Emotion

[dr_mabeuse]

Fascinating, Doc. In my experience pain is ... I think women have a different sensation of physical pain, but an emotional attachment to it. Men have an emotional attachment to the pain, but its not as physical as it is for a woman. Not sure if this makes sense for you, but that's my take.

Now that's fascinating! An emotional attachment? Explain, Charley! Is that like the theory of masochism that says pain can act as a surrogate for ego?

Emotions certainly depend on context and expectation. People who grow up in families where pain gets attention have lower pain thresholds than people who grow up in families where pain is routinely ignored. People administering electric shocks to themselves have lower pain thresholds than people being shocked by others.

 

[tickledkitty]

God, yes! We wallow in it. Martyr ourselves. We give birth, right?

Then there are those women who use their pain and their emotional attachment to it to manipulate everyone around them. I'm sure there are men who do this too, but I've seen it more with women in my life.

 

[bluebell]

I'm a big believer in emotion, and I think we live most of our lives in emotional space - much more than we live in intellectual space - but when it comes to having words to describe emotions, we're in pretty bad shape. We're much better at describing and thinking about ideas than we are at describing and experiencing emotions.

Oooh, ooh. Me likey.
It struck me while reading this bit that whenever we do attempt to describe emotions, we use visuals. Or, we appeal to the five basic senses in order to get our point across. Because no matter what color the gelatin filter is (I like that, Joe), we can ultimately count on the knowledge that most people have sensory barometers with which to gauge experience (thereby making it relevant to them).
That in mind, I feel like I mostly resort to visuals, myself. For example, if someone wanted to demonstrate that a character was lonely they could say her soul plunked around like the stray plastic ball inside an unmanned foosball table, or something stupid like that.
(Dude, that was really, really bad. But you get the gist, right?)

It always seemed a little funny to me that we require the use of a borrowed sense in order to understand another one, or to define something completely other, as in, emotion.
I understand the appeal of going to music concerts. It brings its own fun and separate experience with it. But I'm also struck a little dumb by how we're all paying to see a hear.

To attempt to return to my original point (and I may have had one once upon a time, though I can't promise anything), I suppose we would have to ask ourselves if describing an emotion is really possible, and if it is, does a sensory experience cut the cake? I'm inclined to agree with Zoot that our descriptions usually don't work as well as we wish they would, although it's odd that they wouldn't because it would seem that much of our emotion IS derived from our sensory perception.
If you touch me, I have been touched. Have you ever been touched physically by someone when you weren't expecting it? Skin on skin? Even just hands? It can produce a formidable current, as if all of your cells began to do the fox trot at the same time, but in individual meter. And all of that can feed into emotion. It may have been a brush with someone you don't particularly enjoy, but something inside you can feed on that and grow it.

There's an episode (Gridlock, for those of us nerdy enough to remember) in one of the new Dr. Who series where the Doctor and Martha find these people who peddle emotion patches. You could buy Anger or Happiness or anything else your addicted little heart desired. Once attached the drug would seep right into your bloodstream; the effect was immediate. But it was a fake effect, and it didn't last.
Is depth of emotion determined by time as well as experience?

Conversely, there's a Stargate episode (the original, and yes I truly am demonstrating my super gweek-ness tonight *sigh*) where the team meets up with a technologically superior race called the Tolans. Of course, one of the Tolans digs Sam Carter (frighteningly gorgeous woman, damn her) and before he leaves he gives her a small device that he's recorded an emotion into. It's how he feels about her. If she touches it, she can feel exactly what he was feeling. It wasn't an emotion she had conjured on her own but she could now experience his. His true emotion. Without him having to describe it first.
Is there such a thing as transference of emotion? Can it ever really happen or would selfishness get in the way of that (intentionally OR inadvertently)?

In one of her books Gail Godwin says "Perhaps no one had a stable personality, but people simply vibrated different emotional frequencies, depending upon the lights or darknesses of the moment." I always admired that, and was a little scared of it. Maybe even deterred. If true, it could be making an assumption about you as a person. That you could never really be solid.

 

[xssve]

My own feeling is that the brain is really an emotion-processor more than it is a reason-processor. Every memory has an emotional tag associated with it and we shuffle these emotional symbols around all the time (We even know where those flags are handed out - in the amygdala. That's where memories are given emotional content, and lesions in the amygdala produce all sorts of strange effects) If you pay attention to your thinking what you'll probably find is that most of the time you're playing out little emotional scenarios, looking for the ones that give you the most bang for the buck. The time you spend dealing with pure reason is really rather minimal. You're somewhere between a dream and a wish, playing with feelings.

True - comes in handy if fantasy is your business...

 

[christabelll]

mild thread jack

True - comes in handy if fantasy is your business...

You Okay Bud?


Now back to your regularly scheduled program

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Have you ever been touched physically by someone when you weren't expecting it? Skin on skin? Even just hands? It can produce a formidable current, as if all of your cells began to do the fox trot at the same time, but in individual meter. And all of that can feed into emotion. It may have been a brush with someone you don't particularly enjoy, but something inside you can feed on that and grow it.

Yeah. I think there's something electrochemical going on here with human touch, some kind of sixth-sense type of thing. There's just too much anecdotal evidence about the importance of touch in human development and healing. There's something to it. We're just exquisitely sensitive to touch, and not just loving touch, but angry touch, dismissive touch, contemptuous touch. It's intensely informational and intimate.

In one of her books Gail Godwin says "Perhaps no one had a stable personality, but people simply vibrated different emotional frequencies, depending upon the lights or darknesses of the moment." I always admired that, and was a little scared of it. Maybe even deterred. If true, it could be making an assumption about you as a person. That you could never really be solid.

I don't think of people as being especially solid. I was reading one book about consciousness where the author used the analogy of consciousness being like the hint of a melody you hear when an orchestra is tuning up. The brain is a collection of scores of different functions all operating at once, independent of each other. When it reaches a certain level of complexity it produces a kind of melody like that orchestra that's tuning up and imagines that it has a conductor in charge. It calls this imaginary conductor "me". According to this guy (and according to Zen masters, I guess), the more we believe in this "me", the farther we are from the truth of what we are.

Pretty creepy.

I suppose we all have our default emotional setting though. These days we think of it probably on a scale of depressed to elated or in terms of self-realization, but the ancient Greeks thought of it on a scale from cowardly to courageous, and I suppose in the middle ages they thought of it in terms of faith. It changes with the dominant emotion of the era.

 

[Guest]

I don't think of people as being especially solid. I was reading one book about consciousness where the author used the analogy of consciousness being like the hint of a melody you hear when an orchestra is tuning up. The brain is a collection of scores of different functions all operating at once, independent of each other. When it reaches a certain level of complexity it produces a kind of melody like that orchestra that's tuning up and imagines it has a conductor in charge. It calls this imaginary conductor "me". The more we believe in this "me", the farther we are from the truth of what we are.

Pretty creepy.

I think that's rather apt, actually, or perhaps I'm just sucked in by the music analogy.

Different parts of your consciousness have different responsibilities but all must work together in order to perform.

When they cannot work together - the less complex the thought, the more difficulties the person has with their "me."

Or not. Symphony's in town, gonna catch that this weekend.

 

[christabelll]

Yeah. I think there's something electrochemical going on here with human touch, some kind of sixth-sense type of thing. There's just too much anecdotal evidence about the importance of touch in human development and healing. There's something to it. We're just exquisitely sensitive to touch, and not just loving touch, but angry touch, dismissive touch, contemptuous touch. It's intensely informational and intimate.



I don't think of people as being especially solid. I was reading one book about consciousness where the author used the analogy of consciousness being like the hint of a melody you hear when an orchestra is tuning up. The brain is a collection of scores of different functions all operating at once, independent of each other. When it reaches a certain level of complexity it produces a kind of melody like that orchestra that's tuning up and imagines it has a conductor in charge. It calls this imaginary conductor "me". The more we believe in this "me", the farther we are from the truth of what we are.

Pretty creepy.

