Feelings – MarkCleaveland.org

The Affordances of Emotion (part 2)

In the last post I introduced the concept of affordances. I will admit that my take on the concept is somewhat idiosyncratic. In the design of user interfaces (my favorite book on this topic is still The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman) the concept is mainly restricted to perceptions of function: door handles are for pulling (not pushing), door panels are for pushing (not pulling), and raising an electric window makes more “sense” when the switch is pushed forward rather than pulled backward. Having started using computers prior to touchscreens in “makes sense” to me that pulling down with my mouse will move me forward in a document. For my students pushing up is the more natural way of moving forward in a document. In other words, those who design objects for various functions do well to be aware of the responses that are typically occasioned by the perception of the user. We shouldn’t need a user’s manual for every on of the tools in our lives!

Figure taken from Joseph Friedman’s patent application for the “bendy straw.”

The active design of objects, though, also changes the affordances of a situation. Consider the design of the “bendy straw.” The illustration above (Patent #: US2094268 A) is from 1937, and was granted to Joseph B. Friedman. Mr. Friedman’s journey began with taking his young daughter to soda fountains. At the time milkshakes and other drinks were generally served out of tall bottles and / or glasses. Since straws were straight they elevated where drinking occurred. For a young drinker, tipping a glass filled with milkshake in order to get the straw to the mouth sometimes caused milkshake to spill out of the glass. However, bending the straw to the mouth was also not a solution. As Friedman writes in his patent application:

In order to drink in any satisfactory manner through the straw, it is either necessary to take the glass or bottle in the hand and tilt it, or to lean forward and bend the face down to contact the straw with the mouth. Either of these procedures is awkward and it is extremely common for the straws to become bent and broken over the rim of the bottle or glass during the consumption of the liquid. As the straws are substantially cylindrical such bending greatly obstructs the lumen of the straw and reduces the amount of liquid which can be drawn there through. (Friedman 1936, US patent application 2094268).

Friedman’s “aha” moment involved taking one of the paper straws of the day, inserting a screw, and tightly winding a string around the screw’s ridges. After removing the screw, one was left with a bendable straw. Mr. Friedman had intended that his bendy straw be used at soda fountains. One of the earliest adaptors, though, were hospitals because it became evident that bendable straws enabled bed-ridden patients to drink liquids while lying in bed.

However, rather than focusing on technology design, the psychologist who first proposed affordances as a term, James Gibson, mainly used the concept to capture a sense of what the external environment (i.e., its perception by the organism) “offers” the organism (see an excerpt here and Wikipedia here). Actions connected with threat and play, drowning and swimming, bathing, splashing, drinking, cooling off… all might be “afforded” to an individual by the sight of a pond. Gibson’s point was to stress that an animal is rarely, if ever, passively situated in its environment, and that action is a fundamental component of perception. As the environment changes so too do the potential behaviors.

My own use of the term in the last post leaned more in the design direction, while emphasizing that our evolutionary history, learning and maturation layer our perceptions with actionable meaning. But importantly, I tried to make the point that what is obviously the “correct” course of action – at least in terms of the most likely behavior to appear in a situation — might in fact be akin to an illusion. There are instances in which our perceptions conspire like a classical artist to restrict our attention to what resides within the painting’s ornate frame.

Frame is also perceived context, and reaching out can be as much of an affordance as an interpretative appraisal. This latter point will be important to keep in mind when we consider the affective affordances we perceive in our environments. Remember, emotions are both a form of responding and a perceptual state in their own right. This is a photo by Alfred Stieglitz of Marcel Duchamp’s famous / infamous work of “art,” the Fountain. Image in the public domain.

Given that brief aside, what I would like to do in this post is to consider the affordances of emotions and feelings. Just as we should be aware of and question the perceptual frame that weights our actions with regard to the external environment, so too should we question the perceptual frame that weights our actions with regards to our interoceptive environment. Notice that I am NOT referring to the affective affordances of external objects (see Carava & Benenti, 2024). I might feel the need to wallow in bout of melancholy romanticism and turn to the movie Before Sunset to help me experience this emotion. Or I might doom scroll through social media as a way of mitigating anxiety. Such affective affordances are not what I am referring to here. Rather, I would like to consider interoceptive feelings as their own perceptions that are capable of affording particular actions in their own right.

“Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.” If you know, you know.

My stance will be the same as that taken in the last post – to consider interoceptive perceptions as differentially weighting different types of action. But also, I will want to hold on to a very broad definition of afforded actions. Just as an emotional response (fear of failure, fear of exposure, etc.) is an affordance that might be “suggested” to you by the prospect of having to speak up in class, our recall of particular memories and interpretative stances are also actions. Consider Duchamp’s urinal above. Part of the fame attached to this work of art concerns the interpretive expectations triggered by our perceptions. A Michelangelo sculpture affords a certain esthetic reverence. A urinal affords thoughts of contamination and excrement. Duchamp’s insight was to purposefully conflate the two. In considering the potential affordances of our visceral beliefs we will likewise attempt to hold on to an unrestricted notion of the potential action space.

For example, we all know that social behaviors such as communication are actions afforded to us by our interoceptive cues. A doctor asks us to report how much pain we are feeling on a scale of 1 – 10, or a friend asks us how we are feeling. “About a 7” and “Tired” might be the responses that our interoceptive perception affords. But of course, feeling possess more than just verbal affordances. Happiness affords smiles and anger affords scowls, and an infant cries in order to be held or because of gas pains or because of hunger (and it is up to the exasperated parent to determine which is which). In fact, we spend considerable time trying to train other behaviors to our internal perceptions in order to hide and control how and when we express our internal states. Since communicative actions are so obviously suggested by our interoceptive perceptions, I am not going to address them here. Instead, I would like consider three other, not so obvious actions afforded to us by our interoceptive perceptions: behavior systems, state-dependent memory, and interpretive projection.

From Charles Darwin’s *The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals*. I am always struck by how these individuals are long dead — the experienced happiness of the individuals a fleeting moment in their existence and somehow all the more precious for it.

Let’s begin just as we did with the last post with a puzzle. A rat in a cage is given a running wheel. Anyone who has had a pet rodent knows what happens. The rat will spend some time each day scurrying in the running wheel. What we are going to do, though, is run an experiment in which we force the animal to go hungry for some amount of time each day. Maybe we provide food for the animal for 4 hours per day, or maybe 2 hours per day, or maybe just 1 hour per day. Being good scientists, we have two groups of rats. For one group we do not provide a running wheel, and what we will observe is that all of the animals manage just fine. Those provided with food for only an hour per day, spend the majority of that time eating, while those given access to the food for 4 hours, will eat intermittently during those 4 hours. The important thing to note, though, is that all of these rats will maintain a stable body weight.

From Scheurink et al (2010). The graph shows days on the x-axis and km run in the running wheel by each group of rats on the y-axis. Groups of rats differed in how many hours of access they had to food per day. Notice that the group that had 1-hour access per day is continuing to increase its running, and would in fact run itself to death if the experiment were not stopped.

For our other group, we make one change. We provide these rats with a running wheel. What we will see in this group is a phenomenon known as activity-based anorexia (see Carera et al, 2014). First, greater food restriction will lead to greater time spent in the running wheel. In the graph below, the rats who are receiving 1 hour of food per day are running 10 km in their running wheels! What has also been shown, though, is that the rats in the 1 hour of food per day, will cease to maintain a stable body weight. In fact, if the experiment is not stopped, many of these rats will continuously lose weight, and eventually run themselves to death. How do we explain this?

One potential approach is via what is known as behavior systems theory (see Carbrera et al, 2019) Behavior systems can be thought of as the loose set of reflexes that are attached to functional states such as foraging, reproduction, status seeking, the rearing of young, and so forth. The figure below shows a set of behavior systems for foraging. Depending on the animal, the individual might start a bout of foraging by socializing before setting out with the group to look for food. Or the animal might search out a spot to lie in wait, hidden. Once a food item is located, though, a different set of behaviors come to the fore, and once a food item is being consumed, yet another set of behaviors become more likely. An astute observer will notice that behavior systems are simply affordances by another name.

