CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS

Excited Delirium

2012-01-03T16:10:00.000-08:00

Excited delirium was describe in the mid 1980s, is a state of severe agitation, delirium, hypertension and hyperthermia.

It is a psychological and physical meltdown, sometime resulting in death.

Excited delirium is one of several terms that describe a syndrome that is broadly characterized by:
*At state of high mental and physiologic arousal
*Agitation
*Hyperpyrexia associated with sweating
*Paranoia
*Great strength
*Violence, aggression and hostility
*Insensitivity to physical pain or to restraint sprays.

Victims of excited delirium display sudden onset of paranoia and alternated between calm behavior and extreme agitation. When confronted the victim intensifies the violence and paranoia.

In general, excited delirium may have a mortality of about 10 percent. The research suggest that individuals with a history of chronic illicit stimulant abuse may be particularly susceptible to excited delirium.

Cocaine is the best known cause of drug-induced excited delirium, although many other drugs have been implicated, including prescribed neuroleptics.

Excited Delirium

Emotion frustration

2011-10-10T22:38:00.000-07:00

The term of frustration is a unique English concept, spreading though borrowings form English, on other languages, especially in the technical language of psychology.

Frustration is a common emotion. A certain amount of frustration and confusion is normal when learning new skills and concepts, but too much frustration will lead to a negative experience for the learner.

It’s not an energy strong enough to blow the stuckness apart, yet it is not weak enough to be able to just ignore. It is a spinner.

Frustration sets in the mind and joints freezing one’s ability to move. It causes one’s immune system to attack itself because it doesn’t have a clear powerful outlet.

Frustration level of a learner can be reasoned about by observing the human characteristics associated with negative emotions.

Anger is a powerful emotion. In times of high frustration it can easily overtake rational control even in adults.

Managing the emotion of frustration in a constructive ways is not easy; indeed, the expert noted that a good deal of the world’s problems are caused by the destructive outcomes of anger.

It is one of the most important of the compelling emotions and certainly one of the most common.
Emotion frustration

Early Emotional Development

2011-09-06T22:52:00.001-07:00

The infants emerges into the world prepared to detect and respond to emotions from adults who are essential for its survival.

In early development, the capacity of emotion regulation emerges from the mother serving as an auxiliary ego.

For example, infants and young children lack the capacity to calm themselves when distressed. During early development, parents serve this function.

It has been described that nine different behavioral dimensions that clustered into 3 types, labeled easy, difficult an slow-to-warm-up temperaments.

Children displaying these different profiles exhibited characteristic patterns of responding across a variety of situations.

During the first stage of life, emotions provide an essential survival functions, the infant engages adults with expressions of joy, enlists the aid of caregivers with expression of sadness or fear and explorer its environment when motivated by the emotion of interest.

Children bring with them to their development and to their interactions with others, their own style that plays a role in subsequent behavioral adaptation.

The emotional climate of the home consist not only of how parents respond to a child’s emotions, but also how emotion is expressed among family members.

A large research literature indicates than an emotionally positive family climate is associated with self-soothing behaviors in infants and children’s enhanced self-regulatory capacities and an emotionally negative family climate is associated with more negative and mixed outcomes.

Development involves far more that the growth of ego functions that regulate, modulate, and control impulse and emotion.

Instead, maturation is essentially about the development of a self, that is the emergence of a person who experiences impulse , emotion and interpersonal relations.
Early Emotional Development

Universality of Higher Cognitive Emotions

2011-07-10T08:36:00.001-07:00

Higher cognitive emotions are universal, like basic emotions, but they exhibit more cultural variation and they are s no single facial expression associated with them.

They also longer to build up, and longer to die away, than basic emotions. Unlike basic emotions, which may occur in milliseconds, higher cognitive emotions usually develop over a period of days, weeks, or longer.

Higher cognitive emotions include the following:
Love
Guilt
Shame
Embarrassment
Pride
Envy
Jealousy

Some basic emotions can also be co-opted for the social functions that typify higher cognitive emotions.

These emotions typically require more processing in the cortex of the brain. This essentially means that these emotions can be influenced more by cognitive thought processes, while basic emotions are more reactive in nature.

When someone fells disgusted by the sight of faces, this is a basic emotion.

When you feel disgusted by an immoral act, however, the basic emotional response designed to keep human away from infectious or poisonous things is co-opted for the social function of keeping human away from untrustworthy people.

