Preferring familiar emotions: As you want (and like) it?

2011

Leigh Bush 2 relationships once established or reaffirmed by commensality, highlighting an often overlooked commensal institution for the new individualist: the community table. By exploring our emotional, social and culinary desires I hope to illuminate new avenues that might provide helpful options for the hungry post-modern individual. You're So Emo: Putting Food Where Your Emotions Are Although we may like to think of ourselves as rational beings, emotions play a prominent part in our life experiences and decisions. According to Damasio (1998), emotion designates "a collection of responses triggered from parts of the brain, using both neural and humoral routes" with an end result being our emotional state "defined by changes within the body proper, e.g. viscera [and] internal milieu" (84). Sociologists, however, argue that, rather than being a prewired neurological condition, emotions are affected by our culture, our institutions and the people around us (Parkinson 1996). Studies have shown that people display emotions in institutionally appropriate ways, that they respond emotionally to other individuals' and that our perceptions about how others feel about us shape our emotional states. Regardless, emotions represent psychological and physiological conditions that are difficult if not impossible to invoke by concentrating the rational mind; they cue us into our environment, apprising us of what we find desirable (or not), and in so doing, emotions give us an index of value which we express in our daily lives (Donald 1997). We use emotions to communicate, oftentimes binding ourselves with or separating ourselves from other individuals through our reactions (Massey 2002). Although we usually think

2021

The main body of the text was written while I was with the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Rome, Italy, as a fellow of the International Exchange of Experts program of the World Rehabilitation Fund. However, the main theses it contains were conceived and developed during informal discussions I have had with friends and colleagues, especially Drs. Georg Deutsch and Tom Bourbon, about the fate of ideas in psychology. Upon my return to the States in the summer of 1986, the manuscript was deciphered and typed by Ms. Liz Zindler. I wish to thank her here for that feat of fortitude and also for the care and efficiency with which she implemented, subsequently, corrections and modifications of the original text. These modifications were mainly due to the insightful suggestions of Professor Bourbon, who read and edited the entire manuscript twice. My indebtedness to him can hardly be overstated. I also wish to thank Dr. Deutsch, who acted as a catalyst for many of the ideas presented in the book and who brought his experience as a successful author to bear on the task of articulating these ideas in an orderly and clear fashion. Finally, I wish to extend my special thanks to Professor Pete A. Y. Gunter, to Drs. J. Marc Simard, Reid Young, John Politch and Sidney Weinstein who read the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice for substantive and stylistic changes. I made a sincere, though not necessarily successful, effort to implement the suggestions of all these colleagues, while being amazed to realize the volume of errors one is liable to commit in the heat of intellectual passion, which is often referred to as " cold," quite misguidedly.

Philosophical Psychology, 2020

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

A General Theory of Emotions and Social Life

A SAMPLE CHAPTER, Chapter 6, from A General Theory of Emotions and Social Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) . Secondary emotions, continued: The eight tertiary dyads -- Resourcefulness and shock, morbidness and resignation, sullenness and guilt, anxiety and outrage. The tertiary dyads, which, by definition, are composed of the eight pairs of primary emotions located three positions apart in Plutchik's 1962 wheel, are presented as four pairs of opposites. ;

Routledge eBooks, 2023

My refection on the chapters in this volume 1 is prompted by an emotional response-or rather, a series of emotional responses. The frst of these is my own emotional response to a publication by Edward Gibbon Wakefeld: his "A Letter from Sydney", 2 published in 1829, which served to underpin his theory of "Systematic Colonization". 3 My response to Wakefeld's arguments around the value of land prompted a wave of emotions in me, one that took me back to a second emotional moment. That second emotional moment was between contributors to the workshops which underpin this collection. I was struck, in listening to the impassioned debate between authors, how deeply they felt about value, its defnition, its use, and the work it does in the world and in their scholarship. Questions about value are not only "academic" in nature, but are deeply felt. I was taken back to these fervent discussions by my own emotional response to Wakefeld's discussion of the value of land. 4 This, then, made me particularly attentive to value in an emotional register, and I found myself reading the chapters contributed to this volume with an eye to emotional response, to feelings, or at least the traces of these that can be found in the chapters. I do not subscribe to the still-dominant view that emotion and reason are "structurally opposed", with emotion pitted against reason, and with reason superior to it. 5 Thus I am not looking for traces of emotion that might belie the writer's objectivity, or point to illegitimate bias or lack of rationality. Rather, I posit that we learn from and intellectually (not just biologically) experience 6 Ibid. at 26; see also E. Kidd White, 'Images of Reach, Range, and Recognition: Thinking about Emotions in the Study of International Law', in Bandes et al. (eds.), Research Handbook on Law and Emotion (2021), 492; M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2008). 7 Of course, the decision to take a "straight-laced" "objective" academic-style presentation may be, in itself, an emotive form of communication. With thanks to Geof Gordon for this point.

Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 2003

Tantam offered a phenomenological account of emotions; that is, he described how emotions present themselves to the consciousness of people who experience them. This is not the same as an introspective account, because the emotional processes were described conceptually and related to other models and empirical ndings. The phenomenological approach bridges the gap between clinical research and practice: It advances the researcher's goal of articulating a rational model, but it also speaks to clinical participants' search for a guide to practical action, drawing on emotional information accessible only from a participant-observer's perspective or through empathy . main phenomenological claim was that emotions are not reactions to perceptions of the world, but are our way of perceiving them. Emotions are not caused in the person by a stimulus or located strictly in the person at all. Rather, they emerge at the contact-boundary (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951) of the person and the world, and are inseparable from the world. The processes of perceiving emotion-inducing stimuli cannot be separated from the emotions themselves. The world speaks to us, and emotions are our way of hearing it, sometimes accompanied or followed by thinking, and sometimes not.

2009

Three studies demonstrate that emotions can vary in their construal level, ranging from fairly high-level abstract emotions to low-level concrete ones, and uncover process insights. Relational-(vs. item-specific) processing appears to underlie abstract (vs. concrete) emotions and their association with higher (vs. lower) construal levels. These findings are discussed in light of recent work on complex emotions. The present research explores the possibility that emotions vary in their construal level, ranging from fairly high level abstract emotions to low level concrete ones. Drawing on construal level theory, we propose that higher level abstract (lower level concrete) emotions may entail mentally engaging in farther (closer) psychological distances (Liberman, Trope, and Stephan 2007). That is, emotions arising from appraisals that involve comparisons vis a vis a distant alternative are likely to be more abstract than those that involve comparisons with a proximal alternative. We suggest that certain complex emotions (Johnson-Laird and Oatley 1989; Ortony and Turner 1990), such as hope, pride, and awe, are likely to be fairly abstract because experiencing them requires that people compare their own situation to ones that are physically, socially, temporally, or hypothetically distant. For example, experiencing hope or pride involves a comparison with a distal expectation, ideal, or norm (Frijda, Kulpers and ter Schure 1990; MacInnis and de Mello 2005). By contrast, more concrete emotions include happiness, sadness, and fearsince these arise from responses to more immediate situations and stimuli (i.e., close psychological distances; Liberman et al. 2007). Perhaps not surprisingly, these lower level, concrete emotions tend to be viewed as basic-feelings that are experienced universally from birth and in response to immediate needs (Ekman 1993; Plutchik 1981). Study 1 explored whether emotions may indeed vary in their abstractness. We reasoned that people who experience more abstract versus concrete emotions should engage in a higher construal level and thereby should be more responsive to requests expressed at a higher versus lower construal level. Participants first wrote about an experience where they felt either proud or happy (i.e., abstract or concrete emotion). Subsequently they learned about a charity and were asked their willingness to make a donation-a request expressed at a high construal level, and to specify the precise amount they would donate-a request expressed at a low construal level. Participants also completed a BIF task, which directly assesses construal level (Vallacher and Wegner 1989). As expected, after participants had invoked the abstract emotion of pride versus the more concrete emotion of happiness, they were more willing to donate to the charity (a high level request) yet they committed a smaller dollar sum (a low level request). BIF results also showed after invoking pride versus happiness, participants construed data at a higher level. Study 2 tests our theorizing more directly. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, where they experienced awe (abstract emotion) or happiness (concrete emotion)