THREAT ASSESSMENT and VICISSITUDES with LASSITUDE (or not)
Two verses and a bunch of other stuff fit for the nerd within the reader
I wrote one verse primarily on impulse after hearing the term threat assessment in relation to the upcoming Georgia case involving the activities of prominent Republicans in trying to rob an election for Donald Trump. The witness tampering and intimidation are of concern, hence the frequent voicing of the term in question. As is the larger picture in regards to the nation and its millions this threat assessment extends to you and I, ‘John and Jane Q Public’ and in our democracy.
Here is my verse.
My second verse was written in an effort to better define my emotions in regards to anthropogenic climate change, the recent news coming from Maui in Hawaii. I was thinking that I was becoming numb to it, or possibly having lassitude over the whole disturbing news of extreme weather events nearly every day. I was feeling a little guilty wondering if I was apathetic to it all. I came to the conclusion that I am not in the camp of those apathetic on the right as recent research has identified. The paper itself I did not read except for the abstract, but I felt compelled to dig into it the best I could as it directly related to my verse. And I began wondering, being one of the approximately 65 million Americans on psychiatric medicine, if this might affect my level of impassivity in regards to climate change. This thought has crossed my mind more than once, and I thought it might be good to see what I could find. So I have written an excerpt from this one study that has been done. The results are inconclusive yet I thought it interesting to include some of the study.
First my second verse:
And for our alternative universe, some Truth Social posts which came up with a ‘climate’ search. The two images are full of disinformation and conspiracy theory, and perhaps I’m not accomplishing anything to even post them at this point. Keep some of these people’s thoughts in mind when you read the psychological research excerpts following these two images.
The following excerpts are involved in a study of impassivity in relation to our environment. I have tried to cover nearly every aspect of what is found in the abstract from sources on psychological research and definitions. I found it worthwhile to look at closely, as it is a good self test in our own individual emotions as related to the climate change crisis.
APA PsycArticles: Journal Article
Environmental impassivity: Blunted emotionality undermines concern for the environment.
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Bickel, L. A., & Preston, S. D. [@profprestos]
(2023). Environmental impassivity: Blunted emotionality undermines concern for the environment. from the journal Emotion.
ABSTRACT
The average American believes in climate change, worries about it, and supports related policy, but there are still considerable differences—across individuals and with political ideology—that limit the ability to foster change. Researchers and practitioners often increase concern and action for others through feelings of empathy, which also lincreases pro-environmentalism. However, some people appear less emotionally impacted by environmental destruction—particularly more ideologically conservative and less pro-environmental individuals. To determine why some people appear to be impassive to environmental destruction, we conducted 3 online studies to measure beliefs and emotional processes in political liberals versus conservatives. Across 3 studies, we replicated the link between impassivity and conservatism, and found that more impassive people acknowledge our negative impact on the environment but are less concerned about it and more confident in an eventual solution. Impassivity, however, is not specific to the environment. People who are more impassive about the environment also respond less emotionally to positive and negative images that are unrelated to the environment, including human suffering and hedonic reward. They also report reduced trait empathy, perspective taking, and daily emotional expression and experience. Impassivity is not linked to differences in trait personal distress, anxiety, psychopathy (apart from low empathy), or trouble appreciating consequences. Impassivity is not associated with deficits in processing others’ facial emotion during early perceptual decoding but is associated with the later suppression of emotion. Everyone will not respond to emotional appeals to help a distressed environment. Other strategies are recommended to reach a broad audience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
Trait empathy refers to the capacity for empathic reactions as a stable feature of personality. Individual differences in trait empathy have been shown to correlate with prosocial behavior and situational, “state” empathic reactions to others. Trait empathy is commonly divided into two components: emotional empathy is the often unconscious tendency to share the emotions of others, while cognitive empathy is the ability to consciously detect and understand the internal states of others.
Perspective-taking is the act of perceiving a situation or understanding a concept from an alternative point of view, such as that of another individual.
A vast amount of scientific literature suggests that perspective-taking is crucial to human development and that it may lead to a variety of beneficial outcomes. Perspective-taking may also be possible in some non-human animals.
Both theory and research have suggested ages when children begin to perspective-take and how that ability develops over time. Research suggests that certain people who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with comorbid conduct problems (such as Oppositional Defiant Disorder) or autism may have reduced ability to engage in perspective-taking.
Studies to assess the brain regions involved in perspective-taking suggest that several regions may be involved, including the prefrontal cortex and the precuneus.
Perspective-taking is related to other theories and concepts including theory of mind and empathy.
When people experience emotions—positive or negative—they often describe them to other people, an action defined as emotional expression. Considerable research suggests that doing so enhances liking, intimacy, trust, and receiving support, both in the moment and over the long term. Despite the well-documented personal and interpersonal costs of not expressing one’s emotions for both nonexpressers and their partners, people nonetheless do not always express their emotions, even to others with whom they are in close relationships.
Our bodies are hardwired to feel emotions – whether we express them or not is our choice. Feeling sadness, anger or joy are natural responses to all the events our brains process every day. Throughout history, emotions have played a big role in human evolution. Going back millions of years, our brains developed emotions to pass along responses to certain events to help preserve the species. It's why seeing a predator naturally makes us feel fear – so we know we need to run to save our lives. Emotional expression is simply the acknowledgement of these emotions we are built to feel. Healthy expression allows us to understand the emotions, truly feel them and move on.
Defining Emotions
Emotions are often confused with feelings and moods, but the three terms are not interchangeable. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), emotion is defined as “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral and physiological elements.” Emotions are how individuals deal with matters or situations they find personally significant. Emotional experiences have three components: a subjective experience, a physiological response and a behavioral or expressive response.
