Introduction
ThinkEmotion.com explores the link between thoughts and emotions, focusing in particular on the theoretical model guiding my doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Slideshow of examples:
* Importantly, these descriptions offer only a partial account of emotion.
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In the Dark
Where does your thought end and reality begin? Find out in this illustrated short story about the power of conceptual metaphor to shape how you feel and how you see the world. Begin reading here. |
The Theory, in a Nutshell
Emotions have a variety of causes. Some emotions seem to arise as a direct result of physical sensations. Darkness evokes fear. Separation from mother evokes distress. But, when something happens in your life, how does your perspective on the situation determine how you feel in response?
I propose that some emotions are simulations or reenactments of bodily experiences, such as carrying something heavy or gliding down a slide. Memories of these bodily experiences are relived when the abstract meaning of an event is conceptualized (metaphorically) in terms of that experience. To learn more, please choose "Quick Summary" from the menu above.
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Happiness and location metaphors: Finding joy within sounds boring
Section: General Techniques | Date: May 25, 2008
I recently saw a book called “Happiness is an Inside Job.” I’m sure that’s true, but I think there’s something misleading about this particular metaphor. The common admonishment is that external happiness is fleeting and misguided, and true joy must be found within. The metaphor is that (1) things cause happiness, (2) those things have a location, (3) that location can be internal or external depending on your orientation, and (4) the task is to search in the right location.
Happiness is not to be found in things outside you, so they say. But what is on the inside that is supposed to bring happiness? The idea of finding happiness within sounds as though you must find happiness only in experiences you can generate mentally, like, I don’t know, courage or self-love. All this does is point the search in a different direction. Internal experiences are easier to control, so that makes happiness easier to secure, but not always, and the whole idea just sounds boring, so it’s not particularly motivating or inspiring. Every time I hear this wisdom, I feel a little sick to my stomach. No wonder few abide by it!
Perception and Reality
Have you ever noticed that when you’re exceedingly happy, for whatever reason, everything around you takes on a positive quality? In those moments, happiness does not feel internal. Rather, it seems to imbue every atom irrespective of its location. There is no inside, no outside, just joy everywhere.
But when you try to squeeze this experience into the internal vs. external happiness metaphor, the experience is interpreted as a perceptual malfunction: rose tinted glasses. We seem to be superimposing a false world onto the real one. In this sense, we “lose touch” with reality. We only think we are finding happiness outside ourselves when really, the happiness is coming from within, and that internal happiness is coloring our perceptions.
Yet, what is reality when it comes to emotion? To think that there is some emotionally objective reality that one must somehow ascertain, and the goal is to come as close to this reality as you can… there’s something askew with this approach.
If we feel happiness in response to the environment, there is happiness. Happiness is, and the environment in which it occurs is thereby one evocative of happiness. We don’t emote in a vaccuum. If you think of the environment as a culmination of past events as well, and you take into account the interaction of personal memories, biology, and habits, the arising of happiness is never false. Whether it must be so is a different issue.
Happiness as a Medium
To think of happiness as true or false is exactly what makes it so dependent upon circumstances! If we stop viewing happiness as something we find, or something given to us by another, or as a representation of something else, we can appreciate it as legitimate no matter what triggers it, and the methods for doing so become far more flexible. At the very least, you can experience joy simply by remembering what it feels like to experience joy.
When that joy then rearranges our perceptions of the outside world, instead of seeing this as a possible misinterpretation, we can imagine that what we have done is to create the world using joy as a medium. We are entirely responsible for creating the emotional reality, and what you might call actual reality poses little constraint, that much is certain.
My point is that inside and outside may be useless notions when it comes to happiness.
An Experiment
Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, imagine three things:
- Your current emotional reality is of your own creation.
- Happiness is an energy, like stamina or love, that can be brought into the situation as a resource.
- Happiness transforms reality.
Happy experimenting!
There is No Hole
Section: Examples, Relationships | Date: May 13, 2008
Ever feel like there is a hole inside your heart or your gut longing to be filled? A dark emptiness yearning for the warm, loving kindness of some beautiful soul? I’m going to tell you why you feel a hole, and the reason is not what you might think.
You don’t feel a hole because you need or lack something. The hole is not a symptom of spiritual poverty, personal deficiency, low worth, or failure. You don’t feel a hole because you fail to appreciate what you have.
You feel a hole quite simply because you imagine it. Somewhere in your mind, perhaps only vaguely conscious, you generate a sensory simulation of having a dark open cavity where your heart should be. This simulation is your metaphor for how you see the world, a metaphor which you take as the reality. The reason for this simulation is unimportant. The circumstances that prompt you to generate it really don’t matter. The most crucial truth is that ultimately you create the hole. When you think about your world, your place in life, and your future, you imagine that there are things “out there” that must come inside, and when those things are still out there, you feel their absence. Concentrate hard enough on what you continue to lack, and you will never be filled.
Even if you get what you want, you have only a filled hole, which is still a hole. Real fulfillment happens when you begin to feel and know that there is no hole.
Where the metaphor of emptiness generates suffering, eliminating this metaphor reveals an emotional state quite beyond the mundane, transient happiness that might mercifully punctuate it. The great emotion panacea is not to take love but to be the source of love. When you love, the way you understand and imagine the world negates the existence of any hole. You cannot love and see a hole at the same time. Love so completely and without reservation that the small you dissolves and something is born in its place. This is a something that I can’t articulate. A transformation so profound yet comically simple leaves a wellspring of unending love, bliss, and peace deep within that nothing can touch. I know this sounds prosaic, but I have increasingly prolonged periods (nearly two weeks most recently) in which I feel this, and the words don’t do it justice.
Fear of loving is a trick, an illusion your mind creates out of misunderstanding, and so this transformation requires a leap of faith. You think that loving means giving something away, and so when you imagine it, you imagine loss. Or, you think that loving means exposing yourself to danger. These vague sensations of what it means to love are just inaccurate metaphors shaping the way you feel about it.
Loving is to turn your heart into an enormous light source. The warmth of it is overwhelming. What you give away is the radiance of this light source; nothing is lost. Take the leap, and I promise you that all the things you thought you needed will pale in comparison. Every cell in your body will be dancing with joy. Does anything stand in the way of this? Sacrifice it. Let it go. I promise this is better. An excerpt from “Bliss,” by Katherine Mansfield, illustrates this supernova experience:
Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at - nothing - at nothing, simply… What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss! - as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?
The idea that you need love from somewhere else is an adamant, habitual perspective. My suggestion: practice a new perspective in which you see yourself as a source rather than a consumer. You are the chef, not the hungry. Simply practice seeing things this way at every opportunity. Think of your friends and family, and contemplate what you can do to nourish and support them. Maybe your physical resources are limited, but the mere thought of how you might sincerely help will fill you.
