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.
3 comments:
I wasn't really sure how Qui's "Does it Hurt?" precisely fit in with the week's theme of social neuroscience. It seemed that it might fit more appropriately under hedonics or... I'm not even sure. It seems that physical pain, while sharing many things in common with emotional pain, is nonetheless a distinct phenomenon. The link seemed to be subjective feeling - the subjective experience of a stimulus, whether of pain or of emotional physiology. One thing I look forward to hear in class is how people saw "Does it Hurt" as continuous with the rest of the articles we read for this week.
Your posting highlighted the themes that I found most striking as well. The infants feeling actual physical pain when seperated from their mother resonated with me as an interesting survival adaptation. Additionally, the chameleon effect has always fascinated me, especially when ever I seen a marked change in my boyfriend when he is with his friends. He adopts their habits (both good and bad), presumably for the sake of male bonding. I feel that if it is true that men are particularly suceptible to these social adaptations it is perhaps because verbal communication is generally viewed as being difficult for men?
MM, WHO is your Penn roomie??? and what is the "electric slide"....guess I'm not in the same "circle of vocab words"
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