In the past two posts I have been playing with the idea that interoceptive perceptions (i.e., “feelings”) have and can have affordances. Just as a teacup proposes, is associated with, and enables a range of potential responses, interactions, functions, and utilities, so, too, do the feelings that reside within our body. True, emotions themselves are responses, and emotional regulation can partially involve an appreciation for the situational / exteroceptive triggers for the emotional response. Emotions, though, in addition to being responses are also feelings. That is, they are structured perceptions in their own right, and have been designed just as much as a teacup has been designed. The designer in this case being some combination of ontogeny and phylogeny.
The perceptions of boredom, grief, pride, and pleasure, for example, all suggest and can be associated with a range of behaviors. Someone honks at us, we seethe inside, experiencing “road rage” and after a bout of cursing, we give the honker finger. The feeling of road rage in this instance has the affordance of cursing and giving the finger, or perhaps some other generalized stressor (an unhappy marriage) is the true origin, sensitizing us to perceived slights and aggravations, and hence the response of road rage. Either way, the finger is given.
However, this wasn’t the only potential response we might have made. There is the deep breath and a count to 10. There are reflective questions, “Why exactly am I feeling this? What is this feeling trying to do for me?” There is broadening out of perspective and a chuckle about how silly the whole thing is. All of these and more are potential affordances to the feeling of “road rage.” But normally, we just give the finger, just as normally racists scream at the first blacks who dared to attend white only schools, or just as normally fear leads us to deny our own accountability. We might even tell ourselves the story that our feelings justified the behavior – a story which itself might be an affordance of the feeling. “They made me angry, so of course I was going to lash out. What did they expect.” But of course, feelings do not justify behaviors any more than a teacup justifies lifting it to the mouth with by the handle. In each case behaviors are “suggested” and then selected. We might even say that the meaning is created – more or less strongly – by the design of the percept and the history of our interactions with it. There is no justification, only behavioral options, only affordance.
Take, for example and in honor of the last post’s reference to Duchamp, a scenario with which every parent is well-acquainted – potty training. Potty training is a case of training an affordance to a feeling state. The parent does not have direct access to the feeling state in their child that precedes defecation. Nonetheless, the goal of potty training is to associate new behaviors – “holding it in” and “using a toilette” – with the interoceptive perception of needing to pee or poop. Prior to this association, the child presumably just peed or pooped, just as when we feel road rage, we just shake our fist / give the finger or after an argument with a loved one, maybe we withdraw and give them the silent treatment. But through training almost all children learn the new affordance of “feeling the need to defecate” –> seek out a toilette –> use a toilette.
So, feeling states can be associated with new behaviors. Feeling the need to defecate does not justify peeing in public on the brick façade of a house. Of course, what makes training new affordances to emotional states a more difficult proposition is their relatively rarity. The individual wracked with grief. What are the affordances of this state? Reaching out for social support? Narrative-making that adjusts the value of the missing object? Narrative making that adjusts the value of the self? These are all potential affordances for grief, sure. But notice that part of what makes grief so tricky is that we experience it so rarely. How are we to learn the “going to the bathroom response” for grief? For jealousy? For ecstatic joy? For gratitude? For pride? For attachment (which is not the same thing as love)? We need to defecate multiple times a day. How often, though, do we get to practice new behaviors for jealousy? How often do we get sit with our anger or fear and really pay attention to designed contours of the perception and the affordances that the perception is suggesting? This is doubly true when the affordances, themselves, eliminate access to the originating emotion. We experience abandonment by a loved and feel threat or fear or sadness and respond with self-belittling, or emotional suppression, or a reactive pushing away of the very thing we wish were closer. When it comes to so many of the feelings that we term emotions, then, we are largely left, with the affordances given to us unthinkingly by natural selection or uninvestigated psychological processes.