I’ve been gradually adopting this perspective over the past couple of years, and a number of issues arose. First, I needed to overcome that irritating sense of smugness that occurs when I see myself as a helper. It’s a side effect of the initial imagery. For example, you might imagine that givers are above receivers, and though this is a metaphor, your mind treats it as real. The book, How Can I Help?, by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman, was a tremendous help. I love this book and highly recommend it. Full of inspiring stories and commentary on being a helper, it offers a sophisticated journey to developing a sincere and humble love.
Another issue I encountered is what some call “idiot compassion.” Our understanding of what it means to love and help is so utterly simplistic. Ultimately, I’ve found that I serve others best by bringing them into my heart and following my heart. In this way, motivations and desires encircling my own well being naturally and wordlessly dictate the wisest actions of benefit to others. Most importantly, you discover that love at its deepest does not distinguish between self and other. From the perspective of love, everyone is one person.
Once you become a lover rather than a seeker, you can’t go back. Nothing could draw you from that sweet, ecstatic bliss, and your desire to share it will intoxicate and overwhelm you. It’s not hard to grasp if you give it a try. Nothing crazy or esoteric about it. It’s just how the heart works.
Honesty and intimacy: Metaphors for staying connected
Section: Relationships | Date: April 22, 2008
Sharing is a medium for connecting, or so the metaphor goes. But this metaphor can be misused. During the past few years, someone (who shall go unnamed) has said some fairly unkind things to me (repeatedly and incessantly). All in the name of being honest. Most of these utterances, in my opinion, should have remained ensconced in his own private consciousness where they could do the least damage. Not only did they seem to lose their truth value a little while later (e.g., “I take it back”), but they failed to convey their intended meaning (e.g., cry for help).
I recently learned that the explicit motivation behind these communiques is the philosophy that one must share whatever thoughts pop into one’s mind, on impulse, or one is separate and isolated from the person those thoughts are about. Even if the thoughts and feelings are negative, they must be shared in order to maintain the connection.
To better illustrate this metaphor, imagine a channel of thought-feeling “energy” passing between you and another person. When you share your thoughts and feelings (ostensibly), the channel is open, and energy is flowing, and you are linked or bonded to the other person. If you avoid sharing a thought or feeling, the channel dries up and closes, and you are alone.
The big problem with this metaphor is that if you share something hurtful, the other person is immediately inclined to close the channel. How then does one reconcile the need to express true feelings with the need to protect others from hurtful sentiments? Of course, you could just suck it up and keep your hurtful thoughts to yourself. But perhaps it doesn’t need to be that austere…
A new metaphor: Imagine that the channel of sharing that forms the bond between you and another does not consist of moment-by-moment (live feed) thoughts and feelings but by the choices you make regarding how to treat that person. You can choose to express ill will, in which case the bond will break, or you can choose to express kindness, regardless of your feelings in that moment, and the bond will become stronger.
Sometimes honesty is crucial, and you must avoid hiding your true feelings, but if those “true” feelings are transient and unloving, honesty is not what it’s cracked up to be.
On Telling Stories
Section: Science Philosophy | Date: March 25, 2008
“When you are in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a wreckage of shattered glass and splinteredwood, like a house in a whirlwind, crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you are telling it to yourself, or to somebody else.”
~ Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
What is appraisal? In forming theoretical constructs, does the end justify the means?
Section: Science Philosophy, Appraisal Theory | Date: March 21, 2008
Some researchers believe (myself included) that emotions often depend on how a situation is interpreted or evaluated (i.e., how it is appraised). This notion characterizes the primary claim of appraisal theory, which falls under the umbrella of cognitive theories of emotion.
The difficulty with appraisal theory is that, while it emphasizes the role of thought in creating emotion, it proposes a very loose definition of appraisal, one that can encompass such a wide variety of cognitive processes that it becomes an almost useless theory.
Appraisal can refer to internal verbal monologue, higher-order perceptual processes, memory and attention. Appraisal can be conscious or non-conscious, simple or elaborate, instantaneous or prolonged.
In fact, the only thing that seems to make an appraisal an appraisal is the end result: some sort of personal meaning has been assigned to a stimulus. One would be hard-pressed to think of any cognitive process that does not lead to this result. Indeed, emotions themselves effectively assign meaning to stimuli, which leads to the odd challenge of disambiguating appraisals from the emotions they are purported to generate. So, what is the usefulness of the appraisal construct?
Does the end justify the means?
If our goal is to form an accurate representation of reality, of what cognitive processes generate emotion and precisely how they do it, we must look at the underlying mechanisms independent of their common ends. Because appraisal is defined according to a common end, it makes little sense to pursue the question, what is appraisal? Instead, we might ask:
- What are the various cognitive pathways from stimulus to emotion? What are the higher-order vs. lower-order cognitive precursors?
- How do we assign meaning to the environment? What is meaning?
- What are concepts? How do concepts generate emotion?
- In what way do higher-order cognitive processes (e.g., reasoning) incorporate lower-order processes (e.g., memory), and how does this influence our theoretical model of emotion? If higher-order processes can be broken down into lower-order processes, what is the usefulness of focusing on higher-order processes?
Metaphor for multiple, separate objects of affection
Section: Relationships | Date: February 28, 2008
In the metaphorical scenario involving loving attention, there is the person who loves, a single object or conglomeration of objects (a group) who receives that love, and the love itself shooting out like a laser beam from the first person to the object of affection. Perhaps the beam is a bit spread out, but as it spreads out, it becomes more diffuse. The most intense love is often conceptualized as a bright, focused light that connects two things (the lover and the loved).
When another object enters the scene and evokes loving attention, the beam is redirected. The loving light passes from the lover to the new object, and the old object is forgotten in darkness.
When I am the source of loving attention, I notice that it’s hard to hold more than one or two primary focal points at a time. As a result, my attention is distributed temporally. Today I focus on friend X. Tomorrow I will focus on friend Y. When I am focused on friend Y, friend X may receive some passing thoughts, or quite possibly none at all. I still care deeply about them, of course, but there is an almost disturbing sense that, in my mind, they are for the moment gone. Conversely, when I am the recipient of loving attention, I experience that love until, inevitably, it is redirected to another person. Knowing what happens in my own mind when my attention is redirected, I feel somewhat gone to that person. Usually, this is no bother. Sometimes, when my emotional needs are stronger, it does bother me.
I know this metaphor is not appropriate, but I’ve had a difficult time coming up with any other way of seeing it until now.
Instead of viewing conscious attention as a beam of light, imagine that you are, let’s say, pasty dough or white cake batter. When someone evokes you’re loving attention, they are new ingredients drizzled on your surface. Okay, I know this is weird, but stay with me. For pastry dough, you can think of raspberry filling poured on top. For white cake batter, you might imagine chocolate swirls. Your conscious attention is your surface, and the moment in which you give your attention, you can see all of this on your surface.
Now imagine that, as the moment ebbs, instead of that person leaving your mind altogether, your love for them is simply folded into you, like mixing the melted chocolate into the cake batter. They may leave your conscious awareness, your surface, but the love continues, beneath the surface, intermingling with other aspects of your life and who you are. They become a part of you.
At any given moment in the future, your loving attention for someone may resurface, as if unfolding from within. Thus, instead of starting “from scratch,” you are simply calling to the center of attention something that continued to exist inside you.
Though somewhat clumsy, this metaphor helps me to include more objects of affection in my sphere of love, to expand my circle of compassion, as Pema Chodron might put it. In addition, it helps me to understand that I am still loved even when a friend is focused on someone else. A better way to put it might be to say, I am still loved even when the surface consciousness of my friend entertains a new ingredient. I am still there, folded within them, just as they are folded within me.
Falling or Flying?
Section: General Techniques | Date: February 20, 2008
A little change in perspective is all it takes. This YouTube animation provides an excellent (and heart warming) illustration.
Fleeting thoughts, persistent bodily effects
Section: The Theory | Date: January 25, 2008
The other day, I was sitting in the living room and suddenly thought how nice it would be to get a piece of candy from the kitchen. My mouth watered, and I felt a certain anticipatory sweetness come over me, followed by a slightly uncomfortable urge to get up and find the candy. I was soon distracted by other matters, but several minutes later, I found myself perusing the kitchen with a nagging twinge of want. I studied my want, scrutinized its quality, and found it “pointing” to candy. Yes, candy would be nice.
Then I remembered that only ten minutes ago, I was without desire until the possibility of obtaining candy entered my mind. The thought created the desire, but the desire persisted beyond the thought. Imagine that!
I believe many emotions, particularly moods, follow this course. We have a thought about an event, and our thoughts create an emotional feeling, and this emotion is liable to persist in the body (or as sensations in the mind) long after the thought is no longer reverberating in our mental ear. Unless the thought is countermanded, emotions seem to linger, waiting to be addressed.
Warm feet
Section: Examples | Date: January 24, 2008
This is weird. I was reading an emotion research blog which featured numerous summaries of specific neuroscience research on social cognition, valence, and the frontal cortex. I had the sudden thought that I should be reading much more of this sort of thing, and I got a sense that I’m not super knowledgable on that body of literature. I imagined myself reading book after book detailing specific research, then I thought, there’s no way I could find time for that, and the possibility of developing a detailed knowledge base on that intersection of topics seemed lost. As a result, my feet became very, very warm, as if I was propping them up to a fire. What is that about?
Knowing and not knowing
Section: Science Philosophy | Date: December 30, 2007
She who knows not,
and knows not that she knows not
is a fool.
Shun her.
She who knows not,
and knows that she knows not
is a pupil.
Teach her.
She who knows,
and knows not that she knows
is asleep.
Wake her.
She who knows,
and knows that she knows
is a teacher.
Follow her.
~ Arabic proverb
Are we meant to suffer?
Section: For Healing | Date: December 16, 2007
In an interview with the Shambhala Sun, an online Buddhist magazine, Daniel Gilbert, author of the book, Stumbling on Happiness, says:
The possibility of a life free of suffering is as close to zero as I can imagine. It’s hard to imagine what that would be like. If we think about what emotions do for us—why the brain evolved feelings like happiness and unhappiness—it becomes perfectly clear that having positive feelings all the time is neither possible nor desirable.
What are feelings for? From the psychological and biological point of view, emotions constitute a primitive signaling system. They are your brain’s way of telling you when you are doing things that are or are not in your best interest. It’s no coincidence that fat, sugar, salt, and sex tend to make people happy. These things are, by and large, very good for mammals. They keep them alive and reproducing. It’s no surprise that a whack on the head or a scary face make people unhappy. They are dangerous. Your emotions, then, are a very rough, but not bad, guide to what’s good or bad for you in the world, a compass as it were.
What good is a compass always stuck on north? A compass needle has to be free to fluctuate. Similarly, an emotional system, substantiated in the human brain, has to be free to go from happy to unhappy. It can’t get stuck on endlessly blissful, or else it approaches everything or avoids everything equally. We are meant to be happy, and we are meant to suffer. We’re supposed to suffer when we are encountering circumstances that aren’t good for us.
Perhaps, however, not all emotional suffering is legitimate. In fact, I believe suffering is by nature the sort of emotional pain that becomes a problem in itself, because there’s nothing we can do about it, or it points to events we need not worry about. All of the examples Gilbert provides are events with immediate consequences for physical well being, but what about metaphorical opportunities and threats? Humans have a way of equating events that are otherwise meaningless for survival (at least directly relevant) with physical scenarios. Criticism as a whack on the head, failing to stay on top as drowning, social powerlessness as physical restraint, love as sex.
Suppose that the suffering caused by these metaphors is unnecessary, a dark layer of interpretation superimposed on an impotent reality. If so, we are not meant to suffer, and one can envision a life in which, through mental practices aimed at altering those metaphors, emotional pain never transforms into suffering.
Seeing the light
Section: Science Philosophy | Date: November 30, 2007
A friend recently shared this quote, which made me laugh out loud. Glad I was alone in my office.
“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
~ Max Planck
Metaphor healing: My encounter with a Native American shaman
Section: General Techniques | Date: November 22, 2007
My recent foray into the world of therapeutic metaphor took me to the doors of a Native American shaman. I was stunned on both a personal and scientific level by the emotional power of our four hour meeting. Whether explicitly or implicitly, Ana worked directly with my conceptual metaphors for events in my life. Through interpretive insights and bodily rituals, she reshaped my metaphorical worldview, producing a paradigm shift so profound, I left feeling like a different person in a different life, one no longer clouded by past upsets.
Part I: Understanding the Metaphors
During the first hour or so, Ana asked many questions about my emotional life. Following descriptions of recent events and ongoing stressors, she would pause and get a feeling or sense of the energy associated with these events. She would ask me how it feels then paraphrase for confirmation, using many vivid body metaphors, such as feeling stuck or stifled, giving up energy, or shutting down. Eventually, she came to understand my whole metaphorical worldview, or my system of body metaphors and each of their past origins.
