpleasant, it may cause us to behave advantageously in certain situations. It is sometimes disturbing, especially in the field of addiction research, to think how strongly our drives and pleasures may be below the surface of our conscious awareness.

Sylviane--Week 11 Blog (Decision Making and Neuroethics)

2008-04-13T20:01:00.001-07:00

A theme that I found particularly interesting, and one that resonated in many of this week’s readings on decision making and neuroethics, was the idea of evolutionarily conserved mechanisms. In the Sanfey article on neuroeconomics and cross-currents in research on decision making, he discusses a “growing tradition in neuroscience in which optimal performance is defined for a given behavioral domain, and is then used for constructing theories about underlying neural function.” He goes on to comment that while this technique has its merits, and that complex behavior can be optimal, “simpler evolutionarily conserved mechanisms might prove to be closer to optimal, or at least to have been so in the environment in which they evolved.” This idea intrigued me, for it seems that a great deal of human behavior, and therefore likely the neural foundations of these behaviors, takes the simplest form that has benefited mankind from the earliest generations. A number of the other articles also conveyed this idea; Daw’s article on cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans mentioned that the classic “exploration-exploitation” dilemma is “far from representing idle curiosity” and that “such exploration is often critical for organisms to discover how best to harvest resources such as food and water.” Greene’s article on moral judgment states that intuitions such as reciprocity, loyalty, purity, and suffering, are shaped as much by natural selection as they are by cultural forces. Finally, Grimes’s article on human trust discusses the evolutionary advantages of trusting one another: “Out social brain is also adapted to be cooperative. Individuals can benefit by working together. But that requires trust, which is why, according to Zak, we have a biological urge to trust one another.”

I never cease to be amazed by molecular biology, but this is one of the first times I have been so fascinated by evolutionary biology. Morality, specifically trust, is something that I have never truly considered the origin of, seeing as I have encountered both trusting and untrusting people in my life. Grimes’s explanation for the simple evolutionary advantage to this human trait appears so obvious after reading his article, leading me think that many of human behaviors are likely as result of such simple biological adaptations as well. It would be extremely interesting if there were some way to compare the brains, both in structure and in functioning, of the earliest humans with humans today to see how they have evolved over time, or if they even have.

The other article on morality (Zimmer’s “Whose Life Would You Save) was also interesting to read but for different reasons. In his brief recap of the history of the study of morality, he mentions a philosopher named David Hume who argued that people can an act good not because they rationally determine it to be so but because it makes them feel good. Similarly, an act is deemed bad if it fills someone with disgust, and these ideas led to him propose that moral knowledge comes partly from an immediate feelings and diner internal sense.” This reminded me of countless conversations concerning moral issues in which someone said that something was wrong “because it just was.” I am curious about the neural mechanisms that could potentially support Hume’s theory. In the article, Greene uses fMRI to examine brain patterns while patients ponder moral dilemmas. Are there specific regions of the brain that are present in all humans that will allow not only for a general sense of morality but also for a similar sense of what is right and wrong? Further, is empathy the key to this? Later in the article, Greene mentions studies where it has been determined that while criminal psychopaths can acknowledge emotions in others, they often have trouble recognizing these emotions. Finally, Greene argues that “different cultures produce different kinds of moral intuition and different kinds of brain.” This view, which I suppose is a sort of cultural morality, seems to suggest that morality and moral development is guided more by social and cultural factors than biological ones. I am curious about how the brain activation patterns would compare in individuals from a variety of cultures.

To be, or not to be.... a proponent of the multi-system view?

2008-04-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

Super corny title, yes.

For anyone that has iTunes, and that's probably everyone, I found a Stanford podcast that relates directly to the topic we're discussing, though I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Get on iTunes, select "iTunes Store" from the toolbar on the left > search "Stanford U" > select "Stanford U"> go to "Health and Medicine" > choose "Mental Health > the podcast is "Perception, Decision and Reward: Toward a Neurobiology of Decision-making" by William T. Newsome. Hope you enjoy!

I'd like to start the body of my post with a quick summary of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, which I feel that the Bechara et al., article did not quite explain. (This is a mix my my own limited knowledge supplemented by Wikipedia.)Essentially, the SMH proposes the existence of a mechanism through which emotional processes may either guide or bias behavior, particularly in the realm of decision-making. This proposal indicates that the view held by the authors is one of a multi-system process in decision-making. Oftentimes, one has to make a decision between conflicting alternatives, at which point cognitive processes may become overloaded and are unable to provide an informed option. It is here that somatic markers come into play; somatic markers are psychologically affective states that have been induced by reinforcing stimuli from the environment.
On a superficial level, I was highly entertained by the way Bechara et al. went about defending their hypothesis, and given what little I do know about the matter, I adamantly support them in their defense. Though I am not certain that I wholeheartedly agree with their hypothesis, they present incredibly valid points. For instance, Bechara et al. studied patients with VMPC damage, whereas Maia et al. studied regular Moreover, Bechara et al. point out that Maia et al.'s study, "undermines traditional methods for identifying implicit knowledge" (159). The reason for this accusation is that Maia et al. simply questioned their participants about what they know, undercutting the idea of implicit knowledge, which may be unconscious. In the end, Maia et al. show that even normal participants without damage to the VMPC, with adequate knowledge, are not guaranteed to make the correct decision.
Moving on, while reading the article by DeMartino et al., I found myself thinking, "Aha! This sounds like the SMH". However, I feel that while DeMartino et al. present two systems through which information is processed in decision-making, that they put forth the idea that the overriding system is one of "simple heuristics," or trial and error, while Bechara et al. (though I may be mistaken), propose that emotions, of affective states, are the deciding factor. To simplify, both believe that decisions are not made in the brain by only one system; when the fast and dirty system falls through, another one comes up to take the slack and makes the final decision. The difference between the two papers is that the authors differ on which of the two systems is the overriding one.

When I read the title for the Sanfey et al. article, I was a bit taken-aback to see the term "Neuroeconomics". However, once I began to read the article, it made perfect sense to me. An idea that caught my attention right off was the idea that behavior can be interpreted as choosing alternatives with the goal of maximizing utility. To me, this seems intuitively true, and as such, I thought it might be interesting to discuss this idea in class and see how other people feel. Later, Sanfey et al. provide two processes for decision-making (as do Bechara et al. and DeMartino et al.): automatic processes and controlled processes. To my understanding, automatic processing, true to its name, is quick, or "fast and dirty" and can be compared to the low road in the brain system, while controlled processing, as it is flexible and can support many goals, resembles the high road. Included in the functions of controlled processing are introspection, reasoning, etc., and so it would be reasonable to fit emotions into this category rather than that of automatic processing. This model for the interaction between the two systems, at least to me, resembles that presented by Bechara et al., though I do not wish to simplify the complexities of each of the different models. So my question is simple: Have I gotten it all wrong?
I would really love to hear others voice in on the similarities and differences of all these models of multi-system processing proposed by the different authors we read.

Automatic and Controlling Systems

2008-04-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

Frances Clayton

Radio Lab - http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/28

This is a fascinating Radio Lab that talks about exactly what we have been looking at this week. The episode is called Morality and the link above should take you right to it. Not only do they talk to Dr. Joshua Greene and Franz da Waal (both discussed in the Whose Life Would You Save? article), but the look at morality in a play group of 3-year olds and at some of the roots of our early penitentiary system. Some of the examples we read about (the M.A.S.H. reference for example) are mentioned and taken a step further. It is cool to hear some of the folks we are reading about talk about their own work.

The Green and Haidt article looks at the differences in moral and non-moral decisions and in personal and impersonal experiences. In looking at brain area activation, Greene and Haidt align impersonal moral decisions more closely with other non-moral conditions than with personal moral choices. The main difference pointed to is the activation of social/emotional areas in personal moral decision-making. It seems then that impersonal moral decisions are not processed in the brain much differently than is other decision-making. The areas of the brain show in Table 1 in the Greene and Haidt article that are activated in impersonal moral judgment are also activated when doing other cognitive tasks.
These two different processes of decision-making can be looked at in light of automatic and controlled processing as described in the Neuroeconomics article. (112) Emotions are highly automatic (System 1) and contrast with the deliberative manner of controlled processing (System 2). It could also be said that the automatic process is inline with Kantian philosophy and controlled processing with Mill/utilitarian philosophy. (To be clear, I know that these systems are best seen on a continuum as stated in the Neuroeconomics article.) The field of economics is based on the idea that “behavior can be interpreted as choosing alternative with the goal of maximizing utility.” (108) which can be seen as part of controlled processing. It is the automatic/System 1 kinds of processes that the economic framework does not take into account.
It is the controlled system that people are using in both non-moral and impersonal moral decision-making. It seems that it is the “personal” aspect of the moral questioning that does not allow the control system to override the automatic. We do see a few people allowing the override – those few who are willing to push the man over the footbridge. The Neuroeconomics model clearly says that controlled/System 2/utilitarian processing “monitors the quality of the answer provided by System 1 and sometimes corrects and overrides these judgments.” (111)
The areas of the brain that light up with personal moral decisions and automatic processing, Green suspects are “part of a neural network that produces the emotional instinct behind many of our moral judgments.” (Zimmer, 4) There will be times that System 2 disagrees with the emotional intuitions of System 1 and at point in time the ACC acts as mediator – as the scales deciding if moral intuition or rationality overrides. The Ultimatum Game mentioned in both of articles I have mentioned looks at how this balance works much of the time – with the evolutionary instilled sense of fairness outweighing reason. *
According the “Whose Life Would You Save?”, it could be that evolution is not the only way the instincts of the automatic system are formed. Towards the end of the article Greene uses Haidt to aid his proposition that culture may also have significant influences on a persons sense of morality. “All human societies share certain moral universals, such as fairness and sympathy. But Green argues that different cultures produce different kinds of moral intuition and different kinds of brains.” (Zimmer, 5) This concept is taken even further and the suggestion is made that many of the great conflicts of humans may be rooted in brain circuitry.

* Could one not put up an argument that rationality is at the basis of this dominance of fairness – a way to prevent a person from setting him or herself up to be “taken advantage of”? How does time play into this? What may not be reasonable in the moment could be argued to be reasonable over time. If this is the case however, it seems to be the opposite side of the ‘hyperbolic time discounting’ coin? This question may not make much sense – simply mental ramblings on my part….

Moral Questions

2008-04-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Ardanowski

Feeling Brain

4-11-08

Whose life would you save? Those moral questions were always so impossible to answer. I can follow the logic of moral judgments occurring on a neuronal level, but I think Zimmer is a little confusing/misleading when he states “if right and wrong are nothing more than the instinctive firing of neurons, why bother being good?” (p.5). He then goes on to say, “by the time we become adults, we’re wired with emotional responses that guide our judgments for the rest of our lives” (p.5). This statement sounds like the pathways are a result of learned behavior. Maybe he was referring to the firing as instinctual, but saying “nothing more than” is confusing to me. It is more, a lot more, as he recognizes when he discusses genes, culture, and personal experience. Furthermore, it is possible to change these pathways. The firing may be instinctual, but the pathway isn’t.

While we may wish for the decision making process to be “understood in terms of unitary evaluative and decision making systems” (Sanfey et al, p.111) as the economic approach suggests, I think this is a tall order for the subjective, multifaceted human experience. I think science, and people in general, want a clear definitive answer, with clearly predictable and measurable results. Sanfey et al also speak to the “assumption of optimality” and desire for formal theory (p109). They question the possibility of a single system, noting how different systems can compete, causing different disposition toward the same information (p.111). The descriptions of System 1 (automatic) and System 2 (controlled) reminded me of Ledoux’s low road/high road comparison. It is amazing how much of our functioning is the combination of the unconscious/automatic and the conscious/cognitive. We have discussed this theme a lot. I think we often tend to minimize the intuitive System 1 in favor of the mighty System 2, because as a culture we devalue things we cannot measure. But haven’t we all had those times when we say, “I knew it, but I didn’t say it, do it…etc.” I think you can become more in tune with System 1 if you give it more value. It makes sense to me that “strategic interactions between individuals involves an interplay between emotion and deliberation” (p.113). It makes me think of the cartoon angel/devil on your shoulder.

Speaking of consciousness, the Bechara et al article states, “pure cognitive processes unassisted by emotional signals do not guarantee normal behavior in the face of adequate knowledge” (p.160). I think this is strong support for my value of System 1.

I remember learning about the Kohlberg moral reasoning scale last semester. We spoke a lot about how biased this scale was, and how it valued certain kinds of reasoning while not even considering others. So I am not convinced that it is a good measure of moral judgment. I thought it was really interesting that despite having preserved IQ and cognitive function, and abstract social knowledge, patients with prefrontal damage had “disastrous real life judgment” (Greene & Haidt p.518). The whole idea of emotions influencing moral judgment makes sense. It makes me wonder if there is “no specifically moral part of the brain” (Green & Haidt p.522) than is it possible to really be objective? When we give advice, are on a jury, work with children and families, can we ever truly be impartial? I don’t think so, even if we think we are.

I am also curious if antipsychotic drugs are targeting the areas discussed in the Green & Haidt article and would like to know if drug treatment can improve moral behavior.

Sort of answer to my own questions

2008-04-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

I looked back at chapt 8 of Ledoux and he does talk about repressed memories and the hippocampus. He mentions that the memory loss could be due to damage to the hippocampus because of the stress, which we discussed in class. But what about dissociative behavior or denial?Is what we term "consciousness" that subjective? One who dissociates from an experience or denies what we would call conscious facts-how can we explain this biologically.

2008-04-08T20:24:00.001-07:00

Frances Clayton

I too have lots of questions about repression! It does not seem so shocking that some memory can be buried way down below and emerge later on, but it is shocking when it comes to the kind of traumatic situations some people repress. Defense mechanisms are a powerful thing. (This is all assuming that you are not one of the decenters of belief in repressed memories.) It seems to me clear (and I think it is stated in this weeks readings althought I can’t put my finger on it) that Freudian unconscious is different from the unconscious we speak of here, yet there must be some simple overlap. Is it – oversimplified – that things in Freudian unconscious are less capable of being retrieved whereas unconscious in the readings for this week means two different things: first, it is talking about the state of alertness and secondly that they are not presently in working memory but that does not mean that they are buried in the Freudian sense?
I also understand that behavior can be caused by those things that a person is not conscious of (Tsuchiya and Adolphs, 165). Not only can the things we are not conscious of result in behaviors and “feelings”, we can also attribute feelings to what is currently in consciousness even when it is not the correct root of the feeling. This leaves lots and lots up in the air! Can we ever really know what is causing our feelings?
Another topic that came up a good bit for me is the awareness of or sense of self. I am not sure I totally understand what is meant by a sense of self. The Tsuchiya article cleared it up for a moment, saying that it was not a concept of ones own body but had more to do with awareness of that one is perceiving through ones own eye’s for example. However it then goes on to say to talk about the psychological idea of core self and how it is the basis for the autobiographical self and a sense of continuity. What does this say about people who deal with sensory integration issues? In regards to emotion is it that they loose a sense of self in sensory overload (for example) that they loose a sense of the continutity of emotional self as well?
In this same sense, we saw some brain images of a woman with dissociative identity disorder in one of my classes today. The brain scans were actually different for the different personalities. Is this to say that the same biological person, because they have different autobiographical selves, they also have differing emotional selves?

I found the Emotion and Consciousness article very straight forward in defining the different parts of emotion and consciousness.

I will also have to say that the Southern use of the word “state” ran through my head throughout these readings: “She was really in a state.” “Now don’t get yourself in a state.” ☺

Repression/Consciousness

2008-04-08T19:01:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Ardanowski

Feeling Brain

4-8-08

So now I feel like I need things redefined. Is consciousness just working memory? I guess you could define it this way, but what about things I may not be thinking about, but I can retrieve from long or short term memory-we only call them conscious when they enter working memory? We were reading about repressed traumatic memory in Jan’s pathology class and I was wondering how these memories can be “blocked” from a scientific perspective. I feel that when science talks about “unconscious” we are not talking about the Freudian/psychoanalytic unconscious per se. The article “Emotions and Consciousness” states, “..stimuli can, under certain experience, fail to lead to conscious experience, even though they can trigger emotional responses…..but can there be a failure to experience the emotional responses themselves? (Later)…Can emotion states that are not experienced at all still motivate behavior?” These questions in the framework of trauma, especially childhood trauma, are important. Trauma can influence behavior, even if not consciously, and even if emotional responses were not experienced. I can see how LeDoux’s fear response, the blinding studies, and the subliminal studies are unconscious processes that may or may not become conscious, but what about conscious turned unconscious? Are the same systems, pathways, brain regions involved? How do our defenses turn conscious into unconscious? What about dissociation, and as I mentioned, repression? How does this happen? Do they become blocked from working memory? Ochner and Gross added the term “mood” to the mix of our terminology. I thought it was interesting that they defined emotions as distinct from moods because emotions have “identifiable objects or triggers.” More food for thought.

