Asks the guy who posts in threads he has no interest in.
After a bit more thought, I concede that the definition of EI can become the ability to discriminate and monitor emotions, since the acts of monitoring and discriminating, albeit being complementary, are different. So that's it, end of discussion. Thanks for helping me out Tryptamine.
This post doesn't make much sense. Learn to write and to use words properly, otherwise you're wasting my time. You reduce the chemical reactions happening inside the brain to "1s and 0s"? So what? You map the entire brain into an algorithmic model of "1s and 0s" and you end up with a neat description of the brain. Or are you saying that the chemical reaction ARE 1s and 0s, lol? If so I urge you to go back to school and learn what a model is. And you write all that off-topic rambling as if it were some kind of refutation for my post. As if you could refute my assertion that "any "outside world" pieces metamorphose into feelings the moment they enter the brain". Like trying to refute "water is a liquid substance", or "1+1=2", lol. So your post doesn't refute anything, it only proves you didn't get a word of what I said. The 1s and 0s are created AFTER all the shit I was explaining before. Because we have evolved after countless millennia a feeling/drive/instinct which is called "reason" and which thirsts with a passion for knowledge and which then creates words, signs, languages, logic, scientific methods of grasping the world, technology based on findings brought forth by science, and all this INCLUDES 1s and 0s. This, however, does not mean that our brains ARE 1s and 0s you moron.
I am going to be nit-picky here, and say that the ability to monitor something and the ability to discriminate its aspects and properly label them are not one in the same. If you take a kid from the rice paddies in China, and set him down in front of a television set and let him watch football, the child would be able to monitor what was happening. But he would not be able to discriminate things such as plays, or have labels for them. That is, at least not without spending some time monitoring the game, for he may eventually begin to see patterns and even come up with his own labels for them (as us humans have done with emotions). However, human interaction can be a rather intricate thing, and sometimes while people monitor the facial expressions of someone they are speaking with, they are not always properly discriminating them.
Fair enough. Though my goal was to reduce the definition to a couple of words. The bigger the definition of a concept the shittier it is. When defining something you have to use the least words possible if you want that definition to be of any use. So either EI is "the ability to monitor emotions" or the "ability to discriminate emotions". The word "properly" is superfluous, it's not needed, for who is to tell me what is proper and not? It is a matter of degrees and some people are better at monitoring/reading/discriminating emotions than other people, and that's all that matters. Also I said that at the end of the day monitoring=discriminating, because by the vary act of acknowledging the existence of emotions (plural) you are telling us you are able to discriminate (=differentiate) them. Basically, observing and discriminating go hand to hand. Notice how I can say:
It's just that some people simply suck at monitoring Xs and hence suck at discriminating between Xs
=
It's just that some people simply suck at discriminating Xs and hence suck at monitoring Xs
And using your example of football tactics, for the sake of using a more concrete example, "the ability to monitor football tactics" goes hand to hand with "the ability to discriminate football tactics", because you can't very well discriminate anything if you don't even know what you're looking at, nor can you be said to be a good observer if you are unable to differentiate between different plays. The key word here is ABILITY. I mean, if I tell you you are a good observer of football tactics isn't that the same as saying you are good at distinguishing them? I guess to a very small degree it IS different, but in practice you can't have one without the other.
So the definition of Emotion Intelligence: the ability to monitor emotions, or the ability to discriminate emotions.
Thanks for the reply. I was mostly curious about the claim that emotions are the primary explanation for negative thoughts among depressed people. I haven't read neuroscience, but I know that people connect thoughts according to context.
For example:
"Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail." Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?
The reply to the question is based on the personality of Steve (a stereotypical librarian), and people are often unable to consider things like statistical probabilities (how many farmers there are vs librarians).
Legga wrote:
"Thanks for the reply. I was mostly curious about the claim that emotions are the primary explanation for negative thoughts among depressed people. I haven't read neuroscience, but I know that people connect thoughts according to context."
