What Emotions Are (and Aren’t)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/what-emotions-are-and-arent.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

11 5 11 years ago

tvawnz• 11 years ago

Interesting that one of the opening premises of this piece is: "Most people, including many scientists, believe that emotions are distinct, locatable entities inside us — but they’re not. Searching for emotions in this form is as misguided as looking for cerebral clarinets and oboes."

Meanwhile, this article was linked on HN a few months ago where they essentially mapped the locations of emotions: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/30/25831311...

from the second article: "Each emotion activates a distinct set of body parts, he thinks, and the mind's recognition of those patterns helps us consciously identify that emotion."

OP does mention this, but the thesis is that emotions and responses are not universal, which is contra to the thesis of the second.

drallison• 11 years ago

The IDL study worked with brain imaging data and tried to correlate a particular part of the brain with emotion. The NPR article relates a Finnish study where people experiencing emotion were asked to map our where they felt different emotions. Looks like apples v. oranges to me.

kleer001• 11 years ago

"Most people, including many scientists, believe that emotions are distinct, locatable entities inside us — but they’re not."

Hmmm, smells like a straw-man. What kind of scientists? Biologists? Chemists? Cosmologists? And how exactly does the author know this? A recent survey of published papers? TV shows? An informal questionnaire? Maybe the author will get to it later.

"My lab analyzed over 200 published studies, covering nearly 22,000 test subjects, and found no consistent and specific fingerprints in the body for any emotion. Instead, the body acts in diverse ways that are tied to the situation."

There we go.

bitwize• 11 years ago

Sadness: Well, it turns out we don't really exist. So long, nice knowing you all...

Fear: W-We're being wiped from EXISTENCE?!

Joy: Hey, it isn't that bad! Riley can still feel each of us, so we're real!

Anger: Hey! Who are you to tell us what we are and aren't? You're cruisin' for a broccoli pizza stuffed right up your--

Disgust: Relax, they're scientists. They always have to ruin everything.

Fustian• 11 years ago

Good article. But it's not an argument against essentialism. If two states are judged to share the same emotional character, then they necessarily have something identifiable in common, namely, an essential property. The author merely wants a better measuring device to find this essential property, not to abandon the search.

Darwin did update the idea of essences by giving us many more to work with. The finding of transitional forms in the fossil record helped drive this point home. He also showed that whatever their center of "essential mass" was, it definitely wasn't immutable as many had speculated before him. By explaining speciation through gradual change, Darwin showed us that every species' core is in flux.

For John Dewey (who famously wrote about the impact of Darwin on philosophy), this meant that the concept of a fixed and eternal essence in biology was then metaphysical baggage. But Dewey jumped the gun a bit because he was writing before any understanding of genes. Nowadays, genetic essentialism is an indispensable notion in biology, since it is mostly only by sharing in some genetic core of what a species is that enables two tokens of that species type to interbreed productively.

As for the article, I gather that one of the author's primary aims was to discredit the theoretical basis of practices like profiling, lie-detection, and such. She also wanted to show that localizing emotions in one part of the brain is a fool's errand, which she did to great effect. And while her point about the statistical nature of reading each other's emotions is valid, it's certainly not a stroke against the idea that all feeling states of one kind have something in common. After all, if they didn't, then we'd constantly be unsure whether it's hunger or xenophobia we feel when we smell pancakes in the morning.

What Emotions Are (and Aren’t)

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