So, let’s consider what perceptions might underpin the functional state that affords a particular behavior system. The sight of prey. The feel and smell of the food item, for sure. But what of the sensation of hunger, itself? To be placed into a functional state is to exist within a particular interoceptive perceptual space, and it is this perceptual space that is affording the behaviors in a behavioral system. Bucks during rutting season compete with other males and attempt to copulate with females. Horny teenagers congregate in packs and compete for status and attention. A child in a dark basement hears a sound and flees for the safety of the lighted steps. In each case, a functional state presumably correlates with a feeling state, and this feeling state affords actions just as much as the sight of a tea pot.

A hypothetical behavior system related to hunger / foraging. Notice that behaviors early in the system (at the top) will tend to change the environment in ways that will then bring about subsequent behaviors. The idea here is that many of our emotions / feeling states / interoceptive situations afford behavioral systems. That is, the state is connected to our evolutionary fitness.

For example, from the figure above, an animal experiencing hunger is most likely to show general search behaviors. And (if you are rat) that means movement. Normally, these behaviors would cause prey or food to appear, and then normally the exteroceptive perception of this prey would lead to consumption behaviors. But in the laboratory, our poor animal is stuck. We have removed the normal contingencies of the behavioral system. The hungry animal increases its locomotion, but this does not produce a food item, and only serves to increase the interoceptive hunger cues, which in turn “suggest” the behavior of locomotion. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that is at least partially made sense of by appreciating that interoceptive perceptions (in this case, hunger) afford particular sorts of behavior just as much as exteroceptive perceptions do. It’s just that for whatever reason we tend to change our terminology. We don’t say that the hammer hitting our knee compelled us to kick out. But we do say that we felt compelled to eat the cupcake that was in front of us. The only difference, at least from within our discussion of affordances, is that in one case the perception is external while in the other the perception is internal. In both cases a behavior or set of behaviors is being strongly weighted (or primed) by the perceived situation.

So, when we speak of interoceptive “feeling states” (e.g., emotions, motivations) we should be aware that systems of behaviors are likely to be afforded to these internal “situations.” We feel guilt and behaviors that involve making amends will be suggested. We feel anger and behaviors that remove obstacles or exact payment will be suggested. We feel disgust and behaviors that lessen the likelihood of contamination will be suggested. We feel love and behaviors that care for the other will be suggested.

[Aside. I was educated in the behaviorist tradition, and therefore feel somewhat “dirty” using terminology such as “affordances” and “feeling states” and so forth. However, there are many flavors of behaviorism and I am much more aligned with the behaviorism of Clark Hull than B.F. Skinner. Hull made much use of “drive stimuli” in many of his models of learning, and what is a “drive stimulus” but an interoceptive perception / feeling state? Also, contra Skinner, I don’t think that operant conditioning is the be-all-and-end-all for understanding a behaving organism. For a nice summary of some of the current approaches to decision making and behavior see Redish, 2015). Finally, a crude behaviorism has a way of absenting the particular organism from the explanatory situation. Affordances to my thinking are more species specific, and do a better job of conceptually situating the individual organism in their immediate, perceived environment (internal and external).]

The Affordances of Emotion (part 1)

I am going to try and play with a few ideas in this post, but big picture, at their nexus lies a simple question: Do emotions have affordances, and if so, what are they? So, let’s start with affordances, but in a round-about way.

Imagine that you have been placed in a room. Two strings hang down from the ceiling a certain distance apart. In the room is also a chair and a pair of scissors. Your captor tells you that if you can grab ahold of both strings, they will let you free. The only problem is that the strings are positioned such that if you clutch one of the strings and walk towards the other, that other string remains just out of reach. What do you do?

