Keith Oatley draws on theories from psychology, philosophy and linguistics, as well as writings from other social sciences, to show how emotions are central to any understanding of human actions and mental life.
problems in psychology The three themes of this book are the relation of the brain's structure to psychological function, the problem of how people perceive ...
Readers of fiction tend to have better abilities of empathy and theory of mind. We present a study designed to replicate this finding, rule out one possible explanation, and extend the assessment of social outcomes. In order to rule out the role of personality, we first identified Openness as the most consistent correlate. This trait was then statistically controlled for, along with two other important individual differences: the tendency to be drawn into stories and gender. Even after accounting for these (...) variables, fiction exposure still predicted performance on an empathy task. Extending these results, we also found that exposure to fiction was positively correlated with social support. Exposure to nonfiction, in contrast, was associated with loneliness, and negatively related to social support. (shrink)
According to the Communicative Theory of Emotions, we experience emotions when events occur that are important for our goals and plans. A method of choice for studying these matters is the emotion diary. Emotions configure our cognitive systems and our relationships. Many of our emotions concern our relationships, and empathy is central to our experience of them. We do not always recognize our emotions or the emotions of others, but literary fiction can help improve our skills of recognition and understanding.
The communicative theory of emotions postulates that emotions are communications both within the brain and between individuals. Basic emotions owe their evolutionary origins to social mammals, and they enable human beings to use repertoires of mental resources appropriate to recurring and distinctive kinds of events. These emotions also enable them to cooperate with other individuals, to compete with them, and to disengage from them. The human system of emotions has also grafted onto basic emotions propositional contents about the cause of (...) the emotion, the self, and other matters. Complex emotions always contain such contents, whereas basic emotions can be experienced without them. This article explains the role of basic emotions in social relationships, their effects on reasoning, and their pathology in psychological illness, such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. (shrink)
In understanding the degree of choice we have in our emotions, we benefit from the Stoics’ analysis into first and second movements: appraisals and reappraisals. The Stoics were concerned to avoid the harm that emotions can cause, but their idea of working on goals, rather than on emotions as such, generalizes beyond their concerns. For modern people, the problem of taking responsibility for our emotional life becomes less paradoxical when we consider interpersonal issues.
In the psychological literature, love is often seen as a construct inseparable from that of close, interpersonal relationships. As a result, it has been often assumed that the same motivational factors underlie both phenomena. This often leads researchers to propose that love does not exist in itself—that it is an emotion which stems solely from a need for attachment, fulfillment of reproductive aims, or for social exchange. The popular cultural imagination, however, perceives love as a unique, mysterious, altruistic, ever-lasting bond (...) between two people—a vision of love which is at odds with its supposed psychological origins. We propose that an ideal of love and its enactment in our culture is a result of two intertwining factors. Within the last few centuries, interpersonal relationships and love have replaced religion as islands of existential comfort. Toward this end, lovers project illusory meaning on their partners. The laborious and turbulent process of withdrawing these projections can lead to what many thinkers think “love” is: bestowal of value on another, and consequent respect for, and care for that person, unmotivated by one's own needs, within the context of a real relationship. (shrink)
The ability to think in abstractions depends on the imagination. An important evolutionary change was the installation of a suite of six imaginative activities that emerge at first in childhood, which include empathy, symbolic play, and theory-of-mind. These abilities can be built upon in adulthood to enable the production of oral and written stories. As a technology, writing has three aspects: material, skill based, and societal. It is in fiction that expertise in writing is most strikingly attained; imagination is put (...) to use to create simulations of the social world that can usefully be offered to others. Fiction is best conceived as an externalization of consciousness, which not only enables us to understand others but also to transform ourselves so that we can reach beyond the immediate. (shrink)
One chapter in the science of emotion has focused, largely through an individualist lens, on just a few emotions: the Ekman Six. Considerable debate has occurred and entrenched positions have ensued. In this essay we offer evidence and argument revealing that there are not only six emotions, nor states measured as valence and arousal, but upwards of 20 discrete emotions that contribute to our subjective and social lives. These emotions enable the rich fabric of relationships, from caregiving interactions to collective (...) activities, that are vital to cooperation. Grounded in advances in cultural evolution, we detail how emotions and culture co-evolved, highlighting how emotions are building blocks of cultural forms such as ceremonies, dance, narratives, music, and visual art. (shrink)
