[FRIAM] oxytocin, again

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Are emotion states hidden?  I will grant that hormonal states are "hidden".  But an emotion state is a tuning of the organism's behavior with respect to the environment, and hence "visible" to any well situated observer, no?  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2020 8:28 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] oxytocin, again


Once again the ingroup hormone is in the news:

1) A neurobiological association of revenge propensity during intergroup conflict <https://elifesciences.org/articles/52014>

The link for the paper is the download icon in the upper right.

But in skimming this paper, it seems to contradict what I inferred from this paper:

2) Oxytocin enhances pupil dilation and sensitivity to ‘hidden’ emotional expressions <https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/8/7/741/1653225>

Granted, I expect to infer things not implied because I really have no idea what I'm reading. Whatever, I'm inspired by the other thread on acid epistemology to talk about things that cannot be talked about and run with the apparent contradiction. 8^)

(2) seemed to say that oxytocin is a marker for being "on the look out", whereas (1) seems to imply it's a marker for being "in a state of trust/comfort/empathy/whatever". Endocrine signaling seems (in my ignorance) to be coarse and ambiguous. Since the body is made up of many quasi-autonomous components, an ebb or flow of a signal might take on different "meaning" depending on the *rest* of the conditions experienced by any given component. E.g. pupil dilation might occur in either context, where one's comfortable enough to be free of "fight or flight", but "on the look out" for subtle expressions in their ingroup team *or* safe enough to be free of "fight or flight", but "on the look out" for subtle expressions of subterfuge or betrayal in business negotiations (or whatever).

I suppose a possible resolution of the contradiction might lie in the whole fast vs. slow thinking metaphor. If there are (at least) two conditions where one needs to be "on the look out", one fully engaged in fight or flight ... eyes darting around looking for the snake, pupils dilated ... or fully comfy on your couch listening to Enya ... pupils dilated hunting for the hidden emotional states of your dog.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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