Day: August 1, 2022

In this module, we looked at how emotions are a part of our cognitive systems and how emotions are something that we create rather than something that happens to us. It was very interesting to analyze the relationship between the mind and emotions. I definitely believe that emotions are a part of our cognitive system rather than something that is separate from it.

Inside Out

At the beginning of the film, we see how the emotion character’s are a part of Riley’s cognition. When Riley’s father states, “If you don’t eat your dinner, you are not going to get any dessert,” Anger jumps into the picture. Anger gets very angry that Riley won’t be getting dessert for not having ate her dinner, so he causes Riley to act angry and make a mess with her food and begin to cry and shout. This scene relates to the James-Lange Theory of Appraisal from our lecture slides. In the scene from the film, the event that happen is Riley is told she will not be given dessert if she does not eat her dinner. This causes the character Anger to get up from where he is sitting and become angry. The interpretation of the event is that it is unfair that Riley will not get dessert for not eating her dinner. So, the emotion that comes out of Riley is anger, and she begins to knock her plate and food all over the place. I think this scene is an interesting example of how the film portrays how emotions and the cognitive system are linked together and not separate. This example of Anger causing Riley to act the way she did also goes against William James’s theory that sensations are emotions. Riley’s anger is expressed when the character Anger flips those power switches, and Riley acts out. This goes against James’s ideas because Riley’s mind (Anger)  understands the situation and then makes Riley act the way she does. However, James’s opinion would be that Riley would be anger because of the way she acts in regards to being told she won’t get dessert. Therefore, Anger wouldn’t be the one flipping the switch to make Riley angry. James would argue that the bodily sensations would be the emotion rather than Anger the character. The film does a wonderful job of tying emotions, body, and mind together, as the emotion characters are able to incite reactions out of Riley.

“Man of the People” Star Trek: The Next Generation

This episode was another interesting one. We see Deanna Troi detriorate until death. We find out that Alkar was channeling of all his negative emotions to Troi. It is incredible to see how these negative emotions that Troi experiences causes her to age very very rapidly. I think that this is an important example to show how emotions, mind, and body are tied together, as we see the negative effects of negative emotions on the body. Furthermore, once the negative emotions Alkar was placing onto others comes back to him, he also dies.

It is important to note have strong emotions are and the impact they can have on people. After analyzing these films, I think it’s safe to say that it’s impossible to separate emotions from our cognition. You can’t just turn them on and off and decide if you’re going to have them or not. Emotions, mind, and body are all tied together.

I think the two pieces this week were the best ones we’ve ever watched and it is majorly because of “Inside Out”. I think it’s the cutest movie ever. So heart warming, yet heart wrenching at the same time. A masterpiece.

I believe “Inside Out” expressed the James Lange “Appraisal Theory of Emotions“, where Riley’s life was the chain of events that the Emotions could react to. In this sense, the Emotions controlled Riley and these were two separate cognitions. From how I interpreted the movie, Riley’s reaction to her environment was partly due to her own cognition, along with the Emotions. The movie makes them out to have a separate consciousness from Riley, but all serving the purpose of helping Riley respond in the best way she knows how or they think is best for her. Each Emotion controls an aspect of Riley and in turn makes up her Islands of Personality. While we learned concepts of emotion and cognition being intertwined, “Inside Out” shows emotions that are put upon us. For example, when Sadness and Joy are stranded from Headquarters, Riley seems to turn numb, unable to feel happiness or sadness. While Anger, Fear, and Disgust are still at Headquarters she is unable to feel 2/5 of her emotions that make up her personality. She ends up running away, but as soon as Sadness fixes her core memories and integrates sadness into them, Riley is able to experience joy again.  Sadness and Joy are the core Emotions that help her personalities exist, or more so to appreciate happiness while experiencing sadness. Without them, Riley is unable to achieve happiness or sadness without them. This shows that the Emotions control part of her cognition and is not integrated. The Emotions control her emotions, thus her emotions out of her command.

Crossing over to “Man of the People”, I really enjoyed this episode. It was quite interesting and the plot twist was INSANE. I feel like the concept of cognition and emotion being separated is once again seen. While Counselor Troi is an empath and takes in other people’s emotions, once Alkar has Troi go through with the funeral customs, her emotions are not her own. To be exact, the complex emotions she feels are her own, but an outside force is causing her to experience them. While she is usually calm headed and docile, Troi experiences very negative and forward emotions that cause her to fiend over Alkar. She can do so much better to be honest. In the scene while she is exercising in front of the mirror, her body seems to be taken control by something and she seems to touch herself as if she is experiencing it for the first time. It seems as though an outsider is experiencing her own body, thoughts, and emotions. This expresses a distinct distance from her cognition and emotions, and she becomes almost lifeless or possessed just as Riley did when she became disconnected from Sadness and Joy.

