[Psychologists describe emotions] in terms of a few fundamental dimensions, including valence, arousal, and approach-avoidance.
I didn’t know for sure what any of those were, so I read the wikipedia links.
Valence just means positive or negative (in the affective sense). Arousal is just intensity. Approach-avoidance doesn’t seem any different than valence (note: the link you gave was to approach-avoidance conflicts). From my read, these aren’t 3 dimensions; they’re 1 (real valued).
So the pair of emotion-type (discrete? I don’t know what types there are) and real-valued-valence seems enough.
“Dimensions” because n real values describe an n-dimensional space.
Semantic labels are a way to describe emotions but would not normally be used in conjunction with dimensional descriptions. Typically you would see a 2D arousal-valence emotional space or a 3D arousal-valence-dominance space. (Dominance is a relatively recent addition needed to distinguish some emotions that occupy the same region of arousal and valence: one such pair is anger and fear, both high-arousal low-valence.)
I would say yes. If we take ambivalent to mean “having mixed or contrary ideas about something or someone” like my desktop dictionary defines it, you can definitely feel mild ambivalence (where the two or more conflicting feelings are themselves mild), or intense ambivalence, where you feel strong, painful conflicting emotions about something.
In my original comment I assumed at minimum that you’d have a (probably discrete) type of emotion, and definitely intensity, and maybe valence (no need for polarity if you just add more types). However, it occurs to me now that the intuition supporting discrete types of emotion (because they may be founded in different physical implementations) would also support a many-dimensional continuous strength-of-activation dimension. That is, I see no evidence that there’s only one currently felt emotion.
I followed your search advice and I think I do understand what the cited valence/arousal (both real valued) classification is. Maybe those are the two most important factors, but I’m not impressed.
I’ll postpone thinking/research about how to categorize emotion in favor of more practically useful things. I’ll be interested once researchers have an implementation-level argument for why their abstract emotional state space explains what really happens in brains (a simpler model that doesn’t have any correspondence to brain-level stuff could still make good predictions, but I’m not going to search for that unless anybody has a specific recommendation).
I’ll be interested once researchers have an implementation-level argument for why their abstract emotional state space explains what really happens in brains
Easy: we have separate hardware for approach and avoidance behaviors, rather than a single linear “what’s the value of this” system. It’s easier to first evolve systems for avoiding bad things and approaching good things, than it is to develop a decision-making system that weighs pros and cons and decides which way to go. You can develop a disambiguation system after the first two systems are there, but it’d be hard to make from scratch.
(This, btw, is why I think utility expressed as a single number is lossy with respect to human values: when humans have both utilities and disutilities in a scenario, they usually experience conflict, not neutrality or indifference!)
This, btw, is why I think utility expressed as a single number is lossy with respect to human values: when humans have both utilities and disutilities in a scenario, they usually experience conflict, not neutrality or indifference!
That is a very insightful comment, I find. Let me ponder on that...
I expect then that some approach-related and avoidance-related ‘emotions’ can co-activate (although you’d expect some mutual inhibition circuits, perhaps in some cases it’s mediated only in deciding what concrete physical action to take).
Agreed 100% that the definitions are not very rigorous. Social sciences and psychology are like that. It’s annoying, but I just kind of ignore it.
Still, I don’t think valence and arousal are the same concept. They don’t necessarily correlate, even...you can have intense negative emotions, intense positive emotions, mild positive emotions, etc, anywhere along a two-dimensional continuum. I agree that approach-avoidance isn’t the same kind of categorizer...emotions don’t really fit into a continuum of being more or less approach-avoidance, whereas they do fit into a continuum of being more positive or negative. But based on the Wikipedia page I turned up (the original article assumed I was an expert in the field and didn’t define its vocabulary, damn them), it’s not exactly the same concept as valence. Unless that’s the wrong Wikipedia page and they’re talking about some other psychology concept also called approach-avoidance. I wouldn’t know–this really isn’t my field. Anyway, at the very least emotions can be defined in 2 dimensions, valence and arousal.
