First I should clarify my rather ambiguous remark about mental states affecting perceived goodness and badness as things are retrieved or recorded from memory. What I mean is, the markers which we assign things depend partially on our state of mind. For example, we think of some things as dangerous (tigers, guns, ninjas), and some things as not-dangerous (puppies, phones, secretaries), but some things could go either way (spiders, bottles, policemen), depending on how they’re interpreted. If you’re feeling safe, then you’ll tend to label the border cases as safe; if you’re feeling frightened for unrelated reasons, the border cases will come up as dangerous. In other words, priming applies to somatic markers too, not just semantic ones. Or, as I put it in my previous post, emotional state adjusts the perceived goodness and badness of things as they are retrieved from memory.
If every time you think of something you feel frightened, then you will come to think of that thing as scary, even if the only reason you were frighted at the time was because of some irrelevant other thing. This is what I meant by saying that emotional state affects perceived goodness and badness as it’s recorded to memory.
Yes, and I’m further arguing that these markers are somatic—they exist to effect physical changes in the body.
I’m not so sure about this. They certainly effect behaviors, and those behaviors may have physiological ramifications, but many markers have no effect or only indirect effects. Or you could say that each mechanism in the mind exists to support the body, since they co-evolved, but that would be like saying that my liver exists to support my left thumb; all parts of the body are interdependent, the brain included.
First I should clarify my rather ambiguous remark about mental states affecting perceived goodness and badness as things are retrieved or recorded from memory. What I mean is, the markers which we assign things depend partially on our state of mind. For example, we think of some things as dangerous (tigers, guns, ninjas), and some things as not-dangerous (puppies, phones, secretaries), but some things could go either way (spiders, bottles, policemen), depending on how they’re interpreted. If you’re feeling safe, then you’ll tend to label the border cases as safe; if you’re feeling frightened for unrelated reasons, the border cases will come up as dangerous. In other words, priming applies to somatic markers too, not just semantic ones. Or, as I put it in my previous post, emotional state adjusts the perceived goodness and badness of things as they are retrieved from memory.
If every time you think of something you feel frightened, then you will come to think of that thing as scary, even if the only reason you were frighted at the time was because of some irrelevant other thing. This is what I meant by saying that emotional state affects perceived goodness and badness as it’s recorded to memory.
I’m not so sure about this. They certainly effect behaviors, and those behaviors may have physiological ramifications, but many markers have no effect or only indirect effects. Or you could say that each mechanism in the mind exists to support the body, since they co-evolved, but that would be like saying that my liver exists to support my left thumb; all parts of the body are interdependent, the brain included.