Higher cognitive emotions were very likely designed by natural selection to cope with a complex social environment.

Cognitive processes in the brain enable human to be aware, t think, to known, to learn and to make judgments.
Universality of Higher Cognitive Emotions

Higher Cognitive Emotions

2011-06-12T23:32:00.001-07:00

Emotions is like love should be called ‘higher cognitive emotions’, because they involve much more cortical processing than basic emotions.

Most researchers include love, jealousy, pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment and envy in this group.

These emotions are similar to basic in that they are universal, but there are also variations on the way that they are expressed and experienced by different cultures, and there is also no single facial expression associated with them.

While basic emotions are largely processed in cortical structures buried beneath the surface of the brain emotion like love are more associated with areas of the neocortex.

The neocortex is the part of the brain than has expanded most in the past five millions years of human evolution and supports most of our most complex cognitive abilities such as explicit logical analysis.

The fact that the higher cognitive emotions are more cortical than the basic emotion means that they are more capable of being influenced by conscious thoughts, and this in turn is probably what allows higher cognitive emotions to me more culturally variable than the basic emotions.
Higher Cognitive Emotions

Sociology of Emotions

2011-04-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

In the latter half of the 1970s sociologist began to rediscover the importance of emotions in understanding social process.

Emotions are a biologically given senses, but they are also social in origin. The people socialized to feel certain emotions, learn how and when to express those emotions.

This specialism has also demonstrated at least to its satisfaction, the importance of emotions for social action and order, and for those related moral issues concerned with self-determined and other oriented action.

Paradoxically, however, the relationship between the sociology of emotions and mainstream sociology remains relatively cool.

Emotional issues are still portrayed in many general accounts of the discipline as a luxurious curiosity that properly resides on the outer reaches of the sociological imagination.

More generally, social constructionists view human emotions as historical products and socially contingent phenomena.

The sociology of emotions concerned between consciousness of feeling and consciousness of feeling rules, between feeling rules and emotion work, between feeling rules an social structure.
Sociology of Emotions

Definition of Frustration

2011-01-23T19:38:00.000-08:00

Frustration is an emotional reaction. A dictionary definition of frustration is to induce feelings of insecurity, discouragement, or dissatisfaction.

Other definition is ‘to bring to nothing.’

If your miss the nail and hit your finger with the hammer you are likely to express your frustration or pain with a four letter word - ouch, damn.

Frustration exists when progress toward a desired goal is blocked. Frustration is a threat to one’s feelings of adequacy an can be an obstacle to reaching a goal.

How we react to frustration determines to a large extent whether or not reach the desired goal.

Frustration makes it clear that you are capable of doing something but you not pulling all resources together.

It shows the pathways for evaluation of internal strength and weakness.

Frustration is the common psychological denominator underlying the conditions that instigate emotional instability, precipitate more serious behavior disorder.

You may concerned that your life is not going in the direction you want, or may feel a repressed anger at the stubbornness of the people in your life.

One group of psychologists proposed the ideas that frustration invariably stemmed from the thwarting of a person’s goal attainment, that frustration then cause aggressive behaviors such as inflicting injury on the responsible individual, and that this action reduced the aggressiveness drive.
Definition of Frustration

First Three Months Infant of Emotional Regulation

2010-08-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

First Three Months Infant of Emotional Regulation
Much of the research on the development of emotional regulation skills and abilities has focused on infancy and toddlerhood, primary because dramatic developments may be observed during this period of development.

The developmental process it self may be describe broadly as one in which the relatively passive and reactive neonate becomes a child capable of self-initiated behaviors that’s serve a regulatory function.

In addition, this process has also been described as one in which the infant progresses from near complete reliance on caregiver for regulation to interdependent self-regulation.

As the infant makes this transition, the use of specific strategies and behavior become organized into the infant repertoire of emotional regulation that may be used in a variety of context and that lead to independent functioning across a variety of skill domains.

Early efforts at emotional, regulation, specially those occurring prior to about three months of age, are thought to be controlled largely by physiological mechanism that are innate.

The first three months are marked by the caregiver’s gradually increasing capacity to respond discriminately to the infant’s reflective signals.

By three months of age, primitive mechanism of self-soothing, such as sucking, simple motor movements such as turning way, and reflective signaling in response to discomfort, often in the form of crying, are the primary processes operating, independent of caregiver intervention.

