[HN Gopher] Emotions: A Code Book
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Emotions: A Code Book
Author : KentBeck
Score : 69 points
Date : 2023-07-24 15:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tidyfirst.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tidyfirst.substack.com)
| Tade0 wrote:
| I can't help but feel sceptical about this - correct me if I'm
| wrong, but I don't recall psychiatrists/psychologists explaining
| emotions as a "call" to do something.
|
| > Boredom--a call to do something I am avoiding.
|
| This is actually an evolutionary mechanism preventing us from
| expending energy on things with a low probability of success.
| Only problem is, our brains haven't changed much over the last
| 200k years and they can't assess relatively recent stuff like
| doing taxes or filing for divorce, so these things go to the
| default category of "not worth doing".
|
| One way to go around this is to imagine how you will feel when
| it's done - not guaranteed to help, but at least it's actionable.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Psychiatrists/psychologists have a lengthy history of being
| wildly incorrect or openly fraudulent about a lot of things,
| and in not-so-distant history. Don't expect them to have this
| all figured out.
|
| Boredom is a good example of a bad call. That sounds like how
| he internalizes it, but it's definitely not true for everyone.
| It signals lack of anything challenging. A starving man is
| seldom bored. Same with:
|
| > Hatred--a call to accept something about myself I don't like.
|
| This one's just dumb. This is the logic behind "I hate gays,
| ergo I must be one." Glad we figured that out. Now explain "I
| hate blacks, Asians and Italians."
|
| Hatred--real, actual hatred, not the pithy SJW definition--is
| borne from fear, ignorance, or grief. It is not a signal of
| introspection.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| I'd extend the definition to
|
| > Hatred - a call to accept or change something about myself
| or (my relation to) the world I don't like
| solarmist wrote:
| > Hatred
|
| Or threat. Not as common in industrialized life though.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| A counselor told me emotions are another information input about
| what you value, and you can take them or leave them as far as
| acting on them, but you can't avoid feeling them for them very
| long and be healthy.
| la64710 wrote:
| Anxiety it says is a call to pay attention to something I am
| ignoring. Not sure how because anxiety on the other hand makes me
| focus on something too closely and maybe instead I should step
| back and say F** it instead?
| schoen wrote:
| We might say that anxiety is saying "you should mitigate this
| threat or fix this problem" or "you should mitigate this threat
| _now_! you should fix this problem _now_! ".
|
| A challenge is that we don't know how to mitigate every threat
| or fix every problem, and we may never be able to do so in our
| current situations or in our whole lives.
|
| So there can be an additional challenge of saying "yep, I got
| the message, and unfortunately I've actually done what I can
| about this issue at this time!". (And maybe, if I remember
| correctly what I thought I understood from the SF Zen Center's
| anxiety class, "I appreciate that I'm a person who cares about
| mitigating this threat or fixing this problem; it's great that
| I can see the value and urgency of this".)
|
| We might say that, evolutionarily, acute anxiety, like acute
| physical pain from an injury, is hard to turn off merely by
| saying that we've gotten the message. Anxiety and pain serve as
| reminders of some of the most urgent problems we face, where
| procrastination could be very detrimental. But sometimes we
| need to find a way to say WONTFIX.
| interroboink wrote:
| This reminds me of something I found useful: "Grok" cards[1]. I
| haven't really played the "games" they're packaged with, just
| using the cards to identify what's going on in a non-
| confrontational way.
|
| One useful thing is to distinguish between emotions and needs. I
| believe they're different colors on those cards (red vs. yellow).
|
| Also distinguishing emotions from judgements/perceptions is good
| (eg: "I feel ignored" is not really the feeling so much as a
| guess about _why_ you feel a certain way).
|
| Some other good resources from the same people:
| https://groktheworld.com/products/feelings-needs-body-sensat...
|
| [1] https://groktheworld.com/collections/all-grok-
| products/produ...
| antonkar wrote:
| Sorry for being harsh but this is pseudoscience. The most
| researched approach - CBT - says this: we can change our thoughts
| and it will change our emotions. Something happens, first we
| experience neutral arousal, our fast automatic thoughts color it
| and then we experience emotions.
