Emotions You Don’t Feel | Hacker News Reader

Emotions You Don’t Feel

nautil.us

82 pointsdnetesn41 comments

"Consider one study from 1974. Researchers had an attractive female interviewer stop one group of men crossing a scary suspension bridge and another one crossing a bridge that wasn’t scary. The women asked the men to fill out a questionnaire. The men on the scary bridge responded to the questions with more sexual content, and were significantly more likely to try to contact the interviewer after it was over. This suggests that the men on the scary bridge interpreted (unconsciously) their body’s reaction to the bridge as added attraction to the interviewer."

Personally, I would conclude that the men felt more confident about their chances after having demonstrated their capabilities as worthy mates. Additionally, after having overcome the bridge, they were now ready to try their chances at the challenge of wooing the researcher.

Maybe, fear and the sexual impulse is often described as related.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-embodied-mind/20130...

Antony Beevor's book "Berlin: The Downfall 1945" comes to mind. There is a chapter in that book where the witnesses describes increased sexual activity in the city during and between the bombardments.

Or perhaps they were men who liked the adrenaline rush of the 'scary bridge' and were pleased to find a female that appeared to also like that rush. As an experimental setup I too was unconvinced it adequately accounted for other effects.

Or perhaps reminders of personal-mortality increase interest in procreation to sustain the species.

Or perhaps different people in different places react differently.

I wouldn't conclude anything. Even if you assume that the interviewer didn't know the parameters for the experiment, their biases could have accounted for the results. If a few of the interviewers were attracted to outdoorsy men and were biased towards the ones who crossed the dangerous bridge, their body language alone is likely to get a very different response.

You'd need a pretty large sample size of interviewers and subjects with varying attractiveness, "outgoingness", and confidence to draw any real conclusion.

Evolution doesn't require conscious knowledge of sexual pressure. Why would men be constantly evaluating their sexual value as opposed to simply having a reaction to the situation? The latter would be all that's necessary to provide mating motive.

IMO this is more just that people are really bad at reading themselves. With someone else, you can see the body language and know that they're upset; but with yourself it can be harder to observe body language and other clues.

Most people walk around unaware of their mental state on a minute-by-minute basis. I'm one of them -- I didn't believe it until recently, but once I started unraveling the anxiety I'd been walking around with for years, it became obvious to me why most people thought I was just a grumpy jerk. Other people don't perceive you the way that you do; and in many cases they may have a better perspective.

I was the same way for a while -- had body pains and discomforts that I (somehow) misattributed to whoever was demanding my attention and so came off as (or was) grumpy.

All the studies mentioned in this article are exactly the type that are currently being debunked en masse and generally causing a crisis of faith in psychology.

Came here to say the same. It's not impossible, but you want to see multiple replications, and p a lot lower than 0.05, before believing study results like those.

Do you have references for this claim? I'd love to read more about this.

The replication crisis:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

I feel inclined to think that there's a huge difference between not feeling an emotion (which I would argue is impossible) and not being consciously aware of the feeling (which i would say is what this article is calling 'not feeling')

There's indeed a difference. An emotion which isn't merely not perceived, but not perceptible, couldn't ever come anyone's attention.

On the other hand, why do you think it would be impossible that there might be someone who might not feel certain emotions? Some people are born without a sense of pain, or blind to certain colors. There might be people out there who are born "numb".

> On the other hand, why do you think it would be impossible that there might be someone who might not feel certain emotions?

I think gr3yh47 meant "not feeling an emotion that you're experiencing" rather than "not feeling an emotion full stop".

Well, "not feeling an emotion that you're experiencing" would be just a plain contradiction if experience either required or were identical to feeling.

I can see how it would seem impossible.

> not feeling an emotion (which I would argue is impossible)

It's not impossible. There are people without emotions. And even more people with only minimal emotions.

See: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150818-what-is-it-like-to-...

I see that get repeated a lot, but every time I drill down into the details (including this one), it seems like they're experiencing different emotions, or lacking specific ones, not "lacking emotion altogether".