In the second three months chained interaction sequences develop and apparently give and take interactions between the caregiver and infant may be observed which help the infant on maintain organized behavior in the face of increasing levels of arousal.
First Three Months Infant of Emotional Regulation

Romantic Love

2010-07-20T23:50:00.000-07:00

Romantic Love
In many of the poems a nobleman would fall in love with a lady at the royal court. He would become her knight and devote himself to her service though his passion for her would rarely be consummated.

The love of Lancelot for King Arthurs’s wife, Guinevere, is perhaps the best known story to emerge from this literary genre.

If romantic love really were an invention of some medieval ports, nobody could have felt this emotion before the Middle Ages.

In fact, romantic love probably goes back much further than this, perhaps even to the dawn of human kind. A hundred thousands years ago, while our ancestors were still confined to the African plains, their physical activities were very different from ours, but their emotional lives were probably very similar.

The first humans spent much of their time scouring the terrain for edible plants and making temporary shelters, activities now completely absent from all but a few human communities.

But many evolutionary psychologist have argue that they also spent a lot of time getting infatuated with one another making love, feeling jealous and getting heart broken, just as we do today.

Romantic love can also be found in cultures separated from our own by space as well as time, in the remote preliterate societies studied by anthropologists.

The cultural theory of romantic love defined that romantic love identified the following core features of the idea: a powerful feeling of sexual attraction to a single person, feelings of anguish and longing when the loved one is absent and intent joy when he or she is present.

Other elements also lifted including elaborate gestures such as giving gifts and showing one’s love in song and poetry.
Romantic Love

The Meaning of Collective Emotions

2010-06-14T03:53:00.000-07:00

The Meaning of Collective Emotions
Kemper’s model raises the question of theorizing collective emotions because it imputes structural factors in the etiology of emotional experience.

Thus persons sharing common structural circumstances might experiences common emotions, without recourse to contagion, for instance or other factors.

And yet, such aggregations of emotional experience are not group emotions. We can call group emotions because of relation between members of a group.

Work in sociometry is one approach that indicated the reality and significance of group emotions: attractions and repulsions are experience at the individual level but necessarily underlie the formation, direction and persistence of groups as indivisible entities.

An emotional climate does not require that every person subject to it experience the same emotion. As emotion climates are group phenomenon and as different people occupy different positions within groups, perform different roles and have different capacities, it is indeed likely that individual will differ from each other in the or emotional experiences.

Yet in their relationships they will each contribute to the feelings of the group qua group, to its emotional formation or climate.
The Meaning of Collective Emotions

D. James Makes the Periphery Central

2010-05-13T20:35:00.001-07:00

D. James Makes the Periphery Central
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was turned as a medical doctor.

Contemporary wisdom claims that James’ great achievement was to introduce psychology to Americans.

To the psychologists, one of his towering intellectual achievements was to emphasize the peripheral components of the emotional experience and emphasis James made explicit in what has come to be called the James-Lange theory of emotion.

There is a second characteristics of James’ approach to emotion that is equally marked, for it emphasized an understanding of the importance of a discovery that was not then appreciated by the continental psychologists.

What James understood and the continental psychologists did was the potential significant of Darwin’s work on evolution.

Although James made American psychology independent by breaking away from the European idea of the pervasive important of central mechanisms, he mixed in the powerful principle of natural selection, a case of reverse English, so to speak.

Much, perhaps too much, has been written about James’ theory of emotion: it has guided psychological research since 1890; it is not a theory at all, for it is untestable; it is demonstrably wrong, it fails to explain some critical aspects of emotional experience. These are the complaints and they are all somehow valid.
D. James Makes the Periphery Central

The Autonomic Nervous System and Emotions

2010-04-18T22:57:00.000-07:00

The Autonomic Nervous System and Emotions
A major way by which the mid and body communication is through the autonomic nervous system (ANS), a group of nerves that regulate many of the body’s physiological processes, such as heart rate, blood pressure, constipation, sweating and incontinence.

Centers in the brain, principally the brain stem and hypothalamus, receive information about the state of the body and in response activate the nerve fibers of the ANS to maintain appropriate physiological balance.

For example, when you exercise, the ANS stimulates the heart’s pacemaker cells to increase your heart rate, thus increasing the amount of blood pumped to moving muscles.

The autonomic nervous system derives its name for the fact that its activities normally operate without conscious control.

Thus, you do not think about how fast your heart should beat or whether you should sweat to cool yourself when jogging.