Also, though I didn’t go back and check their sources for this, the article said that emotion types (I think that here they mean the naive division of emotions into anger, sadness, joy, etc) is a problematic/not rigorous way to categorize. I don’t know why they decided this. (I should try to be more curious, I guess, but blaaaach it’s a lot of terms to pick through in order to dig out the concrete suggestions I’m actually looking for.)
They don’t necessarily correlate, even...you can have intense negative emotions, intense positive emotions, mild positive emotions, etc, anywhere along a two-dimensional continuum.
That still sounds like just one dimension to me. For two dimensions, you would need “mild very positive emotions” (contentment?) and “intense slightly negative emotions” (overpowering nostalgia?).
Social sciences and psychology are like that. It’s annoying, but I just kind of ignore it.
That “Downward social comparison” Wikipedia article seemed particularly terrible.
Maybe we can apply the virtue of scholarship in a differentiated fashion depending on the field.
For philosophy, psychology, and anything “harder” than that: do scholarship, they frequently experiment or make rigorous arguments.
For sociology: spin your own theory, that’s all sociologists are doing anyway and your theory doesn’t have to sound impressive so you can get tenure.
That still sounds like just one dimension to me. For two dimensions, you would need “mild very positive emotions” (contentment?) and “intense slightly negative emotions” (overpowering nostalgia?).
One way to get around this is to classify emotions into active and passive (or high- and low- arousal), where, for example, anger would be active/negative, and grief would be passive/negative. Like the emotion diagram I’ve seen around the internet lately:
That still sounds like just one dimension to me. For two dimensions, you would need “mild very positive emotions” (contentment?) and “intense slightly negative emotions” (overpowering nostalgia?).
The two dimensions are negative and positive: you can be both negative and positive at the same time, so your degrees of negativity and positivity can be treated as a point in a two dimensional space.
This still isn’t a fully two-dimensional space—or at least it’s not a square, since extremes of either positive or negative arousal tend to suppress the other. WIthin a certain range, though, you can be both negative and positive or neither, as well as one or the other. So negative-positive isn’t directions on an axis, it’s a pair of sometimes but not always anti-correlated measurements.
I didn’t know for sure what any of those were, so I read the wikipedia links.
Valence just means positive or negative (in the affective sense). Arousal is just intensity. Approach-avoidance doesn’t seem any different than valence (note: the link you gave was to approach-avoidance conflicts). From my read, these aren’t 3 dimensions; they’re 1 (real valued).
So the pair of emotion-type (discrete? I don’t know what types there are) and real-valued-valence seems enough.
Am I mangling this?
“Dimensions” because n real values describe an n-dimensional space.
Semantic labels are a way to describe emotions but would not normally be used in conjunction with dimensional descriptions. Typically you would see a 2D arousal-valence emotional space or a 3D arousal-valence-dominance space. (Dominance is a relatively recent addition needed to distinguish some emotions that occupy the same region of arousal and valence: one such pair is anger and fear, both high-arousal low-valence.)
This is precisely what I”m not understanding: how is intensity of valence different from intensity of arousal.
In other words, can I feel intensely ambivalent? If so, then I see why they claim >1 dimension. If not, I don’t follow.
I would say yes. If we take ambivalent to mean “having mixed or contrary ideas about something or someone” like my desktop dictionary defines it, you can definitely feel mild ambivalence (where the two or more conflicting feelings are themselves mild), or intense ambivalence, where you feel strong, painful conflicting emotions about something.
Neutral valence, high arousal could be “surprise”. If sustained, it’s the proverbial “state of cat-like readiness”.
I recommend using Google Images (“arousal valence space”) to find some pictures, which I think would help your intuition along.
In my original comment I assumed at minimum that you’d have a (probably discrete) type of emotion, and definitely intensity, and maybe valence (no need for polarity if you just add more types). However, it occurs to me now that the intuition supporting discrete types of emotion (because they may be founded in different physical implementations) would also support a many-dimensional continuous strength-of-activation dimension. That is, I see no evidence that there’s only one currently felt emotion.
