Thanks Martin, I am thinking about your comments. Meanwhile, I am
reposting your chart as a .jpg file (it was originally posted as
a .pict file). Someone asked me how I opened it. I dunno, my
computer just did. Might be easier for some to open this, hope it
works.
- Steve
<from xmca jul 5 2010 Interpersonal movements of emot.jpg>
On Jul 6, 2010, at 5:08 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
Steve,
The diagram is just that, a synoptic look at a long monograph
which I recommend as a good read. Yes, de Rivera was offering a
"structural" - basically structuralist - analysis of the emotions.
The basic idea is that each emotion is a movement, often literal
and if not metaphorical, between two people. Each movement has
both a subject and an object: to put it in very simple terms, I
can push you away in anger, or I can withdraw from you in fear. In
both cases you are the object of the emotion, I am the subject.
The movement is in opposite directions, but in both cases it is
along the dimension of intimacy. Other emotions involve movements
along two other dimensions, which de Rivera names openness and
status. The experience one has as the object of an emotion is
different from ones experience as a subject. I should add that he
has conducted cross-cultural comparisons of emotion.
de Rivera does write about the situatedness of these movements,
though of course even the object of an emotion is in the world for
the person who is a subject. In fact, he argues that each emotion
provides a unique way of understanding a situation. For more of
this I always recommend the article by Hall & Cobey, 'Emotion as
the transformation of world.' So, on this analysis, although an
emotion is an interpersonal movement, and so social, it is *also*
an experience of the situation, and so individual.
I wanted to study moral conflicts, not in the form of what people
say when they are asked to reason about hypothetical moral
dilemmas (a la Kohlberg), but in terms of what people actually do.
One clear component of a real, first-person moral conflict is its
emotionality. How to look at that without reducing it to an
individual subjective experience, chaotic and irrational (the
empiricist approach) - or the result of some intellectual process
of appraisal (the rationalist approach, common among cognitive
psychologists)? What I came to argue was that emotion plays a
central role in conflict: it structures the situation in a way
that is immediate, unreflective, and with a strong sense of
conviction. It is a disclosure, a first way of understanding what
has happened, in action rather than in cognition, and it gives
rise to practical concerns (an impulse to confess, or seek
revenge...). This has many positive aspects, but it also makes it
difficult to see the other person's point of view, or even to
recognize that they *have* a point of view. The conflicts I
studied only got resolved when people talked, even if only to try
to convince one another to do what they considered the right
thing, because then they found out that what they had taken to be
'the facts' were only one interpretation. The values behind the
facts started to become evident. I think many of us would
recognize these characteristics of everyday conflicts.
Martin
On Jul 6, 2010, at 2:33 PM, Steve Gabosch wrote:
Martin, on the interesting chart you modified from de Rivera
(1977) with the 12 pairs of subject/object interpersonal movement
of emotions. It seems to deal with emotions in a
decontextualized way - we don't see the situations that create
these responses. Am I correct in that observation? The pairings
it depicts are thought-provoking, but I don't understand some or
most of them. The whole subject-object structure confuses me.
The premise of the chart that emotions are a way of being engaged
in the world, and that emotions are rational, or have
rationality, makes sense - I am ok with that - but I don't see
how this chart is connected to the world - it seems to detach
emotions from their context. I just see an interesting list of
oppositions and groupings of emotions without explanation. So I
seem to be missing something. Could you explain this chart a
little?
On the topic in this thread, I agree with David K that
abstraction and generalization are two different processes. I am
not convinced yet that Vygotsky was always clear on that
distinction - he seems to conflate the two in Ch 5 in some
places, for example, but seems to have found great relief when he
solved new aspects of this question in Ch 6, criticizing the
block experiments and their thinking at the time for some
important limitations in this regard. At the same time, David
points out the great pressures bearing down on psychologists and
pedologists in the early 1930's, greatly distorting that
conversation. Lots of puzzles to work out in that Ch 5 to Ch 6
transition on concept formation theory.
- Steve
On Jul 5, 2010, at 3:30 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
On Jul 5, 2010, at 4:58 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
an emotion is an interpersonal movement.
systematic structure to the emotions, captured in the diagrams
with dimensions of intimacy, status, and openness.
there is a rationality to emotion - emotion is a way of being
engaged and involved in the world.
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