visceral beliefs

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.

Emotions as Possession

Emotions are a form of perception. They are sensations that provide information about the external world, and as perception they are also beliefs about the external world – albeit beliefs that I have been terming “visceral.” So, let’s keep trying to get a handle on how visceral percepts are different from those connected with sight, smell, etc. In this post I’m going to highlight what is known as the assignment of credit problem.

This is a photo of me and my daughters back in 2000 on a trip to Italy. Some of us are travel tired. Some of us are smiling for the camera. And some of us are asking “wuzzat!”

When my daughters were little, around 2-3 years old, I used to carry them on my shoulders while walking down the sidewalk. With their head perched just next to mine, they would often point out at something and say, “Wuzzat?” “A trash can.” “Wuzzat?” “A porch.” “Wuzzat?” “A doggie.” “Wuzzat?” “Ummmm…” What is the word for the structure that supports a swing at the playground?

I bring this story up, because we usually think that our thoughts and behavior are a direct response to the world. We see a red wheelbarrow, we point at it, we name it, we approach it, and lift its handles. We hear a sound to our left, and we turn our eyes to see the friend that has just called out to us. We smell fresh bread, and walking into the kitchen, find a loaf just out of the oven. In other words, our perceptions allow us to build maps of reality…maps that we trust as somewhat true. Yes, artists and philosophers have famously pointed out that these maps are not equivalent to reality — that they merely represent reality. Pointing at the wheelbarrow, whether by word, image or gesture, is not the same as the wheelbarrow, itself. Nonetheless, these mappings contain a high degree of confidence. The image of a pipe is not the pipe, but it is contains a high degree of “pipe”-ness.

This painting by Henri Magritte is justifiably famous as it succinctly makes the point that representations are not the things, themselves. The painting of the pipe contains features of a pipe — color, shadings, etc. — but it is not an actual pipe. Similarly, the percept that our mind registers is also not an actual pipe. It is a belief in pipes — that they exist, have been experienced, have certain qualities, etc. A very simple observation, but one that bears “keeping in mind.” Now, imagine applying the same logic to our emotions. To what do they point?
“Le Trahison des Images – Rene Magritte” bydailymatador is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Emotions, though, don’t quite work this way.

Imagine hearing a sound to your left, someone calling your name. “Mark!” You turn your head to the left, but don’t see anyone. The room is empty. You hear your name called again, though. “Mark!” So, you get up and go over to the nearby table. Is there a speaker here? No. “Mark!” You look under the table; you look up into the lampshade; you tap the side of your head a few times; you press your ear up against a wall. …Nothing. “Mark!”

This is closer to how our feelings call out to us, and it is an important difference between “normal perception” – vision, hearing, smell, etc. — and the perceptions that we term “feelings” – hunger, pain, happiness, fear, disgust, and so on. Namely, if you see a red wheelbarrow among the chickens, you can walk over to it and touch it, measure it, draw it. The red object that you see comes from and is caused by the reality of the wheelbarrow. What though of the feelings that you register? What are their origins? Why are they happening? Do they belong to me?

Bethel, Ohio 3000 years ago? Actually, it is Agamemnon and Achilles riled up and ready to come to blows. Agamemnon will claim that his actions were not his, but rather the result of spiritual possession, i.e., inconvenient emotions. This image is a mosaic uncovered in Pompei and is in the public domain. Original mosaic housed at the Naples Museum.

There is in fact a long history of denying that feelings belong to the individual. Here is a famous passage from Homer’s Iliad that captures this externalizing of emotions. Agamemnon, the main chieftain of the Greek forces, in a fit of jealousy has taken for himself a war prize (i.e., the woman, Briseis) that “rightfully belongs” to Achilles. In response Achilles has taken his warriors and refused to participate on the battlefield. In this passage, Agamemnon and Achilles are reconciled, with Agamemnon blaming his actions on emotions planted in him by Zeus, Erinys and Ate.

