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- Emotion and Cognition essay by Steven Brownlow
Emotion and Cognition essay by Steven Brownlow
- kennethfolk
- Topic Author
14 years 5 months ago #79225
by kennethfolk
Emotion and Cognition essay by Steven Brownlow was created by kennethfolk
Provocative and well-written essay about emotions. Here is an excerpt:
"All emotions are not anger. Fear is not learned through reinforcement, but through Pavlovian conditioning. Anything associated with predicting future danger or pain becomes feared. With repeated and prolonged exposure to conditioned fear stimuli and nothing bad happening afterwards, you can extinguish fear responses in the prefrontal cortex but the amygdala keeps responding, presumably for the rest of your life.
Fear is not about belief. It's about preparation for danger. You can't talk someone out of being scared, though you can reassure them and expose them to fearful situations without negative consequences, which will eventually lead their prefrontal cortex to stop reacting so strongly. Their amygdala is always ready, though.
Sadness is entirely different. Sadness does not appear to be conditioned at all, and nobody I know has adopted it willingly as a strategy (though a few histrionic people I've met come close to this). I'm not talking about depression, which is based on thinking, but on sadness, which is based on real loss."
Read more:
sgbrownlow.com/emotion-and-cognition/
"All emotions are not anger. Fear is not learned through reinforcement, but through Pavlovian conditioning. Anything associated with predicting future danger or pain becomes feared. With repeated and prolonged exposure to conditioned fear stimuli and nothing bad happening afterwards, you can extinguish fear responses in the prefrontal cortex but the amygdala keeps responding, presumably for the rest of your life.
Fear is not about belief. It's about preparation for danger. You can't talk someone out of being scared, though you can reassure them and expose them to fearful situations without negative consequences, which will eventually lead their prefrontal cortex to stop reacting so strongly. Their amygdala is always ready, though.
Sadness is entirely different. Sadness does not appear to be conditioned at all, and nobody I know has adopted it willingly as a strategy (though a few histrionic people I've met come close to this). I'm not talking about depression, which is based on thinking, but on sadness, which is based on real loss."
Read more:
sgbrownlow.com/emotion-and-cognition/
- IanReclus
- Topic Author
14 years 5 months ago #79226
by IanReclus
Replied by IanReclus on topic RE: Emotion and Cognition essay by Steven Brownlow
This is really great Kenneth, thank you.
I read something recently that this brings to mind:
"Being aware and understanding what's going on in your system and then literally working it through your body, like retraining your body how to calm down, is really useful," Meredith says. For many of her trauma patients, it's a long and intense process. And if it goes untreated? "A lot of people don't heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives. There's a study they did with Vietnam vets who'd had'”clearly'”a lot of trauma during the war. Twenty years later, they measured their levels of pain before and after they showed them intense footage from Vietnam. Pretty much across the board, after they saw this really intense, violent footage from the war, their levels of pain went down. Because when trauma doesn't get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down." Which is why, she explains, "A lot of folks who've survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life."
From: www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/
Just thought you might like it.
I read something recently that this brings to mind:
"Being aware and understanding what's going on in your system and then literally working it through your body, like retraining your body how to calm down, is really useful," Meredith says. For many of her trauma patients, it's a long and intense process. And if it goes untreated? "A lot of people don't heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives. There's a study they did with Vietnam vets who'd had'”clearly'”a lot of trauma during the war. Twenty years later, they measured their levels of pain before and after they showed them intense footage from Vietnam. Pretty much across the board, after they saw this really intense, violent footage from the war, their levels of pain went down. Because when trauma doesn't get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down." Which is why, she explains, "A lot of folks who've survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life."
From: www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/
Just thought you might like it.