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Do we all experience emotion differently?
179 Plays1 year ago
How has emotion changed over history, and in different cultures? How do people experience emotion - in the body, cognitively, as concepts, as colours?
Vynn and Francis discuss how different people, including themselves individually, experience emotion.
The conversation leads into the practical question of how it is best to experience emotion, and how that happens socially and in combination with rational thought.
This episode is a follow-up companion episode to the interview with philosopher Tom Cochrane about emotion in the previous episode.
Timestamps:
00:46 Experiments about emotions
03:30 History of emotion
08:51 Emotion in different cultures
10:52 Experiencing emotions in different ways
15:38 Cause of bodily feeling of sensations
18:57 Vynn's experience of emotion
22:29 Francis' experience of emotion
25:09 Desirability of feeling emotion in body more
28:12 Social reality of emotions
32:51 Emotional-rational complexes, practical tips
Show Links:
- “The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States” - book by Tom Cochrane
- How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain - book by Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Critiques of Paul Ekman’s theory of facial expression of emotions - The Atlantic
- Professor Thomas Dixon’s research into history of emotion - website
- This kind of rosy yellow glow in my head - blog post introduction to Hurlburt
- Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears - book by Thomas Dixon
Contact Details:
Please follow us, get in touch, tell us about your inner experiences!
Twitter: @imagine_apple @SurenVynn @frabcus
Email: imagine@flourish.org
Theme written, performed and recorded by @MJPiercello
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Imagine an Apple'
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Imagine an Apple, the podcast about our varying inner mental experiences.
00:00:05
Speaker
My name's Francis and today I'm chatting with my co-host Vin about how different people experience emotion differently as in their body, in their minds, as colours.
Exploring 'The Emotional Mind'
00:00:28
Speaker
It was great interviewing Tom Cochrane yesterday about his book about emotion.
00:00:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:33
Speaker
So just to recap, Tom's book is called The Emotional Mind, and you can get it by emailing him.
00:00:40
Speaker
And he's very open to anyone just reaching out to chat to him and also discuss his ideas.
00:00:45
Speaker
So one of the most interesting things is Tom's approach to emotions, which I think can be contrasted with much of the
00:00:53
Speaker
literature that is currently popular about emotions is he's using a control theory of emotion and tom goes into a bit of a it goes into quite a bit of depth of what that means i don't know what do you think about like the control theory of emotions compared to the lisa feldman barrett stuff yeah so i read read her her book recently as well and yeah she's much more in the this um
00:01:18
Speaker
idea that the brain is a prediction machine and part of what you're doing when you make a prediction is then acting to you can make a prediction that you want to be true almost and then action is altering the prediction and that prediction is a mechanism both for predicting and for causing action which is slightly different from control theory honestly I'm not sure I care about the difference much because I'm a little bit more interested in the impact of emotion I think there's an interesting cognitive science question about how the brain works
00:01:48
Speaker
But my general sense is we haven't done enough experiments yet.
00:01:51
Speaker
I really like the beginning of Lisa's book where she gives loads of experiments from her lab that talks about stuff we thought we knew about facial expressions and emotion not really being true.
Theories of Emotion: Control vs. Prediction
00:02:01
Speaker
And Tom references a few of the experiments in our interview.
00:02:04
Speaker
But overall, my general sense is we've done a lot of not really great experiments collectively as humanity in the last 50 years.
00:02:13
Speaker
And we need to do some more organic ones and more ones where the people are embedded in everyday life.
00:02:18
Speaker
Perhaps, I don't know.
00:02:20
Speaker
What do you reckon?
00:02:21
Speaker
Yeah, no, definitely.
00:02:22
Speaker
Some new experiments about emotions is always a key one because we began with Paul Ekman stuff, which really became the standard for most people when
00:02:33
Speaker
discussing emotion.
00:02:34
Speaker
And that's proven to be a problematic theory.
00:02:38
Speaker
The idea of basic emotions and how Paul Ekman's studies didn't really account that people were actually experiencing emotions in a different way.
00:02:47
Speaker
He just happened to set up his experiments in such a way that confirmed
00:02:51
Speaker
his biases.
00:02:52
Speaker
And so experimentation always is fraught unless it's replicable.
00:02:57
Speaker
And I think this forms part of the replication crisis we see in psychology.
00:03:02
Speaker
So it'll be interesting to see how Tom's more philosophical and systematic approach to the control account of emotions squares in with experimental evidence that can maybe verify his theories.
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:19
Speaker
Yes.
00:03:21
Speaker
And yeah.
00:03:22
Speaker
Okay.
00:03:23
Speaker
Anything else you've got to reflect about either of those for what they were saying?
