Category Archives: Rules

Emotional Science

Posted on by
Reply

Continuing the recent science theme, I’d like to begin an examination of the scientific or evidence based underpinnings of this project. One of the reasons for starting this project is a feeling of dissatisfaction with the way in which emotion is treated, studied and researched. This post is a first draft at a non-technical critique of current approaches, with some pointers as to how we might be able to construct a better science of emotions.

When we look at what science, psychology and medicine have to offer, we can see a number of approaches:

  1. Social or psychological research based on empirical evidence
  2. Clinical practice in working with patients
  3. Brain, genetics or other “hard” science on the emotions
  4. Theoretical work with pointers to the above

So what’s wrong with these? My first reaction is that they are cold – they lack any shred of a type of understanding we might call empathy. The question therefore is how can we possibly study emotion without placing empathy at the heart of the study – or more strongly without actually using empathy as a fundamental tool for both evaluation and interventions if the field of emotions?

Psychiatrist's Office or Hotel?
Photo by randomwire

The problem with taking a non-standard approach is that using empathy is considered unscientific – it lacks objectivity. Indeed many people criticise the basis of much of Psychiatry on the fact that the practice relies too much on untested and untestable insights of the therapist.

So why not build a more robust basis for sharing, learning from, evaluating and scaling empathy? That is what would a science of emotions be like if it were based on a collective economy of subjective evaluations? Today, with social networks we are able to scale, and quantify subjective evaluations. We can “like” a post in FaceBook or +1 a page in Google Plus, and then use these types of recommendation to build socially constructed evaluations.

External Validation
To construct a more robust basis for a scientific language of emotions, that is something we can use as an assessment criteria for successful theory and practice, we need some form of external validation. In the case of empathy, that is successfully identifying the subjective emotions of another, we need to compare the therapists evaluation with a subjective report of the subject of the experience. When we combine these occasional external validations, with predictions based on the reputations derived from the social graph of recommendations, we are then able to assess successful theories as well as good practitioners.

So how?
To describe this in more concrete terms, if people were to rate other people according to how well they were able to empathise with various types of emotional experience, and how well they were able to predict the affective response of other people to interventions or new experiences, we would have a social graph of recommendations based on a range of types of emotional empathy.

Given this data it would be possible to build up theories of practice, based on taking different views of the data, combined with ways in which we use this data. I might recommend for instance a practice in which we took a group of trusted emotional empaths in the area of paranoia, in the cultural context of London, and according to some procedure asked this group to base recommendations for therapeutic interventions for an artist with a “creative block”. Over time, and with feedback based on external evaluations, different theories would emerge, competing with each other for a best therapeutic fit to the external data.

At least then, we would have a science that could evolve over time, based firmly around a subject we all intuitively understand and value. We could replace Freud, with a socially constructed body of theory:

This photo is taken from Madame Tussauds in Berlin, so it's not the real Freud.

 

For the children

Posted on by
3

I’ve been thinking about how this site could be used, and it occurred to me that by using a private diary, with delayed publication, or better delayed sharing, there could be some genuinely useful ways of communicating between parents and children.

Divorced!
Photo by xadrian

I am divorced, and whenever a divorce or separation occurs in a family with young children, there are many things that would be good to communicate to the children, that don’t get said. Sometimes it would help them understand what happened – and just as importantly why certain things happened, and yet understandably these things need often to be kept from them, at least while they young. Yet when they are told later, it can be hard to judge how much the passage of time has altered the story. It could be some twenty or more years later, and memory is a fickle thing.

So why not give the possibility for (those parents that find it useful), to “talk” to their children in the future? A parent could write a private, password protected diary of events, and only allow the children to read it when they were say 16, 18 or 21? Indeed, there could be several levels of the diary, one which is for the children when they were young, and other layers that would be revealed only when the children get to a specific age.

Ideally this sort of “private diary for the children when they are old enough”, would be written by both parents – a two way conversation with a different login for each parent. It is difficult to know without trying, what features would be useful, or what problems could be caused, but it is a promising idea worth further discussion.

I can see for instance, how a two way conversation between the parents, with the intention of being read by the children when they are old enough, could actually help build a better more focused dialogue between the parents. Both parents would have to be more careful what they say, and what they do, because of the knowledge that it will be judged by their kids in the future! Scary thought possibly, but just maybe something that could give the right sort of focus at a difficult time for all concerned? Just maybe this could be a healing thing, even at the actual time of the separation. Even without this, I’m sure my kids would like the option of understanding why their parents separated when they grow up – if they did not then they would not need to search it out,

As with all the private diaries on this site, the diaries would be confidential, and shared only by consent. It’s a delicate task working out what tools and features are needed, and as doubtless many mistakes will be made along the way, we need to think through these issues and test them with volunteers well aware of the risks involved before releasing them into the wild!

Two shots on the black

Posted on by
Reply

When playing pool, there are many different rules. You go to one bar, or pub and they play two shots on the black, in another only one, and yet another you have to nominate a pocket. Strangers, or even good friends can come to blows over such things. The general rule of thumb, much like visiting another country, is to play by local rules – you ask what the rules are before you start to play, and agree them, generally accepting those in play locally.

Pool
Photo by WillyPayne

With emotions, it’s not so clear – what are the local rules? Are there any rules? In general, as far as I can tell the best advise is to forget rules and deal with each situation honestly as it comes up. This feels right. It’s how i was brought up, at least by me peers, and family, but if I think about it, if I look at situations I’ve been in, it seems that this philosophy leads to more trouble than needed. There should be a better way.

Going back to the pool metaphor, not asking before hand, and just accepting the local rules when a situation comes up, works well for fun casual games, but has also led to trouble when the games have more at stake. In my favourite pub in London for playing pool, they solved this problem by sticking a copy of the “Official Pool Rules” on the wall. Any time there was a dispute, I could point to the rules on the wall, and so avoid a personal conflict – after all that was the way you would have to play in a league game. It worked well.

However, that is rare. I almost never find a pub with rules posted on the wall. I’m not sure why, and it would be interesting to ask someone who has run a lot of pool bars, but I’d suspect that the reasons are more or less similar to the reasons why we don;t formally negotiate these things in our every day life. It’s awkward. Putting up a poster takes up wall space, looks over officious. It’s not worth the effort – better to just muddle through and be relaxed about it.

In the pub I mentioned above, it worked because that was the culture of the pub. There were several informal fun tables, and then there was the good table in the main bar where the players on the team played. They played in the league, so it was natural for them to insist on official rules, and this spread to the back tables. No one needed to make a fuss about it, and there was no problem of taking an existing culture and changing the rules to meet some standardised way of settling the disputes. Doing this in another pub would not be so easy.

The problem of standardising on a set of rules is similar with every day relationship and family conflicts, it is not so easy to introduce them rationally, and much more natural when they are simply part of the accepted way of doing things – whether you agree with them or not. That’s what culture is there for, it’s an evolved apersonal thing, something you grew up with, something passed down, and a professional, a therapist, lawyer or any other form of professional is not going to be able to establish these in an easy way.

However in modern cities, with mixed ethnic and cultural groups, with many of the traditional rules about relationships up for grabs, questioned, and uncertain, it is clear that there are far more opportunities of misunderstandings and conflicts. In this context, the rule makers are tempted to move in. Lawyers create prenuptial agreements, life coaches and relationship counsellors introduce new ideas and ways of relating. In many ways, the professional become judges, and new rules are stuck on the wall.