2008-04-06T22:35:00.001-07:00

4/6/08

Mikal Shapiro

According to Ochsner and Gross, one of the ways researchers have investigated emotion control is through “behavior regulation,” such as the restriction of physical expression; a method that ultimately excites SNS activity, hinders memory and, in the end, doesn’t really change how happy or crappy one feels (p. 243). This makes sense given our LeDoux readings: If emotions are, in large part, interoceptive, suppression of expression may only mask external systems without addressing the internal ones. Because this masking further activates the nervous systems, behavior regulation may cause more aggravation in the long run and may even promote dysfunctional personality traits such as passive-aggressiveness (I haven’t researched this. It’s just my own folk theory based on personal bad experience). Research also validates that feelings can occur even if the ability to express them behaviorally is limited by lesions, locked-in syndrome, paralysis, etc. (Tsuchiya and Adolphs, p. 163).

Cognitive models suggest more beneficial emotion regulation through “attentional control” and “cognitive change.” By reconditioning the subjects’ expectations of natural and conditioned pain stimuli, research shows the mind can more globally control emotion states than a body-mind-emotion approach. This mind-over-matter method stems from a conscious “reappraisal” of negative memories--the ability to redefine how we feel about provocative personal experience. Through a cognitive approach, we can “neutralize” bad memories without eradicating them: In a sense, forgive them but not forget them (Oschner and Gross, pp. 243-245).

I believe this kind of hindsight is an extremely important intellectual function. It offers us keener options with future decision-making by giving us vital information about the formation and also the internal negotiation of negative experiences. Research shows emotion affects our decisions (Dolan, p. 1194). More emotional-processing options means better decision making and more conscious creation of our lives. We could learn to harness our emotional flow. I’d like to think LeDoux is right when he concludes, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if we did understand where our emotions were taking us from moment to moment, day to day, and year to year, and why?” (p. 303). I’d like to know. Wouldn’t you? Or do you think life would lose some of its remarkable mystery if we understood our emotional ticks? Would the choice of whether or not to relinquish ourselves to the push-pull of moods create a flat line of emotional experience or would the choice result in, as LeDoux writes, “a more harmonious integration of reason and passion.” I don’t know but harmony sounds good. I’ll vote for that.

Although we don’t need to be conscious of our emotions to experience them, the fact that we can be is made possible through the overlapping of emotion and consciousness-generating brain systems (Tsuchiya and Adolphs, p. 160). Though this “clarity” is not very conducive to quick-and-dirty survival conditions (LeDoux), it is necessary for long-term planning. LeDoux writes about the growing reciprocity of amygdala-cortex connections in higher primates and I ponder (with a nod to Tsuchiya and Adolphs’ recommendation for the collaboration of “neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers” [my italics] p. 158) whether the scientific investigation of emotions could strengthen the amygdala-cortex reciprocity by helping us become more aware of our interoceptive natures. Are we planning our own emotional evolution?

The Godly Amygdala

2008-04-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

[Isn’t it amazing, now to read about the brain and have a visual image of what it is we are talking about?!]
We have arrived at our concluding chapter of Le Doux and much was learned until this point and much is still open to discussion. I wonder if we will ever know for certain and how helpful it may be in our advancement and aid us at selfcontrol?
Le Doux has now turned our attention to the feeling of the emotion, and by doing so has come a full circle from where he began. He is zooming in on the picture of emotions with feelings in the foreground. He emphasizes with his ‘simple idea’ that we need to understand conscious experiences in order to grasp what and where subjective emotions arise, and vice versa. I think this is crucial in understanding the theory he builds upon this base, in which working memory becomes more than just a short momentary memory system, but rather is a storage system and an active processing mechanism necessary in conscious thought. Stephan Kosslyn adds: ‘also the interplay between information that is stored temporarily and a larger body of stored knowledge’ is part of the ways in which the working memory intertwines information, like a puzzle maker. Is this not one of the most fundamental points of being a conscious human being; having the ability to place immediate received information into the idea of what the world should be or is like? Take the idea of the snake, if we have fear because we know by some previous knowledge that this animal might harm us we will be frightened at its sight. But what when the snake is just a log and we are convinced it is a snake, is our fear response not as valid or real to the feeler same as if the stimulus would be a real snake? What is it that makes our emotional body correspond with reality, and where does our mind play tricks on our emotional body?
Another interesting point is the idea that different buffers (=potential inputs in working memory) which are combined with long term memory, seem to me to be the reasoning to why people react and differ emotionally in the same experience. It is akin to the idea that two people can walk down the same road and ‘pick up’ completely different reflections. This, in the emotional world, would be due to the fact that the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulated are both part of the frontal lobe attention network: ‘a cognitive system involved in selective attention, mental resource allocation, decision making, and voluntary movement control.’ The connection between the outside input world and the interior emotional processing amygdala, is what enables us to be conscious of an experienced event; as I understand it, the mental self needs to be a conscious agent of the event for the emotion to affect us feelingly. Can an unconscious emotion occur? Or do we need consciousness to have an emotional experience as we have named the process of feeling? What about animals such as fish, can they have emotions that they are not conscious of, or are they aware of the feeling but it cannot be compared to an experience as such?
The idea that some part of consciousness remains inaccessible to us is overwhelmingly complex. If some of the subsymbolic processing remains unintelligible to us as the conscious agents, it must be concluded that there probably is no possibility of full awareness and this is our curse and our blessing. It is what most perplexes and frustrates us in trying to understand the phenomena of our mind, but it also would be very exasperating if every time we wanted to take a step, we would be aware of the dialogue between the muscles and brain. Hence my title, it seems like the amygdala’s activation and projection is what makes it possible for the forebrain to react to arousal. And as said the prolonged arousal is an indicator to emotional stimuli and has probably to do with the involvement of the amygdala. What I wonder is what agent if not our conscious decides upon a ‘meaningful’ stimuli, and when arousal must or mustn’t occur? By Le Doux’s theory the body is the ‘feedback’ to the amygdala and not the other way around as has also been argued. The body responds by visceral and behavioral expression giving feedback to the brain as emotional agent. However let’s remember, Le Doux is ‘placing his bets’ in favor of the bodies feeling in reacting to emotions. Much more will need to be solved in the future and I think evolutions will decide when best to let us in on its grand plan.

Amina Sariahmed 4-9-08

2008-04-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

In the chapter entitled "Once more, with feelings" Ledoux wraps up his arguments and leaves us with some interesting food for thought.
When he discusses amygdala triggered arousal he brings up dream sleep. He notes that "during sleep the cortex is in the unaroused state"(1996, 285). This makes seems rather intuitive but perhaps this is because "the brain does it so effortlessly" (1996, 284). But this also seems apparent if we consider the experiences of having very frightening nightmares or very pleasant dreams. In each case the arousal causes our body to react to these emotions we face during dream sleep. I wonder if it is the intensity of the emotional content of a dream or a nightmare that can sometimes wake us out of deep sleep and feel quite unsettled, whether that be a pleasurable or distressing kind of arousal.
Another interesting assertion Ledoux makes is that "Arousal helps lock you into the emotional state you are in" (1996, 289). He explains that "this can be very useful (you don't want to get distracted when you are in danger) but can also be an annoyance (once the fear system is turned on, it's hard to turn it off-- this is the nature of anxiety" (1996, 289) This is another point that might seem obvious but I wonder if this state is something that causes us to procrastinate and allows us to continue to do so. I suppose I can only speak of my own conscious experiences and perhaps some of you can relate, but really I could just be imagining it all as a result of "the problem of other minds" (1996, 300). I'm glad Ledoux brings this up because it's another great point to ponder.
We can also talk about Ledoux's exploration of the question regarding animal consciousness. (1996, 300). This is a very important issue in relation to experimentation on animal subjects and whether or not they 'suffer' as a result of some kinds of experimentation.
The last thing I would like to discuss is the following statement Ledoux makes: "...feelings will be different in a brain that can classify the world linguistically and categorize experiences in words than in a brain than cannot" (1996, 302). I'm not sure I agree with this statement;will fear in a chimp be different than fear in a human just because I can say "I'm scared" but the chimp can't? What do you guys think?

"Harmonious Integration of Reason and Passion"

2008-04-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

This week we read LeDoux’s final thoughts about the role of consciousness in emotion and emotional regulation. LeDoux examines the possibility that as we evolve cortical structures will continue to have greater control over the amygdala or the “low road” processes. However, LeDoux expects it is more probable that we will develop a “more harmonious integration of reason and passion.” This leads into the three other readings which examine ideas about cognitive-emotional connectivity and the role of consciousness.
I thought that Dolan’s work really continued with LeDoux’s train of thought. Both Dolan and LeDoux emphasize how emotion is unique as a feeling that can take control over the other systems and influence cognition, perception, memory, etc. Dolan describes emotion as “less encapsulated than other psychological states.” Yet rather than “encapsulate” emotions through more cortical control it might make more sense to just have improved communications between the cortex and the emotional processes.
I was really interested in the study that showed a correlation between index of visceral awareness and “better predictive judgments” in shock trials. We know that predictability is one way to prevent stress. In contrast, disorganization or unpredictability can cause the stress system to go into high alert. Thus it makes sense that from bodily awareness and predictive judgment one might experience less stress from arousal. This is a great example of how a more successful emotional system is not constituted of merely more cortical control, but more fluid interaction between consciousness and the body. Dolan also examines how damage to the PFC leads to personally disadvantageous choices. This also indicates how integration between cognitive and emotional processes is important.
In ch. 8 LeDoux described how it is possible that psychoanalytic therapy works through emphasis of cortical control over the amygdala. After reading ch. 9 I see why LeDoux seemed a bit wary of this process. I remember early on LeDoux cited MacLean’s idea that psychotherapy should begin with the therapist relating the patient’s visceral brain (p. 97). I think this makes a very powerful case for Dance Movement and Arts therapies. Rather than privilege language or cortical dominance, these therapies focus on visceral and bodily awareness as a means to address the connection between emotion and consciousness.
LeDoux addresses the PFC as newer, recently evolved structure. This look at the evolution of the brain made me think of Bruce Perry’s lecture last week and where we are headed as a society. Perry discussed the transformation of our modern society into a less relational and interactive world where emotional development is neglected and not highly valued. Perry views emotional development as the foundation for cognitive or abstract thinking. Without that foundation we cannot really develop higher cortical functions, not to mention a more evolved interaction between cortex and emotion. In addition, early emotional trauma predicts comorbidities. How does this shift away from the natural world shape the development of the brain, making us unhealthy and unable to respond to stress and trauma? Are we moving in the direction LeDoux predicted?

Memory and Emotion 3/9/08

2008-03-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

Kaila McIntyre-Bader

“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built…If we remembered everything, we should, on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking” –William James (McGaugh, p126).

While there were many detailed descriptions of tiny events happening on a hormonal/chemical level, this week’s readings made me question a lot of bigger picture moral and ethical issues. It’s interesting that most of McGaugh’s friends and neighbors said they would take and/or give a memory-enhancing drug to their children with little hesitation. I wonder if the reaction and answer would be the same if that question were extended to a different social circle, or better yet a completely different culture or society. The fictitious character Funes the Memorious “remembered not only every lead of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. [Funes was]… let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort…I suspect that he was not very capable of thought”(p126). The mnemonists S and V.P. both had an incredibly hard time in normal daily life even though they could remember street maps and strings of digits. The human brain has evolved and adapted to make us more fit for survival, and being able to retain every bit of information ever learned is hardly helpful.

But retaining the detailed events of a traumatic experience can be. There are systems in our brains that help us to avoid harmful situations and ensure the passing on of genetic information. It was interesting to read that the brain is designed to allow influences after learning, and that there is an important distinction between learning and performance. The strychnine-saline experiments with the rats showed that administering a stimulant before training and short after training were different things entirely. The first may enhance performance, but the latter enhances memory.

In Chapter 5, McGaugh comments on “flashbulb memories” and the “rehearsing” of memories. I was grateful for the presentation in class on Wednesday because I felt I had a much better understanding of the concepts he was presenting. It was interesting to read about the distinction between the significance of rehearsing and the lack of importance it has on actually creating a flashbulb memory (p91). I also found myself wondering why the idea of emotional arousal affecting memory was being mentioned as a surprising discovery. Maybe I was reading into it too much or reading it incorrectly, but that seems so obvious to me. Memory is a survival tool, and it makes a lot of sense that we would remember things that affect us personally and strongly on an emotional level better than things that do not. The idea of rehearsing a memory is intriguing to me as well. We talked about it a bit in class, but when I read McGaugh’s example of the 1989 earthquake in California, it reminded me of my own experience (p88). I have an extremely vivid memory of that day, yet I would have only been two years old at the time. I can picture the scene in my head and recall the conversation my mother had with my neighbor across the fence while holding me in her arms and waiting to see if there would be an aftershock. But do I really remember that? How much of that is fabricated? (I love how LeDoux assures the reader on page 245 that fabrication is not the same as lying, it is merely remembering falsely). Do I have that memory because my mother has repeated the story to me so many times? Was it traumatic enough for me to hold on to that moment all the way up until now? McGaugh refers to “memory as a creative act” (p116), but I’m pretty sure the jury in a courtroom wouldn’t want to hear that. As I was reading LeDoux’s take on false memories, I found myself uncomfortable because of the ethical implications. It’s interesting to question if the hippocampus is damaged, can victims recall traumatic experiences later on that they had once forgotten? What if the hippocampus shut down all together? I worry about what happens to the victim that cannot recall the traumatic memory for a while and then having it re-surface, especially in a court of law. What if a sexual abuse victim doesn’t recall the memory until later? Will anyone believe him/her? If someone can take a therapist to court for implanting false memories in their head of cults and sexual abuse, will the court then believe the next case based purely on memory? How do we ever know which of these memories are fabricated and which are “real.”

McGaugh goes on to write about “phenomenal memory ability found in autistic children and adults” (p131). I can recall a camper I had at a day camp one summer who could tell me the day of my birthday in any given year, in the near future or years and years away. This and LeDoux’s discussion of disorders and illnesses made me think about the way our society defines a “mental disorder.” Now these autistic children and adults are decidedly “sick,” whereas in another time and place they may have been considered shamans and prophets.

I also found Box 1 on page 3 of LaBar and Cabeza’s article thought provoking. The box says that only 5% of males and 10% of women will suffer from PTSD. Does this mean that women are predisposed to PTSD? Or are more frequently victims of traumatic experiences? Or just more reported? Is this a genetic difference, or a social/cultural one?

I read so much and feel like my brain is about to explode (oh man, maybe a panic attack coming on…? Har har har) and I feel like I could keep writing incoherent strings of reflection and commentary forever, so I’ll end with this last thought. How crazy is the influence of music!? “In these experiments, sad music heard while standing at the bottom of a steep hill led participants to overestimate the incline of the hill. The overestimations were similar to those made by participants wearing a heavy backpack.” (Clore, Huntsinger). It’s amazing that different sounds and frequencies can manipulate our emotions to such an extent.

Memory, Panic, and Conditioned Fear Responses

2008-03-09T21:35:00.001-07:00

Tessa Noonan
3/9/08

I really liked the way that both McGaugh and LeDoux described the process of memory and its heavily emotional mechanisms. McGaugh says “we must acknowledge that remembering is a creative act that accesses and uses much more than, as well as much less than, the information originally stored” (p. 118). Although this seems a little confusing and contradictory, I think McGaugh’s point follows the integrative and thus often unreliable aspects of memory production and recall that factor into the way we remember a particular event.
Of course, this becomes particularly relevant in studies and cases that both authors cited in which adults are made to relive false past experiences of child abuse, for example, the memories of which have been “repressed.” I was interested in the diverging ways McGaugh and LeDoux describe this phenomenon, and the entire Freudian conception of repression in itself. McGaugh comes down very hard on this idea, stating that there is absolutely no scientific basis for “repression” in any form, and that emotionally significant memories cannot just be recovered from this phase. LeDoux, on the other hand, grants this theory scientific validity on the grounds of “hypermesia” (p. 245). Is there a way to isolate these differences into a coherent frame of reference, or is there too little known about this phenomenon to concretely know whether or not repression can take place?

On another note, I thought LeDoux’s description of phobias and anxiety in the form of fear conditioning was extremely helpful in understanding both memory processes and fear conditioning that LeDoux primarily studies. This synthesis proved very useful in describing and beginning to understand panic attacks, phobias, and disorders such as PTSD. Particularly interesting to me was the inherent connection that we’ve seen countless times between the Schacter and Singer findings of interpretive evaluation and the fear reaction that becomes conditioned via bodily response. As in Wolpe’s conditioning theory of panic, the primarily stimulus reaction takes place on an internal level, which is then attributed to an external stimuli that becomes the conditioned fear stimuli. Combining our analysis of the amygdala from last week, and the emotionally salient and indiscriminate response from the “low road” through the amygdala, it is quite easy (and fascinating) to see how someone experiencing PTSD symptoms might mistake a slamming door for a gunshot, just like someone else might mistake a tree branch for a snake.

Anxiety

2008-03-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

Katie Moeller

I found this week’s chapter from LeDoux to be perhaps one of the most interesting we have read so far. Part of this could be because I feel that the further into the book (and into our class discussions) that I get, the better able I am to place LeDoux’s ideas within the context of the other readings about emotions that we’re doing. As his point becomes clearer with more and more evidence and support, so too am I clearer on how his work on the fear system both feeds into and is fed by discussions of other concepts concerning emotions.

