Emotional Ignorance: Lost and found in the science of emotion

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Hübinette T., Lundström C. (2014). Three Phases of Hegemonic Whiteness: Understanding Racial Temporalities in Sweden. Availableat: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504630.2015.1004827 Yes, there can be negative consequences for the emotionally immature person and the others around. They can be immensely unpredictable and cause stress to the people around them. Being in a relationship with such people can cause strained relationships and have a negative impact on the mental health of the partner. General practitioners (GPs) and surgeons described the way colleagues, particularly those junior to them in the organizational hierarchy, may attempt to take over their duties or report them to the boss for any small mistake. In one case, a GP noted during an interview that took place at a café, that being watched and reported to the chief, especially by junior colleagues – nurses and nurse aides – is regular and is very stressful for him. This participant reported an incident where he mistakenly double-booked a patient. Instead of talking to him, the nurse just sent the patient straight to the clinical unit manager. He said at the end ‘being watched is extremely stressful’ especially because he also has to hide his emotions from his white colleagues.

Lost and found in the science of emotion | Royal Institution

Giddings L. S. (2005). Health Disparities, Social Injustice, and the Culture of Nursing. Nurs. Res. 54 ( 5), 304–312. 10.1097/00006199-200509000-00004 In this quote the midwife talks about how it eats her up to listen to other healthcare staff talk negatively about Somali patients and how she witnesses the inadequate treatment they get. When asked if she ever discusses these issues in her workplace she responded: Hochschild A. R. (2012). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkley and Los Angeles: For instance, for all that we’ve still not managed to properly define them, most now agree that emotions have three key properties. Valence (whether an emotional experience is positive or negative), arousal (the degree to which an emotion stimulates us), and motivational intensity (how much an emotion compels us to ‘do’ something).Yet it remains an open question which of the many available psychotherapies work best. A randomized trial published in 2013 was the first to compare methods; its results indicated that a supportive approach, emphasizing an individual's strengths and teaching him or her social skills, was nearly twice as effective as a common interpretive treatment focused on identifying unconscious conflicts. The reason may be because the latter approach requires inward-thinking skills typically deficient in those with alexithymia. The patient then stood up and went to request another doctor at the clinic’s reception, where he was directed to another doctor. The new doctor however told the patient he should do what the first doctor had said. Finally, the patient said he was going to visit a larger hospital instead. The GP noted that the patient seemed to want to consult any other doctor who was a majority ethnic Swede. The GP trivialized the patient’s refusal to accept his medical authority by saying the patient was not clear in the head.

Emotional Ignorance by Dean Burnett | Waterstones

Nonetheless, I was still a father and husband with all the associated responsibilities during a very scary time. So, for my family’s sake, I had to swallow my pain as best I could. What other option was there? Nothing and nobody seemed able to shift the headful of roiling emotions I was experiencing. However, about a month after Dad’s passing, I was walking through my suburban Cardiff neighbourhood for my daily exercise, trying and failing to churn through my bleak and weighty emotions, when I passed a nondescript front door. I caught a whiff of secondhand cigarette smoke from some unknown and unseen neighbour who’d presumably returned indoors just before I strolled by. Normally, given my established dislike of smoking, this would make me recoil. Only this time, it didn’t. Instead of repulsed, I actually felt… better? But the thing is, as an immigrant, what I learnt early on is that you have to fight for yourself. You have to, if everybody is doing what you’re doing, you have to prove even more that I am good at this. Someone may report … some people might feel every little thing that you do, that they feel like: ‘Okay I’m going to tell the boss that this thing is happening.’ And then you feel like you have to be extra careful everywhere. You have to be extra careful. You know, just to not try to take place, too much. Just try to do what you are paid to do, try to listen to others and sometimes, may be do not express yourself as much. Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in one of his most beautiful meditations. A generation before him, Anaïs Nin took up the subject in her diary, which is itself a work of philosophy: “If you intensify and complete your subjective emotions, visions, you see their relation to others’ emotions. It is not a question of choosing between them, one at the cost of another, but a matter of completion, of inclusion, an encompassing, unifying, and integrating which makes maturity.” And yet emotional maturity is not something that happens unto us as a passive function of time. It is, as Toni Morrison well knew, “a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory”— the product of intentional character-sculpting, the slow and systematic chiseling away of our childish impulses for tantrums, for sulking, for instant self-gratification without regard for others, for weaponizing our feelings of shame, frustration, and loneliness. Like happiness— another life-skill we have miscategorized as a passive abstraction — it requires early education, consistent relearning, and unrelenting practice.

Using my neuroscience knowledge, I know now that a lot of it is due to how our sense of smell works and its many unusual properties. It is far more complex and powerful than we often assume and consequently plays a bigger role in our lives than we realise. For instance, smell develops in the womb, seemingly before any other senses. Babies can detect their mother’s scent via the amniotic fluid so our sense of smell allows familiarity and bonding with a parent before we’re even born. I don’t like smoking and my father never did it, so why this? But smell is different. With smell, it’s our first, or earlier, experiences of something that has the more enduring influence on our memories and feelings. Presumably this is to do with the much bigger and more direct impact smell has on the relevant brain systems, something tempered by familiarity. Therefore, if the first time we smell something leads to a happy experience, it will probably bring up happy memories whenever we smell it, regardless of what happens in the future. In another interview, a dental hygienist described how his patient always tries to dismiss him and spoke negatively about migrants and refugees as being lazy and welfare exploiters. He reports: