been thinking more generally about this, what comes to mind with the German word is the measure for 'punitive' like schadenfreude is vicarious punishment, maybe with a empathic dimension with nurturing at one end and punitive on the other, until the pain inflicted no longer cares about what the receiver feels, deserved or underserved.. and it is off the scale. A lot of shoulding the world into place seems to be about how we police this, both in doing it and in stifling it.
In my opinion, How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett is a very interesting book on this subject. I think the book is badly written because it repeats over and over again that detailed emotions are not innate (obviously many people actually believe they are), but it also summarizes some interesting research that underbuilds that opinion.
After reading that book, I think about emotions as social explanations for states of mind. I mean, if a person says "I'm feeling disappointed", that really means "I'm in a sullen mood and my explanation is that I didn't get what I expected". The same with schadenfreude: "I'm feeling elated and my explanation is that an opponent faces hardship".
It is all a lot about social predictability. There are social conventions dictating when a certain feeling is appropriate. Words for feelings are one part of those conventions. We use those words in order to communicate that our emotions are orderly and predictable.
Reading through the opening chapter, already I see what you mean; so far Barrett's remarks are basically a "No, wait! Everything you thought you knew is wrong!" plea for attention:
"Our emotions, according to the classical view, are artifacts of evolution, having long ago been advantageous for survival, and are now a fixed component of our biological nature. As such, they are universal: people of every age, in every culture, in every part of the world should experience sadness more or less as you do..."
But... "there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attach electrodes to a person’s face and measure how facial muscles actually move during the experience of an emotion, they find tremendous variety, not uniformity. They find the same variety—the same absence of fingerprints—when they study the body and the brain. You can experience anger with or without a spike in blood pressure. You can experience fear with or without an amygdala, the brain region historically tagged as the home of fear."
So... "The only reasonable scientific conclusion, in my opinion, is that emotions are not what we typically think they are."
But who cares if you can experience fear without an amygdala? Who cares if some people move their muscles differently when experiencing the same emotion? The work of researchers like Paul Ekman (reference #1), who found that six basic emotions (fear, anger, disgust, happiness, surprise, & sadness) are recognizable across all human cultures, wasn't trying to postulate that the emotions are universal because the facial expressions are universal. The most cursory interaction with freaking *cats* should show that there is a clear component of emotion that is extremely basic and part of the biology we share with other mammals. In fact we likely share it with birds and reptiles, and probably even with unrelated creatures like arthropods through different neurological structures. The same evolutionary problems that our ancestors faced are not unique to us, and any animal that struggles to survive and reproduce will be shaped down similar paths.
Although I didn't mention him in this post, an Estonian named Jaak Panksepp has done a great deal of work on these kinds of shared emotional states which he capitalizes as SEEKING, LUST, CARE, PLAY, FEAR, ANGER/RAGE, and SADNESS/PANIC. If you can tolerate a study, this is a good primer: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00464/pdf Or if you're more into videos, this one is put together very well from the final years of his life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65e2qScV_K8
I like Panksepp's model much better than Ekman's. He looked at animals rather than humans, behaviors rather than expressions, and did a lot of work with neural pathways that I never saw with Ekman. But Panksepp's seven emotions don't do a good job of moving down the ladder of simplicity, or moving up into complexity. The two dimensional model I talked about in this post is wonderful for revealing how fear and anger are similar: An urgent threat requires immediate resolution, stimulating a basic *tense* emotional pathway people refer to as "fight/flight/freeze", which then is refined into aggression, fear, or panic depending on the circumstances. Unfortunately Panksepp's conceptualization doesn't pick up this kind of relationship; it's just FEAR and ANGER as two distinct systems, and LUST, SEEK, and PLAY as three distinct systems.
But ultimately what you describe as disappointent meaning "I'm in a sullen mood and my explanation is that I didn't get what I expected" always seemed implicit in the classical story of emotion. I don't really even like the idea of "emotions" like disappointment or Schadenfreude. Disappointment is a story we tell about low-arousal negative emotions, but does disappointment feel any different from just being depressed? Similarly, does Schadenfreude really feel different from feeling mean and also satisfied at the same time? What is the difference between perceiving a yellow wavelength of light that stimulate our green and red color receptors, and perceiving green and red wavelengths? What is the difference between feeling hot water, or feeling cold and warm water stimulating the same nerves? It turns out there's no difference in our perception, and I vastly prefer these simple explanations for the way they help to make sense of the amazing things I experience as a dude living in a rad world.
been thinking more generally about this, what comes to mind with the German word is the measure for 'punitive' like schadenfreude is vicarious punishment, maybe with a empathic dimension with nurturing at one end and punitive on the other, until the pain inflicted no longer cares about what the receiver feels, deserved or underserved.. and it is off the scale. A lot of shoulding the world into place seems to be about how we police this, both in doing it and in stifling it.
