PSYC18 2009 – Psychology of Emotion

1. PSYC18 2009 – Psychology of Emotion Professor: Gerald Cupchik Office: S634 Email: cupchik@utsc.utoronto.ca Office Hours: Thursdays 10-11; 2-3 Phone: 416-287-7467 TA: Michelle Hilscher Office: S142C Email: hilscher@utsc.utoronto.ca Office Hours: Thursdays 10-11 am Course website: www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik/psyc18.htm Textbook: Oatley, Keltner & Jenkins (2006, 2nd Ed.) Understanding Emotions.

2. Background - Relation of theory to phenomena - Gestalt psychology and “the situation” - Gestalt and figure/ground relations in terms of topic and the search for a relevant context. - Tradition of Natural History… observation and collection of richly described instances. - Naturwissenschaft and Geistwissenschaft

3. Goethe Dilthey Husserl Cassirer Lewin

4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) His Criticism of Science in the Late 18th Century: “The greatest threat to science was the sterile passivity induced by degenerate scientific scholasticism, the mere handing down of a written tradition without substantial criticism.” Science cannot tolerate the authoritarianism of sects and schools because a sect holds tenaciously to what is only a part, which is presented nevertheless as if it were a whole. Vorstellungsarten… the ways of conceiving things… to bring many objects into relationship that they did not have with each other, strictly speaking.

5. As long as a scientist remained entirely wrapped up in a single dominant Vorstellungsart he would be unable to criticize his work adequately or that there might be something lacking from his understanding of nature. Goethe dealt with the historical appearance and disappearance of Vorstellungsarten with their pervasiveness and modes of influence… dominate the imagination of the age and set the standard for all other sciences. He felt that intelligent amateurs can make small but important contributions to observational sciences… they might notice things that escape the attention of experts… they have not been indoctrinated into the ways of the discipline… they inject new ways of conceiving things.

6. Background Goethe worked in the tradition of experimental science from the 18th century. For natural philosophers of that century, physics was not a specialized discipline studying motion, matter and forces “but rather the knowledge of all nature, including the realm of the animate as well as the inanimate.” In German-speaking lands, physics was often called Naturlehre (doctrine of nature) and “nature philosophy” in English-speaking countries. It involves “everything about bodies that has ever been experienced or thought” (Gehler, 1787-96). In Aristotelian fashion, this approach to science tended “to coalesce around the various genera of natural things: light, magnetism, plants, animals, etc.”

7. Goethe’s method… theories have tendency to atomize phenomena… we should follow a method that explores laws, relationships, similarities and homologies in the course of development – a genetic, even a dynamic method (insofar as it identifies forces at work)… look for the intrinsic interrelatedness of things in nature… natural things must be studied in a larger context and this context is always capable of further enlargement, in the direction of the totality of phenomenal nature. Let things speak for themselves.

8. Goethe’s Approach Vorstellungsarten – the ways of conceiving and representing things was bound to the question of Darstellung (presentation), the question of presentation is a question of language and rhetoric. As a poet, Goethe recognized with unmatched clarity the role of language in science, its symbolic and inalienably metaphorical character. Analogy between science and art. Both strive to rescue phenomena from the obscurity of accident by raising them to significant eminence and clarity, no single portrayal of phenomena embraces the whole truth… while some relationships might be enhanced and clarified, others withdraw from view.

9. “Just as art always presents itself as complete in every single artwork, so should science always show itself whole in every single thing it treats.” Pure experiences ought to lie at the foundation of all natural science… “The event of the phenomenon constitutes the real subject of inquiry.” “As much as possible the theory must wait upon the phenomena.” For Goethe, the first duty of a scientist is to explore the associations and connections of one phenomenon to another, without the intervention of a theory or hypothesis rather than try from the outset to give proof of a theory.

10. A science founded in a pluralistic spirit requires two virtues above all: patience and irony. With irony one may not be overwedded to the supposed perfection of the truths one holds. With patience one may not rashly reject as impossible alternatives one violently disagrees with. “We must not exclude any of the human powers from scientific activity. The abyss of intuition, a sure view of the present, mathematical depth, physical precision, sublimity of reason, sharpness of intellect, agile, yearning fantasy, loving joy in the sensuous. Nothing can be foregone if there is to be a lively, fruitful, seizing of the moment, through which alone a work of art, whatever its content may be, can arise.” In nature nothing happens that does not stand in a relationship with the whole. How are the findings of the isolated facts in an experiment related to the whole phenomenon?

11. Goethe is able to represent apparently simple facts as different moments of a single dynamic phenomenon… moments that correspond to varying conditions of the basic experiment. With these facts we can do a re-synthesis to reconstruct the original event and experience of the phenomenon and view it again with comprehension. Comprehension takes the form of a seeing embedded in the fullness of phenomena. Goethe’s proximate goal of this method is to achieve naturgemasse Darstellung, a presentation in accordance with nature… which must correspond to the fundamental elements of the phenomenon in question, such as the continuities, associations, contrasts and wholes that give it structure. The initial work – collection, examination, and organization of the phenomena – must be done with the greatest of care, industry, rigor so that when wit and imagination are set loose they do not distort the phenomena at will. Every directed looking Ansehen leads to consideration… Betrachten… which can lead to reflection… Sinnen… every reflection to connection… Verknupfen… and thus with every attentive look Blick at the world we are already theorizing.