Oooh the images this conjures... And I think closer to the truth of it that anyone wants to imagine - We are the Body Electric and so are our emotions and I cant ellucidate this thing that swirls in my head - except within my dreams
when the music of the universe sends me dancing - dancing- spinning - without ryhme nor reason- yet the music moves me onward... within the dream others come and go, and the trajectory changes, and the leaps and bounds are larger, longers, lower, then slowly the spinning returns, the whirling dirvishs of the spheres... only once... just once... did the dance have a partner - and I woke with tears on my face from the sheer beauty of its musical grace - then the solo flying returned - and I danced, buoyed on uncertain wings, the bits and pieces that make up the me, incorporeal, insubstantial, electric - flying free...

good morning
the doc just said I could get off these fricking Meds!

 

[xssve]

You Okay Bud?

Fine, you?

Yeah. I think there's something electrochemical going on here with human touch, some kind of sixth-sense type of thing. There's just too much anecdotal evidence about the importance of touch in human development and healing. There's something to it. We're just exquisitely sensitive to touch, and not just loving touch, but angry touch, dismissive touch, contemptuous touch. It's intensely informational and intimate.

Deficiant skin conductivity is one of the physical symptoms of psychopathy:

Psychopathy is a personality disorder with interpersonal–emotional and antisocial deviance facets. This study investigated these facets of psychopathy prospectively using normal-range personality traits in a community sample of young adult men who completed a picture-viewing task that included startle blink and skin conductance measures, like tasks used to study psychopathy in incarcerated men. Consistent with prior research, scores on the interpersonal–emotional facet of psychopathy (“fearless dominance”) were associated with deficient fear-potentiated startle. Conversely, scores on the social deviance facet of psychopathy (“impulsive antisociality”) were associated with smaller overall skin conductance magnitudes. Participants high in fearless dominance also exhibited deficient skin conductance magnitudes specifically to aversive pictures. Findings encourage further investigation of psychopathy and its etiology in community samples.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2242355

It may be that Masochism is related to diminished physical sensitivity, i.e., some people may simply require higher levels of stimulus in order to elicit a given reaction - others may be conditioned to higher levels of stimulus (jaded).

It may not be all there is to it, but it is almost certainly a factor.

 

[xssve]

I suppose we all have our default emotional setting though. These days we think of it probably on a scale of depressed to elated or in terms of self-realization, but the ancient Greeks thought of it on a scale from cowardly to courageous, and I suppose in the middle ages they thought of it in terms of faith. It changes with the dominant emotion of the era.

Uh, no, these days I believe we think of it as "rich" or "poor" - it is unseemly for poor people to be anything but meekly depressed, they have no right.

 

[Guest]

images of him jamming a pick down into your nerves.

I had both a physiological and a psychological reaction to that. *shudder*

*reading, learning*

 

[xssve]

Conclusions The results support the theory that psychopaths are characterized by a pronounced lack of fear in response to aversive events. Furthermore, the results suggest a general deficit in processing affective information, regardless of whether stimuli are negative or positive. Emotional hyporesponsiveness was specific to psychopaths, since results for offenders with BPD indicate a widely adequate processing of emotional stimuli.

http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/58/8/737?ck=nck

 

[AllardChardon]

What about hate, is it one of the strongest emotions or one of the stongest feelings?

Once I was stalked by an ex-lover. I had no idea how much I could hate another person until this experience. It was frightening.

Was I engulfed in feelings, emotions or both? Hate was all consuming for awhile. More so than love, I am sad to say.

Now, years later, I can barely recall those feelings but the haunting emotions seem to be lingering. Maybe I answered my own question here, huh? Are feelings more transient on their own? Do they become more permanent when we attach our emotions to them? Do emotions lose their importance over time if they remain unused?

Or could those feelings and emotions be brought right back up to the surface with double intensity if anyone tried to stalk me again? I think so.

I hope I never hate like that again. It was destructive to my being.

 

[shereads]

Well, we all know about you.

There's always something new to learn.

 

[shereads]

N People administering electric shocks to themselves have lower pain thresholds than people being shocked by others.

That, I didn't know. Maybe electric shock is related somehow to being tickled?

(We can't tickle ourselves, either. We can target our own 'ticklish' spots, make the necessary motions, but not elicit that breathless pain-laughter response that's caused when someone else does it to us.)