Part II: Manipulating the Metaphors
After determining my metaphor system, Ana began with a ritual designed to evoke perceptions of help and love from the spiritual domain. I will keep the details private, but she focused her prayers to each of the four directions, which seemed to effectively address every area of space within which my body metaphors might extend. For example, if I had a metaphor of danger looming before me or someone talking behind my back, her focus on every spatial direction would encompass it.
She then guided me in a meditation using a stone. I conjured up memories associated with my current emotions (quite possibly, the origins of my body metaphors), allowed the emotions to revive, and imagined the pain moving into the stone. According to Peruvian myth, the stone would “mulch” the emotion, turning rotten energy into nourishment for the environment.
Other rituals and ceremonies followed, which I will keep private. Needless to say, Ana expressed deep kindness and compassion as she entered my world and journeyed through it with me on a quest for healing. My new metaphor: I was not alone.
By working with my body metaphors as real, material entities, Ana was able to alter my perceptions of myself and the world around me in a single day, to enact immediate change in my emotional state, and to bring these new sensations to bear on my understanding of the personal meaning of situations in my life, both past and present.
Healing loneliness through meditative listening
Section: Depression | Date: November 17, 2007
This morning, I saw a troop of circus youth perform various fantastic physical feats (juggling balls, doing flips, and spinning around in human-size gerbil wheels). I was particularly interested in these motor acts as metaphors for abstract goals in life. What might these performers learn from their experience of physical effectiveness that could be translated into positive approaches to success and failure?
One performer dropped a ball. Another fell off one. Another tripped. Yet, they all incorporated these unexpected mistakes into their performance. They turned feedback indicating failure at a motor goal into success feedback! Can this strategy be translated into the abstract domain? (uh, yeah: turning lemons into lemonade)
Interesting, but this strategy felt even more useful in relation to social goals. Consider loneliness.
What if loneliness can be framed as a failure to receive the sensory feedback we want, typically some particular social stimulus (e.g., a warm message from a friend)? You hold out your hand, but you don’t catch the bowling pin. You move forward, but the wheel fails to spin. In other words, what if loneliness is like a failed motor goal? Can we make failure feedback into success feedback by transforming what sensations we are seeking to indicate success?
During a particularly intense bout of loneliness, I felt an overpowering desire to receive an interesting, emotional message from someone close to me. (Like, “hey, anyone out there?”) Such stimuli produce a surge of oxytocin, which acts like an analgesic. Thus, my social goal was to be the recipient of an intimate communication (e.g., a warm or funny email).
No message was forthcoming in that particular moment. How impatient I get! Silly, I know. Nevertheless, I viewed my current sensory stimuli as failure feedback. I wondered, how can I turn this sensory information into success feedback (as when a juggler incorporates a dropped ball into their performance by turning the event into an opportunity for comedy)?
I listened to what I could currently hear and sense as if what I heard was what I wanted to hear, or as if I was on the edge of hearing what I wanted to hear. The ticking of a clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the buzzing of a lamp. The warm light from the living room, the tactile sensations of my soft sweater, the simple sensations of breathing. In some way, I treated them as success feedback. When you label your perceptions as success feedback, you let go of the original goal, because you don’t need it anymore; the act is done.
The result was, quite literally, a sense of contact that ameliorated the sense of disconnection characterizing my emotion of loneliness in that moment. The lonely feeling was replaced with sensations suggesting fullness. Somehow, a focus on sensations in the present moment replaces recognition of failure with a sort of open receptivity to how the current situation is fulfilling. An appreciation develops along with a defying sense of satisfaction.
Beauty and metaphor
Section: Relationships | Date: October 26, 2007
The need for beauty stirs many strong emotions. People brave a range of risky surgical procedures to look attractive to others and probably experience a wide range of deeply felt, painful emotions surrounding their outside appearance due to cultural beliefs that physical beauty defines the worth of a person.
Yet, perceptions of beauty are not always physical and concrete. Often, they are evoked by abstract features (cf. “inner beauty,” “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”). The metaphors in the following quotes illustrate abstract or metaphorical beauty:
“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
Kahlil Gibran“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”
Dorothy Parker“Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.”
Anonymous
Side effect: Doom and gloom
Section: Scope and Context, Depression | Date: October 23, 2007
The following personal anecdote illustrates how bodily states can influence thinking and emotion:
While taking an antibiotic, Bactrim, for a minor infection, I noticed that everything going on in my life had taken on a negative aura. Whether academic, interpersonal, or just personal, everything seemed bad somehow, in a shaky way, as if disaster was on the horizon. Anytime I contemplated a situation, I would get that gut feeling that something bad was about to happen. I questioned the stability of my career path, found new laments in my communication skills, and could scarcely contemplate much less engage in harmonious social interactions, which left me with that raw feeling of not wanting to be touched, torturously combined with an increased need for it.
The global nature of this anxiety compounded the emotion, creating an all-around sense of impending doom.
All the while, it was clear to me that my anxiety had no logical basis. In most domains of my life, good fortune and warm sentiments have overruled in abundance. Yet, my anxiety was stubbornly persistent. Feelings of electricity scorching my veins, an overdose of caffeine, a rotten hole in my stomach, a weight on my chest, and the muscular precursors of sobbing took root in my body and would not let go.
Finally, it occurred to me that my anxiety had started when I took the first Bactrim tablet. (Thank you Schacter and Singer!!!) An internet search quickly revealed that severe anxiety and panic attacks are side effects of the drug. While I continue to feel the anxiety until this course of medicine is mercifully concluded, I have experienced some freedom from its downstream cognitive influences. Whatever dark cloud wafts into the day’s events can be adequately dissipated with a bit of reattribution and patient pain tolerance.
The “light at the end of the tunnel” is in fact all around me, and the tunnel is just an artifact of my drugged imagination. I wonder… how often does our anxiety fit this story, with some other influence akin to Bactrim? There is probably hope in every situation even if we can’t feel it.
Fill the Room
Section: Relationships | Date: October 15, 2007
The following story illustrates the power of small things, a fantastic metaphor for the heart:
A wealthy businessman in Hong Kong had spent the best years of his life building up his mammoth textile business. One day, he was told that he was dying from an incurable disease. His thought of his business. Who would carry it on? And which of his three sons could he trust it to?
He called his three sons and gave them a 10 cent coin each. To each he said, “Go into the market place and buy something that will fill this empty room. You must not spend anything more than 10 cents and you must be back before sunset.”
When evening came, the first boy dragged a bale of hay into the room. When he undid it, it hid two walls of the room. The old man gave a grunt of satisfaction. The second boy brought in two bags of cotton and when he undid them it covered the three walls.
“Excellent!” exclaimed the old man.
Then he turned to the third boy, “what have you bought?”
“Father,” he replied uncertainly. “Part of it went to feed a hungry child, and part I gave it the church. After I had done that I found that I had only one cent left. With that I bought this candle.”
