Emotions, Feelings, Appraisals

Emotions, Feelings, and Appraisals

It should be a fairly easy task to define what an emotion is You've felt dozens of them every day, from minor irritations to experiences that made you smile. Anecdotally, we are very familiar with emotions. But only anecdotally. It's an untrustworthy rope that ties the anecdotal to the neurological. You need go no further than the English language to show how difficult anecdotal experiences are to characterize.

For example, take the basic word “emotions” and try to separate it from the word “feelings.” Are both of these different from the word “motivation”? What about the word “drive”? Or “appraisal”? Are the emotions of love different from the feelings of hunger for example? How are these related to survival drives?

Certainly, context matters. There have been many attempts to settle these definitional issues – but they still haven't been settled.

Some researchers do not believe in the concept of emotions at all, except at the obscure anecdotal level. To them, what we call emotions are simply patterns of electrical stimulation involving specific neural networks recruited for some survival purpose.Different patterns accomplish different things, but they're just patterns of activity. To them, distinctions between our feeling worlds and our thinking worlds are artificial.

According to Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, “emotions are automatic, largely unconscious behavioral and cognitive responses triggered when the brain detects a positively or negatively charged significant stimulus.” A positive stimulus might be realizing that you're falling in love. A negative stimulus might be realizing that you're falling off a cliff.

“Feelings are the conscious perceptions of emotional responses,” say Damasio and LeDoux. You become aware of various emotional responses your body and brain are cooking up in reaction to some stimulus. That awareness plus emotion equals feelings. This not the entirety of the data; it may not be the most accurate. The relationship between brain and body and the experience of emotions is fraught with controversy.

Another concept is that of evaluation, or appraisal, in emotional processing. From the appraisal comes the emotion, and then the feeling. It's a chain. However, not everybody agrees with that chain.

You do not see with your eyes; you see with your brain. Photo by Elena.

The Darker Side of Pleasure

The Darker Side of Pleasure

The cargo is the famous molecule dopamine. The nucleus accumbens uses dopamine to mediate its electrical signaling to the VTA. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. In fact, it's one of the excitatory neurotransmitters – that is, its function stimulates nerve cells into action (as opposed to inhibiting them).

Dopamine follows the normal course of any neurotransmitter. The presynaptic cell releases dopamine into the synaptic cleft. The dopamine travels across the clef to the neighboring postsynaptic cell, where it binds to a receptor, stimulating it into action. The dopamine is released. It ends up back in its neural origin in a process known as reuptake.

Dopamine is involved in a bewildering number of behaviors. The neurotransmitter is involved in learning and memory formation. It's also involved in emotional arousal, and feeling pain and motor activity.

Its deregulation can have severe consequences. If you make too much of it, you may get schizophrenia. This idea is known as the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia. On the other hand, dopamine deficiencies in specific areas of the brain cause Parkinson's disease. In addition to its function of mediating pleasure, it's also involved in the ability to coordinate muscle movement.

One of its most insidious functions is the role it plays in addictive behaviour – and how powerfully we can be drawn to pleasure when overstimulated. This toxic effect can be illustrated by one of the most heart-breakingly familiar experiments in all of brain science. It was first designed in the lab of James Olds.

The basic design of the experiments is as follows. Tiny metal electrodes were inserted into the nucleus accumbens of a lab rat, allowing the region to be stimulated electrically. The electrode apparatus was connected to a bar in the cage. Every time the animal pressed the bar, electricity flowed through the electrode, stimulating the nucleus accumbens. Because the region mediates pleasure, every time the rat pressed the lever, the animal experienced pleasure.

Text to the brain is simply a complicated picture. Illustration by Elena.

This landmark study provided many great insights into the addictive side of pleasure. The nucleus accumbens electrically stimulates the VTA via dopamine, the molecular cargo. As a result, you feel pleasure. If you stimulate it too much, really bad things can happen. Chief amongst these is the experience of addiction.

Put simply, addiction is the state of behavioral dependence on a chemical substance or activity. Some behaviors, such as an addiction to gambling, show the same hallmarks of addictive behavior.

They even involve some of the same neurological processes as chemical addictions. The following are the tree main hallmarks of addictive behavior:

1. Craving: The most obvious characteristic of addiction is an intense craving for a substance often after casual use. In the case of crack cocaine, the high comes very quickly, a high so pleasurable that most people want more of the drug as soon as the high subsides, which is soon, because the high only lasts a few minutes. Cravings set in within the first hour after ingestion. As the days and weeks go by, you consume more of it in an attempt to repeat the initial buzz.
2. Tolerance : Tolerance is defined as a reduction over time of the ability of a drug's “regular“ dosage to get you high. After a while, you have to take more of the drug to get a buzz. The high becomes less and less intense, so you begin consuming more of the drug, attempting to reestablish the pleasure. Eventually, the drug no longer gets you high. You have to take it just to feel normal, just to function, and to avoid the third characteristic of addictive behavior: withdrawal.
3. Withdrawal symptoms. The drug's most insidious characteristic comes from the fact that, over time, your body switches from pleasure seeking to aversion avoidance. You begin to experience withdrawal if you can't ingest the drug. Now you're not looking to the drug for a buzz; you're looking to the drug for survival. In the case of cocaine, you can become depressed (even suicidal), fatigued, hostile, anxious, paranoid, violent, homicidal, and equipped with such a craving to get more of the stuff that nothing else in life seems to matter. And when/if you finally do get more stuff, you have to take such large dosages that it can become life threatening.

