Qualia and Emotional Health

Apart from the Easter Egg hunt, it seems that one thing this blog is great for is expressing my opinion on things I know very little about, so here I go again...

For a while now I have been interested in the idea of emotional cognition.  My 4th year undergraduate project involved very crudely measuring the reaction times of people's ability to conjure up an image in their head relating to a specific time when they felt a particular emotion.  So called 'basic emotions' were indeed significantly faster than non-basic ones.

Recently though several sources including David Lodge's book 'Think' (which I am only a little way through), and Twitter discussion with @keith_laws and colleagues @cityLCS among others as well as an article here about basic emotions not being so uniform across cultures,  has made me think about Qualia - the sense of what something is, and whether we have common experiences of generally agreed terms.  Guilt in particular fascinates me.  As I age, I become increasingly convinced that guilt is not only felt in differing degrees by different people but is also particularly susceptible to qualitatively different experiences across individuals.  Women especially (including myself) often seem to take guilt on as some kind of clingy overcoat, obsessing and ruminating about relatively small issues or conversely wide and uncontrollable events.  Men appear to be more able to work with guilt and shrug things off, sometimes to the frustration of the women around them!  Perhaps this is all just down to levels of trait anxiety, or locus of control. But on the other hand maybe we are experiencing different things and calling them by the same name.  When your partner, colleague, friend or mum says 'they feel bad about it' or 'angry' or 'delighted' do they actually experience the same emotion or something quite different?  Behaviourally there might be clues to support quite marked individual differences...the person who can fall asleep immediately after an argument; those people who seem happy to create a reason for an error, true or otherwise, without apparently internalising the mistake; individuals who cannot contain their excitement.... We tend to explain away these differences as variation in executive processes - control of emotions, inhibition of anger etc.  It seems equally possible though, that the quality of the emotion felt is in fact different and therefore requires or leads to that alternative response.    Thus, if we are working with individuals who find it difficult to control undesirable emotional reactions , it may not (just) be a matter of 'managing' the behaviour or lessening the emotion, but instead actually changing the nature and quality of this experience.  

Language might have a part to play in this.   At an @ESRC Festival of Social Science event we ran a few years ago, staff working with deaf children talked about emotional literacy in sign language.  The children they worked with did not have enough emotional language to express the feelings they were experiencing. Particularly with anger this caused a major problem, since the most effective way to express all kinds anger was to externalise it with aggressive actions. They reported that introducing a wider vocabulary of signs went a long way to decreasing unwanted behaviour.  Other individuals with developmental language difficulties such as VLBW and language disorder also experience increased risk of emotional health problems.  But maybe even within the general population we are also doing ourselves a diservice in not thinking carefully enough about the language we use to define and describe how we feel.  Maybe the assumption that the terms 'guilty' 'sad' 'angry' 'happy' 'frightened' and 'disgusted' are common ground, is actually causing more confusion and less progress in our emotional lives.