Emotions function as a guide for us to survive and thrive. They focus on our attention and motivate us to take a specific course of action. Emotions are also contagious because our feelings can spread between people, like a virus. We tend to pick up on each other’s emotional states whether we realize it or not.

In the movie Inside Out, Riley has different emotions inside of her and we get to see how they all work and think. We have Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger. We get to see how each emotion functions and how they effect Riley. When Joy and Sadness are gone we see Riley struggling as she can only experience anger, fear and disgust. She struggles with her identity and expressing her emotions. In the scene where her mom talks about hockey, her favorite sport, Riley can only react with disgust when she should’ve reacted with Joy. When Anger takes over the control panel, the father also begins to get upset over her attitude, showing how emotions can be contagious. In the end when sadness and joy work together, Riley seems happier and more comfortable again because she is able to express the proper feelings. We need every single emotion in order to survive. If I was only controlled by anger, I’m pretty sure my road rage would be a lot worse haha

In Man of the People, Troi go through an emotion “curse”. We see Troi get very sexual by making advances to people on the ship, and even signs of rapid aging. Troi even expresses a bunch of anger when she discovers Alkar working with Liva and even tries to attack him with a knife. In the slides from this week, we learned that an instance of emotion arises by categorizing our culturally  contextualized body stimuli. I think this applies to Troi because her anger for example caused her to attack Alkar with a knife, an out of the ordinary action for her character. She was unable to control her body and emotions. I feel like this episode was a little similar to the Futurama episode we watched when Bender was experiencing Leela’s emotions. Bender couldn’t really control his emotions in a way that Troi couldn’t truly express hers.

SIDE NOTE: did anyone else cry when Bing Bong died? I was crying so hard; I haven’t watched this movie in a while and I forgot how sad his death was. I tend to cry in every movie lol

A few days ago, I started replaying one of my favorite video games, Omori. The game is an emotional roller coaster ( ha ha) and when I first played it, I had to take a step back every so often to recollect myself. It’s a masterpiece of a game and I feel that it connects a bit to this unit because in this game, emotions are an important gameplay mechanic when it comes to battles. Your emotional changes in battle will increase or decrease your stats and change the tides of battle. It’s really unique and fun ! 

The reason I bring this up is because upon starting the game, I thought to myself “I’ve already played this game ! This can’t possibly hurt me.” And yet I started to weep the moment i saw my favorite character. Which is exactly what happened to me when I watched Inside Out. I forgot that this movie about emotions could make me so emotional. While I have so much I can say about this movie, I want to focus on the portrayal of the “emotions” in other characters head. While Riley seems to experience joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger in a way that may be seen as “standard,” the same can’t be said about many of the other characters. An example would be the bus driver at the end of the movie, whos emotions all geared a physical resemblance to “anger” and seemed to experience the same thoughts and reactions to outside stimuli. This would suggest that he may come off as a bit aggressive, despite experiencing the same spread of emotions that Riley does.

Another thing I noticed was how Joy seemed to be the strongest emotion in Riley’s head, the leader the others looked to. However her mother’s emotions seemed to look to Sadness for guidance. Additionally, her Sadness seemed to be more composed and calm, which suggests that she experiences sadness in a less outward way. This may be a sign of maturity.

I thought a lot about the past two units while watching Inside Out as well. As I began to cry for Bing Bong, I thought about what exactly was making me cry. The theory that crying is the reason you’re sad or vice versa wasn’t something I thought about until I was actively crying and feeling sad and I could not remember what came first. I’m a really sensitive person, so I tend to cry a lot. But I also cry tears of joy ! If an emotional response such as crying triggers sadness, then what do tears of joy mean ? Additionally, at the end of the movie I began to cry alongside Riley. Maybe I was just super tired, but I remembered our unit on empathy at this point in the movie. I was sad, sure, but I think I was sad with Riley rather than for her. I was experiencing her emotions parallel to her which is something that the characters in the film seem to do as well !

