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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Emotions are at the core of our life.They makelife livable.Rather than turning off our emotions completely, most of uswould like the ability to turn off our emotional reactions to specifictriggers selectively.We would like to use a delete key to erase a spe-cific trigger or set of triggers, a script or concern, stored in our emo-tion alert database.Unfortunately, there is no definitive, solidevidence about whether this can be done.One of the foremost students of the brain and emotion, psychol-ogist Joseph LeDoux, recently wrote: "Conditioned fear learning isparticularly resilient, and in fact may represent an indelible form of learning.3.The indelibility of learned fear has an upside and adownside.It is obviously very useful for our brain to be able toretain records of those stimuli and situations that have been associ-ated with danger in the past.But these potent memories, which aretypically formed in traumatic circumstances, can also find their wayinto everyday life, intruding into situations in which they are notespecially useful."4I fortunately had the opportunity to talk with LeDoux about thiswhile I was writing this chapter, and to push him a bit on exactlywhat he meant and how certain he was about it.First, I should beclear that LeDoux is referring only to learned triggers, what I havecalled the variations.The themes, which are the product of our evo-lution, both LeDoux and I believe are indelible, such as the findingsabout rats who were born in a laboratory and never had any experi-ence with a cat, yet showed fear when they first saw a cat.It is aninborn theme, a fear trigger that doesn't require learning.The powerof a theme to trigger an emotion can be weakened but not totallyremoved.But can we unlearn the variations, the triggers we acquirein the course of our lives?Without going into the technical details of LeDoux's brainresearch, we do need to know that when an emotional triggerbecomes established, when we learn to be afraid of something, newconnections are established among a group of cells in our brain,forming what LeDoux calls a cell assembly.5 Those cell assemblies,which contain the memory of that learned trigger, seem to be per-manent physiological records of what we have learned.They makeup what I called the emotion alert database.However, we can learnto interrupt the connection between those cell assemblies and ouremotional behavior.The trigger still sets off the established cellassembly, but the connection between the cell assembly and ouremotional behavior can be broken, at least for a time.We are afraid,but we don't act as if we are afraid.We also can learn to break theconnection between the trigger and those cell assemblies so the emo-tion is not triggered, but the cell assembly remains, the database isnot erased, and its potential to be reconnected to the trigger and theresponse remains within us.Under some circumstances, when weare under stress of one kind or another, the trigger will again become active, connecting to the cell assembly, and the emotionalresponse springs forth once again.While all of LeDoux's research has been on fear, he thinks thereis no reason to believe it would be any different for anger or anguish.This fits my personal experience, and what I have observed in oth-ers, so I will assume that his findings generalize to the other emo-tions, perhaps even to emotions that feel good.*Our nervous system doesn't make it easy to change what makesus emotional, to unlearn either the connection between an emo-tional cell assembly and a response, or between a trigger and an emo-tional cell assembly.The emotion alert database is an open system,in that new variations continually get added to it, but it is not a sys-tem that allows data to be easily removed once entered.Our emotionsystem was built to keep triggers in, not get them out, mobilizingour emotional responses without thought.We are biologically con-structed in a way that does not allow us to interrupt them readily.Let's return to my example of the near-miss car accident onceagain to see how LeDoux's findings help us understand what hap-pens when we try to change what we become emotional about.Every driver has had the experience, when sitting in the passengerseat, of having her foot involuntarily shoot out toward a nonexistentbrake pedal when it seems that another car is veering toward her.Hitting the brake pedal is a learned response to the fear of being hitby another car.Not only is the response hitting the brake pedallearned, but so, too, is the trigger.Cars were not part of the envi-ronment of our ancestors; a car veering toward us is not a built-intheme but a learned variation.We learn it quickly because it is veryclose to one of the likely fear themes something that movesquickly into our sight, approaching us as if it is about to hit us.While most of us will, when sitting in the passenger seat, invol-untarily press down on a nonexistent brake pedal when we sense*Not everything that makes us emotional is a result of conditioning, however.Frijda points out thatsome emotional stimuli have "little to do with having experienced aversive or pleasurable consequencesaccompanying a particular stimulus." Emotions result "from inferred consequences or causes.Los-ing one's job, receiving criticism, perceiving signs of being neglected or slighted, being praised, andseeing norm violations [actions that contradict our dearly held values] are all quite indirectly orremotely connected to the actual aversive or pleasurable conditions that they somehow signal and thatgive them emotional life." I view these as all instances of variations that resemble the universal themes,even though some of them are distantly related. danger, driving instructors learn not to do so.They may learn tointerrupt the response, in which case they will still feel afraid, butthey won't physically respond.(I suspect there would still be a traceof fear on their face or in the sound of their voice.) Or they maylearn to break the connection between the trigger that car lurchingtoward them and the cell assembly in the brain that was estab-lished for this fear trigger,* Perhaps they finely tune the connectionbetween the trigger and the cell assembly so that fear is aroused andthe protective brake pedal response is activated only when the dan-ger is very likely to occur.But if they have had a bad night's sleep, orare still mulling over an unfinished argument with their spouse thatmorning, that foot will shoot out once again, just as it would for anyof us who are not driving instructors, who have not learned to inter-rupt this trigger.The links between the trigger, the cellular connec-tions, and the response have not been erased, only weakened [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl agnieszka90.opx.pl