Full often have the Achaeans spoken unto me this word, and were ever fain to chide me; howbeit it is not I that am at fault, but Zeus and Fate and Erinys, that walketh in darkness, seeing that in the midst of the place of gathering they cast upon my soul fierce blindness on that day, when of mine own arrogance I took from Achilles his prize. [90] But what could I do? It is God that bringeth all things to their issue. Eldest daughter of Zeus is Ate that blindeth all—a power fraught with bane; delicate are her feet, for it is not upon the ground that she fareth, but she walketh over the heads of men, bringing men to harm, and this one or that she ensnareth.

The Iliad, Samuel Butler Translation at Tufts Perseus

In other words, Agamemnon is suggesting that the conflicted state that caused his actions — the pride he felt in himself, and the jealousy he felt toward Achilles –originated from the gods. The emotional turbulence is not owned by him; it does not represent him; but rather was imposed on him by outside forces.

This is actually a pretty common attitude. Here is another passage taken from a work some 1,700 years later. Hamlet (Act V, Scene ii). In the passage, Hamlet is preparing to duel with Laertes, the son of a man that Hamlet has earlier mistakenly murdered in a fit of paranoid, antic rage. Prior to the duel, Hamlet publicly asks Laertes for forgiveness. However, he does so by essentially pleading insanity.

And you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d
With sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.

Hamlet from the Complete Works of Shakespeare housed at MIT

Hamlet’s understanding of his own emotions is essentially no different from Agamemnon’s. It’s the “I don’t know what came over me,” or the “it wasn’t me, it was the alcohol speaking.” It’s what will lead philosophers to place feelings and emotions outside of reason. Animals might possess emotions, but we humans are capable of reasoning…except when those pesky animalistic emotions get in the way.

Feelings, though, are simply another type of perception. We don’t say that vision or taste is somehow animalisitic. We simply accept that vision and taste are processes that help us construct and relate to the external world. Feelings are no different.

Except they are.

Imagine that when my daughters pointed out at the world and exclaimed, “Wuzzat,” imagine if I, their father, could not directly see what they were pointing at. “Wuzzat?” …pain? …hunger? …sadness? I don’t have direct access to their perception, so in this situation, I would have to ask for more information and make an educated guess. Is it coming from your belly? Your foot? Does this help? Does that? In other words, feelings, i.e., visceral perception, are different from other types of perception in that they harder to localize within a Euclidean, causal space. A ball leaves a bat and flies through the air in a particular trajectory. We see this trajectory; we hear the connection of the bat with the ball; we sense the tactile impact of the ball hitting a glove. And yet, just describing this trajectory took years of effort by physicists. But what is the trajectory of an emotion? That sadness or happiness or anxiety or anger? What are it’s contours? In what space does it reside? What is really causing it and what forces bend its coursings?

Ceci n’est pas une emotion. I say that jokingly…sort of. The point is that the representation of interoceptive perceptions is not at all straight forward. Spoken language, after all, involves exteroceptive cues. Written language exteroceptive cues. What is the appropriate language for translating emotions? Photo is of a sculpture, “Composite Wing” by Jon Shearin, which is part of the Art on Main Exhibit in Chattanooga, TN

In psychology, this ambiguity of cause is sometimes referred to as the “assignment of credit” problem. The assignment of credit problem is a mapping problem. At any given moment perception offers up a cacophony of inputs. Depending on a task, our psychological filters remove dampen and discard certain inputs, magnify others, behaviors occur, and the world changes. The assignment of credit problem has to do with the psyche’s task of determining need, determining cause, and determining a path that satisfies need. What exactly caused the world to change? What inputs were relevant? What is the shape of the closet in which you are placing the hangers of your belief?

