Meaning and Emotions
Meaning and Emotions
It's hard to tell where one stops and the other starts.
A sense of meaning results from the way we experience the brain’s
hierarchical processing system. It includes comparisons, rankings, and
judgments about value: what is desirable, helpful, beautiful, or moral. Emotion, personal history, culture, religion,
ideology, and historical moment heavily influence the brain’s
construction of meaning, and these, of course, are often in conflict.
Components of Meaning
The Adult brain (the prefrontal cortex) interprets emotional signals of change by appraisal (What is going on?), reality-testing (calculating the probability that an emotional signal is accurate),
and explanation.
For example, anxiety is triggered by a sudden noise that disrupts prevailing sound patterns. The Adult brain identifies the source of the noise as the phone ringing and assigns high probability to the accuracy of the signal. (If there’s no phone in the house, the probability plummets.) It appraises the phone ringing as a routine occurrence of no threat, and the anxiety immediately gives way to interest, which motivates answering the phone.
Reality-testing is, in part, validation or invalidation of the emotional signal. If the Adult brain validates the anxiety stimulated by the ringing phone (something must be wrong) it speculates (bill collector, death in the family), sending anxiety levels through the roof. If it invalidates the signal, say through denial, “I didn’t really hear anything,” the anxiety persists at a slightly lower level, as in “whistling in the dark.” If it explains the signal as, say, a stupid overreaction, anxiety gives way to shame.
Focus is the most energy-consuming of all brain activities. Uninterrupted concentration is difficult and soon produces exhaustion. (We continually take tiny breaks of distraction, enjoyment, or relaxation in most concentrated activity.) The brain treats focus as a scarce resource to be applied selectively.
Arousal and focus tend to go together. When they do not, the result is unpleasant. For example, high arousal minus focus equals restlessness; high arousal minus focus plus blame equals impatience, irritability, or anger. Low arousal minus focus equals boredom.
Focus can be wide or narrow, rigid or flexible. In wide focus we scan the surface, gather classification data (what kind of thing is it) and sometimes try to fit information into the bigger picture. Extremes of wide focus produce superficial, unsatisfying emotional experience.
In narrow focus, we see detail and depth. Extremes produce tunnel vision and insensitivity to context.
In rigid focus we admit little or no information other than what we want or expect. In the extreme, this eliminates creativity and tolerance of differences.
Flexible focus allows us to see many different aspects. In the extreme, it reduces conviction and makes us easily distracted.
Explanation is to meaning what feelings are to emotions. Although the slowest part of the thinking system, explanations seem to dominate perceptions of meaning in the way that feelings seem to dominate emotions.
Explanations aid survival in two important ways. They enhance interest, which motivates behaviors suitable to finding food, shelter, protection, and opportunities for sex. They also protect us from the harmful effects of our own fight-flight alarm system by creating an illusion of order, predictability, and safety.
The enormous influence of emotions on explanations can be seen most clearly in minor emotional experience. A slight arousal of anxiety often leads to arbitrary selection of one of a thousand possible causes, as the brain looks for something to worry about. When feelings are hurt, the brain looks for something to resent. A tremor of guilt leads us to seize one of a thousand misdemeanors as the cause. Explanations of a dull feeling of shame can derive from a myriad of presumed failures or defects. Hostility will force focus on a thousand offenses.
Explanations do not have to be right; they just have to navigate emotional experience, for better or worse. The inability to understand negative experience is anxiety-provoking and can be overwhelming:
To keep anxiety manageable, we would rather have a bad explanation than no explanation at all. I would rather think that I feel bad because I'm a loser (or my coworkers are dicks, my congressman is corrupt, or my partner is selfish) than have no idea why I feel bad. When it comes to pain and discomfort, the human brain craves explanation more than truth.
Components of Meaning
The Adult brain (the prefrontal cortex) interprets emotional signals of change by appraisal (What is going on?), reality-testing (calculating the probability that an emotional signal is accurate),
and explanation.
For example, anxiety is triggered by a sudden noise that disrupts prevailing sound patterns. The Adult brain identifies the source of the noise as the phone ringing and assigns high probability to the accuracy of the signal. (If there’s no phone in the house, the probability plummets.) It appraises the phone ringing as a routine occurrence of no threat, and the anxiety immediately gives way to interest, which motivates answering the phone.
Reality-testing is, in part, validation or invalidation of the emotional signal. If the Adult brain validates the anxiety stimulated by the ringing phone (something must be wrong) it speculates (bill collector, death in the family), sending anxiety levels through the roof. If it invalidates the signal, say through denial, “I didn’t really hear anything,” the anxiety persists at a slightly lower level, as in “whistling in the dark.” If it explains the signal as, say, a stupid overreaction, anxiety gives way to shame.
Focus is the most energy-consuming of all brain activities. Uninterrupted concentration is difficult and soon produces exhaustion. (We continually take tiny breaks of distraction, enjoyment, or relaxation in most concentrated activity.) The brain treats focus as a scarce resource to be applied selectively.
Arousal and focus tend to go together. When they do not, the result is unpleasant. For example, high arousal minus focus equals restlessness; high arousal minus focus plus blame equals impatience, irritability, or anger. Low arousal minus focus equals boredom.
Focus can be wide or narrow, rigid or flexible. In wide focus we scan the surface, gather classification data (what kind of thing is it) and sometimes try to fit information into the bigger picture. Extremes of wide focus produce superficial, unsatisfying emotional experience.
In narrow focus, we see detail and depth. Extremes produce tunnel vision and insensitivity to context.
In rigid focus we admit little or no information other than what we want or expect. In the extreme, this eliminates creativity and tolerance of differences.
Flexible focus allows us to see many different aspects. In the extreme, it reduces conviction and makes us easily distracted.
Explanation is to meaning what feelings are to emotions. Although the slowest part of the thinking system, explanations seem to dominate perceptions of meaning in the way that feelings seem to dominate emotions.
Explanations aid survival in two important ways. They enhance interest, which motivates behaviors suitable to finding food, shelter, protection, and opportunities for sex. They also protect us from the harmful effects of our own fight-flight alarm system by creating an illusion of order, predictability, and safety.
The enormous influence of emotions on explanations can be seen most clearly in minor emotional experience. A slight arousal of anxiety often leads to arbitrary selection of one of a thousand possible causes, as the brain looks for something to worry about. When feelings are hurt, the brain looks for something to resent. A tremor of guilt leads us to seize one of a thousand misdemeanors as the cause. Explanations of a dull feeling of shame can derive from a myriad of presumed failures or defects. Hostility will force focus on a thousand offenses.
Explanations do not have to be right; they just have to navigate emotional experience, for better or worse. The inability to understand negative experience is anxiety-provoking and can be overwhelming:
“My God, why is this happening to me?”
To keep anxiety manageable, we would rather have a bad explanation than no explanation at all. I would rather think that I feel bad because I'm a loser (or my coworkers are dicks, my congressman is corrupt, or my partner is selfish) than have no idea why I feel bad. When it comes to pain and discomfort, the human brain craves explanation more than truth.
