I searched, but could not find the thread I wanted to revive. Part of it was about controlling emotions. From memory it was Transward who put forth the observation of Abraham Lincoln that people are as happy as they want to be.

My airport read that I am just finishing up on is "blink" by Malcolm Gladwell (the author of The Tipping Point), Back Bay Books, ISBN 978-0-316-17232-5.

Beginning about 106 he is talking about a guy who has made a career of studying facial expressions and has an incredible track record of being able to look at photos or movies and judge people [he perfectly pegged Bill Clinton before Monica et al]. He spent years breaking down all the muscles in the face and what they do and then combinations of muscles and what emotions they show (incidentally, the same in cultures worldwide). Once they pieced all that together, they practiced on themselves control of individual muscle groups to show others the emotional reactions.

And a funny thing happened. They felt the emotions they showed on their faces. They did study groups of people, asking them to show emotions on their face and measuring various bodily reactions - respiration, heart beat, perspiration, etc.). Showing an emotion on a person's face causes measurable changes in the body metrics.

Their conclusion was (p. 208) "We think of the face as the residue of emotions. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the other direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process."

This is an unsurprising result. So-called "depth" psychology sold generations on the idea, as old as Romanticism, that emotions cause behavior. Many modern psychologists have collected data suggesting the opposite: that behavior causes emotions. This makes sense - emotions are a response to our circumstances, and our actions identify those circumstances. Our actions tell us how we're situated at any moment.

Arguing the opposite - that emotions cause behavior - leaves emotions as unexplained mysteries. Freud and his followers were concerned with physical drives, and it's true that our physiology defines our humanity, but this is largely a constant. While our instinctual nature stays the same from one moment to the next, our situation is always changing, and with it our actions. The flux of emotions that we all experience trails in the wake of our changing situations and our actions in response to those situations.

It's well known to therapists that getting people to change their behavior is the easiest way to change their emotions, unless there is a physiological abnormality such as is found in psychosis. For most people, Lincoln was right.

People may persuade themselves that their habitual behaviors are somehow natural to them, and constitute their personalities. Even when habits are maladaptive, they may cling to them, and the unhappiness they cause. Behavioral therapy is essentially education - training people to act in ways which make them happy. A focus on behavior may take some of the romance and mystery out of human life, but it's liberating. It tells us we're not doomed to repeat our past follies.

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2010 6:37 pm I searched, but could not find the thread I wanted to revive. Part of it was about controlling emotions. From memory it was Transward who put forth the observation of Abraham Lincoln that people are as happy as they want to be.

My airport read that I am just finishing up on is "blink" by Malcolm Gladwell (the author of The Tipping Point), Back Bay Books, ISBN 978-0-316-17232-5.

Beginning about 106 he is talking about a guy who has made a career of studying facial expressions and has an incredible track record of being able to look at photos or movies and judge people [he perfectly pegged Bill Clinton before Monica et al]. He spent years breaking down all the muscles in the face and what they do and then combinations of muscles and what emotions they show (incidentally, the same in cultures worldwide). Once they pieced all that together, they practiced on themselves control of individual muscle groups to show others the emotional reactions.

And a funny thing happened. They felt the emotions they showed on their faces. They did study groups of people, asking them to show emotions on their face and measuring various bodily reactions - respiration, heart beat, perspiration, etc.). Showing an emotion on a person's face causes measurable changes in the body metrics.

Their conclusion was (p. 208) "We think of the face as the residue of emotions. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the other direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process."

Is this the thread you are looking for:

http://www.eunuch.org/vbulletin/showthr ... post153254

also this post of mine is relevant to your description of the muscle reader in the book.

A while back they published a study where volunteers were given cloth swatches to smell cut from t shirts worn by men, women and children. Most people were able to tell, with a fair degree of accuracy, the sex of the person wearing the shirt when the wearer was past puberty. In another study both men and women could identify the smell of their romantic partners t shirts from other t shirts worn by people of the same sex as their partner. We receive far more information from our five senses than we bother to become aware of. I suspect that a lot of ESP may not actually involve more than the five senses we all have, but paying attention to information that we previously didn't know how to use. A similar idea is "muscle reading"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_reading

"Muscle reading, also known as Hellstromism and Cumberlandism, is a technique used by mentalists to determine the thoughts or knowledge of a subject, the effect of which tends to be perceived as a form of mind reading. The performer can determine many things about the mental state of a subject by observing subtle, involuntary responses to speech or any other stimuli. It is closely related to the ideomotor effect, whereby subtle movements made without conscious awareness reflect a physical movement, action or direction which the subject is thinking about.

The technique relies on the assertion that the subject will subconsciously reveal their thoughts through very slight involuntary physical reactions, also known as ideomotor responses. The performer can determine what the subject is thinking by recognising and interpreting those responses. Muscle reading may be billed by some entertainers as a psychic phenomenon, where the audience will be told that by creating physical contact with the subject, a better psychic connection can be formed. In fact, the contact allows the performer to read more subtle reactions in the subject's motor functions that may not be apparent without contact, such as muscle control and heart rate.