There are many classic experiments in psychology that get at the assignment of credit problem. Importantly, though, and relevant to understanding the landscape of visceral perception, psyches rarely simply guess. Rather, animals come into the world with particular biases. [1] Rats shocked after drinking flavored water while lights are flickering, will “assume” that the flickering lights are the cause of their pain. But rats made nauseous after drinking flavored-tasting water while lights are flickering will “assume” that the taste is the cause of their distress. (Garcia & Koelling, 1966. See this article for a description and some general applications.). [2] Male college students asked to complete a survey by a young woman on a high footbridge are much more likely to call that woman later, than if she approached them on a low footbridge. The most accepted explanation is that on the high bridge, the young men “assume” that their anxious arousal is caused by the woman, rather than by the bridge height. (Dutton & Aron, 1974. The phenomenon is often termed “misattribution of arousal,” and is the reasoning behind the folklore notion of taking a date to a scary movie or to an amusement park as a means of getting them to “like you.”

For the purposes of this blog post, though, let’s just appreciate how much guessing our psyches engage in. Or if not guessing, then biased cartography. For the rat, either or both light and taste could be the cause of their discomfort. But the “space” in which this visceral perception exists causes nausea to be ascribed to taste and shocks to be ascribed to visual cues. There was no choice on the part of the rat. No reasoning. A visceral perception appeared from nowhere and the psyche attributed it to a particular antecedent. Spiritual possession, then, or natural selection? And of course, in both cases the rat is wrong. The nausea is not related to taste, and the pain is not related to flickering lights. These connections are an illusion created by the experimenter. Nonetheless, the feelings are undoubtedly real for our poor rat and exist to inform the animal of characteristics of the environment and actions that impact these characteristics.

By the way, this notion of biased cartography is captured in psychology by notion of a “rule of thumb” or psychological “heuristic”. For example, items that we can more readily remember are felt to be more probable. This is termed the “availability heuristic” and influences the judgement that getting on an airplane is riskier than getting in a car. First of all, we get in cars much more often than we get on airplanes, and second, we are more likely to have read about airline accidents than car accidents. Therefore, the “availability” of a memory of an accident is higher when getting on a plane than when getting in a car. Or as another example, losses elicit more arousal (i.e., “feeling”) than equivalent gains, which leads us to avoid losses and demand more for items in our possession than what we paid for them ourselves. I might feel that pen is worth $1.00 when you have it, but feel like I should receive $1.50 when it’s mine. This is known as the endowment effect.

The endowment effect, the availability heuristic, and other seemingly structural mental short-cuts all relate to the assignment of credit problem. Our visceral perceptions are something like phantoms in a house of mirrors, apparently free-floating and existing only to confuse the clarity of “true,” “rational” perception. And yet there is a form to the space in which they reside. A structured supply chain built up by natural selection in the same way that vision has been built up by natural selection. That emotional vigilance you feel? Well, it might be love or it might be fear. As with vision, natural selection and your individual experience will step in to help you make the bet.

This is a loaded dice from Medieval London. The image shows the six sides. Good luck getting a 1, 2 or 3! Our visceral perceptions exist in a similar, biased landscape. Best guesses being assembled that map “need” to cause to action.
“File:A late Medieval to Post Medieval bone cuboid false dice dating 15th-16th century. (FindID 872260).jpg” by The Portable Antiquities Scheme, Stuart Wyatt, 2017-10-30 14:26:13 is licensed underCC BY 2.0

On Being a Neighbor

The other week I was having lunch with a friend. This was just as fear of the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning its tidal flow here in the U.S. – an approaching moon’s gravity pulling at our collective conscious. My friend asked me what I thought it would mean to be a “good neighbor” during a pandemic. It’s a great question: what does it mean to be a good neighbor? Here is Mr. Rogers’ version of the question:

I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you,
I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.

So let’s make the most of this beautiful day,
Since we’re together, we might as well say,
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won’t you be my neighbor?

Won’t you please,
Won’t you please,
Please won’t you be my neighbor?

by Dr. François S. Clemmons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

The request to be a neighbor is a question of values, not beliefs. To answer Mr. Roger’s question in the affirmative is to choose a value, because to choose to be a neighbor is something independent of feelings. In fact values, as I am defining them, exist in spite of feelings. Let me explain what I mean.