In addition to those factors, I was also really intrigued by Chapter 8 because it is primarily focused on anxiety, a topic in which I have both academic and personal interest. One of my conference papers last semester looked at the role of anxiety in our first years of life as primarily adaptive, and one of the ways that we all learn to predict and navigate the many “dangers” of the world. While I was working primarily within a psychoanalytic framework, much of what I learned through my project correlates with LeDoux’s assessment of anxiety as a type of fear, often unresolved and related to an internal rather than an external stimulus. I was happy to see that LeDoux clarifies that anxiety in and of itself is not pathological, because while people see to have an easy time excusing their own fear reactions or the fear reactions of others (perhaps because it is easier to locate a “cause”), it seems that the very fact of anxiety makes many people anxious and uncomfortable.

I was particularly struck by Miller’s experiments, which LeDoux describes on page 233. After a phase of basic fear conditioning in which a buzzer signified a shock, rats learned to jump over a hurdle, in order to avoid the shock. Thus, the rats jumped the hurdle at every buzzer, even if the shock was turned off. While originally the rats jumping the hurdle would shut off the buzzer, Miller then left the buzzer on until the rats learned to press a lever. He then stopped the lever from controlling the buzzer, and chose something else. The rats were able to learn these new responses in succession, even though the original shock was never again administered with the buzzer. What Miller felt this illustrated, and what I found fascinating, was the incredible strength of fear as a motivator, and the lengths that living creatures will go to in order to avoid the recurrence of a painful or uncomfortable situation. This illustration seemed to me to be very indicative of how anxiety works, and the way in which, as a self-protective measure, our fear of one situation can lead us to avoid not only that particular scenario, but also other scenarios that we associate with the original scenario, because of some intermediate trigger which may have been completely unrelated to our original discomfort.

Another element of LeDoux’s examination of anxiety that I was very interested in was the role the amygdala plays in laying down unconscious memories of a traumatic learning situation. Because the amygdala has been described as the “quick and dirty” route for processing emotions - producing coarser, less specific assessments than the cortical regions - it makes sense that in certain types of anxious responses there is not as clear a picture of the cause of the response. LeDoux writes, “The subcortical pathway, not being very capable of making fine distinctions, may produce learning that more freely spreads to other stimuli,” (p. 255).

As a person who has dealt with some recurrent anxiety in my life, I can confirm that from an insider perspective, this is what anxiety feels like; it feels like it is coarse, unpredictable, and widely generalized. While there are specific situations in which I can expect to feel a certain level of anxiety (with all its lovely features - butterflies in my stomach, blushing, shakiness, etc.), there are also at times these total curveball situations in which I feel myself having the anxious reactions before I am even aware of why I am anxious. When I do finally get the chance to cognitively assess the response, I am often a bit perplexed about what exactly triggered my anxiety at that time, and whether or not I can then expect to react in a similar way the next time I face that situation again.

LeDoux points out that in trying to determine the origin of an anxious response there is added complexity because as a result of stress levels and chemicals associated with increased stress, a conscious memory of the traumatic learning experience is not always stored. Nevertheless, because the amygdala is still hard at work even despite stress (and maybe working harder, for that matter), it is possible to form and store “very powerful, implicit, unconscious emotional memories” (p. 245) that can stay with us and affect our behavior without our knowledge of why. Especially interesting to me, in light of my presentation with Molly last week on flashbulb memory, is the fact that while the intensity of our anxious and phobic responses do seem influenced by the level of personal meaning associated with the triggering object or stimulus, this does not necessarily guarantee that our memory of the original learning condition is vivid, let alone accessible.

Memory

2008-03-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

Kevin Goldstein

This week’s readings represent a treasure-trove of fascinating tidbits on affect and memory—especially regarding the question of the durability of memory—which I am still trying to bring together into a cohesive whole. In lieu of a grand narrative, then, perhaps an examination of the tidbits is in order.

LeDoux makes a profoundly intriguing point: in highly stressful situations, adrenal steroids can act upon the hippocampus in such a way as to impair explicit conscious memory. In contrast, such situations either have a neutral influence or actually enhance the operations of the amygdala. The latter would seem to make perfect sense in the creation of lasting fear-conditioned responses; in short, the longevity of implicit memory. Meanwhile, LeDoux examines the way in which fear-conditioning can imperfectly shapes responses—anxiety disorders such as phobias represent instances in which the fear-response is in great excess of the real threat posed by the stimuli. The fear system breaks loose from cortical controls.

At the same time, McGaugh writes in his “Meandering and Monumental Memory” chapter of traumatic events and their relationship to later stimuli-response scenarios. In extreme cases, a black hole around a traumatic memory ensues in which stimuli unrelated to the prime traumatic stimulus become associated with it. The stereotypical example is that of the Vietnam veteran driven into a terrific fright seemingly by the slightest occurrence, literally replaying a traumatic memory or memories. Like LeDoux, McGaugh outlines instances in which a highly stressful situation leaves an indelible mark on the experiencing subject. I was rather struck by the discourse on drugs as memory enhancers or inhibitors, paralleling our discussion in class concerning the latter’s potential use with soldiers immediately after traumatic experiences (though perhaps more preventative measures are in order there!)

Another parallel with our discussion in class relates to so-called flashbulb memories, or the relationship between affect and long-term memory. Significant public events are indeed remembered over time; herein consequentiality and emotional response are fundamental to such durability. Nevertheless, very often memories meander, and thus make evident the constructive nature of memory. All memories are reconstructions in that they involves the interaction of many parts of the brain, but nonetheless remembering can often walk a fine line between reconstruction and creative necessity, where a specific event, such as a robbery, for example, is blended with similar past experiences and a generic notion of what a robbery entails. As Bartlett argues, coherence can often supersede accuracy.

(Warning: some pseudo-philosophical meandering follows) What is accuracy, or objective memory then but an abstract, a perennial hypothetical? Memory is the interrelationship between perception and events in time and space. To the extent that no subject perceives with disinterest, then no event exists independent of those who perceive and thus construct it. This brings us back to the Clore-Huntsinger article and the “affect-as-information” hypothesis. Cognitive processes are interwoven with the affective information which underlies them, once more contesting the emotion-reason dichotomy.

Seahorses and Almonds

2008-03-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

Molly McDonough
3.9.2008

I thought a lot about what Aidan said last class about why flashbulb memories aren’t present in situations of happiness, or surprises of joy. I’m not even sure these readings explain the answer. The only solution I could come up with is that happiness is something universally understood, people make us happy, music makes us happy and for whatever reason happiness is communal. It is very easy to say, I am happy because of… and therefore I think happiness lives in the moment.
Stress and sadness on the other hand are indicative to the person. Sadness during a certain event can be based on a history of sadness linked to something/someone in the past, or related circumstances to something more personal. And when I look bad I remember more of the times I’ve cried over things, than the times I have laughed. That is sad. But I was talking to Kaila and I think we agreed it could go the opposite way as well.
The chapter in LeDoux focuses on the effects of anxiety and how anxiety, stress, and fear play a role in the making of memories. I was struck by the concept of fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli. Snakes are still a more effective stimulus for fear, even more so than guns and knives. What?? How many people have even come across a snake? A gun or a knife? This is disturbing, we have not evolved to fear these tools of destruction when they are much more available in our society than snakes. Maybe media is the anti-anxiety drug we have been taking to eliminate our stresses, and the more we see the less we fear.
Chapter 4 of McGaugh begins with the question of whether or not people would give their children memory enhancements if they didn’t have a learning disability. I don’t know. Isn’t having a good memory a part of our personality? Should everyone have a good memory? What are all these things we need to remember so readily? I’m not sure people would get along as well as they do if we remembered everything we told one another. McGaugh leads into FBM as well, mentioning Brown and Kulik. He went over the categories in the descriptions and the details of what makes a FBM different. FBM is all about the details, even though our reaction to a tragedy is described as “emotions evoked,” is it even about our emotions or the reaction to the emotions of others?

"Promiscuous Amygdala”

2008-03-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

Molly Moody

The amygdala gets around. McGaugh’s interpretation of memory consolidation existing among a network of brain locales is not surprising. Similar to our previous discussion on the adaptation of emotions stemming from different areas of the brain; memory also seems to originate in a series of steps from a number of locations. The amygdala influences memory consolidation for any kind of information by temporarily influencing other brain regions; the ultimate bachelor. I found LaBar’s paper a little overwhelming, but it was interesting to watch him converge with our study of Pavlov and LeDoux’s fear conditioning. He was quick to point out that the amygdala plays an important role in encoding, consolidating, and reconsolidating retrieved memories. The amygdala’s link with memory even makes its way into my dreams as McGaugh suggests it may play an important role in memory consolidation through sleeping and dreaming. I always attributed my ability to recite lines for the school play only after a night’s sleep sheer luck, but the dream theory is certainly a more provable one. I must wonder, couldn’t memory recall post sleep be attributed to greater vigor and less fatigue thus better recall rather than the repetition exhibited by dreams?
LaBar makes an interesting point in explaining that emotion in memory “facilitates consolidation processes, which take time to emerge” (55). After reading this I was somewhat confused over which process has a greater impact upon memory: repetition, time, or arousal? After completing all of the readings, however, I believe they focus most prominently on arousal’s and its relationship with time, rather than one extreme over the other. McGaugh mentions the stress hormone, epinephrine, acting as a stimulant drug that alters memory consolidation in his rat/foot shock experiment (p98). This idea is backed up with LaBar’s mention of emotion benefiting memory “particularly after sever or prolonged stress” (p54).
Clore’s paper was a very interesting continuation on the discussion of fabricated memories from last week’s post. His paper suggests emotions affect problem-solving, stereotypes, and persuasion; this is most certainly frightening when taken into consideration the emphasis we put on separating the rational from the emotional.

Another thought

2008-03-04T19:18:00.001-08:00

Perhaps it is that memories that are more attached to emotions consolidate and/or reconsolidate differently than motor/procedural memories?

Time and Consolidation

2008-03-04T19:13:00.000-08:00

Suzanne Ardanowski

3-4-08

Feeling Brain

I am writing my research paper on memory, which I was just working on all day. I need some sleep so that my learned memories can fully consolidate and enhance! To pull off of some ideas in my paper and in the reading, I am thinking more about consolidation and reconsolidation. McGaugh says that consolidation is evolutionary and occurs over time. The issue of how much time seems to be dependent on what type of memory is being consolidated. In some of the amnesia cases, (McGaugh) a woman lost recollection of her second language following a stroke, HM lost a few years before his surgery, people lost remembrances of changes done to their house prior to a brain injury. Is it the type of memory that takes longer to consolidate and this is why it is lost or is it the way in which the brain is damaged, or both? Are certain memories thought to now take years to truly fully consolidate or does it just appear that way but in fact they are lost because of the way the damage occurred and not necessarily because they were not consolidated? I think it is interesting how evolution, nature, God, universe-whatever the case may be-seems to have the implicit procedural/motor skills as more resilient to amnesia than episodic, explicit memories. Is this a fair observation? I also like the associative memory network for fear on page 213 in Ledoux. I think you can even expand on this by adding a whole unconscious level as well.

Time and Consolidation

2008-03-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

emotional memory

2008-03-03T16:54:00.000-08:00

Endira Ferrara

The most interesting discussion in the readings for this week I found to be the investigation behind why we tend to remember emotionally arousing experiences more accurately than those experiences considered to be neutral. The researchers behind the experiment conducted in the article "Remembering one year later" conclude that recognition is greater for the emotional (both pleasurable and displeasurable) pictures shown to the participants. As a result, they reveal that the amygdala is more engaged during the retrieval of events during which emotion is aroused.

While some might say that the memory system is developed to retain the events of relevance to the survival of the human being, it is clear in any case that events producing extreme emotion are more easily remembered. Does this mean, therefore, that they are more easily consolidated, or more easily triggered in the process of recollection? The researchers of the study conclude that emotion enhances recollection, due to the fact that in the process of recollection, one undergoes a form of re-experience of the situation, and therefore assists in the memory of context and the details of situations. Additionally, in the process of retrieving the memory, one may experience similar feelings to those experienced during the actual event.

The discussion between recollection and familiarity in this article also provided an interesting distinction between the memory of an event accompanied by contextual information (time, location, sensation, etc.) and merely the feeling that the event happened in the past, without the ability to contextualize it. We've discussed the importance of context specifically in the expression of emotion, and it is interesting to see the correlation between the necessity of context for the sake of not only expression but also memory storage. Without the ability to recall the entire situation of an experience, it becomes impossible to place within the autobiographical timeline of one's life.

I enjoyed the chapters in "Emotion and Memory" because I was able to see how the study of emotion and memory in a sense parallel one another. Even though two distinct forms of memory have been termed - short-term and long-term - it is clear that a number of systems in the brain are involved in the creation and expression of memory, just as is emotion. The distinction exists between memories established on the basis of condition, for example skills learned through continuous practice and repetition that often out necessity become habit, and those traumatic, highly aroused experiences that often take years to consolidate. They both reflect different forms, I believe of long-term memory. One requires the notion of repetition as an imperative process towards the consolidation of the experience so that it becomes conditional, and the other may be one single event of particular significance that gave rise to an extreme emotional response. McGaugh says that our response to each and ever new event depends upon what we expect or predict our response to be, based almost entirely on our memories of past events. In this sense, much of our emotional response to situations results from individual experience in the world. Does this mean, therefore, that much of the process of memory storage and consolidation is specific to the individual? It may be that the way in which we organize experience - that is, in terms of a past, present, and future - is common to us all, but our response to new experiences is dependent upon past experience, which is in essence not the exact experience itself, but the way in which we remember it.

In these two readings specifically, I couldn't help but think of Freud and his discussion of recollection and repetition. In his first chapter, McGaugh alludes to the notion of repetition as an imperative process towards the consolidation of experience. At the same time, Freud advocated repetition for the sake of remembering and making sense of past experience, and thus bringing what lies in the unconscious to the realm of consciousness. The idea that traumatic experience is only brought fully into the conscious (and is contexualized as an event in the timeline of one's life) through a repetition of that experience, or in other words, is only overcome through the re-experiencing of the emotional arousal accompanying the situation, is interesting to examine in light of the fact that we tend to remember the events that were the cause of an enhanced emotion. Particularly in terms of the 'flashbulb' memories, or the most traumatic experiences, it is true that at times these are the memories that are suppressed rather than remembered. In this case, only the feeling and experience is remembered, but not the situation and context. It may be that what is constant in one's memory of an event is the emotion; after significant amount of time has passed, the emotions of the experience remain; even if the context is not remembered, the feeling that such an event happened remains, and if the context is remembered, the feeling accompanies it. The fact that one is able to access a large amount of contextual detail of a situation through a re-experience of the particular emotion felt in that situation may support this idea.

Reaction, Memory : Personality, Emotion

2008-03-03T00:43:00.000-08:00

Molly Esp
Biology/Psychology: The Feeling Brain
2 March 2008

This week's readings shared a similar theme with last week in the reiteration that memories are inextricably tied to emotion. This idea is proven through the two case studies in which individuals are shown images as their brain activity is monitored, looking to find a concentration of activity in certain areas, in the hopes of revealing emotional or cognitive thought.

Reminding me of last week's discussion of various forms of amnesia, McGaugh explains that memory is "without doubt, our most important possession, our most critical capacity. We are, after all, our memories. It is our memory that enables us to value everything else we possess. Lacking memory, we would have no ability to be concerned about our hearts, hair, lungs, libido, loved ones, enemies, achievements, falures, incomes or income taxes. Our memory provides us with an autobiographical record and enables us to understand and react appropriately to changing experiences" (2). I found this point to be very relevant to the reoccuring theme of defining emotion and determining what is or is not an emotion. From this, it can be concluded that emotion is a reaction influenced by one's memory. Without his or her "autobiographical record," one would assumably react differently to certain stimuli. However, can it be said that one would in turn exhibit a different emotion or degree of emotion? Does studying amnesia allow us to answer this question?

As for the biological aspects of the readings, I find LeDoux's method of explanation to be the easiest to understand and digest, perhaps because there is often a visual to accompany the words. Page 164's figure 6-13 clarified the process in a way that the language of the other readings made confusing. The diagrams on page 190 (figure 7.2) also worked to make the biology less abstract by illuminating the locations of the amygdala and hippocampus. For me, it is very difficult to understand these very real aspects of human biology without an image. Maybe this need for pictoral support in order to understand and internalize further supports memory and the power of images?

Emotional Memory

2008-03-02T21:09:00.000-08:00

Amy Fleischer
Blog: Emotional Memory
March 2, 2008

It seems like an important rule for this week’s readings is that change is the only constant. While emphasizing the integrative functions of different types of memory, we’ve learned about how we reconstruct our memories of the past by recalling them in the present. By use of our imaginations, we are constantly making our worlds through a complex interplay of memory and emotion. Since there are so many ways in which we re-make or create via memory, a thorough investigation the variety of processes is in order.

Part of our readings reviewed material we discussed in class last week. I found the repetition to be helpful, so what follows is another attempt to summarize:

In Memory and Emotion, McGaugh distinguishes between short-term (working) memory and long-term (lasting) memory. The former contains our most recent experiences, while the latter involves explicit recall of specific events (episodic) or factual knowledge (semantic) (10). He goes on to explain that there are, in fact, many different forms of memory as a result of integrated functioning between the hippocampus, caudate nucleus, and amygdala (28 fig3).