Even though the ANS functions without conscious control the signal it sends to the body can be affected by thoughts and feelings.

For example, nearly all students are familiar with the nervous stomach and sweaty palms that accompany taking an important exam.

Realizing that it is possible to do poorly in an exam (a thought) leads to anxiety (an emotion), which activates the ANS to produce symptoms.

Panic has an immediate effect on breathing and heart rate, and stress can constrict blood vessels, causing headaches or high blood pressure.

Many students live fast-paced hectic lives that full of time pressures and stress. Besides doing school assignments many students work at jobs and nearly all try to maintain harmonious social relationship with family and friends, and which take time and attention.

More over, the modern environment is filled with cell phones, the Internet, TV video games, iPods, and other stimuli that compete for one’s attention.

Trying to accommodate all of life’s demands produces near continuous physiologic arousal mediated by the sympathetic nerves of the ANS, causing among other things, sleep disturbances, muscle tension, gastrointestinal symptoms and an increased risk for cardiovascular disease.
The Autonomic Nervous System and Emotions

Exploratory regulation

2010-04-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

Exploratory regulation
Exploratory regulation encompass that foster the development of skills, build knowledge, or help to new resource that incidentally contribute to the maintenance of emotional.

Exploratory regulations may come into play when immediate anticipated control needs are perceived to be absent and can concur vicarious experience of emotional situations depicted in movies, folk or novels.

By observing other people grapple with moral and social or by imagining themselves in the role of the protagonist, individuals get a fells of different experiential realities and learn about possible and their associated emotions.

Many people seek out certain genres of such as thrillers or comedies or activities specific emotions in an intensity that may be undesirable, rare or to find in their everyday lives.

The safety of the context combined with strength of the stimulus providers the opportunity to explore, observe, learn about these intense emotional response.

Rock climbing, parachuting, other extreme sports may also promote future emotion self-regulation, example by honing concentration skills, practicing patience and allowing with novel ways to manage negative emotions or accentuate emotions.

All creative activate shave the platform for serving as a form of exploratory regulation through which we explore possible solutions to emotional control needs.

For example, writing has been found to be a health promoting tool do the therapeutic self-understanding and self expression, not only when used as part of a personal journal, but also describing imaginary reactions to another person’s trauma.

Linking health gains from writing to the opportunity to construct idea of self-schemas superordinate reference values that drive regulatory processes.
Exploratory regulation

The differentiation of emotions

2010-03-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

The differentiation of emotions
Emotions are not simply in individual acts of conformity but in social interactions more broadly.

There are three basic steps in the argument:
First, all social interactions can be characterized in terms of two formal dimension of social relations, namely power and status, or what might be called involuntary and voluntary compliance, for instance, for constraint and regard and so on.

Power and status can be scaled in terms of whether they are in excess of what is required in the relationship, adequate for it, or insufficient.

Agency - who might be responsible for too much or not enough power, say – can similarly be differentiated as ‘self’ or ‘other’.

The second step holds that specific physiological processes are stimulated by specific experiences of power and status.

This idea is well known: there is a direct relationship for instance social stress and myocardium infarction.

Finally there is particle emotions are physiologically specific. For instance, anxiety is associated with secretion of the hormone epinephrine; anger is associated with secretion of the hormone noradrenalin.
The differentiation of emotions

The Problem of Sequence

2010-03-02T22:11:00.000-08:00

The Problem of Sequence
These warning about using physiologic as the sole explanatory principle when studying emotion are only cautionary.

They do not override the enormous contributions made to an understand of emotion in the last century by those who have preferred physiology as the fundamental principle.

By the late 19th century two choices seemed appropriate: either emotions were purely cognitive or they represented our perception of bodily processes resulting from perception. These sequence can diagrammatically represented as follows:

Perception -------- cognition ------------ arousal state
(I see a bear) ..........(I am afraid)................ (I tremble)

Perception -------- arousal state -------- cognition
(I see a bear) ..........(I tremble) ..................(I am afraid)

The similarities between these two sequences are that:
1. That emotion begins with perception
2. That emotions reside in the cognitive state.

It implied that emotion comes without, not from within.

The difference between the two schemata is that in the first the perception presumably leads to a cognitive state (the state being what we call emotion)and on the basis of the cognitive state, behavior occurs.

In the second schema there is a mechanic relation between the perception and the behavior, but it is the awareness of the sensation accompanying behavior that produces the cognitive state we know as emotion.

