Oliver North
Junior Member
Originally posted by Ascendancy
Why don't you lay it all out there for me then? I thought it was simple enough that my original stating that certain responses to the emotions people are feeling would indicate the strength of those emotions but clearly that just does not get it done. If you would be so kind as to present a nice clinical definition of emotion since it seems that is needed for this to go any further it would be greatly appreciated. I see it in no way to be necessary because if it were then there would be no point in anyone who doesn't have a psych degree posting here just as there would be no point in anyone posting in the theories of the universe thread if he lacks an undergraduate degree in physics, yet somehow that thread did not devolve in the same way.
The difference is, in a subject like physics, laymen are typically more open to things because they recognize they do not know, whereas psychology is inherently a subject that people believe they understand through basic life experiences. The term is folk psychology, and the general public believes things that would be comparable to the fringe quantum mumbo-jumbo in physics, which you have had no problem with other posters calling out as such [in fact, you accused a group of members of having an inflated ego when Aster took a joke about physics a little too seriously].
The concept of "emotions" is very similar. While in a colloquial sense, we can say "emotion" and have a general idea of what is meant, but if we are trying to talk about what emotions actually are, something I would consider a prerequisite of determining which is strongest, it might be nice to define the term in a way that includes things like sadness/sorrow/etc (an emotion which can be associated with little-to-no overt changes in behaviour). Even when discussing fear, in a social situation, fear can make individuals withdrawn and quiet, which according to your definitions would not register as an emotional experience because we see less behaviour.
When you scratch the surface of the issue, it becomes incredibly complex, I don't see why you are upset about this. You are presented with an opportunity to expand how you understand human cognition and you get upset at me for trying to demonstrate how complicated it is. I'm sorry you don't like the fact that, at a cognitive or neurological level, the concept of "emotions" becomes hard to pin down, but it is hardly my fault, and if you don't want to address these complications, you are welcome to not reply to me, as this is sort of the aspect of the conversation I find interesting.
Originally posted by Ascendancy
Again, since we are fully off track as is please provide this perfect definition that we may proceed further. My lay position of offering subjects responses as an indication of the severity of emotional impact is clearly inadequate.
well, for one, it is entirely inadequate, so get off of whatever martyr complex you are trying to appeal to.
Secondly, I have already posted a fair bit about my ideas on emotion in this thread, so this attack against me as if I'm not presenting my own ideas is a little silly [re: see the other thread where you accuse me of this too]. I'll recap some of the more interesting points I've made previously and try to summarize as to why I think this topic is a fool's errand to begin with:
Originally posted by Oliver North
to emphasize how complex a question like this is, let me give an example.Piet Mondrian is an artist who made vibrant paintings of large square blocks of colour. I personally find them incredibly beautiful, though this is unimportant.
There are experimental tasks that researchers can do in order to occupy a person's attention. This is actually not all that hard. Say you have a display of red C's and green Os, like 10 of each. Then, there is a target, a red O (the idea being that you must attend to both the colour and the shape of the object in order to find the target, and it occupies your visual system, because it can't find the target by only looking for red things or O shaped things, it has to mix the info together).
So, here is the task. Subjects look through the search display of Os and Cs for the red O target. as they do this, a Mondrian-esque picture is displayed below the search display.
After finding the target in a number of searches, subjects are shown various mondrian-esque pictures, which they have to give a subjective evaluation of. By selecting abstract colour based pictures, it reduces the chance that a subject will remember an exact piece shown during the display (obviously display pictures were randomized, lest one thinks only the less beautiful ones were presented, and yes, there is a chance that, for each observer, the pictures displayed would have been subjectively less beautiful, though with statistical analysis [and considering the paper was published in peer review] the probability of this is far less than of the conclusions I'm discussing).
Subjects would rank the pictures that had been present during the search as less beautiful and inspiring than those that had not been. This shows that an emotional response to stimuli is based largely on the context that stimuli was presented in.
So, with relation to this thread, defining what constitutes and emotion or emotional power is going to be a difficult hurdle to begin with. Adding the fact that attentional prioritization and immediate context have an affect on emotional processing gives yet another layer of complexity to the issue.
Originally posted by Oliver North
This is potentially the case in humans as well. Fight or flight reactions and anxiety have unique cortical representations, and affect the body differently than other emotions.There is also the idea that emotions are more representative of our narrative description for a state of arousal, or even just our physical posture. Studies have concluded that people who force the muscles in their face to form a smile report more positive feeling.
Originally posted by Oliver North
I personally am swaying more this way, the strength of an emotion has nothing to do with the emotion itself, but the context in which the emotional systems activate. Our later interpretation of this context will tell us what emotion it was we were experiencing, but that will be unrelated or at the very least, subsequent to the subjective experience of arousal.Maybe what I'm saying is that emotions don't have strength, our reaction to stimuli does. It is more likely that the strength of that reaction determines our interpretation of the emotion than the other way around.
Basically, the way I see it, emotions are less a thing we experience and more of a story we tell ourselves to explain why we are at a certain state of physiological arousal. The reasons why fear and disgust or things like that are so primal and visceral in our experiences, is because they have unique neurological pathways that are only activated in fearful or disgusting situations, so the story we tell is very easy, however, there is what is known as a misattribution bias, where people are actually very poor at identifying the source of their emotion. For instance, a person might recognize they are fearful, but be unable to accurately determine what they are fearful of, and will attribute their emotional state to anything nearby that satisfies the emotional narrative they tell themselves.
What we might call "basic" emotions are generally more communicative tools, so facial expressions, those things. They aren't about the experience of an emotion, but about letting other members of our social group know what behaviour to expect from you.
If you really need me, after this, to put a stake down and give some type of definition, I'd say it has to do much more with noumenous experiences an individual has after these narratives and such. Unfortunately this experience is non-measurable in a way that would let us define "strength" outside of any individual at any particular time. So, we could see the activation in a person's amygdala (thought of as part of the emotional center of the brain), but that only will tell us that there is some emotional processing going on, and the individual's subjective experience of that emotion is going to be tempered by memory, attention, and a host of other things, that prevents us from saying "more activation in the amygdala means more noumenous experience of emotion". Large sample studies where you paired emotional states with activation (this is in theory, such a study would be inhibatively complicated to do, as it would require reliably inducing emotional states in a subject who is in an fMRI, not to mention the ethics of making people feel bad [no, I'm not kidding]) in some type of self report measure might give you an idea of how an it works for each individual, but it would be only relevant to the tested contexts, as a change in memory or attentional content will change the experience of the emotion.
/phew
getting long, new post for the last bit