Feelings

[gilana]

Do you ever have to diagnose your feelings from symptoms, rather than just experiencing them in the moment? "Oh look, I'm crying. I must feel sad." "Tense muscles, urge to throw things, everyone around me is really annoying... either I need to eat something, or else I'm angry." Somehow it seems like I ought to know what I'm feeling more easily than that, but I guess it's better than ignoring feelings entirely.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- all the time. . .

[sandhawke.livejournal.com]

Wasn't there some brain research that showed all reasoning was done only after the decision was made? Makes perfect sense -- you're mostly run by a reptile brain, but since then we've added these massive monitoring and diagnostic systems which allow communication of and about the reptile-brain and thus allow complex social structures....

That is, the labeling of an emotion is and should be secondary; it's only there to allow you to participate in a dramatically effective social organization.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, no. If you dive into the last ten years or so of research on emotional intelligence (ably summarized by Goleman in his book of that name) you'll see that our brain models and accompanying social models are quite wrong. For example, the number of connections "down" from the cortex into the visual system outnumbers the number of "up" connections by well over 10:1. Our cortex is not just a passenger on top of the lizard-brain - it's a completely integrated controller.

That said, we (Western Civilization in general and US culture in particular) are horrifically bad at recognizing, understanding, and dealing with emotions. We venerate IQ, which has zero correlation with success in life (whether you measure money or self-reported satisfaction). We ignore EQ, which does very strongly correlate and may even predict.

So it's not surprising we don't know how to recognize our affective states except by retrospective analysis. The fact that someone can do this places them ahead of the majority of Americans.

--wex, spent a couple of years up to his metaphorical elbows in this stuff.

[sandhawke.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

Is there a test for EQ? Are there poster children for it (like Einstein somehow became for IQ)...?

[(Anonymous)]

There are various EQ tests. Nobody's standardized one. No poster children come to mind. Didn't Einstein score poorly on IQ tests anyway?

[macthud]

well, yeah, and unsurprisingly, he didn't do well in school...

IQ tests are not intelligence tests. As I think you know... and yet...