One of McGaugh’s softer points on the function of emotion regards how we use it to make meaning (2). Continuing last week’s discussion of narrative, the study of memory is important to scientists as well as historians for obvious reasons. A major debate existing in the field of oral history, in particular, is how much “honesty” counts when an altered memory could speak more for the truth. That is, with greater attention to context, narrated events may tell more about the meaning of historical events (be they individual/autobiographical or public) than would dry recollections of facts. The creative components of memory lend artistic impulses to research methods in history and science, as well as many other disciplines.

Of course, McGaugh and LeDoux and many others still insist on the value of objective analysis in the study of memory (McGaugh 7); but if researchers are too adamant about achieving objectivity, they may miss out on some important points. McGaugh’s critique of Pavlov’s experiments as being flat-out wrong was surprising to me… although his study was extremely important to behavioral studies, his inferences about conditioning as mere habit formation is misleading. In reading LeDoux as well, I was interested to learn about the historical abhorrence to psychological explanations of animal behavior (147). Hopefully, this denial of subjective emotional states in animals is now being checked. (Do you think that it is in the studies we have reviewed?)

I got kind of lost, in Chapter 7 of The Emotional Brain, where LeDoux describes the relationship between the hippocampus and the amygdala. I understand that explicit memories of emotional experiences (which are declarative or conscious) occur via the hippocampus and implicit emotional memories (which are procedural or skill-based) occur via the amygdala- but there still must be connections among them (181). Could it be that memories are all made of the same “stuff” but that this “stuff” functions differently in different regions of the brain? Depending also on various experiences?

By trying to remember an event with respect to time, it might be easier to compare how the two additional studies that we read examine the role of emotional memory. The Sharot, et al. article refers to earlier stages of memory formation in order to learn how memories are made, while Dolcos et al. looks more to the current situation in order to examine how memories are re-constituted over time. In both studies, mapping the consolidation of memory can provide valuable insights into the learning process.

Meanwhile, several of our readings referred to the experience of “memory without remembering” (McGaugh 46). The most classic example is in the case of H.M., but who among us can attest to a type of deja-vu experience, wherein something triggers the sense that we are re-experiencing a past event? Perhaps this is an exaggerated example of the way emotion affects the experience of “remembering”, as opposed to “knowing”, which is the topic of the study by Sharot, Delago and Phelps. (If this connection only makes sense to me, it is likely that I’ve misunderstood the study. Therefore, please help!)

The work of Dolcos, LeBar, and Cabeza places great emphasis on retrieval mechanisms for good reason. In addition to the assigned readings, I recommend listening to the Radio Lab on Memory and Forgetting (June 8, 2007). See the link on our course website and play close attention to the part about LeDoux’s research assistant who discovered that he could intervene in the process of remembering learned behavior (in rats) in order to erase specific, negative memories. (Sound familiar? Remember that movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? It was made a few years after the study!) Consider the implications for treatment of PTSD and other affective disorders… Accordingly, McGaugh reminds us how our ability to forget is also important, even at the level of every-day operations (8).

In the words of Radio Lab’s moderator, do not forget that emotional memory refers to the “physical structure” of brain cells… and so I keep thinking of emotional memory like a kind of cement, which helps to secure blocks of experience- although the structure is always open to remodeling.

Emotional memory is like a muscle that gets stronger when flexed, but might snap if over-extended. Just like muscles (which help to hold our bodies together) emotions act like a kind of glue, or binding agent, at the site of relationships between (or within) people, things, and ideas.

(Since this topic is prone to anecdotes, be glad I spared you the load! So many scattered memories have come flooding back while reading about this topic. Has this also been the case for you?)

The Scent of Bitter Almonds

2008-03-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

Oliver Edwards

The Scent of Bitter Almonds

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of a seemingly neutral stimulus becoming a catalyst for strong, vivid emotional memory. Our sensory modalities, especially the olfactory, have a remarkable ability to construct emotional cues for our long-term memory using all the sensory information that becomes associated with an emotional event. The McGaugh reading, more than any other, has helped me to clarify scientifically some of these ideas in a way that had previously only made sense to me in the literary realm.

In the LeDoux reading we have been geared up for his unfolding expertise on the structure of fear conditioning, and he has just now begun to discuss how fear memories are formed. It seems, however, that we get a clearer picture from the generalized viewpoint taken by McGaugh. He walks us through the origins of emotional neuroscience, emphasizing important points about many of the misconceptions we have and the false starts in the history of neuroscience.

I was very interested in and surprised at the section on Pavlov. First of all, it is important to note that Pavlov did not want to be considered a psychologist, that he considered the largely introspective field of psychology to be unscientific. He therefore considered himself purely a physiologist. This is ironic considering that he is a household name in psychology. More importantly, McGaugh points out that Pavlov was fundamentally wrong in that he supposed memory to be a direct Stimulus Response habit formation. Perhaps in an overzealous attempt to be more objective and avoid the anthropomorphization of his dogs, he supposed their memories to be, not only mechanistic, but simplistically hard wired to act directly based on stimulus response.

McGaugh guides us gracefully through the research that has picked this theory apart, proving that animals and humans have mechanisms for forming memories that are more dynamic, and thus determining which brain areas allow us to do this. He then goes on to discuss memory consolidation, illustrating the phenomenon of delay memory formation. This has enormous implications for the understanding of how rich, emotionally potent memories can be associated with varying stimuli. He posits that memory consolidation takes a long time because it could be evolutionarily adaptive to allow a variety of sensory input to influence the memory, and everything surrounding the emotional event must be absorbed into the memory. This may just bring science closer to the mystery of how bitter almonds could make one think of unrequited love.

Emotion and Memory

2008-03-02T16:41:00.000-08:00

Maggie Fenwood

The Feeling Brain

3/2/08

Week 7: Memory and Emotion

I have to say that it took me a little longer to get through these readings because of my limited knowledge on the structures of the brain but it was interesting to learn exactly where exactly in the brain these functions of memory take place. These readings were good for understanding where the current stance on memory and emotion evolved from, with a shift away from stimulus-response and purely behavioral explanations. Mostly focusing on amygdala and the medial temporal lobe Dolcos, LaBar and Cabeza looked at the memory-enhancing effect of emotional stimuli. Although they were looking at recollection from only one year later it did show the way in which retrieval activity for emotional and neutral pictures differs in favor of emotional stimuli enhancing the ability of the participant to remember it. Furthermore, they were looking for a distinction between knowing and remembering. This seems like a difficult thing to try to test, which they did in terms of activation in the brain. In the fMRI scans they found that the region of the medial temporal lobe may be sensitive to the reinstatement of sensory details but the hippocampus is critical for binding content and context in order to distinguish between knowing and remembering. As such, Dolcos et. al. conclude: “the Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Entorhinal Cortex all contribute to the enhancing effect of emotion on retrieval processes and only the first two regions can additionally differentiate between emotion effects on recollection and familiarity” (p. 6). So, the emotional content of the neural stimulus is important to retention and recollection although it might just be a memory-enhancing effect rather than a familiarity. This makes a distinction between remembering a stimulus in the form of an emotion-evoking picture and actually being familiar with or having knowledge of the picture in some other context. It is interesting to consider the degree to which the participants were exposed; although the stimulus was emotional it obviously would not be enough to traumatize them. So, in the case of someone who has PTSD it is even more so a familiarity than just a remembering of the event. The level of context and content play a very important role in the level of emotion and recollection in this sense. It would be interesting to know if any of the participants had other associations with the pictures that also enhanced their memory of the emotional pictures.

I thought that LeDoux’s chapters pointed out some interesting things about fear response, thinking about it in an evolutionary sense, as a mechanism for conditioning a response that is quick and long lasting. The fear stimulus only needs to occur a relatively limited number of times in order for the conditioned response to kick in. Where the declarative memory, in this sense, was developed for the preferential retention of information associated with motivational goals, emotional arousal can also enhance encoding and consolidation of memories that in an evolutionary sense are part of survival. So, learned, defensive behavior comes from fear response and the conditioned fear response involves unconscious or implicit processes. This multiplicity of memory is something that LeDoux talks about in terms of the brain having different systems which mediate different kinds of memory. The area that mediates explicit or declarative memory is different from the areas for classical conditioning or implicit learning. For example, the woman whose doctor pricked her with the tack in his hand, obviously she remembered that a negative stimulus came from shaking the man’s hand but she could not attribute any explicit knowledge to this fear condition. It seems as though these systems work with each other but are not dependent on one another. LeDoux states that the multiplicity of memory idea was obvious because of the role of the hippocampus, where information is transferred from the perceptual cortical sensory system and into the conceptual domain of the brain. So, it makes sense that researchers would not be looking for these things in non-human animals per se, because the animals they were testing could do most memory tasks without the hippocampus, it didn’t seem relevant. Now it seems as though the hippocampus plays a very important role in what goes beyond purely behavioral aspects of memory. The emotional aspect of memory is wrapped up in the way it is conceptualized and consolidated in the mind.

McGaugh makes a good point in saying that memory is not only the lasting consequence of experience but it is also what we learn from that experience. Once researchers were able to figure out that memory was a separate from the physicality of it, (i.e. a paralyzed rat still remembering the maze route) that was the key to understanding memory as a system with multiple methods of learning and ways of remembering. As such, McGaugh explains that slow development and consolidation of memory allows for recollection of detail and strength of memory. As an evolutionary adaptation implicit memory allows for us to learn new things constantly. Lasting memories are not formed instantly just like poorly learned material is quickly forgotten like learning an instrument takes practice. We are not simply conditioned to live in reaction to stimulus but we are constantly incorporating information and depending on the emotional content and/or context it will be consolidated in some capacity into the implicit memory.

Cognition and Emotion

2008-02-26T19:46:00.000-08:00

Sorry this is delayed--having major computer difficulties!

I thought all of the readings for this week focused on a really interesting aspect of child development that is not often explored: the significant developments that allow for emotion. I thought that Lewis in particular had a lot of interesting things to say involving the emergence of consciousness, both of the self and of society. Lewis argues that this cognition is necessary to understand and produce complex emotions that we have discussed including guilt, love, jealousy, etc. The importance of cognitive evaluation (how he distinguished between emotional states and emotional experience) also seemed particularly relevant in cultural differences in emotion. He again discusses that case of the Japanese and comes to, I think, a very interesting and palpable conclusion: "It may be the case that Japanese children or adults may act in an angry way and may even have the emotional state of anger. However, since having such a state is inappropriate, they are not likely to have the emotional experience of anger" (p. 274). I think this theory probes deeper into the cultural realm than others have, and examines the abstract "display rules" in a developmentally and culturally significant way.

Development and Emotion

2008-02-26T18:02:00.000-08:00

The Feeling Brain: Biology and Psychology of Emotion
Week 6: Development and Emotion
Aiden Bussey

To preface my post, I am not particularly interested in developmental psychology. However, some of the topics and theories covered in the reading were interesting to me.

One of the topics I found most interesting was Harris' discussion of narrative as a crucial component of emotional understanding and development. Narrative is an extremely important and intriguing phenomenon that penetrates not only the fields of psychology and neurobiology, but also philosophy, literature, anthropology and other seemingly unrelated disciplines. Further, narrative organization exists across a wide spectrum of ages and cultures, indicating that forming narratives is some sort of fundamental process for humans.

As our other readings have shown, emotion seems to penetrate evolution (non-human animals, including animals without elaborate linguistic systems seem to experience emotion in ways analogous to human experience) and various mental functions (such as reasoning). Thus, it makes sense that emotion would bare some significance in the formation and utilization of narrative.

The link between emotion and narrative to me seems to be related to the link between emotion and reasoning. Emotional contribution to reasoning seems to work primarily through giving value to memory. For instance, emotion allows neutral objects to be perceived as pleasant or unpleasant. This sort of memory requires an awareness of chronology and attribution of significance to the various components of a situation. This is directly related to narrative, which arrange connected events both in terms of chronology and significance.
Similarly, the early psychology of Freud was hugely driven by narrative forms. While much of Freud is no longer used today, he was nonetheless responsible for huge innovations in the field of psychology and many of his theories have an intuitive appeal that, while not necessarily supported by modern understandings of cognition, experience, or emotion, can nevertheless provide insight into the way that cognition, emotion, and experience are experienced. Narrative allows an individual both to situate events in time and space and to construct and arrange meanings. Often, narratives are employed to privilege the present, portraying the past as leading up to the present. This important in that it creates continuity in events that may be experienced as unrelated or senseless.

Week 6 Blog

2008-02-24T14:44:00.001-08:00

Sylviane--Week 6

I found Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom’s article on social evaluation by preverbal infants to be very interesting, although it did stimulate quite a bit of doubt within me. I was particularly intrigued by the idea that “the capacity to evaluate individuals by their social actions may also serve as a foundation for a developing system of moral cognition.” At first I was a bit confused as to why the results of this study indicated the beginning of a moral system, for they seemed to reflect more punishment than morals. But I realized that the fact that the child reaches for the “helper’ or “neutral” party rather than the “harmful” party indicates some sort of approval of helping over inhibiting the third party, deeming one set of actions appropriate and the opposing set inappropriate. Another interesting part of this study was the conflicting data of the reaching and staring studies involving a neutral party; while infants reached for a neutral party over the hinder but for the helper over the neural party, this pattern was not reflected.

I did wonder, though, about the validity of the results and conclusions of this study because of both the methods and the population. I was surprised that wooden blocks with large eyes glued on were selected as the “characters” in this experiment. Because the face itself is so unique and a great deal of social information is conveyed through the eyes, it seems as if a more accurate representation would be necessary to truly evaluate an infant’s moral development. It seems unlikely that wooden blocks with eyes glued on would be able to adequately represent this. I am curious to see what would result if the study used blocks without eyes glued on, or blocks with images of actual faces glued on, although I do understand that using real faces would present a problem as well since “infants in the first half-year of life exhibit preferences for social individuals based on static perceptual features (for example, facial attractiveness, race).” The reaching behavior of the infant could possibly be influenced by the perceptual features of the face.

After reading this article, I read the chapters from The Handbook of Emotions and found the section on the development of emotional experiences in the chapter written by Lewis to be interesting. He writes, “Emotional experiences occur through the interpretation and evaluation of states, expressions, situations, behaviors of others, and beliefs about what ought to be happening. Emotional experiences are therefore dependent on cognitive processes.” He writes a bit later, after discussing infants inability to discriminate between facial patterns and have simultaneous comparisons, “This would suggest that infants are not capable of experiencing emotions prior to this point. Perhaps if I had read this article prior to Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom’s article I would have agreed more with this point, but I did not. The article on social evaluation by preverbal infants provided very compelling evidence that evaluate the states, behaviors, and actions of others (they recognized that the third party was being helped or hindered and expressed either approval or disapproval of this) and have beliefs about what ought to be happening (they were surprised when the third party moved towards the hinderer). Although not every single one of the cognitive components Lewis has deemed “necessary” for experiencing an emotion are present, it seems as if it could be possible for infants to experience emotions. While I do agree with the fact that some emotions likely emerge before others, such as fear before shame since shame involves a more complex thought process (social norms, sense of self, disappointment), the emotional experience of infants should not be denied. The example of the woman who did not experience the state of fear she was in as her car slid off the road seems to reflect an attention issues; she was so preoccupied with handling the car she was not aware of the changes in her bodily state. Because infants can focus their attention, though, I do not think it is out of the question for an infant to “be in a state of pain or a state of fear, yet not experience that state.” Being very interested in the biological component of emotions, I wonder if Lewis’s ideas could be tested using some sort of brain imaging task.

Week 6

2008-02-24T14:01:00.001-08:00

Sara Dholakia

I have to say, I truly wish I had read the the first two posts lasts, because I enjoyed them the least, and in fact, I would go as far as to say I was trudging through them. I believe that the last three articles on the list said both more eloquently and more succinctly, what the first two were trying to get across.
I didn't find that the first two articles presented much information that I was not already aware of, though I did appreciate that they both presented contrasting viewpoints.
Of the two models offered by Lewis on page 269, I find myself much more inclined toward the first, which asserts that the infant begins with a bio-polar state at birth, meaning the capacity for positive and negative emotions, so to speak, and that subsequent states emerge with the development of the brain and of the infant's interaction with others. This theory claims that specific emotions come about through differentiation of the positive and negative. I know that in class there has been quite a debate over whether emotions begin at the level of positive/negative, etc., and I believe that certain feelings can surely elicit both positive and negative emotions, but I believe that they all come about through differentiation and through development in cognition. For instance, Lewis presents the example of the fear of being caught cheating on a test; one would feel fear in this situation, but only after cognition took place and as a result of one's position in society.
The alternate model, the "discrete-systems model," argues that some states are preprogrammed and do not require further differentiation (269). Some of these states may not present themselves until certain development has occurred, however they are believed to exist.
I was really intrigued by the Harris article, specifically the sections dealing with the impact that emotionally charged conversations and those discussing emotion can have a positive effect on a child's emotional self-awareness. This seems perfectly reasonable, though I had never thought about it. The article shows that children from families that discuss emotion are later better able to define others' feelings, and they have a greater awareness of their own feelings. Moreover, conversation can provide children with a narrative format with which to organize the events of their daily lives (283). Harris does concede that some children may naturally be more empathic or more prone to try to discover others' feelings, however, the evidence provided is quite convincing.
In regards to the Hoffer article, I have to say that more than anything, it reminded me of Harry Harlow's experiments with macaques and the cloth mother. It might be interesting to discuss the extent to which a non-living construction can fill in for a real mother. Of course, a living, breathing caretaker is necessary for optimal development, but given the experiments provided by Hoffer, it would be interesting to get some opinions on the topic.