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose Tom's theories are very much more systematic and more philosophical in its approach.
00:03:36
Speaker
And I really appreciate that.
00:03:37
Speaker
I mean, there's so many ways to study emotion.
00:03:40
Speaker
And in addition to like this control theory approach, I'm also interested in like the history of emotions.
00:03:46
Speaker
And I know you're really interested in the phenomenology
Historical Perspectives on Emotions
00:03:49
Speaker
of emotion.
00:03:49
Speaker
And I'm wondering how
00:03:51
Speaker
those approaches emotions might bring to the table something completely new in perspective.
00:03:57
Speaker
And one of the people I'm one of the approaches I'm thinking about is Thomas Dixon, who is a well-known history of emotions, a researcher.
00:04:06
Speaker
And basically what he does is he scours the literature for how
00:04:10
Speaker
emotions have been used to describe internal mental states and how that term only emerged in the 1830s.
00:04:18
Speaker
At least this is what Dave he gives according to his genealogy, which really brings the whole field or the whole concept of an emotion into relief because what did people use to think about their mental states that we would now call emotions before they had the term and the category of emotion?
00:04:40
Speaker
So it's not just they didn't have, it's almost like you're saying emotion isn't a concrete concept, really.
00:04:46
Speaker
It's a concept we have in our modern society.
00:04:48
Speaker
I'm not even sure everyone agrees on what it means, even in our current society, actually, which is why I'm interested in phenomenology.
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:54
Speaker
So you're saying it was very different at other times in other countries.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yes.
00:04:59
Speaker
So I guess the technical term is to describe it as anachronistic or, I don't know, anatopic.
00:05:05
Speaker
It basically means it's
00:05:07
Speaker
out of date and out of place is the word emotion to describe the mental experiences of people from different histories and different cultures.
00:05:16
Speaker
An example of this is how Aquinas, for example, Thomas Aquinas writing in the 12th, 13th century, I think,
00:05:24
Speaker
never uses the word emotion, but instead uses terms like passion, affections, and sentiment.
00:05:31
Speaker
And we're used to thinking of these terms as synonyms for emotion.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, those are obviously synonyms from our perspective, but the distinctions that mattered between the delineating passions from, say, for example, affections or
00:05:48
Speaker
moral sentiments is that one was intrinsically seen as sinful.
00:05:53
Speaker
It belonged to the lower level feelings, the stirrings of the body and things that we wouldn't consider as emotions such as lust or feeling cold or feeling pain.
00:06:05
Speaker
These would have been seen as expressions of like the passion, whereas I think they're a bit too physiological to count as emotions in our modern day understanding of that.
00:06:15
Speaker
But likewise, on the other hand... That was in which period?
00:06:18
Speaker
Medieval.
00:06:19
Speaker
So Thomas Aquinas writing about this would have been, yes, pretty much middle of the medieval period.
00:06:27
Speaker
And he... So these are the passions, and it's usually contrasted with the affections.
00:06:34
Speaker
What we might maybe...
00:06:36
Speaker
call from our modern perspective the higher level and a higher level emotion such as affection would include things like love for god or sympathy for your fellow human beings having empathy for fellow for your fellow creatures and these were things that were supposed to like guide your your reason so in this like dichotomy between affections and and the reason we don't find the common trope
00:07:03
Speaker
that is now typical of framing emotions versus rationality.
00:07:09
Speaker
That might have been true for passions versus the reason, and that might mirror our emotion versus rationality discourse.
00:07:18
Speaker
But
00:07:19
Speaker
In the past, at least, when you had this distinction between the affections on the one hand and passions on the other, people could make much finer distinctions between feelings that were good and supposed to rightly guide the reason and passions which were supposed to be rightfully guided by or conquered by the faculty of reason.
Constructed Concepts of Emotions
00:07:43
Speaker
That's all super interesting.
00:07:44
Speaker
That fits really well with Lisa Feldman Barrett's general point that emotion is constructed and social and there's concepts that we make up as a society.
00:07:52
Speaker
And it's interesting you bring in rational thought into that as well, because, yeah, there is this idea that there's emotions and there's rational thought, and that's maybe fundamental to brain structure almost or to our body either.
00:08:03
Speaker
But you're sort of saying that this show, would they treat rational thought in that same, that would be categorized differently as well as the emotions being categorized differently?
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, completely.
00:08:15
Speaker
Mainly because they didn't have this catch-all term that we have.
00:08:21
Speaker
One thing that the medieval writers, the medieval Christian theologians at least,
00:08:25
Speaker
wouldn't have done that we do on a daily basis with our category of emotion is we reduce up passions into emotions and we also reduce down the higher level affections into emotions so we only have this one category whereas maintaining these distinctions seems like a very important way to conceptualize how we go about thinking and making decisions
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, great.
