Towards trainable mental skills for domain-neutral high-performance cognitive reappraisal.
Blessed with the capacity for cognitive reappraisal, one is constantly confronted with some degree of freedom over the emotion they experience in a given of clarity. How does one decide upon an emotion?
Therapeutic considerations dominate literature on cognitive reappraisal, however, performance considerations take a share of pie too. To illustrate the latter, sports psychologists have identified certain emotions as higher performance and lower performance emotions in sport. Some of the results are counter-intuitive and partially incompatible with the therapeutic research. Importantly, it appears that student’s performance emotions in the class differ from athletes. This makes it difficult to generalise about a general theory of performance emotion which can be applied to any arbitrary situation arising, from a political negotiation, to editing a Wikipedia page, to conducting a semiotic analysis in one’s mental space.
Alas hope is not lost. Yerkes–Dodson law is a generalised ‘theory’/law of learning predicted from stress (anxiety) response. Perhaps if we stratified the stress response of students in classrooms, athletes on the track, and other performance scenarios, then mathematically transformed the data to model the stress/anxiety to performance relationship, we may be able to classify emotions based on their impact on human performance in task where novelty, unpredictability, self-inefficacy or a threat of negative social evaluation can be predicted. I’ve been constructing exercises for myself and experimenting with this in cold approach, but this craft’s community doesn’t like that crowd, apparently. It’s a fun exercise in theory of mind, IMO!
anxiety risk management
I’ve been toying with the idea of a risk management framework for rationalists.
The question is, how do you align your willingness to take risks with its ability to do so?
I frame risks in terms of threats to mental well-being, and figure anxiety is good catchall. Then, I practice defensive pessimism to identify what I’m willing to lose before my anxiety level rises to a point of internal dissent. Contrasting my current state to that counterfactual makes me grateful and therefore positive and optimistic. Then, I gamble all of that over a diversified portfolio of risky activities with the highest potential rewards I can muster. I try to convert ~70% of these rewards into non-property gains e.g. learning, happiness, relationships then reinvest the rest in future gambles in so far as my baseline anxiety tolerance level hasn’t rises or fallen. Finally, I don’t explain myself, or rationalise about past decisions. Why?
Comments?
edit: hyperlinks fixed. Thanks for telling me. I added the www.’s originally thinking they were missing, but didn’t test them out.
edit 2: for people this is useful for, I recommend trying out other techniques associated with generalised anxiety disorder and sports (performance) psychology:
To combat the previous cognitive and emotional aspects of GAD, psychologists often include some of the following key treatment components in their intervention plan; self-monitoring, relaxation techniques, self-control desensitization, gradual stimulus control, cognitive restructuring, worry outcome monitoring, present-moment focus, expectancy-free living, problem-solving techniques, processing of core fears, socialization, discussion and reframing of worry beliefs, emotional skills training, experiential exposure, psychoeducation, mindfulness and acceptance exercises
Towards trainable mental skills for domain-neutral high-performance cognitive reappraisal.
Blessed with the capacity for cognitive reappraisal, one is constantly confronted with some degree of freedom over the emotion they experience in a given of clarity. How does one decide upon an emotion?
Therapeutic considerations dominate literature on cognitive reappraisal, however, performance considerations take a share of pie too. To illustrate the latter, sports psychologists have identified certain emotions as higher performance and lower performance emotions in sport. Some of the results are counter-intuitive and partially incompatible with the therapeutic research. Importantly, it appears that student’s performance emotions in the class differ from athletes. This makes it difficult to generalise about a general theory of performance emotion which can be applied to any arbitrary situation arising, from a political negotiation, to editing a Wikipedia page, to conducting a semiotic analysis in one’s mental space.
Alas hope is not lost. Yerkes–Dodson law is a generalised ‘theory’/law of learning predicted from stress (anxiety) response. Perhaps if we stratified the stress response of students in classrooms, athletes on the track, and other performance scenarios, then mathematically transformed the data to model the stress/anxiety to performance relationship, we may be able to classify emotions based on their impact on human performance in task where novelty, unpredictability, self-inefficacy or a threat of negative social evaluation can be predicted. I’ve been constructing exercises for myself and experimenting with this in cold approach, but this craft’s community doesn’t like that crowd, apparently. It’s a fun exercise in theory of mind, IMO!
anxiety risk management
I’ve been toying with the idea of a risk management framework for rationalists.
The question is, how do you align your willingness to take risks with its ability to do so?
I frame risks in terms of threats to mental well-being, and figure anxiety is good catchall. Then, I practice defensive pessimism to identify what I’m willing to lose before my anxiety level rises to a point of internal dissent. Contrasting my current state to that counterfactual makes me grateful and therefore positive and optimistic. Then, I gamble all of that over a diversified portfolio of risky activities with the highest potential rewards I can muster. I try to convert ~70% of these rewards into non-property gains e.g. learning, happiness, relationships then reinvest the rest in future gambles in so far as my baseline anxiety tolerance level hasn’t rises or fallen. Finally, I don’t explain myself, or rationalise about past decisions. Why?
Comments?
edit: hyperlinks fixed. Thanks for telling me. I added the www.’s originally thinking they were missing, but didn’t test them out.
edit 2: for people this is useful for, I recommend trying out other techniques associated with generalised anxiety disorder and sports (performance) psychology:
I try to use these myself!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reappraisal
You have two links (“cognitive appraisal” and “Yerkes-Dodson law”) to www.en.wikipedia.org, which doesn’t exist; they should go to en.wikipedia.org.
This is interesting—is self-reporting a reliable way to measure stress levels, or would cortisol testing be the only way?
These days heart rate variance is likely the best way to measure stress levels.