Now I did not claim that emotions were the primary explanation for negative thoughts among depressed people. My exact wording was: "Why do depressed people constantly have negative thoughts? Because their limbic systems emanate depressed moods." You are correct in that people connect thoughts according to context.
I get the idea, it could be an erroneous one, that you have the belief that it is really context which is the key for the depressed thoughts. And often it is (but not always, as I will show)! But most importantly, what I was saying is that the negative mood "emanates" or "radiates" from the limbic system, which then affects the part of our brain responsible for our rationality (the cortex). Now I am using lots of terms here, so this may be an appropriate time for an image to illustrate what I'm talking about:
And as I also said: "Is there a feedback system between thoughts and emotions? Yes." I will show a little bit about that too. But here is some research. I've made bold the parts that I thought were especially relevant. Many of the brain structures may be unfamiliar to you, but I think you should be able to get the gist of what is being said just fine without knowing what a "nucleus accumbens" is.
This 1999 research paper abstract sums up what I've been talking about beautifully. It also had a good sample size, but the process by which samples were chosen is rather complicated. I've omitted discussion of the samples in this reply, but you are free to have a look yourself. That is a link to the complete research paper.
OBJECTIVE: Theories of human behavior from Plato to Freud have repeatedly emphasized links between emotion and reason, a relationship now commonly attributed to pathways connecting phylogenetically “old†and “new†brain regions. Expanding on this theory, this study examined functional interactions between specific limbic and neocortical regions accompanying normal and disease-associated shifts in negative mood state. METHOD: Regions of concordant functional change accompanying provocation of transient sadness in healthy volunteers and resolution of chronic dysphoric symptoms in depressed patients were examined with two positron emission tomography techniques: [15O]water and [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose, respectively. RESULTS: With sadness, increases in limbic-paralimbic blood flow (subgenual cingulate, anterior insula) and decreases in neocortical regions (right dorsolateral prefrontal, inferior parietal) were identified. With recovery from depression, the reverse pattern, involving the same regions, was seen—limbic metabolic decreases and neocortical increases. A significant inverse correlation between subgenual cingulate and right dorsolateral prefrontal activity was also demonstrated in both conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Reciprocal changes involving subgenual cingulate and right prefrontal cortex occur with both transient and chronic changes in negative mood. The presence and maintenance of functional reciprocity between these regions with shifts in mood in either direction suggests that these regional interactions are obligatory and probably mediate the well-recognized relationships between mood and attention seen in both normal and pathological conditions. The bidirectional nature of this limbic-cortical reciprocity provides additional evidence of potential mechanisms mediating cognitive (“top-downâ€), pharmacological (mixed), and surgical (“bottom-upâ€) treatments of mood disorders such as depression.
Another 1999 study that found correlations between limbic structures and mood disorders. Unfortunately, the sample size wasn't the greatest:
"Volumes of basal ganglia in postmortem brains of 8 patients with mood disorders and 8 control subjects without neuropsychiatric disorder were determined."
"Results of the present postmortem study confirm and specify findings of basal ganglia abnormalities reported from CT or MRI studies. Neuroimaging studies have shown that structural abnormalities exist in basal ganglia of patients with mood disorders. In nonelderly patients with unipolar depression, controlled MRI studies found at least a trend for reduced volumes of the caudate and the putaminal complex. However, this seems not to be the case for bipolar disorder."
"This finding may have pathophysiological relevance, since the nucleus accumbens is part of the ventral striatum and thereby belongs to the limbic nuclei. There is a reciprocal projection between the nucleus accumbens and the ventral pallidum, which share common neuromodulators such as γ-aminobutyric acid and opioids. Furthermore, the nucleus accumbens is the terminal of the mesolimbic dopaminergic projection from the ventral tegmental area. These two pathways are known to be relevant to rewarding effects and locomotion. Moreover, there exist afferents to the nucleus accumbens from cortical and subcortical limbic structures such as the entorhinal cortex, prelimbic and infralimbic cortices, the anterior cingulate, the hippocampus, the mesencephalon including the dorsal raphe nucleus, the basal amygdala, and the lateral hypothalamus. For this reason the nucleus accumbens is believed to be a pivotal structure at the interface of the limbic system and the basal ganglia and might be associated with psychic functions like mood and motivation."
