Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's done a ton of academic research in emotions, I just want to point out:

Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of emotions (which this article uses) is widely considered implausible by emotions researchers, but she's gotten a surprising amount of media coverage that presents her theories as consensus or fact.

In a nutshell: traditional "appraisal theory" says for example, we appraise something as dangerous (a bear), and have an emotion that consists of bodily and mental feelings (fear), and that emotions are inbuilt much like colors are. (You can't choose to see red as blue).

What Barrett argues is that seeing a bear produces adrenaline -- a feeling which precedes emotion -- and then we can interpret that adrenaline feeling however we like, that emotions are essentially cultural constructions or labels we've invented that we're free to uninvent.

However, this view, besides defying common sense, simply isn't consistent with data. Emotions follow regular patterns in what generates them (e.g. a dangerous situation creates fear) and what relieves them (e.g. escaping a dangerous situation allows fear to subside). There's zero evidence we can reinterpret or redefine our emotions by will, as she suggests. (Nor can she account for why infants all share the same emotional patterns, before they could have learned them culturally.)

If you really want to get into current academic theories of emotion (and Ctrl+F for "Barrett" to see where she sits), you can basically start here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/

Do you know of any studies where this has been studied in autistic people?

For me, the gap between physical reaction and identifying an emotion can sometimes be very long, like days or longer.

Because I don't identify my emotions intuitively, I actually have to sit and look at the physical symptoms to figure out what the emotion was. My heart was racing and I felt queasy in my stomach. Did something about him scare me and I should be wary, or am I attracted to him? I can't always tell.

Sometimes it does seem like I could choose. Like as a kid, I thought I had really bad stage fright, until someone said maybe I was actually excited. It was an easy shift. Now I love speaking in front of people, and I do it easily. But were they right and just identifying my emotions better than I was? Or was I actually afraid and, by thinking of those same physical symptoms as excitement, did I become excited?

I'm fascinated to find out this has been studied and people have theories leading toward actual answers!

Unfortunately emotion in autistic people isn't an area I've researched, so I can't help you there specifically.

But with the rest of what you're saying, I can say a few things in response.

First, that plenty of people don't identify their emotions intuitively at all, that's not something necessarily autistic. In fact, it's why the whole field of "educational intelligence" education exists. You're describing a classic case of high arousal that is very common to take quite a bit of life experience and feedback to be able to accurately interpret the emotion you're feeling. But also, emotions are often mixed -- it's easy to be attrated to someone but also scared, whether scared of them directly, or scared of the attraction, or scared of the strong feeling period -- or scared in multiple ways, and then one goes away but another continues!

And as for the second example of stage fright, there are three things I can say.

The first is the common adage "if it's mentionable it's manageable" -- in therapy, simply being able to recognize and name an emotion allows us to live with it in a healthy balance rather than be dominated by it. For some people, understanding that stage fright is normal anxiety that operates within certain expected parameters and a healthy response is enough to be able to speak comfortably. Indeed, if you weren't nervous at all, that would show you didn't care -- so a certain level of anxiety is expected and good.

Second, actors specifically are often told, if nervous, to imagine that their character is nervous, and so rather than to fight against nervousness or stage fright, to use it to their advantage -- and indeed most acting scenes are "high stakes" so it works well.

And so third, what your friend told you was great advice. Anxiety and excitement aren't exactly the same thing, but simply by recognizing and validating your emotional arousal and framing it as a positive thing (regardless of its label), they essentially accomplished the previous two things I described -- that it's a positive emotion (it means you care), and energy you can use to your advantage (because it's appropriate).

So in other words, you were probably feeling anxiety and excitement, but the simple message of "it's OK and good what you're feeling" kept anxiety at a reasonable normal level that doesn't interfere, and really that low-level anxiety is essentially healthy heightened attention appropriate to the situation.

Hope that all makes sense!

It really does! Thanks so much for explaining it so clearly.

It also helps me understand why people like the one in the article want to believe that interpretation or recasting of emotional responses might be retrainable. It does sound like it would be advantageous if that were true! If I could convince myself that whatever physical response I was feeling was due to a positive emotion, I can see why I would self-report feeling happier.