Here’s another one. Below are nine dots arranged in a square. Your task is to take a pen or pencil (or use your mouse pad) and draw no more than 4 lines that connect all of the dots.

Or here is one more. You are a chimp living at the Anthropoid Station in Tenerife during WWI. A German researcher named Wolfgang Koehler has suspended a treat just out of your reach. Sometimes the treat is dangling up in the air, and crates are strewn about your enclosure. Sometimes the treat is on the ground beyond the enclosure’s fencing. In these cases there are sticks available. What do you do?

Scan taken from *The Mentality of Apes* (1921) by Wolfgang Koehler

These types of problems are known as “insight problems.” Insight problems tend to have what is called an “ah-ha” moment. The person doing the puzzle repeatedly bangs their head against a wall, until suddenly the solution emerges as if in one conceived whole. The chimp might reach out towards the suspended treat. It might become visibly frustrated and hurl crates about the enclosure. What Wolfgang Koehler observed, though, was that sometimes after these displays, a chimp might pause and look back and forth between the crate (or stick) and the treat. After this pause, the chimp would suddenly go over to the crate, drag it under the treat, climb up, and pull the treat in. Or the chimp would grab the stick, reach out, and pull the treat into the enclosure. The learning (i.e., achievement of the desired outcome) was not gradual, but sudden. Take the problem of connecting the dots, remember that no one said that your lines couldn’t extend outside of the implied boundaries of the square. Or take the problem of the strings, no one said that a pair of scissors has to be used for cutting. Scissor handles can be tied to strings and used as a weight to start the string swinging.

There is a lot that could be said about insight problems and insight learning, levels of selection and units of selection. I wrote an entire master’s thesis-equivalent on the topic! And that was many, many years ago prior to much additional research that has come out since. For the purposes of this post, though, let’s just appreciate that one common aspect of insight problems is something known as “functional fixedness.” This is the idea that certain objects and situations “suggest” certain actions / behaviors. These suggestions can be more or less “strong.” We see a pair of scissors and the suggestion is, “Scissors are for cutting!” We see nine dots arranged in a square, and we assume that the implicit edges of the arranged dots are a boundary. For chimps, crates aren’t for dragging. Maybe for climbing on top of, but for dragging?? Really? And sticks. They are for poking. Maybe scratching. But for extending one’s reach in a generic sense? For Koehler, who belonged to a school of psychology known as the “gestalt psychology,” the rules (what I have termed “beliefs” in earlier posts) that constructed perceptions were central to how the environment made available different courses of action.

The functional fixedness that defines many types of insight problems essentially says that sometimes perception very strongly suggests particular actions. We see a button, we press it. We see a chair, we sit on it. We see a book, we open it (or throw it across the room). We see chalk and a chalk board, we write or draw on the board. Our perception isn’t just a description of the world, but also a call to action. It is this connection between perception and action that lies at the heart of the concept of affordances.

The orchid is triggering copulation in the digger wasp in order to benefit its own pollination (image captured from “10 things you didn’t know about orchids.“

Or let’s come at this a different way by considering reflexes. We can think of reflexes as a particularly simple call to action, although reflexes, modal action patterns, and reflex chains can be highly complex. In this case were are not talking about “emitted behavior” or skills and habits that we have learned through trial and error, but rather “elicited behavior.” The suggestion from perception is an imperative: thou shalt use the scissors to cut! Only it’s not scissors but puffs of air to the eye, taps to the patella, the smell (to a male dog) of a female dog in heat, a viral invasion of a body, memories of a traumatic event, or the soft cloth to the motherless monkey… In each of these cases, perception mandates action, which is to say that the action feels involuntary. The eye blinks. The foot shoots up. The male dog jumps the fence and pursues the female. The immune system responds. The skin conductance goes up and the pituitary gland releases hormones. The soft texture evokes attachment / feelings of comfort and safety. And yes, emotions can be as much of a response as the blink of an eye – i.e., emotional responses are contained in an animal’s “affordances” as much as a stick may be used for poking and scratching and reaching and throwing and whittling. Perception suggests these behaviors, but also the behaviors of anger, contentment, sadness, stress, and humor. Emotions are responses and therefore suggestions for action made by our perceptions.

