[From Bill Powers (2003.07.04.0851 MDT)]
David Goldstein (2003.07.03.0744 EDT)--
Are you familiar with the research in which classical conditioning is
used to train a person to react negative emotionally, or positive
emotionally to nonsense syllables?
I've heard of it. Not very familiar with the experimental details.
After training, a person reacts to the nonsense syllable in a negative
or positive emotional way. Before training, there was no emotional
reaction to the nonsense syllable.
How about _during_ training? I would assume that during training, any
emotional reaction would be to the conditions occurring during training.
Isn't the effect seen because the nonsense syllable is regularly followed
by a disturbance of some controlled variable? Such a disturbance, according
to PCT, would be followed by a change of lower-level reference signals, and
according to the theory of emotion, a change in reference signals being
sent to the organ systems to support the action. So this would account for
any "emotional" response during training.
The evidence for classical "conditioning" is that the nonsense syllable,
presented without being followed by the disturbance of a CV, still appears
to result in an "emotional" response -- that is, a physiological
preparation for action (as well as any actual motor behavior that occurs).
In other words, the basis of the so-called conditioning is that a
perception which regularly precedes a disturbance comes to be perceived as
signaling the occurrance of that disturbance, so the organism reacts as if
the disturbance had actually occurred. This is the sort of thing that could
occur at the event level.
I can think of a task which would test this idea. Suppose that a light
turns on, and the subject is instructed to turn it off as quickly as
possible by pressing a key. If the subject adopts this goal, we will see
that after a series of trials, the reaction time comes down to some
irreducible minimum like 0.15 seconds.
Now we can institute a beep that occurs some fixed time before the light
turns on. As the trials continue, we will find the reaction time to the
light shortening until it is approximately zero (anticipatory key presses
should have no effect). This corresponds to the training phase of an
operant conditioning task, the difference being only that the "US" is a
learned controlled variable.
The next phase is to omit the light, the prediction being that the subject
will still treat the beep as a signal that the light will turn on after a
fixed delay. The subject will still press the key nearly at the time the
light is expected to turn on, giving the appearance that the beep (the CS)
is the cause of the response.
If emotions are involved in the response (that is, if the physiological
preparation is pronounced enough to be classed as an emotion), there will
be such a preparation as soon as the beep sounds or shortly after it,
because now, with the warning, it is possible to prepare _before_ the light
turns on. Normally, since the disturbance is too brief to counteract, it
comes too late, as does the beginning of a motor response.
In fact, I would guess that the "emotional response" would, after many
trials with and without either the light or the beep, come to be stronger
without the light than without the beep, because the person would learn
that any response to the light alone would come too late to achieve the
quickest turnoff. To get an emotional response of measurable magnitude, I
would guess that we would have to make the closure of the key contact
moderately difficult, so that an appreciable effort would be required.
Which suggests another experiment. Suppose that the person is asked to
perform a difficult task, like lifting a heavy weight off a table with one
hand in a single quick movement. No external CS is involved in this
experiment; the person simply initiates the task at any time after getting
into position. We would measure such things as GSR or muscle innervation
(with a myograph), as well as the position of the weight. Now, according to
my theory of emotion, we should see a change in the GSR and the state of
the muscles _just before_ the lift. If we could also measure heart rate and
breathing, these, too, should show changes before the act is performed. In
fact, all physiological measures normally used to indicate emotional state,
even brain-scans, should show indications prior to the action. These would
correspond to the "preparation for action" of which I speak. Of course if
the delay is too short, the preparations would merge into the action.
This research seems to show that the process of classical conditioning
is one way that emotionally neutral perceptions take on emotional
properties.
Only if that's what you already believe. Actually, I doubt that the beep
would change its properties at all. The overall perception might change, in
that just after the beep you would feel your body preparing for action. At
some level you might see a pattern made up of the beep and the somatic
changes, and if you weren't observing very acutely you might think the
somatic changes were somehow attached to the beep. This is the same sort of
evaluation that is involved in superstitions. Careful observation, however,
would quickly reveal that the beep is exactly the same in all trials, and
that the added feeling is due to what you are doing, not what the beep is
doing.
If one did brain imaging studies before and after the nonsense syllables
took on emotional meaning, one could see which parts of the brain light
up and in which order.
What do you think?
See above. Clearly, the meaning of what you see depends heavily on the
theoretical glasses you wear while looking at the data.
Best,
Bill P.