Images from Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals

Coursekeeping/related matters of interest:

• Friday, 1:15-2:30 pm, MCC: Brown Bag Lunch Conversation on Rethinking Science Education

• Friday, 2:30-4:00 pm, CC 200: Stories of Teaching and Learning: Alexis Bennett and Kelly Strunk on "Psychology 340 - Women's Mental Health"

• First paper "opportunity": 5 p. m. Monday (in my box and posted on-line)

• For Tuesday, in preparation for conversation with Peter Brodfuehrer, Department of Biology, read
  Chapters 1-3 in Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and
  Chapters 6-7 in Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

• Please post your responses before class, so Peter has some clue what he's walking into--esp. what your questions are.

• Angeldeep: in previous experience when using serendip it has often happened that when you post your email address on here you start getting lots of spam. So, if its okay with Prof. Dalke, it might be best to exclude email addresses from posts.

So: what is an emotion? How does it differ from an instinct? From a feeling?
How can these two guys help us in answering these questions?

Freud, "Anxiety": I shall not enter upon a discussion whether the words...mean the same or different things in common usage...a certain ambiguity and indefiniteness exists in the use of the word....

Lauren: one problem I had with these readings was the lack of differentiation between instinct and emotion.... I think we need to designate a line between the two.

Alice: he doesn't...define what exactly he takes as the emotion that we recognize after we react....James...seems to indulge in crossing emotion and instinct quite a lot.

Ken Fogel in the "Psychoanalysis and the Neuroscience" Forum: "emotion" and "feeling" mean two different things to the neurobiologist, while they are invariably used interchangeably by the therapist.... emotion is the biological substrate, while feeling is the subjective interpretation of the phenomenon in question...the inclusion of a cognitive component to emotion is "feeling".... We assume that emotions are universal, but feelings are idiosyncratic. Emotions are responses to the environment (inner or outer) and are as "real" as neurotransmitters and action potentials. Feelings... have an abstract component that we are hard-pressed to locate in the material world.

A couple of experiments: with hammers, and juice, and "flicking," and foot-stomping, and head-shaking....

Some of our experiences outside class:

• Lauren: a customer...became very angry at me...so I decided it was an appropriate time to cry. I screwed up my face and stuck out my bottom lip and suddenly, there were tears in my eyes. After a time I found that my heart was racing and I was shaking and coughing, just as if I were really sad, but I just kept thinking that all I wanted was for this mean old man to feel sorry for me....All I wanted was some justice....And I got my way by faking it....I found that I had trouble stopping...my performance....Physiologically, I got my body to think it was sad, but I knew in my mind that I wasn't....This really makes me wonder if...any show of emotion (or lack thereof) is actually an act of the will...because we know we should.

  Laura O: I like to believe I am always in control of my emotions. Then I recalled times of moodiness as a young teenager....I was tired and therefore cranky, not cranky and therefore tired....Do I simply feel those emotions, do I cover them in stories?

  Catherine: The thought of my feelings as formulaic, as locks that just need the right key, hurt. The theory makes us as robots, as just series of synapses. But ...can I separate sadness from tears or that nausea from the sight of blood? No, I honestly can't.

  Erin: when I search my bank of experience I find several examples that seem to prove the truth... of James' reversed cause and effect....in Italy last year...all the sudden I couldn't breathe; I felt a strong constriction in my chest and my heart was racing....later when... I tried to figure out why my body had reacted that way... I told myself a story... to explain the physical reaction I had had to leaving him....I realize now that in the moment I had a purely physical or bodily reaction which didn't get assigned a specific emotion...until later, when I reflected on the physical symptoms I had felt. The times when I have felt an emotion...the feeling was somehow fabricated....when I decide that I need to perk up... I listen to upbeat, energetic music until I am eventually ...feeling a bit more alive....James suggests... faking it until you make it. Pretend to be happy in some outward, physical way - whistle, perhaps - and eventually you will convince yourself that you are indeed what you had before only been pretending to be. Our bodies seem to hold the trump card over our emotions to the point where repetitive action can almost hypnotize us into belief.

  Alison: James completely echoed an experience I had today. While reading USA Today, i read a story that shocked me emotionally. Without considering the emotions behind it, my body plunged into nausea and dizziness, as if my body was feeling a revulsion that my brain could not understand....a good example of James's progression of body reaction to emotion. My body felt sick and only after the sickness hit me could I grope for the powerful emotions that may be connected to illness.

  Sky: when I thought back for a time in my life when a physical reaction preceeded am "emotion," the first thing that came to mind was my one bout with jealousy...I distinctly remember... feeling sick to my stomache, being sore like a lot of my muscles had just spasmed, and bursting into tears....I didn't realize until later that I was feeling jealous....I have to remember all my... training in... "method acting"...which...disdains the common faking of emotions...one must truly feel... to project it cleanly onstage....actors are trained to bring up these emotions through memory; think of a time when you were hurt like this, or surprised like this, etc, and FEEL that.

