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

@Possibility

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.

(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

Just for the hell of it, and for what it's worth, and because I'm a fan of John Dewey and this topic reminded me of something, here's what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say of his expansion or revision of James' view of emotions in an essay Dewey wrote in 1894:

"In actual cases of emotion, a perception excites a pre-organized physiological mechanism; our recognition of such changes just is the emotional experience: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike” (James 1890 [1981: 450]). Dewey’s “The Theory of Emotion” (1894b & 1895, EW4) pressed James further, toward the integrated whole of feeling-and-expression. Being sad is not merely feeling sad or acting sad but is the purposive organism’s overall experience. 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” (AE, LW10: 72)."

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

A one-easy-trick-emotional-theorists-hate-him perspective, not to negate what you're saying, but to try to better draw out what you take the significance of all this to be.

It goes like this:

The classical view of emotion mixed up 'emotion' with 'affect.' It's not emotions which are simply felt, but affects. Affects are subsequently expressed, not emotions. Emotions are expressions, affects are simply felt.

So: the mistake of people talking about emotions is they mislabeled them. What they were really talking about was affects. Just as we once thought different emotions can lead to the same action, we now say various affects can lead to the same actions. so forth. Just as we once knew from literature, conversation, life that the sturm of drang of violent emotion would take a more understandable form as we grew and learned to understand ourselves, now we know its the sturm and drang of violent affects.

What does this miss?

Then, a bold new theory of how affects are constructed...

What does this miss? — csalisbury

Affect is not violent - it has intensity, but it is internal sensory information only.

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 think it's been demonstrated that smoking weed as a teenager, and sometimes even into the early twenties, affects one's emotional development. So I don't think it could be something learned very young then fixed. Puberty appears to play a significant role in emotional development.

I didn't mean violence against others, but violent in the sense of, well, intense - as one talks about a 'violent wind' etc.

This is my suspicion. I think Bloom's misprision is a good guiding light. I think we forget what others knew, which you can get a dim sense of by looking at the infinite complexity with which people spoke of 'emotions.' Then you say emotions only meant this. And then, having limted what 'emotion' means, you introduce a new language which just says all of what youve missed but as a new discovery. I am open to correction though.

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

This what Feldman Barrett has to say about affect.

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

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. Understanding that affect is not emotion enables us to interpret interoceptive changes more carefully, and be open to the value of prediction error in the scientific method, I think.

But I think the most valuable part of her theory is how concepts relate both to sensory information through neuron firing patterns, and to action through prediction.

Once you see through it, there's no going back...

It took the OLP's to make me see it, I'm ashamed to admit.

Good news for all of us - according to Bloom, misprision's the sign of a strong spirit. But then you have to create.

I don't know, these verbal games just strike me as boring. Maybe it's an avenue for creativity, but sometimes I feel like I would rather learn something in the banal sense, not 'learn' something with quotes (shuffle concepts).

The misprison is where you misinterpret your forebearers, right?

yeah, that's right about misprision. I don't know him as well as I feign. What I understand him to mean is that every mature poet offers a Big Poem (or a body of work that can be considered as a Big Poem) and that later poets have to carve out their own space, for their own passions. They misread the old poem, but neccessarily, and in doing so, actually come up with something new. A lot of it is repetition, but the confusion secretes something actually new.


I also think learning something banal would be its own reward. But there's maybe a double thing of learning how to deal with the part of yourself that wants to make the thing you're learning link up to something else? There's the learning something banal and then a side thing of learning how to learn something banal, if that makes sense?

Going afield tho

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

I feel I'm in agreement with most of what Barrett says about emotions. There seems to be a hidden logic behind feelings - the "about-ness" you referred to - and, as far as I can tell, it boils down to survival, survival as an individual entity, as a social entity, as the thing one identifies as the self or as a integral part of that self. Emotions, on that view, is the logic of self-preservartion with a scope coextensive with what one thinks of as me and mine.

