Operaciones relacionadas con el agujereado

After decades of neglect, research on affect generally, and emotions particularly, and their relation to cognition, began about thirty years ago in psychology claimed Forgas in 2008. One reason for the neglect of studying affect and emotions in psychology, as Forgas suggests:

… may be a long-dominant view in Western thought, held since Plato’s time, that affect is a dangerous, invasive force that subverts rational thinking, an idea that has recurred in many theories throughout the ages … Forgas (2008, p.94).

37

Yet until very recently, the meaning of ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ were not clear and even today the term ‘emotion’ is still used very frequently and interchangeably with other terms such as affect and mood as many philosophers and researchers point out (Deigh, 2009; Cowie et al., 2011). Scherer (2005) adds that the concept of ‘emotion’ presents a

particularly difficult problem because researchers, scientists, and lay-people have different answers to the question: ‘What is an emotion?’ and this can be attributed to differences of experiences of feelings, personalities, cultures, and languages. Fortunately, progress is now being made in drawing some lines of demarcation. During the last several decades, researchers in different areas as social cognition, neuroanatomy, and psychophysiology have recognized that affect is often a useful and even crucial component of cognition and behaviour (Damasio, 1994; Forgas, 2008) and that it has significant implications for learning and teaching. In Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, students who

experience negative emotions such as fear or anxiety may be less active and less successful than peers who experience positive emotions (Arnold, 2011). For example, when a student feels high anxiety, her cognition may work more slowly than the normal rate.

In the neurobiology literature, the process of emotion has been explored by scientists such as Damasio (1994) and LeDoux (2012) who have explained the mechanisms of the brain and how it receives information and interprets it with emotions. Such researchers have also clarified what happens in our body when we feel some emotions. However, we still need to understand why we are influenced by what our brains receive as stimuli, and what is so important that makes our brain and body react to that stimulus. The answers to these questions, I think, can be helped by philosophers who are interested in emotion. In philosophy, the previous questions might possibly be interpreted as: What creates an emotion?, Why are we moved to experience emotion?, and ‘What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of an emotion?’. For my study, these questions help me on the journey towards a better understanding of the causes of anxiety experienced by English Language students, their responses to anxiety, and the contexts in which they feel anxious. Typically, emotions occur when we confront or perceive either a positive or negative, actual or imaginary, perceived change in our present situation. This important perceived change works like an alarm that stimulates emotions and signals that something requires attention (Stearns and Stearns 1988; LeDoux, 2012). It is also important to note the crucial role of familiarity, as well as change, in generating emotions (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001). In some cases, despair and frustration are caused by a familiar background and situation or event and change seems absent. For example, the death of a person to whom one had been close

38

might continue to make that person sad even after a long period of time, perhaps

experiencing intense emotions of sadness and sometimes crying for a long time after the event when remembering or reminded of the person who has died. According to Buchanan (2007), the retrieval of emotional memories is often combined with greater accuracy and/or vividness than events that lacked emotions. Buchanan (2007) reviews the literature

addressing the influences of emotion on retrieval, focusing on the cognitive and neurological mechanisms and concludes the following.

The amygdala, in combination with the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, plays an important role in the retrieval of memories for emotional events. The neural regions necessary for online emotional processing also influence emotional memory retrieval, perhaps through the re-experience of emotion during the retrieval process (Buchanan, 2007, p.761).

Emotions are greatly sensitive to personal circumstances, and this is what Ben-Ze’ev (2001) refers to as the ‘personality of emotions’. The degree of a change’s significance is personal because it is determined by the subject, the person who experiences the emotion. Usually the change happens in the person’s situation or, in some cases, the change may be associated with people close to the person and who influence the person’s environment. In the context of this study, a teacher could influence a person who is a learner, and a teacher could change that learner’s situation. If a person perceives the change as a significant concern then intensive emotions are expected to be generated. Sometimes we blame others about producing certain emotions in some certain situations because we decide the

emotions generated by others are inappropriate. This might occur because, as Nussbaum (2001) points out, we do not see the world from the point of view of others’ scheme goals and projects. So, if one of my students is very upset or angry because s/he receives what she considers a low grade from me and I think it is a good grade for that work, I might not regard the upset or anger as appropriate or I might, at least, not understand the emotions of that student. According to de Rivera (1989) evaluating other’s emotions is like evaluating other’s actions. The similarity is that both evaluations depend on our personal and cultural contexts.