  Margaret: I know that I can influence my emotions by acting differently, eg. I sometimes smile in the middle of a hard workout or test just to lift my spirits and stop feeling upset.

  Amy: often, I will have a panic attack for basically no reason, and the physical sensations will throw me INTO the emotional ones. If my heart is pounding, my body is shaking, and it's hard to breathe, I will inevitably FIND something to make me panic about; when asked what triggered my anxiety, my only answer is "the anxiety did". And if that's true about one emotion, it must be true about others, right? ...I still don't know, actually. I'm not sold yet. But at least I'm thinking about it, I guess.

  Jessica: this phenomena happens for me once a month: I get angry, passionate, sad, irritated, everything goes wrong and I cannot handle it, I cry, a lot. I know that this is not me, not what I'm really feeling, not what I know to be a true reflextion of what's happening. Two days later I get my period, and everything makes more sense. I know its a physical reaction, chemically based, and not what Freud means by unconscious, but its how I can think of an emotional response to an idea I have no control of.

  We have a range of differing interpretations of such experiences (and of James' account of them):
  
  dismissive/irritated/unsure it matters:

  Laura O: Who cares where emotion comes from or what causes it? The point is that it's inside me and I feel it and have to deal with it....Come on James, prove something that really matters.

  Laine: irritated me that he kept asking "the reader" to think about their emotions. Reader do this, reader do that. I can't feel anything because I'm thinking about it too much! Actually, I take that back. I feel anger and frustration that make hurl the course packet across the room. But I can't even enjoy that sensation because I'm called upon to exmaine what my irritation is a result of- throwing the book or reading it.

  Muska: I'm not certain whether I agree with James's notion that the bodily expression comes first and then the identifiable emotion to correspond with it. As a writer, I have an easier time understanding the distinction between emotion and bodily expression by thinking about the difference between the adjective and the verb in a sentence....as a member of the audience, are we first seeing the bodily expression of the woman, or are we seeing her emotion? Are we first seeing the verb (sit) and then the adjective (sad)...but most importantly, what does it matter what we see first, as long as the audience sees the shot and understands that the correlating sentence would be "A sad woman sits in her kitchen" ? Is the chronology of verb/adjective and bodily expression/emotion only important for the writer, in terms of how he/she decides to construct the script?

  doubting:

  Emily: I had trouble believing James's theory on emotion....I believe it is true that going through the physical motions associated with a certain emotion might very well make one appear to be feeling that emotion...but...I continue to believe that it is the emotion which causes the physical reaction.

  Freud, "Anxiety": the James-Lange theory...is utterly incomprehensible to us psycho-analysts and impossible for us to discuss....an early impression is...reproduced as a repetition in the anxiety affect.... the experience of birth...a prototype for all occasions on which life is endangered....the first anxiety was...toxically induced...when the meconium...was present in the waters at birth..."the child is frightened"

  Marie : I just don't think James can be right....Isn't part of the emotion the experience of the emotion- can these two things be separated? ....Saying it is not enough to truly feel it....you need an action to occur that makes you really happy...you cant have one without the other, unless you are faking it.......I can't seem to agree with James.

  Alice: I'm also not a huge supporter of James' 'see a bear, so run, so feel afraid' progression...I would tend to view it more along the lines of...various physiological reactions combine with a desire to get rid of what we percieve as negative feeling....what in our minds then, if fear = bad, goes to a horror movie?

  Jorge: It doesn't make any sense whatsoever to argue that you first have a set of physical reactions and that then you identify those as a particular emotion....There's something more psychological (and less physical) about emotions.... there's more to emotions than James makes it seem....I tend to agree more with Freud, because he digs deeper into the mind and human psyche to justify or explain emotions. James seems a little too superficial with his explanation, just focusing on what the body tells you.

  Adina: The idea that emotions can be unconscious at all directly challenges that idea that physiological reactions come first because if we are just superficially relying on people's perceptions of their feelings, there is no way of accounting for their unconscious other than by their physiological reactions.

  believing:

  Chris: James'... basic idea is that the body will have an automatic reaction to a stimulus...His role for emotion is to be the language with which we understand the physical reaction....brought to the social level, I think it is not saying that emotions are fake, but malleable and can be controlled. We...have an awareness....Therefore, we can mimic the physical movements in ordered to conjure up an... emotion.....James' theory...is extremely useful. When we believe that emotions are...a more malleable controllable thing like language, we can start constructing them and using them in communication. I would not say that it is to fake them, because I do not believe as much in the sanctity of emotions. I think that sometimes they can be so overwhelming that it is hard to sort them together, but I believe that through proper construction and combining, like combating anger with sadness, they are able to exist as a form of language and communication.