The ability to think in abstractions depends on the imagination. An important evolutionary change was the installation of a suite of six imaginative activities that emerge at first in childhood, which include empathy, symbolic play, and theory-of-mind. These abilities can be built upon in adulthood to enable the production of oral and written stories. As a technology, writing has three aspects: material, skill based, and societal. It is in fiction that expertise in writing is most strikingly attained; imagination is put (...) to use to create simulations of the social world that can usefully be offered to others. Fiction is best conceived as an externalization of consciousness, which not only enables us to understand others but also to transform ourselves so that we can reach beyond the immediate. (shrink)
Experiential and behavioural aspects of emotions can be measured readily but developing a contactless measure of emotions’ physiological aspects has been a major challenge. We hypothesised that different emotion-evoking films can produce distinctive facial blood flow patterns that can serve as physiological signatures of discrete emotions. To test this hypothesis, we created a new Transdermal Optical Imaging system that uses a conventional video camera to capture facial blood flows in a contactless manner. Using this and deep machine learning, we analysed (...) videos of the faces of people as they viewed film clips that elicited joy, sadness, disgust, fear or a neutral state. We found that each of these elicited a distinct blood flow pattern in the facial epidermis, and that Transdermal Optical Imaging is an effective contactless and inexpensive tool to the reveal physiological correlates of discrete emotions. (shrink)
To understand human emotions we need, alongside appraisal, the concept of emergence (derivation from the expectations of relationships) and the concept of unfolding (of sequences that can be expressed as narratives). These processes can be seen in resentment, which has not been studied extensively in psychology. It is associated with envy, and it can be thought of as a kind of destructive anger. Such issues can be studied in works of literature: simulations of the social world in which emotions can (...) be experienced by means of empathy. Shakespeare's Othello enables us to understand the emergence and unfolding of resentment in Iago, who is passed over for promotion and improvises a plan to destroy Othello. Iago's resentment is difficult to empathize with, and the play raises the question of whether we need to recognize in ourselves the capacity for reprehensible emotions. (shrink)
The Varieties of Religious Experience is an exploration of personal narratives about religious experience, but as one might gather from the epigraph to this article, James treats religion in an eccentric way. He takes religious experience to mean something close to the emotional experience of identity. His central question is how one might discover happiness within oneself and in one's relations with others, or if such happiness seems far distant, how one might achieve a change that will accomplish a new (...) identity. (shrink)
In Imagination, Jim Davies explains that most humans have mental imagery: an ability to make pictures in the mind without immediate perceptual input-as we do when we dream. Davies writes programs that enable computers to do something similar. Given a few words of description, a computer can generate pictures with several objects arranged in appropriate ways. Jonathan Gilmore’s Apt Imaginings is about whether engagement in works of fiction is continuous or discontinuous with how we deal with people and objects in (...) everyday life. He argues for discontinuity. In constructing a critical framework within which to evaluate these two books, I use Kenneth Craik’s theory of mental models. Craik’s theory enables us to understand how we humans have evolved to imagine possible futures, to plan and to act in relation to them, and also to imagine what might be going on in other people’s minds. (shrink)
The psychology of emotions illuminates the questions of intentional capacities raised by Barresi & Moore. Complex emotions require the development of a sense of self and are based on social comparisons between mainly imagined objects. The fourth level in B&M's framework requires something like a constructive agent rather than a mental agent.
We argue that theory-of-mind understanding has developed to facilitate joint thinking and planning, defined as the creation of new mental objects that could not have been created by one mind. Three components of this ability are proposed: the mental architecture indexed by false belief understanding, domain-specific knowledge, and the prioritization of the joint mind over the individual mind.
Fiction involves exploring imaginative arrangements of places and characters: elements that can be recognized by readers. In childhood, exploration occurs from a safe home base of a caregiver; fiction enables a comparable basis. Physical elements in fiction are settings. More important are social explorations: transactions with characters that can include transformation. This is illustrated by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
