The emotions we feel may shape what we see | Hacker News Reader

The emotions we feel may shape what we see

medicalxpress.com

49 pointsdnetesn12 comments

I see this article. It is interesting research, and matches well with what I noticed from my meditation practice (in-so-far-as how emotional state profoundly colors interpretation of reality).

I have friends and family on both sides of the political debate here in the US, and I see a lot of theatrics and narrative building.

How much of the political theater is affected by this?

I am thinking, a lot more than we'd care to admit.

>How much of the political theater is affected by this?

IMHO the political theater is not affected by theatrics and narrative building. Theatrics and narrative building are the very backbone of politics. Want to push a bill you consider appropriate? Nope, you'll have to generate outrage, participate in a couple of speaking engagements at conferences click-baity names, tweet a snarky remark that simplifies an otherwise complex topic to a petty "exchange", pander to the demographics most likely to agree with you.

You're pro-gun rights? Hope for a terrorist attack! You're pro-gun confiscation? Hope for a school shooting! It's so disgusting, it's utterly worrying, sad, disgusting to see us engage one another in this way.

Theatrics, opinion shaping, narrative building is the backbone of public spaces, therefore also of our media, of course also of our culture and definitely of our politics.

If I had to coin a snarky sentence to shape the future for years to come I'd plaster the following everywhere as a warning to everyone regarding the very dystopian future we are building:

It's about emotions, stupid! Oh, and they know.

Social media, online communities, memes, viral content, Machine Learning all are very useful tools in furthering the feedback loop that lead our emotions to only spiral more and more out of control.

I had thought much the same before, focusing on the theatrics, until I started working with a startup with lawyers and for lawyers. There was also a family matter that deeply affected my wife and I. My wife worked with a lawyer to regain custody of her child back from a screwed up situation. The product I was helping to write was related to what was affecting my family.

There is a lot of thought put into policy and governance -- of what to do when the group of people are too large for everyone to know each other. Further, when I was introduced to the book Crucial Conversation, I realized that resolving conflicts among people without shared narrative does not have to happen this way. The book talks quite a bit about the typical reactions to crucial conversations -- violence and silence. That's exactly what I keep seeing when I see people talk about politics now, in the Trump era.

So I disagree: the theatrics and narrative building is not the backbone of politics, though I will agree that those theatrics and narrative building is one of the core tools people typically use to gain and wield political power. There's the tool -- which may have alternatives -- and then there is what you are trying to accomplish with that tool.

And thus, I come back to: How much of the political theater is affected by this? Isn't there a way for people to be inclusive and respectful of individuals?

Meh... this is a poor interpretation. Subjective emotion is a response to prediction on the nociceptive inputs we get. So we get the input of the unseen happy thing, and our brain tries to make a prediction of WHY that thing is happy, then if it guesses right we feel happiness and if it guesses wrong, we feel unhappiness. Roughly.

There are a lot of good studies on this, they're all pretty technical, but seem very well done. I can't find with a quick Googling the one I came across (in the context of researching VR and potential consequences of 'virtual embodiment') a few days ago, but this is in a similar vein (though more focused on pain than on general emotion): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4529956/

>That is, we do not come to know the world through only our external senses - we see the world differently when we feel pleasant or unpleasant.

So, what they're saying is that pessimists have been right all along!

In seriousness, though, I consider myself a very logical person, I've often wondered I am simply good at rationalizing away emotions that truly drive my thinking. Begs questions on the origin of cognition.

Are we rational beings experiencing emotions, or are we emotional beings hiding behind a facade of rationalism?

From my own experience meditating (various forms of observation of mind, awareness, identification, arising thoughts, emotions, and sensations) and dealings with people, I think we're emotional beings hiding behind a facade of rationalism. Neurodivergents, such as those with the psychopathy "warrior genes" are probably one of the few exceptions.

It's my experience that most people don't recognize when emotion is coloring their otherwise 'rational' thinking.

Psychopaths feel emotions, they are just disconnected with the emotions of external entities (simplified summary). Is there something else I'm missing when you say that?

Psychopaths feel very little emotions, particularly emotions around bonding with other people. They can get angry or irritated, but they won't feel things like fear. People with those psychopathy neural architecture cannot be motivated through pain, fear, or punishments though they can be motivated through rewards if it is framed in a way that makes rational sense.

In the clinical world, there is a strong coupling of psychopathy-the-neurological-architecture, and anti-social personality disorder, which is defined more along the lines of behavior rather than genetics or neuroscience. On Quora, there is a community of people with psychopathy that writes about their experiences, advocating for the decoupling of psychopathy and anti-social personality disorder -- and if you think about it, that kind of advocacy is very rational. It's not because they want people to understand them, but because the misunderstanding people makes dealing with non-psychopaths more inconvenient, and sometimes irritating.

One Quoran whose posts are a good starting point to read up on is Athena Walker. Reading Walker's posts and others like her's, is a great exercise in finding out just how much emotions and narrative you project onto the things you read. There are a lot of things we neurotypical people think is rational, but they are experienced through the lenses of emotions coupled together with social bonding and shared narratives with other people.

Just as an example ... Years ago when I was just starting out in martial arts, I found myself in the company of combat veterans. None of them are psychopaths. One of them, a senior student, was talking about having to clean up a friend who killed himself. He shot himself in the head with a shotgun. When the senior student went to go clean up the house, he had scrape the pieces of brain and fragments of skull into the bag. I winced and made a face, and both my teacher and the senior student said: that isn't a person anymore; it's a corpse. They had read my face and knew what was going into my head. That I was feeling the mutilation of a living person, that the person is suffering and in pain, because _I_ am simulating that suffering an pain as if it were my brain and skull fragments blown out. And the disgust with flesh and blood.

This is pretty typical of how neurotypicals feel and think about death if they had not spent some time seriously examining their beliefs, thoughts, and feelings about death. At some recent point in my life, I realized I would not give up my empathy -- it isn't so much that it makes me human as it is a part of who I am, just as the lack of empathy is part of who Athena Walker is -- but I can have empathy and be rational about it too: that's a corpse, and someone suffered and tried to end that suffering.

Very much the latter, if we do not keep ourselves to higher standards.

Is attention and mood such a new concept that we need an entire article for it? Am I the only one that sees this as obvious and intuitive? You only look for what's relevant to you. There's no need to "see" the vast majority of things you come across every day.

There are many ways to study attention and mood. What I took from the press release which appears to be novel (though I've not read the original research article) is that our higher-order representations of facial emotions are able to be influenced by stimuli presented to the participant unconsciously. Although the participant was not aware of the happy faces being presented to them, their representation of the emotion of a separate face was affected. This is very different from the obvious "our mood influences what we attend to in the world".

Also highlighted in the press release is the fact that this was robust for unconsciously presented happy faces -- it is unusual for positive stimuli to have a stronger effect on most psychological measures. This is usually due to negative stimuli causing higher levels of arousal (as far as I know, though I'd need to confirm this in the literature), so it's really due to a confounding of valence and arousal.

My main question from this article would be how they controlled for low-level visual properties of the stimuli presented. The hope is that their upside-down face experiment was able to account for any possible confounding of face emotion with something like spatial frequency characteristics influencing the participant's subjective judgement of the neutral face, but there will never be a way to fully claim that it was the emotion of the face alone. If you fully control the underlying visual properties of the stimulus, you remove the emotion!

The article is about the methods of new studies that are attempting to quantify something that many - but not all - find intuitive. Yeah, there are bigger fish to fry, but I found it interesting.

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