From the work of Harry Harlow. This image is in the public commons and is from research Harlow conducted on stimulation that triggers “emotional attachment” in young rhesus monkeys.

Zooming back out, though, the point here is that perception is not just a description of a world (and remember, exteroception perceives the world outside the body, while interoception perceives the world OF the body). Perception is also a weighted suggestion of all sorts of an actions — suggestions with differences in probability, urgency, intensity, and obviousness. Take reflexes. It might be reasonable to assume that our strongest call to action will be elicited by naturally occurring stimuli. A parental gull returns from foraging. The gull chicks peck at the red dot at the base of the parent’s yellow beak. The parent regurgitates food for the chicks to eat. Red dot on a yellow beak suggests pecking, or since we are talking about a reflex, red dot on yellow beak compels pecking in the hungry chick. Except it turns out that there are other perceptions that compel even more pecking. Affordances can be hacked. It turns out that more compelling than the naturally occurring red dot at the base of a parent’s yellow beak are several red lines drawn at the tip of a yellow rod. This, this is the better parent, at least if determined by the vigor of pecking made by the hungry gull chicks (Tinbergen & Perdeck).

Two very handsome birds!! From the article “A Taste for the beautiful: Latent aesthetic mate preferences for white crests in two species of Australian grassfinches by Burley and Symanski. See the link in the text.

The finding that the “best” stimulus for eliciting a reflex might not be a naturally occurring stimulus is captured by the idea of a supernormal stimulus. Basically, a supernormal stimulus is to reflexes what functional fixedness is to insight learning. Glue a long, white feather to a male grass finch’s head, and it becomes very attractive to females (Burley & Symanski). Provide a nesting oyster catcher with an unnaturally large egg, and it becomes the preferred egg to brood. Provide a female platyfish with a male to which you’ve affixed an artificial “sword tail,” and that males become highly desirable, compared to the normally swordless males (Basolo). There are many examples of supernormal stimuli that have been researched, and like visual illusions they tell us something about how our minds construct their beliefs about the world. In the case of affordances – that recursive network of perceptions to actions — whether we are aware of the whispered suggestions or not, our minds are an ecosystem of hows-to-engage.

Memes… So much said in such minimal visuals.

Now, though, I would like to pivot. Normally, affordances are thought of in terms of exteroceptive perception, or perception of the world “out there.” A chair, the smell of baked bread, an approaching bear “suggests” certain types of behavior… and remember, emotions are a behavior. But we also have perceptions of the world “in here.” That it, we have feelings. Emotions in other words are both a suggested action, but also a perception. So, a reasonable question is what sorts of affordances are attached to these interoceptive perceptions. What are the affordances of anger, of delight, of boredom, of hunger, of body aches and a runny nose? I am going to argue for a couple of possibilities. First interoceptive states / perceptions broadly structure sets of behavior into behavior systems. Second, interoceptive states suggest certain types of memory recall (and yes, “remembering” is an action). Third, interoceptive states are fundamentally responsible for turning exteroceptive description into interpretation. That is, just as our brains actively fill in the blind spots of our exteroceptive, visual world, one of the actions called up by our interoceptive states is projection. We’ll get to all of these in the next blog post.

Emotions as compass

Outdoor teaching tents are a kind of defiance.

