Lecture 20: ch. 14 Emotions IV specific and complex emotions

How are you feeling?  Increasingly complex answers to a simple question.

20 emotions

Basic Emotions

• Fear
  • What are you afraid of? Survey researchers have suggested that most of us have 3-5 irrational (excessive, out of proportion to any actual danger[physical or psychological]) fears
  • Fear: specific stimulus, clear action tendency (escape, avoidance)
    • possibly develops out of Moro reflex: unlearned reaction to loud noises or sudden loss of support, reflex disappears over first year of life and is replaced with startle response, which has both respondent and operant elements (unlearned and learned aspects).
    • reduction of fear usually functions as negative reinforcement
    • exposure reduces conditioned fears; knowledge and skills reduce realistic fears
    • and sometimes we seek out fear inducing stimuli (horror movies, roller coaster rides, bungee jumping)
  • Phobia: An extreme form of fear that is . . .
    • Mark’s 1969 definition of a phobia: A phobia is a special form of fear which, is out of proportion to demands of the situation, cannot be explained or reasoned away, is beyond voluntary control, leads to avoidance of the feared situation, persists over an extended period of time, and is unadaptive.
    • Miller, Barrett, & Hample (1974) offered a slight modification/addition to this definition for children: Is not age or stage specific.
    • AGE TYPICAL FEARS
    • birth – 6 months ……… (Moro reflex)……. loud noise, loss of support
    • .5 – .75 years ………………… ……………………………….. Strangers
    • (1) 2 – 4 years …………………………………………………. Separation
    • 1.25 – 4 years ………………………………………………….. Creatures, Bad people,
    • ……………………………………………………………………………….. Death, Being alone
    • 2 years ………………………………………………………………… Toilet
    • 3 years …………………………………………………………………. Animals
    • 4 years …………………………………………………………………. Dark
    • 5 – 6 years …………………………………………………………. School
    • 11 years ………………………………………………………………. Injury, Natural events
    • ………………………………………………………………………………… Social, All fears
    • 12 years ………………………………………………………………. Social, Sexual
    • 19+ years …………………………………………………………….. Natural events
    • Treatment of fears: exposure (unreinforced trials)–face your fears and these diminish, run away and these exacerbate
  • PTSD is a reaction to severe stress; symptoms of chronic arousal, emotional numbing, intrusive reexperiencing; may reflect derailed/malfunction of “normal” adjustment to stress
    • Diaster Survivor Syndrome: stage 1: emotionally numb, hyper-suggestible, compliant; stage 2: emotionally more agitated, talkative (about experience), more “oppositional”; stage 3: return to baseline emotional/behavioral characteristics
      • stage 2 kind of looks like systematic desensitization (repeated exposure, emotional reprocessing, extinction of excessive arousal)
    • A continual question: Why doesn’t PTSD extinguish?
    • Empirically supported treatments of PTSD: Prolonged Exposure (Foa); Emotional Processing Therapy (Resick); PTSD (Shapiro)
  • Joseph LeDoux (among others) has argued for a, “two-system” view of “fear” (LeDoux & Pine, 2016; LeDoux, 2019): one set of brain circuits generating conscious feelings (primarily involving cortical elements) and one set of brain circuits controlling behavioral and physiological responses to threat (mostly involving subcortical regions, such as the amygdala, although certain cortical areas interact with and regulate processing in these regions). For LeDoux the term “fear” refers to the conscious experience of a threat, either immediate or imminent; and he refers to the “behaviors that occur in response to threats as defensive behaviors, and to the peripheral changes in physiology that support defensive behaviors as defensive physiological adjustments.” (LeDoux & Pine, 2016, p. 1084),
• Anxiety: no identifiable threat, no clear response available
  • “on alert”, general arousal, worry
  • LeDoux refers to anxiety, “to describe the feeling that occurs when the source of harm is uncertain or is distal in space or time.” (LeDoux & Pine, 2016, p. 1084)
  • Clinical manifestations
    • Generalized Anxiety Disorder: feeling worried, tense, anxious most of the time (<50% of the time); causes impairment (sleep, concentration, social); not caused by other explanations (depression, other mood disorders, substance abuse, medical conditions, environmental) or exclusive to occurrence of other anxiety disorders
    • Panic Disorder: acute anxiety reactions without precipitating cause (client may believe there are causes)
  • Intolerance of Uncertainty as a risk factor for anxiety