The Star Trek episode reminded me of the part in Inside Out where Riley’s control panel goes dark and becomes unusable. She becomes unable to experience her emotions, much like Deanna seems to when she loses her empathy. What strikes me as interesting is that empathy is being used as almost a catch all for “understanding feelings” where its more about the feelings of others.

Inside Out

I love the movie Inside Out, I’m glad it was featured this week as a good excuse to watch it again. 

The movie starts out with the base emotion of Joy for baby Riley when sadness intrudes on them. This movie vaguely incorporates the seven basic emotions but excludes contempt and surprise and they use the term “Joy” or rather, character, in place of happiness. A big focus of this film is also memory and how “core memories” make up Riley’s personality. Back to emotions though, Joy and Sadness are removed from headquarters when they’re sucked out of the tube that collects the days memories, along with all of her core memories. 

Sadness can’t help but touch memories and turn them from happy to sad. This shows that Riley has a little bit of control over the influence of the emotions versus the emotions controlling her entirely. 

Another connection to the lecture is to the quote by Lisa Feldman Barrett, she said emotions are socially constructed. When you look into the mind of Riley’s father, his primary emotion is Anger which is tied to the social construct of men being more angry, aggressive, quick tempered. When viewing the Riley’s mothers emotions, her primary emotion is Sadness, which if you have taken a sociology course on relationships, you’ll learn that those two types of families lack communication (which we even see) and Riley’s mom is probably continuously let down. I think becoming an adult in general often leads to happiness taking a back seat and an emotion like sadness or anger taking the forefront. You could also say that the leader emotion is the general mood. 

While watching the film, I also tried to analyze which theory one could say Riley falls into in terms of arousal and appraisal and I’d have to say she falls into Arnold’s Appraisal Theory, event to appraisal to emotion to action. During the scene where Riley is video chatting with her friend, the emotions were observing what was happening and then choosing how to react which was by saying “I have to go” and slamming the laptop closed.

“Man of The People” Star Trek

In the Star Trek episode this week, the concept of an empath was brought up again. Deanna is an empath, when talking to Alkar who also appears to be an empath, he says he can only sense the emotions of his own species. When Alkar’s mother suddenly dies, he requests that Deanna do a ceremony with him since she’s the only other empath there but something seems to happen when the crystals they’re chanting with click together. She appears to lose her empathy, which is clearly seen when she’s talking with one of the crew members. It’s like the ceremony took away her ability to feel, or was his mother’s feelings transplanted to her? We finally find out that Alkar transplanted his dark thoughts  into his “mother” and then did it to Deanna. Fast forward, when reviving Deanna, all of the dark thoughts, the emotions he can’t handle and doesn’t want to deal with, were transplanted back to Alkar, killing him. He completely lacked the empathy he claimed to have, even the title of the episodes shows how he contradicts himself. 

I think this is going to piss some people off…but I do have a confession to make:

I did not like Inside Out.

Look, I’m sorry (kind of) that I didn’t find it as sad as people made it out to be. Maybe my Sadness is on her day off, or something. It’s not even about the emotional part of the movie. I was never a fan of these animated films from Pixar because their plots are pretty straightforward, and their messages are very “in your face”, if you will. In my opinion, the movie is not for me. That doesn’t make it an objectively bad movie.

Okay, with my self-crucifixion out of the way, let’s talk about emotions.

Inside Out portrays emotions as these independent beings that trigger how you feel in reaction to what they’re seeing, not what the individual is seeing. There are five core emotions: Anger, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, Joy.

For the record, my favorite character of the lot is Sadness (ironic, isn’t it?). I love how by the end Sadness was not seen as this emotion that needs to be pushed away; it’s an important emotion that acts as a signal to other people near you. Though I wasn’t a big fan of the movie, I enjoyed how this was portrayed.

Anyhow, this is an analysis, so on we go. I want to talk about the James-Lange Theory of Appraisal. It’s very present in the scene where Riley first sees the inside of her new house (situation). She notices how run-down it is, how there are dead things in corners, how it’s nothing like her old house (arousal). Riley has an interpretation (that this is much worse than her old house, which also had a better neighboring area), and that’s where the emotions (the characters) start fiddling with the terminal. Joy is very adamant about keeping positive, meanwhile every other emotion is complaining.

I want to say this scene reminded me how I was as a kid, moving from place to place. It was always very bad on the first day, a lot of skepticism involved in it, sadness, etc. And it the back of my head, my own Joy was somewhere in there, trying to reassure me that things will be alright.