I followed your search advice and I think I do understand what the cited valence/arousal (both real valued) classification is. Maybe those are the two most important factors, but I’m not impressed.
I’ll postpone thinking/research about how to categorize emotion in favor of more practically useful things. I’ll be interested once researchers have an implementation-level argument for why their abstract emotional state space explains what really happens in brains (a simpler model that doesn’t have any correspondence to brain-level stuff could still make good predictions, but I’m not going to search for that unless anybody has a specific recommendation).
Easy: we have separate hardware for approach and avoidance behaviors, rather than a single linear “what’s the value of this” system. It’s easier to first evolve systems for avoiding bad things and approaching good things, than it is to develop a decision-making system that weighs pros and cons and decides which way to go. You can develop a disambiguation system after the first two systems are there, but it’d be hard to make from scratch.
(This, btw, is why I think utility expressed as a single number is lossy with respect to human values: when humans have both utilities and disutilities in a scenario, they usually experience conflict, not neutrality or indifference!)
That is a very insightful comment, I find. Let me ponder on that...
It does seem easy. Thanks.
I expect then that some approach-related and avoidance-related ‘emotions’ can co-activate (although you’d expect some mutual inhibition circuits, perhaps in some cases it’s mediated only in deciding what concrete physical action to take).
Agreed 100% that the definitions are not very rigorous. Social sciences and psychology are like that. It’s annoying, but I just kind of ignore it.
Still, I don’t think valence and arousal are the same concept. They don’t necessarily correlate, even...you can have intense negative emotions, intense positive emotions, mild positive emotions, etc, anywhere along a two-dimensional continuum. I agree that approach-avoidance isn’t the same kind of categorizer...emotions don’t really fit into a continuum of being more or less approach-avoidance, whereas they do fit into a continuum of being more positive or negative. But based on the Wikipedia page I turned up (the original article assumed I was an expert in the field and didn’t define its vocabulary, damn them), it’s not exactly the same concept as valence. Unless that’s the wrong Wikipedia page and they’re talking about some other psychology concept also called approach-avoidance. I wouldn’t know–this really isn’t my field. Anyway, at the very least emotions can be defined in 2 dimensions, valence and arousal.
Also, though I didn’t go back and check their sources for this, the article said that emotion types (I think that here they mean the naive division of emotions into anger, sadness, joy, etc) is a problematic/not rigorous way to categorize. I don’t know why they decided this. (I should try to be more curious, I guess, but blaaaach it’s a lot of terms to pick through in order to dig out the concrete suggestions I’m actually looking for.)
That still sounds like just one dimension to me. For two dimensions, you would need “mild very positive emotions” (contentment?) and “intense slightly negative emotions” (overpowering nostalgia?).
That “Downward social comparison” Wikipedia article seemed particularly terrible.
Maybe we can apply the virtue of scholarship in a differentiated fashion depending on the field.
For philosophy, psychology, and anything “harder” than that: do scholarship, they frequently experiment or make rigorous arguments.
For sociology: spin your own theory, that’s all sociologists are doing anyway and your theory doesn’t have to sound impressive so you can get tenure.
One way to get around this is to classify emotions into active and passive (or high- and low- arousal), where, for example, anger would be active/negative, and grief would be passive/negative. Like the emotion diagram I’ve seen around the internet lately:
Emotion Diagram
That being said, it’s still interesting how vague emotional classifications can be.
The two dimensions are negative and positive: you can be both negative and positive at the same time, so your degrees of negativity and positivity can be treated as a point in a two dimensional space.
This still isn’t a fully two-dimensional space—or at least it’s not a square, since extremes of either positive or negative arousal tend to suppress the other. WIthin a certain range, though, you can be both negative and positive or neither, as well as one or the other. So negative-positive isn’t directions on an axis, it’s a pair of sometimes but not always anti-correlated measurements.
Sounds like a plan!