I didn't find this model particularly compelling compared to the many that have been developed in the psychological and therapeutic literature, or in the esoteric spiritual traditions.
However what I think is valuable, and is what the author is experiencing, is that thinking about emotion and how it works, and developing our own model of it that makes sense of your own experience, is a profoundly helpful thing to do. Developing your own personal model is fundamentally different from learning someone else's, wherever it comes from.
So, whether this model does or doesn't work for you, it may be worth figuring out why, and making your own better one.
hey, author here. i didn't realize this was on hacker news :)
a thought occured to me yesterday - perhaps my use of this internal model isn't "for everyone", but it "works for me" because of some kind of placebo effect. every time i have emotional reactions, i'm able to look at them through this lens and act in a way that typically involves modifying an errant belief.
I think the key point is that you now have developed this reflective process by which you consider your emotions and beliefs. Expect it to continue to get richer!
No, because in my experience emotions are not clear and concise. They are a very complex and nuanced way of generating relatively rapid responses to our environment based on our genetics and our experience. Our experiences are complex, therefore so are our emotions.
However his book:
Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self, by Donald L. Nathanson
Describes one system that I have found helpful. It's not concise, and it's not easy to read, plus there are obvious flaws, but I thought it was still as good as anything I've encountered.
Sure, I guess I wasn't looking so much for an in depth text as a high level summary of different models and how they differ. Just to get an idea of what's out there.
You're better off picking up a meditative practice with just enough "seed" and go from there. It's a kind of empiricism where you observe your experience, and in which insights naturally emerge from being aware of your experiencing. In a practice like that, eventually to get to the deeper stuff, you drop your attachment to models and explanations.
> ...Bob may overestimate the probability that Alice lied intentionally and thus would experience more anger, because he will compute more possible outcomes where he gets hurt by Alice.
The author's theory kind of sounds like a "Parallel Universes / Many-Worlds Theory" model for psychology.
While it can be useful in many ways, the model itself might not be based on reality (i.g., how the brain works), and in the example - it might just be that the ego needs control, and when that control is shown to be false, it reacts the best way that particular brain's ego can...
A confident person would just blow what happened off. A stressed person might get angry. Etc.
This seems very similar to the old "Happiness = Reality - Expectations" equation. Great reality and low expectations? Large positive number. Poor reality and high expectations? Large negative number. If you want to be happy, then don't expect much, and don't expect often. Unfortunately for happiness, I don't know how to turn off the endless flow of "what if"s my mind produces - the flip side is that I'm always thinking of new things.
Similar to my model, which is itself quite intuitive to someone who likes economic modelling: I like to think of emotion as a function of the change in the expected discounted sum of lifetime utility.
First, utility is a measure satisfaction at any point of time, which can be a function of many variables, including relationships, food, wealth etc.
Discounted utility means that changes in soon satisfaction levels have a higher impact than changes in satisfaction that are still a long time away.
And the fact that I use the expected value of the function allows for biases abd inconsistencies, which are obviously very frequently observed.
What I don't get is how you reduce a variety of different emotions (hunger, anger, hope, etc) into a dichotomous "positive/negative outcome" spectrum. You don't really address that.
the "positive/negative" spectrum is meant to apply to possible outcomes reflected by the emotions - not the emotions themselves. An emotion like anger typically arises when lots of new negative (unwanted, undesired) possibilities appear newy likely, or lots of desired or 'good' possibilities disappear.
For example, suppose you were going home and upon pulling onto your street, you see the house is on fire. This is probably something you "don't want" - and the SoP model suggests that the negative emotion you experience corresponds to your internal estimate of 'likely events' being updated.
I realize that for most people, the explanation of "well if your house burns down, you'll be angry" seems kind of fatuous. The point of the model is to try to find an underlying thread or consistency to emotional experiences. Yes, it's "obvious" that seeing your house burn down will make a person angry.
What's the relationship between seeing your house burn down, having your best friend cheat on you with your partner, and then finding out that lawsuit was filed against you - aside from "they will all make you mad?"
Anyone can say "its obvious that those will make you angry", but the things we found "obvious" in mathematics for thousands of years turned out to be covering up a very complex situation.
The underlying thread that I see in all of those above situations, aside from them inducing anger - is that they all will cause the person experience them to reduce the probably of positive outcomes they predicted for living in the house, their relationships with their friends and partners, and their finances and time.
For each one of those situations, if you go through the 'set of possible outcomes eliminated' and then try to eliminate them _before_ the 'anger inducing event' occurs, suddenly the event doen't make you angry any more. Playing with the 'set of expected outcomes' seems to directly impact the anticipated emotional response.
If you had already planned to move out of your house, and packed everything up - none of your stuff was damaged, you suffer no financial loss, and insurance recoups everythign you need. Any lingering unpleasantness you feel can be attributed to a reduce sense of 'saftey' or an increased estimate that the house will burn down - but by removing the chance that you planned on staying in that house for years, or that you had a bunch of stuff in there that was destroyed - the emotional sting goes down.
