V. Feeling and Attention
Experiences in everyday life are either pleasant or unpleasant in varying degrees. Those that seem neutral lack the intensity to distract our attention from other matters, whereas those that are exceptionally intense distract us from any other sensation.
These sensations are the basis of our feelings, which are pre-cognitive reactions to the stimuli: pleasant stimuli give rise to pleasant feelings and negative ones to negative feelings. Feeling arise from stimuli even if we are not conscious of the precise stimulus that is causing a feeling.
These, in turn, give rise to our motivations. We are naturally inclined to prolong pleasure and escape displeasure - either by its intensity or duration - and thus are motivated to act.
It is in this sense that our sense perception creates an experience, and experience creates our attitudes and the habits of human behavior.
(EN: I don't see a consideration of memory and perception, which could be a serious shortcoming. That is, to believe we merely react to stimuli is misleading. Our feelings, emotions, and motivations are often proactively elicited by an expectation of pleasure or displeasure that may not be entirely accurate. And since we are "primed" to feel a certain way, this filters our perception of stimuli. This is very significant in understanding the differences among individuals.)
Emotions
Pleasure and displeasure are basic sensations, and correspond to the basic feelings of happiness and sorrow. But most situations in life bring about far more complex "feeling states" that constitute emotions, which are often a mixture of pleasure and displeasure that we may be experiencing as a cause of multiple factors - environmental and somatic - at any given moment.
Emotions may bring about physical reactions. The feeling of love causes our heartbeat to increase and the feeling of grief causes or breathing to become spasmodic. These reactions involve the major organ systems of the body and are often natural - we are inclined by our nature to have physical reactions to emotional states.
Nearly every organ in the human body is emotionally responsive. We are best able to observe the muscles and the skin, and to a lesser degree the cardiorespiratory system, but we are also aware of some sensations from the digestive and endocrine systems. And there are likely many visceral responses we have not yet been able to observe or detect.
It is suggested that these physical reactions to emotions are universal to the human species, though there are different methods by which cultures instruct individuals to suppress or conceal these natural reactions, or to allow them to occur unhindered, to varying degrees.
Our feelings and emotions are the source of nearly all our volitional actions. While we may intellectualize our behavior, nearly everything we do is prompted by love, hate, fear, jealousy, anger, grief, and other emotional states. (EN: Again, I echo my concern that this is strictly reactive - we are often motivated to act in anticipation of feelings rather than merely respond.)
This relationship between feeling and action is highly significant: if out intention is to gain control over our behavior, we must try to control our emotions. For example, to undertake and complete any action that will produce a benefit we must first overcome our fear of the possible negative effects - otherwise our courage will fail us and we will abandon and flee.
Pyle turns again to the topic of education, and the way in which teachers use the drives of pain and pleasure to motivate children to perform. Some teachers use fear of punishment - whether physical beatings or emotional humiliation - to motivate children to attend to their lessons. Others use desire for pleasure - a reward of some kind - to the same effect.
In the natural environment, a child learns by experience - the hackneyed example of touching a hot stove aptly demonstrates that the ignorant child touches it and feels pain. Once this has occurred the child is knowledgeable, and anticipates that if he touches the stove again he will experience pain again, and so refrains from doing so. The same may be said of any lesson learned in life: our experience of pain or pleasure guides our future actions.
As an aside, he notes that schoolwork is problematic because it is artificial. The lessons we learn are academic in that we do not recognize their connection to anything in the real world - the six year old student will gain no immediate benefit from learning mathematics. Hence the teacher must find extrinsic methods to motivate students because the academic environment does not allow students to experience the natural rewards of their actions.
It can also be noted that in many situations in life people attempt to manipulate others into acting to further their own interests in a way that does not benefit those who perform the actions. Where any extrinsic reward or punishment must be offered, this is generally to be suspected (e.g., religion and government). Though in some instances, extrinsic rewards are applied because an individual does not recognize the intrinsic reward he will gain.
Much of the earliest years of education entails gaining control over ourselves and resisting the urge to act on our baser emotions. The childe is trained to inhibit or prevent the actions he is normally inclined to take in reaction to his emotional states. The character flaws of many adults also demonstrate a lack of discipline in the same regard.
Mood and Temperament
Emotions tend to be temporary states in reaction to very specific stimuli, but over a longer period of time people develop moods that may be disconnected from the stimuli that initiated them.
The human body seeks to maintain a state of homeostasis: our organ systems seek to enter into a sustained pattern of action, such as a regular pulse and respiration. When there is a brief interruption to this pattern, the brain recognizes it as an unusual state and attempts to return to its normal patterns afterward. But when an irregular state becomes prolonged, the brain begins to adopt the temporary state as a permanent one.
In that sense, prolonged or repeated anger changes the natural rhythms of our bodies, including the organ of the brain. A person who has experienced a prolonged state of sadness is thus cast into a pattern of sadness, and this becomes a homeostatic state. The body and mind seek to perpetuate this state by resisting stimuli that would cause happiness and overreacting to stimuli that would maintain sadness. And by so doing, the person falls into a morose mood that will last for hours or days after the stimuli that evoked it are no longer being experienced.
Moods are perceived as "permanent" when they persist for longer periods of time. And when this occurs they are then considered part of a person's temperament or character, as that is the default state of their emotional mechanism. As such there are some people who are usually solemn and morose whereas others always seem to be happy and cheerful.