00:08:51
Speaker
Can you give any other examples, like maybe present day ones where, you know, emotion's different somewhere else outside the West?
00:09:00
Speaker
I think it's really difficult.
00:09:02
Speaker
I think it's really difficult to separate non-Western conceptions of emotion from Western ones, mainly because even while I was growing up, we, so the Malay terms for emotion are emosi, which obviously is a direct calc-ing or loan word from English.
00:09:23
Speaker
Perhaps feeling there is like the word which translates to feeling but can also be literally translated as like tasting because the root word to taste.
00:09:34
Speaker
So that's something quite interesting going on there where we use like feel, which is typically more associated with touch to describe emotion or like some type of like mental state akin to emotion.
00:09:45
Speaker
Other cultures might use different sensory modalities.
00:09:48
Speaker
Hmm.
00:09:50
Speaker
And this kind of ties back into the synesthesia that some people have whenever they're, and how certain emotions are associated with color.
00:09:59
Speaker
They become colored, like literally, as in red is an expression of anger, for instance, green with jealousy.
00:10:06
Speaker
So there's all these interesting ways that the other sensory modalities feed into our conceptions of emotion.
00:10:13
Speaker
And not just visual stimuli such as color, but also emotions that are overwhelming and
00:10:20
Speaker
anger-like typically are considered to be hot emotions and I think this is quite an interesting thing to to note because it anger being you know a temperature or or cool sadness being cool and melancholy for instance really speaks to how we experience our emotions in multiple modalities and I'm not sure yeah
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, no, definitely there are lots of ways people experience emotion, which sometimes gets under-talked
Cultural Influences on Emotional Perception
00:10:48
Speaker
about.
00:10:48
Speaker
People just, yeah, don't mention it enough.
00:10:50
Speaker
Your colour example, there's a lovely example, which I just found randomly.
00:10:54
Speaker
There's a book by Hulbert and someone called Schwitzgabel,
00:10:58
Speaker
Hilbert's the researcher at Las Vegas University who documents people's inner experiences by giving them a random buzzer and making them write down what they were experiencing.
00:11:08
Speaker
And they did this in detail on one of their research as she volunteered to have her experiences published in a book called, yeah, it's called Describing Inner Experience, Proponent Meets Skeptic.
00:11:21
Speaker
And specifically, there's one which really struck me where she's reading some documentation to assemble some furniture and laughing at something in it.
00:11:29
Speaker
And the humour appears in her head as a kind of rosy yellow glow.
00:11:35
Speaker
So she literally sees in her imagination a particular rosy yellow glow to represent this emotion of humour, of funniness.
00:11:43
Speaker
And I was like, no one's ever said anything like that to me.
00:11:46
Speaker
And this isn't like they've looked for a strange person who's an aesthetic.
00:11:50
Speaker
This is a completely random, just as one sample in this perfectly normal woman's mental experience.
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah, really interesting.
00:12:02
Speaker
I mean, do you think, I just want to, while it's still in my mind, you said the Malay word was using taste, did you say?
00:12:11
Speaker
More touch.
00:12:13
Speaker
And do you think that might even alter?
00:12:14
Speaker
Because lots of people talk about getting bodily sensations of emotions, which...
00:12:19
Speaker
I don't feel like I do much, or if I do, I'm not categorizing them as emotions, which is another possibility.
00:12:25
Speaker
Right.
00:12:26
Speaker
Do you think maybe people who speak Malay as their first language might get tastes as emotions more often because of this?
00:12:34
Speaker
I don't...
00:12:34
Speaker
I don't think it's necessarily to do with the culture.
00:12:37
Speaker
I think it's more to do with how much people experience their emotions as part of some bodily sensation rather than how much they think it's happening all in their head.
00:12:50
Speaker
And the reason I say this is because although there's a rich vocabulary in Malay to describe emotions as happening in, for example, your heart or
00:13:01
Speaker
your belly or your belly liver.
00:13:04
Speaker
So there's literally an expression to say that if you have no compassion for someone, then you lack belly liver, you lack hati perut.
00:13:11
Speaker
So that kind of suggests that compassion is felt in the stomach, like this viscera region.
00:13:19
Speaker
And I think that's similar to how English also has the word heartless to describe someone for being not compassionate or showing sufficient level of kindness, the suffering of others.
00:13:31
Speaker
And I think there's something going on when people speak about certain body parts being associated with
00:13:39
Speaker
with strong emotions.
00:13:40
Speaker
And English probably had that more in the past when we're more embodied, I guess.
