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Re: [xmca] Emotions and culture

Mabel and Larry focus on what I think is a key issue in understanding  
emotion. First, that emotions are generated in time, as a process. It  
is a process in which we ourselves are ACTIVE, and not, as in some  
folk theories taken over into psychological models, merely reacting to  
external events and conditions. Second, its genesis takes place over  
multiple timescales. There is the very short term, moment-to-moment,  
rise and fall of various feelings, their layering onto one another,  
the transitions from one to another. Then there is a longer-term  
tendency, closer to the mood of the "moment" (which is a much longer  
moment than the first timescale), which may define a trend in the  
progression of our feelings. And this in turn is coupled more into the  
situation and setting, who else is there, what is going on, what is  
the activity and the goals that we are engaged with. Then further,  
there are still longer term scales, over months or years of our lives,  
which merge more into social processes and the expectations of the  
culture and subcultures, the communities we operate within.

I very much like the idea of ethnographic neuroscience, and I wish  
there were more neuroscientists who did! but they are not trained in  
this way, and it requires a collaboration at least. It is so much  
easier for them to study only short-term, isolated, laboratory- 
controlled events as they appear in their neuro-physiological  
correlates, which makes sense if they imagine that they are looking at  
universal processes, which occur in the same way every time.

But of course they don't, and how they appear is very context  
dependent. At least we know this is the case in terms of how they feel  
to us, and how they emerge over the shorter and longer timescales of  
relevance. It would be very interesting to know what is the same and  
what is different across cases and events, in different situations and  
settings, for "the same" emotional response. This will, I think, be on  
the agenda of the neuroscience of a decade or two from now.

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 1, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Mabel Encinas wrote:


Hi, Larry and all.




Thank you very much Larry, for having introduced Stern. I am not  
into psychoanalysis. I am a Gestalt psychotherapist, and maybe  
because this perspective emphasizes the 'here and now', I realised  
that I had to discuss the present moment, and the performative  
making sense of the situation when I faced the challenge to analyse  
my videos about classroom interaction. Also, I discuss the  
difference of actions that seem intentionally loaded, with others in  
which intentionality is quite contestable. My research is based in  
microanalysis. For being able to study emotions, I decided to study  
Vygotsy's understanding of emotions. Also I found in this analysis  
of video (I did not interview neither the teachers or the students  
about their emotional experience, although I did had long  
conversations with the teachers), that in order to understand  
videos, there was important to find 'whole' situations in which  
emotions were first of all 'evident'. The segments then were from  
about 1 to 4 minutes long, and I then describe them in depth,  
including drawings of the interactions. I study this excerpts as  
developmental in terms of emotions. I already said that the metaphor  
I use is that I study certain threads without taking them away from  
the tissue. In my descriptions, I present the richness of the tissue  
and I relay in the concept of context that weave together (Cole,  
1996). I discuss how emotions emerge and impact the situation, and  
how this impact 'informes' in turn the sense that individuals keep  
making of the situation instant after instant.




My conclusions are more about the way in which emotions can be  
studied, and I pose questions to neuroscience, as I see Stern does!  
I suggest to do 'ethnographic nueroscience'. Stern (2004) says:




" Two kinds of data are needed. First, accurate timing of brain  
activity correlated with phenomenal experiences. Second, the timing  
of th analogic shifts in intensity or magnitude of neural firing  
during the same phenomenal expereinces".




I have to read more about Stern, I would like to understand what are  
the similarities and differences with Vygotsky's thought, and the  
usefulness of Stern's contribution. So far, so good :)



Best wishes,

Mabel


















Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 12:45:44 -0800
From: lpurss@shaw.ca
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: [xmca] Emotions and culture

Hi everyone

I wanted to look at another level of the discourse on emotions.  
This is to add to the recognition of the other levels such as  
institutionally and historically contexts of emotion. This in no  
way minimizes the critical importance of these levels of process  
for understanding emotion.
But, in the same spirit of discourse analysis which loos at the  
micro level of conversation I believe we expand our horizon of  
understanding by exploring the microgenesis of emotions as the  
interface between biology and culture. I have posted before on the  
position of Daniel Stern and the moment by moment generation of  
emotion. Today I want to summarize the thoughts of a DONNEL B.  
Stern to this discussion in his book "Unformulated Experience"

(p.43)When we talk about content or structure or experience it is  
not a THING at all, but a PROCESS, one that has CONTINUITY OVER  
TIME. Some processes have more continuity (organization) some less.  
We act AS IF these discrete abstractions which our folk psychologhy  
labels thoughts, memories, feelings, are REAL but they are socially  
mediated constructions that locates experience in PARTICULAR stable  
ways. Psychoanalysis is interested in how these processes keep  
reproducing experience in similar shapes or patterns through  
interpretive organizing ACTIVITY.
Stern discusses a psychoanalyst "ROY SCHAFER" who attempts to  
translate all psychological events and language games into ACTION  
LANGUAGE to recognize these psychological events as ACTIVITY.  
Schafer chooses not to take this approach because communication  
becomes awkward.

However he does elaborate the processes of REFLECTIVE EXPERIENCE  
(where we stand back from and observe our phenomicological  
processes. Folk psychology (common sense) leaves the impression  
that thoughts and emotions just arrive or leap into existence  
without the DEVELOPMENT of the thought or emotion. In reality each  
moment of experience is a process of emergence (MICROGENESIS) a  
sequence of necessary steps that must occur as experience UNFOLDS.  
Microgenesis, applied to thought and emotion develops from moment  
to moment in a process Donnel Stern calls FORMULATIND THE  
UNFORMULATED. The microgenetic lens emphasizes the developmental  
life (Dewey's "arc") of each present moment OUT OF the experience  
of the recently formulated experience. Conscious, explicit,  
liquistically articulated experience (formulated)emerges from  
activity (verbal and nonverbal) that took place in the preceding  
(sociocultural) moments. This emergence of experience INCLUDING  
THAT PART THAT ARRIVES IN AWARENESS is ORGANIC and CULTURAL and is  
a continuous dynamic process. Sometimes AFTER THE FACT the way one  
moment developed from the PREVIOUS one COMES TO OUR ATTENTION but  
more often it does not.
Donnel Stern uses the terms thought and emotion as heuristic  
devices and stress that he sees these processes as a single process  
of COGNITION (which for him is emotional-thought or thoughtful- 
emotion) Cognition is formulated as a process of emergence within  
sociocultural activity.
William Blake's metaphor "seeing the world in a grain of sand"  
captures the spirit of this inquiry at the microgenetic level. If  
this is seen as the unit of analysis it posits identity,  
subjectivity, and self-ing as emergent in moment to moment  
enactments which become organized into cultural patterns.

I hope this captures the spirit of the relational frame emerging in  
psychoanalytic discourse. They also are elaborating how the micro,  
meso, and macro levels of process develop in particulat historical  
contexts.

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