There is much more that could be unpacked here, but in this post, I am going to only consider two affordances for our feeling states: projection and state-dependent memory. Ultimately, many forms of cognitive behavioral therapy and somatic therapy are centered on deconstructing the affordances individuals have attached to interoceptive cues and introducing / training new behavioral possibilities. My goal isn’t to review any of that literature, but rather to sensitize the reader to the idea that interoceptive perceptions are designed perceptions and that the available affordances are more varied and subtle than we might think
Let’s start with projection. Classically, projection is classified as a psychological defense mechanism. The story goes that certain triggers will produce a feeling state akin to “threat”… the masked knife wielder at the door of the self. For example, an individual who has learned an anxious attachment style in their childhood finds someone who genuinely loves them as an adult. This triggers a profound sense of threat / lack of safety / distrust in the anxiously attached individual, but such emotions threaten the self. After all, I’m a good person who is trusting and wants to be loved. So, what is this other person hiding, this person who “claims” to love me? Certainly, they are up to something, and the evidence is out there if only I will look hard enough. Such are the outlines of projection. For example, in one study by Neal and Lemay (2019) heterosexual relationships were tracked. If an individual in a relationship experienced attraction to individuals outside the relationship, they were prone to 1) feel that their partner had a “wandering eye,” and also 2) report an increase in negative feelings and behaviors directed toward their partner. But notice that psychological defense mechanisms are affordances. They are responses (mostly unconscious) suggested by an emotional state as much as road rage suggests giving someone the finger or the feeling of needing to pee suggests finding a bathroom. Projection is an affordance of interoceptive perception.
Interestingly, projection as a defense mechanism doesn’t appear to hold up. That is, although projection is common, it does not appear primarily to serve the function of ego protection classically assigned to it [see also “assumed similarity” and “the false consensus effect”]. What then is the function of projection? First, stated simply, projection is the assumption that others share our own emotional state. This assumption, itself, makes certain outcomes more likely. If I experience a crush on someone, and I assume that the other person shares that feeling (i.e., project my feelings of attraction onto the other person), then I am more likely to engage in behaviors that potentially establish a relationship with that person. We can also think of projection as a being a first pass in which our own emotions fill in a “blindspot,” which is the interiority of other individuals. We don’t have access to the interiority of others, so projection can be thought of a hypothesis — the setting out of a possibility — the TYPE of story that can be told GIVEN the emotional landscape of the moment.
I’m going to close out this discussion of affordances by considering one more set of often overlooked responses that are attached to our interoceptive perceptions, namely memory recall. I will acknowledge that we are stretching the concept of response here. Is recalling the face of a loved one really the same as sitting down in a chair? Obviously not, but sitting down in a chair is not the same as feeling angry, but both are responses. Similarly, recall as a response can be practiced and improved, and no one would argu with the fact that certain situations are more likely to trigger certain memories. In this sense, then, recall is a response to perceptions, and we can therefore include recall in the bucket of affordances.
State-dependent memory refers to the finding that individuals more readily recall memories when the interoceptive state at recall matches the state at encoding. Put into more normal language, if a memory is stored when you are happy, you are more likely to recall the memory when you are once again happy. Rats taught an escape response while under the influence of a drug, more readily demonstrated the escape response when they were again under the influence of the drug vs. not. Students who studied while intoxicated (or not intoxicated) performed best on the subsequent test when they were the same state as they studied. And of course depression is at least partially characterized by the depressed individual finding it difficult to recall moments in which they were ever happy. The point here, is to appreciate that the recall of memories that we carry with us in any particular moment are at least partially the responses of – affordances of – our feeling states.
Summary: What do emotions mean? On one level, that is the question that this and the last two posts have been addressing, but by emphasizing the fact that emotions are designed “objects.” What does a teacup mean? When we speak of designed objects, we are making assumptions about functions and potential interactions and responses to the object. I’ve been using the term “affordances” to link functions and potential responses to our perceptions. So, stated differently, designed objects have affordances which is to say “suggested” interactions and responses. That is one answer to the question, “What does a teacup mean?” We pivot to emotions by recognizing that normally, we think of designed objects as existing outside of the organism. However, our emotional states are also designed objects (as well as being learned responses). In that sense, emotional states also have affordances that have been given by natural selection, but also by learning. That is at least partially their “meaning.” My hope is that framing interoceptive perception in this manner makes us more curious and opens us up to exploring the range of affordances and hence meaning made available by our feeling states.