Saying that, he lit the tiny candle. The light from it filled the whole room!
The pain of romantic separation
Section: Relationships | Date: October 2, 2007
A practitioner of Buddhism tells her story of suffering and depression during the loss of her lover. She often compared the emotional pain to physical pain, describing how the sadness affected her body. Her experiences are moving and profound, a tale of courage in the face of monumental pain.
As you read her story, consider how her concepts of the situation might have involved simulations of physical experiences, like being torn or broken, weighed down, starving or exhausted. What if, during her sitting meditations, she had noticed these simulations as simulations? Thoughts are more than just internal verbal monologue; they are reenactments or recreations of sensations and actions, patterns of sensory memory being conjured up in the mind in response to the abstract circumstances in our life. What if she had observed these reenactments as reenactments? Not taking them to be the reality? Might she have experienced some relief? Perhaps, in the end, she found healing by gradually letting go of those simulations.
Re-simulation: Instant emotional change through sensory recall
Section: General Techniques | Date: September 26, 2007
Last night, I finally hit on out a powerful way to adopt a new mental simulation.
If you haven’t read about the metaphor simulation model yet, first read the quick summary for some background. The idea is that many if not most emotions are mental simulations of bodily experiences, such as physical injury, falling, smothering, or carrying something heavy, where these bodily experiences are metaphors (not in language but in thought) for the situation evoking the emotion.
These simulations feel real, and you recreate them in your body. Hence, the emotion. My intuition is that they represent sensory memories… what it feels like to fall, what it feels like to have a heavy weight on your body, what it feels like to have difficulty breathing.
If simulations are sensory memories conjured up during conceptualization, choosing a new simulation is not just a matter of mental imagery, it’s a matter of memory. These are virtually the same, but there’s a trick to it.
When I mentally imagine a physical experience, I tend to place my current self (emotions and all) into a new scene. This makes it difficult to overwrite my current emotion. I take it with me into my mental image. I might attempt to imagine lying on a beach to relieve anxiety, but I am actually imagining myself feeling anxiety on a beach. The anxiety persists, stubbornly, despite my imagery exercise.
Here is a far more powerful technique. When imagining a pleasant bodily experience, imagine that you are being asked to remember what it feels like to experience particular bodily sensations. For instance, if someone asked you what it feels like to have a chest cold or taste chocolate, you could probably summon those sensations rather quickly. In contrast, if you sat down and tried to place yourself in an imaginary scene in which you are suffering from a cold or eating chocolate, the bodily sensations would come far less easily. The difference is how you summon the sensory memory. Instead of attempting to fabricate an experience in imagination, you simply remember “what it feels like” to experience a certain set of sensations. I’m not sure why, but the second way just works better.
For instance, last night I was feeling a pressure on my chest and a jittery feeling throughout my body, a mixture of anxiety and excitement at the looming possibility of success. I tried to imagine feeling light and bouyant on a river of warm water, but it was not working. In my mind’s eye, I saw the water, saw myself floating, but it did little to counteract the pressure on my chest. Instead, I was bringing my pain into the mental image.
Then, I remembered a time when I felt lightness in my chest, a sense of easy expansion, and a pervasive calm throughout my body, lying on a beach in France. In essence, I asked myself, what does it feel like to feel light and calm? I recalled the sensations in the same way that you might recall the pain of a shot upon seeing a needle. This process was less a matter of effortful imagery and more a matter of feeling around for a memory.
The result was instantaneous and intense. Immediately, my anxiety evaporated, and I felt deeply relaxed and content. The shift was as rapid and powerful as any strong emotional response to a sudden event.
To make the new simulation stick, I convinced myself that it posed a better representation of my current situation than the previous simulation. More on that another day.
If I can master this mental process, I think it will transform my emotional life entirely. We tend to think that our emotions are thrust upon us by the world. But, in reality, they are completely in our jurisdiction. Imagine the sort of life you could live if you continuously, consciously shaped your emotional state to your desire.
Any mental exercise takes practice. I first began honing my imagery techniques when I was pregnant, preparing for the pain of labor. Over many months, my mental imagery became stronger, more vivid, and easier. Whatever you attempt to do with your mind, keep trying. You’ll figure it out.
Building Models of Reality
Section: Science Philosophy | Date: September 14, 2007
“It seems to me that the fundamental pattern of the sciences of the mind is that someone develops an insight, which puts the field on the right track—promising models are developed—as models are refined, they bump up against the limitations of their own resolution, as reality is ultimately more complex than any model. Then the egos of their proponents come into play, and the model itself, however useful it might once have been, becomes a roadblock at the milestone of its own success.”
~ Quoted from my new friend and colleague, Dave Perlman, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The ultimate goal of any science is ostensibly the search for truth, but finding the truth, in this context, necessarily involves a redescription of reality. We are not content to perceive what happens. We must be able to explain, predict, and communicate what we perceive. Building theoretical models allows us to capture and organize our perceptions in a way that promotes a shared understanding of reality.
The problem, as Dave points out, is that no model can fully capture the intricacies of reality. Instead of recognizing this, however, many thinkers are prone to protect and overextend their models, gaining a sense of security from the simplicity of a mental framework in the unstable sea of happenstance.
How hard should we struggle to let go of our models when we meet their limitations? The metaphor simulation model developed here has definite limitations. From the subtleties of an isolated emotional experience and the complexities of ongoing mood to the obvious cases of innate emotional responses to direct perceptual stimuli, which have little to do with metaphorical thought, I can see where the model fails to explain or predict the truth. When do I tweak the model, and when do I abandon it?
Some consider it intellectually dishonest to continuously hone a theory to fit the facts. A model that transforms itself with every new fact is weak, vague, and pretty much worthless. On the other hand, rejecting a theory due to a particular limitation may constitute throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In my humble opinion, discovering and exploring the limitations of a model is as much a part of science as model building itself. It does not necessarily weaken or destroy a model. If the model has any merit at all, it will only strengthen it.
When I contemplate where the metaphor simulation model fails, I feel the same passion and delight that I experience when I attempt to formulate a model in the first place. Perhaps this positive emotional association with theoretical limitation stems from the fact that I conceptualize limitation as another part of the territory waiting to be mapped. When your ultimate goal, your deepest intellectual lust, is to paint a portrait of the universe, the edges and empty spaces are as inspiring as the form and geometry of the things you can see.
Indecision and Motion Sickness
Section: Examples | Date: September 13, 2007
According to Lakoff and Johnson (1999), mental states are often conceptualized as locations in space, and changing one’s mental state is seen as moving from one location to another.
