Posted by Estella on May 21, 2006, at 1:54:53
In reply to Re: three factors of emotion pulled apart, posted by llrrrpp on May 19, 2006, at 7:36:34
> this is getting over my head.
mine too... lots of random thoughts...
> Thank you for correcting me earlier when I asserted that emotions are responses to external stimuli (duh, of course can be internally generated too... can you hear me kicking myself?)
there is an intuition though... i have it too. prinz argues for it explicitly... that initially our brain states (hence body responses) are reliably caused by external events. he thinks the brain states need to be set up that way. after they have been set up that way we can learn to initiate them top down (from thoughts) but he thinks we couldn't do that without the training from world to brain (to fix the content of the brain state)
> The amygdala is a fascinating little bit of tissue isn't it?yeah. i don't know too much about it...
> Are you psycholinguist, or cogn. psychologist?philosopher :-)
> you might be interested in some work on pain by Jean Decety. He's looking at neural correlates of this, and I like his theory. It may not be descriptive or useful to describe less somatic emotions, like... I don't know? Schadenfreude?
neural correlates of pain is interesting... philosophers still go on about 'c fibers' and apparantly that is a very old theory now (and there are many counter-examples to it). we get around the issue by saying things like: 'pain is x' where x is to be determined by science ;-)
> Also, you asked me earlier when I was talking about babies and cats about behavior being a good proxy for emotion. Well, in judeging others' emotional states, I think it's about all we have to go on.yeah. though there are many different components to behaviour. fairly coarse grained behavioural responses (like crying and running away), and facial expressions and posture and things like that too.
not only that but in learning how to use emotion terms properly we can't learn what they designate by matching the name with the phenomenology because nobody else can access our phenomenology to verify or dispute the match when we are trying to learn the language. behaviourism offers a better account of how we can learn to use emotion terms: we learn them on the basis of matching a term to the behaviour. then we can add in the typical stimuli and judgements as well (seeing as they tend to co occur in most episodes of emotion).
poster:Estella
thread:645293
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060513/msgs/646451.html