Comment by 082349872349872
1 year ago
Aha, that's our problem: for me, anger is part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response and so Irritation, Frustration, and Resentment aren't included because they don't necessarily involve that article's:
> Impaired Decision Making: When consumed by anger, rational thinking tends to take a backseat which could result in poor decision making.
(In fact, because my major interest is in good decision making despite high adrenaline levels, I lump Irritation, Frustration, and Resentment into a boring Dissatisfaction; I can appreciate that distinguishing these as well as linking them to the highly-limbic expressions of anger would be useful for people who are discussing non-adrenalised states, but for me the non-adrenalised/adrenalised boundary yields a clear qualitative distinction between dissatisfaction and anger)
I guess it might help if natural language agreed on emotional ranges at least to the extent that it agrees on colour names...
That makes sense, and sure.
I'm not overly familiar with this part of psychology, but I think a good distinction is between emotions and mood states. Adrenalized anger would probably be considered a mood state. I'm probably wrong about this though, as a quick search leads to distinctions between emotions, feelings, and moods. It looks like there are also "mood disorders" which seem to be extended affective complexes of particular emotions.
> I guess it might help if natural language agreed on emotional ranges at least to the extent that it agrees on colour names...
Probably the largest reason it doesn't is because while the majority of humans experience visual sensation similarly enough (white/blue dress notwithstanding), the emotions are something else entirely. We spend so much time in certain emotions compared to other people that it's like wearing colored wraparound spectacles all of the time.
How about this: because we are capable of the (potentially motivational) conscious feeling anger, relying on the unconscious emotion anger has questionable utility?
(affect and mood may be well defined within a discipline, but cursory googling seems to reveal substantial interdisciplinary inconsistency)
Given human variation I'm not quite willing to generalize that much. I'd say pretty much anything our minds do is of questionable utility when taken to an extreme. But this extreme will vary between people.