Angry Jane Doe: "I have started to sleep around. I sleep with men I am not dating. I sleep with men and refuse to date them, actually. I come to their houses, fuck them, say thank you for a nice time, and don't let the door hit me on the ass on the way out. You might think this is a pretty good deal, but it is not. Because I fuck and tell. Because I'm pissed." (NSFW.)
[more inside]
posted by velvet winter
on Jul 27, 2011 -
339 comments
Can robots feel human emotions?
"Hal, switch to manual hibernation control."
"I can tell from your voice harmonics, Dave, that you're badly upset. Why don't you take a stress pill and get some rest?"
"I'm sorry, Dave, but in accordance with special subroutine C1435-dash-4, quote, When the crew are dead or incapacitated, the onboard computer must assume control, unquote. I must, therefore, overrule your authority, since you are not in any condition to exercise it intelligently."
"Hal," said Bowman, now speaking with an icy calm. "I am not incapacitated. Unless you obey my instructions, I shall be forced to disconnect you.
previously
posted by Xurando
on Dec 13, 2009 -
152 comments
The True Love Project — People are exhorted to "say cheese" for the camera so their faces will approximate a happy look. Other emotional states, such as love, are far more complex and not easily photographed. Love is intimate and deeply personal, and its expression may be hard to share in a staged setting. Hypnosis opens a pathway into the unconscious, the neurological realm of emotional memory. In TRUE LOVE a group of volunteers worked with a professional hypnotist to reach, in trance, a point where they were able to visualize the camera as a beloved person. The resulting images captured people who were actually in love with the camera.
posted by netbros
on Sep 22, 2009 -
42 comments
The Feel Tank. "We are a feel tank, but this does not mean that we do not think. We are governed by
outrage that the desires and demands for a less
bad life and a better good life continue to go unrecognized."
posted by papakwanz
on Feb 7, 2008 -
25 comments
The history of emotions has yielded substantial studies on love, anger, fear, grief, jealousy, and many other discrete emotions. However, there is no particular study of cheerfulness, a rather moderate emotion, which, for reasons that I will discuss further, has remained unnoticeable to the scholarly eye. Based on much of the historical literature on emotions, some primary sources and some other areas of cultural history, I outline here the social use and conceptualization of cheerfulness over the last three centuries. I argue that, in the modern age, cheerfulness rose in value and became the most favored emotion for experience and display; as such, it was individually sought and socially encouraged until it became the main emotional norm of twentieth-century America.
From Good Cheer to "Drive-By Smiling": A Social History of CheerfulnessAnd the
Taxonomy of Emotion Terms there is of interest on its own.
posted by y2karl
on Mar 13, 2006 -
10 comments
Language started with emotional signaling. That's the thesis of a new book,
The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker.
Lived emotional experience is key to language learning, the authors suggest. "Mathematicians and physicists may manipulate abstruse symbols representing space, time, and quantity, but they first understood those entities as tiny children wanting a far-away toy, or waiting for juice, or counting cookies. The grown-up genius, like the adventurous child, forms ideas through playful explorations in the imagination, only later translated into the rigor of mathematics."
The book is very ambitious, and I don't think we'll ever
know where language came from, but this sounds like a more fruitful line of thinking than Chomsky's
deus ex machina "language gene" mutation.
posted by languagehat
on Sep 29, 2004 -
32 comments
"The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields." Scholarship on
the emotions is a rich field for historians and philosophers.
Martha Nussbaum (previously discussed
here) has written on historical views of the relationship between
morality and emotion, and delves more deeply into it in her recent book,
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Of particular relevance these days may be M.F. Burnyeat's new book,
Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, which focuses on Classical views of anger and its proper place in human action. Many today could learn from
Marcus Aurelius: "as grief is a mark of weakness, so is anger, for both have been wounded and have surrendered to the wound." [First link via
Ye Olde Phart.]
posted by homunculus
on Feb 25, 2003 -
17 comments
Disgust is universal it seems. Can anyone think of any other universal disgusts out there?
posted by ideola
on Nov 25, 2002 -
11 comments