    • DeSerisy et al. (2021) review difficulties with traditional conceptualizations of anxiety, diagnostic categorization, and treatment of anxiety disorders
      • They note that, “Anxiety is a universal human experience and occasional anxiety, . . . ., serves both motivating and protective roles in everyday life.” (p. 346)
      • “patients rarely exhibit symptoms of only one anxiety disorder” (p. 346)
      • and, “longitudinal studies of anxiety suggest that anxiety presentations changes across the lifespan” (p. 346)
    • they (and others) suggest that at an Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) model of anxiety provides a useful conceptualization, incorporating both both cognitive and behavioral theories to explain the development of anxiety symptoms: “theorists posit that IU is the cognitive schema through which individuals perceive uncertainty in the environment, while anxiety or worry is the subsequent mental reaction or coping response to the perceived uncertainty” (pp. 346-347)
      • high IU is associated with both appraisal biases and avoidance behaviors
      • individuals high in IU “demonstrate global, stable, and intrinsic attributions of uncertain (and therefore negatively perceived) events and extrinsic attributions for more certain (and therefore positively perceived) events (p. 347)
        • IU is subdivided into prospective IU (desire for predictability and tendency for uncertainty to result in apprehensive anxiety prior to feared events) and inhibitory IU (tendency for uncertainty to cause behavioral inhibition or paralysis)–the importance of both cognition and behavior to the IU model of anxiety. They site evidence that prospective and inhibitory IU make unique contributions to development of worry and anxiety.
        • They cite studies of relationship of IU to generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, and worry in nonclinical samples, perceived microaggressions and racial stress, and reduced help seeking
    • Deserisy et al. (2021) review findings that the salience network (which includes the insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex [dACC]) is involved in processing decision making, ambiguity, and novelty. Perceived uncertainty leads to increased insula activation and activation in the dACC; the salience network communicates this to, “primary emotion centers and brain regions important for muscle movement to direct behavior to address potential threat and generate emotional and motivational responses” (p. 348).
    • “The dACC is thought to downregualte insula activity in response to threatening stimuli, allowing individuals to then access healthy coping mechanisms, such as cognitive reappraisal or problem solving.” (p. 349).
• Anger
  • Response to being blocked: counter, attack, destroy
  • Anger, agonistic behavior, aggression
    • “Agonistic behaviour is any social behaviour related to fighting. The term has broader meaning than aggressive behaviour because it includes threats, displays, retreats, placation, and conciliation.”
• Disgust
  • “Disgust has been recognized as a basic emotion since Darwin (1872/1965). Like other basic emotions, disgust has a characteristic facial expression (Ekman & Friesen, 1975; Izard, 1971), an appropriate action (distancing of the self from an offensive object), a distinctive physiological manifestation (nausea), and a characteristic feeling state (revulsion).” (Rozin & Fallon, 1987, p. 23)
  • “Our definition is as follows:  Revulsion at the prospect of (oral) incorporation of an offensive object. The offensive objects are contaminants; that is, if they even briefly contact an acceptable food, they tend to render that food unacceptable.”  (Rozin & Fallon, 1987, p. 23)
    • “In our definition of disgust, the idea of oral incorporation into the self is central. By self fie mean the biologically well-defined “bodily self,” that entity roughly delimited by the skin.” (Rozin & Fallon, 1987, p. 26)
  • “One’s own body products have a peculiar status with regard to the self. Feces and urine in one’s own body, either by their nature or through a process of adaptation, do not elicit a disgust response. As soon as they leave the body, however, they become disgusting (although in American culture, at least, they are less disgusting than someone else’s body substances). Allport (1955)noted that although one is not disgusted by saliva in his or her own mouth, it becomes offensive outside of the body so that one is disgusted at drinking from a glass into which he or she has spit.” (Rozin & Fallon, 1987, p. 26)
  • “We will review evidence suggesting that disgust is absent at birth and develops through early and middle childhood.” (Rozin & Fallon, 1987, p. 33)
  • Evolutionary Psychology and Disgust
