The Mandelbear's Musings

Thanks to this post by @elf, we have a fascinating article: What if emotions aren’t universal but specific to each culture? | Aeon Essays. Apparently recent research contradicts the widely-held theory -- the article calls it the Basic Emotion Theory -- that a small number of "basic emotions" are "hard-wired" by evolution, and that a person who is unable to recognize them in themself or other people is afflicted with a disorder called "Alexithymia", which translates roughly as "not having words for emotions". According to the Aeon article (from which all quotes in this post are taken unless otherwise noted),

The Basic Emotion Theory – also called the Universality Thesis by some of its critics – goes back to the 1960s, when the US psychologist Paul Ekman (who consulted on Inside Out) conducted studies with the Fore, an Indigenous society in Papua New Guinea. Ekman showed that the Fore could match photographs of faces with the emotional expressions they depicted – happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid or surprised – with a fairly high degree of correctness.

But what if the experimental subjects were just making educated guesses in matching a limited number of faces to a similarly limited list of words for emotions?

In one experiment, published in 2016, just 7 per cent of Trobriander subjects correctly identified anger from posed photographs. The prototypical disgust face, in turn, was often seen as sad, angry or afraid. Only the smiling face was, by a slim majority of volunteers (58 per cent), matched to happiness. By contrast, a control group in Spain, shown the same photos, correctly identified the depicted emotions 93 per cent of the time, on average. In another study, Crivelli found that Trobrianders consistently ‘misread’ the paradigmatic fear face – eyes wide open, mouth gasping – deeming it angry and threatening. And when the standard forced-choice procedure was relaxed, about a fifth of the subjects insisted they didn’t know what emotion they were looking at when presented with a sad or a disgusted face. (In fact, in this study, the most common response to all but the happy face was not an emotion word at all but ‘gibulwa’, which roughly translates as a desire to avoid social interaction.)

So it seems that the way people identify emotions has a very strong cultural or linguistic component.

These differences can be startling. ‘I ask my American participants how they’re feeling,’ [Yulia Chentsova-Dutton] tells me. ‘I give them a list of emotions. They are done with that list in under a minute.’ With Chinese participants, the same task would take many minutes to complete. In Ghana, the experiment verged on ‘a disaster’. ‘My students would sit there with this one page of emotion terms for 30-40 minutes, just that page. And when I ask them what is happening, they would say: “Well, I understand all the words … but how am I supposed to know what I feel? … And as an emotion researcher and a cultural researcher, I was stunned because the fact that people know how they feel is never something I questioned.’

There's this phenomenon called "Chinese somatisation". Research in the 1980s found that depressed Chinese patients did not experience the illness in the ‘correct’ way. Instead of the expected psychological symptoms, they reported various aches, lack of sleep and exhaustion, leading scholars and doctors to puzzle over the missing emotions.

The Aeon article ends with this delightful quotation from one of Chentsova-Dutton’s most recent papers (behind a pay-wall, alas!), which swaps terms like "alexlthymia" and "psychotherapy" with "lexithymia" and "somatotherapy", etc.

The term lexithymia describes a dimensional personality trait characterised, at the high end, by an extreme and potentially problematic tendency to think about one’s own emotional state and to describe these states to others … Lexithymic patients often do not respond well to, and may grow frustrated by, traditional somatotherapies (see ‘Somatotherapy with the Garrulous Patient’, Rolyat, 1980). Although local epidemiological studies suggest that high levels of lexithymia are relatively rare, there are some intriguing cultural variations. Mounting evidence suggests that lexithymia is much more common in so-called ‘WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic] people’, who tend to live in societies where an independent model of self-construal predominates … Rather than aiming to treat lexithymia, WEIRD societies have developed many indigenous approaches that encourage patients with various health problems to talk at great length about their feelings.

I find this a very apt description of the way I have to think about myself in relation to other, "normal", people. And I love the acronym "WEIRD".

To finish up with, here are a few quotes about alexithymia and therapy:

From The Most Important Personality Trait You’ve Never Heard Of | Psychology Today: People high in alexithymia are poor candidates for psychotherapy, while at the same time having higher risk for a variety of psychological disorders. -- which I think explains a lot about my own experiences.