The facial expressions of others convey information that is important for social communication. The processing of facial expression has been found to be strongly modulated by situational context such as the emotional *valence of background images, the meaning conveyed by stories accompanying facial expressions, and the race, attractiveness, and trustworthiness of people whose faces are being viewed.
As a social signal, the same facial expression can be perceived differently depending on these influencing factors. This phenomenon could be assumed in two ways. First, how much does the expression on a perceived face influence the attentional resources that it can attract? For example, when someone is in a singing competition, even though the audience includes hundreds of faces, the judges’ faces are the center of one’s attention because their facial expressions are valid predictors of one’s score. Second, what is the relationship between the valence of the expression itself and the valence of the meaning it conveys? A happy face of a partner indicates one’s team is winning. In this case, both the valence of the facial expression and the valence of its outcome to him/her are positive. However, when the face of one’s opponent is frustrated, its outcome is also positive for him/her, despite the negative valence of the expression itself. In order to integrate a facial expression in a particular outcome, we must check whether its outcome valence and its specific emotional valence are contextually appropriate. According to previous studies, the processing and decoding of facial expressions of emotion involves a double check of valence and specific emotional information for the perceiver. However, how the valence of a perceived emotion and the valence of the self-outcome it conveys are processed in the brain has not yet been explored.
*On valence: “Negative" emotions like anger and fear have a negative valence. But positive emotions like joy have a positive valence. Positively valenced emotions are evoked by positively valenced events, objects, or situations. The term is also used to describe the hedonic tone of feelings, certain behaviors (for example, approach and avoidance), goal attainment or non-attainment, and conformity with or violation of norms. Ambivalence can be viewed as conflict between positive and negative valence-carriers.
Theorists taking a valence-based approach to study affect, judgment, and choice posit that emotions with the same valence (e.g., anger and fear or pride and surprise) produce a similar influence on judgments and choices. Suffering is negative valence and the opposite of this is pleasure or happiness.
People Who Are Unmoved by Climate Destruction Are Less Emotional in General
News Published: September 6, 2022 - Neuroscience Review
Ruairi J Mackenzie [@rjmsci]
But there remains a significant proportion of people who appear less emotionally impacted by environmental destruction, particularly, say the authors of a new study published in the journal Emotion, “more ideologically conservative and less pro-environmental individuals."
Their new research suggests that this apathy may be less to do with their attitudes to environmental protection and more indicative of a general emotional impassivity.
The work, published by University of Michigan graduate student Logan Bickel and psychology professor Stephanie Preston, involved three online studies that examined 600 volunteers’ responses to a variety of emotional stimuli.
Bickel and Preston found that people not concerned when viewing pictures of damage to the environment also didn’t react as negatively to other stimuli, such as images of:
wounded soldiers
injured athletes
moldy food
crying babies
These individuals also reported feeling less empathy for others in daily life and were less awed by nature. Heightened impassivity did not associate with trait anxiety or psychopathy, aside from their reduced empathy.
Interestingly, their apathy extended beyond negative emotion – these respondents also reacted less to positive stimuli such as images of:
happy babies
piles of money
ice cream
Preston explained that some people’s lack of concern for the environment could simply be a characteristic of their emotional range. “Given that our sense of risk and decisions are strongly guided by emotions, more impassive people are less inclined to dedicate resources to this slowly building crisis,” she commented.
Appeals to help the environment must consider variation in people’s emotional make-up and devise new tactics for those who are unpersuaded by appeals to emotion, said Logan.
Finally I address something personal which has been on my mind for some time, in if my psychiatric medication may be interfering with my concern for climate change. It might sound like an odd thing to wonder but I did find some relatively new research from the United Kingdom which might touch upon the whole question. It appears that the research may be quite limited. This research was interested in the social cognitive effects of several medications which might have a sedative function. I found a figure in the study interesting in that it lays out the basics of social cognitive domains. I looked at these domains and find that I am not really deficient in any one, at least that is my impression.
Published November 29, 2021 by BMC Psychiatry
A systematic review of the effects of psychiatric medications on social cognition
Zoe Haime, Andrew J. Watson, Joanna Monctieff, Nadia Crellin, Louise Marston and Eileen Joyce
@Zhaime
@nadia_crellin
@joannamonctieff
@Andrew_JWatson
@MarstonLouise
Conclusion
Deficits in social cognition have been identified in people with psychiatric diagnoses, and are associated with impaired social functioning, yet we remain uncertain to what extent these are attributable to the effects of the disorder or the effects of its treatment. A number of healthy volunteer studies suggest that diazepam and lorazepam can impair emotion processing abilities. Studies on antipsychotics were inconclusive and suffered from methodological limitations. There were no studies on any other drugs with recognised sedative properties, and studies focused mainly on the emotion processing domain of social cognition. Better data on the ability of drugs to affect social cognition will help to improve our understanding of the nature of social cognitive deficits in mental disorders, and the effects of treatment. Optimising the treatment of social cognition could potentially lead to better social functioning outcomes.
So I ended up being a robin hopping from nightcrawler to nightcrawler in an early morning rain in this latest posting. I found that I learned a good amount in the exercise, and perhaps realize that my level of lassitude over climate change may not be as faulty as first suspected. I didn’t explore the first verse to any extent, as I’m relatively sure I made a well known point at this time. I remember getting the full story of Helen Keller in sixth grade in the tiny Montana town where I grew up. Her’s was an amazing story and so I will gladly give her the last word.
“We may have found a cure for most evils; but we have found no remedy for the worst of them all, the apathy of human beings.”
— Helen Keller
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
71st posting, August 9, 2023