Their example in this case: "I didn't feel joy on first seeing my child." Okay, that's one situation you don't respond to; it doesn't mean they never experience joy.

Some people aren't bothered when e.g. others poke holes in their story; doesn't mean that person never experiences anger.

I admit it comes down to a tricky question of what you're counting as an emotion.

Psychopathy is a spectrum disorder characterised by an inability to feel one or more emotions.

There's certainly a difference between when the average person says they don't feel, and when a psychopath does, but it certainly lies in the realm of possibility.

No, antisocial personality disorder (usually seen as psychopathy in criminology for which no paychxological diagnosis exists) is characterized by impulsive behavior, aggression, anger, lack of empathy, no regard for existing laws/rules and in inability to learn from discipline. See the Wikipedia page for more information. Lack of feeling emotions is not a defining trait in psychopathy. Lack of feeling emotions is a defining trait in schizoid personality disorder, certain flavors of depression, and dissociative or trauma based disorders.

This touches on something personal, so I'll try to keep this civil, and encompassing, but I won't respond further.

The definition for psychopathy changes within various countries and even the industry addressing the issue.

The US conflates what have clear distinctions where I am: sociopathy and psychopathy.

The definition Wikipedia leans towards would be called sociopathy here.

APD, and several other disorders, get classified as psychopathy here.

The definition I gave is simply the definition I was given post-diagnosis.

However, my point that a lack of emotion is possible, seems to stand regardless of the name you give to the disorder.

There was an experimental procedure using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation that opened up empathy for an autistic person. (And similarly, TCMS was used experimentally to temporary induce autism in someone). So I wonder to what extent TCMS can be used for this. Though, like autism, if TCSM can reduce, it can also induce.

It's in my experience that psychopathy (or whatever we'd like to call it) is a consciousness state, and there are some people who can deliberately shift into it by choice. These are usually folks who experiment with hacking their consciousness, such as psychonauts or meditators, so I'm not necessarily talking about people who are born into it, or conditioned by circumstance into it.

The most interesting thing about consciously shifting into that state is that, once you are there, you feel zero motivation to shift out of it, even if you have the knowledge and skill to do so.

And it is not so much that there is a lack of emotion, so much as the lack of suffering when it comes to experiencing things. At that point, any morality is driven by choice, rather than by pathos.

One of the English NHS (except they're independent of the NHS) "death panels" NICE has said there's limited evidence of effectiveness of transcranial magnetic stimulation as a treatment for depression, but recommended that it's offered to some people in some situations.

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/IPG542/chapter/4-Efficacy

> There was an experimental procedure using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation that opened up empathy for an autistic person.

An article: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/an-experimental-aut...

What countries defined "psychopathy" as a specific medical oandition? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

says: no psychiatric or psychological organization has sanctioned a diagnosis titled "psychopathy"

The words "psychopath" and "sociopath" are very general terms for mental illness.

The word is alexithymia, not psychopathy which is something else.

For anyone interested in "emotional intelligence" or being more conscious of emotions in yourself and others, check out Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life by Dr. Paul Ekman.

https://www.amazon.com/Emotions-Revealed-Second-Recognizing-...

I quite like Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I struggle a lot with connecting with my emotions and that book really helped me intelectualize them.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26329.Emotional_Intellige...

It's tough to balance, I'm often overwhelmed by always wondering how others are feeling and trying to decipher their behaviour.

Dr. Ekman is renowned for his research into facial expressions and body language as it relates to our emotional content. He discovered that there is a set of universal facial expressions (microexpressions) which human beings from all cultures unconsciously exhibit when we are feeling certain emotions. His findings are used by many computer facial recognition systems.

Knowing what these facial expressions look like can help you become much more adept at perceiving emotions.

However, once you have identified the facial expression/emotion, the big question is why they are feeling that emotion. Ekman advises using great caution and open mindedness when trying to determine the answer to this question.

In my experience both personally and professionally, the solution is to not overthink it, and to just ask. I find that I am too often wrong about the underlying motivations and reasoning (usually it's more benign than I think), so just asking leads to much healthier results.