In many of the posts I’ve put up on this blog so far, I have spoken of beliefs. I’ve suggested that perceptual illusions exist because of “beliefs,” and that reflexes exist as “beliefs,” and that emotions are “visceral beliefs.” When a doctor taps my knee, and my foot jerks forward, this behavior shows a “belief” that maps the stretch of a ligament with falling. When I see the Mueller-Lyer lines as being of unequal length, this judgment shows a “belief” that maps angles to depth. And when I feel fear or anger or disgust, these are visceral beliefs that map a situation to perceptions of particular types of risk and that elicit avoidance / elimination behaviors.

Here is an important distinction, though: beliefs are not the same as values.

A belief is a perceptual conjecture or a hypothesis about the causal structure of the world – one that originates from each individual’s unique set of experiences and/or our species’ shared evolutionary experiences. Beliefs are inferences updated (or not) from experience. Values, though, are aspirational. They are less a conjecture about the world, and more a hope for the world. This is a crucial point, especially when it comes to our emotions / feelings. So let me state it again: feelings (visceral beliefs) are not values.

We have visceral beliefs, i.e., “feelings,” that pertain to status, relative self-importance, relative need for resources, and so on. If I feel that I am of a higher status than another individual, I might also feel that my needs are more important, or that actions that harm that other person are justified. These beliefs are not so much chosen as they are free-floating in the contingencies of our environments. (Remember, “contingencies” refer to the selective forces of history). Just as we don’t choose to see a visual illusion, we don’t, in the moment, choose our feelings. They simply happen.

Feelings or values?
A group of teenage girls scream obscenities in front of their Montgomery, Alabama school against desegregation, 1963. (Photo by © Flip Schulke/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images). Used with permission.

Values, though, are those principles which we have self-chosen, from within the boundaries of our individual contexts, of course. They define how we would like to act. They are our ideals — the person we would hope to be.

Values might coincide with visceral beliefs (feelings) and/or they might conflict with these beliefs. It is easy to be gracious from a position of strength. Less so from a position of vulnerability. This is why Rambert in the section from The Plague says, “You two,” he said, “I suppose you’ve nothing to lose in all this. It’s easier, that way, to be on the side of the angels.” Rambert, remember, has been seeking to escape the quarantine of the plague in order to return to his love in Paris. He is stating that it is easy for the Rieux and Tarrou to courageously stay and take care of the sick because they have no cost. In this sense, their beliefs align with their values. For Rambert, though, the visceral love he feels for his wife is at odds with staying to help combat the plague. At the end of the section I provided in the last post he learns that he is mistaken.

I bring this up because crises trigger feelings – some heroic and some shameful. We have leaders inciting fear and directing it at others. So, we have President Trump speaking of the “China Virus,” we have Secretary of State Pompeo speaking of the “Wuhan Virus,” we have senators darkly hinting that SARS-CoV-2 was released from a secret Chinese lab, and we have accusations from Chinese officials that covid-19 was brought to China by the American military. Closer to home (for me, at any rate), we see individuals attempting to escape the horror of widespread, indiscriminate death by linking it to “positives.” So, the President of Vassar College recently tweeted out “How many lives has coronavirus saved in China due to less pollution? Ironic” (Tweet has since been deleted). To her credit she immediately apologized, and I suspect she regrets the feelings that motivated the original posting. Further, it is also quite possibly feelings that lead one to “smugly” point out that the “Spanish Flu” that killed millions world-wide in the early 20^th c. occurred in Kansas, or suggest that isn’t it ironic that the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 momentarily decreased oil consumption because of the aviation shutdown. As if this helps anything — raises one’s status or makes one appear more knowledgeable.

Again, to refer back to the quote from The Plague, it is indeed like a single record that gets played over and over and over. Blame. Diversion. Dry intellectualization. The desire to be “right.” However, I would be hesitant to judge any of these reactions. After all, although the the reactions are perhaps problematic, they are also tragically human — behaviors, comments, and tweets driven by the machinery of our Homo sapien psyches.