00:13:45
Speaker
But with the advent of like word category of emotion, and how that was associated with people began to associate this thing as being a purely mental activity rather than coming from
00:13:58
Speaker
the heart, not like the metaphorical heart, but like the literal heart, then you predict these feelings as coming from your head and maybe at the detriment of noticing it appearing elsewhere in the body.
00:14:12
Speaker
I certainly feel my emotions
00:14:13
Speaker
very much in the body, especially in more recent times, as I've become more aware and started adopting more meditative practices.
00:14:24
Speaker
So stress in my shoulders, lumps in my throat whenever I feel embarrassed.
00:14:30
Speaker
I think when there's a
00:14:32
Speaker
threat to my reputation.
00:14:33
Speaker
I feel it very strongly in the abdominal region.
00:14:38
Speaker
And it's really quite interesting to be able to experience all this and realize when someone says, oh, I'm experiencing heartbreak, they don't mean it as in, oh, my...
00:14:49
Speaker
metaphorical heart is breaking no no they're feeling it as in like the sinews in their heart are probably tugging and like the emotions there are like the muscles there are tensing up and that's being registered if you look for it in in those parts but you're not going to look you're not going to notice that in fact you're likely to ignore it if you think if you focus that if you think that your emotions are happening in your head and you focus all your attention there so what's actually going on here so we know from
00:15:20
Speaker
Some of the stuff Tom Cochrane said, that emotion is very cognitive.
00:15:23
Speaker
So something like embarrassment necessarily requires social modeling.
00:15:27
Speaker
So it's not like your body is directly responding.
00:15:30
Speaker
It's going via the brain and the brain somehow influencing the feeling in the body or making up the feeling in the body.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:39
Speaker
But we also, Lisa Phil McBarrett, talks a lot about body budgets and the purpose of both affect and, I think, emotion as well, to alter how the body decides to, you know, allocate resources.
00:15:51
Speaker
An obvious one would be produce adrenaline, say, right?
00:15:54
Speaker
So it might be that you're feeling something which is caused by the emotion, that's to try and, like, an action taken from the emotion by the physical body.
00:16:03
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:16:04
Speaker
Do you have any idea what's going on with this?
00:16:07
Speaker
Is it made up in the mind or is there a real feeling in the body?
00:16:12
Speaker
And then how's that feeling getting caused when it must be cognitive as well as physical?
00:16:16
Speaker
So I have no expert opinion about this.
00:16:19
Speaker
but if I were to try to like hazard a guess I think the mind i.e the nervous system because it's throughout the body it affects more than just whatever's going in the skull certainly whenever I feel like a duissance or like a frisson it emerges from my spine and it starts to like ripple out from the body rather than
00:16:43
Speaker
oh yeah, I'm feeling this incredible pleasant sensation.
00:16:46
Speaker
It's because my brain is generating.
00:16:48
Speaker
And I'm like, no, probably it's coming from a part of my body that is processing this emotion and then generating sensations from that part.
00:16:57
Speaker
And I think cognition is very much intertwined with
00:17:01
Speaker
The nervous system and the nervous system isn't all in the head.
00:17:05
Speaker
I think the brain certainly gets, certainly is responsible for much of this cognitive decision making.
00:17:12
Speaker
But the brain is also connected to the spinal cord and the spinal cord is connected to every nerve in the body.
00:17:17
Speaker
And that kind of innervates the whole organism instead of just remaining within the skull.
00:17:24
Speaker
critically the gut brain in this as well.
00:17:25
Speaker
We've got a brain as complex as the spinal cord in our guts, which could be doing some computation and working something out.
00:17:32
Speaker
Yeah, certainly.
00:17:33
Speaker
I think having good emotional slash mental health also affects how the gut processes things and how it does its job.
00:17:44
Speaker
Certainly, the immune system is very strongly affected by our mental states.
00:17:48
Speaker
And if you're suffering from depression, I think research has shown that people tend to have weaker immune systems when their mental state is jeopardized in some way.
00:18:01
Speaker
Or likewise, it goes the other way around.
00:18:03
Speaker
Having poor immune system can affect our mental state.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah.
Emotional Intelligence and Health
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, there was actually a great bit about that.
00:18:11
Speaker
Again, in Lisa Feldman-Berrett, where she talks about if you develop your emotional intelligence by paying more attention to your emotions and getting more granular and being more perceptive of your emotions, that can then potentially improve other things like your mental health, your bodily health and so on.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of like that because
00:18:30
Speaker
Instead of taking your vitamins or what have you and your tabs, you could just think through your emotions and emotionally healthy, emotionally intelligent person would be just as effective as regulating their...
