The Role of Emotion in Adult Development and Expression

Emotion shapes how individuals relate to themselves and their environment, influencing motivations and actions.

### The Complexity of Emotions: Understanding Their Role and Expression
* 🧠 Emotions play a **crucial role** in how we interact with ourselves and our environment, often defined as **configurations of our cognitive systems**.
* 💡 Psychologists differentiate between emotion and feeling, with **emotions being affective states that have specific objects** and are influenced by our **motivations and needs**.
* ⚖ Our motivations are based on a balance of needs that **coexist and compete**, which our brain navigates to maintain **dynamic homeostasis**.
* 🗣 The experience of emotion is tied to feelings, where our perceptual systems **assess situations based on subconscious evaluations** and project these feelings onto our **body maps**.
* 🌍 Cultural contexts greatly influence emotional expression, as seen in the contrasting expectations between **Eastern European** and **American societies** regarding emotional displays.
* 😐 In Eastern Europe, a lack of acknowledgment of suffering in existence can lead to perceptions of **ignorance**, while in the U.S., positivity is often emphasized, sometimes to the detriment of **recognizing reality**.
* 📚 The narrative of the Little Mermaid serves as an allegory for the **complexities of love and sacrifice**, highlighting the **darker themes** often overlooked in more sanitized retellings.
* ❤ Ultimately, the essence of emotions intertwines with our **cultural identities**, shaping how we **perceive and express our feelings** in various contexts.

You said that in some sense becoming an adult means you take charge of your emotions. Maybe I never said that, maybe I just made that up. But in the context of the mind, what's the role of emotion? And what is it first of all? What is emotion? What's its role? It's

several things. So psychologists often distinguish between emotion and feeling, and then in common parlance we don't, I think that emotion is a configuration of the cognitive system, and that's especially true for the lowest level for the affective state. So when you have an affect, it's the

configuration of certain modulation parameters like arousal, valence, your your attentional focus, whether it's wide or narrow, interception or extraception and so on. And all these parameters together put you in a certain way to you relate with the environment and to yourself. And this is in some

sense an emotional configuration. And the more narrow sense, an emotion is an affective state. It has an object, and the relevance of that object is given by motivation. And motivation is a bunch of needs that are associated with rewards, things that give you pleasure and pain.

And you don't actually act on your needs, you act on models of your needs because when the pleasure and pain manifest, it's too late. You've done everything but so you act on expectations. What will give you pleasure and pain? And these are your purposes. The needs don't form a

hierarchy, they just coexist and compete, and your organism is why your brain has to find it on dynamic homeostasis between them. But the purposes need to be consistent, so you basically can create a story for your life and make plans, and so we organize them all into hierarchies.

and there is not a unique solution for this. Some people eat to make art, and other people regard to eat. They might end up doing the same things, but they cooperate in very different ways because there are timid quotes are different and we cooperate based on shared purpose.

Everything else, it is not cooperation on shared purpose is transactional. I don't think I understood the last piece of the cheating the homeostasis. Are you distinguishing between the experience of emotion and the expression of emotion? Of course, so the experience of emotion is a

feeling, and in the sense what you feel is an appraisal that your perceptual system is made of the situation at hand, and it makes this based on your motivation. Yes, and on the you are estimates not your but of the subconscious geometric parts of your mind that assess the situation.

in the world with something like a neural network, and this neural network is making itself known to the symbolic parts of your mind, to your conscious attention by our mapping the them as features into a space. So what you will feel about your emotion is a projection.

usually enjoy your body map. So might feel anxiety in your solar plexus, and you might feel it as a contraction, which is all geometry, right? Your body map is this face that is always instantiated and always available. So it's a very obvious cheat if your non-symbolic parts of your

brain try to talk to your symbolic parts of your brain to map the feelings into the body map, and then you perceive them as pleasant and unpleasant depending on whether the appraisal has a negative or positive valence. And then you have different features of them that give you

more knowledge about the nature of what you're feeling so for instance when you feel connected to other people you typically feel this in your chest region around your heart and you feel this is an expansive feeling in which you're reaching out right and it's very

intuitive to encode it like this that's why it's encoded like it's encoded it's in color code it's a code in which the non-symbolic parts of your mind talked with the symbolic ones and then the expression of emotion is then the

final step that could be sort of gestural or visual yeah so on that's part of this MOOC is probably evolved as part of an adversarial communication so as soon as you started to observe the facial expression and posture of others to understand what emotional state they

are in others started to use this as signaling and also to subvert your model of their emotional state so we now look at the inflections at the difference between the standard face that they're going to make in this situation when you were at the funeral

everybody expects you to make a solemn face but the solemn face doesn't express whether you're sad or not it just expresses that you understand what face you have to make at a funeral nobody should know that you are Trump triumphant so when you try to read the

emotion of another person you try to look at the Delta between a truly set expression and the things that are animated making this face behind the curtain so the interesting thing is so having done these having done this podcast and the video component one of the things I've

learned is that now I'm Russian and I'm dad you don't know how to express emotion on my face when I see that as weakness but whatever the people look to me after you say something they look to my face - just to help them see how they

should feel about what we said which is fascinating because then they'll often comment on why did you look bored or why did you particularly enjoy that part or why did you whatever it's a kind of interesting it makes me cognizant of on part like you're basically saying a

bunch of brilliant things but I am part of the play the role of the key actor and by making my facial expressions and then do and therefore telling the narrative of what the big like the big point is which is fascinating makes me makes it cognizant that I'm supposed to

be making facial expressions even this conversation is hard because my preference would be to wear a mask with sunglasses to where I could just listen yes which is understand this because it's intrusive to interact with others this way and basically Eastern European society have a taboo against that and

especially Russia the further you go to the east and in the US it's the opposite you are expected to be hyper animated in your face and you're also expected to show positive affect yes and if you show positive affect without a good reason in Russia they people will think you are

a stupid and sophisticated person exactly and here positive affect with our reason goes either appreciated or goes unnoticed no it's the default it's being expected everything is amazing have you seen these lego movie no there was a diagram where somebody gave the appraisals that exist in the US and

