Ralph Adolphs

Their words

you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be relatively effortless and automatic. It has to become automatic at some level and then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way.

Their words

is it's interpersonal. It's between people. You regulate other people's emotions and you have to pick up on other people's emotions and you influence other people's emotions.

Their words

The most successful skill is if you don't just have one, but you have variety and you can switch between them and you can use context to switch between those.

Their words

I can get to the emotion state from seeing a bear or smelling a bear or hearing a bear or hearing a twig snap, hearing somebody yell there's a bear. Zillions of different inputs completely unlike the rigid reflex which only has one input and that's it.

Their words

What you would want to do is have a detailed highdimensional readout of okay your your gallbladder and your liver and your kidney and your heart and changes all over your body and look at that and ask is there is there some kind of association between specific emotion states and changes some kind of complex change in your body and I would bet that there is but we just don't have those data yet

Their words

it's ultimately about people's concepts of how emotions correspond to changes in the body, not the real actual changes in the body.

Their words

And once you look at the brain systems, they're distinct brain systems in this instance for fear to something out there in the world versus panic of something happening inside you like having a heart attack or not getting enough air.

Their words

We took stock of the whole literature and asked is this really true? Is Ecman's claim really true? Can you tell how someone feels from their facial expression? And the answer is well not nearly as well as you would think and in general not.

Their words

I think it's a uniquely at least as we have it it's uniquely human emotion and it's based on a broad sort of metacognitive ability we have which is to detach our conscious experience from the here and now and do like mental time travel.

Their words

And I'm not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there's a there's a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions that they can become kind of automatically regulated.

Their words

one quick answer to the question of what's the most successful strategy is the earlier you can stop that process, the better. And so, in the first place, don't get yourself into a situation where you're going to be anxious or guilty or sad or whatever emotion you want to avoid.

Their words

so I think as long as you have some kind some concept which need not be put into words some way to think about and differentiate the different emotions that are going on in you that gives you a purchase on your ability to to some extent evaluate them and say this is an emotion I want or this is an emotion that I don't want

Their words

if you have massive frontal lobe lesions that make it the case that you're no longer emotionally responding to stimuli the consequences are devastating which is that you cannot make decisions complex decisions in your life you can't organize your life you're not motivated to take the right path through life because you don't feel one one way or the other about the different options that are available.

Their words

most of pathologies and difficulties about emotions are not about the emotion per se. It's about our ability or disability to control them to regulate them.

Their words

And the other question is if you tie emotion to the the conscious experience of emotion, that is you equate you conflate emotions with feelings. Well, then you're not studying emotions, you're studying consciousness.

Their words

well but again these are functionally defined emotions and there's I think there's no problem assigning to AI to some extent and certainly to many animals uh those functional emotions

Their words

So, I thought this was a really cool study because it showed very clearly that there is temporal persistence in emotions and sadness probably has one of the longest time constants as we know from personal experience. But it's separate from just declarative memory.

Their words

if you have a bear or a tiger, you know, something charging at you, that challenge requires a control of behavior that's intermediate between those two extremes. I can't have a reflex for a bear if it's far away or if it's close or if it's a rattlesnake or or or a tiger or all the different kinds of potential threats out there. Instead, I need something that's more flexible, which emotions are.

Their words

The basic answer is that I think of emotions as functional states of a particular type. They should be understood by what they do, their function rather than how they happen to be constituted in the human brain or differently in an octopus nervous system or in an AI which we should talk about.