WHAT we SEE...what WE feel...

Since taking Lizzie’s Feeling brain course I have become obsessed with the mirror neural system and focused my conference work on emotion regulation. It’s only natural that Stafford’s chapter “Mimesis Again,” would prompt me to write my blog post about its relevance to visual communication and perception. Mirror neurons are potentially a neural correlate to empathy. This is all very intriguing to me being that I have an over active mirror neural system. I'm extremely empathetic to others. Lizzie brought to my attention in one of our conferences so I began researching it. I wanted to learn how I could control being too sensitive or crying all of sudden and not knowing (consciously) the exact reason behind it.

The neural organization of the emotional brain has infused the linguistic study of the role of mimicry. Mimesis orients beings both animals and humans. Identifying with another begins with involuntary shared emotion. As social beings we bounce off one another. Our perceptions of pleasure and pain are worked on day to day. We are moved to either draw experience in, making it intimate or refute it, making it distant. Our visual communication is essential to how we interact in and with the world.
Emotions are part of self-regulating homeostasis. The development of emotions starts at birth, activated consciously as well as sub-consciously. The most dramatic changes occur in prenatal development, infancy and childhood. From the moment they are pushed out of their mother’s womb they express emotion, typically they are crying and screaming. The first distinction a person can identify in a baby’s emotional state is between positive and negative affect; meaning whether they are content and happy expressed through a smile or whether they are sad or upset expressed through a pouty face or crying. Many important emotion regulatory skills and strategies are developed during the first five years of a child’s life. The emotional environment in which a child is raised can enhance or interfere with their ability to learn to regulate emotion and function with others.
In the first few months of their infant’s life, mothers claim to have the ability to differentiate between their ranges of emotions. The primary emotions are most likely discernible at this stage, happiness, interest, surprise, sadness, fear, anger and pain. Anger and pain become increasingly easily distinguished from each other when the baby is around seven months or so. For the most part after infancy emotional expression is learned from others, through observation and imitation.

When a mother and baby are interacting usually exchanging expressions, the baby is more often than not simply responding to the mother’s initial expressions. Say if the mother differed to a frown as opposed to a smile or spoke in a harsh tone of voice the baby would not automatically recognize this emotion as anger. The baby would identify that this tone of voice is un-pleasurable or very different from what they are accustomed to. Social referencing studies have proven that infants can sensibly interpret the emotional expression of their mother. Social referencing is defined as a process characterized by the use of one’s perception of other persons’ interpretation of this situation to form one’s own understanding of the situation. Ambiguous situations, are well studied i.e. reactions to strangers or reactions to strange toys. When a baby comes in contact with a stranger for the first time they will usually look at their mother’s current expression so they know how to act in this situation. If the mother reacts positively to the stranger, so will the baby. But, if the mother ignores the stranger then the baby will not react positively to the stranger.

Emotional experience originates with autonomic nervous system arousal. Sometimes emotion precedes cognition, sometimes emotion is preceded by cognition. These two systems work together. The autonomic nervous system is aroused by prominent change in this person’s world. An environmental event, the individual’s actions, memories or actions of others. Negative emotionality does not always stem from self-related experiences.

In social interactions indirect induced anger can result in disregulated behavior, behavioral constriction, or concern for the person or persons expressing the anger, depending on the child’s coping method. Children who experience sympathy frequently try to assist others in distress; in contrast, children who are anxious or distressed in reaction to others’ negative emotions often avoid dealing with the distressing situation or may even respond aggressively. Some children are able to deal with anger, aggression, and anxiety in a constructive manner in social contexts, while other children have difficulty regulating their emotional reactions and emotion-related behaviors.

The forms we see all around us mirror the deep structure of the cosmos. It is our innate cognitive proclivity to mimic and to respond to features of the ambient that correspond to our neural architecture. Stafford states that imitation may even trigger patterns among individuals in a process akin to culture, meaning cross-generational copying of social interaction.

Motion is an intrinsic component of emotion. Arnheim tells us that motion is the strongest visual appeal to attention. There is a mirror system for movement and action comprehension. I believe filmmakers are also masters of mimesis just as painters Hogarth and Greuze. I attended a film screening of “Kingdom of Heaven,” for my art history lecture and Ridley Scott definitely recreated the historical war scenes over Jerusalem between Christians and Muslims, to the T. They were so realistic; the mimicry of these actual events was phenomenal and evoked the appropriate emotions. Everyone’s perception is different, based on their past experiences or knowledge of a given subject matter. However, when people are getting killed left and right, in gory depictions with blood is gushing everywhere, we can expect to have similar feelings about what we are viewing. That is unless the person sitting next to me watching the same film is a masochist.

Perception is a moving process that activates a reaction to a stimulus. This is due to vision being animate, a bodily sampling of one’s changing surroundings that locates the viewer in a particular territory. We imitate and internally as well as externally re-create. This is true on so many levels and across many mediums and it just hit me this second fashion is just like that a cycle, everything is recycled and coming back into style slightly modified. Whoa I could go for days with this one, let me know if your are interested in reading my fifty page conference paper regarding this topic. Hahaha