I’m not Raemon, but elaborating on using Gendlin’s Focusing to find catalysts might be helpful. Shifting emotional states is very natural to me-I used to find it strange that other people couldn’t cry on demand-and when I read Focusing I realized that his notion of a “handle” to a feeling is basically what I use to get myself to shift into a different emotional state. Finding the whole “bodily” sense of the emotion lets you get back there easily, I find.
Rossin
Karma: 167
This seems largely correct to me, although I think hyperbolic discounting of rewards/punishments over time may be less pronounced in human conditioning as compared to animals being conditioned by humans. Humans can think “I’m now rewarding myself for Action A I took earlier” or “I’m being punished for Action B” which can seems, at least in my experience, to decrease the effect of the temporal distance whereas animals seem less able to conceptualize the connection over time. Because of this difference, I think the temporal difference of reward/punishment is less important in people for conditioning as long as the individual is mentally associating the stimulus with the action, although it is still significant.
Also what’s the name of the paper for the monkeys and juice study? I’d like to look at it because the result did surprise me.
This reminds me of Donald Kinder’s research that shows people do not vote primarily on self-interest as one might naively expect. It seems that people tend to ask instead “What would someone like me do?” when they vote, with this question likely occurring implicitly.
In the book Gendlin says that the steps are really just to help people learn, they aren’t at all necessary to the process, so I think Gendlin would himself agree with that.