Emotional Blogging
One of the problems with blogging is that content gets old really fast. This can mean that great old posts can get lost under the sheer weight of new ones. To rectify this, and as I'm currently writing about emotion here, I've searched some of the other blogs I read to see what they've had to say about it. In the process I've dug out some old, and not so old, posts which provide some interesting insights into different aspects of emotion research.Developing intelligence has this piece on robotic behavior.
"...a team lead by David Bell from Queen's University is using emotions to guide robotic behavior. Their robot responds to new objects with a cascade of feelings; initial fearfulness gives way to caution and inquisitiveness."AlphaPsy describes neural dissociations between shame and guilt in an fMRI study:
"Moral philosophers have long made the distinction between guilt (the awareness of doing something intrinsically wrong) and shame (the awareness that your behavior is an object of laughter and spite from others)."The BPS Research Digest has two posts on recognising emotions in others. The first study found we empathise better with those we identify with:
"Just as we're better at recognising people who share our ethnicity, we are also better at interpreting the emotional facial expressions of people from the same ethnic, national, or regional group as ourselves."
The second that depression was linked to emotional sensitivity towards others:
"Depressed people are normally thought of as being somewhat disengaged from the rest of the world, but psychologists at Queen's University in Canada have found that mildly depressed students actually have a heightened ability to detect other people's emotions."Mind Hacks points out a piece from the Guardian about why the search for happiness could be pointless, and why the unemotional are better gamblers.
Mixing Memory on 'fear goggles' and one of the:
"...the coolest studies ever [...] they had participants cross a footbridge suspended 230 feet above a river. There were two manipulations. One involved who approached experimenters and asked them to complete a survey."
...and again on nostalgia:
"Anytime I hear songs from when I was in high school or college, I get very nostalgic. I remember people I knew, places I went, good times I had. It's a powerful and complex feeling, with all sorts of interesting psychological aspects."
And again on how emotions influence moral judgements. This research left Mixing Memory 'a bit disturbed':
"It seems that when we encounter a moral problem, we're unable to distinguish the emotions that are elicited by the problem, and those that are a result of other properties of the context in which we encounter the moral problem."
Labels: Emotion
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2 comments
I just posted an entry discussing the connection between a feeling and a word that indicates such a feeling. You'll find it at Plexav.com
Summum Bonum,
Ken Stein
Would you be able to suggest a link to a page that shows people how they can effectively control positive and negative emotions so that they can be a calm person most of time? Especially in stressful situations involving other people who might not be so calm?
Would be interesting to see suggestions/comments about it.