Dualism of Descartes
At the outside, we should recognize that the relationship between emotion, physiological functioning, and cognition is but a variation of what has come to be known as the mind-body problem.
It is common to accept the view that little of significance in the study of emotion occurred in the nearly 2000 years if intellectual thought between Aristotle and Descartes, and that, for all Descartes’ flaws, he put the problem of emotion into perspective for our millennium by pointing out the relation, or lack of it, between mind and body.
In his attempt to improve upon Aristotle and Aquinas, who saw emotion as experiencing and evaluating stimuli in terms of their potential for gain or pleasure, Descartes’ work led later writers to confuse the mind-body problem with a soul body problem.
Descartes can present a seemingly unsolvable problem for our investigations only if we take seriously his use of the soul as an explanatory device.
We accepted the dualistic view of mind and matter and we seemingly forever trapped into designing ways to relate one world to another.
The potential evils of that divisive strategy remain with us in medicine, psychiatry, and religion, not to mention psychology.
Strategically, Descartes represents a dualistic alternative, but not an important advance in our understanding of emotion.
Psychology and other disciplines concerned with human understanding have interpreted Descartes to have presented a mind-body problem.
He presented them with a dualistic universe in which one aspect the soul is fundamentally unknowable.
Dualism of Descartes
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Challenges in Measuring Antecedent Emotion Self-Regulation
Challenges in Measuring Antecedent Emotion Self-Regulation
Common to all antecedent-focused strategies is the act of selecting situations and meanings, which presupposes conscious awareness and decision making based n knowledge of linkages between situations and emotional responses.
Conceptualization emotion self-regulation in this way may have limited heuristic value, because often situations are emotion-provoking due to high levels of ambiguity.
Thus, many emotional episodes present ‘muddy terrain’ in which it is difficult to discern any clear causal relations.
Because gaining insight into causal pathways requires at least one if not multiple prior experiences with the emotion-provoking situations, it may be difficult to distinguish empirically between antecedent and response focused emotion self regulation.
Measuring selection of meaning (i.e., appraisal) as an antecedent emotion regulatory strategy also runs the risk of confounding emotion self-regulation with emotion understanding or verbal knowledge of emotion.
Because appraisal has predominantly been measured by self report most of the available data on emotion self-regulation concerns changes in peoples’ construal of their emotional experiences which may or may not be accompanied by changes in their actual experience.
Furthermore, it is difficult to establish whether such verbally reported changes in experience or construal also reflect changes in peoples’ ability to regulate their emotion in vivo.
As for situation selection, this strategy may not be a feasible option for the majority of emotional events, because it requires that opportunities exist to select out those situations.
In daily life, however, the kind of situations that generate intense emotions most frequently tend to be interactions with partners, spouses and superordinates at work that are difficult to avoid.
In most cases we cannot chose our families, though we can try to change how often we interact with them (situation selection), and learn to modify our behavior in these interactions (response-focus emotion self-regulation).
Nonetheless, the extent to which we can modify out emotional responses by means of antecedent or response focused regulation in these familial interactions might be rather limited because the response are likely to present the product of a complex and robust mix of personality and quasi automatic patterns that have co-developed over a period of time.
Challenges in Measuring Antecedent Emotion Self-Regulation
Common to all antecedent-focused strategies is the act of selecting situations and meanings, which presupposes conscious awareness and decision making based n knowledge of linkages between situations and emotional responses.
Conceptualization emotion self-regulation in this way may have limited heuristic value, because often situations are emotion-provoking due to high levels of ambiguity.
Thus, many emotional episodes present ‘muddy terrain’ in which it is difficult to discern any clear causal relations.
Because gaining insight into causal pathways requires at least one if not multiple prior experiences with the emotion-provoking situations, it may be difficult to distinguish empirically between antecedent and response focused emotion self regulation.
Measuring selection of meaning (i.e., appraisal) as an antecedent emotion regulatory strategy also runs the risk of confounding emotion self-regulation with emotion understanding or verbal knowledge of emotion.