Indecision can be thought of as an oscillation between two or more mental states. Consequently, indecision involves the simulation or reenactment of somwhat wretching movement to and fro. Consider the following entry from my journal:
Dizziness and the Status Quo
November 2006Getting over a viral illness, I recently developed intense chronic dizziness. I can’t turn my head without swooning, and I can’t bend down without falling to the floor. Even holding my head still, I feel as if the whole world around me is tossing and turning, everything shifting and spinning, nothing certain and nothing stable.
Ironically, this comes at a time when my metaphorical world is also spinning. The very depths of everything I hold dear have been threatened, and I don’t know in which direction to head. I don’t know which way is up, in my abstract world or physically. The parallels astound me. I am facing the prospect of fundamental life changes that would make my world completely unrecognizable, and this scares me to my core. Yet, the status quo is equally scary. What can you do when you can’t move and you can’t stay still? Where do you go? When this happens physically, you experience intense dizziness. When this happens metaphorically, you are lost.
I feel both physically and metaphorically as if I am free falling through the vast open sky, like a jet in a tumble, and there is nothing to hold onto. I search for something to steady myself, and I find nothing but ghostly clouds.
But I’m reminded of an image depicting a vast spinning storm representing change, and the only stability is found in the center. The only constants in this equation of my life are (1) myself and (2) the element of change. I take advice for the dizzy: Sit still and breath. This is the first and most essential instruction in meditation as well.
Perhaps in such instances, dizziness is an emotion resulting from the cognitive experience of indecision, an emotion as legitimate as feeling burdened, smothered, or buoyant.
I recently read an excerpt from Burning Patience, by Antonio Skarmeta, which features this conversation between the poet, Pablo Naruda, and the postman, Mario:
“You are now going to walk along the beach to the bay and as you observe the movement of the sea, you are going to invent metaphors.”
“Give me an example!”
“Listen to this poem: ‘Here on the Island, the sea, so much sea. It spills over from time to time. It says yes, then no, then no. It says yes, in blue, in foam, in a gallop. It says no, then no. It cannot be still. My name is sea, it repeats, striking a stone but not convincing it. Then with the seven green tongues, of seven green tigers, over seven green seas, it caresses it, kisses it, wets it, and pounds on its chest, repeating its own name.”
He paused with an air of satisfaction.
“What do you think?”
“It’s weird.”
“Weird? You certainly are a severe critic.”
“No, sir. The poem wasn’t weird. What was weird was the way I felt when you recited it… How can I explain it to you? When you recited that poem, the words went from over there to over here.”
“Like the sea, then!”
“Yes, they moved just like the sea.”
“That’s the rhythm.”
“And I felt weird because with all the movement, I got dizzy.”
Suppose that, rather than speaking of the movements of the sea, the poem above described indecision over whether to proceed along a certain path. Might the listener get dizzy?
Here by myself, the option presents itself. It comes and goes. I say yes, then no, then no. I say yes, tentatively then in full. I say no, then no. I cannot be still. My name is confusion, I repeat, looking for solid ground, for good reasons, but there are none.
On Trying to Be Smart
Section: Science Philosophy | Date: September 10, 2007
The endeavor
to be witty and clever
wins only the affection of those
with secure egos.
The attempt
to be dumb and diffident
enamors only the unsure until
you fail to fail.
The demand
to be smart on command
flounders like a comedian’s vow:
be funny now.
The purview
to be the ordinary you
grants the true an open door
to the luminous core.
CursePlatt
Section: Science Philosophy | Date: September 7, 2007
The following poem was written in reaction to a paper by John R. Platt, “Strong inference: Certain systematic methods of scientific thinking may produce much more rapid progress than others,” published in 1964 in the journal Science.
Platt Primer
First, a few quotes from the paper:
Insight Through Exclusion
“The method of most rapid progress in such complex areas, the most effective way of using our brains, is going to be to set down explicitly at each step just what the question is, and what all the alternatives are, and then to set up crucial experiments to try to disprove some. Problems of this complexity, if they can be solved at all, can be solved only by men generating and excluding possibilities.”
“Any conclusion that is not an exclusion is insecure and must be rechecked. Any delay in recycling to the next set of hypotheses is only a delay.”
The Branching Logic Tree Metaphor
The ideal method of doing scientific research “is like climbing a tree. At the first fork, we choose–or, in this case, ‘nature’ or the experimental outcome chooses–to go to the right branch or the left; at the next fork, to go to the left or right; and so on.”
The Question
“One severe but useful private test… I call it ‘The Question’… consists of asking in your own mind, on hearing any scientific explanation or theory put forward, ‘But sir, what experiment could disprove your hypothesis’; or, on hearing a scientific experiment described, ‘But sir, what hypothesis does your experiment disprove?’”
Criticism of Long-term, Incremental Studies
“We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will ‘add another brick to the temple of science.’ Most such bricks just lie around in the brickyard… Tables of constants have their place and value, but the study of one spectrum after another, if not frequently re-evaluated, may become a substitute for thinking, a sad waste of intelligence in a research laboratory, and a mistraining whose crippling effects may last a lifetime.”
“The man to watch, the man to put your money on, is not the man who wants to make ‘a survey’ or a ‘more detailed study’ but the man with the notebook, the man with the alternative hypotheses and the crucial experiments, the man who knows how to answer your Question of disproof and is already working on it.”
While I wholeheartedly embrace the idea of forming alternative hypotheses and conducting experiments capable of disproving them (who wouldn’t), Platt promotes an approach to scientific problem solving that seems overly simplistic, particularly when applied to the more macroscopic elements of the scientific process (as opposed to the details of experimental design).
CursePlatt
Making sharp exclusions is the primary factor
in all real scientific progress.
But sir, I ask, with all due respect,
what could disprove your hypothesis?
Nature versus nurture? Particle or wave?
How can both quantum mechanics and relativity be true?
The reality lies somewhere in between or in the synthesis of
these apparently opposing points of view.
Are we selfish or altruistic? Do we compete or cooperate?
You’ll get mixed answers from psychology.
The Venn diagram thus seems a better fit
for some questions on your branching logic tree.
Speed is the ultimate yardstick, the hallmark of good science,
and the encyclopedic survey, its antithesis.
But sir, I ask, with all due respect,
what could disprove your hypothesis?
The Human Genome Project, whose bricks have built
a “temple of science” that could save a life?
Or the Kinsey report, whose sensational finds
provided data that could save a wife?
Nobel prize-winning proof of how the universe began
followed aimless surveys of the sky, every square inch.
And the most influential theory in human history
followed thirty years studying the finch.
We must fashion some alternatives
and try to throw them from the roof.
But when the natural alternative is “no effect,”
what of the burden of disproof?