|
| For example, we interpret this neutral arousal as anger if we
| think that another person did something intentionally, not by
| mistake/accident/because of tiredness... If we think that it was
| our mistake - we experience sadness.
|
| You thoughts are lines of code that cause your emotions and
| actions. You can rewrite your thoughts. I recommend counseling
| and reading the primary source - CBT Basics and Beyond by Beck -
| it's very readable and simple. It's like learning another
| programming language and rewriting your own brain OS.
|
| You'll change your nonadaptive unhelpful thoughts to the adaptive
| helpful ones.
|
| P.S. Please, at least remove the line about suicidal thoughts.
| You should never say "change" to a suicidal person.
| sdwr wrote:
| Interesting how you say "geek", because this is definitely the
| geek approach (this information is "out there" to be learned) vs
| the nerd approach (building mastery over the subject).
|
| Emotions are about other people, and about social positioning.
| Traditional self-help gets away with murder when it talks about
| "exploring your emotions" as a personal thing. "Exploring your
| emotions" really means acting on other people, which you
| illustrated well.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| > Emotions are about other people, and about social positioning
|
| That's... one way to put it for sure.
|
| Emotions can teach you about yourself: what you like/dislike,
| what actions you are likely to take after a trigger, how you
| respond if others act a certain way (as you mention), what
| situations are more/less likely to impact you in different
| ways, etc.
|
| Understanding what you feel will help you become a better
| thinker. We're constantly being tugged around by our mind and
| emotions are a big part of that push/pull. We think we're
| rational but most of our mind does not work that way and has
| subtle ways to nudge us.
|
| This can be an exploration about yourself exclusively if you
| make it so. You could climb a mountain to avoid contact with
| other human beings and still learn about yourself by paying
| attention to your emotions.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| Useful concept. I used to call them 'signals': like alarms going
| off that I should pay attention as they may be telling me
| something. Specially when the alarm goes off for no good reason:
| my mind is trying to tell me something I'm not aware of
| (anxiety/depression are some of these).
|
| Learning about my emotions is the only other thing that has
| changed my life for the better comparable to learning about
| computers. 10/10 would recommend trying to understand how to deal
| with you 'inner monkey'. You've been rooming with it in your mind
| since the day you were born and how you relate to it shapes every
| aspect of your life.
| jstarfish wrote:
| I think Scribblenauts (and maybe The Sims) implemented emotions
| in a similar way. When a character feels Hungry, their
| directive becomes "find food." Hunger is going to take
| precedence over Boredom's directive ("find toys").
|
| I don't know if they're technically signals or states or
| something else; there seem to be conditions by which some are
| triggered, and circumstances by which some just become
| True/False when other conditions are met/unmet.
|
| So your theory seems to work. The only exception is anything
| depression-related, because what are you supposed to do about
| it (it's a nebulous emotion whose drivers we cannot fully
| articulate, which makes "find joy" as useless a directive as
| "overthrow capitalist society," "take SSRIs" and "touch
| grass").
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| I think something like depression is just one of these
| signals ignored for long enough that it becomes a constant
| state of mind. At that point it's literally a blurry signal
| to 'change something'.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Yep, sometime after college I sort of settled on this method of
| visualizing my emotions / feelings - take what I'm feeling,
| hold it in front of me, and look at it as it's own thing,
| outside and aside from 'me.' And then ask myself: 1) what is
| this that I'm feeling, and 2) what does it make me want to do.
|
| 'Why' I'm feeling is interesting, whether I should act on a
| feeling is obviously necessary to consider - but really just
| those two things, "what is this and what does it make me want
| to do" is usually enough to move me into a position where I
| have agency, sidestepping emotional outbursts and ill-
| considered or unhelpful behavior.
|
| It's incredibly empowering to find yourself coming out of a
| situation, thinking "when I was a teen this would have been
| awful, but now as an adult, it's just something to roll my eyes
| at and move on." Not everybody gets to do that so easily, I
| feel very lucky to have figured at least this little bit out
| for myself.
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