In the vast majority of cases, asking someone creates a venue for you to gain clarity and address anything that needs addressing, especially if you suspect it's a negative emotion towards you.

As someone who has suffered badly from anxiety in the past this really rings true. Sometimes I would be completely unaware of what was causing a particular bout only to later have it become abundantly clear once having talked through things with my therapist.

It's amazing how much is going on in your brain at the subconscious level, it's far more than just processing stimuli etc.

Yeah, anxiety can be weird like that.

The key I've found is keeping something of a diary, initially it was a sleep diary so the next time a doctor screws up and prescribes me a drug that makes me manic, I'll figure it out quickly.

I added any medications I take, various other things (especially weird dreams are fun), and when I feel unusually anxious I write that down, and mentally go through the things that have happened in the last day or so. The one(s) that make me feel noticeably more anxious right then and there as I enumerate through the list, well, that's the tipoff.

I recommend learning cognitive therapy, now with an added "behavioral" component, if you want to try something like this out, and it can help in general to the extent it helps you realize some of the things that bother you are cognitive distortions.

Most of the process of me getting better was learning to understand and recognise my own thoughts, so I totally agree. For me personally it was talking therapy that really worked.

This has been my experience.

Let's be more precise. There are emotions you are aware of and emotions that you are not. When we say "consciously feel" it, we are talking about awareness.

Awareness can be trained and expanded. Awareness can also be conditioned to avoid painful and unpleasant experiences. In such a way, emotions can be buried deep in the psyche, with mental constructs that filter someone from feeling it.

It's also been in my experience that burying painful emotions leads to rot.

Reminds me of a neuroscience article of Berridge where he talks about emotions that we're not conscious of. I did some digging and found of articles of Berridge. It seems that he mainly worked with another researcher who knows more about this: Piotr Winkielman.

Berridge wrote a lot about unconscious liking and unconscious wanting. He showed that in rats there are different neural areas being activated. There is a wanting pathway and there are liking hotspots ('islands' close or on the wanting pathway).

Disclaimer: bsc. psychology, typing this from memory so subtle errors are probably there.

I hope the links aren't paywalled, I didn't look into it.

Links:

http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/13/3/120.full.pdf

http://lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/publicatio...

http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/winkielman_zajonc_ER-2010.pdf

Pages of the researchers.

Berridge: http://lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/research/a...

Winkielman: http://winkielmanlab.ucsd.edu/

I think a good way to think about emotions and feelings is by strictly separating them conceptually: Feelings are bodily effects like fear, anger, hunger, arousal... while emotions are learned acts of communication. Emotions are interpretations of feelings and Emotions are communicated feelings, arranged in complex patterns or "scripts" that are culturally highly variable. So you could say that all emotions (outward, visible acts of communication) are based on more "invisible" feelings. Take mourning for example. The feelings are a mixture of fear, but how you mourn is extremely variable over cultures, times and even intrapersonally. Emotions have to be learned, feelings are the raw material or puzzle pieces the body/mind offers from birth.

To deprive yourself of future confusion you can separate this further into: feelings, emotions and "bodily effects". I present you a slightly less morbid example: you feel happy and you smile. Act of smiling is an expression of emotion that is not named in the prior statement. The happy feeling is expression-less in this example and merely a conscious record of your internal self-observation.

“We find that we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind-stuff’ out of which the emotion can be constituted.”

This is Holmes at work. "Emotion" is a social construct and a rationalization after the fact. What we have is a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system that react to instinctual stimulus and its derivatives, and streams of consciousness that instantly try to rationalize those reactions. Theory-theory has no physical basis.

I disagree with that. There is a certain socialization (and mimicry) involved. However, if you were to strip out the socialization as well as strip out the pattern of physical sensations that arises, there will still be something, which is the emotion.

I am not speaking metaphorically. I'm talking about using your own consciousness as the laboratory and your awareness as the instrument to examine and experience this directly. It is possible to concentrate on an emotion as it is being experienced, and mentally distinguish between what is the socialization and what is not. The same with distinguishing what are patterns of physical sensations related to the emotion.

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