Said more simply, properties that are pointed out by parents (or other speakers) or those that are functionally relevant in everyday activities will bind to core affect to represent anger in that instance. As instances of anger accumulate, and information is integrated across instances, a simulator for anger develops, and conceptual knowledge about anger accrues. The resulting conceptual system is a distributed collection of modality- specific memories captured across all instances of a category. These establish the conceptual content for the basic-level category anger and can be retrieved for later simulations of anger. — Feldman Barrett, 'Solving
(To paraphrase William James somewhat: we don't stop our feet because we are angry - we are angry because we stomp our feet: although it's a bit more complex than that). — StreetlightX
The classical view of emotion holds that emotions are natural states which we simply 'feel' and then subsequently 'express — StreetlightX
At the 'base', biological level, what is 'immediately' felt is a kind of generic, non-specific 'affect', which simply indicates both intensity (heightened or dull feeling - 'urgency' of affect) and valence ('good' or 'bad' feeling, something threatening or rewarding). The second step in the 'production' of emotion however, is an evaluative one - a matter of categorising this initial affect (as sadness, as anger, as joy...), a categorisation which takes place on the basis of a range of bio-cultural considerations. — StreetlightX
What does this miss? — csalisbury
Is it something that is learned very young and then is relatively fixed, or in her view, is it something that we continually construct as we encounter new situations and compare it to what we have seen, causing rough patterns around emotional response? — schopenhauer1
I guess a central question to this, and something Hanover sort of touched on is the difference between affectivity and emotion. How is she using these terms differently? It seems a bit shoe-horned like there is indeed some core (innate?) reaction going on, and emotion is how to take this innate reaction and apply it to various contexts and situations by learning and socio-cultural cues. But then, this leaves affectivity itself to be explained, doesn't it? I guess this might be answered more clearly in understanding what her definition of affectivity is, and how that arises versus emotion. If it is more "innate" then, wouldn't that itself point to emotions automatically mapping to certain situations, that would almost "force it's hand" to always be used in certain contexts? In that case, the affectivity is pushing the learning, and not the other way around. Again, I could be mistaken based on her definition of affectivity. — schopenhauer1
Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. the pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favourite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energised feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or an asshole, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect...
Affect...depends on interoception. That means affect is a constant current throughout your life, even when you are completely still or asleep. It does not turn on and off in response to events you experience as emotional. In this sense, affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness, the brightness and loudness. When your brain represents wavelengths of light reflected from objects, you experience brightness and darkness. When your brain represents air pressure changes, you experience loudness and softness. And when your brain represents interoceptive changes, you experience pleasantness and unpleasantness, and agitation and calmness. Affect, brightness, and loudness all accompany you from birth to death. — FB - ‘How Emotions Are Made’
I guess the older view was really embedded for me, plus I'm not too bright. — praxis
On the account given here, this is exactly the wrong way to look at things. Or at least, it is only half the story. As a matter of conceptual evaluation, emotions are not simply reactions to stimuli, but involve a degree of intentionality which cannot be reduced to causality. This is why emotions are a skill - a matter of learning. To quote Barrett again on this exact topic: "Core affect [what I referred to above as 'generic affect'] is caused—it represents the state of the person in relation to the immediate environment (in philosophical terms, this is its intension), but “cause” and “aboutness” are not equivalent. [However], when we identify our core affect as being about something, it becomes intentional, and the experience of emotion begins."