Because muscle reading relies so heavily on the subject's subconscious reactions to their environment and situation, this technique is used commonly when performing stunts dealing with locating objects in an auditorium or on stage, and as such, it can be done 'clean' by the magician skilled in reading body language.

Performers often instruct the subject to imagine voicing instructions, which presumably amplifies the reactions of the subject, thus promoting the idea that the trick involves genuine thought tranference or mind-reading. However the subject who is "thinking directions" has a physical, kinaesthetic reaction that guides the performer so that he or she can, for example, locate a specific place on a wall on which to place a pin, without prior knowledge of where the pin should go.

Knowledge of muscle reading is a technique that is also reportedly used by poker players to hide their reactions to the game, as well as to read the other players for potential bluffs and/or better hands.

While muscle reading requires practice, it is much easier to do than one might think. Performers often test subjects before trying it in public, because some people give clearer physical responses than others."

Perhaps related to the Buddhist idea of "the fully awakened one."

Transward

Thanks

Transward

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2010 6:37 pm Their conclusion was (p. 208) "We think of the face as the residue of emotions. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the other direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process."

This is the wisdom of the old line "Keep your chin up" (Or the Southern version "Chin up and tits to the wind") Contrawise if you want to be depressed, stare down, round your shoulders and assume a hangdog demeanor. The appropriate mood will soon follow. In this as in many systems in humans, you have a feedback loop. Behavior is affected by mood and mood is affected by behavior.

Transward

I'm not aruguing that the body affects the mind and vice/versa. But I question the usefullness of such tools in the long run.

If our answer to pain, sadness, guilt and fear essentially becomes "keep your chin up" - then where are we really?

At the funeral of a loved one, should we practice smiling to ourselves or do we accept the reality of our pain and sadness?

I am going to argue that it is a quite useful technique - not in the sense of funerals, etc. but in the sense of getting around the morning grumpies, etc.

bobover3 (imported) wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2010 10:26 pm This is an unsurprising result. So-called "depth" psychology sold generations on the idea, as old as Romanticism, that emotions cause behavior. Many modern psychologists have collected data suggesting the opposite: that behavior causes emotions. This makes sense - emotions are a response to our circumstances, and our actions identify those circumstances. Our actions tell us how we're situated at any moment.

Arguing the opposite - that emotions cause behavior - leaves emotions as unexplained mysteries. Freud and his followers were concerned with physical drives, and it's true that our physiology defines our humanity, but this is largely a constant. While our instinctual nature stays the same from one moment to the next, our situation is always changing, and with it our actions. The flux of emotions that we all experience trails in the wake of our changing situations and our actions in response to those situations.

It's well known to therapists that getting people to change their behavior is the easiest way to change their emotions, unless there is a physiological abnormality such as is found in psychosis. For most people, Lincoln was right.

People may persuade themselves that their habitual behaviors are somehow natural to them, and constitute their personalities. Even when habits are maladaptive, they may cling to them, and the unhappiness they cause. Behavioral therapy is essentially education - training people to act in ways which make them happy. A focus on behavior may take some of the romance and mystery out of human life, but it's liberating. It tells us we're not doomed to repeat our past follies.

However, I must add that BEHAVIOR is very, very difficult to change once it has been established.

IT takes a VERY strong resolve and will to do it...

Yes, it can be very hard to change behavior. That's why people go to therapists. But it's even harder to change emotions without changing behavior. Classical Freudian psychoanalysis - which seeks to change lives from the inside out - produces minimal results over periods of many years.

bobover3 (imported) wrote: Sun Jul 04, 2010 4:36 pm Yes, it can be very hard to change behavior. That's why people go to therapists. But it's even harder to change emotions without changing behavior. Classical Freudian psychoanalysis - which seeks to change lives from the inside out - produces minimal results over periods of many years.

That's an awfully broad statement. Certainly since Freudian psychoanalysis was the first therapy, it was tried on every type of mental problems. On what are now recognized as biochemical mental illness, the paranoid schizophrenics and such, they were largely failures. Plus the results of therapy are notoriously difficult to measure objectively, relying on the reports of the treated (who may, of course, be crazy.) I have known a lot of people who have been in a lot of different kinds of therapy, from Primal Scream to Freud to shamanic rituals to behavioral to cognitive. I have known several creative types who claimed that their Freudian therapist kept them sane and functioning.

Different strokes for different folks.

Regards,

Transward

transward (imported) wrote: Sun Jul 04, 2010 7:30 pm I have known several creative types who claimed that their Freudian therapist kept them sane and functioning.

That of course is merely anecdotal evidence; in controlled studies, groups of patients receiving Freudian therapy did no better than untreated patients. Scientific conclusion: orthodox Freudian psychotherapy is 100% medically ineffective. The idea of Woody Allen or Robin Williams spending a lifetime paying a therapist for vague, leading responses is almost funny, if it were not criminally deceptive. The late Albert Ellis argued thjat psychotherapy should last no more than 6 months; if at the end of that period, the patient wasn't better, he should find a competent therapist. Widely regarded as a crank when he first shone light on the practices of the Freudians, Ellis's cognative therapy that seeks to influence behavior rather than regress to causes and origins is pretty much mainstream thought today.