The former sequence is assumed by most 18th and 19th century academicism. It reflects the centralist approach in which cognition filters perception and selects the behavior.

In this influential model, cognition is the reasoning, reasonable and knowable part of the machinery of the mind.

The peripheralist view, expressed in the second formulation of the sequence of emotion, emphasizes the role of peripheral receptors on telling the central state “what to think,” so to speak.
The Problem of Sequence

Emotional Dissociation

2010-02-17T00:34:00.000-08:00

Emotional Dissociation
Although discrete emotions are generally thought to produce a coordinate set of emotional responses or response programs involving experiential, epxressive-behavioral, and physiological components, a large body of research attests to the co-occurrence of contradictory or inconsistent emotional responses in different response channels.

An everyday example for this phenomenon is a sales person who might eagerly compliment a customer while simultaneously expressing disgust in his face.

Conversely, subjective emotion response may be experienced in the absence of overt behavioral expression, for instance, when a speaker feels anxious when giving a speech, but appears confident and relaxed to the audience.

Another type of experiential-expressive discrepancies that appears to arise from at least partially autonomic processes rather than conscious regulatory efforts is emotional dissociation.

Processes of this nature are characterized by a transient shift in the focus of attention away from awareness of a particularly and usually negative, emotional response toward other, more benign content.

This intentional shift may serve a regulatory function by attenuating or diminishing the subjective experience of aversive that would normally accompany the physiological aroused elicited by potentially stressful situations.
Emotional Dissociation

Categories of Emotion

2010-01-31T17:05:00.000-08:00

Categories of Emotion
It might seem that there were two quite clear cut categories of emotion. On the one hand, there are basic emotions, which are universal and innate.

On the other hand, there are culturally specific emotions such as ‘being a wild pig’.

However things are not really this simple. Innateness is not an all-or-nothing thing, but a question of degree.

When investigating emotions or any other biological or psychological trait it should not really ask whether it is innate or not, but rather how innate it is.

The more special conditions; over and above the basic necessities of survival that are required for development of a trait, the les innate it is.

Learning a language is less innate than growing legs, since growing legs requires lonely normal genome, basic nutrition, and the luck to escape nasty accidents, whereas learning a language requires all these things plus interaction with other speaking humans.

So rather than thinking of basic and culturally specific emotions as two completely different kinds of thing, the people can see them as sitting at opposite ends of a single spectrum.

Depending on how many special condition are required for a given emotion to develop, and on how special they are, the emotion would be located more towards the “basic” end of the spectrum or more towards the ‘culturally specific’ end.

Basic emotions are much more innate than culturally specific emotions, but they still require some minimal conditions to develop.
Categories of Emotion

Loneliness is a Feeling

2010-01-14T20:36:00.000-08:00

Loneliness is a Feeling
For people who are chronically lonely, painful feelings are a fact of life.

Three factors that figure prominently in chronic loneliness are shyness, poor social skill and a self defeating attributional style.

Of course the link between these factors and loneliness could go either way. Feeling lonely might cause you to take negative attributions about others but making negative attributions can also lead to loneliness.

Shyness is commonly associated with loneliness. Shyness refers to discomfort, inhibition, and excessive caution in interpersonal relations.

Specifically, shy people, tend to
1. Be timed about expressing themselves
2. Be overly self conscious about how others are reacting to them
3. Embarrass easily
4. Experience physiological symptoms of their anxiety such as racing pulse, blushing or an upset stomach.

There is a research showed that 60% of shy people indicated that their shyness was situationally specific.

That is, their shyness is triggered only in certain social context, such as asking someone for help or interacting with a large group of people.
Loneliness is a Feeling

Emotion and Social Explanation

2009-12-16T06:15:00.000-08:00

Emotion and Social Explanation
Conventional accounts explain the inclination of people in society to conform, more or less, to an established order of practices in terms of external constraints, especially the constraints of force or of a system of norms.

These alternatives are often thought to be exhaustive of all possibilities, giving rise respectively to what are known as the ‘coercion’ and ‘integration’ theories of society.

An entire industry has risen through attempts to reconcile these opposed, partial and flawed approaches, but t is an industry that adds littlie to the currency of sociological thought.

Social order and stable conformity cannot be explained by coercive force, because the likely outcome of coercive fore is resistance either organized and therefore conflictual, or frictional, resistance - productive of not order but the disorder of apathy, indifference and alienation.