  Laura S: I just wanted to say a few words in James' defense....James does not mean that our physical response ...engenders an emotion in us, but instead that we label our physical response as an emotion.... It may be ... helpful to think of the ...components of the physical fear response, such as sweaty palms or increased heart rate....It is not that these symptoms are in and of themselves frightening, but that we label our experience of them fear....Does that seem any less counter-intuitive?

  Anna: a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity....doctors preformed tests on reeves by sticking a pin into his foot...when asked, reeves said he couldnt feel anything at all, but... his foot...pulled itself away from the pin that was pricking it without reeves "knowing"....without ever having come in contact with a snake before, or being "taught" by it's predecessors that snakes are beings to fear, this rat freezes and then zooms about attempting to find a way out of the tank...HOW did it know to be afraid? HOW did reeves' foot "know" to withdraw??? ... which DOES come first?...have you ever TRIED to STOP laughing at something? i wouldnt be able to....we dont tell our heart, "ok, im scared, start racing and thumping and flipping out"...it starts to do that. we dont tell the hairs on our arms, "stand up...skin, get bumpy" it just happens.....we are, i fully believe, taught to feel shame. it is not something natural - which is what james' point is....we are trained to be naked, but we are born nude.

  Tyler: I found his ideas on emotion not only to be logical, but correct....I've never considered stimulated physical effects as a part of emotion. I've only viewed emotion in what James calls an "intellectual" sense - e.g. the idea of hate, not hate's essence.

Relating all of this to the Turn of the Screw...?

Marie : the governess...feels lonely because...she is alone....Though she feels scared, she is not trembling- on the contrary, she acts with duty and courage.

Steph: what I found most interesting about James' essay was... "When we teach children to repress their emotions, it is not that they may feel more, quite the reverse. It is that they may think more..." Could that possibly be the reason why Miles and Flora have such few yet strange lines? It seems like they speak in extremes, saying either nothing of importance, or speaking a few emotionally-charged phrases. What is repressed in their unconscious, and who taught them to "think" their emotions instead of express them?

Margaret: While reading James and Freud, I found that I developed a new sense of Turn of the Screw... that the governess' anxieties about being alone and responsible for two children...or even the anxiety of being a little out of place socially...lead her to create the ghosts as a way to explain her feelings?.... I thought it was interesting when he talked about the "shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us" when listening/reading a heroic narrative. Perhaps the reason that I never really bonded with or felt inspired by the governess (or believe that she actually saw ghosts) was that I never felt that shiver.

And a little time on Freud's "The Unconscious"?

liken perception of unconscious mental processes to sensory perception of external world...
the existence in us of an unlimited number of states of consciousness, all unknown to us and to one another...
characteristics, peculiarities which seem alien, incredible, directly counter to attributes of consciousness:

• exist side-by side, exempt from mutual contradiction
• in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty
• that introduced by work of censorship between unconscious
• in the unconscious only contents mobile intensities
• in the unconscious...processes timeless, not ordered temporally, no reference to time (that work of consciousness)

Alison: I saw a paraphrase of Descartes in Freud's "The Unconcious" when he writes that conciousness only brings us into our own minds, very "I think, therefore I am."

Allie: James may have purposely written a "slow read". By this I mean that the incoherencies and never ending passages added to the loss of "real time" and reminded me of how time seemed to pass in childhood. When I was younger, I had a much different concept of time then I do now: an event of only a few hours felt like days and the years passed from holiday to holiday with just a few events in between....perhaps this loss of real time contributes to...a childhood mental state and childlike perception of time and events.

Cf. Tyler on "time":James argued a sequential succession of events based on an external event. The stimulated impulses affect the involuntary muscles before both an awareness of the stimulus and the physical effects is achieved by the consciousness. That takes time, and a time so small that the concept of emotions is not the sum of parts, but one whole. I believe that is why some members of the class cannot recognize these parts - because they can't see that they exist.

And the briefest time on Freud's "Anxiety":

real anxiety...appears...rational...a reaction to the perception of an external dangers...an expression of the instinct of self-preservation....expectant readiness is...advantageous...the development of anxiety..inexpedient...

We'll return to this notion of emotion as "signal," a vital source of information about the environment, and our necessary response to it....

Arlie Hochshild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983):
emotion is a bodily orientation to an imagininary act (here I draw from Darwin)...it has a signal function: it warns us where we stand vis a vis outer or inner events (here I draw on Freud)...what does and does not stand out as a "signal" presupposes certain culturally taken-for-granted ways of seeing and holding expectations about the world....Feeling...acts...as a clue. It filters out evidence about he self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize....emotion, like seeing and hearing, is a way of knowing about the world...a way of testing reality...every emotion has a signal function....It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective...warning system, guidelines to the self-relevance of a sight...emotion is a potential avenue to "the reasonable view"....Emotion locates the position of the viewer. It uncovers an often unconscious perspective, a comparison....When we reflect on feeling we reflect on this sense of "from where I am"....Taking feelings into account as clues and then correcting for them may be our best short at objectivity.

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