The search for life in space
or the archeologists’ “missing link”
could not be “mortally endangered,”
but should go on, I think.
Strong inference is the best approach
for every problem, every trial.
In response, I offer just one alternative
“subject to denial.”
When ideas are set in competition
and the researchers are riled
we might first attempt to understand
how they might be reconciled.
String theory, epigenetics, Schrödinger’s cat
are brilliant by uniting contradiction
Perhaps to be or not to be [disproven]
is not always “The Question.”
A retort from my colleague, David Havas:
Platt defended, in the form of Haiku…
Science at the Edge:
Intelligent designs are
Hypothesis tests!
My rebuttal, a limerick:
There once was a hypothesis tester
Who drove out in search of his sister
She stood at the juncture of two streets, a great spot
But at this fork in the road, to the right, she was not
So he turned left and entirely missed her.
Reaching out or pushing upon?
Section: Relationships | Date: September 2, 2007
Lately, I have struggled to find the delicate balance between reaching out to my friends with gestures of affection and pushing myself upon them. Where is the fine line between extending positive social contact and smothering someone?
The metaphor for my behavior offers some clues. In both cases, I am moving my body closer to someone. When I reach out by, for example, writing a friendly email, I metaphorically extend my body close enough to touch them. Yet, I can perform the exact same movements (e.g., send the same email), but instead of evoking feelings of warmth, I evoke feelings of pressure. Why?
I believe the differences lies, at least in part, with the recipient of my gesture. Very simply:
- If they desire the social contact, my gesture is perceived as reaching out. Before I complete my movement, they begin moving towards me. They feel in control, free, a sense of space, and delight at the thought of social contact (uh, hopefully).
- If they do not desire social contact, my gesture is perceived as pressure. I am invading their space. They have lost ground. They are not in control. They are motivated to push me away.
Most of the time, people are clear about what they want. The trouble arises when desires are ambiguous or mixed. I want to “be there” for my friends even when they are unable or disinclined to ask, but I do not want to irritate them with repeated overtures of interpersonal warmth.
Perhaps one solution is to reach out part of the way and let them come the extra distance. Like the Date Doctor says of kissing in the movie Hitch, go 90 percent of the way and hold.
Stop running
Section: Motivation and Action | Date: September 1, 2007
Most emotions entail an urge to act, or what psychologists (Magda Arnold, Nico Frijda) call “action tendencies.” Often, these urges do not lead to the most appropriate behavior, particularly in modern, human life. The result is that, many times per day and for the rest of our lives, we must hold back, resist, restrain. In these situations, there is pain associated with the emotional experience.
I thought this pain was the emotion itself, the emotion of sadness or regret at a loss, or anger at an injustice, or anxiety over the future. But, quite often, I found that the emotion had a rather ambigious place on the pain-pleasure spectrum. Instead, the pain emmanated from the frustrated action tendency.
My hypothesis is that action tendencies are fundamentally physical action tendencies, some inspired by physical situations (e.g., a physical obstruction one is compelled to obliterate) and others inspired by metaphorical situations (e.g., an abstract obstacle, such as a bureaucracy, that one is again compelled to obliterate). If this hypothesis is correct, frustrated action tendencies are carried out, at the most basic level, through muscular restraint. Ouch.
Some visual imagery… I imagine a state of muscle relaxation and mentally (or metaphorically) let go of any motor impulses. I eliminate not only the tension compelling me to move but the intension to move, the idling motor plan. In this way, I overwrite the action tendency, like rubbing a bruised elbow to overwrite pain signals to the brain. You can’t feel an urge to act (even metaphorically, I believe) when you aren’t engaging your motor system.
The result… resistance fades, frustration eases, and I am left with nothing but the bare emotion, the emotion inherent in recognizing an undesirable situation. And, it is not nearly as painful. Sometimes, not painful at all.
It makes sense. The brain is reasonably designed if pain increases the more our motivations are frustrated, if we believe there is any chance at all that we can accomplish our goal. If we can see the finish line, then the closer we get, the harder we run. But, if the finish line is irrelevant to what really matters, just stop running… literally.
My corny Lakoff limerick
Section: Metaphor | Date: August 30, 2007
There once was a fellow named Lakoff
Who sincerely thought he could make off
By telling the world of verb and noun
That more is up, and less is down
And comprehension of charts and graphs would take off
Summary of potential therapeutic techniques
Section: For Healing | Date: August 29, 2007
People who face no threats to their physical well-being can easily become deeply unhappy. Clearly, the abstract meaning of life events can have profound emotional effects. Attention to conceptual metaphor may facilitate change in psychotherapy. Metaphors have been recognized and manipulated to some extent in cognitive psychotherapy. In this domain, the focus has been chiefly on the utility of metaphor in promoting change or accentuating important messages from the therapist (Muran and DiGiuseppi, 1990; Martin, Cummings, and Hallberg, 1992), metaphorical expressions that clients use to describe their emotions (Angus, 1996) (not to be confused with metaphor for the events that elicit those emotions), metaphors as indicators of therapy outcomes (Levitt, Korman, and Angus, 2000), and the use of metaphors to develop rapport with clients (Linehan et al., 2000). Although practitioners have recognized metaphors in how clients describe life events (Witztum, Van der Hart, & Friedman, 1988), no theory has been proposed to systematically elucidate what kind of metaphors are relevant, what emotions they bring about, and how they influence emotions. The examples described throughout this website offer some starting points.
One possible goal of therapy would be finding new metaphors to represent the same events. For example, numerous work assignments can be seen as physical burdens, leading people to feel pressured and overwhelmed. Adopting a new metaphor, the assignments could be seen as helium balloons. Although there are many, they weigh nothing, and one can hold onto them all by easily grasping their many strings in one hand. To encourage such a metaphor, the collection of strings could represent a “to do” list, which links the assignments together in one handy, easy to access place.
For faster relief, the metaphor simulation hypothesis suggests ways in which emotions might be immediately altered regardless of one’s power to change or reappraise the environment. First, certain physical interventions should be highly effective in alleviating emotional pain. For instance, experiencing the weightlessness of a swing at the park should alleviate, at least transiently, the emotional burden caused by a heavy work load. Eating something sweet should make it more difficult to experience social disgust. Schacter and Singer (1962) demonstrated a similar process in their experiment on anger and epinephrine.
These sensory experiences may in turn influence ongoing appraisals of life events. As intended, the bodily sensations will resemble emotional experiences and, in line with the emotion-as-information hypothesis (Schwarz & Clore, 2003), be taken as indicators of the abstract meaning of events.