From Here's What Alexithymia Actually Is—and Why It Can Make Therapy Challenging | SELF, When you first enter therapy, it might be surprisingly difficult to answer the question, "How are you feeling?" Answering that question can be even more of a challenge if you deal with what is known as alexithymia... (That article goes on to call it a "disorder", of course.) Here's a paper that calls it a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, which is certainly closer to the way I tend to view it.

Those of you who have been tracking my "done since" posts way too closely may recall that in the middle of June I signed up for online therapy on a site called 7cups.com (short for 7 Cups of Tea). Since then, in addition to chatting from time to time with my therapist, I've been spending a lot of time on the site, mostly in the fora (forums? I'll go with the Latin version).

Mostly, the site is there for free conversations with (slightly) trained volunteer listeners (I wrote about the value of such conversations back in July). Besides that and the fora there are two other features of the site that some people had come to rely on: the "feed" (sort of twitter-like), and group chats.

Right now there are two different kerfuffles in progress -- the feed (officially unsupported since sometime in May) was taken down with less than 24 hours notice, and access to group chat rooms was closed off to everyone who had fewer than a certain number of 1-1 chats with listeners. That was done with no notice at all. The people who relied on the feed and the group chats are understandably upset, and I've been spending quite a lot of time making comments on forum posts.

I have to mention at this point that I haven't found much use for the volunteer listeners -- I'm paying to talk to my therapist -- and I've dipped into the group chats on a few occasions and found them almost impossible to follow and mostly uninteresting. But... I've realized a couple of things:

One is that people like me who are there mainly for the paid therapy or the fora (or the now-defunct feeds) are very much second-class citizens. The hours I've spent with my therapist don't count toward the chat quota for getting into the group chatrooms, and the money I'm spending doesn't get me any of the (rather minor) features you get with a paid membership that costs a tenth as much. It's weird -- apparently the old adage that says "if you're getting it for free you're not the customer, you're the product" doesn't apply on 7cups.

The other is why I spend so much time on the fora: I'm being helpful: making comments with encouragement, sympathy, and occasional bits of wisdom. Which is what the Middle-Sized Bear always does. For some reason I found that surprising.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   4637 words in 8 posts this month (average 579/post)
    432 words in 1 post today

Please excuse me -- this is going to be a bit round-about, although I do expect to get to a point eventually. Not necessarily the point.

There are two different things going on. The first is that I recently joined a site called 7cups.com, where one can connect via (text)chat with an actual therapist, for an entirely reasonable monthly fee. N. suggested it partly because there are no therapists on the island who take Medicare, but mostly because she knows that I communicate better in text than I do in speech. (I also forget stuff if I don't write it down.)

I'm just getting started with this, trying to work on my anxiety and chronic depression. So naturally I needed to start with something of an infodump.

The second thing is that I've been finding myself trying to give various health-care providers (and their minions; I'm not sure how much of a clinic's or hospital's staff "provider" covers) a "quick" overview of Colleen's recent medical history. That's an infodump in its own right, and I was having trouble remembering what happened when.

Being a tool-using bear, I figured that the simplest way to do it, or at least to make a first cut, was by combining a couple of tagging conventions that I was already starting to use in my yyyy/mm.done files. You'll notice that they already sort properly by date. The problem is that when you grep for, say, "hospital", you get line numbers instead of day numbers.

I had already started putting (mmdd) at the front of entries that I figured I was going to want to know dates for, like hospital admission and discharge dates. I had also started using a new flag character, '/', for events involving Colleen. (I've been using '%' for myself for a long time.)

Now, it was a simple matter to

    grep ' / (' */*.done | wc -l
    141

That number there is the line count. Right. Of course those aren't all hospital admissions and discharges, and the record goes back to 2008. But still, that includes at least ten hospital stays since we moved to Seattle. And it doesn't include moving four times, being laid off twice, my job burnout, totaling my car, and everything going on in the rest of family. So.

That led to the following infodump on 7c, as slightly paraphrased in this week's to.do file:

Not sure how much detail I need to go into about what's been going on in my life, but 2012 and 2015-2018 were particularly stressful. We moved four times between 2012 and now, and C was hospitalized at least 10 times. I changed jobs three times, and retired. My cat died in 2015.