Developing & Understanding Emotions

2008-02-24T12:02:00.000-08:00

It is most interesting to try and understand our ever-evolving emotional life through the lens of a child’s cognitive developmental process. Michael Lewis’s account on The Emergence of Human Emotions and Paul L. Harris’s account on Understanding Emotions brings to our investigatory table some very interesting arguments, on which I would like to elaborate.

The emotional elicitor is argued to be either a learned function of how to behave or a natural process whereby specific events elicit specific emotions. A problematic one would encounter with trying to define an emotional elicitor, is the difficulty of trying to determine which stimuli is an emotional trigger. Can there ever be a satisfactory definition for the interplay of external/internal world of emotions without generalizing? The idea that the same emotion can be provoked by different elicitors and that different emotions can be triggered by the same elicitor; is it not a generalization of something very individually determined? Further the dilemma is raised weather an emotional elicitor is internal or external, the state or the experience, the everlasting dilemma of body versus mind. This I think is only solvable by accepting the view that each enhances and influences the other. Biologically determined and also learned in the very beginning of life, in other words, cognition as mediator of elicitors. He moves forth to determine specific emotional states: The ‘non-state’ theory is most interesting to me, the common idea that ‘its all in our head’ and that generally emotions are a consequence of thought. Then the idea that we develop the emotion through appraising it should make one question our appraisal tool - language. Is the word we have acquired for the feeling broad enough to express all its different states? (E.g. love can be experienced so differently and yet it is the same word we use to describe: maternal, paternal, romantic etc.) The other view, since Darwin, is that of a specific emotional states which then must correspond with the body; the interaction between specific emotions and the felt experience with the correspondent body is necessary; And it is true I believe that we store our emotional weight in the body. As I understand it we need to be able to verbalize the experience, to understand the general or specific emotional state one undergoes.

If the infant has not yet acquired language to express the ‘I’ experience of a certain emotional elicitor or an emotional state, does it mean the actual experience is lesser or non-existent? For example In the experiment conducted on ‘Social evaluation by preverbal infants’ that measured the ability of the child to engage in complex social situation as a third ‘objective’ party, with only 6-10 month old infants, the findings show that early on we evolve social empathetic feelings. Lewis would have argued that infants do not even experience emotions prior to 7-8 month. Lewis raises the complex idea that an emotional state can be experienced without consciously experiencing it. How can an individual ‘experience’ anger without experiencing it? As noted in psychotherapy these states can be brought about to consciousness, but I want to ask, where do these emotions go? Where is the subconscious storing them? And how come they can be brought about from unconscious to consciousness? The idea that a child is simply not feeling ‘self-conscious evaluative emotions’ because its sense of self in the face of the world is not yet evolved, seems different then the subconscious emotions experienced by adults, but I wonder if it really is? As Darwin said these unique emotions are what makes us human; is the infant then not fully a human until three years of age? As said that by the age of 3 years our emotions become differentiated, an elaborate and complex system of emotions will have evolved. (But don’t the bipolar infant state follow us throughout our life? Aren’t the emotions most intensely felt when in one extreme or the other?) Once we are capable of self-analyzing our emotional state, certain emotions which would be a result of an external social stimuli, are still not physically felt. Therefore I wonder does the protection mechanism in our body stop the chemical reaction that occurs in the brain from affecting the body, or the less likely option that there is no response at all?

I do agree, “…the most likely explanation of emotional development is the differentiation of emotion state which occur as a function of maturation, socialization, and cognitive development” (Lewis). Yet it is a very tricky approach as in early childhood the basic emotions seem to be felt most purely by the developing human—without the social construct of appropriation—these seem to be the innate features on the basis of which the learned script of emotions develops. Yet we have no concrete internal data to determine weather our external evaluations are correct, or vice versa.

In Paul L. Harris’s account we move form the development of emotion to the coherent understanding of emotion, the child moves from differentiation to the appraisal of his/her emotional life. It is indeed due to our specialty in language that differentiates us from other primates, as we can put our feelings into words. As said can words ever be sufficient to express the emotional experience? It is through children that we can assess most precisely how the emotion is affected by developing cognition, as it is assumed that although they begin to put their feelings into words it is not done in a self-conscious manner as evaluative adults would. Then indeed the question arises as Harris asks: ‘to what extent are children able to offer not just a report but an accurate report of emotions?’ With the rise in vocabulary and understanding of the self in relation to the other, children begin to be able to assess their own emotions and others, in social situations with peers and family (ages 3-5). It is important to remember the individual as a measure of emotion, because some children may naturally be more empathetic then others. Moreover is it interesting to me that the familial discussion and openness about felt emotions and why one is feeling such emotions, will affect the ability of the child to appropriate social interactions. Language, which enables the child to formulate a narrative of the emotional life, makes it possible to discuss and share emotionally charged experiences. Yet I feel words can sometimes also confine us to the ‘script’ of feelings we are taught to express, and I wonder if it is at all possible to understand feelings without words? Like the example of understanding what people feel without talking to them, but merely through observation of facial expressions and body language. I think one can get to the core of very true feelings more so then often times with words as intermediaries. This is because language and cognition enable us to deceive, and how often do we recon someone is feeling quite differently then what they express in words. On the other hand conversation about emotions can be a positive sharing of attitudes, and hopefully can make sense of the appraisal processes that underpin it. Children with high emotional intelligence and verbal ability might understand the specific appraisal process relevant in a certain emotional states. The other side argues that children might be more sensitive to the non-verbal signals, and can detect a fake smile from a genuine one or a look of surprise from fear. The finding that emotional expression is related to popularity makes total sense here. Further early on and universally children can understand that the emotional reaction with its intensity is in reaction to an immediate situation; nevertheless is the power of the mind and memory capable to recreate emotions. This is an overwhelming discovery in ones own mental assessment. As mentioned by Harris, the script concept reveals a conceptual difficulty that the same situation can elicit different emotions (just as Lewis notes about the correlation of elicitor and emotional state) this script is argued to begin with an inherently psychological event, of a person appraising a situation. In children it is argued, they realize early on that it is in the match of goals and desires with the expected outcome that triggers strong emotions. Later on they begin to formulate the actuality of their beliefs and expectations as emotional stimulators. And as concluded, children’s developing understanding of the process of emotions, is an epiphenomenon!

I feel as though we are in a vicious circle with the ever determining questions such as: are the emotions innate or part of our natural developmental process as human beings; if it is the latter, is it maturational or interactive? I think that our lexicon of words is to banal to express the internal complexities of our emotions. If the emotional experiences occur on different conscious levels, what if there are such deep emotions that we cannot feel because we have no name for them hence no experience of their existence and so we never understand them consciously?

The idea that infants are not capable of experiencing emotions up to a certain point brings up many questions. Would abortion be seen in a different light if there were a certainty that the fetus did not feel a thing? And how come the emotional state of a mother during her pregnancy can affect the child’s future character? How come there are studies that show that in our infancy, in the attachment period, our basic trust in people is evolved; As well as many other subconscious developments in our emotional world that will accompany us throughout our life? There must be a distinction between the experience of an emotion and the rationalization of it. Even when we do not understand we have hunches within us that will make us curious to understand the ‘I’ experience in the first place, then when we have learned words to express our states of being it still seems insufficient and self disguisable.

AAI

2008-02-24T09:56:00.000-08:00

This week’s reading was so incredibly dense that it is hard to decide on a focus or specific place to start for a discussion. I feel like these readings could produce weeks of discussion and topics! I have decided to look at the AAI used in both Seigel and Harris. My understanding is that the Adult Attachment Interview is an interview given to adults to understand the attachment they had to their parents in early childhood. It is fascinating to me that this could so clearly predict the attachment the child of these parents will have to them and what this says about the child’s emotional development.
According to Harris, the “coherence and degree of reflection with which a child’s mother talked about her own attachment was a predictor of later performance by her child on the assessment of emotion understanding.” (pg. 284) Harris also states that the children were tested on situations to the extent in which they could provoke a mixture of positive and negative feelings.
Harris then offers two interpretations of this AAI study. The first is according to attachment theory and says that the mother’s coherence and sensitivity will help in secure attachment with the child that will then foster the child’s understanding of emotion. The second interpretation is based in the theory that family talk about emotion will facilitate a child’s open expression, communication and acknowledgment of emtotion. (284)
It seems to me that these two can co-exist and actually fit together quite nicely. It would seem that a caregiver who has a coherence and sensitivity in regards to emotion will be more capable of and more likely to talk to their child about emotion. Also, understanding and being more comfortable with emotional expression themselves, it seems not too far fetched to say that they would be better able to interperate and understand the childs non-verbal expression of emotion and be more responsive to that. This responsivity seems to me to be a form of non-verbal talk. So, with a caregiver who has a more cohesive sense of emotion, there would be both more “talk” and more secure attachment. With this secure attachment and better emotional understanding, this child is more likely to have a secure attachment with their future children. It seems to be a continuing cycle.
This brings us to the Siegal article on several points. First, verbal or non-verbal “talk” could be seen as the “collaborative interpersonal interaction” that Siegal mentions as the key to healthy development (Siegal, 72). It is this interpersonal connection, found in secure attachment, that the circuits regulating emotional and social functioning are ingrained. Development is about the creation of specific circuits. (73) So it follows that interpersonal relationships are key to development.
Second, Siegal also discusses the transfer of trauma across generations (88). Integration is key in all respects to Siegals understanding of emotion and emotional experience. He suggests here that psychotherapeutic interventions would promote neural integration and promote better self-regulation and a coherent self-understanding. AAI, it seems, could be said as testing for internal integration.
Following from all of this it seems that attachment theories and talk theories do not contradict one another but are pieces of the larger answer.

Question:
Have any of the topics in this weeks reading addressed parents that are not biological? Has the AAI test been given to caregives who are not biological parents for example?
It seems to me that this would tell us a good deal about how emotions develop. Could it be that past traumatic responses in our genetic histories affect the way we develop emotion or is it totally a result of our social interactions with our parents.
This weeks readings also address the development of some attachments before birth, such as a mothers smell. Does it cause emotional stress for the child to be separated from this prenatal connection? Then the Hamlin reading addresses the elements of what may cause distress at the separation of mother and child. It seems that many of the elements mentioned in the Hamilin reading would not be problematic with a parent who adopted but the prenatal attachments could cause problems.

2-22 Emotional States, Experience, Attachment

2008-02-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

Suzanne Ardanowski

2-22-08

Feeling Brain

The Lewis article raised some questions for me. To think this through, let me put down on paper his ideas on emotional states first. Emotional states are “particular constellations of changes in somatic and/or neurophysiological activity” (267). Changes in body, face, voice, hormones occur which one may or may not be able to perceive. He sites Elkman and says that while some have argued for correspondence between internal states and emotion, proof of specific states tied to specific emotions is lacking, with the exception of some bodily and facial expression (p.268). There are then the cognitive nonstate theorists, who believe emotions are a result of thinking. The fear response is given as an example of a specific state, elicited by a certain stimulus. Shame is an example of cognitive processing resulting in an emotion. My first question is then when he says “cognitive” does he necessarily mean conscious? Lewis states, “it may be quite possible to have a specific emotional state but to be unaware of it, ignore it, or even deny it” (p.268). In saying this is he saying unconscious emotions only occur in emotional states, and not cognitively? The cognitive emotions seem to be more complex-such as shame, guilt, embarrassment, envy, pride. Is he suggesting these “cognitive emotions” can never be unconscious? Psychoanalytic theory would say otherwise.

He does address psychoanalytic theory, discussing unconscious functions, and how conscious perceptions of experiences can be unavailable. However, this is dependent on the experience of an internal state (p.273). Is the unconscious therefore linked to neurophysiological activity? Freud had wanted to prove this. Cognitively speaking, states are really cognitive constructions of experience, past history, and the responses of others. While I believe in the power of cognition, I have a hard time separating unconscious influences from cognitive experience. Though I did think the passage on the spinal injury patients was fascinating. Without access to a neurophysiological state they were able to have a sexual experience-giving strength to the argument of cognition and the ability of the human brain to use past knowledge to construct an experience. But is sexual experience the same as emotional? They could overlap, but not necessarily….I guess it depends on your definition of emotional experience.

The experience of emotion is said to “require that the organism posses some fundamental cognitive abilities, including the ability to perceive and discriminate, recall, associate, and compare. Emotional experiences also require a particular cognitive ability-that is the development of a concept of self” (p.273). So, does that mean that animals and babies do not have emotional experiences? It is stated that prior to 7 or 8 months of age infants are not capable of experiencing emotions. This I cannot agree with. I don’t see how the definition of emotional experience needs to be tied to the cognitive ability of attending to the self, and in fact how are we measuring a sense of self? Infants have a state of oneness with their mother (in Western culture at least), but does that mean you cannot have an emotional experience in this state? There has been plenty of infant research, including studies on attachment, which give much argument to the emotional life of infants, including newborns and even prenatal. Lewis goes on to say that infants maybe can “be in a particular emotional state and yet not experience it” (p.274). The argument for this is the comparison to the woman whose tire blows and does not experience her emotional state of fear. This is comparing apples to oranges. To me, the woman is unconsciously utilizing her defense mechanisms (in this case perhaps depnial of fear) for survival. She also may feel the fear after she gets out of the car, when she is no longer in danger. I think it is too narrow a definition to say that an emotional state must be accompanied by self-awareness, but I can see why one would suggest this. However, the exclusion of young infants and animals does not seem right. How can we truly know whether someone has a sense of self? 15 months is given as the age of being able to “make reference to the self as having that state” (p.274). So before this infants are unaware of what they are experiencing? What about in cultures where self awareness is not valued? Is this part of their definition of experiencing emotion?

The Hofer article addresses the attachment bond between a mother and child, which to me is an emotional experience, despite the symbiotic relationship. It is argued in psychoanalytical theory to have lasting (even lifetime) effects on behavior, personality, and experience. The regulatory process of the mother-infant interaction and the impact of this interaction on later play and social interactions is something we have also been leaning about in the Play and Culture class. The Harris article states that as soon as children are able to talk, they begin to project feelings onto nonhuman objects, which is also a huge component of play and one of the foundations of play therapy. Narratives as Harris suggests are also essential for understanding emotion for children, and for adults, which give credit to the powerful effects of talk therapy.

The social evaluations of the infants in the Hamlin et al article, who had “a liking for those who act cooperatively to facilitate the goals of others” (p.558) parallels the relationship between an infant and his/her mother. A child’s appraisal of a situation is also discussed in the Harris article. I think subtle cues are essential to a child’s appraisal. I remember once I was having a heavy discussion with my brother in front of my five year old niece. We were both remaining calm but there must have been a tone to our voices that my niece picked up on because she kept running back and forth between me and my brother, giving us each hugs. I didn’t realize she was even doing that until later on, and I realized how comprehension is not always essential to appraising a situation. I also thought it was interesting in the Lewis article how he notes that we are more likely to believe as adults that certain expressions are tied to certain emotions depending on the context. He gives the example of saying a child is expressing fear when a stranger approaches, yet if a child expresses the same face when sitting next to his/her mother we will call the expression something else given the context. We see what we want to see.

Language and Emotion

2008-02-19T18:23:00.000-08:00

The role of named emotional concepts in emotional experience is really interesting. I agree with James' argument that "People describe their emotions in the language they know, and the categories of their culture undoubtedly influence the emotions they feel" (Yamaguchi, p.21). I feel that culturally unique emotions (Amae, Fago, Iajya, etc.) are in fact experienced by all cultures whether or not they are defined in language. The fact that the Japanese experience Amae positively while Americans find Amae-situations offensive (and only positive in that they have control) does not seem to be a difference in Japanese/American emotions themselves but a difference in cultural responses to a given situation. The role of language in the recognition of emotional experience seems almost deceptive because these same Americans, had Japanese been their first language/culture (and here we get into the "bilingual minds" theory), would test positively when faced with Amae-situations because their cultural responses (and not their emotional capacities) are activated/inhibited by different situations than an American from the US.

Week 5 Blog: Language, Culture, and Gender

2008-02-19T13:34:00.000-08:00

Sylviane

The article on Amae in Japan seemed to clarify a number of the issues brought up in other readings concerning cross-cultural psychology. I was immediately intrigued after reading the description of what Amae is, for it is an emotion that I feel I can relate to and understand the meaning of despite the fact that I do not know of a word in English that conveys this feeling. I was surprised, though, that it is suggested that the provider of the help “feels good about granting the favor, either by feeling close to the requester or by gaining a sense of power.” The ladder reward was particularly unusual to me, not only because it is something I cannot relate to, but it seems to contradict the sentiments that I understood Amae to include. The section explaining the definition of Amae noted that approximate English translations of the word all have fairly negative connotations and that in Japan, Amae does not typically imply disapproval. Thus, I was fairly surprised that gaining a sense of control would be a component of the emotion. As I read further and considered the highly independent nature of culture in the United States, I felt that this may be a culturally unique aspect of the emotion. While I do not feel that certain emotions can only be experienced by individuals in certain cultures, it does seem likely that they can vary slightly simply because what is “appropriate” can vary from culture to culture.