From this abstract of a 2014 study:
"Treatment-resistant depression is a common clinical occurrence among patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), but its neurobiology is poorly understood. We used data collected as part of routine clinical care to study white matter integrity of the brain's limbic system and its association to treatment response."
"Treatment outcome was determined by review of clinical charts. MDD patients (n = 29 non-remitters, n = 26 partial-remitters, and n = 37 full-remitters), and healthy control subjects (n = 58) were analyzed for fractional anisotropy (FA) of the fornix and cingulum bundle. Results. Failure to achieve remission was associated with lower FA among MDD patients, statistically significant for the medial body of the fornix. Moreover, global and regional-selective age-related FA decline was most pronounced in patients with treatment-refractory, non-remitted depression. Conclusions. These findings suggest that specific brain microstructural white matter abnormalities underlie persistent, treatment-resistant depression. They also demonstrate the feasibility of investigating white matter integrity in psychiatric populations using legacy data."
From a 2004 study:
Discussion of the sample population: "Data were obtained from either the left or right thalamus of both male and female subjects who had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or no psychopathology. The collection and diagnosis of subjects in the Stanley Foundation Brain Bank has been described in detail previously (14). Sixty specimens (15/group) were originally obtained. However, some of the specimens were not counted because either they could not be appropriately stained (N=3), they had missing tissue (anteroventral/anteromedial: N=5; mediodorsal: N=8), or they exhibited evidence of gross thalamic pathology (congenital defect in the region of the medial thalamus, plaque-filled lesion in the globus pallidus, loss of staining in anteroventral neurons, or neuronal hyperpigmentation in surrounding tissue). Because of the differing number of specimens affected by missing tissue, there are different numbers of subjects in the anteroventral/anteromedial (N=49) and mediodorsal (N=46) analyses."
Still a decent sample size, I think.
"There were significantly more neurons in the mediodorsal (37%) and anteroventral/anteromedial (26%) nuclei in subjects with major depressive disorder relative to the nonpsychiatric comparison subjects. Neuron numbers and volumes in these limbic thalamic nuclei were normal in the schizophrenia and bipolar subjects. CONCLUSIONS: The data indicate that there is an elevation in total neuron number in the limbic thalamus that is specific for major depressive disorder. This represents the first report of a neuropsychiatric disorder being associated with an increase in total regional neuron number. The present findings, along with recent data, indicate that significant anatomical and functional abnormalities are present in limbic circuits in major depressive disorder."
This post was supposed to be a reply to Legga's post above this one.
In my spare time, I used to read neuroscience textbooks as well as troves of research papers. I will get to your your question, but give me a minute here. Check out this neat little graph of baseline dopamine (a molecule very important in schizophrenia and psychosis) levels and performance on a divergent thinking task:
And this near infrared spectroscopy scan study by Vanderbilt University:
How fascinating is that! Schizotypal people use more of their right frontal lobes during divergent thinking tasks! Now this was published in 2005; look at all the connections between schizotypy and creativity being discussed in recent years.
Autism and schizophrenia/psychosis are very interesting conditions, and an abundance research that shows the two conditions may be linked. In fact, they may even be "diametric opposites" of one-another.
There is a camp that believes that the people on the psychotic spectrum have enhanced abilities to make divergent associations, and that people on the autistic spectrum have enhanced convergent associative abilities. Another camp argues that the psychotic spectrum represents a tendency toward heightened Theory of Mind abilities at the cost of lateral associations, while the autistic spectrum represents the ability to make lateral associations at the cost of Theory of Mind. Perhaps there is some middle ground between both camps (I believe there is)?
I'm not going to make a thread about that (it would take an entire thread), but check out these images!