00:18:48
Speaker
diseases and like immune system than someone who takes the train your managing of your body budget to be super detailed yeah interesting yeah so would you say that most of the time when you use the phrase that you experience emotion is it usually a bodily feeling when you experience emotion or do you sometimes experience it as imagine imagery or words or
00:19:10
Speaker
So it's interesting because I don't really imagine, I don't have much imagination when it comes to emotion, but I definitely express it in words.
00:19:20
Speaker
Whenever I'm not feeling it cognitively, if I'm not cognizing emotion, as opposed to feeling it bodily, it feels like I'm suppressing some part of an emotion.
00:19:34
Speaker
And so I have to cogitate about it.
00:19:36
Speaker
And so it feels like it's happening more in my brain, more in my head than it is in my body.
00:19:42
Speaker
But if I stop suppressing it, it kind of like reemerges somewhere else in the body.
00:19:47
Speaker
So that's an emotion you're trying, by suppressing, you mean like hiding?
00:19:51
Speaker
Yes.
00:19:52
Speaker
Trying to not feel it almost, or you don't want to feel it.
00:19:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:55
Speaker
Or like I don't want to express it.
00:19:58
Speaker
And the expression sort of goes into my head and I'm becoming more aware of the feeling without necessarily sensing it in a body part.
00:20:10
Speaker
And then you're saying it then can go to a different body part.
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly.
00:20:14
Speaker
Well, as I found out recently, that's what it does.
00:20:16
Speaker
Apparently, there's no suppressing it.
00:20:19
Speaker
Oh, I see.
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:20:21
Speaker
So you'll feel... Right.
00:20:22
Speaker
So rather than correctly feeling it in your heart, you'll then get tension in your neck or something.
00:20:26
Speaker
That kind of thing?
00:20:27
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:20:28
Speaker
Typically, this is something... If the feeling... If the emotion is being expressed or being felt in the face, such as like...
00:20:37
Speaker
clenching of the jaws or like some furring of the brows or something like that some contorting of the face i'll be very mindful of this because obviously it's the face is a site of social information and i don't want to um you know put people off with my disgust or like my anger and so i'll suppress my face
00:20:58
Speaker
But in doing so, not only am I thinking about it in my head, it's also being expressed probably somewhere else.
00:21:05
Speaker
And it's gone to my, I don't know, viscera region or down to my fist.
00:21:11
Speaker
And I'll notice that when I look at my hands, it's clenched up in a ball or something.
00:21:17
Speaker
It could be anywhere in the body.
00:21:18
Speaker
And each time I notice where it's being expressed and I try to suppress that,
00:21:22
Speaker
it probably find somewhere else, so like find some other outlet to explode through.
00:21:28
Speaker
That's really interesting because I'm naturally very, my face is very expressive.
00:21:32
Speaker
Like people often notice emotions I don't even realize I've got by looking at my face.
00:21:35
Speaker
So I think I'm just wondering if I'm doing that to stay like relaxed and chill, I deliberately let it express subconsciously.
00:21:41
Speaker
Right, yeah, yeah.
00:21:43
Speaker
Is that a meta emotion then?
00:21:44
Speaker
Because Tom Cochrane used this phrase, for emotions about emotions, was a meta emotion.
00:21:49
Speaker
So if you've got some other reason to not show your emotion in your face and then you suppress it,
00:21:54
Speaker
and then you feel it somewhere else in a negative way it might be that you're feeling almost the negative the meta emotion in another place kind of like you always know yeah i've never thought about it that way i've never thought about um me suppressing one emotion and it then re-emerging somewhere else as like an expression of the meta motion of that emotion rather than the emotion itself if that makes sense i'll have to come back to you on that one but
00:22:19
Speaker
I'm not sure if it helps, but yeah.
00:22:21
Speaker
Okay, that's super.
00:22:23
Speaker
Yeah, so much going on here.
00:22:24
Speaker
Definitely asking people how they experience emotion is a very interesting thing to do.
00:22:28
Speaker
So I'm completely different from you.
00:22:31
Speaker
I do, I don't know.
00:22:32
Speaker
I'm not sure I count bodily things as emotion as much.
00:22:35
Speaker
So some people have referenced hunger as being emotion occasionally.
00:22:38
Speaker
I think Lisa Feldman Barrett has.
00:22:40
Speaker
Whereas I think Tom Cochrane would make say it was affect more.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:45
Speaker
Is it more an affect?
00:22:46
Speaker
Yeah, hunger definitely.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah, both of them have to be affect.
00:22:49
Speaker
Right.
00:22:50
Speaker
So because I certainly wouldn't count something like hunger as an emotion, even though it can be a physical feeling.
00:22:55
Speaker
Although even then, even hunger is not always a physical feeling in me.
