Josh's Crosstime Salute

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For some people, discussing emotions is a fairly simple and straight forward process. If we think of them as colors, they tend to have a basic set of 10 or 30 (or some other number of) colors. This is the genesis of the face charts of emotions we see:



But many of us are aware of experiencing many more emotions than those charts - even those with many more faces. Hence the effort to take advantage of the hexadecimal color system to provide greater variety and gradation of emotional expression.

The way that hexadecimal colors work: each digit has 16 possible values, going from 0-9 with a-f added on the end to count as 10-15. The first two digits of the number represent the brightness of red, f being the brightest, 0 the darkest. the second two are for green, and the last two are for blue.

In this system the first two digits (those representing red) stand in for physical excitement; with 0 being a very slow, and f being high on adrenaline.

The second two digits (those representing green) standing in for mental excitement, or the amount of noise and thought going on in ones head. A 0 here would mean it is very hard to think, while a f would mean the thoughts are tumbling on top of each other too fast to keep track of.

The last two digits (those representing blue) stand in for pain vs pleasure. a 0 here is very painful, and an f very pleasurable.

This gives a way of categorizing emotions using color. for instance: When all are at their highest value (the most physically and mentally excited, and pleasurable), we get white; while the lowest values on all three would show black.

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As this is very much an idea that is early in its development, it would be very helpful if you would use the charts above and the Hexadecimal Color Chooser to provide the colors that would represent those emotions to you and then either post them anonymously below or send them along to kindgrove@gmail.com.

Our intention is to use the information provided to us to develop a better guideline for using the color selector or other system for expressing one's own emotions. We will not use anybody's name or identifying information without advance permission nor do we anticipate doing so with permission.

Thank you for your time and assistance!

Some of you may be interested in the article, Social Consequences of the Internet for Adolescents - A Decade of Research, by Patti M. Valkenberg and Jochen Peter; in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol 18, No. 1.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2006/december/hauser.php?page=1

I talked a bit ago about a lecture I attended on the subject of resilience. Well, Smithsonian has an interview with the author of a new book. From the page I linked:

Psychiatrist Stuart Hauser answers questions about his new book, Out of the Woods, which chronicles four emotionally disturbed teenagers

I can tell you that I will be getting the book and that just the interview has given me plenty to think about. And it makes an interesting companion piece for this, from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/health/22KIDS.html?em&ex=1166936400&en=dc70978d39d5fa8e&ei=5087%0A

Troubled Children:
Parenting as Therapy for Child’s Mental Disorders

And this, also from the times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/health/psychology/19essa.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

It's an essay, entitled Sometimes, the Why Really Isn’t Crucial, about the issues and difficulties of causation in therapeutic work.

I don't know that I have anything original to add here, but between my post and a number of others, coupled with a few conversations over the last week and some news articles, I have reactions, at least.

As I noted tother day about the Human Development Experiments, the pull to behave as the masses do is very strong. Apparently, this may go beyond simple perception of fitting in. In a separate bit of news, we were told that laughter IS contagious. The brain reacts to heard laughter by triggering muscles that will smile.

Colleges attract more students by raising their prices, because if their prices are as high as the competitive colleges' are, then they must be almost as good, right?

What if that is what happens with almost any externally observed behavior? There is a perception of what is the norm and the individual is programmed to follow that perception? I was talking with one of my Voyagers students about expectations. Yes, if the patients in the hospital have it made clear to them that they are ignorant and should not question the professionals, the patients are easier to work with. Students who learn to respect the authority of the teachers, unquestioningly, are unquestionably easier to teach - or at least, to control in the classroom!

So, when a person follows the pack's behavior - to mock another person's clothes or intellect or habits, are they not responsible for their behavior? Are they following a preprogrammed path laid out for them?

Go along to get along, not as philosophy but as genetic predisposition?

Now, we come up with plenty of rationalizations for why it is okay to mistreat that person, ignore this one, behave this way or that, even though we are really trying to convince ourselves.

Because, as I see it, even if the 'pack mentality" theory is right, there are still people who do not do it by instinct.

Some do not do it at all. They tend to be outsiders, they tend to be the scorned.

There are others who tire of being the outsiders, of being scorned. And so, they act in order to fit in, to belong. They choose the path, engage in the hurtful behaviors, while knowing full well what they are doing.

And they salve their conscience with the reassurance that at least they fit in.

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Personally, I prefer to think that with education, nobody would behave like the guards at Abu Ghraib or in the Stanford Prison Experiment. I would like to think that casual cruelty to those who are different from the ostensible norm would no longer be so present, so casual.

But I am not currently convinced that there is enough education in the world. The siren's call to fit in is powerful. Don't see what you are not supposed to see. Don't question what you are not supposed to question.

Ask any homeless person.

I watched the Sundance Channel this evening, on which was being aired a documentary called The Human Behavior Experiments. It included footage, discussion, and retrospective interviews with some participants in the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments, along with other experiments, the Kitty Genovese murder, and Abu Ghraib.

These are all tied together, conceptually, in how people behave in groups versus alone, along with how they respond to the voice of authority. The kicker, for me at least, was the case of the strip searches ordered by a voice on the phone.

For approximately a decade, a man has been calling up restaurants and other places, pretending to be a police detective, and ordering the person who answers the phone (or whomever is in charge and handed the phone) to conduct strip searches of employees - and a lot of other things.

The behaviors of those on the phones is amazing. It is appalling. And, apparently, it is human nature more than not.

A report and some very disturbing footage is here: <http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2684890&page=1>. I seriously recommend not watching it if inappropriate behavior and dehumanizing behavior disturbs you or makes you too uncomfortable.

The special didn't really tell me anything I didn't know about human behavior. It showed me some experiments I hadn't seen, in addition to the McDonald's strip search (and others) and it did a good job of tying it into Abu Ghraib. The similarities between the Stanford pictures and those from Iraq are eerie - and not just to me, but to some of those involved in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

If you get Sundance, I commend the show to interested people (and others who are unfamiliar and can handle it). It will be on again, I am sure.