KlM-J0NG-UN t1_jaruozn wrote
In cognitive theory, emotional experience is a consequence of interpreting sensory experiences. E.g, sensing threat=feel anxious.
Trusting anything requires a leap of faith but it's easy to see that our feelings will be skewed to the extent that our interpretations is skewed. Feeling anxious doesn't prove that a threat is there since we have limited access, through our senses, to what is really there.
minorkeyed t1_jasquo1 wrote
True. The last decade or so I've seen an argument emerge around the value and role of emotions as a source of truth with most proponents seemingly more interested in validating emotions as equally valuable, equally capable, as reason. I've always been wary of these argument as they seem like an attempt by emotionally indulgent people to justify being indulgent, especially if they aren't considered particularly intelligent in the normal sense.
'Emotional Intelligence' is a phrase that makes me cringe for similar reason. I'm still not even sure what that's supposed to be as every definition sounds more like a skillset for, or knowledge base of, emotion, not intelligence. We wouldn't say a physicist is Physics Intelligent or a doctor Medical Intelligent or an athlete is athletics intelligent. The choice of calling it intelligence seems a disingenuous attempt to equate emotions with intellect, as emotion is much maligned as a trustworthy system of assessing truth. One could make a similar case for being culturally aware and call it Cultural Intelligence, and it would seem equally inaccurate. It's a bit confusing tbh.
anonymous__ignorant t1_jat5m9n wrote
"Emotional intelligence": have you ever heard someone say "i don't know how / what to feel about something" ? At first it baffled me, for me it was something obvious, like an instant reaction. But then i understood they have no IDEEA about it and with the lack of an ideea came the lack of an apropriate emotional response.
Some of us have that "gut feeling" or intuition or some other predictive, associative mechanism that drives our emotions for us beyond learned experience.
As an excercise think about this: how would you feel / percieve the news that an alien ship landed on Earth but no communication has been established? What would your emotion default to?
Somehow you would have to think about it first. Are you intelligent enough to extrapolate instantly with the information you have ? Would your current knowledge drive you to joy? Fear?
minorkeyed t1_jatsdz0 wrote
Are you trying to explain what 'Emotional Intelligence'(EI) is? Or just discussing the topic in general? I'm a little confused what you're trying to explain.
anonymous__ignorant t1_jatuf2c wrote
> 'Emotional Intelligence' is a phrase that makes me cringe for similar reason. I'm still not even sure what that's supposed to be as every definition sounds more like a skillset for, or knowledge base of, emotion, not intelligence.
I was trying to explain the link between emotion and intelligence in the expression itself and how to test for it.
minorkeyed t1_jaumnzm wrote
Okay. The emotion part is pretty apparent but where is the intelligence part?
anonymous__ignorant t1_jav67xp wrote
You can still have all the knowledge and not connect the dots, just like a toddler that has the knowledge yet still throws a tantrum. Or racists that insist in theyr hate while having all the needed knowledge. Or hate towards those different ... you get the gist.
Theyr feelings are primal, uneducated. They hate just because they picked some cues here and there while they grew, emotional cues that now are defaults and bypass even routine checks.
minorkeyed t1_javjfeq wrote
In those cases emotion has overwhelmed reason. Higher reasoning and analysis are literally not functioning when emotions are so strong. I would argue they don't have access to most of their knowledge in those moments.
All emotions are primal, though, as the limbic system is one of the oldest parts of the brain, developing much earlier than the faculties of reason. Are you suggesting only emotional responses you deem 'bad' are primal and uneducated?
They hate because their experiences trained those coping responses and those coping systems worked effectively to protect them. Those responses are often still protecting them. They didn't just mimic others to learn deeply held responses, they almost certainly had traumatic experiences that provoked the creation of strong defenses the rnateojg motivators to keep those responses. Any attempt to highlight those defenses, triggers them.
I don't see how any of that relates to intelligence, though. Self awareness and emotional management skills would be more accurate in my mind, neither rof which are intelligence. Intellect is not a characteristic of emotions at all, it's a characteristic of reason, a faculty that is often in directly competition with the emotions of the limbic system for driving behavior.
This is why I think people who are easy to emotion, or mostly drive by emotion, may use 'emotional intelligence' as a term to gain validation and elevate emotion to the same level of respect and value as reason, especially when they may not possess much of capacity for reason.