00:22:58
Speaker
Sometimes I just become rationally aware that I'm getting, I might have some other expression of hunger, like low blood sugar levels making me hangry like a bit.
00:23:08
Speaker
catchy or annoyed and then I'll cognitively go, not consciously, but cognitively realize I must be hungry and then I will say I'm hungry and go and get some food, but actually I haven't necessarily even felt I'm hungry yet.
00:23:21
Speaker
And so typically when I feel emotion, I become conceptually aware.
00:23:27
Speaker
So I use lots of what Hulbert calls unsymbolized conceptual thinking.
00:23:31
Speaker
So this is thinking, when you think in your mind, you don't have images, you don't have words, you
00:23:36
Speaker
but it's quite active and it's about concepts.
00:23:40
Speaker
But it comes as a detailed, rich awareness of a concept in my head.
00:23:46
Speaker
And quite often I'm aware of emotions like that.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I'll go, oh, I'm feeling a complicated emotion.
00:23:52
Speaker
I don't even have a word for it.
00:23:53
Speaker
It's very, very common.
00:23:55
Speaker
I'll go, I can sort of start to describe it or why I'm feeling it, but it's rich and detailed and I can't express in words what this emotion is.
00:24:05
Speaker
And it very much feels very, they feel very mental to me.
00:24:08
Speaker
Like their cognitive, complex, rich, intuitive, cognitive responses, usually to social situations, I guess.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:17
Speaker
And they're definitely emotions.
00:24:19
Speaker
And sometimes they wash through me.
00:24:21
Speaker
The expressions I get are physical.
00:24:23
Speaker
Crying.
00:24:24
Speaker
I really like crying.
00:24:25
Speaker
I find it really powerful.
00:24:26
Speaker
And crying is an extremely rich language.
00:24:29
Speaker
There's lots of subtly different ways of crying.
00:24:31
Speaker
And it can express all manner of emotions really well.
00:24:33
Speaker
Uh, and it somehow releases it.
00:24:35
Speaker
It feels like a fulfillment in a good way of the emotion to cry for me.
00:24:41
Speaker
Um, and I get other, I sometimes get like pulses through my body, um, particularly extreme situations, like something really amazingly good, uh, like romantically or even a situation, like a thing that happens, I might get a rush of emotion through me.
00:24:57
Speaker
And I've definitely had like all the common ones, some of the common ones we have words for, like butterflies in your stomach.
00:25:02
Speaker
I have had those, some of those ones we have words for, but yeah, it seems relatively rare.
00:25:08
Speaker
And I know there's an idea that we ought to feel our bodily emotion more.
00:25:11
Speaker
It's quite often mentioned amongst people.
00:25:14
Speaker
Like, do you know where that's come from?
00:25:16
Speaker
Is it kind of Alexander Technique or?
00:25:18
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely, I'm not sure if it's originated from Alexander Technique, but I've certainly heard many AT people say,
00:25:26
Speaker
endorse this embodiment and like being aware of the bodily sensations so it's certainly popularized by Alexander Technique crowd.
00:25:34
Speaker
Whereas when we asked Tom Cochrane this he said oh yeah there's a bit of a dispute about whether emotions bodily or whether it's situational and sometimes I feel like oh there's something wrong with me or I'm feeling like I'm being too much of a geek by not feeling emotions in my body enough but other times I'm like well actually I've
00:25:51
Speaker
I do feel my emotions, but I feel them as rich concepts.
00:25:54
Speaker
And that feels very valuable thing to do as well in a different way.
00:25:58
Speaker
But maybe that means I don't manage my body budget as well, right?
00:26:00
Speaker
Because I'm not as connected to my body.
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think Tom's argument was that it can be both bodily sensation as well as like higher mental experience.
00:26:08
Speaker
And that's what he's trying to bridge with his control theory of emotion.
00:26:13
Speaker
Yeah, definitely both are involved.
00:26:15
Speaker
There's like little doubt about that.
00:26:20
Speaker
From what they both say and what we've been talking about, it feels like emotion is very unusual because it's both bodily and cognitive.
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:28
Speaker
A good example of this is with the crying thing.
Cultural Shifts in Emotional Expression
00:26:31
Speaker
Weeping can have multiple meanings.
00:26:35
Speaker
It's certainly very strongly associated with sadness, at least in our culture.
00:26:42
Speaker
Thomas Dixon wrote a book on Weeping Britannia, Portrait of a Nation of Tears.
00:26:49
Speaker
He's another historian of emotion that traces this particular expression, this producing tears or lacrimation,
00:26:57
Speaker
and looks at how it has symbolized different sorts of emotions throughout the six centuries of weeping Britain from medieval mystics who are experiencing ecstasy for God and how tears for God were seen as this joyful expression to tears as like a sign of melancholy to tears of rage and how it became suppressed during
00:27:22
Speaker
the Victorian era and the idea of like the British stiff upper lip emerged and suddenly weeping became a sign of like weakness, which thankfully it's now becoming, you know, has less purchase in most people's minds these days.