    • Buss (2019), who is a true believer in this approach, makes one of his best cases for disgust being an, “evolved psychological adaptation). He considers disgust in reviewing how organisms have evolved to “combat hostile forces of nature” in the face of survival needs (food, water, shelter) and reproduction needs (sex, offspring)
    • “The problem of food selection become especially crucial for omnivores . . . . Eating a wide range of foods–plants, nuts, seeds, fruits, meats–increases one’s odds of being poisoned because toxins are widespread throughout the plant world.” (p. 68)
    • “Both humans and rats have an adaptation called neophobia, defined as a strong aversion to new foods.” (p. 70)
    • “the emotion of disgust is a key component of the behavioral immune system. Disgust is a hypothesized adaptation that serves as a defense against microbial attack . . . . If the emotion of disgust is an evolved defense against disease, several predictions follow.” (p. 71)
      • 1. “disgust should be evoked most strongly by disease-carrying substances”
      • 2. “disgust elicitors should be universal across cultures”
      • 3. “disgust should activate the immune system”
      • 4. “people should show an especially good memory for objects that have been touch by sick or diseased individuals”
      • He reviews evidence he believes supports all these predictions
• Contempt
  • a feeling of moral superiority to another person
    • scorn “You are not worth my attention (and I wish you would go away)” (Fiske, 2011). Dr. Fiske makes a good case for the socially corrosive effects of scorn and envy, both of which she sees as based on social comparisons
• Sadness (or distress)
  • Depression: symptom (feeling), syndrome (pattern), disorder (sustained & impairs)
    • Major Depressive Disorder
      • A Major Depressive episode that persists two weeks and causes significant personal distress or functional impairment
        Major Depression: 5 of 9 symptoms which must include either:
        1. Depressed mood nearly every day for most of the day, or irritable mood in children and adolescents
        or
        2. Anhedonia (diminished interest in or pleasure from activities)
        plus as least three or four of:
        3. insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day
        4. significant weight loss or gain, increase or decrease in appetite nearly every day, or failure to gain expected weight in children
        5. psychomotor agitation or retardation [observed, not reported]
        6. fatigue or low energy nearly every day
        7. feeling worthless or excessive guilt nearly every day
        8. difficulty concentrating or indecisiveness nearly every day
        9. recurrent thoughts of death or suicide
        last at least two weeks, and cause either suffering or impairment in functioning
    • Dysthymic Disorder (Persistent Depressive Disorder): sustained (2 years) of less severe depressive symptoms
    • mania and hypomania
    • “DIGFAST”
    • Distractibility–Poorly focused, multitasking
    • Insomnia–Decreased need for sleep
    • Grandiosity–Inflated self-esteem
    • Flight of Ideas–Complaints of racing thoughts
    • Activities–Increased goal-directed activities
    • Speech–pressured or more talkative
    • Thoughtlessness–“Risk-taking” behaviors (sexual, financial, travel, driving)
    • (Ghaemi S.N. Primary Psychiatry. 2001;8:28-34)
    • manic and hypomanic (little mania) episodes form the basis of bipolar mood disorders (Bipolar I, Bipolar II, Bipolar Unspecified)
  • Joy: things are going well
    • stimulates interest, motivates environmental engagement & replenishes personal resources
    • Damasio’s view that positive emotions are our experience of bodily homeostasis
    • You text considers shades of job: amusement, wonder, pride (?), contentment, “perhaps love”, schadenfreude
• Self-Conscious Emotions
  • Shame: public exposure of wrong doing?
    • Robertson et al. (2018) presented studies showing that wrongdoing was unnecessary for shame, “social devaluation is sufficient”
  • Guilt:  private conscience
  • Embarrassment: public exposure of ?
• Gilbert (2010) discusses shame, embarrassment, and guilt as different types of self-conscous emtions
  • He sees shame and hmiliation as focused on the self and defending the self, “about feeling attacked or vulnerable in some say” (p. 101), and “are often unhelpful and can lead to destructive, defenseive behaviours” (p. 101)
  • vs. “guilt is about one’s behaviour, awareness of harm tot he other, and motivated desires to repair harm” (p. 101); “built is an emotion of behavioural responsiblity, including responsibility to make amends. (p. 101)