Of course, this implies that I was, and still am not, in control of my emotions. If they are a bunch of tiny humanoid creatures running around in my mind, it implies that I have no autonomy over what happens in there. Since we see that Riley is influenced a lot when Joy and Sadness are away from the terminal.

On the other hand, the Star Trek episode sees emotions as things which are pushed onto the other person. Slightly reminiscent of the Futurama Episode with Bender’s Empathy Chip, the episode involves a man named Alkar force his negative emotions onto Deanna Troi, justifying this action by saying he is able to work better without his negative emotions interfering.

He views emotion and thought as two separate entities, with the former being the most troublesome. This is the conventional way of seeing emotions. And man, is Alkar really blunt about it.

He straight up sees the bodies of other people are storage units for his negativity. It’s very ironic how he can’t see how bad these emotions are to other people who also play a role in the situation affecting the planet he is trying to “save”.

In any case…sorry for the lack of Quality Jokes™ today. It’s almost 2 am here in Greece, and it’s really hard to focus ;-;

I’ll be back soon, though. Wish me a safe flight…

Like please…I hate turbulence…

Warmly,

Guga Khidasheli

This week we learned about emotions, more specifically how emotions are constructed. Whilst watching both “Inside out”, one of my favorite movies, and the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation “Man of the People” I really payed attention to whether or not the emotions of the characters were created or happened to them. I think both pieces of media display examples of both. I have to say I enjoyed both of these. Star Trek is growing on me, from the few episodes we’ve watched I’ve been so invested in what is going to happen to the characters.

Emotions are wildly complex and I think the film “Inside Out” does a rather good job at portraying that. Riley has five emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Each of which have a large impact on Riley’s body and mind. Without emotions humans just like Riley would lack what it mean to experience life. It would be great for humans to always be happy just like Joy wants Riley to be, however this would be terrible for the world. If everyone was happy all of the time no one would be able to experience life for what it is. In order to survive humans have to feel every emotion, with anger or fear a human grows into a stronger and more intelligent person. While watching the film we see Riley become a more well rounded human when Joy comes to realize how important the other 4 emotions are to Riley’s human experience. The same goes for the other characters in the film like Riley’s mom and dad. With a look into her parents emotions we see they have the same emotions but are controlled by sadness and anger in the same way Riley is controlled by Joy for the most part.

The Star Trek episode confused me a bit at first. After digesting the episode though I think the episode highlights an idea that the relationship between ones emotions and body is very strong. As Troi is succumbed by the negative emotions of Alkars “mother” she becomes more and more unwell. I suffer from really bad anxiety and I sort of related to Troi becoming so sick. Whenever I have a really bad anxiety or panic attack my body feels like its falling apart. I really think emotions play a huge part into ones body. In this episode emotions could be transferred which I think is true to some extent in real life. When I see someone is hurting or sad I feel sadness with them especially when it’s someone you love. I think emotions are universal. Across the world we may all speak different languages or wear different clothes but we all can share the same emotions. When something tragic happens in the world everyone hurts together regardless of how far away it happened.

As we learned in lecture, emotions have subjective different views from different psychologists and philosophers. In the Film inside out, much of the film takes place in the head of an 11-year-old girl named Riley, with five emotions such as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. Her overall goal is to make sure that Riley is always happy. But by the end of the film, Riley, and the audience learns that there is much, much more to being happy than just the thought of only positivity. Toward the end of the film,  Joy seems to take control to some of her fellow emotions, particularly Sadness, Riley seems to achieve a deeper form of happiness. I think that this film shows adults and children a deeper meaning on emotion. As part of being human, Riley allows herself to feel sadness, in addition to fear and anger. This show us at the time when she thinks of running away from home. she decides not to go through with her plan. This choice reunites Riley with her family, giving her a deeper sense of happiness and contentment in the comfort she gets from her parents, even though it’s mixed with sadness and fear.

In Star Trek episode “Man of the People” As an ambassador mediates peace talks to end a fierce civil war, Deanna Troi begins to act emotional after spending some time with him. Troi begins aging rapidly and the crew must then race against the clock to figure out what Alkar has done to her, before she dies. Turns out Alkar is using Troi as a “receptacle” to telepathically shunt off all the negative emotions that he experiences during his negotiations. This episode seems to show them being emotionally innate more so than the “Inside out” view on emotions.During out lecture we spoke about Plato.  The great philosopher.Plato as we spoke about, believed emotions typically include both pleasant and unpleasant aspects! however, Aristole believed that emotions are an original and integral part of  ethics. Emotions are an inherent part of our moral reasoning and being, and therefore they should be an inherent part of any moral deliberation.