00:27:41
Speaker
And it just goes to show how like the attitudes towards tears and crying change over time in history.
00:27:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:49
Speaker
So just that one expression is, again, it's cultural as well as, but it also seems natural.
00:27:55
Speaker
It's not like anyone's told me to cry when I feel this complex emotion.
00:27:59
Speaker
I don't think I've even seen, I don't feel like I've seen, I guess there must be films and things where I've seen people do complex uses of crying, right?
00:28:08
Speaker
So perhaps I have taken it in culturally a bit.
00:28:10
Speaker
Hmm.
00:28:11
Speaker
Very interesting.
00:28:12
Speaker
So it's much like it's a skill more.
00:28:14
Speaker
It's much like any other human activity, isn't it?
00:28:16
Speaker
Where there's different ways we can learn to do it and different ways we can engage with it.
00:28:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:21
Speaker
So this is interesting because this ties back to what Tom said yesterday about, for example, who is responsible for the expression of an emotion?
00:28:31
Speaker
Is it triggered by...
00:28:33
Speaker
especially the social emotions, when you have a reactive attitude to someone, sort of resentment at some norm violation, does your anger therefore become triggered by the other person who is violating the norm?
00:28:47
Speaker
Or are you responsible for regulating your feelings of anger and anger?
00:28:53
Speaker
And so there's all this debate about who is responsible for it and what are the correct ways to express anger.
00:29:00
Speaker
And there was this famous piece of ethnography about the Eskimo and how their expression of they don't experience anger, which is an edgy way of saying that their emotional regulation of anger is so powerful that people just do not express it in ways that we might recognize it in Western countries.
00:29:22
Speaker
emotional um norm so my i don't i'm really i think i learned when i did a lot of therapy was that i don't express anger and i hide my anger way too much um i still feel i still experience it but i hide it and that's definitely come from my family i think my whole family does that yeah and i ultimately think it's uh an adaptive thing to cope with world war ii actually in the end it goes all the way back to their
00:29:48
Speaker
And that's definitely caused me some problems because I don't communicate when there's something that strongly doesn't meet my needs.
Family Influence on Emotional Suppression
00:29:55
Speaker
And I tend to hide it.
00:29:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:59
Speaker
So it's interesting that even in a society where there's anger,
00:30:02
Speaker
you can have some, you know, subsets of people who then don't use that in some way.
00:30:07
Speaker
And presumably the cultures where there isn't anger at all, but that are very functional, hopefully they have, you just say they probably got another way of dealing with the same problems that mean they almost don't need anger because they're so good at communicating needs anyway.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:23
Speaker
And I've certainly like experienced this clash in cultures and like
00:30:27
Speaker
emotional styles is like how i'm going to call it mainly because like growing up in different sorts of environments sometimes you're expected to show anger and other situations you're not expected to show anger so when you start to anger when you start to express this emotion in according to like
00:30:46
Speaker
the wrong norms of if it's very much in discord with the cultural norms of how you should express that anger in a situation, then you can get into a lot of trouble.
00:30:57
Speaker
And one example is with at least any of my friends that I'm currently living with, and I live in the UK at the moment.
00:31:05
Speaker
There's a premium on being direct about your emotions and at least being forthright about when your needs are not being met, because suppressing it can do resentment and further down the line, this can cause all sorts of problems.
00:31:21
Speaker
And so it's better to have these outbursts rather than to not have them.
00:31:25
Speaker
And I certainly experienced this when I was being raised by my uncles.
00:31:30
Speaker
And having grown up with a different set of norms, this was very difficult for me to pick up.
00:31:36
Speaker
But then I learned it all the same.
00:31:38
Speaker
And so when I went back to my parents to live with them for a few months after I graduated, I was acclimatized to these new norms of express your anger all the time.
00:31:50
Speaker
And that was obviously like wrong when I brought it back to the home environment where anger is not supposed to be expressed, least of all from someone who is seen as like lower down the social hierarchy.
00:32:02
Speaker
If you have no authority, then you're not supposed to show anger.
00:32:05
Speaker
And when I did assert like my needs and authentically like expressed my emotions, that was met by disregard or like insolence.
00:32:16
Speaker
And yeah,
00:32:18
Speaker
Yeah, and it was just really fascinating to see how what I thought was like a righteous form of anger could very easily be seen as like insolence in another cultural context.
00:32:28
Speaker
Right, so that's a sense of emotion being social in that it's about impacts between people.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:35
Speaker
And there's also emotion that gets shared.