Culture, Gender, Language

2008-02-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

Lily Thom
Matsumoto defines culture as a sociopsychological construct that encompasses not only nationality or ethnicity but also gender and language experiences. Thus, we can look at all the articles from this week as studies in cross-cultural psychology. Barrett et al’s work from last week can provide an interesting backdrop for examining cross-cultural studies on emotion. Barrett’s concept of emotional granularity could be extended to consider cultural, or gendered granularity of emotion. In the variety of studies on language and gender what Barrett saw as mental representations of emotion may also be cultural representations. People of difference cultures, using different languages experience different emotional states or emotional intensity. This goes beyond just display rules. We see differences in brain activation, electrodermal reactions, language for emotions, and differences in expression and recognition.
Both Wager and Matsumoto approach gender as a cultural difference. The Wager study shows that men have greater brain activation in response to violence and aggression and points to enculturation as a main reason. It is interesting to compare this study to some of the many studies Matsumoto cites on cultures with varying differences in individualism, masculinity and power distance. Within cultures, these dimensions may apply very differently to men and women. For example, American culture may encourage women to sacrifice individual goals more than men. Matsumoto shows that individualism is positively correlated with intensity ratings of anger and fear. I wonder if there is a connection between this outcome and that from Wager’s study in terms of how gender and culture interconnect.
Harris et al examine language learning as both a cognitive and emotional process and introduce the “emotional context of learning” theory to explain why first languages are often more emotional than second languages. Harris et al’s work can be considered in the context of Barrett’s work on the role of memory in emotional processing. Language is deeply connected with emotional memory and context in evoking emotions. Harris et al examine the ideas that early language learning is more closely related to emotional or visceral meaning making. First languages develop simultaneous to emotional regulation systems, contributing to a deeply emotional context. However, a striking counter example is that of parents who raise children and have deeply interpersonal interactions using their second language. In such cases, this emotional context overrides the emotional context of early language.
Considering cultural or mental representations of emotion lead me again to wonder about the function of emotion, something we have only touched upon in class. Niiya et al show that humans have the capacity to experience emotions that may not be named or recognized in their own culture. Yes still we see an astounding variability in emotional experience, both within and across cultures. Niiya et al recognize that emphasizing Amae in one cultural environment serves to reinforce and strengthen the culture. Whereas in a more invidualistic culture Amae does not have a socializing function and, therefore, is not emphasized. What biological purposes do such variability and flexibility provide? How do cultural or language barriers limit this emotional range and why? What biological purpose might there be to these limitations?

2008-02-17T22:26:00.001-08:00

I should have read the Matsumoto reading first. I read it last and then I felt the need to revisit the other articles with his work in mind. His writing made me hyperaware of the importance of cultural contextualization in emotion research and although I’ve been vigilant to certain “American” science biases, I found that my revisits--under the scope of his perspective--cast the other research in a vitally new light. I agree with his suggestion for the revision of mainstream psychology and the need to integrate it with cross cultural studies (Matsumoto p.15). I also agree with Matsumoto that a basic emotions theory that transcends culture is a good working theory even if it’s not completely articulated (yet). There are only so many hormones, based on only so many amino acids, encoded by only so many DNA bases. Certainly, some of these chemicals play a bigger, more primary function than others in the processing and expression of emotion but by like token, they can be mixed in a diversity of chemical cocktails. If an emotion is recognized and expressed across a spectrum of radically different “sociopsychological constructs,” then the likelihood of its universality seems reliably validated (Matsumoto, p.2). The on-going question, as we have repeatedly discussed in class, is if these basic emotions exist, what are they? Matsumoto is convinced by Ekman’s super “six”—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, and adds his own “contempt.” He believes these are universal in a cross-culturally acceptable way and re-emphasizes that if we don’t accommodate for a cultural context in our search for them, we may wrongly asses their globalization.

Still, scientists do not always recognize their own bias. In the “Sex Differences…” article, Wager, et al. do not bother to contextualize the sociopsychological constructs influencing the research. Who are the subjects? What kind of culture do they live in? Are they Americans? French? Sudanese? Gay? They briefly touch on the possibility that discrepancies in their findings might suggest “regulation of expression” based on “self-presentation biases” and “beliefs about emotions, including cultural stereotypes” but they continue to generalize using the terms “men” and “women” as if all men and women are alike (and perhaps all men and all women are alike in some ways, but without context, how can we be sure the research is not universalizing the responses of particular men and particular women?) Would their findings be different if they studied men and women from a more matriarchal society or from more diverse sexual orientations? What images are they using to arouse emotion? Did they research whether or not these images were cross-culturally emotionally arousing?

The “Amae” article is far more contextualized. I really enjoyed the idea that “emotions named by a language may act as magnets for emotional experience (Niiya and Ellsworth, p. 293).” It suggests that the larger our emotional vocabulary, the more expansive our palette of “feeling.” As I read it, I was reminded of Barrett’s metaphor of the color wheel to describe basic emotions and the idea that more complex emotions are derivative of these basic tones. In the following days, I found myself referencing Amae in my own relationship anecdotes when other feelings felt less specific. It’s like learning the word for “violet” after previously trying to describe the color as either red or blue or a combination of the two. The feeling/color takes on its own significance and becomes more easily seen, utilized, communicated and in the end, felt. According to Matsumoto’s research, we can not only learn to “see” new feelings, but we can be taught not to see them, as in the case of the Asians rating facial posers as having less intense emotions than Caucasions out of “politeness or ignorance” (Matsumoto, p. 7).

I was struck but the fact that Amae was hard to categorize as an emotion because it did not have a corresponding facial expression or particular physiology (Niiya et al. p.280). Have scientists researched the physiology of Amae? And is facial expression the only behavior that can qualify an emotion? The writers also stated Amae would be “oversimplified” if deemed an emotion because it is relational and involves beliefs, etc. (Niiya et al. p. 281). I wonder what Matsumoto would think of this.

The “First Language” excerpt seems in alignment with Matsumoto’s approach. It is abundantly contextualized while aware of its cultural limitations--such as the idea that Turks might be more reactionary to violent words than Americans who are more removed from war (Harris, et al. p. 269). The use of SCR helps curb the biases of expression regulation, a problem in the research on sex differences, and the historical biases of linguistics have been re-examined and eliminated (Harris, et al. p. 273). It was interesting that childhood reprimands scored the highest on emotional reactivity supporting the theory that in childhood, we are building the emotional systems that dictate our emotional sensitivity as adults (Harris, et al. p. 262). I don’t know much about the child development side of this but perhaps someone in class can shed more light on the relationship between the emotional receptiveness of childhood and the development of adult preference and personality. Even if a second language can be more emotional given the emotional context of learning it, perhaps the wiring for emotional sensitivity, in general, takes place at a much earlier age.

Sylviane---Week 4 Post: Emotional Expression

2008-02-12T19:37:00.000-08:00

Sylviane Boddy

The Gladwell reading concerning reading faces brought up a number of points that I found particularly interesting. In its account of John Yarbrough’s encounter with the criminal, Yarbrough is described as having a “hunch” that the kid with the gun was not a threat, and that this understanding was something that “ninety-nine out people out of hundred wouldn’t have seen.” It proceeds to detail a study in which participants are shown videos of people telling the truth or lying, and that Yarbrough performed far better than the average fifty percent correct score. This made me wonder what would cause any one individual to be so skilled at a task of reading faces, considering that is something we all encounter every day. (Granted, Yarbrough was a police office and likely had a bit more experience in immediately threatening situations, like the one described.) Further, because it has been shown in a variety of studies that emotional expressions are essentially universal across cultures, can it be suggested that reading faces is a genetically encoded skill? It is known that face processing activates specific areas of the brain, namely the fusiform gyrus, occipital gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus, but what specifically gives us the knowledge to complete such tasks; is it a skill we have learned throughout our lives or something we are born with? Finally, I wondered about the impact of other factors, such as body position and gestures, on reading a person’s emotion or state of mind in their face. Previous reading mentioned that little is known about the biological nature of reading this information, but their importance in reading emotion cannot be disregarded.

emotional conciousness

2008-02-11T12:39:00.000-08:00

Kevin Goldstein

I’m intrigued by the sudden reversal found in this week’s readings, namely that LeDoux’s emphasis on the emotional unconscious has been superseded by emotional consciousness. The motif which traverses these readings, save LeDoux’s, concerns the integrated character of emotion; emotion is a state of mind both affective and conceptual: “brain structures at the heart of the neural circuitry for emotion (e.g., the anygdala) impact cognitive processing from early attention allocation…through perceptual processing to memory” (Barrett, 386). As the Barrett article argues, emotions emerge at the level of psychological description with underlying correlative neurobiological processes. There is thus an evolving, continuous stream of affect and conceptual processing underway.

Here we find a shift in focus framed around a shift in definition. If emotion is not merely defined by neurobiological response but conscious representation, then how we examine the experience of emotion necessarily changes. LeDeoux argues that as emotions are primarily unconscious, introspective accounts or self-reports prove specious as a mode of analysis. If, however, we define emotions as emergent on the conscious level, then indeed self-reportage becomes nor merely valuable but invaluable to analysis.

Core affect, defined as the universal, valence-orientated neurobiological responses to a given stimulus or stimuli, is entrenched in a kind of internal dialectic—though perhaps this creates an impure dichotomy—with psychological representation, or the conceptual framework, with in turn produces a meaningful synthesis, namely emotion, “the remembered past” (Barrett, 386). This conceptual framework, characterized by conditioned—either experiential or sociocultural—notions of what constitutes an emotion, functions in unison with these neurobiological responses. In short, on the conscious level, affective responses are always mediated in a social context.

Thus, on the conscious level, the sociocultural ramifications of affective response are indeed a key facet of emotional experience. From a scientific standpoint, however, self-reports run the danger of becoming merely anthropologically significant. Emotional expression becomes a question of representation, and thus semiotics overwhelms neurobiology. In this way perhaps we become enmeshed in surface structures.

In Freudian terms, neurobiological responses constitute a kind of id response which is, in turn, met with the superego conceptual framework; herein the ego mediates to produce the emotion. Is this excessively neat? Perhaps, especially when we insist on delimiting spheres of consciousness vis-à-vis emotion. Indeed, as the Barrett article claims, the affective and conceptual blur; the pure subject is not existent, but emotes along a social continuum. Neurobiological responses are interwoven with the conceptual framework just as the self is interwoven with the community. Better said, they are neither mutually exclusive nor undifferentiated. As the Barrett-Russell article asserts, through the representation of emotional states, language maps onto affective feelings.

Meanwhile, “The Naked Face” article contests mere introspection as a limit of emotional analysis. In short, self-definition with regard to emotion is potentially misleading, as LeDoux maintains; one is not always the best judge of one’s emotional state—though the Bechara-Naqvi article would have it that at the very least we can read certain visceral sensations with relative facility. By way of the so-called voluntary emotional system, we can manipulate our emotions as a means of manipulating others, but nonetheless, we are not always in control of our emotive signifiers, namely as concerns the involuntary emotional system’s microexpressions. In other words, there is at times a discrepancy between what is said and what is signaled. Thus our conceptual framework is faulty, or at the very least orientated more towards a certain internal homeostasis. At the same time, this article reveals that emotional meaning construction is not merely of an intrapersonal but interpersonal character. As social animals, perhaps interpersonal communication often takes precedent over self-knowledge.

2008-02-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Amina Sariahmed

2-11-08

It is difficult to argue that there is one unified system of processing emotion in the brain and Ledoux asserts that such a system is unlikely to exist (1996, 106). However, I am inclined to disagree. Examining different emotions separately may be a good place to begin exploring the mechanisms that control such phenomena but I do believe that once individual emotions (if we can even define a singular emotion) are thoroughly understood I would hypothesize that we would find much in common between them. But this approach can be problematic because it is difficult to isolate one emotion from another. Emotional experiences are not discrete and singular occurrences that exist independently from one another. If we consider the spectrum of emotions, many emotions are interconnected and overlapping, so it seems impossible that fear for example can occur by means of a process entirely separate from that which may bring about happiness or anger. How can scientists effectively monitor various emotions when there is a lack of consensus on how to define them?

Molly Moody

2008-02-11T06:34:00.000-08:00

Molly Moody

I am overwhelmed with where to begin.

I thought the Barrett-Russell article was particularly useful in defining many of the terms we use to describe emotions. Words such as experience, affect, and pleasure, necessary terms for describing emotions, have dual expressions used in every-day vocabulary. Barrett is right; there really is no language in which to communicate this field of science. In this light, describing current affect as “a space formed by two bipolar, but independent dimensions” is a brilliantly worded counter to Darwin’s one-sided view of emotional evolution.

Upon first glance I felt a kinship with Darwin’s idea of emotions; animal adaptations slowly evolving from basic (fear, rage) to complex (panic, tense, relaxed, etc) emotions. Plutchik also set forth the innovative idea of blending Primary Dyads (a mix of adjacent basic emotions) to create Secondary and Tertiary Dyads. Both men captured the magnitude of emotions like Anger and Fear (Basic emotions for both) when compared to demi-emotions like Friendliness (Primary), Sullenness (Secondary), or Delight (Tertiary). Though this use of hierarchical emotions is beautifully debated in Structure of Current Affect (p.3), there is no argument that three principles correlate different emotions with different shades, similar to last week’s discussion of a color wheel of emotions. In light of the Barrett-Russell [color] wheel, however, Darwin and Plutchik both seem to have over-generalized “basic” emotions. Anger and Fear may seem like more forceful emotions, but intensity is not to be confused with greater brain function.

It is this idea of intense emotions, however, that got me wondering about the need for Secondary or Tertiary emotions to exist at all. Though Barrett briefly discusses the use of feelings as necessary to instinctual memory, it was not mentioned anywhere else in the text. The Emotional Brain’s discussion of Tooby and Cosmides view on evolutionary memory intrigued me, “emotions involve situations that have occurred over and over…cause us to appraise present events in terms of our ancestral past” (p126). Perhaps this view can be expanded to explain the necessity for such a large variety of emotions. What is the correlation between feelings and memory?

After reading LeDoux and Structure of Current Affect, I thought I had an interesting grasp of the material, but Listening to Your Heart just messed me up. From the article, I understand that the body will always react to a stimulus, and emotions only derive from an emotional stimulus, but what is an emotional stimulus? It is obviously more complex than “you see your love” or one of the other scenarios described by Bechara. Are our own personalities in control of what makes a stimulus an emotional stimulus, or are emotional stimuli products of a need to survive and instinctually recognize danger, or a chance to reproduce? In that case, what is personality? Does my personality, likes and dislikes, make the difference between my reactions to a bear slightly different from someone else’s? What if it were a broken vase instead of a bear?

I found one particularly interesting correlation between study methods of The Experience of Emotion and Ekman. Feldman-Barrett describe their observational methods as examining self-reports of emotions as an indicator of verbal behaviors rather than content of the conversation, “infer the content in mental states such as experiences of emotion is by treating self-reports as verbal behaviors and examining how people use

words to represent those experiences” (p.5). This really interesting idea is similar to Ekman’s study of faces; it is the same idea that listening to the words a person uses does not get results, but rather looking for patterns within the open atmosphere allowed. How many times a day does one get the opportunity to truly speak about the way he or she is feeling uninterrupted? Even if the words expressed are meaningless and come from an obvious first person point of view, facial expressions and key words vocalized shed more light on one’s emotions than an entire monologue of words. Obviously emotions are such a dominant part of our personalities that they underscore everything rational.

Week Four Readings

2008-02-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

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.

Kaila- Week 4

2008-02-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

Kaila McIntyre-Bader

February 10, 2008

In Barrett’s introduction, she comments on an important topic slipping from scientific view as psychology transformed from the science of the mind into the science of behavior: the subjective experience of emotion. LeDoux states that he is not mentioning the subjective feelings of emotion because he believes that “the basic building blocks of emotions are neural systems that mediate behavioral interactions with the environment particularly behaviors that take care of fundamental problems of survival,”(p 125) and the “feelings” can only occur if the organism has the capacity for consciousness. He isn’t willing to say which animals have feelings and which don’t, which is understandable. It may be for this reason that he is focusing on Fear instead of an emotion more like sadness, which seems more subjective. (Just an aside: I really like the way consciousness is compared to digestion and photosynthesis in biological naturalism).

This choice of consistently using Fear as an example makes sense, since it is an emotion exhibited by most animals, and seems evolutionarily sensible, as every organism needs to protect itself long enough to procreate and pass down its genetic information. The physical response from fear is incredibly strong, causing organisms to jump back (like Darwin and the snake) and have an intense “fight or flight” response like the rats LeDoux mentions.