Part of what is at stake here is calling into question any simplified - much too simplified - distinction between 'emotions vs rationality'. There is a rationality specific to emotions, in strong sense that emotions are not simply 'caused' but also partake of an inferential economy. Worth quoting another paper of hers two, especially with respect to your recent interest in brains:
"As an animal’s integrated physiological state changes constantly throughout the day, its immediate past determines the aspects of the sensory world that concern the animal in the present, which in turn influences what its niche will contain in the immediate future. This observation prompts an important insight: neurons do not lie dormant until stimulated by the outside world, denoted as stimulus->response. Ample evidence shows that ongoing brain activity influences how the brain processes incoming sensory information and that neurons fire intrinsically within large networks without any need for external stimuli. The implications of these insights are profound: namely, it is very unlikely that perception, cognition, and emotion are localized in dedicated brain systems, with perception triggering emotions that battle with cognition to control behavior. This means classical accounts of emotion, which rely on this S->R narrative, are highly doubtful" (Barrett, "The Theory of Constructed Emotion", my bolding). — StreetlightX
Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. the pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favourite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energised feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or an asshole, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect...
Affect...depends on interoception. That means affect is a constant current throughout your life, even when you are completely still or asleep. It does not turn on and off in response to events you experience as emotional. In this sense, affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness, the brightness and loudness. When your brain represents wavelengths of light reflected from objects, you experience brightness and darkness. When your brain represents air pressure changes, you experience loudness and softness. And when your brain represents interoceptive changes, you experience pleasantness and unpleasantness, and agitation a — FB - ‘How Emotions Are Made’
Being predisposed to her view makes it easier to follow - it’s a paradigm shift, in many ways. We’ve always ‘known’ that emotions are ‘inherently’ understood by those around us, but there is a fuzziness to the concepts that we also can’t deny. So much of the suffering we experience and cause in the world can be traced to affective realism and prediction errors in how we conceptualise emotions. — Possibility
What does this miss? — csalisbury
But what Barrett brings to the table is thinking of emotions as inferential results, an effort to cope with the environment in terms of 'predicting' an appropriate response (I haven't brought much if any of this side of things into the conversation yet). — StreetlightX
What does this say beyond the idea that when most people feel an affect intensely, they express it in a way that fits the situation? ' — csalisbury
This is Dewey’s attempt to gently correct James’ unfortunate reiteration of mind-body dualism. To understand emotion, Dewey argued, we must see that “the mode of behavior is the primary thing” (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 174). As with habit, emotion is not the private possession of the subject, but rather emerges from the fluid boundary connecting event and organism; emotion is “called out by objects, physical and personal”, an intentional “response to an objective situation” (EN, LW1: 292). If I encounter a strange dog and I am perplexed as to how to react, there is an inhibition of habit, and this excites emotion. As I entertain a range of incompatible responses (Run? Call out? Slink away?), a tension is created which further interrupts and inhibits habits, and is experienced as emotion (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 182) Thus, emotions are intentional insofar as they are “to or from or about something objective, whether in fact or in idea” and not merely reactions “in the head” — Ciceronianus the White
How would you characterize the paradigm shift? What was the old paradigm and what is the new? — csalisbury
.The classical view of emotion holds that we have many emotion circuits in our brains, and each is said to cause a distinct set of changes, that is, a fingerprint. Perhaps an annoying coworker triggers your ‘anger neurons’, so your blood pressure rises; you scowl, yell, and feel the heat of fury. Or an alarming news story triggers your ‘fear neurons’, so your heart races; you freeze and feel a flash of dread. Because we experience anger, happiness, surprise, and other emotions as clear and identifiable states of being, it seems reasonable to assume that each emotion has a defining underlying pattern in the brain and body.
Our emotions, according to the classical view, are artifacts of evolution, having long ago been advantageous for survival, and are now a fixed component of our biological nature. As such, they are universal: people of every age, in every culture, in every part of the world should experience sadness more or less as you do - and more or less as did our hominin ancestors who roamed the African savanna a million years ago.
Emotions are thus thought to be a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality. The primitive part of your brain wants you to tell your boss he’s an idiot, but your deliberative side knows that doing so would get you fired, so you restrain yourself. This kind of internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilisation. It helps define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast — FB
If your brain operates by prediction and construction and rewires itself through experience, then it’s no overstatement to say that if you can change your current experiences today, you can change who you become tomorrow. — FB
You can't feel unaffected. To feel is to be affected. Yet, you can feel unaffected. — neonspectraltoast
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