00:32:39
Speaker
which is really interesting as well, where you all feel the same emotion and that feels stronger, which feels, I guess it's the same thing, but that's a positive feedback loop rather than a conflict feedback between people.
00:32:49
Speaker
Interesting.
00:32:50
Speaker
Great.
00:32:51
Speaker
Any other topics you want to cover, Vin, before we wrap up?
00:32:54
Speaker
Nothing too deep.
00:32:55
Speaker
I suppose I saw a tweet the other day where they very cleverly circumvented the typical emotion versus rationality dichotomy of having that conflict between the heart and the head.
00:33:08
Speaker
And instead of saying, oh, it's my emotions against my rationality, it's my emotional-rational complex against another emotional-rational cluster.
00:33:20
Speaker
And I thought that that's a more accurate phrasing or like depiction of what's going on in my head when I feel like this typical head versus heart dynamic going on.
00:33:32
Speaker
Oh, so you're saying that when that happens, the part that you're thinking of is rational has got some other emotion linked to it as well.
00:33:39
Speaker
And indeed, the part that's very emotional has probably done lots of complex cognitive processing to work itself out in the first place.
00:33:45
Speaker
It's actually quite rational.
00:33:48
Speaker
Oh, that's really good.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:50
Speaker
Interesting.
00:33:51
Speaker
Thanks.
00:33:51
Speaker
That's a great tip.
00:33:52
Speaker
Because the thing I was about to ask at the end is if you had any obvious tips or things that people can do in practice to use
Mindfulness and Emotional Awareness
00:34:00
Speaker
all this?
00:34:00
Speaker
to develop this day to day?
00:34:03
Speaker
I suppose my practical tips would be having some kind of breath work, some mindfulness practice that allows you to focus in on your bodily sensations.
00:34:13
Speaker
And breath work is a really good one because you're focusing on your lungs.
00:34:17
Speaker
And I happen to feel many of my emotions in my chest area.
00:34:21
Speaker
I'm not sure what other people feel it, but this helps me to at least like progressively take notice of my chest, my lungs, my heart, and eventually even like my stomach.
00:34:33
Speaker
These surprisingly have...
00:34:35
Speaker
focus i like have concentrations of like emotion whenever i feel them um so that's my first so when you pay attention to the body you then feel you get awareness of the emotion in more rich detail that was there anyway yep so i'll be able to like associate guilt or compunction in this in my i guess stomach area
00:34:59
Speaker
And that seems to be where it's like concentrated the most.
00:35:02
Speaker
Or whenever I'm stressed, I tend to like clench my jaw very strongly and not being aware of this leads to bruxism and like, you know, teeth grinding.
00:35:11
Speaker
And just being aware of that suddenly allows me to just let go and focus on like the more mental or cognitive aspects of it and unpack the emotion.
00:35:22
Speaker
And this leads to the next point of like how I manage to regulate my emotions.
00:35:25
Speaker
Like, okay, now that I have noticed when my body is like,
00:35:29
Speaker
tensing up or like feeling some crunching or like my skin crawling or something like that uh what can i do to um regulate it i write things down and i start to like conceive of things so this is where the this is the mental bit of the emotion regulation just having some way to regulate it by writing it down in a diary and unpacking it yeah yeah
00:35:50
Speaker
Yeah, I've got much better at the cognitive side in the last five or 10 years by doing exactly that, like journaling.
00:35:57
Speaker
So specifically, I've got an instinct where if I feel I'm not wanting to talk about or write about something, if I'm like being avoidant, then I'm like, no, I must actually go and write about it.
00:36:09
Speaker
Because usually there's something rich and interesting going that I'm in denial about or wanting to hide from someone.
00:36:14
Speaker
And it really draws it out, either talking to a really close friend about it
00:36:19
Speaker
or just writing it down on my own definitely improves that, makes me more intelligent about my emotion.
00:36:28
Speaker
So interesting.
00:36:29
Speaker
And really interesting to hear you combining it with the bodily stuff and that both kind of are important.
00:36:34
Speaker
Cool.
00:36:35
Speaker
Right.
00:36:35
Speaker
Thanks, Vin.
00:36:36
Speaker
That was a fun conversation.
00:36:38
Speaker
We'll put loads of links in the show notes to all.
00:36:42
Speaker
Yeah, there's a ton of stuff that we both mentioned.
00:36:46
Speaker
Yeah, I'll put my reading down in the links as well.
00:36:48
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:36:49
Speaker
Thanks so much, Francis.
00:36:50
Speaker
Thanks.
00:36:51
Speaker
Take care.
00:36:51
Speaker
Bye-bye.