“Emotions are a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of psychological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation.” – Paul Ekman, PhD

As we learned he described them they describe people to have seven basic emotions: fear, anger, joy, sad, contempt, disgust, and surprise!

Is it innate or is it due to a stimulus? I think it is subjective to each person. As the professor taught us… different emotions can happen differently depending on the individual!

 

Emotion can be defined and explained in many different ways. Some believe that emotion is born with you while others see emotion growing and developing along with the person that wields them. In my opinion, I believe that both of these theories are correct. One is born and brought up with some form of understanding of emotions and how to respond to the people around them. However, as that person meets others and ventures past the area they were raised in, they will immediately realize that their understanding is not always true for other people.

In the movie “Inside Out” every one of the different emotions has their own quirks and personalities relating to their specific emotion. One of them is overly happy about the situations they come across while another is always viewing the negative side and how it all can go wrong. But, even though they are polar opposites, they all use each other’s opinions to understand any situation they are put through just like our emotions. When I see a dog with no collar on the street, I immediately feel anger for the owners. But after I realize that the dog is all alone and has a very good chance of being put in a kennel, my sadness makes the anger for the owners disappear and only makes me think of finding the dog a happy home. My emotions that I have developed through my own experiences worked with each other to help me decide what I thought was the right thing to do.

In the episode “Man Of The People”, Deanna Troi has an almost tragic encounter with the negative emotions of Ambassador Ves Alkar after the death of his mother. Alkar’s people are able to read the emotions of one another but not of other species and he uses this to trick Deanna into taking all of his negative emotions. This completely contradicts everything we’ve learned about emotion by placing artificial and non-original emotions into another person’s mind. What I found very interesting about this is that the negative emotions send Deanna Troi into a spiral of rapid-aging, almost leading to her death. One example of negative emotions rapidly aging people in real life would be former president of the United States Barack Obama along with many other presidents. In only 4 to 8 years of them being in office, their difference in facial structure, hair color, and overall physique before and after becoming president is frightening. Stress and anger tend to always have a negative aspect on people both mentally and physically without the release of emotions like joy.

This week we had to watch two films that both dealt with emotions in some way. People don’t tend to realize that emotions just don’t happen, they exist because we create them. As social creatures, human go through experiences that allow these said emotions to be felt and publicly observed. Human can tell for the most part what emotion someone is feeling because emotions are socially constructed. We collectively have agreed that if someone is happy, they might be smiling and someone that is sad might be crying. With that being said, emotions aren’t just shown in one way, people express themselves differently.

In the film Inside Out Riley is a joyful person. We know this because it’s the emotion that leads all the other ones. In the film, the emotions are little characters that live in the heads of people.  Riley was a joyful little baby, but when she didn’t get what she wanted or needed, she began to cry as do most babies. This “unlocked” a new emotion, sadness. This directly connects to the Theory of Constructed Emotion because Riley constructed new emotions as she experienced feelings.

Right at the beginning of the film as we see Riley growing up, we also see the events that caused her to create more emotions. Riley not getting dessert triggers Anger and running and tripping over a cord causes Fear to be visible.

Something that I was wondering about the film was that we see Riley’s lead emotion as Joy, the Mom’s as Sadness, and the Dad’s as Anger. I wonder what it took for emotions to switch leads or if it was always Sadness/Anger. Since the Mom, Dad, and Riley all have the same basic emotions, I feel like emotions in the movie were basic and universal. The emotions all acted in similar ways, but were specific to one’s life experience.

Star Trek’s “Man of the People” also showed me the Theory of Constructed Emotion. It is not explicitly said in the film, but Deanna’s body language showed that she was trying to get with Alkar. I’m assuming this because of the way humans have socially constructed emotions and could assume without being told. Deanna quickly changed emotions when Alkar refused her. We can’t say that she constructed the feeling of disgust and anger right then and there because she probably has experienced them in the past. Emotions, the mind, and body all work together. Once the mind was able to comprehend what was happening, the emotions started being projected and shown through the bodies actions.

 

Emotions are a very powerful thing that human experience. Not everyone expresses emotion in the same way, but for the most part, others can tell what one is feeling. Emotions are essential because a human mind without emotion really won’t be a human mind.

We can assume that Deanna had her seven primary emotions, but Riley only has five. I wonder which of her five emotions picked up the other two primary emotions…