Wtf: "Why We Cry: The Fascinating Psychology of Emotional Release" (Article Recc)

[black_sluggard]

I'm subscribed to a lot of newsletters through email, most of them by accident. Sometimes I read the articles, but mostly not, because most of the subscriptions came as a consequence of some petition or another, so many of the articles are political in nature. The state of things right now is such that, mostly, those articles just wind up making me mad about something that I (pessimistically) have a hard time believing humanity will ever be "healthy" enough to fix, so it just turns into impotent rage that doesn't really help anything.

Today, though, I found an article through AlterNet that I actually managed to get into without hating the world. It is called "Why We Cry: The Fascinating Psychology of Emotional Release", and I thought was very interesting. It is a look at the biochemstry behind tears, both their cause and their importance, and how that sometimes gets fouled up through cultural perceptions and confused responses.

 I've probably said (somewhere) how I have a tendency to feel like an abstraction. If nothing else, a few discussions and posts from others on my flist have had me thinking about it a lot. Sometimes it seems like I'm "in my head" too much, or don't feel a connection between my thoughts and the world around me. And a lot of my understanding of emotion comes from fiction, where what the character is feeling is often right there on the page—stylized, well defined, and easy to see—so translating that understanding of words on paper to what's going on inside my brainmeat can be kind of hard for me. I don't often really have an awareness of my own emotions when I'm not being overwhelmed by them. So, naturally, I was interested in how the article talks about feelings flowing from thoughts rather than the other way around. With that in mind, I guess it doesn't seem so strange not to know what I'm feeling, so long as I know what I'm thinking.

I don't know. I guess overall, the perspective in this article makes a lot of sense to me. While it talks about the previous "steam-kettle" image of emotional expression as intuitive, this feels more "real" and "natural" to me. More relevant to how I've experienced the world.

Comments

[game-byrd.livejournal.com]

By the way, I read the recommended article, loved it, found it VERY helpful/useful, and of course wrote fic that used it: http://game-byrd.livejournal.com/172222.html.

:D

Thanks for the recc. The 'feelings flowing from thoughts' was very helpful for me, too, because so much of the time I don't seem to 'feel' anything of significance, but I'm thinking nearly all the time.

I've never understood the 'letting off steam' thing either. I suspect it is like the theory that people occasionally 'snap' and perform a violent action in an irrational manner. Yet if you examine what they did, you'll see that it wasn't irrational at all - they choose their victim, they choose their manner of attack, they calibrate the attack, often they choose where to strike so as to not leave public marks (or the opposite, if they wish to mark up their foe), etc. All of which belies the idea that people lose rationality when they fly into violence. On the contrary, violence is almost always carefully thought out, even if not premeditated.