The Emotion Machine

what they’re connected to.

Trial and error can teach us new ways to achieve the goals we already maintain.

Attachment-related blame and praise teach us which goals to discard or retain.

This suggests that Pride and Shame play special roles in what we learn; they help us learn ‘ends’ instead of ‘means’. Listen to Michael Lewis describe some of the striking effects of shame:

Michael Lewis: ”Shame results when an individual judges his or her actions as a failure in regard to his or her standards, rules and goals and then makes a global attribution. The person experiencing shame wishes to hide, disappear or die. It is a highly negative and painful state that also disrupts ongoing behavior and causes confusion in thought and an inability to speak. The body of the shamed person seems to shrink, as if to disappear from the eye of the self or others. Because of the intensity of this emotional state, and the global attack on the self-system, all that individuals can do when presented with such a state is to attempt to rid themselves of it.”[11]

But when do we experience these particular kinds of feelings? They are especially prone to come when we’re in the presence of those we respect—or whom we wish to be respected by. This suggests that shame and pride may be involved with how we acquire our high-level goals, and that these values are greatly influenced by those to whom we become ‘attached’—at least in those our earliest ‘formative’ years. So the next few sections will ask some questions like these:

What are goals and how do they work?

What are the spans of those ‘formative’ years?

To whom do our children become attached?

When and how do we outgrow attachments?

How do they help us establish our values?

We’re almost always pursuing some goals. Whenever you’re hungry, we try to find food. When we sense danger, we strive to escape. When we feel wronged, we may wish for revenge. Sometimes you aim toward completing some work—or perhaps you seek ways to avoid it. We use words like try, strive, wish, aim, seek, and want so often that our minds seem controlled by collections of goals.

Here is a very simple idea about what words like want and wish might mean:

You ‘want’ to achieve a situation G when some active mental process works to reduce the differences between G and your present situation.

Later, in §6-3, we’ll see that this idea is more powerful than it may seem. For example, when there are several such differences to remove, then achieving goal G may take several steps. For example, suppose that you’re hungry and want to eat, but you only have a can of soup. Then you must seek some tool to open that can and then try to find a bowl and a spoon, and then you’ll want to feed yourself. Each of those ‘needs’ comes from some difference between your situation and the one you want—so each such difference becomes a ‘sub-goal’ of your original goal.

Of course, you first may need to make a plan for how to accomplish all those tasks —and making such plans can sometimes engage substantial parts of the rest of your mind.

Citizen: Why do you focus so much on goals, as though all we do is purposeful? Sometimes we simply react to what happens, or act out old, habitual scripts—and sometimes we daydream and fantasize, or aimlessly imagine things.

It would be very hard to prove that anything that a person does is wholly devoid of purposes—because, as Sigmund Freud observed, some of our mental processes may work to conceal from us some of our principal motives and goals. But in any case we need more ideas about how we form those purposes.

The most usual theory of how people learn is by what we call ‘trial and error.’ That’s how Carol learned when playing alone, when she worked by herself to fill her cup. She was annoyed when she failed with a fork, but was pleased by success when she used a spoon—so the next time she wants to fill a cup, she’ll be more likely to know what to do. That seems like simple common sense—that we learn from failure and from success—but we need a theory of how that might work.

Student: I suppose that her brain formed connections from her goal to the actions that helped her to achieve it.

OK, but that is rather vague. Could you say more about how that actually works?

Student: Perhaps Carol starts with some goals just floating around—but when she succeeds by using her spoon, then she somehow connects her “Fill Cup” goal to her “Use Spoon” goal. Also, when she fails with the fork, she makes a “don’t” connection to “Use Fork,” to keep from doing that again. Then, the next time she wants to fill a cup, she’ll first try the sub-goal of using a spoon.

That would be a good way to start, and I like your mentioning those “don’t” connections. These are important because we must not only learn to do things that work, but also must learn ways to avoid the most common mistakes.

However, while this kind of theory can help to explain how we interconnect goals that we already possess, it does not answer such questions as, “How do we get new goals that are not subgoals of existing ones?” or, more generally, “How do we learn new ideals and values?”

I don’t recall much discussion of in academic psychology books. The following sections will argue that we cannot acquire our high-level values in the same way that we learn other things, that is, by ‘learning from experience.’ Instead, we’ll argue that children learn values in special ways that depend on the persons to whom they are ‘attached.’

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§2-3. Imprimers