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

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

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!'

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

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

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

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

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.