It has been a while since the last post. The start of a school year during a pandemic has a way of soaking up one’s attention. Daughters looking for jobs and starting their own semesters amidst a pandemic. Friends moving to new cities and starting graduate programs in the middle of a pandemic. Friends ill, brothers nurturing their own children, parents navigating potential transitions…all under the weight of our shared pandemic. It did not need to be this way, of course. In the U.S. we have a leadership that understands no laws other than grievance and the accumulation of power. A virus? Fires? Hurricanes? Wind storms? You can’t sue them away. You can’t wish them away. You can’t have a fixer pay them off or have a tabloid buy up the stories and bury them. You might try to pin the blame on someone else, hide the data and do it some more, distract, and include others in your narrative so as to hide your own failure. But the behaviors that work in human social networks — status, money, grievance, power, humiliation, deceit — they have no bearing on the forces that create pandemics. While water inexorably fills the hull of the boat, the captain from his helicopter claims that the boat is just fine, and his crew, from their own lifeboats, tell the stranded passengers how great freedom is.

Just a few thoughts.

But I will say this. I teach at a liberal arts college in New York. In the lead up to the semester, tents were erected, like domed mushrooms, across the campus. Students trickled in over August. Tested, and tested again. Professors nervously watched the news as university after university after university shut down due to Covid outbreaks. And yet, on the first day of our semester, in the early morning dew, there were the students in their masks under the tents attentive and ready. And there were the professors, masked, with their voices gently spilling out from the tents. I don’t know. It gave me chills, because in some ways in the face of nature, all we have is culture. An assertion not of power, but of accumulated hope — hope passed down from one generation to the next across centuries. “This is what I know, this is what was given to me, and I hope that you will go further.”

These are our visceral perceptions — a Compass Rose, tuned not to the earth’s magnetic fields and rotation, but to value (or need or fitness) and arousal
“Compass Rose Prague” by Mark Morgan Trinidad B is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In my last post on visceral perception, I pointed out the difficulty we have in placing these perceptions. They can appear to be free-floating; given or owned, rather than embedded. If our visceral perceptions are particularly difficult to place within our psyche’s maps, perhaps it might help to consider them as less a feature of a space and more as a type of compass. If our exteroceptive perception is like a bed, our interoceptive perceptions are the IKEA instructions on how to assemble the bed, clean the bed, sleep in the bed. Let’s unpack this idea.

We all know that our perception of taste is somehow “for” ingestion. Or to use the language I’ve been proposing: taste informs and constructs beliefs about sweetness, saltiness, sourness, and so forth. These beliefs mediate our navigation through a landscape of ingestible items. I write this while eating a chocolate walnut cookie and savoring the chalky, musky sweetness that I recognize as chocolate, a cultural artifact born of agriculture, fermentation and global supply chains. Similarly we recognize that our perception of touch relates to and constructs beliefs about comfort, warmth, safety, object qualities, and pain. In Harlow’s famous studies young monkeys preferred “surrogate mothers” that felt a particular way. Any of us that had a favorite blanket or stuffed animal as a kid, will remember that touch was a significant contributor to the safety that was experienced from the object. We know that our perception of vision concerns beliefs about distance, size, color, shape, and so forth.

Does the child perceive depth? Does the child fear the perceived cliff? We know that visual perception is for one of these. But where does the fear come from? What is the origins of its perception?
“File:NIH visual cliff experiment (cropped).png” by From Gibson and Walk (1960). Copyright 1960 Nature Publishing Group. is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Consider for example, the visual cliff experimental paradigm. Here, an animal (or young child) is placed on a small platform, a portion of which has a strong pattern covering its surface, and a portion of consists of a piece of plexiglass with the same pattern in view on the floor below. A caregiver stands on the other side of the plexiglass, and beckons for the animal / child to approach. The experimental paradigm has primarily been used to examine when perceptions of depth 1) develop and / or 2) when they relate to beliefs about safety.

But notice what I did with each of my examples. Chocolate was not only tasted but “savored.” Touch did’t simply relate to texture but to “comfort.” And vision doesn’t simply perceive depth (itself a constructed belief), but also relate to feelings of “risk / safety.” Savoring, comfort, and risk — these are feelings, visceral perceptions that in one form or another layer on top of the world a personal sense of relative value.

So, let’s start bluntly and simply. What type of perception are feelings? They are the category of perceptions that relate to and construct our beliefs about value and arousal.

