
The emotions we feel may shape what we see - dnetesn
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-04-emotions.html
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hosh
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.

~~~
ILikeConemowk
>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.

~~~
hosh
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?

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otakucode
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/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4529956/)

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allthenews
>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?

~~~
hosh
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.

~~~
Arbalest
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?

~~~
hosh
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.

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John_KZ
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.

~~~
khr
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!