Such people are stuck for a long period of time in a homeostatic emotional state, and the longer this state persists the more the body and mind attempt to maintain it - hence it is more difficult to cause a person to have a reaction that is contrary to what we call their temperament, character, or nature.
Training Emotions
The emotions, hence mood and character, are amenable to being trained. The child can be taught to control his fear of the unknown, and in time to develop curiosity, and then intense interest in something that initially provokes a negative sensation.
Consider the virtues that are applauded in human beings: a sense of calm, integrity, self-direction, courage, ambition, and the like. Each virtue represents a set of behaviors that can only be achieved by taking control of emotional states and training oneself to resist natural urges. Conversely, the various vices of man (self-indulgence, cowardice, spinelessness, lethargy, etc.) represent behaviors that arise from allowing natural tendencies to hold sway - to be the slave, rather than the master, of one's own emotions.
Human beings fancy themselves to be a higher form of life from the base and vulgar animals - but can only achieve this higher state by behaving differently to animals. And again, if our behavior is the result of our emotional states, we must train our emotional states to produce better behavior.
Pyle also cautions against the common misconceptions that emotions are chaotic and free-floating, and that people are beset by emotional states as if they were rapacious demons. All emotional states originate within ourselves, and can be controlled and modified with effort.
(EN: All of this is a very fine sermon, but seems to lack practical instruction as to how this desirable activity may be undertaken.)
Attention
Attention is another critical concern of psychology because it largely determines an individual's perspective of experience. Each of us is constantly beset by stimuli from the environment as well as our somatic state and responses. We often cannot control the stimuli to which we are subjected. But we have a limited capacity to give attention to certain things - and the choice of what stimuli we give attention (hence notice, hence ignore all other stimuli) is largely a matter of choice.
Said another way, attention is "the controlling aspect of consciousness" that causes us to take notice of some things and ignore others. It is the reason that two people may receive the very same stimuli, but some are able to notice things that others aren't. And if we do not notice something, then it does not exist for us. Hence the existence or nonexistence of things is the basis of objective reality, but attention or inattention is the basis of the reality that each individual experiences and recognizes.
Our survival instincts have the greatest ability to command our attention: if we perceive something that poses a threat, we cannot avoid giving it attention and may have difficulty moving our attention away from it. If we perceive something that poses an opportunity, we likewise are drawn to it. These acts of attention are reflexive and instinctive and generally cannot be overcome.
However, our experience teaches us the true nature of things: it is our understanding of the world that enables us to train our attention on certain things. A man who works in a train yard has considerably less fear of a large and fast-moving engine than does a person who is not accustomed to being in proximity to trains. He will stand closer to the tracks and experience less emotional distress at an approaching train because he is aware of where he may stand to avoid being struck. Likewise, doctors and morticians have less fear of blood, disease, and dead bodies than does a layman who has little experience dealing with them. They recognize what is or is not a threat, and do not pay attention to things that have a threatening appearance but in reality are non-threatening.
(EN: As an aside, this also leads to the problem of overconfidence. A zookeeper who routinely handles dangerous animals may become too inured to them and fail to pay attention to danger signals that should serve to cause him to proceed with greater caution. Likewise, butchers can often become injured by being careless with sharp knives because, having handled them so regularly, they become inattentive.)
While the examples thus far have been negative (learning to tune out false signals), experience and knowledge also has the ability to focus attention upon things that may not be recognized as threats or opportunities. Pyle gives the example of spending a day with a machinist, who could very quickly spot minor problems and misalignments in complex machinery that a laymen is unable to perceive - which is to say, he perceives them as stimuli, but does not recognize them as things that require his attention.
In that sense our skill at practical tasks is not only the knowledge of what to do when the need arises, but the ability to recognize that the need has arisen. This, in turn, is attributable to the way in which the mind has been trained to give attention to certain stimuli.
And in a broader sense, our success in life is similarly dependent on the knowledge and experience to understand the actual potential of things that may seem to be opportunities or threats. We must know what to do, but have attentional habits that enable us to recognize that it is appropriate to take an action.
Pyle discusses two different instances of attention: purposeful attention is given to the elements we believe to be involved in an action which we are undertaking (we pay attention to things that are relevant to a specific task) and general attention is given to things in our environment when we are not actively engaged in a task (we happen to notice things).
He also suggests negative attention and inattention, which are slightly different. Negative attention implies that something is noticed briefly and then dismissed as unimportant, whereas inattention indicates that something is not noticed at all. He does not dwell on this much, as it has more to do with evaluating past experience (explaining why we failed to notice something) rather that training for future experience (learning to take notice of something).
Interest
Interest is the extension in span of attention in the same way that mood and character are extensions of emotion, though lacking in a physical basis. That is to say that when an individual gives prolonged attention to something, it is said that they have an ongoing interest in it - but because attention is a purely psychological phenomenon, there is no impact to any organ other than the brain.
In this sense, attention is foundational to education, experience, and the formation of interests directs our habitual behaviors. Likewise, interests can be developed by training the attention on certain things, and tends to become self-perpetuating: we develop an interest in things because we have paid them attention, and then pay attention to things because we have developed an interest.
In that way, interest can be developed by the deliberate focusing of attention on certain things. This likewise has obvious ties to education, as a child is not naturally inclined to take interest in any subject without some knowledge of it - hence a general education gives a student exposure to many things in which he may not have an interest because it is by this exposure that his interest may be kindled.