Posted by alexandra_k on January 26, 2005, at 20:56:24
In reply to My T's talk about feelings has twisted my brain up, posted by littleone on January 26, 2005, at 20:23:14
Personally, I like a functionalist model of feelings myself. This is unsuprising as I like functionalist models of beliefs and so on and so forth as well...
I used to think that to label a feeling one needed to introspect. To 'look with oneself' and focus on it really hard maybe intensifying it a little and then its name would suddenly come to me.
That didn't work.
It didn't help me name them.
It didn't help me deal with them.
It tended to intensify them.A functionalist model of feelings is a model of what feeling words refer to or pick out. The idea is that
-There are typical situations or events
-There are typical ways of seeing or perceiving, or describing those events
-There are typical 'action urges' that we have as a result of the first two things.Different feeling words (e.g., anger, shame etc) have different sorts of things and perceptions that tend to prompt them, and they tend to result in different action urges.
Linehan's skills training manuel provides lists of the typical things associated with different feelings.
For me there are fairly much two types of emotional states: positive and negative. To do better than that I need to look at the above mentioned things.
This isn't really a theory of what feelings ARE
More a theory of what our feeling terms pick out or refer to.
What makes us 'right' or 'wrong' in labelling a feeling as whatever we try to label it as in a public language...Hope I didn't just twist your brain up even more... :-(
poster:alexandra_k
thread:448365
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050122/msgs/448385.html