Naked Negative Emotions

by Gary Berg-Cross

A pundit on the political scene recently summarized today’s conflict of raw emotions and suggested (I paraphrase) that Hate & Anger was winning out over Love and Happiness while Fear over Hope. These battle of opposites may be so, although dichotomizes are often a simplification that hides important complexities (see my discussion of Binary Thinking). Certainly this sports-game metaphorical judgment of winners and losers seems disturbing. We might also apply other psychological state ideas like apathy and cynicism in the political sphere. I guess there is more mention of this although since they aren’t binary ideas they don’t have as easy a comparison of one going up and thus the other down a zero sum game.

More broadly our system seems not to be handling distressful social and cultural problems, such as school, office and church shootings or racial and ethnic tensions.  It is easy to be on the negative side of emotions but we might more systematically expand that observation of what is abroad in the emotional and attitudinal space of the nation.  

Discrete emotion theory developed 2 decades or so ago (Fogel and friends) assumes that psychological states & emotions are phylogenetically adapted to serve the basic function of survival. That is, they are like a skill such as language learning and planning. Human emotions like reasoning serves a human purpose. 

And like a tree growing from a small acorn we might conceptualize them unfold from simpler states – feeling good or bad, being energized or not. Seeing a bear gets one energized. That’s basic for survival. Arousal is a primitive state as is its unaroused, relaxed state. If seeing a bear generates enough fear we may run away and survive. Babies have both but emotions can build on these as they develop. Being a social animal as well as one that can be eaten by bears some complex emotions like parental love are largely social in nature but are central to babies hence society surviving. There is developmental support for the idea that emotional expression like language expressions emerges, driven by maturation of the central nervous system but also social interaction.  Human children learn rules that modify and modulate emotional expression and behavior.  Simple experiments to test the theory reveal surprising results.  When people are told to hold a pencil between their teeth for some period of time (this uses the facial muscles involved with smiling) they afterwards reported feeling happy!  Discrete emotion theory, mentioned earlier, proposes functional values for each emotion, suggesting that patterns of particular neural activity in the brain causes the associated, subjective changes in feeling, but also in behavior. Behavioral changes make the theory testable.  These behaviors can be as simple as distinct sets of facial, vocal, respiratory, skin (measurable galvanicly), and muscular responses

During childhood certain repetitive emotional experiences, say anger situations, can develop traits and biases that will be a strong factor in interpersonal relationships later in adulthood. 

So it is bad for us as a culture if indeed Hate & Anger are winning out over Love and Happiness while Fear is dominating Hope.  Cultural systems can favor some emotions over others. An economic system that has a central base of fear and greed may be heading for a bit on trouble.  Sure fear is a core emotion, but so is happiness. Greed is more complex, although we can see kids hugging toys to preserve comfort and happiness.  Guilt is used by  cultures, including religious ones, as a balance on greed. Mary share your toys!

Indeed some negative emotions like resentment may act as moral checks on drives like greed.  It’s a question of balance. So hearing a binary contest of greed versus generosity just seems to be simplifying things too much.

But to be sure in the contemporary atmosphere the end result of emphasizing a negative emotion like fear or anger is to produce people and groups whose trait is being in the state of fear, or frustration or anger for long periods.  That’s unbalanced and bad for reasoning which usually requires some middle ground between excited and relaxed. 

Arguing vs. Discussing - The Challenge of Talking to True Believers

By Gary Berg-Cross

Annual CPAC meetings generate quite a bit of talk around the Beltway where politics, policy and lobbying are popular sports. You or I may even be that eager person who often slides into these easy conversations. They may start out on sound grounds say gun safety policy or the boundaries of religion and politics and slide into surprisingly murky concepts.  One often finds emotions rising and sound reasoning banned from the area.

 

CPAC seems to have more of this than some other meetings and it does attract media attention.

Did an audience member at the Conservative Political Action Committee panel on Republican minority outreach really defend slavery as good for African-Americans?  Something like argument arose when Frederick Douglas was noted as forgiving his slave masters. Forgive them for what?

 

“Shelter, clothing, and food?”

Boy, is this an ahistorical summary of slavery, but perhaps civics classes aren't what they once were.  It was reported that several people in the audience cheered and applauded the comment. Well, what does one say to such seemingly affirmatory bias thinking that tramples on reasonable understanding?

There have any number of practical guides generated by people of experience to better handle these situations where entrenched interests, affiliations, identity, ego, debating habits and ideology all play a role. 

One I saw recently was called “How to Talk to A Conservative” by Courtney Horne.  Her topic was “drug testing welfare recipients” but the points are a bit more general than the examples used. To be sure there are entrenched interests like the lobbying of drug testing groups, but they have analogs elsewhere such as the NRA for gun safety discussions.

In either case grounding a discussion in facts rather than arguing abstract points may be useful. In Courtney’s case she went to the cost of the policy, evidence that it wasn’t effective and implications for the idea of “welfare” and what we know about the working poor. I’m not sure that any of this would actually have worked with the CPAC audience member who may have opinions set in cement. Asked by a women about his claimed Republican Party’s roots and his demographic claims, he is reported to have responded:

 “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Arg!   Well what does one say besides some people are ready to argue, but not to discuss? At least exposing such things to the light provides some perspective of the challenges we face.

This is free opinions without what Paul Kurtz described as the new paradigm of free inquiry here beliefs are treated as hypotheses to test.

We are increasingly in a fact-free zones where any opinion is equal to any other opinion and facts and skeptical stances are given the day off along with critical thinking & reasoned argument.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images

 

True Believer: http://powerpopoverdose.blogspot.com/2011/10/true-believers-true-believers-1986.html

 

CPAC from CPAC site