But as I’m reading this, I can’t help but wonder how understanding Fear, as an emotion (without “feeling”), will help us understand other emotions. What about grief? Grief seems to inspire apathy and debilitating distress. When thinking about it in pleasure vs. displeasure terms, or arousal terms, both emotions are unpleasant, yet fear is an active response and sadness makes one desire absolutely nothing. This is only hearsay and I can’t remember the source, but I’ve heard that many times when a baby elephant dies, the mother will stay with it in mourning, many times until she, too, dies, of starvation or some other cause. How can this possibly work with LeDoux’s theory of emotions as an evolutionary response? How can he reconcile it with the idea of emotions being behavioral responses to the environment in a way that “takes care of fundamental problems of survival?” If anything, this sadness took the organism out of the gene pool.

The discussion of consciousness as a biological phenomenon reminded me of a reading we did in my Origins seminar. We learned that some monkeys have a “fear grin,” a facial expression beyond their control when they are experiencing some kind of threat. In Ray Clarke’s class, we discussed a situation in which two monkeys were confronting one another, and one of them was more afraid and couldn’t help but show this grin on his face. He would repeatedly turn around and use his fingers to smooth his lips down and hide the expression, and then turn back around to fight. It seems he was conscious of his expression, and aware that the other chimp would see it and know what it meant.

The capacity to read faces is an incredibly interesting topic to me. The “Naked Faces” article was riveting. I am curious as to why so many people do so poorly on tests that are targeted at recognizing emotion through facial expression (the majority guessing correctly about 50% of the time), while a small minority shows an innate skill for it. What is even more interesting to me is how the skill can be learned. Once shown the “tricks of the trade,” it seems that almost anyone can decipher more information from a face than they’d thought possible.

Another student and I were struck by the idea of using the FACS (Facial Action Coding System) in political situations, like in the courtroom or analyzing the behavior of politicians. We found the anecdote about Bill Clinton’s “hand-in-the-cookie-jar-love-me-Mommy-because-I’m-a-rascal look” particularly amusing. It’s interesting to consider the ethics of people like Ekman pointing out qualities in a person based purely on facial expression. It seems Ekman is convinced that Clinton “needed to get caught,” and did, but how much of this speculation is hindsight and projection, and how much of it can FACS specialists truly predict? For some reason it reminds me of a sort of Minority Report situation. Can you really know if someone is going to do something wrong before they do it? When Harms shot the potentially dangerous man, did he really know that his intention was to turn the inside of the squad car into an inferno? Are people’s future actions demonstrated by their facial expressions? And when we look at those brief flashes of expression that happen so fast they are hardly detectable, how do we approach the censorship of feelings and the difference between emotion and cognition or that false dichotomy?

Communicating with Emotion

2008-02-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

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?

Sorry About First Post!

2008-02-10T13:36:00.000-08:00

Tessa Noonan—Feb. 10 (Week 4)

In chapter five of The Emotional Brain, LeDoux again investigates the different components of emotional responses, this time evaluating the genetic or biological aspects of emotions with the primarily psychological elements of consciousness that contribute to emotional being. LeDoux is very straightforward about the prevalence of emotional behavior in animals, as he asserts that all animals display fear reactions, for example. However, he does distinguish between innate biological responses that could be considered “emotional” and what we could deem “feelings,” which are relative to “the capacity to be consciously aware of one’s self and the relation of oneself to the rest of the world” (p. 125). LeDoux’s main point follows Darwin, that animals display very similar responses to stimuli across species, and that their emotions are in fact related to each other evolutionarily. However, in light of cultural variation in emotional display rules, for example, LeDoux acknowledges other cultural determining factors that may adjust the biologically based emotions in order to interact in specific ways.

Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, and Gross’s article follows from John Searle’s idea of biological naturalism, which extends conscious states of emotion beyond the neurobiological event of that emotion. This places a greater emphasis on the contextual categorization and appraisal of an emotional event than the pure physical state. They deal with a “core affect,” which seems somewhat akin to LeDoux’s biological emotional core, although that is never explicitly stated. The steps to more complex mental representations of emotions for Barrett et al. rely on surrounding content and contexts in which the emotion and stimulus are based.

I heard about a very interesting study that follows somewhere along these lines, as well as with the Bechara and Naqvi article. In this particular study, a group of researchers went to a high, scary bridge, which is something of a tourist site in Vancouver. The study involved a moderately attractive woman who asked a few questions both to men who were not near the bridge and to men who had just passed over it. The questions themselves were not important in that the study actually documented the man’s reaction to his interviewer: men who had just crossed the fear-inducing bridge found the woman interviewer attractive much more attractive than men who were not near the bridge due to their increased state of physical arousal. When asked about the attractiveness of the interviewer, men frequently attributed this arousal to her rather than to the bridge, demonstrating the easy transference of emotional due to contextual events.

On a separate note, I also found the New Yorker article to be fascinating in its implications. In one of the quotes from Eckman in reviewing tapes of interviews, he says, “He’s not doing it voluntarily,” indicating the elusive and perhaps subconscious nature of our physical emotional reactions. Similarly, he restates a finding he already read about, how creating a facial expression could actually drastically affect the body’s assessment of an emotion and begin to feel that way. This just shows the immense connection between the physical body and the mind in terms of emotions. I wasn’t sure if this position was entirely contradictory to the Barrett et al. article, although there did seem to be some contrasting elements.

Understanding and Experiencing Emotion

2008-02-10T13:33:00.000-08:00

Sylviane--Week 3

2008-02-05T18:41:00.000-08:00

Sylviane Boddy

Like Amy, I found Demasio’s analysis of the prefrontal cortex, and its implications on connections between emotions and decision making, very interesting. This idea, which was also brought up Davidson and Irwin in regard to its role in positive and negative affect, was particularly intriguing to me because while I had already known that the prefrontal cortex played a major role in decision making, I was relatively unaware of its role in emotion. Because emotion plays a large role in decision making, it seems fit that these two functions would be in a sense, anatomically connected. Gage, who appeared to have trouble with emotional reasoning, seems to perfectly personify the link between emotion and decision making, revealing the important affect one has on the other.

2008-02-03T22:25:00.000-08:00

Amy Fleischer

This week we have touched on some important implications for affective neuroscience, including the de-stigmatization of mental illness and potential improvement of treatment for affective dysfunction. Now that we’ve asserted these very practical reasons for the onslaught of questions I am about to present, I feel less guilty for the confusion I may cause!

Common to all of our readings so far has been a concern for the concepts, methods, and implications of conducting research into emotional processes of the brain. The major task of breaking down exactly how we conduct such an inquiry is essential to the topic itself. In other words, our study of the brain is at once conceptual and concrete- it is also an immediate example of how we understand or process information. In this case, of course, our focus is the emotional content of experience and our aim should be to discover the neural correlates of emotion. However, I hope that we can be attentive to the technical content of each study while remaining aware of the more emotional aspects involved in learning. (Despite LeDoux: remember to observe how we perceive and understand information whether it is explicitly emotional or only referentially so.)

In his book, Descartes Error, Demasio probes the function of emotion by telling the story of Phineas Gage, a man who suffered a ghastly blow to the head and lived to tell about it. When a metal rod pierced his skull at tremendous speed, vital parts of his brain were destroyed. After the accident, Gage lost his ability to reason based on emotional information, which also meant that he could not sustain jobs or social relationships. He had lost his personality, an extremely significant yet elusive element of any person’s life.

From his story, we have learned that emotions direct bodily action and organize behavior that is motivationally consistent. Demasio's account suggests potential connections between decision-making and emotional processing. Furthermore, the studies that have followed serve to transform our understanding of the brain: whereas it was previously believed that regions of the brain possessed isolated functions, they actually perform as parts of a system.

In order to try and understand this endlessly complex system, Adolphs has distilled a two-part process consisting of a) the perceptual awareness of emotional information and b) the recognition of emotional meaning. (Before I continue, does this correspond to the assertion that emotional expression takes place in the hypothalamus and emotional experience occurs in the cerebral cortex?) His theory, as well as those of Feldman-Barrett and Wager, also involves a method of categorizing emotion that proves useful because of the problem it contains.

Perhaps I am stumbling over semantics, but I struggled with the debate between “categories” and “dimensions” of emotions. Such a classification does not seem accurate because the resulting groups are not mutually exclusive or fully comprehensive. Barely do they even seem comparable, since the list of “categories” is too limited and the list of “dimensions” too vague. Even though the latter may better account for varieties in emotional experience, it still presents a form of dualistic thinking that is restrictive. For example, approach/withdrawal cannot account for a multilayered experience of love, wherein a person can be compelled and repulsed at the same time. This and other so-called “social” emotions (in the service of communication) are deemed too complex for consideration. However, we should never cease to ask such difficult questions if we intend to understand such difficult topics.

Despite the fact that this type of categorization proved weak as a tool for analysis, it has led to more important questions. In the field of cognition, our attention has been turned to the activity of circuits in the brain. Neuroimaging techniques, such as PET and fMRI, have proved especially useful for exploring connections and finding patterns. A question that drives this method of research is how affective qualities of experience are linked with autonomic and behavioral control systems during the genesis of emotion. More specifically, one might ask (as MacLean has already) how these qualities unfold in the establishment and maintenance of psychosomatic diseases. Based on further research, another question posed in this weeks’ reading asks how the limbic system depends upon or interacts with the neocortex.

Over the years, the theory of localization has been challenged by theories of connectivity. Language becomes an issue, not only at the level of human interaction, but within individuals as well, which brings our curiosity to how regions of the brain may speak foreign languages to various other parts of the same brain. What results is a lack of communication between conscious and unconscious levels of experience.

A potential metaphor for our transformation in understanding that began with phrenology, or the study of bumps on the head, and evolved into the field of affective neuroscience might go like this: the early phase is like studying geography, the political divisions of land on earth’s surface, while the second phase attempts to be concerned with planet earth at every level. Not only might the inquirer of the second practice ask how continents are defined, or where tectonic plates exist, but he or she may also ask why it is that they move in the first place and what are the potential consequences of this action.

The fact there are so many levels at which to study the earth is exciting and overwhelming! Likewise, the brain is infinitely complex and invites equally complex methods of examination. Much of this discussion presupposes that emotion can be categorized in the first place. What do you think? Have we approximated a system already? I would like to discuss this and the many implications of neuroimaging in class. While I appreciate a very tangible approach to understanding emotions, it seems like technology is advancing at a pace that exceeds our ability to understand and use it well.

Ledoux and Damasio

2008-02-03T21:46:00.001-08:00

Oliver Edwards

1/3/08

I wonder if I’m the only one who felt that Ledoux was a bit harsh with James’ theory of emotion. I was actually confused about how he seemingly refutes James in the previous chapter, claiming that James was wrong in assuming that emotional responses take place before any conscious awareness. It seems Ledoux has constantly courted the notion that the majority of emotional life is unconscious, yet he shoots James’ theory down on the basis of the very opposite claim. In the fourth chapter, Ledoux says flat out that James was wrong in claiming that the cerebral cortex was needed to produce an emotional response. First of all, I’m not sure if that was part of James’ theory. He may have claimed that the production of ‘feeling’ required the cortex, but it seems that James never got as far as localization of emotion. He was more interested in the nature of how it functioned.

I was very interested in the difference in style and approach between Ledoux and Damasio. Damasio’s writing is much more centered around the telling of a good story. He spends two chapters discussing Phineas Gage, a subject that Ledoux maybe would have crammed into two paragraphs. But I don’t think his ventures into storytelling are a waste of time, mainly because they bring us towards an intimacy with the process of neuroscience. Understanding how Gage’s injury affected his personality, how it made him suffer, really brought home the notion that certain very specific parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others) are extremely important for the subtle interplay that we call our emotional life. Damasio unravels his theory of the emotional brain very carefully, revealing only with extreme tact his own position on the subject of emotional neuroscience.

It is interesting to note that Damasio does not spend much time enumerating the many theories of emotion that he judges to be wrong. Whereas Ledoux gives us a kind of history of failures, leading perhaps towards a constructive process of understanding, Damasio seems to stick to cases and findings that will support a theory that he seems to be pretty confident about. Although he also discusses phrenology, and has the same sense of humor about it, Damasio brings it up only to demonstrate that Gall was in fact correct about the notion of brain localization. The merit of Damasio’s writing is not the encyclopedic quality with which Ledoux constructs his book, but in the richness of his stories.

I was very interested in the case of Elliott, and would be interested to know how much more has been gleaned about emotional neuroscience through studying people like him. The damage caused to his prefrontal cortex seemed to create quite a distinct psychological phenomenon, that of completely sound judgment and understanding of emotion without the ability to decide on an issue involving emotional preference. Did he remind anyone else of the women in James’ What is an Emotion? It seems that with the advent of PET and MRI, more precise evaluations of brain anatomy and function could be executed in the study of people like Elliott Would it be effective to examine the brains of healthy but affectively varied subjects? To what extent could MRI studies evaluate the abnormal emotional behavior of people with diseases like Aspergers and schizophrenia?

emotions and reason

2008-02-03T21:31:00.000-08:00

Endira Ferrara

One of the most interesting themes in the reading for this week I found to be the idea that reason and emotion intersect in various parts of the brain structure. In "Descartes Error," the suggestion that certain psychological illnesses tend to damage not only one's ability to make decisions, but also one's capacity to exhibit feeling, reveals that the respective realms of rationality and emotion are linked. The idea that the systems in the brain related to the thinking process are the same as those which govern emotion is contrary to the common assumption that reason and emotion counteract one another.

LeDoux describes some of the various theories concerning the structure of the brain, which help to explain the link between reason and emotion. For example, the Papez hypothesis advocates that sensory inputs absorbed by the brain split into different systems - one into the stream of thought (the cortex), and another into the stream of feeling (the hypothalamus). In other words, emotions arise out of direct sensory experience, and are processed as both thought and feeling. Through the stream of thought, the sensations are processed into information consisting of memory or perception of that experience. It makes sense to perceive of the act of processing emotional experience occurring simultaneously with behavioral expression. The fact that one exhibits emotion and attains a consciousness of the feeling itself stems from the thought process, and in part from the desire to understand and categorize the feeling. This may be one way to explain the notion that the thought and emotional processes in the brain are inextricably linked. The attempt to rationalize, understand, or categorize experience in terms of emotion also demonstrates the way in which reason and emotion are connected.

Another important theory described by LeDoux is that of MacLean's, which suggests that emotions are inherently involved in the maintaining of survival for the human being. They are the result of visceral sensations (i.e. those that are instinctual), and thus reflect the evolution of the brain. MacLean argues that the visceral brain "eludes the grasp of the intellect because its animalistic and primitive structure makes it impossible to communicate in verbal terms (p.96, The Emotional Brain)." If this is the case, then emotions stem from an arguably conscious, reasonable place - in part, the desire to communicate that which is essential to human survival and unable to be communicated in words.

LeDoux's conclusion, however, that there may not be one emotional system in the brain, but instead several, does leave room for the possibility that these emotional systems may be connected to the more reasonable, practical, decision-making aspects of the brain. The article on the "Structure of Emotions" describes emotions as psychological events, which are the product of an elaborate process within the brain. LeDoux stresses the desire on behalf of scientists to locate the emotional system's position in the brain, and the concept of emotion as a process or event also suggests that emotions are involved in a variety of systems with the brain and are not localized to a specific place.

Interconnectivity in the Brain (Week 3)

2008-02-03T20:18:00.000-08:00

Maggie Fenwood

The Feeling Brain

1/31/08

I found this week’s readings interesting if not purely for the fact of the diverse body of theories that are still influencing current neuroscience. I also want to say that I found it interesting that Wager and Barrett also quote Shakespeare in their article. I found it to be a nice connection to Darwin and pointed the importance of understanding emotion as it is manifested in scientific and literary works alike.

I felt like LeDoux gave a good account of how emotion came to be considered an important part of what goes on in the brain. He does this by starting with concepts of phrenology and then moving on the theories of the limbic system. We get a sense of the origins of neuroscience of emotion and how these theories can be adapted and cited in a contemporary setting. LeDoux emphasizes the importance of these origins but also explains their inadequacy. In this chapter her focuses on the Limbic system and where he feels it goes wrong in terms of localizing brain function. Now that we have access to neuroimaging technology we can see that the limbic system theory does not account for all of the emotion functions in the brain. So instead of localizing brain function so exclusively, LeDoux suggests that brain regions pertaining to emotion also have functions which interact with a larger system. This seems to make the most sense to me because of the interconnections and overlapping in brain activation that have been shown by MRI and fMRI. Given these assumptions LeDoux makes the conclusion that there might be more than one emotional system in the brain. He goes on to give examples of when parts of the brain are removed certain functions remain intact such as in the case of ‘psychic blindness’ where the removal of the temporal lobe leaves sight intact but inhibits the sense of fear toward psychologically significant stimuli. It seems to be a more practical way to look at a phenomenon such as this; in terms of subsystems that contribute to overall brain function. For example, vision is not solely localized in the visual cortex it is a necessary part of the system that makes seeing possible, so there can be other contributing systems to sight that is not solely located in the portion of the brain that is directly connected to the eyes.