shame	inwardly directed attention on damage to self and reputation	thoughts focused on negative judements of “whole self”	behaviours focused on submissive-appeasing; wanting to be liked/accepted again
humiliation	externally directed attention to damage to self by the other	thoughts focused on unfairness of any negative reactions of others	behaviours focused on vengenance and silencing the other
guilt	externally directed attention on hurt caused with empathy for the other	thoughts focused on harm to other; sympathy & empathy	behaviours focused on trying to repair harm; genuine apologies, making amends

• Pride                            
  • authentic and hubris
• Triumph
  • In discussing the origins of self-conscious emotions, Michael Tomasello, reviews the literature on self-presentation and the social evaluation of both the individual and the group in human children and great apes: “In comparing the social lives of great apes and human children, one difference that stands out with special salience is children’s sense of self as seen through the eyes of others.” (p. 278).
  • “Sometime between one and two years of age human infants begin showing signs they know when others are observing them”, “By three years of age, children will actively conceal forbidden actions from an adult . . . as will great apes” (p. 279). “Children as young as four years of age, then, are actively managing the impression they are making on others” (p. 280). “Five-year-olds care not only about their own reputation but about their group’s reputation as well.” (p. 280).
  • “Children’s strategic impression management is clearly not moral, it is about personal advantage. However, being able to simulate the judgments that others are making about oneself-seeing oneself from the outside, as it were—is the cognitive foundation for the moral capacity to have a conscience, to feel guilty for transgressions, and for holding oneself accountable to standards.” (p. 281).
  • “Guilt is a joint function of sympathy for the harmed person and regret that I caused it. . . . Guilt as a distinct motivator of prosocial behavior then seems to emerge at about three years of age. It is still possible that at this age it is still a kind of second-personal guilt (a form of second-personal normative) aimed only at the victim, whereas later children will experience a more ‘objective’ guilt when they fail to conform to the moral norms of the moral community at large.” (p. 282).
  • Guilt constrasts with shame, in which the main issue is whether an act affects my compatriots’ reputational assessment of me. For example, a neighbor miof others if I fail to separate my recyclables from other trash. The normal response to shame situations is to withdraw and hope that others will forget” . . . Even if I correct my recycling mistake, I cannot undo the information that others how have, which affects their reputational judgements of me—I have lost face.” (pp. 283-284)
• Jealousy (our text does not consider this one, except in passing on p. 296)
  • Buss (2019) argues that we have an, “evolved psychological mechanism” to deal with the “threat of losing your partner”, cues, “trigger a reaction whe can call sexual jealousy”, “the output . . . . can be physiological (arousal), behavioral (confronting, threatening, hitting), or imput into other psychological mechanisms (reevaluating the status of your relationship).” (p. 45).
    • He argues and reviews evidence that there are sex differences in jealousy which can be best understood as adaptations to different evolutionary pressures experienced by men and women:
      • men and women do not differ in the frequency or the magnituve of jealousy they experience ( p. 318)
      • men respond more to cues of sexual infidelity
      • women respond more to cues of emotional involvement to another person (cues of potential long-term diversion of investment)
  • for Dr. Buss the basic underlying envoultionary dynamic is the a female always know for certain that she is genetically related to an offspring (50% of genes have come from her) whereas a man cannot be absolutely certain that a child “is his” (and thus carries 50% of his genes). This difference plays out in much of his discussion of differences (perported) in emtional behavior in men and women.

Cognitively Complex Emotions

•  Envy 
  • “I whish that I had what you have (and that you did not) (Fiske, 2011)
  • Lake Woebegone
  • Joseph Epstein (2003). Envy: The seven deadly sins. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • envy combines hurt and anger
• Gratitude
  • positive feelings when you receive something of value
    • voluntarily given, given at some cost to giver, done intentionally
  • Your text contrasts gratitude with “indebtedness”
    • attention to giver’s kindness vs. attention to benefit
• Disappointment and Regret
  • We don’t always get what we want
  • And, sometimes we do
• Hope
  • hope provide significant protection from suicidal behavior, loss of hope is one of most powerful predictors of suicide risk
  • hope and hopelessness may be distinct (but correllated) variables (Huen, Ip, Ho, & Yip, 2015)
• Schadenfreude “pleasure derived by someone for another person’s distress”, “malicious pleasure”
  • Leach, Spears, & Manstead (2015) distinguished between Schadenfreude: seeing another’s misfortune and gloating: causing another misfortuen.
  • Wilco W. van Dijk’s research has looked at Schadenfreude as a function of desire for vengence and justice
• Empathy: identify with feelings or prespective of another
  • Singer & Klimecki (2014) suggest that “empathic distress: is associated with: “self-related emtion”, “negative feeling: e.g., stress”, “poor health, hurnout”, “withdrawal & non-social behavior.”
  • Loggia, Mogil, & Bushnell (2008) found that empathy for another increased both sensory and affective components of pain perception
• Compassion moves us to action, desire to help
  • Singer & Klimecki (2014) suggest that compassion is associated with: “other related”, “positive feeings”, “good health”, “approach & prosocial motiaveion”
• Other views of experienced/expressed emotions
  • Susan Fiske’s work on status and social categorization, Envy Up, Scorn Down (2011)
  • Social comparisons