Researchers have discovered, in broad outlines, the biology behind the addictive behaviors that are seen in substance abuse issues. We know the following four things:

1. We know that the VTA is deeply involved in the initial phases of setting up cocaine addiction.
2. We know that the nucleus accumbens, which the VTA targets, helps mediate the pleasure responses to the drugs.
3. We know that both regions, and the neural circuits that connect them traffic in dopamine.
4. We know that drug abuse overdrives these systems, releasing massive quantities of dopamine into their circuitry. The buzz is so powerful that you only want to get high.

The darker side of the pleasure. One of the most insidious functions of dopamine is the role it plays in addictive behavior. Photo by Elena.

Fluid Intelligence and Creativity

Fluid Intelligence and Creativity

Fluid Intelligence

One textbook defines fluid intelligence as the “ability to deal with novel problem-solving situations for which personal experience does not supply a solution. That's a pretty broad definition. It's probably made clearer by describing what it does not include.

Fluid intelligence does not rely on experience. It relies on things like inductive reasoning, abstract reasoning, and pattern matching. It deeply engages your ability to come up with unique solutions when presented with vexing stimuli. This not the realm of experience dependence. That's why the definition includes problem-solving skills.

From an evolutionary perspective, we think that these talents spring directly from the geological and meteorological instability of our East African birthplace. If we couldn't solve a problem on the spot, if we didn't have robust fluid intelligence abilities, given our biological wimpiness, we'd be dead.

Many brainteasers exercise fluid intelligence. If you're good at them, you may have strong fluid intelligence scores.

Inductive reasoning, problem solving, and pattern matching are all skills that engage the more creative aspects of our psychological selves. Exactly what does creativity mean under these conditions? How does it relate to fluid intelligence? There is a relationship between fluid intelligence and creativity; they may actually intersect at a memory system and may even be two sided of the same coin.

Creativity

Creativity may involve a balance between two cognitions on opposite sides of a catwalk. On one side, we have something called cognitive disinhibition; on the other side, we have something called latent inhibition.

Noted Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson defines cognitive disinhibition as the failure to disregard information that is irrelevant to some preestablished goal, thought process, or activity. Simply put, you choose not to remove extraneous facts from your conscious awareness, even if those facts are irrelevant to whatever goal you are trying to achieve.

One way to illustrate cognitive disinhibition is to find new uses for something. Laboratory instruments have been devised that measure it – instruments called tests of divergent thinking.

People who have unrestrained, or unrestrainable cognitive disinhibition often have a mental health issue, such as schizophrenia. Photo by Elena.

One famous example involves finding new uses for a brick. If you are not particularly creative, you might respond by explaining that it could be a paperweight or doorstop. Someone who scores high on divergent thinking tests might say that he or she would scrape the brick with sandpaper, mix the dust with water, and use the concoction to paint something.

Unfortunately, not all disinhibited responses are signs of creativity. For some people, cognitive disinhibition is a weapon of mass distraction. It results in the collapse of something we call cognitive filtering, which itself has many complex neurological processes associated with it.

On the opposite end of the catwalk is latent inhibition. Put simply, latent inhibition is the ability to block out options in pursuit of some goal, such as communicating with someone. It is a filtering system, and we use it all the time. It can even be measured in the laboratory.

If you have high latent inhibition scores, you can block out a lot of the options being offered to you in pursuit of a goal. If you have low latent inhibition scores, you become willing to entertain more and more unusual – potentially irrelevant, certainly uninhitibted – ideas. It is very possibly that these data are revealing the internal circuitry of narrow-mindedness and also the intoxicating freedom of choice.

There has been a great deal of interest in these filtering systems in the mental health community. Indeed, some researchers say that the presence of creativity and the presence of mental illness go hand in hand. Others simply say that it is a matter of perspective. 

Cognitive dishinhibition and latent inhibition reside side by side, in tension in typically functioning human beings. You don't get creativity with both. How do these relate to fluid intelligence? Where they may find common ground lies at the intersection of creativity and a memory system known as working memory, or short-term memory.

Some researchers say that the presence of creativity and the presence of mental illness go hand in hand. Illustration by Elena.

Working Memory

Working Memory

Working memory is a temporary storage, whereas long-term memory is permanent. Although they reside in one brain, they are separate systems.