Here, after all, is the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Warning, the video shows individuals suffering…it also shows doctors and nurses doing their part to care for those who are suffering. And here is an image that shows a row of military vehicles lined up along an Italian street. Are they bringing in needed resources? No. They are carrying away bodies.

And here is an image of Dr. Li Wenliang, who died in the service Chinese patients, many of whom also succumbed from COVID-19. As Rieux says in The Plague, “There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of righting a plague is common decency.”

These images evoke feelings, and some of those feelings are unpleasant, meaning our psyches recoil and search for ways to escape their input. Blame. Raise the drawbridge. Dehumanize. Ignore. Become wary. And these reactions may in fact align with one’s values. They do not, though, align with values that recognize every individual, regardless of status and tribe membership, as unique, valued and equally bounded by death. Values centered on healing, self-sacrifice, and the preciousness of our limited time, rather than self-protection and self-aggrandizement.

Does psychology have anything to say about this interaction of “feelings” and values? It does actually, and I’ll get to that in the next post.

Does a chameleon feel its colors? Read on!

Not all beliefs are spoken – at least not in the way that I’ve been unpacking the term so far in this blog. We have beliefs that we articulate, but we also have beliefs concerning what we see and hear. We have beliefs about what is in the future (anticipations, predictions, hopes, expectations, etc.) and beliefs about what has transpired in the past (memories, post-hoc rationalizations, etc.). Our consciously experienced reality is in a sense nothing but belief – a constructed amalgam of history within which we each reside…indeed, within which the totality of our lived existence transpires. We see an external world, but that external world is constructed for us according the imperatives of a history embodied in the form of an eye, the tunings of neurons, and the expectations of experience. At some point I do want to pivot and think through what sort of freedom and responsibility this science permits, because I don’t think that it therefore follows that anything goes – that the mechanistic churnings of historical contingency eradicate morality or freedom. More that these things are a choice and can’t merely be taken for granted. In answer to question from Waterland a few posts back, “Does this mean that the individual never happened / doesn’t matter?” No. But we can only make that assertion when we understand what, exactly, that individual is.

So, I’d like to sit a bit longer with how our embodied beliefs of psyche are constructed. This post is going to start rummaging through a set of perceptions I’m going to term “visceral beliefs.” These are things like pain, emotions, motivations (hunger, thirst, fatigue), but I’m going to focus on emotions in this post.

This past week it just so happens that I went to see “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” with my parents. A few days later we went to hear a performance of excerpts from Handel’s Messiah. The connection? Emotion. When I was a kid – maybe 10, I remember the first time that I heard Handel’s Messiah. It was on a set of vinyl records (I think). Anyway, what I remember is not being able to get enough of the shivers the music sent through me – a weave of layered voices, voices calling out and responding, solitary and unified, and yeah, that Hallelujah chorus! I don’t know how my parents stayed sane, because my memory is of playing the vinyl records over-and-over-and-over-and-over. The reaction I remember having then, is the same reaction that I’ve since had watching an athlete perform at an the unexpected level, or a child returning with bandages to help an injured animal, or a group of people rising to stand in solidarity with an individual, or a red car in space with earth in the background. That reaction, that emotion is something that I connect to potential. A participatory wonder and exhilaration in raw human potential.

The world, though, isn’t necessarily designed for wonder. A book that I once assigned for a seminar, entitled Reality is Broken, essentially argues the societal imperatives of the 21^st c. U.S. have minimized the emotions of wonder and exhilaration. Specifically, essential motivations connected with feelings of autonomy, competence, and meaningful social interactions have been removed from our daily experience. This is why, according to the author Jane McGonigal so many individuals have turned to games and virtual environments. Only in these environments do they encounter the sense of raw potential that they crave. In a sense this theme is no different from that found in the book The Giver. A colorlessness. An imposed blindness. And this is how “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” comes in. The movie is essentially an episode of Mr. Rogers for adults. An emotionally stunted, “blinded” protagonist learns to attend to his emotions, to accept them, and to own their meaning. Mr. Rogers is the guide, and the protagonist follows him into a place of, well, new potential. What was unseen becomes seen. As William Carlos William’s writes:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

