Chance Emotional Generalizations and Introspection

An emotional generalization is an emotion experienced in several or many similar situations that becomes a subconscious conclusion influencing our subsequent choices and actions. It is not formed by explicit conceptual identification and is therefore a “chance” occurrence.

Emotions, which exist in both humans and higher animals, are psychological counterparts of physical pleasure and pain. The process in infants and animals to generalize emotional experiences occurs automatically, but humans in later life, preferably beginning in toddlerhood, can use conscious thought to control part of the process, to make and identify generalizations and correct mistaken ones.

Most of us, unfortunately, leave our generalizations from emotional experiences to accident or circumstance, not explicit conceptual identification.

For example, a toddler who is yelled at by his father and called bad names for spilling a glass of milk may feel fear, anxiety, and hurt for the way his father reacted to the objectively harmless event.

The boy likely cannot name the emotions he has just experienced or determine why he feels what he feels, although he is presumably aware that his reaction is to his father’s response to the spilling of the milk. He feels pain and the threat of pain, drawing negative conclusions about himself. This is a one-time experience.

If similar situations of being yelled at and called names arise in the future, not just involving his father, but also his mother, other relatives, and teachers, the boy’s subconscious mind may generalize, having repressed the origin of the feeling, and draw the subconscious conclusion—what Edith Packer (chap. 1) calls a core evaluation—“I can’t do anything right. I must be careful around other people.”

As the boy grows older and becomes an adult, he may experience the same emotions to yelling and name-calling even when the sounds are not directed at him but nevertheless are within earshot.*

This scenario can be observed in higher animals, such as a dog who as a puppy was abused by a male owner through yelling and hitting. The puppy experiences painful feelings that become stored and associated with males, especially who yell and hit. When moving to a new family, the puppy and adult dog may still react fearfully and defensively when meeting the new, but kind, male owner and other males in the household or neighborhood. The dog may also run out of the house whenever a human voice is raised.

Emotional generalization in the higher animals is essentially how their behavior is guided.

The difference between the higher animals and humans is that we can identify the nature and cause of our emotions and correct the ones that are out of context and based on false underlying premises.

This is an important component of what the capacity to reason in humans means. Through introspection we can identify and regulate our cognitive mental processes by conceptualizing them, that is, putting words to them, as opposed to bouncing from one chance emotion to another.

The skill of introspection is what we all need to learn and practice and, especially, is what needs to be taught to children when they are young, probably as soon as they begin to speak.

Introspection is what psychotherapists—whether or not they acknowledge the validity of introspection in science—encourage their patients to learn in order to resolve the psychological problems and conflicts they are suffering.

Introspection in children, if it were taught, would go a long way toward preventing the development of many unfortunate problems and conflicts.

Emotions are psychosomatic responses to a situation—a person, object, or event—that presuppose a previous perception of what is factual about the situation, along with an evaluation of the facts. Either can be true or false. “That bang,” for example, “was a gunshot [fact], which constitutes a threat to me [evaluation]. As consequence, I feel fear.”

The emotional reaction is automatic, but every emotion rests on implicit, often subconscious, judgments of fact and value. It is the fact and value judgments that can be identified through introspection and changed. As it turns out, the bang was the backfire of a car [corrected fact], which does not constitute a threat to me [corrected evaluation]. This knowledge corrects my mistaken judgments. As a result, the emotion of fear disappears.

Conceptualization is the tool needed to identify the facts and values that stand behind all of our emotions. Introspection is the method by which we use the tool. Unfortunately, neither has been taught to us, certainly not in childhood, and, if at all, minimally in adulthood.

Without knowledge of how to introspect, we are left at the mercy of chance emotional generalizations, many of which we have formed unaware (subconsciously) in childhood and adolescence and which essentially determine and control our adult lives. Chance, unexamined emotional generalizations are what lead us to think that we are helplessly determined by our genes and environment.

The best advice here is Edith Packer’s (p. 278): “If parents and schools could teach children the connection between thoughts and emotions, if they could teach a child that when he feels something, he’s really thinking something—so that the child would learn to ask himself, ‘What am I thinking when I experience this emotion?’—it would be invaluable.”



* I hasten to add that not every child will react the same way to this father’s behavior. A rare child might say to himself, “What’s the big deal? I didn’t do anything wrong. Father is being ridiculous.” My example is not of environmental determinism, but of a serious influence that hampers many a child’s healthy development. The father needs to learn how better to relate to his son.