Audience: E12 classes
Writer: me
Purpose: To create a piece of writing that illustrates the concepts, theories and research of modern neuroscientists about the human brain, emotions and actions. To connect Davidson and Begley's theory to an accessible text and explain its impact on our decision making process.
Context: I am studying self-reflection in E12 and gathering information about the brain's process in decision making and human reactions. I am creating definitions of the different theories and connecting these to my own ability to self-reflect and make decisions.
There are six dimensions of emotional style (Davidson and Begley XIV):
Resilience: how quickly or slowly you recover from difficulties or misfortune
Outlook: how long you are able to have a positive emotion.
Social Intuition: how well you are able to pick up social signals from those around you.
Self awareness: how well you perceive your own feelings that reflect emotions.
Sensitivity to context: how good you are at controlling your emotional responses to take into account the situation you find yourself in.
Attention: how sharp or clear your focus is.
Davidson, Richard J., and Sharon Begley. The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them. Plume, 2013.
Inside Out. Pixar. Walt Disney Studios. 2016. DVD.
Joy also demonstrated a high resilience when faced with issues. When she and Sadness were lost in long term memory, Joy was persistent in finding a way home. Every time she was knocked down she got right back up and tried again. Disgust plays a minor role, with her high social intuition she also has a hyper sensitivity to context. She is able to take a situation and react to it how she sees fit, even if that reaction is with disgust. She rarely acts in situations that do not pertain to her. Sadness is a major character and one that we understand with more appreciation as the film progresses. With her glum and negative outlook on everything sadness struggles the entire movie. She thought that everything was the end of the world and was not able to maintain any positive thoughts. Even when Joy was asking her what she enjoys or likes.Sadness also has a very low attention when it comes to what she is supposed to be doing. She often gets distracted by the things around her. For example when Joy asks her to stay in one spot she immediately gets distracted, leaving and ultimately touching another memory. Fear plays a smaller role and there are many times that Fear and Disgust have similar reactions. With his high anxiety about all situations fear has a very fine tuned sense of social intuition. He is always picking up on what others thinking. doing or saying and worries about it. For example he worries about what the other kids at the new school are thinking about Riley. Do her clothes match? Are those girls the cool girls? What do they think of her?
Fear also has a has a low resilience. He struggles to overcome situations or let things go. He always brings up past situations when things have gone wrong for Riley and lets that control how he acts about current situations. Finally Anger ends up having and important part of guiding Riley's spontaneous decisions. This hot headed (literally) emotion struggles with maintaining a positive outlook on life. The move to San Francisco was a struggle with anger, because everything was different and different is not good in his eyes. Each struggle just reinforces his negative outlook on the move. One of the moments where this is reinforced is the incident with the pizza. At first he was hopeful that the day may get better with a nice slice of pizza but of course San Francisco just had to ruin pizza, therefore ruining the whole move.Although he has a low outlook on life he does maintain a high self- awareness. He is able to tell when he is upset and when he is about to do something irrational, but he is unable to stop himself from behaving inappropriately making his sensitivity to context very low.
As for me, in terms of the five emotions that guide my decisions, I think Joy and Sadness are fairly balanced for me and I have sprinkles of Fear, Disgust and Anger that each flare-up at various times. However, with age I am getting better at dealing with the flare-ups of the Fear, Disgust and Anger. In terms of the six dimensions of emotional style, I think as a teacher my sensitivity to context is one of my strengths. When it comes to student situations I must hold myself in a certain way and control my emotions. If I were to get upset with a student this may escalate the situation and make it worse than it needs to be. Being old you have more life experience, thus time becomes a great teacher and has helped me to build up my resilience. I am able to endure more challenges with a learning mentality and appreciate more moments in those moments. I understand that difficulty is relative to my life experience and that good does not exist without bad.
