Molly Moody

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.