PSYC18 Psychology of Emotion

1
PSYC18 - Psychology of Emotion Lecture 10
Professor Gerald Cupchik cupchik_at_utsc.utoronto.ca
S-634 Office Hours Thurs. 10-11, 2-3
T.A. Michelle Hilscher hilscher_at_utsc.utoronto.ca
S-150 Office Hours Thurs. 10-11, 2-3
Course Website www.utsc.utoronto.ca/cupchik
2
Aesthetic Experience Now lets apply this model
to aesthetic experience. Consider your emotional
reactions to unique meanings that are embedded in
or expressed by paintings, plays, stories, films
and so on.
3
Aesthetic Experience You need a proper aesthetic
distance from a work which balances personal
relevance (engagement) and aesthetic
understanding (detachment). If the unique
meaning floods you with emotion, you wont like
the piece and will withdraw.
An artwork, story or play that is personally
valuable permits you to get out your emotions
without being overwhelmed by them.


4
Existential Phenomenology and Emotion
Looking back at the psychodynamic approach we see
that it introduced the importance of reactions to
the unique symbolic meaning (i.e., content or
subject matter) of situations for individuals or
members of groups.
The emotions experienced in a particular
situation remind us of or resonate with earlier
life experiences. In other words, they represent
the tip of the iceberg.
5
Existential Phenomenology and Emotion However,
when the emotional reaction is too powerful, it
will be repressed by the ego and, as a
consequence, the person might not quite know what
is causing their bad feelings. The goal of
therapy is to help the person gain access to both
the feelings and their historic cause. This is
usually accompanied by a catharsis, the release
of emotion that was pent up in the
unconscious. We contrast phenomenology with the
positivist outlook on the world.
6
Positivist Outlook So what is known
is relative to the knower, the knowers own
meanings and measurement tools. So knowing is a
human activity of identifying, relating,
measuring and interpreting data that are selected
and defined by the knower according to the
criterion that he or she selects. We never know
from scratch. Objective knowledge is situated
in prior understanding.
What is real can be measured, calculated or
controlled. Consider the paradox that in its
quest for the physical entity that exists
separate and completely independent of our
conception of it, physical science has been led
to a submicroscopic entity that is so dependent
on our conception of it that existence can only
be indirectly inferred we encounter limits in
our attempt to measure it.
7
Phenomenology Defined as the science of
experience. Phenomenology looks at the effect
of prior understanding on human experience,
including knowing. Phenomena are not univocal
but appear in a multiplicity of ways. Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938) argued that phenomenology
begins with the direct description of experience.
We have direct experience prior to thinking
about it. We must begin with an understanding of
the situation.
8
In this case, we examine the situation in
relation to emotion. For example, fear is (1)
physiological change and... (2) cognitive
appraisal and... (3) avoidance behaviour
but... (4) first and foremost it is fear. It
remains fear during and after scientific
inquiry. Its essential being is its being fear.
It means fear for us. The neurological,
cognitive and behavioural analyses are related to
each other because they all refer to the
structure we call fear.
9
Why has science overlooked this experiential
ontology (defined as the science of being)? By
limiting fear to one aspect of its being, the
physiologist discovers more about fear. The new
discovery might be mistaken as the essence of
fear. For Husserl, we have an intentional
relation to our environment which makes it
intelligible. We dont experience the environment
as an unrelated series of meaningless data to be
subsequently made intelligible and related to one
another. As Gestalt psychology has argued
independently, we experience formal wholes, not
disconnected data.
10
We have an understanding when we have a sense for
the essence of a thing or event. These meanings
are not introspected but are intuited.
Introspection means to look within and is
modelled on observation...and detachment.
According to phenomenology, ideas and feelings
are grasped without distance they are intuited.
You understand directly and immediately. You
see a person as angry. Intuiting permits us
to experience things are intelligible whole and
not just as data. Each of these wholes is
identified and understood against a
spatio-temporal horizon or field.
11
To understand is to situate! The human
environment is always first of all a situation
- an organized hierarchy of wholes. Isolated and
meaningless data are always the results of
analytical abstraction from an original and
organized whole. For Husserl, we experience
phenomena as a whole because the act of
experiencing is holistic. Dont confuse the
part or mechanism of experience with the
experience itself. Phenomenology maintains that
sensing and judging occur simultaneously.