Similarly, social order cannot be explained by a system of social norms because in any unequal society, which is to say in any society, there is an absence of a general agreement concerning norms.

Instead, we find that social groups tend to adhere to norms and values that reflect their position in the unequal pattern of the distribution of resources.
Emotion and Social Explanation

Dualism of Descartes

2009-11-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

Dualism of Descartes
At the outside, we should recognize that the relationship between emotion, physiological functioning, and cognition is but a variation of what has come to be known as the mind-body problem.

It is common to accept the view that little of significance in the study of emotion occurred in the nearly 2000 years if intellectual thought between Aristotle and Descartes, and that, for all Descartes’ flaws, he put the problem of emotion into perspective for our millennium by pointing out the relation, or lack of it, between mind and body.

In his attempt to improve upon Aristotle and Aquinas, who saw emotion as experiencing and evaluating stimuli in terms of their potential for gain or pleasure, Descartes’ work led later writers to confuse the mind-body problem with a soul body problem.

Descartes can present a seemingly unsolvable problem for our investigations only if we take seriously his use of the soul as an explanatory device.

We accepted the dualistic view of mind and matter and we seemingly forever trapped into designing ways to relate one world to another.

The potential evils of that divisive strategy remain with us in medicine, psychiatry, and religion, not to mention psychology.

Strategically, Descartes represents a dualistic alternative, but not an important advance in our understanding of emotion.

Psychology and other disciplines concerned with human understanding have interpreted Descartes to have presented a mind-body problem.

He presented them with a dualistic universe in which one aspect the soul is fundamentally unknowable.
Dualism of Descartes

Challenges in Measuring Antecedent Emotion Self-Regulation

2009-10-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

Challenges in Measuring Antecedent Emotion Self-Regulation
Common to all antecedent-focused strategies is the act of selecting situations and meanings, which presupposes conscious awareness and decision making based n knowledge of linkages between situations and emotional responses.

Conceptualization emotion self-regulation in this way may have limited heuristic value, because often situations are emotion-provoking due to high levels of ambiguity.

Thus, many emotional episodes present ‘muddy terrain’ in which it is difficult to discern any clear causal relations.

Because gaining insight into causal pathways requires at least one if not multiple prior experiences with the emotion-provoking situations, it may be difficult to distinguish empirically between antecedent and response focused emotion self regulation.

Measuring selection of meaning (i.e., appraisal) as an antecedent emotion regulatory strategy also runs the risk of confounding emotion self-regulation with emotion understanding or verbal knowledge of emotion.

Because appraisal has predominantly been measured by self report most of the available data on emotion self-regulation concerns changes in peoples’ construal of their emotional experiences which may or may not be accompanied by changes in their actual experience.

Furthermore, it is difficult to establish whether such verbally reported changes in experience or construal also reflect changes in peoples’ ability to regulate their emotion in vivo.

As for situation selection, this strategy may not be a feasible option for the majority of emotional events, because it requires that opportunities exist to select out those situations.

In daily life, however, the kind of situations that generate intense emotions most frequently tend to be interactions with partners, spouses and superordinates at work that are difficult to avoid.

In most cases we cannot chose our families, though we can try to change how often we interact with them (situation selection), and learn to modify our behavior in these interactions (response-focus emotion self-regulation).

Nonetheless, the extent to which we can modify out emotional responses by means of antecedent or response focused regulation in these familial interactions might be rather limited because the response are likely to present the product of a complex and robust mix of personality and quasi automatic patterns that have co-developed over a period of time.
Challenges in Measuring Antecedent Emotion Self-Regulation

The necessity of emotion

2009-10-05T06:26:00.000-07:00

The necessity of emotion
The conventional opposition between emotion and reason typically leads sensible people to reject emotion and it regard it as an inappropriate category of analysis, unless in accounting for psychological and behavioral pathology, in which case the emotions are held to predominate.

Indeed, there is a tradition in sociology that claims that the power of individual social actors derives from their self-control in defining purpose and executing them, under the aegis and direction of values, and against distracting impulses and emotions.

What is ignored by this position, though, is the fact that all actions and indeed reason itself, require appropriate facilitating emotions if successful actions or reason at all are to be achieved.

How could a person deal competently with any practical problem without the emotion of confidence in their actions, without the emotion of trust in the actions of enabling others, without the feeling of dissatisfaction with failure to encourage success, without the envy of competitors to spur the pursuit of interests and so on.