Let’s get a bit clearer on terms. By value, here, I roughly mean valence or desirability of a perceived situation – the degree of pleasantness / unpleasantness. When something produces a perception that has a positive valence, then we “want” it. We “appreciate” it. We “enjoy,” “like,” “envy,” and / or “covet” it. Conversely, when we perceive a negative valence about a feature of the external world, we “hate” it. We find it “unpleasant,” “obnoxious,” “nasty” and / or “unsatisfying.” In either case we engage in behaviors that will maintain, protect and nurture features with a positive valence, and we engage in behaviors that eliminate, avoid, and alter features with a negative valence.

Aside 1: By the way, dissatisfaction with the one’s self suggests that we perceive our selves as an external object much like we perceive a slice of cake as an object. There is the perception; and there is the feeling. Whether and when self-perception arises is a fascinating question. Does a child perceive itself as an external object amenable to alteration? Does an elephant or a dolphin? On the other hand, this says nothing about the emotional valence attached to the purported self (beyond self preservation). After all, one one of the tropes of adolescence is the emergence of a visceral perceptions of worth that layer value beliefs onto the self. It’s a complicated topic, but if you are interested start here, here, and here. For the purposes of this blog post, though, lets just recognize that the perception of a self is a separate perception than the visceral beliefs that we experience relative to that self. As ever, too, we should expect variation around these two categories of perception. Some aspects of sociopathy (i.e., antisocial personality disorder) and narcissistic personality disorder, for example, might suggest differences in certain normative, visceral perceptions of their selves (for Narcissism, for sociopathy ]

From Reiss and Marino (2001). Figure 4 with caption as follows:
“Mark-directed behavior by subject to a real mirror immediately after release from being marked. A narrow Plexiglas mirror, 41.9 cm × 101.6 cm × 0.32 cm is affixed in a vertical orientation to the exterior of one of the reflective walls (Wall 6). During this session, the mirror was the best reflective surface in the subject’s environment. The faint white line on the wall indicates the location of mirror. (B) The dolphin at Wall 1, the best reflective surface in the session, exhibiting late sham-directed behavior: a continuous and repetitive sequence of 12 dorsal-to-lateral-ventral flips exposing the location of the sham-marked area of his body, the underside and tip of the right pectoral fin, to the reflective surface. This unusual behavioral sequence continued for 32 sec.”

Back to our terms, though. If value refers to valence, to what does arousal refer? Arousal refers to the relative energetic readiness of the individual. This readiness might be actual or expected. For example, we might find something incredibly enjoyable, but find ourselves simultaneously in a state of low arousal. Everything is finished and nothing needs to be done! Think of lying in a comfortable bed on a Saturday, knowing that you don’t have the day off, for example. Similarly, we might find something incredibly enjoyable, but find ourselves in a state of high arousal. Think being in the zone while playing basketball or jumping up and down at a live show or going on a rollercoaster. Conversely, we might feel a situation as unpleasant, while being mildly aroused. Think boredom or mild irritation directed at a housemate who forgot to pick up a requested item from the grocery store while out running errands. What though if the housemate regularly forgets to pick up requested items? Well here, the expected energetic output is going to be higher. After all it will take more energy to alter the situation. Irritation becomes anger. Or think of the anxiety connected with being unprepared for a talk that is a month away vs. the panic triggered by a dream in which you are unprepared for a talk that needs to be given in a few minutes (while only partially dressed, of course).

From Russell (1980) Figure 2. This is a best-fit interpretation of subjects rating the relative similarity of the listed emotion terms.

Using the dimensions of value and arousal, psychologists have been somewhat successful in categorizing a broad array emotions. Here is a statistical map created by James Russell in 1980. I say statistical, because it is a map that provides the mathematically simplest categorization of 28 “emotional” terms. Essentially, subjects were asked to either rate the relative similarity of terms or, in this case, to position the terms on the edge of a circle. When this is done emotional categorizations tend to be well-described by the dimensions of arousal and value / valence. More recent work has found that these two dimensions are descriptive even when more objective measures of emotionality are used (e.g., skin conductance, fMRI’s, etc.)