Something I drew a long time ago: charcoal on paper

This poem is partially about seeing. Noticing. Attending, and it is a beautiful poem. I’m mentioning it, though, because a similar poem could be written for the perceptions that we label “emotions.” So much depends upon a feeling of sadness, or a feeling of joy, or a feeling of contentment, or a feeling of urgency. If a wheelbarrow is worthy of notice – and it is – then the emotional landscapes we inhabit are equally worthy of notice.

Emotions are curious things. We are taught the need to control them, and some of us even have a fear and an embarrassment of them. An emotional reaction to emotion! Classically, too, emotions have been held to be in opposition to reason. Reason = good = human. Emotions = bad = animalistic. The thing is, though, emotions are merely another type of perception. They are really no different from vision or smell or hearing. Would we say that vision = bad = animalistic? And yet to denigrate emotional information is really no different from purposefully wearing a blindfold throughout the day.

But what kind of information is contained in an emotion? Well, as I pointed out a while back, our perceptions are constructed things. They are beliefs about the world, and illusions are fun because they remind us of this fact. I apparently have beliefs about color and shade and times of day, and these beliefs construct for me a gold and white dress where others have constructed within their psychological interior a blue and black dress. Likewise, the Hermann grid illusion produces beliefs about discolorations that are not actually present.

This is an illusion that is apparently created by the manner in which our brains respond to vertical and horizontal lines.

Emotions, too, are a form of perception. They don’t “just happen” any more than yellow and white dresses “just happen.” Emotions are constructed things. They are a perception or set of beliefs, albeit of visceral sensations. So, in that sense (ha! intended pun, there) emotions are visceral beliefs. In fact, I’d argue that the term “visceral belief” is a much more accurate expression than “emotion.” Here is the entymology for “emotion“:

1570s, “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation,” from Middle French émotion (16c.), from Old French emouvoir “stir up” (12c.), from Latin emovere “move out, remove, agitate,” from assimilated form of ex “out” (see ex-) + movere “to move”

Culturally, then, emotions are things that cause agitation – a stirring up from the inside. However, is gratitude a type of “stirring up” from the inside? Is depression? Is contentment? Or let me ask a different question. Is “age” an emotion? Is it a motivation? Is it a belief? From the perspective of psychology the answer is yes and yes and yes. Age is a visceral thing. A set of visceral stimuli that we psychologically “read,” build upon, learn about, and fit like a puzzle piece into cultural / social systems. In other words, we feel it. We might not attend to the feelings of “age” or have any basis for comparison or prefer to look at its “sensation scale” (i.e., more or less feelings of age / youth) from one direction vs. another, but regardless, age is a sensation, a perception that originates in the body. “Youth is wasted on the young.” “I am 40 years young.” “I’m really feeling my age, today.” All of these expressions relate to the feelings that we term “age.”

These feelings of “age” are real, and age is certainly both an objective measure as well as a feeling. But when we use that word “feeling” what we are speaking of is a perception that originates in the body. If vision is a set of constructed beliefs about “things out there,” feelings are a set of constructed beliefs of “things in here” – where “here” is the body you inhabit. The precise terms are exteroceptive vs interoceptive stimuli. Exteroceptive stimuli are those that originate from outside the body, while interoceptive stimuli originate from within the body. Interoceptive stimuli are the change in body temperature, the constriction of blood vessels, the beat of the heart, the tingling rush of adrenalin, the vertigo, the rise of body hair, the rhythm of a walk, the roil of the stomach.

Here’s a diagram showing how perception is (at the very least) determined by both exteroceptive and interoceptive cues. Exteroceptive cues refer to information that originates outside the body, while interoceptive cues refer to information that originates inside the body. We call the latter “feelings.”