VitriolicViolet t1_jb2cq52 wrote
>True. The last decade or so I've seen an argument emerge around the value and role of emotions as a source of truth with most proponents seemingly more interested in validating emotions as equally valuable, equally capable, as reason. I've always been wary of these argument as they seem like an attempt by emotionally indulgent people to justify being indulgent, especially if they aren't considered particularly intelligent in the normal sense.
i mean separating the two isnt possible.
what one considers rational and logical comes from emotion, so much so that anyone who successfully separates the two would have no opinions on anything other than simple cause an effect.
is it ok to hurt people? is welfare good? is abortion ok? is morality useful? what defines 'good' or 'bad'?
literally all of these start in emotion and use logic to justify it (its how all human cognition works, emotion first and logic to justify it)
elidevious t1_jati39n wrote
In Indian philosophy, “Samskaras” are emotional biases we hold on to due to past experiences. Samskaras essentially skew our perceptions of reality. Therefore, the practice of a Yogi is to let go of Samskaras in an effort to be present with what’s actually taking place bring one closer to pure awareness.
I’m not Indian or a yogi, but this idea brought me a lot of clarity and is a good reason why I am in an effort to not judge the world based on my knee jerk emotional state.
hamburglin t1_jathy0s wrote
It's just not that simple.
Eating something that destroys my guts reduces my serotonin levels to depression levels. The serotonin levels control my emotions.
This in turn changes how I experience the same exact sensory input.
So, it's both. Not one or the other. There's no theory here. There's only pretending to interpret reality through one of the inputs that lets us experience life.
RadioForest14 t1_jax2jft wrote
I would hesitate to say that any chemical "controls" our emotions. If it was so simple depression would be a thing of the past.
Truth is we barely know anything about how the brain functions. The belief that we do is based on pure hybris. The replication crisis in medicine and psychology can attest to that.
hamburglin t1_jax5sz0 wrote
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion in your second sentence. It's simply illogical outside of major assumptions, in a vacuum.
Your second paragraph also does nothing to support it. In fact, it borders on countering your initial conclusion.
Maybe you're getting tripped up on the word "controls" though. Reality is a set of various systems that come together to produce something. What I'm saying is that hormones, which are known to be tightly controlled to emotions, have an equal or sometimes greater input than raw, real-time senses.
Now, if you want to call memories "senses", or learned behaviors "senses" (not sure why you would), then there might be some play there. But the way the words were stated that I initially responded to, I fully disagree that sensory input is the lone, key driver of how we interpret reality in the moment, and react the next.
Even our human-built computer systems are not that naive.
RadioForest14 t1_jazq7zd wrote
I don't see anything "illogical" about it. Perhaps you can elaborate? If chemicals controlled our brain, like the medical field and psychiatry has believed (and appears to largely still believe), depression which, in this reductive view, is purely a chemical imbalance. This is why anti-depressants are often quickly given to anyone suffering from depression. But if this was actually true, the anti-depressants must be hyper-effective. The direct effect is however relatively miniscule.
Hesitating from saying that our brain works in any highly specific way (chemicals controlling our brain) and stating that we barely know how the brain functions is hardly contradictory. Also, the support in my small 3-sentence paragraph is the replication crisis: Somewhere around half of all studies published within psychology and medicine is proven false within 1 year after publishing. That is not a healthy and normal figure in science, it is abyssmal, and that's only the studies being tested. This attest to the fact that there are major fundamental misunderstandings and fundamental assumptions within each field which are completely incorrect. Fruit from a sick tree, you could say. That is the support in my short paragraph, it was just summed up by "the replication crisis".
It's definitely the word "control" I react on. Again, it strikes me as overly reductive. There is a significant difference between saying that hormones can control, i.e. dictate, our emotions, and saying that they play an important role in how our emotions emerge and function.
I was actually not talking at all about what you initially replied to regarding emotional experience.
hamburglin t1_jb0jrix wrote
Then you need to take an official logic course or buy a book on it.
KlM-J0NG-UN t1_jatwuyn wrote
Serotonin causing depression has never been proven despite a lot of research.
hamburglin t1_jaufc4h wrote
Hahaha
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