James-Lange Theory | Hacker News Reader

James-Lange Theory

en.wikipedia.org

38 pointstintinnabula12 comments

I'm a bit surprised that it was still possible to pull off something like this in the late 70s:

"According to Adler, however, the pleasant emotions tests, hunger and sexual desire, were not well envisaged. On the hunger side, the researchers instructed their subjects not to eat for 24 straight hours, and would go to the lab. There, they would be submitted to smelling and seeing a bacon sandwich with a cup of coffee, but would not be permitted to eat it, so the downfall of that was that they would experience the sensations of anger afore-mentioned, such as dilated pupils, and so on. On the sexual desire side, the participants were enclosed with women with which they had already had sexual encounters before, girls which were instructed to engage in mild forms of fondling, accompanied by affectionate speech, which only caused the subject to feel embarrassment."

I imagine that as for the second half of that, "already had sexual encounters" played heavily into why this was doable. Some couples don't mind being watched I guess, or the Sears gift cards they handed out for participation must have slapped.

It’s really difficult to show that emotions exist independently of the autonomic nervous system. Sure you can just ask people, but the challenges of reliable ratings mean it’s still a legitimate question 100 years later.

For instance, who can answer today, with all of the wearables available, how much of the variance in how we feel is explainable by autonomic indicators like heart rate, sweat, activity? After the variability tied to physiology is explains, what’s left over?

Reminded me of this one which should be interesting if you think OP interesting.

Also grounds emotion in the physiological. Published recent years.

The Emotion Process: Event Appraisal and Component Differentiation

Annual Review of Psychology

January 2019

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-psych-1222...

Advances in AI are making the connection between embodiment and cognition into a pressing question.

But the idea that bodily sensations entirely precede emotions seems absurd. If someone does something to make me mad, I "feel" it in my brain immediately, and it takes a while to get to, say, my hear.

The adrenal cortex (i.e., fight-or-flight) is a good example where your brain-in-the-body reacts before your conscious awareness.

That assumes your perception of the ordering of events is reliable. But the brain is perfectly capable of retconning qualia (e.g. chronostasis).

Feel like I'm hallucinating seeing this on Hacker News at the end of a long study session. Studying for the MCAT this cycle and the theories of emotion (James-Lange, Schacter-Singer, Cannon-Bard) are frequently tested. IIRC James-Lange is the more well-supported and accepted.

And I read the article just a couple of hours ago while researching Darwin's Facial Feedback Hypothesis. Shades of the Baader-Meinhof effect.

Eh, here’s mine:

``` ### Feelometry (A Geometry of Feeling) Discovered in 2018 by Bion

*TL;DR*: Time, Valence, and Locus of Control

1. *Past* 1.1. *Positive* 1.1.1. Internal - Pride 1.1.2. External - Gratitude 1.2. *Neutral* 1.2.1. Internal - Reflection 1.2.2. External - Acknowledgment 1.3. *Negative* 1.3.1. Internal - Guilt 1.3.2. External - Resentment

2. *Present* 2.1. *Positive* 2.1.1. Internal - Flow 2.1.2. External - Pleasure 2.2. *Neutral* 2.2.1. Internal - Calmness 2.2.2. External - Awareness 2.3. *Negative* 2.3.1. Internal - Distraction 2.3.2. External - Pain

3. *Future* 3.1. *Positive* 3.1.1. Internal - Motivation 3.1.2. External - Hope 3.2. *Neutral* 3.2.1. Internal - Anticipation 3.2.2. External - Curiosity 3.3. *Negative* 3.3.1. Internal - Anger 3.3.2. External - Fear ``` Yikes at this markdown formatting lol

can you tell us a little bit about what's going on here

Sure! It’s a hierarchical numbered outline of the emotion words according to time (past, present, future), then valence (positive, neutral, negative) and finally, locus of control (internal or external).

That’s cool because it lets us understand emotion in terms of logical relationships between points in a geometric space.

When we understand emotion in this way, it becomes clear how emotion isn’t separate from logic, but rather, emotion IS logic. Logic of the memory, experience, and prediction of pleasure, “zen,” and pain!

Consider Star Trek. Commander Data wouldn’t exist without emotion, he couldn’t, it wouldn’t make sense, that would imply he had no world model about time (duh) and good vs bad.

Future Good: Hope Future Bad: Fear

I dare you to find one emotion word that doesn’t fit this framework.

The consequences for AI could be huge. Specifically, we may not be able to avoid developing emotional AI, because emotion emerges directly from the structure of reinforcement learning over time.

We might be forced to deal with “scared AI,” whether or not we want to deal with it or want to create that, because fear is a generic term for the apprehension of future loss. Don’t expect AI to be unfeeling. Evolution may work by repeated accidents, but the cumulative result is NEVER an accident.

Sorry for the formatting, but the content is crucial, and I find it infinitely more clear than “emotion as arousal” (the referent of the “James-Lange Theory” eponym) — that’s overly simplistic.

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