(I bet you can guess which of the two camps of thought I described published the above graph in their research paper)
Some more lightly corroborating parallels from an entirely different study that I actually found while researching psychopathy (maybe some of the sociopaths who made it this far would find this moderately interesting):
Speaking of autism, funky thing that is. Look at what this study had found (I put certain parts in bold for emphasis):
"We studied brain anatomy using quantitative MRI, and sensorimotor gating using prepulse inhibition of startle in a subset of 12 individuals with Asperger’s syndrome and 14 controls. We found significant ageâ€related differences in volume of cerebral hemispheres and caudate nuclei (controls, but not people with Asperger’s syndrome, had ageâ€related reductions in volume). Also, people with Asperger’s syndrome had significantly less grey matter in frontoâ€striatal and cerebellar regions than controls, and widespread differences in white matter."
No reduction in cerebral hemisphere volume over age!? Whoa!
Now that all took me about 7 minutes to gather up, including taking screen images, cropping them, and uploading them so that I'm not using up other peoples' bandwidth. And I don't consider that 7 minutes wasted, because I love to talk about this kind of stuff.
I started researching neuroscience obsessively for about a 3 or 4 year period years back (interest slowly waned around 2 years ago). I can tell you that I did not pull the things I typed up in that post out of thin air.
I can tell you that everything I've said in the post you were referring to is scientifically accepted, and maybe you believe me, maybe you don't. At the same time, I'm not about to describe the entire evolutionary process of the human brain while giving citations for each thing that I say—that would be a monumental task! If you have a question about a specific statement I made during that post, I would be more than glad to give explanation for it as well as some research to back up what I'm saying, to show you that I'm not rambling.
Do you think this is partly because of your chinese (cultural) heritage? The society that values social status and success above everything, expects everyone to follow a strict family model, choose their partner according to logic and raise children to meet the parents' often impossible expectations..
My post was apparently too long, so here is the rest of it:
But enough about all this depressing stuff. There are some interesting studies that show that while the limbic system dictates what we feel, our rationality can also affect how our limbic systems behave!
From a 2011 study:
"Objective. To assess the effect of meditation on work stress, anxiety and mood in full-time workers. Methods. 178 adult workers participated in an 8-week, 3-arm randomized controlled trial comparing a “mental silence†approach to meditation (n=59) to a “relaxation†active control (n=56) and a wait-list control (n=63). Participants were assessed before and after using Psychological Strain Questionnaire (PSQ), a subscale of the larger Occupational Stress Inventory (OSI), the State component of the State/Trait Anxiety Inventory for Adults (STAI), and the depression-dejection (DD) subscale of the Profile of Mood States (POMS). Results. There was a significant improvement for the meditation group compared to both the relaxation control and the wait-list groups the PSQ (P=.026), and DD (P=.019). Conclusions. Mental silence-orientated meditation, in this case Sahaja Yoga meditation, is a safe and effective strategy for dealing with work stress and depressive feelings. The findings suggest that “thought reduction†or “mental silence†may have specific effects relevant to work stress and hence occupational health."
From a 2005 study:
"Past research has shown that rumination exacerbates dysphoric mood whereas distraction attenuates it. This research examined whether the practice of mindfulness meditation could reduce dysphoric mood even more effectively than distraction. A dysphoric mood was induced in 139 female and 38 male participants who were then randomly assigned to a rumination, distraction, or meditation condition. As predicted, participants instructed to meditate reported significantly lower levels of negative mood than those in either of the two other conditions. Distraction was associated with a lessening of dysphoric mood when compared to rumination but was not as effective as mindfulness meditation. The implications of these findings are discussed."
One is left to wonder exactly how as "dysphoric mood" was induced in these participants...
If you click on the first search result from this Google search, you can download a PDF of a research paper titled "A revised limbic system model for memory, emotion, and behaviour," which explains just that. It's a pretty dense paper though. I'm giving myself a week to read the thing.