So, one way of approaching visceral beliefs is to hypothesize that they are for value and anticipated arousal. We might say that they layer “meaning” on top of our exteroceptive perceptions, but we should be careful with our claims. Our exteroceptive perceptions are already “meaningful” in the sense that natural selection has designed us to be a species that sees, smells, and hears particular features in of the universe. We do not see magnetic fields or polarized light and we do not hear the ultrasonic calls of bats. Without tools to aid our perception, these features of the world have no “meaning” for our species. Similarly, we are designed to “feel” the world in a particular way. We value status and social belonging and hence perceive feelings that relate to these variables as “meaningful,” while a ferret, ant, or hawk might not. Our feelings (visceral beliefs) concerning social “anxiety” or “covetousness” or “validation” might be psychologically real, but they are ultimately as arbitrary as the color red. In other words, our interoceptive perception doesn’t add meaning so much as orient our selves to the meaning that natural selection has embedded within our psyches.

A Clarification of Terms

In my recent posts I have been using the term “feelings” as interchangeable with “visceral beliefs” and with “emotions.” Let’s be a bit more careful. I am using “feelings” in the colloquial sense as a placeholder for what someone might term emotions and drives. Emotions are perceptions that we label “happiness,” “sadness,” “jealousy,” “anger,” “depression,” “anxiety,” and so forth, while drives are perceptions that we label “hunger,” “thirst,” “lust,”etc. Personally, I think that there are good reasons to lump emotions and motivations into a single perceptual category. I’m fully aware, though, that visceral “feelings” encompass many more phenomena than just emotions and motivations. For example, here is a “map of subjective feelings” produced by Nummenmaa et al (2018).

From Nummenmaa et al (2018). Figure 2. In the analytical vernacular, this figure is given by both an average distance analysis and a cluster analysis. Colored points indicate statistically significant clusters (grey being non-clustered or neutral.

Dizziness, headaches, memorizing a list of terms, and daydreaming all possess particular visceral qualities – in other words, these sensations feel a particular way. The same goes for the sensation of forgetting something previously remembered. In their study, Nummenmaa et al suggest that these visceral feelings can be meaningfully categorized (using a variety of measures) and distinguished from other “feelings” such as anger and hunger.

I don’t necessarily agree with Nummenmaa et al’s clustering and terminology, and I have issues with some of their methodology. For example, we’ll see in a few posts that “wanting” needs to be distinguished from “pleasure,” despite the fact that they are placed within a single cluster here. Also, the study crudely collapses the proprioceptive qualities of behaviors (e.g., eating, shivering, breathing) with language categorized, interoceptive qualities of visceral states (gratitude, despair, sympathy). However, the point of the Nummenmaa et al’s article is well-taken. Our psyches engage in quite a bit of visceral perception. In fact, on some level all perception is visceral, given that it is instantiated in the biology of our bodies. Those philosophers who would distinguish “feelings” from “rationality” would do well to consider whether rationality isn’t simply a particular state of feeling. Similarly, those moralists who would separate body from soul based on the subjective qualities of a “religious experience” would do well to remember that the subjective experience of a religious experience is housed in the body. This says nothing about the origins of those perceptions. If I see a UFO, then it is possible that I am seeing a legitimate alien craft, and if I feel touched by a god, it is possible that I have legitimately been touched by a god. On the other hand, these perceptions, though subjectively real, might be illusions, delusions, or the random firings of neurons during a dream.

For the purposes of the current set of blog posts, though, when I refer to “feelings,” I am using the terms as synonymous to “emotions” / “motivations.” And when I refer to “visceral beliefs,” or “visceral perception,” I am also referring to emotions / motivations. I am not simply using the term emotions, though, because my point is to anchor this concept within both perception and the body. Emotions are perceptions of the body – but not a body as a piece of meat, but a body as a nexus of evolutionary and contextual pressures.