BIAS Map: Stereotypes of Warmth (Friend-Foe) and Competence (Status)

• van de Ven and colleagues (2009) studied “benign” and “malicious envy”
• malicious envy motivated to damage the position of the envied outer
• benign envy motivates to attain more for oneself
• benign envy levels up and malicious envy levels down
• malicoius envy related to schadenfreuden (van de Ven et al, 2014)
• Appeasement in human emotion, social practice, and personality:  Dacher Keltner  has considered embarrassment is a series of studies and discussions (1995), (Keitner, Young, & Buswell, 1977)
  • Social relations where one party anticpates aggression from another
    • A breach of social convention (Keltner & Anderson, 2000)
  • Submissive inhibited behavior intended to bring about social reconciliation
• Two classes of appearsement:
  • Reactive appeasement, forms that placate others after social transgression: embarrassment and shame
  • Anticipatory appeasement, forms which reduce likelihood of social conflict and aggression: polite modesty and shyness
• Kelter & Anderson (2000) wrote about the appeasement function of embarrassment in terms of the “problem to be solved”:
  • Problem to be Solved                        
  • Components                                       
  • Consequences

Antecedents	Feelings	Behaviors	Response of Other
Physical ineptness	awkwardness	facial display	laughter
Cognitive shortcoming	foolishness	blush	affiliation
Loss of control	self-consciousness	hiding	liking
Failure of privacy	nervousness	apologize	trust

Possible Evolved mechanisms to suport cooperation

• Buss (2019) argues that for cooperative coalitions to emerge in hunter-gather societies, “humans have evolved specialized psychological adaptations” (p. 267)
  • one problem is defection: opting out of cooperative action to avoid the cost: dropping out of raiding party claiming you have a thron in your foot
  • another problem is free-riding: sharing in rewards without contributing
• he argures that. “Evolutionists have focused on the rule of punishment in solving the free-rider punishment” (p 268)
• “One hypothesis is that an emotion called ‘punitive sentiment’ has evolved as a solution to the free-rider problems in the evolution of cooperative coalitions–a desire to harm ‘slackers’ in the grouop (Price et al., 2002).” (p. 268)
• “Cross-cultural studies, such as of the Shuar in Equador, support the hypothesis that the punitive sentiment may be a human universal” (p. 268)
• “while punishing noncooperators, the brain region of the dorsal striatum become particularly active–a brain region linked with reward and anticipated satisfaction (de Quervain et al., 2004). People experience pleasure during the act of punishing noncooperators. Even merely observing an unfair game player (noncooperator) reeiving physical pain activated reward centers, expecially among the male participants (Singer et al., 2006).” (p. 269)

11-30-22

Emotions convey by brief human vocalizations

• A recent article in the American Psychologist (2019, vol 74, no 6, pp. 698 to 712) presented the work of Cowen, Elfenbein, Laukka, & Kelter, “Mapping 24 emotions conveyed by brief human vocalizations.”
• “It is something of an anatomical wonder how humans communicate with the voice: The contraction of muscles surrounding the diaphragm produces burst of air particles that are transformed into sound through vibrations of the vocal folds, and leave the mouth, depending on the position of the jaw, the tongue, and other implements of vocal control (Titze & Martin, 1998) in the form of words, laughter, playful intonation, crying, sarcastic tones, sighs, song, triumphant hollers, growls , or motherese. In essential ways, the voice makes humans human.” (opening paragraph, p. 698)
• They argue that human communicate emotion through two different kinds of vocalization:
  • Prosody–“the nonlexical patterns of tune, rhythm, and tember in speech” (p. 699)
    • research on matching neutral content phrases spoken with different emotions indicate that hearers can judge five emotions, “with accuracy rates approachign 70%: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and tenderness (p. 699)
  • Vocal Bursts–“brief nonlinguistic sounds that occur in between speech incidents or in the absence of speech”, “cries, sighs, laughts, shrieks, growls, hollers, roars, oohs, and ahhs”, “Vocal bursts are thought to predate language and have precurors in mammals: for example, primates emit vocalizations specific tp predators, food, affection, care, sex, and aggression (Snowdon, 2002).” (p. 699)
• They define a “semantic space of emotions” to try and understand how people infer meaning from brief vocalizations
  • dimensionality: the number of distinct varieties of emotion that represent within a response modality
  • conceptualziation: how do emotion categories and appraisals capture the individual’s respresentation of an emotion-related response
  • the distrubution of emotional states within the space
• They present data that vocal bursts reliably and accurately convey 24 distinct dimensions of emotion
  • Adoration, Amusement, Anger, Awe, Confusion, Contempt, Contentment, Desire, Disappointment, Disgust, Distress, Ecstasy, Elation, Embarrassment, Fear, Guilt, Interest, Pain, Pride, Realization, Relief, Romantic love, Sadness, Serenity, Shame, Surprise (negative), Surprise (positive), Sympathy, Triumph
• Their analysis supported two general conclusions:
  • “In contrast to many constructivist and appraisal theories, these dimensions cannot be explained in terms of a set of domain-general appraisals, most notably valence and arousal” (p. 709)
  • “However, in contrast to discrete emotion theories, the emotions conveyed by vocal bursts vary continuously in meaning along gradients between categories. These results converge with doubts that emotion categories ‘carve nature at its joints’ (Barrett, 2006).” (pp. 709-710).

