Wednesday, January 20, 2016

fear and greed

http://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/


they can talk ?

http://theycantalk.com/

what are you feeling today?

From WBUR's Cognoscenti pages:
The most successful leaders, he suggested, know how to manipulate the emotions of their followers: “The energy that actually shapes the world,” Orwell wrote, “springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war.”
Your own emotions, however, are not what you think they are.

Recent research on emotions http://www.affective-science.org/  points to indications that there is little or no difference between anger, sadness, and other bad feelings:  it just feels bad.   There are good feelings, too, but between these two big groups, finer distinctions turn out to be our own invention.

Here's the rub: if we as individuals form (create?) our own emotions,  we are responsible for our reactions to people identified as "leaders".    Go back to the top of this page.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

ooh an alternative to Paul Ekman

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/06/25/emotions-facial-expressions-not-related/print/

After decades of dominating the emotional landscape Ekman's work is being challenged, The potential impact in many areas could be huge.




About Face
For half a century, one theory about the way we experience and express emotion has helped shape how we practice psychology, do police work, and even fight terrorism. But what if that theory is wrong?
By Shannon Fischer | Boston Magazine | July 2013



PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSE BURKE

Forty-six years ago a young San Francisco–based cowboy of a psychologist named Paul Ekman emerged from the jungle with proof of a powerful idea. During the previous couple of years, he had set out trying to prove a theory popularized in the 19th century by Charles Darwin: that people of all ages and races, from all over the world, manifest emotions the same way. Ekman had traveled the globe with photographs that showed faces experiencing six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. Everywhere he went, from Japan to Brazil to the remotest village of Papua New Guinea, he asked subjects to look at those faces and then to identify the emotions they saw on them. To do so, they had to pick from a set list of options presented to them by Ekman. The results were impressive. Everybody, it turned out, even preliterate Fore tribesmen in New Guinea who’d never seen a foreigner before in their lives, matched the same emotions to the same faces. Darwin, it seemed, had been right.