Lecture 3: Embodied sense making Flashcards
Enactivism
A version of theory of mind strongly influenced by phenomenology. It emphasises the embeddedness in a body and in an environment of the thinking and experiencing of minded animals like ourselves.
- Cognition = a form of action
Embodied sense-making (valences)
Sense-making is a fundamental part of being alive: in order to stay alive, an organism must make sense of its environment-even if only in the very basic sense of distinguishing food from non-food, danger from safety, mates from non-mates, etc. Living beings are dependent on their environment for their survival and this dependence implies the need for some (basic) form of sense-making activity of the organism.
Existential sense-making (stance taking)
However, as soon as organisms are capable of relating to themselves and their environment, like human beings, the functionality principle [of embodied sense making] is loosened or altered. For it is no longer just survival that counts, but also living a good life. If valences result from being a needy creature in relation to an environment, we can say that values emerge for those organisms that on top of that can relate to this relation. We do not only have the will to survive, we also have the “will to meaning” as Frankl calls it.
Neural systems of primary emotional systems
- Intrinsic inputs (US): the system can be activated by inborn signals (e.g. a loud noise -> FEAR)
- Coordinate physiological and behavioral outputs (UR): the activation of the system results in inborn reactions (e.g. FEAR -> startle response).
- Gating of inputs (CS and CR): this means that the system learns on the basis of classical and operant conditioning, by which learned stimuli can activate the system (CS) and learned responses can become activated (CR).
- Positive feedback (including ‘auto-activation’): the systems are NOT only affected by external stimuli (as in classic behaviorism), but 1) have patterns of internal auto-activation, like sleep-wake rythms for the SEEKING system. And 2) once activated the system tends to remain activated for quite some time influencing our perspection of the world for longer than the duration of the stimulus.
- Cognitions instigate emotions (top-down influence): this indicates that ‘higher-level’ cognitive processes are involved in activating the systems.
- Emotions control cognitions (bottom-up influence): this bottom-up influence is strong – as you all know from experience. The activation of a strong emotion colors our thoughts, attention, memory, self-feeling, and so on.
- Affect reflects the full operation of such processes: this is important. A full and complete affective state is not simply a single basic emotional system, but the full activation of multiple systems together with behavior and cognition. The affective state is in this sense like tasting a complex wine: it is not just sour or sweet, but much more than that.
Forms of vitality
= patterns of arousal that are associated with certain sensory experiences and movement; experienced in any modality of sensory experience (cross-modal)
—> Attempt at thinking about the experiential world of infants; world lacks many of the verbalizations and conceptualizations of adults but it does contain a lot of arousal, energy, moving body-parts and being moved by others. Also looking and hearing and other senses are forms in which energy and arousal-patterns are transferred to the infant and by which the infant is affected. Mirror-neurons are also doing that from very early on.
Mirroring
Mirroring generally refers to aspects of sameness in the reaction of the parent to the child. In complete mirroring there would be almost no difference between what the movement and sound of the child and that of the parent. The child then would have a difficult time distinguishing self and other.
Marking
Marking generally refers to the aspect of differentiation in response to the child. For example, the child may utter a voice that goes upward and the parent a voice that goes downward. Or there may be variations on the pattern of the child, or responses in a different modality like making a sound that mirrors the movement of the child. In development the amount of variation and differentiation tends to increase. If the difference is too large the connection may be lost; this is called a misattuned response.
Attunement
Well-regulated mirroring and marking
Misattunement
Dysregulation of self-experience and self-with-other experience
Repair
The movement from misattunement to attunement
Detachment
If repair is absent repeatedly and for longer periods, then despair, detachment, hate and traumatic moments set in and are stored in embodied memory.
The Self as a dancer
- before the “I” starts to have a self (“Me”), there are already bodily movements and sensations
- affective experiences are always taking place within this context of a body that moves and is being moved (affected)
- so, movement and affect seem a beautiful place to start when trying to grasp something of the development of the experiential bias of self
What are 4 reasons for including animals in theories of personality
- we evolved from common ancestors and share a huge amount of genes
- they may provide models for what human bodies share with other animals that do not have the kind of symbolic structures we live in
- gives glimpses of non-cultural aspects of humans
- many more types of experiments can be done with animals
What are the 7 primary emotional systems and what are the affective experiences and possible clinical problems
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SEEKING = provides animals with energy to explore the environment —> necessary to find mating partners as well as food
Affective experiences:
- high; interest/euphoria
- low; disinterest/lack of motivation
Possible clinical problems:
- high; manic states, drugs of abuse
- low; anhedonic, depressed, detached states -
FEAR = promotes the avoidance dangerous situations and to carefully monitor the safety of environments
Affective experiences:
- high; flight or freeze/terror
- low; safe (to explore)
Possible clinical problems:
- high; anxiety disorders, cluster C, PTSD
- low; psychopathy, risk taking -
RAGE = observed when animals are in need to defend themselves, in situations of frustration, when an expected reward is absent or being in enclosed in a small space
Affective experiences:
- high; irritation/exploding
- low; trusting/naivety
Possible clinical problems:
- high; intermittent explosive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, narcissi’s rage
- low; lack of assertion -
LUST = activity in animals is of importance for procreation, appears to serve social functions
Affective experiences:
- high; feeling some attraction
- low; low interest/asexuality
Possible clinical problems:
- high; problematic sexual behaviors
- low; impotence, lack of pleasure -
PANIC/GRIEF = reflects separation distress and signals a situation of having lost contact with an importan erson or being lost in the environment —> for mammals and avians, separation from a caregiver or another important person triggers distress which leads to vocalization to reunite, if this doesn’t happen there are strong feelings of deactivation and grief
Affective experiences:
- high; longing or lonelinessPANIC; high SEEKING, GRIEF; low SEEKING)
- low; safety/exploring
Possible clinical problems:
- high; separation anxiety, trauma, borderline states
- low; schizoid, detached states, maybe in psychopathy -
CARE = taking care of one’s offspring (helps assure that the young children grow into adults and can have families)
Affective experiences:
- high; tenderness/parental love
- low; carelessness/detachment
Possible clinical problems:
- high; self-sacrifice
- low; anti-social features, parental failures, postnatal depression -
PLAY = inherent, of importance to learn social competencies and motoring skills, helps to get better along in complex social groups (as adults), via play friendships emerge
Affective experiences:
- high; friendly/joy
- low; satiety/quietness
Possible clinical problems:
- high; difficulty concentrating, ADHD
- low; obsessive patterns, joylessness, depressed personality
What primal emotions are the big 5 connected to
- openness to experience; high SEEKING
- extraversion; high PLAY
- agreeableness; high CARE, low ANGER
- neuroticism; high negative emotions (FEAR, SADNESS, ANGER)