As for learning emotions, I think of it in terms of developing the skill to express the right feelings at the right time about the right things, toward the right people, for the right end, and in the right way (1106b). [Aristotle, Golden Mean]. It seems Feldman Barrett isn't the first person to suggest that emotions are not completely devoid of rationality and that people should learn to deploy them on the right occasion in the right way.

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’

I hadn't realized this when I first posted on this thread, but I do know Feldman, sort of. I listened to her interview with Ezra Klein on the Ezra Klein Show. Ezra, courteously, explained he read the book and that it made him think of how sometimes he doesn't know what he's feeling until he thinks about it after. She says 'yes, exactly' (or something similar) and, in that moment of connection, you can't help but come away with the feeling he read her book.

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

How would you characterize the paradigm shift? What was the old paradigm and what is the new?

What does this miss? — csalisbury

I suppose that what interests me isn't really the affect/emotion distinction, which sure, is objectively interesting or whatever, but that's just mechanism. What's more striking to me is the change in status of emotion: not as a primitive [emotion = express [anger] [sadness] [joy]], but as a product that has a kind of basis in biology but is deeply, in-itself, socially and culturally mediated and routed. The account implies a kind of autonomy of emotion (implied in the language of say, 'anger scripts' that Barrett uses), which is not merely a matter of personal I-really-really-feel-it-in-my-gut-it-expresses-the-depths-of-my-soul, but an embeddedness in culture and society, in a way that exceeds any simple interoiroization of emotion.

This in itself it now new of course - much earlier, neuroscientific theorists like Damasio (probably the most famous pop-neuroscientist?) had already considered a three-tiered approach to emotion ("a state of emotion, which can be triggered and executed nonconsciously; a state of feeling, which can be represented nonconsciously; and a state of feeling made conscious, i.e., known to the organism having both emotion and feeling" - Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens), while insisting that emotions are public rather than private phenomena; 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).

So yeah, one would indeed need a theory of 'affect' in Barrett's sense as well - probably something to do with bodily homeostasis and movement, if I were to have a guess - but that's neither here nor there. The cool thing to me is the kind of bodily 'topology' that the approach inaugurates, where the inner is outer, and emotion is infused with reason.

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

To continue the conceit: 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? '

To really draw this out - here's a fake passage from a fake YA fiction book:

'She felt a flutter of butterflies, a roller-coaster-feeling, but she knew there was no way her parents would understand. So she said she felt 'scared', that they'd understand.'

What does that leave out?

The subtext here is : what is going on that isn't just telling ourselves what we already know & believe in brittler language?

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

Lots more besides, but I think you're being performatively stupid atm.

Could be. But I sincerely think my YA example encompasses everything you were talking about in the quote I responded to. I think it was a legitimate response that legitimately tests the explanatory power of the theory you're discussing. I'm being contentious, for sure, but I don't think I'm being unfair.

if you want i can do a point by point breakdown of your post and my response

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

This is really good, the bolded part in particular. I tried to skim over the essay but Dewey doesn't write in a way amenable to skimming for me. Gonna have to just read his books one day. Unsurprising that Dewey wrote on education - anyone who writes on education, pedagogy, seems to me to generally approach things the right way.

How would you characterize the paradigm shift? What was the old paradigm and what is the new? — csalisbury

Feldman Barrett refers to a ‘classical’ view of emotions:

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

.

The new paradigm shows that emotions are not universal or instinctive in themselves, but are mental concepts or predictions constructed from patterns of experience, including rationality, specifically in relation to affect.

With regard to the new:

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

God, this sucks.

So instead of saying we're feeling emotional, we should be saying we're feeling affected? And the words themselves are emotional, and we must be feeling emotional or we wouldn't have expressed our feelings?

So we're both affected and emotional, even though emotions can create an affect?

I feel unaffected by this thread.

You can't feel unaffected. To feel is to be affected. Yet, you can feel unaffected.

I affect by un-feeling in this thread?

You can't feel unaffected. To feel is to be affected. Yet, you can feel unaffected. — neonspectraltoast

No. Affect is a constant current. To have consciousness is to be affected. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect. Emotion is how you interpret that affect in relation to experience.