Emotions and psychopathology

• Disturbances in emotions are often viewed as the basis for many forms of human maladjustment
  • mood disorders (depression, dysthymia, bipolar)
  • anxiety disorder (phobias, generalized anxiety, OCD)
  • trauma based disorders (PTSD, adjustment disorders)
  • some personality disorders
    • borderline personality disorder (problems in emotional regulation)
    • antisocial personality disorder (psychopathy)
      • Hervey M. Cleckley offered one view of the “psychopathic personality” in The Mask of Sanity (1941)
      • Simon Baron-Cohen (2011) sees a lack of empathy as the basis of psychopathic behavior, as does Abigail Marsh (2017)
      • there are several interesting features of the emotional behavior of psychopaths
        • impaired fear conditioning
        • impaired judgments of fear in the faces of other
        • limited/lack of empathy
      • However, nothing is ever as simple as we would like:
      • individuals on the autism spectrum may have little empathy but typically do not show psychopathy
      • and psychopaths are not all alike; some are relatively well adapted (Thomas, 2013). The research of Hare (and others) shows that the DSM category of Antisocial Personality Disorder has a well documented mix of individuals with differing degrees of two basic dimentions (chaotic life pattern, callaous emotional responses)
        • In contrast to how they are often portrayed in fiction, most actual psychopaths are not sadistic (they take no pleasure in inflicting pain/harm on others), they simply have little/no inhibition on taking actions to serve their own ends that most of you would find abhorrent. As long as you are not in their way and don’t have something they want, they can often be charming and friendly; if you are a barrier to a goal they have or have something they want: too bad for you.

Final thoughts: Emotion, motivation, behavior

• Antonio Damasio (2018) recent discussion of emotions and their place in our lives begins with a consideration of the very beginnings of life. Structures capable of replicating themselves engage with environments. The basic dynamics are: engage, ignore, flee. Damasio theory gives the central role to homeostasis: the regulation of an internal state within values to allow flourishing of the organism. Emotions are the expression and power behind our basic adaptive responses to the world. On one level this makes a great deal of sense to me.
• But, also, the emotions you and I experience, label, express in thoughts and words are abstractions: we classify and categorize. I believe this represents a very fundamental aspect of human cognition; which has also served us well adoptively, but, has limitations: Is this experience of fear (anger, joy, pick a feeling) exactly the same as my last experience of ____? Are exactly the same groupings of neurons firing in exactly the same pattern? We look for regularities in nature, and often find them, to some degree. But sometimes we (unintentionally) impose regularities that obscure important details and differences.
• A common saying among some approaches to psychotherapy is: “The map is not the road.” Our verbal concepts, useful as they often are, are not the same as the reality we are representing with these words. As you think about and consider “the emotions wars” [basic vs. constructed, five vs. seven, physiological vs. appraisal, etc etc], work at keeping open to the usefulness of different conceptualizations. Even if theories are as useful as our author suggests, reality (in as much as we can figure it out) is usually even stranger. The map is not the road.
• We don’t get to “choose” our emotions but we are not powerless, acceptance of emotions is often the necessary first step in change, and we can make choices to build up the emotional person we wish to be. The old Native American story of the two wolves living inside of each of us captures a basic truth: emotions are enhanced by the focus and attention we give to them, “the one you feed.”