British scientists Alan Baddeley has done a lot of research to characterize the many facets of working memory. He conceived of working memory as a temporary workspace, like a desktop, with lots of items on it. Working memory is a temporary storage space in your brain. Its job is to bring information into your conscious awareness and then hold it for a short period of time, usually to support some activity you have chosen to engage in.

For example, you use working memory when you decide to call someone, inserting the phone number into working memory while you punch in the number. You also use it when you are reading, holding pieces of previously exposed text in a temporary buffer while you take in new information. You use it when you are drawing things or when remembering an artistic work someone else drew.

Working memory has a number of complicated associated subsystems, according to Baddeley. There is a subsystem within working memory that mainly processes verbal information. Baddeley calls this the phonological loop neurons of working memory. There is another subsystem that mainly processes visual information, called the visual-spatial sketchpad neurons of working memory. Finally, there is a subsystem in the brain that supervises the work of the other two subsystems, called the central executive. These three components work together in a coordinated fashion to help you read text, see objects, and generally get along in life.

Some researchers believe that working memory can directly affect your fluid intelligence abilities – and for a simple reason: It determines the number of temporary variables you can hold in your head simultaneously. The bigger your capacity, the more you can hold.

This is a skill you need if you are going to attempt to pattern match, solve problems, do abstract reasoning, or use any of the cognitive gadgets that characterize fluid intelligence. Cattell and Horn believe that the many skills involved in fluid intelligence need a fairly robust desktop to function adequately. It's the same space you need to be creative.

The ideas of Cattell and Horn both require memory processing. They say that crystallized intelligence involves long-term memory systems. Fluid intelligence involves short-term memory systems.

The presence of both short-term and long-term memory is another terrific way to show that memory is not a unified concept. The concept is mature enough that we even know some of the neurological systems involved in each. We needed both to survive in the unstable world of the Serengeti.

We have many senses which work together to give us perceptions of reality. Illustration by Elena.

Luna - Moon Rising

Luna – Moon Rising

By Ian McDonald

She cries out. She is in Boa Vista again, Boa Vista full of green and life, light and water and warmth. The serene, full-lipped faces of the orixas watch over her as she explores the river, wading barefoot through pools, scrambling up the small cascades and falls, her dress soaked through. A drone floats over her head, her madrinha's watching presence. The detail goes far beyond her own memory; she hears every leaf stir, sees every shadow and ripple, imagines she feels the cool cool water between her toes, smells the warm verdure of old Boa Vista. Noises from a stand of tall, swaying bamboo distract her from her mission: there are paths cut through the canes, irresistible to young explorers. The tracks wind in: she glimpses movement through the screen of wands. The path delivers her to a clearing in the centre of the grove. There is Lucasinho, on the growing edge of kidhood, wearing a long-skirted, flowing sky-blue dress and make-up.

“Lady Luna, Quuen of the Moon!” he cries and curtsies deep to Luna. “Yemenja Queen of the Waters welcomes you to her grand ball!” He bends down to take her hands and half-squatting, half-bounding they dance around the clearing, laughing and laughing and laughing.

“How old was I ?” she asks Luna-familiar.

Three, says the grey-silver ball hovering over her chest. Lucasinho was thirteen.

Now he is fifteen and she is five and they are in his apartment in Xango's eye. He has tasked some long-armed, high precision bots and they are passing a long evening playing with faces. Each programs their bot to spray-paint them a new face: the winner is the one who gets the biggest reaction. She remembers this.  She doesn't want to see it again, in detail that time has dimmed. The animal faces, the theatre masks, the high-fashion make ups and the fight-faces of the martial artists. Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Then Lucasinho turns away from her and the bot arm is busier than she has ever seen it, weaving and dancing and dodging in and out, drawing circles, making sudden runs across Lucasinho's hidden face.

He turns back to her.

His face is eyes. Nothing but eyes. A hundred eyes.

She screamed then. She screams now. She fled then, but she stays now. She can look at the face of a hundred eyes. She has seen worse.

Now she is six and she goes by her secret path to her special pool that is fed by Iansa's tears but Lucasinho has found the secret path to her special pool and he's in it, with a friend, and they're both naked and looking at each other and when she says, This is my pool, they turn round and go “Oh, hey” and step away from each other. Now Luna can understand what they were doing but the all she said was, “Well, I'm going to join you” and they fled like she had poured poison into the water.

The boy's name was Daystar Olawepu, Luna-familiar tells her. He was in Lucasinho's colloquium in Joao de Deus. Luna realises now that the reason they ran was not because she had caught them playing with each other's penises, but because Lucasinho had smuggled the boy through the security grid. And she thinks, “but he didn't get past the security grid, because the security grid checked everyone. Daystar was let through. And she thinks, Daystar is a pretty name.

Now she is seven and Boa Vista is full of movement and music and lights and peuple in wonderful clothes and she is chasing ornamental butterflies between the guests. She is in a white dress with bold red peonies and wherever she goes she is told how pretty she looks.

Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Photo by Elena.