Russia, so you have your black curve, and and the lower 10% in the U.S., yeah, it's a good start. About the lowest 10%, it's amazing, it's amazing. And for Russians, yeah, everything below the top 10% is it's

terrible. And then everything except the top 1% is I don't like it. And the 10% is even, so yeah, it's funny, but it's kind of true. No, yeah, there's a deeper aspect to this. It's also how we construct meaning in the U.S., usually

you focus on the positive aspects, and you just suppress the negative aspects. And and our Eastern European traditions, we emphasize the fact that if you hold something above the waterline, you also need to put something below the waterline because existence by itself is at best neutral, right? That's the basic

intuition. If at best neutral, yes, or it's just suffering. The default there are moments of beauty, but these moments of beauty are inextricably linked to the reality of suffering. And to not acknowledge the reality of suffering means that you are really stupid, unaware

of the fact that basically every conscious being spends most of the time suffering. Yeah, you just summarized the ethos of Eastern Europe. Yeah, most of life is suffering with the occasional moments of beauty. And if your facial expressions don't acknowledge the

abundance of suffering in the world and in existence itself, then you must be an idiot. It's an interesting thing when you raise children in the U.S. and you in some sense preserve the identity of the intellectual and cultural traditions that are embedded in your own families.

and your daughter asks you about Ariel the mermaid, yeah, and asks you why Ariel is not allowed to play with the humans. And you tell her the truth, she was a siren. 70 people, you don't play with sirens. It does not end well.

And then you tell her the original story, which is not the one by Anderson, which is the romantic one. And there's a much darker one, using a story what happened. So when Dean is a mermaid, or a water woman, she lives on the ground off a river.

And she meets this prince and they fall in love, and the prince really, really wants to be with her. And she says, okay, but the deal is you cannot have any other woman. If you marry somebody else, even though you cannot be with me because obviously you cannot breathe underwater and

I have other things to do than managing your kingdom. It's busier up here. You will die. And eventually, after a few years, he falls in love with some princess and marries her. And she shows up and quietly goes into his chamber, and nobody is able to stop her or willing to

do so because she is fierce. And she comes quietly and said out of his chamber, and they asked her, what has happened? What did you do? And she said, I kissed him to death. All done. And if you know the end of the story, right, in the

end of the story, the mermaid is playing with this prince that she saves, and she falls in love with him. And she cannot live out there, so she is giving up her voice and her tail for a human-like appearance so she can walk among the humans. But this guy does not recognize

that she is the one that you would marry instead he marries somebody who has a kingdom and economic and political relationships to his own kingdom and so on as he shoots quite tragic she dies yeah so yeah instead of the Disney The Little Mermaid story has a little bit of her

happy ending that's the Western that's the American Way my own problem is justice of course that I read Oscar Wilde before I read the other things so I mean I was inoculated with this Romanticism and I think that the mermaid is right you sacrifice your life

for romantic love that's what you do because if you are confronted with either serving the Machine and doing the obviously right thing under the economic and social and all other inhuman incentives that's wrong you should follow your heart you

Role of Emotion in the Mind (Joscha Bach) | AI Podcast Clips

Clips from the Lex Fridman podcast. Visit the main channel for full conversations and other videos.

Lex Clips

Discussion on the role of emotion in the context of the mind.

Distinction between emotion and feeling; emotion as a cognitive system configuration.

Emotion as a configuration of parameters like arousal, valence, and attentional focus.

Emotion as an affective state with an object, relevance determined by motivation and needs.

Acting on models of needs and expectations of pleasure and pain; purposes and their organization.

Experience of emotion as a feeling; appraisal of the situation based on motivation and subconscious assessment.

Feeling as a projection from non-symbolic parts of the mind to conscious attention.

Mapping feelings onto the body map; perception of pleasant and unpleasant based on valence.

Examples of feeling connectedness in the chest region; encoding emotions through color code.

Expression of emotion as a final step; gestural or visual communication.

Cultural Differences in Emotional Expression

Evolution of facial expression as adversarial communication; subversion of emotional state models.

Reading emotions by observing the delta between expected and actual expressions.

Personal experience of expressing emotion; awareness of the role of facial expressions in communication.

The speaker's role as a key actor in conveying the narrative through facial expressions.

Cultural differences in emotional expression; taboos against overt emotional displays in some cultures.

Comparison of emotional appraisals in the US and Russia; differing perspectives on positive and negative affect.

Cultural differences in constructing meaning; focusing on positive aspects vs. acknowledging suffering.

Eastern European emphasis on acknowledging suffering as part of existence.

The implication that ignoring suffering indicates unawareness of reality.

Summary of Eastern European ethos: life is mostly suffering with occasional moments of beauty.

Telling children the original, darker version of the Little Mermaid story.

Contrasting the Disney version with the original, more tragic tale.

The original Little Mermaid story and its tragic ending.

Comparison of the Disney and original endings; the American way vs. the original's tragic consequences.

Personal perspective on the importance of following one's heart over societal expectations.