And then I added:

Looking back objectively, I think I have to admit that I'm in surprisingly good shape, considering.

And

I guess that means that I have to change the question under discussion from "how can I reduce my depression and anxiety?" to "how can I cope with stress?" So... improving my coping skills and self-care skills. And reducing procrastination, which is not just a (broken) coping mechanism but also one of the few sources of stress that's actually under my control.

N's reaction when I told her this was "I thought you'd already done that." It turns out that depression and anxiety are perfectly normal and expected reactions to that level of stress. I may need to work on self-awareness, too.

Bears can be a little slow sometimes.

Today I have been reading about Emotional Intelligence, at a site I found while looking up alexithymia, which is basically the opposite, and is a condition I already knew I have.

I think it probably explains a number of things about me, including the fact that I have trouble communicating with Colleen, and the fact that I haven't gotten much out of therapy. With both of the therapists I've tried, I've seemed to go through an initial period of getting my immediate questions answered, and then I run out of questions and am left with a vague feeling that something is wrong or missing, but no words to express it with.

I suppose it must be frustrating for everyone else, too -- the therapists who can't help me because I can't coherently express what's wrong, the women I've had brief relationships with who felt that there was something important missing that they couldn't quite pin down. My kids. Colleen.

I don't know whether there's much to be done about it. Here's a list of "feeling words" -- many of which don't even seem to me to describe feelings at all.

There's a related term: Emotional Literacy. I had an experience of its opposite, emotional illiteracy, yesterday, when I completely failed to pick up on the emotional consequences of something N said to me in an IM.

I've been told that I have a lot of empathy. Sometimes I wonder. Other times I think I suppress it because it overloads me. Other times I'm just plain baffled.

A pretty good day -- busy, somewhat productive at work (mostly getting a new coworker set up with hardware and a development environment, and sorting through my list of tasks to find the ones that aren't actually my problem). Though the huge pile of tasks still left at work, and the massive pile of boxes and envelopes in the office at home, were (and still are) pretty overwhelming.

Naomi had asked me to call after dinner and sing to her, but when I finally did call she was busy, so I sang to Colleen instead. Naomi joined us just as I (thought I) was finishing up, so the concert continued. I probably did more singing last night than I did all weekend at Consonance. That's OK; I didn't go to Consonance to sing, but to talk to people. (I didn't do enough of that, either, but I didn't expect to.)

The most interesting thing was going through the handouts on recognizing emotions that I got from Dr. Rogers in the morning and discovering that many of my most common symptoms match up with shame. That was a huge surprise, though it may have something to do with my self-image. What there is of it.

The top link, I think, was Data as Art: 10 Striking Science Maps at Wired.com

Oops. It looks as though I meant to post this yesterday, but got distracted. I did get a walk in -- go me!

It occurrs to me that there's a significant difference between "that jacket looks good on you" and "you look good in that jacket". I've heard both, but they're not interchangeable. The first is about the jacket, and easy for me to accept. The second is about me, so it's harder. I am, however, gradually becoming convinced.

OVFF conflicts with a close friend's wedding this year. Grumph.

My therapist says I need to accept the fact that I don't have time for everything I want to do. But what if I don't have time for everything I need to do? It doesn't help that some days I oversleep badly.

Some good links under the cut, as usual.

Most of the morning was burned up by meeting Colleen at Kaiser, waiting for her to get out of yet another CAT scan, and paying for her wheelchair transport. The good news is that in the afternoon in her PT session she stood up six times, twice for slightly over a minute. This makes me very happy.

The major insight of the afternoon was that it's not surprising I've been getting anxiety attacks on Wednesdays -- I'm an introvert. Colleen isn't. I've started tightening up when I pick up A because she's an extrovert, and a non-stop talker. Now that I understand the problem, I can handle it exactly the way I have been handling it, by retreating to the office or some other room for most of the evening, and dealing with a limited number of people at a time.

This also explains why I don't like to sing on Wednesdays, unless there are people there who really want to listen and pay attention. I can noodle, because that's something I can retreat to.

Went out to Jasmine with pocketnaomi (we would have had cflute as well, but she was exhausted after going shopping with A and having to hit 4 different stores in order to get everything). A nice, relaxing evening; we brought back take-out for cflute and Colleen.