Second, the model suggests targeted uses of mental imagery that could also alleviate emotional pain. Rather than creating a physical experience to counteract the simulated metaphor, one could simply imagine it. Many meditation practices appear to utilize imagery in this way (e.g., compassion meditation). Visualizing light, warmth, and energy moving in sophisticated patterns through various areas of the body should have a profound effect on one’s emotions.
Finally, at a most simple level, one might alleviate emotional distress by attending to current bodily experiences in order to dissolve or override simulated bodily experiences (i.e., realizing that one is not in fact falling or suffocating). This may account for some of the beneficial effects of meditation on mood. A therapeutic practice of meditation aimed at eliminating metaphorical thought and attending exclusively to present-moment sensory experience should thus dramatically influence emotion. Upon mentally dissolving a simulation in this manner, people with metaphorical models of the world in which they carry a heavy burden or are trapped may feel sudden relief or freedom from a situation they scarcely realized they were creating.
Even quicker summary
Section: The Theory | Date: August 28, 2007
According to cognitive theories of emotion, some emotional responses to life events are determined by conceptual evaluations, or appraisals, of the abstract meaning or personal significance of the event. How do these evaluations yield emotion, and how are appraisals and emotions related? Research on embodied cognition offers a clue. Abstract concepts, such as time, power, and communication, involve the partial mental simulation or reenactment of particular sensory perceptions and motor activity. Some of these simulations form the basis of conceptual metaphors, where a sensory experience supplies the substance and structure of the abstract concept due to their conflation in early experience. Because sensory-motor imagery is subjectively like perception, using some of the same areas of the brain and producing peripheral physiological activity that mirrors the imagined scene, metaphorical concepts should generate sensations and motor impulses like those composing certain emotions. Therefore, I propose that some emotions are simulations or reenactments of sensory-motor experiences, such as falling, smothering, or carrying something heavy, where these experiences are metaphors for the abstract, personal significance of events, such as failure, limitation, or responsibility.
The big question
Section: The Theory | Date: August 28, 2007
How do life events generate emotion? Consider the experience of an employee who depends heavily on her salary and suddenly gets laid off. Her manager approaches her, pulls her aside, and tells her things are not working out. Upon hearing the news, she is devastated. Overcome with a heavy sinking feeling deep within, her body feels shaky, her knees feel weak, and she finds it difficult to breath. She walks away slowly and leans on a chair for support. How did her conversation with her manager produce such an intense emotional reaction? One could imagine another employee in the same establishment receiving the same news, yet walking away feeling light and liberated, as if a weight had been lifted. One could also imagine the same employee receiving the same news a day earlier or a day later and feeling angry or depressed rather than devastated. This leaves one to wonder what processes interceded to transform a conversation with no immediate physical consequences into such an overpowering bodily experience.
Conceptual evaluations of the abstract meaning or personal significance of events, known as appraisals, play a major role in determining the emotional outcome of events, particularly in response to novel events with no physical consequences or intrinsic (i.e., genetically-endowed) meaning (Arnold & Gasson, 1954; Arnold, 1960, 1970; Lazarus, 1966; Beck, 1976; Ellis, 1973; Abramson et al., 2002; Weiner, 1985; Roseman, 1991; Smith & Kirby, 2001). For example, getting a flat tire has no intrinsic emotional value. Upon evaluation, however, the fact that the flat results in a loss of personal mobility, damage to a useful possession, and delayed arrival to a desired destination can elicit frustration and a sense of powerlessness. On the other hand, the flat tire can be evaluated as an opportunity to demonstrate skill at repairing mechanical equipment, which would elicit pride or delight. Frijda (1993a) notes that “assuming a process of appraisal mediates between events and emotions is the clue to understanding that a particular event evokes an emotion in one individual and not in another, or evokes an emotion at one moment, and no emotion, or a weaker or stronger one, at another moment.”
If conceptual evaluations translate simple perceptions of events into emotional reactions, how does the conceptual evaluation then generate emotion? Most theoretical models of appraisal have focused on the content of appraisals with the aim of identifying the key evaluations (e.g., control, certainty, blame, anticipated effort) that correspond to each emotion (Roseman & Smith, 2001; Ellsworth & Smith, 1988; Roseman, 1991; Scherer, 1993). For example, in the model proposed by Ellsworth and Smith, happiness is associated with low effort and high certainty while fear and anxiety are associated with uncertainly, low control, and a lack of predictability. Roseman (1979) constructed a list in which judgments on the availability, desirability, probability, agency, and legitimacy of an event determine the appropriate emotion. Patterns of these dimensions differentiate among a wide variety of emotions (Roseman, Antoniou, and Jose, 1996). However, research correlating dimensions of appraisal with different emotions offers only a partial answer to the question of how events lead to emotion. How does the appraisal of an event, or how do these various components of appraisal, then generate emotion? More specifically, what are the causal mechanisms linking thoughts in the mind to emotional sensations and motor impulses in the body?
The hypothesis
Section: The Theory | Date: August 28, 2007
According to the model, some emotions are simulations or reenactments of common sensory-motor experiences that result when we conceptualize the abstract, personal meaning of an event metaphorically in terms of that physical experience. These simulations occur fairly automatically, involuntarily, and mostly outside of conscious awareness. However, they are accompanied by subjective sensations that resemble the simulated experience, as if one were reliving that experience.
In the case of the employee who lost her job (see “The big question” under I. The Metaphor Hypothesis), the woman sees her job metaphorically as a physical support structure, the ground under her feet. In other words, she conceptualizes the abstract support provided by her job as the physical structure upon which she stands, which is to say that her understanding of the situation is grounded in partial simulations of her experiences with physical support structures. The job “holds her up,” providing a “foundation” for her goals, a “platform” from which to launch her dreams. She “leans heavily” on it, because she has no “safety net.” When she loses her job, this support structure is abruptly demolished and suddenly gives way. She has “nothing left to stand on” and begins to fall. In attempting to articulate her perceptions of the situation, she might say, “they pulled the rug out from underneath me” or “the bottom fell out.” She feels as if she is plummeting, responding physically to this metaphorical simulation as though it were real. She feels a sudden lack of pressure from under her resulting in uncomfortable tingling sensations in her feet, shins, and knees. Her legs become wobbly, and she takes more careful steps. She interprets these sensations as an emotional experience, which she might describe as devastation or shock.
In contrast, another employee might instead see her job as a restraint or burden impeding her movement or weighing her down. When this employee loses her job, she is “relieved” of her “work load” or “released” from the “confinement” of a job, “unfettered” by work, no longer “shackled” by a full-time commitment. Instead of feeling devastated, she feels uninhibited and buoyant. Her body seems to weigh less, and it feels easier to move about. Due to their different conceptual metaphors for the same event, while the first employee would report despair, the second would report relief, with the subjective sensations associated with these emotions matching their respective metaphors.
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