Your friend cheating on you with your partner - that one is much harder to 'prepare' as having zero expectations for the future' - could a friend really be your friend if you didn't plan to be with them? So try the opposite, them - it stings much harder if it's your best friend you've had for 40 years, and your spouse of 30, than if it's a someone you just met and enjoyed spending time with, and a partner you just started dating. Again - this is "OBVIOUS" to most neurotypicals - and so they wouldn't bother explaining to themselves "ok here is why this is." As someone with a very intense emotional history, i wanted to understand the patterns underlying these phenomena.
a) Hunger is not an emotional state. It may be an input to one's emotional state but I think that its impact is usually quite weak. b) Overly simplistic example-- do mature adults really have such wide ranging emotions during a conversation over whether there is pizza or not in the fridge?
a) The use of "hunger as an emotional state" is sort of a 'model artifact." "My grandma died" is not an emotional state, but it induces one. perhaps calling hunger an 'emotional state' is akin to saying "my grandma died is an emotional state" - it's wrong, but they can both produce emotional outcomes.
Maybe for you the impact of being hungry is weak. I've found myself that being hungry or tired makes the whole world seem darker, gloomy, and less ... doable. It unraveling this thread helped me realize that i came up with a lot fewer random ideas for businesses when I was hungry. It just seemed like the world was less full of possibility, and so that was one of the clues that lead me on this path, to see emotion as being a 'measure of possibility.'
I'm sure plenty of people would say i am not an "emotionally mature adult" - and I know this is something i still work on. i'm extremely sensitive and have a hard time being around other people who are upset. I think i put so much work into learning how emotions work because I knew i kept having these intense responses where other people would have milder ones. I think i've been far more bothered in life by the pain I've caused others than those other people themselves were bothered.
a) Fair, although I think the author's justification for describing it as such is reasonable. b) Sure, but I don't think maturity is the point. I think the point is to establish a way of thinking about emotions—which I suppose might be more useful the less mature a person you're dealing with.
Someone can be fairly mature and still have very strong emotions. Furthermore, just because the strength of the emotion is easily detectable in one person, doesn't necessarily mean it is as perceivable by another person. What allows a person to perceive emotions has to do with how well they have trained their awareness to pay attention to emotions rather than either ignoring them, or avoiding them.
Hunger itself isn't an emotion. It's a complex of physical sensations. However, in most people, it is highly coupled with various emotional responses. Hunger is one of the first things an infant experiences, often coupled with being fed by a parent and loved upon. It's not accident that a lot of people (not everyone) eat more when they are stressed. (Comfort food). I have seen otherwise mature adults regressed to childhood, infantile behaviors because they skipped a meal.
It's actually a fairly immature understanding of emotions to associate poor emotional control or behaviors with the level of maturity. Your ability to handle emotions has more to do with whether you fully pay attention to the emotions and process them out. Although people with greater physical age will tend to have experienced a wider range of emotions in a variety of life circumstances, if they don't pay attention to them when it happens, it festers in the back of the mind, carried on for years.
I think this model is a "good try". It seems good enough for now, for the author. And although it scratches the surface, I think it's great for anyone to think about this more closely.
To really start digging in there, you have to allow yourself to experience the emotion; "thinking" about an emotion without allowing yourself to experience it or be aware of it tends to be a way for the mind to avoid experiencing painful things.
A very nice summary of relevant scientific work is
www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Whatever%20next.pdf
Also, thinking fast and slow and other pop-sci books around decision making put a similar model forward. Personally, I am more focused on the active elements of consciousness and I try to use decision as the hermeneutics element rather than subject. Instead of looking at conscious beings like processors that model their environment and act upon that model, I am interested in the long term impact of decisions on behaviour and perception (i.e. my decisions impact the way I perceive the world.) Both models can co-exist. The article linked above has some very interesting links to much more researched models than my intuition.
Clarification: to reinforce my theory, I am wring about decisions when the author looks into emotions!
I wonder if a model like this one could be the basis for coding AI with emotions. Not that you'd really want a robot butler who experiences mood swings, but I'm sure there would be useful applications.
as the author mentions below, this is his effective internal model, and his sharing it simply offers the opportunity for anyone else to read it, think about it, and take and apply what works for him or her.
that said, for me, it's not so easily applicable to interactions with others, such as with Bob and Alice. for issues in my own peabrain, i can try and logically explore the bases for my emotions, my triggers, and possible alternate solutions, which i can apply at any point in a particular journey or task. i have the ability and choice to attempt to alter my own course, in terms of actions and reactions, any time i start to be plagued by and cognizant of my own discomfort. in interactions with others, however, the applicability is limited. unfortunately, it rests on having the ability to understand the complex nuances of someone else's emotional triggers, subconscious or unconscious, and having some sort of reliable heuristic to predict their reactions and digressions.
personally, i don't have an issue with the simplification to positive/negative outcomes. sort of reduces emotional processing and synaptic fires to binary code, or an electrical circuits with switches and AC current.
A former professor of mine wrote his PhD thesis on categorizing human emotion (I believe it was out of an AI department). Not sure how much help it will be, but it might have some ideas you can pull from.
However what I think is valuable, and is what the author is experiencing, is that thinking about emotion and how it works, and developing our own model of it that makes sense of your own experience, is a profoundly helpful thing to do. Developing your own personal model is fundamentally different from learning someone else's, wherever it comes from.
So, whether this model does or doesn't work for you, it may be worth figuring out why, and making your own better one.