Live data from Hacker News

A Model of Emotion

markpneyer.me

1–10 of 32 posts

Re: A Model of Emotion

#4
a) Hunger is not an emotional state. It may be an input to one's emotional state but I think that its impact is usually quite weak. b) Overly simplistic example-- do mature adults really have such wide ranging emotions during a conversation over whether there is pizza or not in the fridge?

Re: A Model of Emotion

#5

a) Hunger is not an emotional state. It may be an input to one's emotional state but I think that its impact is usually quite weak. b) Overly simplistic example-- do mature adults really have such wide ranging emotions during a conversation over whether there is pizza or not in the fridge?

a) Fair, although I think the author's justification for describing it as such is reasonable. b) Sure, but I don't think maturity is the point. I think the point is to establish a way of thinking about emotions—which I suppose might be more useful the less mature a person you're dealing with.

Re: A Model of Emotion

#6
I didn't find this model particularly compelling compared to the many that have been developed in the psychological and therapeutic literature, or in the esoteric spiritual traditions.

However what I think is valuable, and is what the author is experiencing, is that thinking about emotion and how it works, and developing our own model of it that makes sense of your own experience, is a profoundly helpful thing to do. Developing your own personal model is fundamentally different from learning someone else's, wherever it comes from.

So, whether this model does or doesn't work for you, it may be worth figuring out why, and making your own better one.

Re: A Model of Emotion

#7
post #6

I didn't find this model particularly compelling compared to the many that have been developed in the psychological and therapeutic literature, or in the esoteric spiritual traditions. However what I think is valuable, and is what the author is experiencing, is that thinking about emotion and how it works, and developing our own model of it that makes sense of your own experience, is a profoundly helpful thing to do.…

Can you point to other models that are so clearly and concisely explained? Would really like to read that.

Re: A Model of Emotion

#9
This seems very similar to the old "Happiness = Reality - Expectations" equation. Great reality and low expectations? Large positive number. Poor reality and high expectations? Large negative number. If you want to be happy, then don't expect much, and don't expect often. Unfortunately for happiness, I don't know how to turn off the endless flow of "what if"s my mind produces - the flip side is that I'm always thinking of new things.

Re: A Model of Emotion

#10
A very nice summary of relevant scientific work is

www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Whatever%20next.pdf

Also, thinking fast and slow and other pop-sci books around decision making put a similar model forward. Personally, I am more focused on the active elements of consciousness and I try to use decision as the hermeneutics element rather than subject. Instead of looking at conscious beings like processors that model their environment and act upon that model, I am interested in the long term impact of decisions on behaviour and perception (i.e. my decisions impact the way I perceive the world.) Both models can co-exist. The article linked above has some very interesting links to much more researched models than my intuition.

Clarification: to reinforce my theory, I am wring about decisions when the author looks into emotions!

Post reply on HN