On the other hand, it reminds me of my experience with CBT after my sister and nephew died. My therapist kept trying to challenge me to think about the situations in my life in a way that made me something other than sad. But it all felt so much like I was lying to myself that I eventually quit going. Maybe that model is helpful for other kinds of depression when the events really are more neutral, but it rang awfully hollow with appropriate situational grief.

Not only did I have no hope of convincing myself I was something other than profoundly sad, I didn't want to. Being that sad in that period was necessary in a "the only way through it is through it" sense.

Maybe that's part of what's left out in this author's approach. Unless you're one of the people who found out isolation and interacting by screens actually suits you, maybe this last year and a half should be a period of sadness and anxiety.

Seriously fascinating, thank you for sharing.

I had taken a skeptical gaze at the article, not because I professionally study the subject, but because this particular area of science has recently come under fire for issues of researches attempting to reproduce results and discovering some of the "Really Surprising Results" turned out to just be wrong. And the source is a "General News Provider"[0].

I am not autistic. I know a lot of study is being put to understanding that condition, better, but I wonder -- along those lines, do they study the differences, or the edges of those differences: As an explanation, I'm pretty consistent/quick with emotional response but I just read you nearly tell a stage fright story I have related to my children. I used to do community theater, but ended up getting a paid, roll in a play at age 13 that got me out of two months of school.

Dress rehearsal I had a bit of an anxiety attack; one of the women in the show came to check on me and said something along the lines of "how exciting this is". And that was it, anxiety turned excitement. I'd sort of taken for granted that I probably "just changed my way of thinking about the experience". After all, what I was nervous about didn't go away -- I was nervous I would fail in front of a large audience who just spent more than I could afford for a ticket to this thing. I was excited about succeeding but that wasn't a guarantee.

I think I was wrong about that; I think it happened a lot more like you describe: I remember hearing "exciting" and feeling an instant change because I had recognized that what I thought I was experiencing: overwhelming anxiety, was not what I was really feeling: overwhelming excitement and almost no stage fright[1]. The next time it happened was a lead (singing) part in a high school production in front of my peers, with a lot of the school year left[2], but this time it was exactly one heart-beat long, immediately replaced with excitement, just before I walked on stage.

[0] See "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect"

[1] I was a shy kid; I think my parents recognized that, along with the fact that during my childhood, girls almost always played boy parts due to not a single boy showing up for an audition. My first part was because I was dragged along to something my sister auditioned for (and failed to get the part). I think I was too young to understand fear of embarrassment, and did that so frequently in my childhood that it never really formed outside of minor nerves and this incident.

[2] Our school, I was surprised to learn, was unique for a run-of-the-mill suburban public high school theater. Two shows a year, one musical, different every time, sold out by the end of the day the first day tickets are offered (no shows during school hours). Head of English department (also Director) disallowed "extra credit" b/c of the theater size which really made looking at a packed with "Standing Room Only" tickets sold out, attended by a bunch of "not the good kids", all shifting their weight, standing, while laughing at something written by Shakespeare, performed in home-made costumes/set by high school kids.

I watched an interview with her on YouTube and she had a very argumentative tone when questioned by an audience member, rather than a conversational and educational one. Not surprised to hear from a fellow expert that her theories aren't really supported by evidence. She seemed extremely defensive during the Q&A.

Here's the video: https://youtu.be/qwsft6tmvBA

In fact the audience member I linked to basically accidentally stepped on a landmine which seems to be the main critique you've posted of her work, just by talking about facts that seem evident (that emotions are the result of chemicals flooding the brain)

That we can reinterpret our emotions by will I agree is fairly silly, and seems like more like the thing one would believe if one wants to sell self-help books.

But this doesn't rule out that emotional responses are early, learned scaffolding on raw internal cues that we couldn't reliably distinguish without context.

That all babies seem to learn e.g. fear and laughter in a similar way doesn't contradict that. We could just all be pushed by our circumstance to learn in a similar same way.

And more darkly, we may not quite all learn basic emotional resposes in the same way. Reading about people growing up in abusive relationships, and e.g. returning to an abusive spouse I've often wondered, does the person here described literally confuse fear and affection?

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