Changing Habits of Mind by Zoltan Gross

Author:Zoltan Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

The term natural kinds is a philosophical label for what many people already assume about emotion. Many of the most influential scientific treatments of emotion are founded on the view that certain emotion categories (such as anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and happiness) carve nature at its joints. It is assumed that each kind of emotion can be identified by a more or less unique signature response (within the body) that is triggered or evoked by a distinct causal mechanism (within the brain). As a result, it should be possible to recognize distinct emotions in other people, identify them in one’s self, and measure them in the face, physiology, and behavior.

(p. 30) (original emphasis)

Emotions within this traditional frame are static “building blocks” or “elements” that can be measured, analyzed, constructed into an explanatory whole in much the same way European physical science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enriched our knowledge and lives. However, employing that paradigm to psychological phenomena ignores their nonsensory (physiological) nature. They are equilibratory processes where movement and duality are their autochthonous characteristics. Ignoring them reifies psychological process. Reification lies at the heart of the concept of “basic emotions.”

Many theorists have looked for the “elemental” nature of feelings in the hope of discovering that the “basic units” of emotion will enable them to construct an emotional periodic table that could give us the same kind of understanding of psychology that it gave us in chemistry and physics. Others have attempted to conceptualize emotions as though they were like light displayed on a color wheel. Physical things are highly predictable. They don’t move. They stay put. Casual observations of everyday objects are experienced with familiarity. The visual experience of color has a tempting invariance that invites simplistic theories of emotionality.

The visual experience of regularity is the invariance upon which scientific theories are built. The regularity of physical processes that are perceived by the sensory systems is different from the regularities of the nonsensory process of the prefrontal cortex. These are the regularities of psychological phenomena. But they are not visually seen or processed by any of the sensory systems.

Psychological theories based on visual observation are cast into a common-sense paradigm. Commonsense oriented psychologists, like Heider (1958) and Kimble (2000) are theorists who rely upon the phenomenal (sensory) appearance of behavior as the data base for their theories. Kimble states this position in the following quote.

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