.Emotions are at the core of our life.They makelife livable.Rather than turning off our emotions completely, most of uswould like the ability to turn off our emotional reactions to specifictriggers selectively.We would like to use a delete key to erase a spe-cific trigger or set of triggers, a script or concern, stored in our emo-tion alert database.Unfortunately, there is no definitive, solidevidence about whether this can be done.One of the foremost students of the brain and emotion, psychol-ogist Joseph LeDoux, recently wrote: "Conditioned fear learning isparticularly resilient, and in fact may represent an indelible form of learning.3.The indelibility of learned fear has an upside and adownside.It is obviously very useful for our brain to be able toretain records of those stimuli and situations that have been associ-ated with danger in the past.But these potent memories, which aretypically formed in traumatic circumstances, can also find their wayinto everyday life, intruding into situations in which they are notespecially useful."4I fortunately had the opportunity to talk with LeDoux about thiswhile I was writing this chapter, and to push him a bit on exactlywhat he meant and how certain he was about it.First, I should beclear that LeDoux is referring only to learned triggers, what I havecalled the variations.The themes, which are the product of our evo-lution, both LeDoux and I believe are indelible, such as the findingsabout rats who were born in a laboratory and never had any experi-ence with a cat, yet showed fear when they first saw a cat.It is aninborn theme, a fear trigger that doesn't require learning.The powerof a theme to trigger an emotion can be weakened but not totallyremoved.But can we unlearn the variations, the triggers we acquirein the course of our lives?Without going into the technical details of LeDoux's brainresearch, we do need to know that when an emotional triggerbecomes established, when we learn to be afraid of something, newconnections are established among a group of cells in our brain,forming what LeDoux calls a cell assembly.5 Those cell assemblies,which contain the memory of that learned trigger, seem to be per-manent physiological records of what we have learned.They makeup what I called the emotion alert database.However, we can learnto interrupt the connection between those cell assemblies and ouremotional behavior.The trigger still sets off the established cellassembly, but the connection between the cell assembly and ouremotional behavior can be broken, at least for a time.We are afraid,but we don't act as if we are afraid.We also can learn to break theconnection between the trigger and those cell assemblies so the emo-tion is not triggered, but the cell assembly remains, the database isnot erased, and its potential to be reconnected to the trigger and theresponse remains within us.Under some circumstances, when weare under stress of one kind or another, the trigger will again become active, connecting to the cell assembly, and the emotionalresponse springs forth once again.While all of LeDoux's research has been on fear, he thinks thereis no reason to believe it would be any different for anger or anguish.This fits my personal experience, and what I have observed in oth-ers, so I will assume that his findings generalize to the other emo-tions, perhaps even to emotions that feel good.*Our nervous system doesn't make it easy to change what makesus emotional, to unlearn either the connection between an emo-tional cell assembly and a response, or between a trigger and an emo-tional cell assembly.The emotion alert database is an open system,in that new variations continually get added to it, but it is not a sys-tem that allows data to be easily removed once entered.Our emotionsystem was built to keep triggers in, not get them out, mobilizingour emotional responses without thought.We are biologically con-structed in a way that does not allow us to interrupt them readily.Let's return to my example of the near-miss car accident onceagain to see how LeDoux's findings help us understand what hap-pens when we try to change what we become emotional about.Every driver has had the experience, when sitting in the passengerseat, of having her foot involuntarily shoot out toward a nonexistentbrake pedal when it seems that another car is veering toward her.Hitting the brake pedal is a learned response to the fear of being hitby another car.Not only is the response hitting the brake pedallearned, but so, too, is the trigger.Cars were not part of the envi-ronment of our ancestors; a car veering toward us is not a built-intheme but a learned variation.We learn it quickly because it is veryclose to one of the likely fear themes something that movesquickly into our sight, approaching us as if it is about to hit us.While most of us will, when sitting in the passenger seat, invol-untarily press down on a nonexistent brake pedal when we sense*Not everything that makes us emotional is a result of conditioning, however.Frijda points out thatsome emotional stimuli have "little to do with having experienced aversive or pleasurable consequencesaccompanying a particular stimulus." Emotions result "from inferred consequences or causes.Los-ing one's job, receiving criticism, perceiving signs of being neglected or slighted, being praised, andseeing norm violations [actions that contradict our dearly held values] are all quite indirectly orremotely connected to the actual aversive or pleasurable conditions that they somehow signal and thatgive them emotional life." I view these as all instances of variations that resemble the universal themes,even though some of them are distantly related. danger, driving instructors learn not to do so.They may learn tointerrupt the response, in which case they will still feel afraid, butthey won't physically respond.(I suspect there would still be a traceof fear on their face or in the sound of their voice.) Or they maylearn to break the connection between the trigger that car lurchingtoward them and the cell assembly in the brain that was estab-lished for this fear trigger,* Perhaps they finely tune the connectionbetween the trigger and the cell assembly so that fear is aroused andthe protective brake pedal response is activated only when the dan-ger is very likely to occur.But if they have had a bad night's sleep, orare still mulling over an unfinished argument with their spouse thatmorning, that foot will shoot out once again, just as it would for anyof us who are not driving instructors, who have not learned to inter-rupt this trigger.The links between the trigger, the cellular connec-tions, and the response have not been erased, only weakened [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]