Here is a figure to help visualize all of this. Perception is the category of experience given by our senses. Some of those senses respond to information that originates outside the body (sound waves, light waves, chemicals, pressure, etc.) while some of those senses respond to information that originate from inside the body. This latter category is what I’m terming visceral beliefs, and emotions are one type of visceral belief. Others are states like “hunger,” “thirst,” “ennui,” “age,” and so on.

I’ll quickly explain the other boxes, but I don’t want to dwell on them right now. Homeostatic state refers to the fact that our bodies are designed to monitor particular “needs.” Some of these needs are common to other animals. We monitor salt, and when we “need” salt, we crave it, and it tastes particularly good. We monitor temperature, and when we “need” temperature, warmth feels particularly good and we take actions to procure it. These homeostatic needs partly define the type of animal that we happen to be (Homo sapiens), and so we have social needs that, for example, might be absent from a turtle, and as mammals we engage in nurturing and attachment in ways that I would categorize as “motivational” (i.e., connected with homeostatic “need”). Finally, behavioral systems refers to the species typical way that we satisfy our homeostatic needs. Do we hunt in packs? Do we play? Do we perform mating rituals? Finally, learning, of course, can layer all sorts of complexity into this system, but as a starting point, it’s a decent way to begin thinking about the mechanisms constructing our psyche.

Here’s an exteroceptive cue that might just start interacting with motivational states and interoceptive cues to produce the feeling “Mmmmmm.”

Emotions and feelings are visceral beliefs. A kind of perception that originates within the body, and which is built up from basic processes and learned expectations. Sometimes we attend to these “feelings” and at other times we do not, just like sometimes we attend to the clouds in the sky and sometimes we do not. Sometimes we purposefully “look away” from feelings in the same way that we might look away from a panhandler, or we learn to ignore feelings in the same way that we learn to ignore the train that passes by every night at 4:00. We feel tired, but push on through the night in order to complete an assignment. We feel sad, but believe that sadness is “weak” and ignore the sensations. The point is that just as the room you visually inhabit is partially constructed from color and lines and assumptions of depth, the emotional room you inhabit is constructed from the stuff of the body.

Soapbox Aside: I’ve been meaning to remind everyone that when it comes to psychology, we need to be careful about ascribing a particular state to everyone. Just as some individuals are “color blind,” not everyone experiences empathy or fear or anxiety. Not everyone experiences pain the way that you do. Some people see colors when they hear music. Some people experience extreme disgust to situations to which others merely shrug their shoulders. Some people are attracted to women. Some are attracted to men. But “men” and “women” are variable categories, too. Some are tall. Some are short. Some have penis-like appendages. Some don’t. There’s no such thing as a “real” woman or a “real” man. Not in any scientific sense, and most of us do know this when we pause to think about it, but there is a tendency to get sloppy. For example, the other day I was listening to the radio and a very reputable commentator said, “I believe that everyone is fundamentally good.” Depending on what the commentator meant, the odds are that, no, not everyone is fundamentally good. If the commentator meant that everyone has “fellow feeling,” that is wrong. Most might possess this perception, but there is variance. Some experience it more often, while others experience it less often. On the other hand, perhaps the commentator meant that all humans have the potential to be “good,” or the commentator might be using short-hand for a belief that all individuals possess “value,” but that is a very different thing that saying that everyone is fundamentally good. The latter statement is passive, shirks responsibility and is simply inaccurate. Variance is the norm, even if broad strokes (e.g., averages, medians, modal frequencies) allow for certain generalities. Speaking of which, there is a realted generality known in psychology at the fundamental attribution error. This a tendency for people to allow variance for themselves, while dismissing it for others. Why did you do poorly on the test? Because you didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Why did that other person do poorly on the test? Because they are stupid, lazy, a member of a racial category, etc. In this blog, if I make overarching generalizations I am either being lazy, or I am trying to make a broad point as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it makes sense to refer to averages, but it is important to always remember that there is almost always variance around and average, and that variance is normal.