12. Goethe saw Newton as atomistic, mechanical, and mathematical. Goethe thought of himself as inclined to the genetic (versus atomistic), dynamic (versus mechanical) and concrete (versus abstract). Change in the use of the term “fact” in the 18th century. Original sense in Latin, English, and the Romance languages. The word “fact” was something done, a deed, and derivatively, anything that occurred. The fact had a doer, a time and a place. The actor or the event was visible, in evidence. The more modern acceptation has added a subjective component… something known by actual observation or authentic testimony (thus opposed to mere inference) – a datum of experience. Dogma of facts was a prerequisite for the rise of positivism. Comte’s “positive” reveals an utter dependence on facts… “coordination of observed facts.”

13. Goethe follows the logic of a phenomenal, experiential science of nature. Method: 1. Begin with a question about a natural phenomenon...something that appears as a part of a whole 2. Discover through systematic experimentation, the conditions for this appearance 3. Vary and recomplicate the elemental conditions so that the research leads back toward the original standpoint from which the observer will see it with a sharper and better trained eye and with a better grasp of the whole and its parts. The phenomena will then be surveyed and embraced in their entirety as a unified and comprehensive scientific phenomenon. Goethe acquired the habit of taking careful notes of his observation....study the phenomena of nature in painstaking detail....mid-1780s..in pursuit of a principle that would account for the order and unity of plant species....

14. Gestalt Psychology Aristotle The Greek philosopher Aristotle had written more than 2000 years ago that “the whole is prior to the parts.” He was talking about “essences” or “forms” which determine how something is constituted. Goethe Again Goethe refocused this idea on the intelligibility of things. He used the term “Gestalt” to refer to the “self-actualizing wholeness of organic forms.” Goethe believed that all advanced structures of a plant or animal are transformations from a single fundamental organ… a king of Systems Theory. Similarities among members of a species are determined by formal laws of self-organization, ultimately derived from a kind of “ideal type” he called an Urbild and attributed variations to environmental effects. So things develop based on a law inherent in the whole – which is a different approach to cause and effect in mechanics.

15. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) Dilthey argued in 1894 that conscious experience is not a collection of simple sensations and their corresponding “ideas” but a “structured whole” combining intellect, feeling, and will. The whole is not static but “dynamic,” a “living, unitary activity within us. Dilthey argued that the “dominant psychology” could not grasp this idea because it reduces “all phenomena of consciousness to elements imagined to be atom-like” and constructs consciousness from hypothetical entities. He argued that we should “proceed from the whole to the parts” and focus on the inner life as the “experienced connection of thought, feeling, and will”. So, Dilthey spoke of the person as a “psychophysical whole” who is formed by his or her own history and by that of their society and culture. People are shaped by interactions with their cultural circumstances which formed what he called their “character” or Gestalt.

16. Dilthey made an important contribution in his distinction between “natural science” (e.g., history, law, literary criticism) and “human sciences” (e.g., physics, chemistry). Correction: This part above should read… “natural science” (e.g., physics, chemistry) and “human science” (e.g., history, law, literary criticism). In the surrounding physical world of the “natural sciences” (Naturwissenschaften) objective necessity rules and we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect. But, in the “human sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften) inner experience was characterized by “sovereignty of the will, responsibility for actions, a capacity to subject everything to thinking and to resist everything within the fortress of freedom of his/her own person.” We seek to understand in terms of the relations of the part and the whole. In the social sciences, a general theory of understanding or comprehension (Verstehen) could be applied to all manner of interpretation ranging from aesthetics to events in the “life world” (Lebenswelt).

17. Kurt Lewin (1890 - 1947) His approach to science was empirical, pragmatic, and pluralistic. He stressed the interaction of the person and the environment. B = F(P,E) Two modes of Scientific Thinking: Aristotelian and Galilean (1931) Aristotelian Mode of Thinking Lewin criticized what he described as the Aristotelian approach to scientific thinking. According to this approach, the classification of phenomena defined their essence in a static manner; hence there were different laws for different kinds of motion (e.g., on earth, in the sky). In psychology, this kind of normative typological categorizing in psychology include the terms “normal” or “pathological” or rankings in intelligence testing. This relates to the problem of “essentializing” or defining something by a central property. In this approach, lawfulness is equated with frequency and unusual events are regarded as unnatural or even incomprehensible.

18. Galilean Mode of Thinking The Galilean approach is more dynamic. Instead of computing “the abstract average of as many historically given cases as possible,” researchers should focus first on “those situations in which the determinative factors of the total dynamic [event] structure are more clearly, distinctly and purely to be discerned.” Lewin’s Strategy He was influenced by Ernst Cassirer whose discussion of Galileo’s procedure in classical physics argued that “the first goal of experimental inquiry is to gain a pure phenomenon.” He wanted to recreate situations in which the structures of ideal-typical person-environment interactions could be made to appear in the laboratory. In this way, researchers could derive formal and, ultimately, mathematical descriptions of their dynamics. The goal was therefore to develop idealized concrete psychological situations.