Reason, too, requires it s back-ground emotions, without which there is no reason; these include feelings of calmness, security, confidence and so on.

This is not an argument against reason, only against the inflation of reason at the expense of emotion.

Without the appropriate emotions underpinning and supporting reason, reason turns to its apposite.

A well developed appreciation of emotions is absolutely essential for sociology because no action can occur in a society without emotional involvement.

The smallest society in this sense, then, is a single human person choosing between alternatives, for such a choice requires an internal dialogue. And choice itself must include the choice to do nothing. Everything, then, in the human universe, requires emotional involvement.
The necessity of emotion

Precursors of Physiological Explanations

2009-09-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

Precursors of Physiological Explanations
Theories of emotion based on physiological principles have varied with our changing concepts of the nervous systems, although this parallel does not imply that changes in our conceptualization of physiology are responsible for changes in our theory of emotions.

At least in the 19th century (where time now permits a clearer view than we can possibly have of our own time), there is reason to suppose that changes in conceptualization of the philosophy and psychology sometimes prompted revision of physiological dogma.

Faculty psychology developed form philosophical descriptions of the mind, exemplified by Rolando, Flourens, and Gall.

Rolando offered physiological evidence that part of the brain controlled mood (another he thought controlled sleep); Flourens developed extirpation techniques that permitted him to suggest that segments of the brain had special functions; Gall, whose work is often cited but little read, and therefore much misunderstood, ascribed traits to areas of the central nervous system.

Following the useful distinction made by Gardiner, Metcalf and Beebe-Center, our appreciation of the physiological and philosophical conceptualization that govern theories of emotion during the last two centuries can be aided by noting the shift from central to peripheral theories.

Today, we would regard the major differences as being between mental and psychological theories. The former type of theory was characterized by the importance ascribed to mental activity and the latter by that attributed to the influence of peripheral structures on central states.

There is compelling evidence that our generation is finding strictly reductive physiological theories to be unproductive and that in various guises central theories are being call for once again.

The guise is most often one called “cognitive factors’” for, as is argued by some contemporary theories, emotion is a cognitive state that overlies physiological functioning.

It is precisely this distinction that consumed the attention of 19th century writers on emotions.
Precursors of Physiological Explanations

Process Model of Emotion self-Regulation

2009-08-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

Process Model of Emotion self-Regulation
In a highly influential paper, emotion self-regulation defined as referring to “the process by which we influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how we experience and express them”.

The central feature of the model is the distinction between different emotion self-regulation strategies by their location in the emotion-generative process.

Antecedent-focused regulatory processes influence the generation of emotion whereas response-focused regulatory processes alter an emotional response tendency when it has already begun.

Examples of antecedent-focused strategies include the selection of situations (involving avoidance or seeking out of people, places or things), actively changing a situation to modify its (potential) emotional impact, selectively focusing on or distracting oneself from attending to specific aspects of a situation, or cognitively reappearing the meaning of a potential; emotion-evoking situation.

Response-focused emotion self-regulation strategies include enhancing or suppressing either the experience of the expression of an emotional response.
Process Model of Emotion self-Regulation

On Being a Wild Pig

2009-07-26T03:42:00.000-07:00

On Being a Wild Pig
The same is not true for all emotions. Some emotions, it seems, really are culturally specific.

There is an emotions felt by the Gururumba people of New Guinea for example, that is apparently never experienced by people from other cultures.

It is known as the state of ‘being a wild pig’, because people who experience it behave just like wild pigs: they run wild, looting articles of small value and attacking bystanders.

Emotions like this would certainly not qualify as ‘basic’ in sense of the word. They are not universal. Nor are they innate.

Now the word ‘innate’ has been used in lots of quite different ways, and some biologists and philosophers have recently argued that we should abandon the term altogether.

The term is fine, so long as we are careful to say what we mean by it.

In saying, then, that culturally specific emotions are not innate, is that they will not develop unless special conditions are in place, conditions that provided only by particular cultures.

The main such condition is that to learn about this emotion when you are child. In other worlds, unlike basic emotions, which develop willy-nilly, culturally specific emotions develop only if you are exposed to them by your culture.

For emotions like ‘being a wild pig’, then it really is the case that you would not feel them unless you had first heard about them.

It is this that distinguishes them from basic emotions such as fear or anger, which you would have the capacity to feel even if you had never heard of them.
On Being a Wild Pig