Similarly, as emotions vary among people, they also differ across cultures (Mesquita et al., 1997). I have already noted how a bride in Libya is expected not to express and show certain emotions such as happiness. Peterson (2006) emphasized the important role of culture and considers it a fundamental component of an emotion using the work of Gordon (1981) and Thoits (1990) in which they described the four components of emotional experience as: (a) bodily sensations, (b) expressive gestures, (c) social situations or

39

relationship, and (d) the emotion culture of a society. Emotions, as noted, occur when a change in the present situation is evaluated as important and relevant to a person’s personal concern and the description of typical emotional concern requires some consideration. First of all, there is comparative concern, in which the person compares his/her present situation against a certain background framework (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001). This framework involves comparing a novel situation to the ideal, ‘ought to be’, or imaginary alternative. Each person has limited flexible baselines through which s/he expresses his/her own values and attitudes and these baselines depend on some personal, biological, social, and contextual features. The limitations of the baselines are derived from our limited ability to change our values and beliefs (Ben-Ze’ev in Goldie, 2000). My student gets upset or angry at

receiving what she sees as a bad grade and what I see as a good grade, because she had worked for twice as many hours as normal but I did not know that.

Social comparison also plays an important role in describing typical emotional concern. Smith (2000) argues that social comparisons are responsible for producing familiar and subtle emotions according to social comparison theory and research. The comparisons involve a person similar on attributes related to the comparison and on aspects of comparison that are significant and relevant to the self (Tesser, 1991). People who are involved in this process are important for our well-being and flourishing because they constitute our environment. People with more social relationships tend to be physically and mentally healthier than others with fewer relationships, and they may be more positively emotional. Negatively, social comparison may be a source of personal instability and self- esteem and envy and jealousy may depend on a person’s personal and contextual

circumstances. Group membership, in addition, can influence emotional responses. The members of the same group can share norms about something. Our emotional intensity may be influenced by the size of the group and the extent of social contacts with members of a group and events around people may result in different emotions such as cooperation, conformity, competition, envy or jealousy (Keltner and Haidt, 1999). So, my student who had worked for twice as many hours as normal and got a B compares herself to her friend who had worked only half the time and had got an A, and then might feel upset, angry, or jealous at receiving what s/he sees as a bad grade, especially in comparison to her friend who received an A grade.

Understanding emotions, as indicated above, will involve understanding aspects of situations such the typical cause and the typical emotional concern, namely, a typical emotional object, which refers either to the person who experiences the emotions or to

40

others. Sometimes the object is more than one person, for example, when we feel compassion for a group of people. Emotions might be also directed to fictitious or dead objects and Nussbaum (2001) illustrates the concern of emotional objects in detail. She emphasizes that emotions have an object: emotions are always about someone or

something and the object is an intentional object with ‘aboutness’, as Gordon (1974) and Nussbaum (2001) point out. This means that it is not merely that our emotions are directed to someone or something, but that they can be more internal. When we have an emotion towards a person, we are not just pointing to the object, but we need to see, to

communicate with the object in our own ways. Our ways of seeing an object are not the only ways embodied by our emotions; beliefs are also involved as Scherer (1999) proposes in his ‘appraisal theory’. The importance of beliefs lies in their power to create a plausible cause which arouses the emotion (Frijda et al. 2000). Getting angry must have sets of beliefs such as that some significant damage has occurred either to the person or to someone close to that person, perhaps done by someone willingly. A person’s beliefs underlying emotions do not require truthfulness for beliefs, they can be unfounded. However, people sometimes change the beliefs that trigger an emotion, but their emotion continues. My hypothetical student is angry with me because she thinks that I was not fair when I gave her a B grade although in herself she believes that my evaluation was fair. Since emotions are presented with respect to an object, this object must have some importance or value to the subject. My hypothetical student with what she regards as a disappointingly low grade had placed a high value, an importance, on gaining a higher grade. The extent of the value perceived in the object typically generates the intensity of the experienced emotion (Griffiths, 2013). In grief, for example, people probably do not experience the same degree of grief when they read about a stranger who died in a car accident as the grief of losing one of their own parents. The importance of the two persons is not equal for the reason that we usually judge a parent as a valuable person and as important for our own well-being. Usually a parent plays an important role in our personal life and so this role seems to make reference to our own flourishing. Thus, emotions in general involve judgments about significant people or things that are parts of the person’s own world (Nussbaum, 2001). For example, students I teach who express anxiety about speaking in English may regard the ability to talk in English as salient to their flourishing, perhaps with respect to success in gaining a good job. For others, anxiety might result from their judgement that they are weaker than their peers. For others, there may be no anxiety because they do not hold speaking in English to be of importance for them.

41

After introducing emotions and its theoretical approach, I shall now move to a discussion of what is and what is not an emotion because, as noted earlier in this Chapter, the word emotion can mean different things to different people and is often used interchangeably with mood or states.