Because appraisal has predominantly been measured by self report most of the available data on emotion self-regulation concerns changes in peoples’ construal of their emotional experiences which may or may not be accompanied by changes in their actual experience.
Furthermore, it is difficult to establish whether such verbally reported changes in experience or construal also reflect changes in peoples’ ability to regulate their emotion in vivo.
As for situation selection, this strategy may not be a feasible option for the majority of emotional events, because it requires that opportunities exist to select out those situations.
In daily life, however, the kind of situations that generate intense emotions most frequently tend to be interactions with partners, spouses and superordinates at work that are difficult to avoid.
In most cases we cannot chose our families, though we can try to change how often we interact with them (situation selection), and learn to modify our behavior in these interactions (response-focus emotion self-regulation).
Nonetheless, the extent to which we can modify out emotional responses by means of antecedent or response focused regulation in these familial interactions might be rather limited because the response are likely to present the product of a complex and robust mix of personality and quasi automatic patterns that have co-developed over a period of time.
Challenges in Measuring Antecedent Emotion Self-Regulation
Monday, October 05, 2009
The necessity of emotion
The necessity of emotion
The conventional opposition between emotion and reason typically leads sensible people to reject emotion and it regard it as an inappropriate category of analysis, unless in accounting for psychological and behavioral pathology, in which case the emotions are held to predominate.
Indeed, there is a tradition in sociology that claims that the power of individual social actors derives from their self-control in defining purpose and executing them, under the aegis and direction of values, and against distracting impulses and emotions.
What is ignored by this position, though, is the fact that all actions and indeed reason itself, require appropriate facilitating emotions if successful actions or reason at all are to be achieved.
How could a person deal competently with any practical problem without the emotion of confidence in their actions, without the emotion of trust in the actions of enabling others, without the feeling of dissatisfaction with failure to encourage success, without the envy of competitors to spur the pursuit of interests and so on.
Reason, too, requires it s back-ground emotions, without which there is no reason; these include feelings of calmness, security, confidence and so on.
This is not an argument against reason, only against the inflation of reason at the expense of emotion.
Without the appropriate emotions underpinning and supporting reason, reason turns to its apposite.
A well developed appreciation of emotions is absolutely essential for sociology because no action can occur in a society without emotional involvement.
The smallest society in this sense, then, is a single human person choosing between alternatives, for such a choice requires an internal dialogue. And choice itself must include the choice to do nothing. Everything, then, in the human universe, requires emotional involvement.
The necessity of emotion
The conventional opposition between emotion and reason typically leads sensible people to reject emotion and it regard it as an inappropriate category of analysis, unless in accounting for psychological and behavioral pathology, in which case the emotions are held to predominate.
Indeed, there is a tradition in sociology that claims that the power of individual social actors derives from their self-control in defining purpose and executing them, under the aegis and direction of values, and against distracting impulses and emotions.
What is ignored by this position, though, is the fact that all actions and indeed reason itself, require appropriate facilitating emotions if successful actions or reason at all are to be achieved.
How could a person deal competently with any practical problem without the emotion of confidence in their actions, without the emotion of trust in the actions of enabling others, without the feeling of dissatisfaction with failure to encourage success, without the envy of competitors to spur the pursuit of interests and so on.
Reason, too, requires it s back-ground emotions, without which there is no reason; these include feelings of calmness, security, confidence and so on.
This is not an argument against reason, only against the inflation of reason at the expense of emotion.
Without the appropriate emotions underpinning and supporting reason, reason turns to its apposite.
A well developed appreciation of emotions is absolutely essential for sociology because no action can occur in a society without emotional involvement.
The smallest society in this sense, then, is a single human person choosing between alternatives, for such a choice requires an internal dialogue. And choice itself must include the choice to do nothing. Everything, then, in the human universe, requires emotional involvement.
The necessity of emotion
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