In my opinion, How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett is a very interesting book on this subject. I think the book is badly written because it repeats over and over again that detailed emotions are not innate (obviously many people actually believe they are), but it also summarizes some interesting research that underbuilds that opinion.
After reading that book, I think about emotions as social explanations for states of mind. I mean, if a person says "I'm feeling disappointed", that really means "I'm in a sullen mood and my explanation is that I didn't get what I expected". The same with schadenfreude: "I'm feeling elated and my explanation is that an opponent faces hardship".
It is all a lot about social predictability. There are social conventions dictating when a certain feeling is appropriate. Words for feelings are one part of those conventions. We use those words in order to communicate that our emotions are orderly and predictable.
"I think about emotions as social explanations for states of mind." This is in part my 'worlding'.
"social predictability" this is a part of what English uses the word should or ought for.
What the individual feels and what the world should do with that as an emotion is the gap we jitter as Janus.
If the self is an ego, then the world is a non-self ego we all get to should into place/ into being.
Neither exists but we feel they should.
Reading through the opening chapter, already I see what you mean; so far Barrett's remarks are basically a "No, wait! Everything you thought you knew is wrong!" plea for attention:
"Our emotions, according to the classical view, are artifacts of evolution, having long ago been advantageous for survival, and are now a fixed component of our biological nature. As such, they are universal: people of every age, in every culture, in every part of the world should experience sadness more or less as you do..."
But... "there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attach electrodes to a person’s face and measure how facial muscles actually move during the experience of an emotion, they find tremendous variety, not uniformity. They find the same variety—the same absence of fingerprints—when they study the body and the brain. You can experience anger with or without a spike in blood pressure. You can experience fear with or without an amygdala, the brain region historically tagged as the home of fear."
So... "The only reasonable scientific conclusion, in my opinion, is that emotions are not what we typically think they are."
But who cares if you can experience fear without an amygdala? Who cares if some people move their muscles differently when experiencing the same emotion? The work of researchers like Paul Ekman (reference #1), who found that six basic emotions (fear, anger, disgust, happiness, surprise, & sadness) are recognizable across all human cultures, wasn't trying to postulate that the emotions are universal because the facial expressions are universal. The most cursory interaction with freaking *cats* should show that there is a clear component of emotion that is extremely basic and part of the biology we share with other mammals. In fact we likely share it with birds and reptiles, and probably even with unrelated creatures like arthropods through different neurological structures. The same evolutionary problems that our ancestors faced are not unique to us, and any animal that struggles to survive and reproduce will be shaped down similar paths.
Although I didn't mention him in this post, an Estonian named Jaak Panksepp has done a great deal of work on these kinds of shared emotional states which he capitalizes as SEEKING, LUST, CARE, PLAY, FEAR, ANGER/RAGE, and SADNESS/PANIC. If you can tolerate a study, this is a good primer: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00464/pdf Or if you're more into videos, this one is put together very well from the final years of his life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65e2qScV_K8
I like Panksepp's model much better than Ekman's. He looked at animals rather than humans, behaviors rather than expressions, and did a lot of work with neural pathways that I never saw with Ekman. But Panksepp's seven emotions don't do a good job of moving down the ladder of simplicity, or moving up into complexity. The two dimensional model I talked about in this post is wonderful for revealing how fear and anger are similar: An urgent threat requires immediate resolution, stimulating a basic *tense* emotional pathway people refer to as "fight/flight/freeze", which then is refined into aggression, fear, or panic depending on the circumstances. Unfortunately Panksepp's conceptualization doesn't pick up this kind of relationship; it's just FEAR and ANGER as two distinct systems, and LUST, SEEK, and PLAY as three distinct systems.
But ultimately what you describe as disappointent meaning "I'm in a sullen mood and my explanation is that I didn't get what I expected" always seemed implicit in the classical story of emotion. I don't really even like the idea of "emotions" like disappointment or Schadenfreude. Disappointment is a story we tell about low-arousal negative emotions, but does disappointment feel any different from just being depressed? Similarly, does Schadenfreude really feel different from feeling mean and also satisfied at the same time? What is the difference between perceiving a yellow wavelength of light that stimulate our green and red color receptors, and perceiving green and red wavelengths? What is the difference between feeling hot water, or feeling cold and warm water stimulating the same nerves? It turns out there's no difference in our perception, and I vastly prefer these simple explanations for the way they help to make sense of the amazing things I experience as a dude living in a rad world.