I felt LeDoux’s chapter related to the Barret and Wager meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies in that they were also emphasizing the evidence of a more integrative system in which emotion is not just localized in one particular area. In their section on ‘specificity’ they cite a study by Wager et. al (2003) in which they found that “many of the same regions showing emotion-category effects also showed specialization for the broader category of withdrawal related affects” (p.82). The example they give is that fear-related stimuli may activate the dorsal region of the amygdala because they are part of a broader class of aversive stimuli that engage in that region. So, as well as being an important area for memory consolidation and emotion processing the amygdala is visually responsive so it can compute the significance of stimuli.

If I haven’t totally misinterpreted this information, then my question is: does this mean that emotion could be registered in a number of different regions of the brain depending on the stimulus? Wager and Barrett cite studies where very specific brain regions are activated for specific emotions, however the Phan et al. (2002) and the Murphy et al. (2003) studies do not show the all the same findings. This leads me to back to the more integrative approach LeDoux talks about. It also reminds me of the discussion we had last class in which it was brought up that it is difficult to put emotion and subsequent events caused by it into a linear order. It seems like going back and forth between stages of appraisal, cognition, reaction, etc., should be taken into account instead of a strictly linear view. So, the interaction of different brain subsystems should be taken into account as well, when trying to localize brain function. Perhaps, just as it is not so simple to pin point the order of emotion stages, it also not so clear cut where these functions occur in the brain and whether maybe different stimuli activate different regions even if the emotional reaction is the same.

Emotional Underpinnings (Week 2)

2008-01-29T16:42:00.000-08:00

Tessa Noonan-Jan. 29, 2008

Perhaps the most fascinating component of this week's reading (a difficult task to be sure) was in LeDoux's review of Nisbett & Wilson's work, and his subsequent work with Michael Gazzaniga. These experiments examined the deep emotional content that is experienced and then labeled and qualified. However, such research began to evidence that much of this labeling was often wrong, a type of guess at explaining the stimuli and the response. This was particularly evident in patients with split brains, who had no ability to communicate right brain function, but could somehow still experience the emotional content of their experiences (an amazing phenomenon in itself). After providing the right side with a stimulus, LeDoux states that "time after time, the left hemisphere made up explanations as if it knew why the response was performed" (p. 32). The almost subliminal quality of these pervasive emotions, as well as the left brains reaction to justify such an action go far to interpret the brain's emotional content.

Along these lines, I found the biological connects that Darwin asserted and Ekman, Sorenson, and Freisen supported to be very interesting. The fact that there are ways in which the entire human species experiences and interprets emotion similarly is quite amazing. However, I think that some of this research, particularly the article on cultural displays of emotion, minimizes the extent to which the interpretation of emotional forces plays a part in the experience and conceptions of emotions as a whole.

Appraisal and Intuition, Classification of States of Mind

2008-01-29T15:54:00.002-08:00

According to Ledoux as demonstrated by Zajonc's studies , it is "possible for the brain to know that something is good or bad before it knows exactly what it is" (69) I wonder if this initial appraisal is the basis of intuition.

I find Ledoux's classification of motivation and personality as "other mental processes" (68) as opposed to emotion somewhat problematic because aren't mental states of mind such as these based on and created from emotional experiences?

Darwin's Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals

2008-01-27T22:07:00.000-08:00

Aiden Bussey

I found Darwin's Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals to be both interesting and somewhat complicated. I found myself wishing that I had time to read all the chapters rather than just the beginning and end; Darwin seemed to be aware of many of the points I felt were problematic. One of these is the way in which Darwin attempts to generalize the physical effects of emotions. For instance, Darwin says that fear causes paralysis and inaction, which it sometimes does. But fear can also be a tremendous motivating factor. Similarly, he says that fear robs the individual of his or her strength, where people under the influence of fear can be capable of extreme, sometimes superhuman, feats of strength. Darwin is certainly aware of this discrepancy and bothered by it -- he is sure, for instance, to qualify his statements about exciting or depressive emotions saying that all of the depressive emotions are capable of causing either short-term excitement or excitement when experienced in the extreme. It seems that one question these discrepancies raises for me is whether the terms being used are really appropriate. The fault may lie either in the classification of emotion -- grouping two separate emotions as "fear" -- or in the categories the emotions are being put into -- exciting versus depressive. Because Darwin considers excitement to be a central quality of the emotions in determining the form of the expression (exciting emotions leading to an overflow of nerve force and the activation of involuntary and habitual gestures) this issue needs some sort of resolution.

One thing I found very interesting about Darwin was his use of literature. In just the section that we read, Shakespeare appears at least twice. Importantly, the Shakespeare quotations are not merely decorative -- they do not merely adorn the beginning of a chapter and set the mood or provide a sort of accessible front to the public. Instead, the Shakespeare quotations are regarded as having something centrally important and scientifically valid to say about the human experience of emotion. Darwin uses Shakespeare as an appeal to the audience: we know this is so; look what Shakespeare said.

I was a little hesitant to accept Darwin's proposed evolutionary path describing the acquisition of emotional expression in social animals and found it to be very similar to Lamarkism's inheritance of acquired characteristics. Much of Darwin's argument hinges on the idea that voluntary actions precede habitual actions, which precede inherited or instinctual actions. Darwin to not take the reverse route very seriously at all -- he does not expend very much time or space in dismissing the idea that emotional expression may progress from reflex toward voluntary actions, though perhaps I misunderstood his argument. To me, it makes more sense that emotional expression and emotional experience would grow out of a reflexive actions in part because this is the progression that seems to occur in individual animals (human or non-human) -- Darwin talks at length about infants' more extreme and instinctive screaming in discomfort as being the source of frowning in both anger and sorrow -- and reflexive actions are present in much simpler organisms than consciousness or willpower. Reflexes are simpler than conscious or voluntary actions. While Darwin's argument does make some sense from where he starts -- "lower" mammals -- when one considers the entire advancement of evolution and the wider range of behaviors that must be accounted for, it is hard to accept voluntary or consciously chosen actions as a source. I do not disagree with Darwin's argument that emotional expression may be physically or instinctively based and inherited from parent to offspring, and I also do not disagree that an understanding of emotional expression may be similarly inherited, but I do consider the arguments he uses to explain the evolutionary development of emotional expression in need of expansion and especially to more fully and thoroughly refute alternate paths of development.

Week 2 Post--Sylviane

2008-01-27T20:39:00.000-08:00

Sylviane Boddy

I found one of the most compelling aspects of this week’s readings on the evolution of emotions to be the concept of the origin of emotions, a topic that is quite controversial. I was intrigued by James’s discussion in What is an Emotion?, in which he sequence of stimuli, body response and emotion. His rather unorthodox hypothesis that was the stimuli causes a body response that causes the emotion, such as you are scared of a bear because you run. This argument, which I feel has at least some merit, stayed in the back of my mind while I did this weeks readings and found that I was able to clarify some of my own feelings towards this standpoint.

The reading that I found most interesting was Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen’s article on autonomic nervous system activity. This paper discussed an experiment in which nervous system activity was recorded as participants relived emotional experience or constructed, muscle by muscle, facial expressions that are prototypes of specific emotions. It determined that not only are there autonomic differences between four negative emotions (disgust, anger, fear, sadness) but also that constructing emotional faces produces autonomic activity. This finding initially seems to support James’s theory that the physical reaction occurs before the emotional one, since creating the physical state of facial muscles can induce bodily responses that constitute emotional responses. However, upon further reading and thought, reveals that although some autonomic activity is generated, it is impossible for individuals to produce the complex patterns of autonomic activity that truly make up and emotional reaction. The minimal reactions that were produced and record in this study, such as heart rate and muscle tension, although usually indicative of some sort of emotion, do not necessarily create an emotion.

This idea was reinforced by the writings of Darwin, in which he detailed the emotional responses of many animals. For example, he describes a hostile dog walking towards a man and how his head is raised, tail erect, and walks stiffly. As I read through Darwin’s accounts of animals’ responses in different emotional states, I realized that many of the physical characteristic of these states overlap amongst emotions, and that it must be more than a combination of traits to cause a true emotion. The same is true of humans; a physical state of shaking and sweating may be found in individuals who are experiencing fear or anxiety. Similarly, activities such as exercising can cause an increased heart rate and sweating but do not result in an emotional response. Further, the physical reactions that occur must themselves start in the brain as well. All of this evidence leads me to think that the sequence of an emotional response must be stimulus to emotion to body response. Perhaps my biological background is creating a bias, but it seems illogical, in light of this weeks readings, to think that mere physical state can cause an emotion. I am curious if there would a way to test this idea, or if it has already been tested. Since physical states, such as muscle tension, would ultimately start in motor control regions of the brain, would it be possible to monitor which neural activity is happening first? Studies similar to the one conducted by Ekman, et al. but using more precise measure of emotional and physical state, such as MRI for example, would, I believe, reveal a great deal.

1/27/08

2008-01-27T19:47:00.001-08:00

Frances Clayton

I will use Darwin’s three principles as an outline to discuss three different things that came up for me in this weeks reading. In the first principle I found a strong link between Darwin and LeDoux. As for the second principle, I am not quite sure I grasp all of Darwin’s reasoning and will discuss my major source of questioning. In the third principle, specifically in the discussion of the “power of association” I felt that there were some specific implications for clinical work. (This is certainly not to imply that each of these topics is limited to only one of the principles.)

I. Movements which are serviceable to gratify desire or relieve sensation and are performed often become so habitual that they become innate or inherited and are performed whether servable or not.

LeDoux’s seventh theme of the nature of emotions says “emotions are things that happen to us rather than things we will to occur.” (pg. 19) While he admits that we people do things in an attempt to control their emotions and may succeed in mediating them, he clearly states that emotions are stronger than our will. “While conscious control over emotions is weak, emotions can flood consciousness.” (pg.19) It is true that, at least in my experience, I have not been able to will emotions away. It is almost as if the more we try to make an emotion disappear the more aware, or conscious, we are of it.
LeDoux does not only make this point, he then attributes it to the stage in the evolutionary process that we currently find ourselves. He says that at this point the brain has much stronger “wiring” from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems than from cognitive to emotional. While LeDoux does not indulge us enough to search for the reasoning to this, I believe it can be found in Darwin’s first principle.
Darwin’s first principle states that actions are at some point conscious and serviceable and then due to repetition become habit and eventually are so habitual that they become innate and inherited from one generation to the next. Why then is the connection stronger from emotional to cognitive than from cognitive to emotional? It seems to me that this is evolutionarily necessary. Is the emotional response not more necessary for survival than the ability to stifle that emotional response?
Darwin uses the term “reflex actions” to refer to an action which excited muscles or glands into action that can take place outside of consciousness. To illustrate reflex actions he uses an experience he had with a puff adder at a zoo. Standing close to the thick glass plate between himself and the snake, he was determined not to “start” back if the snake struck at him. Despite all of his determination, the snake struck and he jumped. “My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced,” he says.
In looking at this through the evolutionary perspective of Darwin and in regards to his first principle, it could be inferred that a serviceable action (jumping back from a dangerous snake) has over time become innate in humans. If humans are to servive, they must avoid such dangers. While it is necessary for survival that we react emotionally, it is not necessary for survival that we are able to mediate this reaction. Had the snake not been behind glass, and the reaction not been immediate, the result could have been fatal. This is a necessary action. However, there is no real danger to Darwin “starting” when the threat is actually not there. Darwin’s will and reason were powerless against the expression of emotion. There is little control over emotional reactions – regardless of the determination.
LeDoux says that “at this point in our evolutionary history” it is the case that “conscious control over emotions is weak, emotions can flood consciousness.” This phrasing seems to imply that as our evolutionary history continues, this may not be the case. It seems clear to me that in our evolutionary history, humans must first develop the habit of serviceable actions. This is indeed more necessary than the ability to tell when those actions need not be employed.

II. Antithesis – A state of mind leads to serviceable action and the opposite state of mind leads to opposite action though they have no service

While this principle of antithesis seems clear to me, I feel as if I am missing a piece. As I have read it, there seem to be times that it is a chicken or egg argument. His point as I have read it, is that when one state of mind causes a serviceable action, the opposite state of mind causes the opposite reaction though it may be of no service.
One of the examples he uses is the dog approaching another dog or a person in a hostile frame of mind. This dog approaches with a stiff body, staring eyes, hair on end, head raised, ears and tail erect, canine teeth exposed, etc. The antithetical expression, when the dog sees her master, is shown through a flexible body, smooth hair, loosely hanging lips, eyes darting around, ears low, tail wagging, head lowered and crouching.
For this to support Darwin’s second principle we must suppose that he intends the first set of actions, those of the hostile approach, to be serviceable and those actions in approaching the master simply to be the antithesis of the hostile ones. Possibly it is that the raised hair, stiff body, erect ears and tail, etc. make the dog seems larger, stronger and therefore more threatening to the opponent. The exposed canine teeth show the threat of a bite and the growl shows displeasure of some sort. Ok, this all still seems to make sense. That being the serviceable expression, of course the others are the antithesis.
However, how can we tell which ones are serviceable. It seems that the place to start is with the aggressive necessary actions of protection. Why? Could it not as easily be said that the crouching, lowered ears, wagging tail, hair down, and flexible body make it clear that the dog appear smaller and therefore less threatening? Could the serviceable actions not as easily be in the dogs approach to the master? Could it be said that it is serviceable for the dog to appear submissive as to protect itself from attack?
My initial thought was that the expression in the approach to the master was a form of communication in opposition to the serviceable actions of the hostile approach. But then I realized it could as easily be argued that the hostile approach is simply a means of communication showing opposition to the friendly approach. While I am not sure I totally disagree with the second principle, it seems impossible to me to prove that one is more serviceable than the other.
Darwin seems to address this when he says that “it is incredible to think that they (dogs) could ever have deliberately thought of drawing back and depressing their ears,…because they knew that these movements stood in direct opposition to those assumed under an opposite and savage frame of mind.” How is it so unlikely that they “think” of this more so than it is likely that they “think” that holding tail erect and stiffening the body show hostility?

III. Direct action of an excited nervous system on the body independent of the will and partially independent, although influenced by habit.

This third principle, especially the discussion of the power of association (also mentioned in discussion of the first principle), made me think of a specific case of Freud’s. The case dealt with a woman who could not drink water and was therefore physically suffering. During treatment, it was discovered that she had seen a cat drink out of her water glass. This was so incredibly repulsive to her that from that moment on, she was incapable of consuming water. This memory had been suppressed but once it was brought to light and dealt with, the woman was again able to drink water.
Darwin talks about how the power of association can be one reason for the involuntary actions resulting from an excited nervous system. He says that a “moderate amount of exertion will tend to act on the heart; an on the principle of association…we may feel nearly sure that any sensation or emotion, as great pain or rage, which has habitually led too much muscular action” will also act on the heart.
It seems to me that when you combine Darwin’s third principle with his earlier discussion of the power of association, there is an explanation for psychosomatic symptoms. In the above example, the association between the experience and water caused an emotional response even though the experience was not in consciousness. Independent of the will, but through association, the body responded.

Week 2 Post

2008-01-27T14:39:00.001-08:00

Sara Dholakia

I thoroughly enjoyed the chapters we read out of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals for many reasons; Darwin presents many of the ideas I had been pondering in regards to facial expression in an eloquent and articulate way, and to prove his point, uses everyday examples that anyone can relate to, whether they be a part of the lay public or of the scientific community.

Regarding the first principle Darwin expounds is “The Principle of Serviceable Associated Habits” (29), and this essentially asserts that complex actions directly or indirectly serve certain states of mind to relieve or gratify sensations, and whenever that state of mind is aroused, through sheer force of habit, those complex actions are launched. This principle implicitly addresses the presence and force of the unconscious, which LeDoux discusses. This is of course not the unconscious of Freud, but the cognitive unconscious. Darwin permits that some of the aforementioned actions may be suppressed through an exercise of will, but one would necessarily have to be aware of the action taking place.

The second principle Darwin puts forth is “The Principle of Antithesis” (29), which takes into account the first principle then claims that when states of mind opposite from the ones causing the actions mentioned in the first principle are aroused, there is a “strong, involuntary tendency” to perform actions that are of an opposite nature. Upon first reading this, I was not sure if I agreed with this theory or not, but it must be said that Darwin offers many compelling examples such as that of the cat and dog. The cat, both domestic and wild, when ready to pounce, crouches down, bristling somewhat, etc; this reaction is clearly an evolutionary adaptation, allowing the cat to spring into action from its crouching position upon seeing its target. The opposite reaction, seen in domesticated cats, is that of affection towards its caretaker. In this situation, the cat perks up its ears and tail and perhaps rubs itself on the caretaker. In the wild, I can see no need for any such action, and so it follows that it is indeed very possible that this reaction is merely the opposite of the attack position.

The third and last principle that Darwin offers is “The Principle of Actions Due to the Constitution of the Nervous System, Independently from the First of the Will, and Independently of a Certain Extent of Habit” (29). For this one, I had to check dictionary.com for the definition of “sensorium,” which means the seat of sensation in the brain. We now know that there is not just one area designated as the “seat of sensation,” and that different parts of the brain are employed for different types of sensation. Given this, on a technical level, Darwin’s theory is false, and as such, requires no discussion.

To conclude, this reading certainly gave me a lot to think about, and I am incredibly interested to know what everyone else thought about this, and if I was the only one persuaded by Darwin.

Reflections cognition & the unconscious

2008-01-27T05:44:00.000-08:00

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.