While reading David Huron’s book Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, I learned that Huron used findings and techniques from modern cognitive research to expand on music theorist Leonard Meyer’s 1956 work, Emotion and Meaning in Music. Unfortunately, I was unable to delve further into Meyer's work at this time, but hope to explore this over the summer as I found Huron's work quite impressive. I was startled by Huron's belief that there are no neutral emotions, only positive or negative emotions. He refers to the positive or negative quality of emotion as valence. He defines contrastive valence as the conjecture that the hedonic value of an experience is amplified when preceded by a contrasting hedonic state. I need to research and process the concept of no neutral emotions, but I can see where evolutionarily speaking, organisms would need positive and negative response range to promote efficient survival mechanisms.
In my primary perusals I have found references to neutral emotions in The Effect of Positive Emotions on Multimedia Learning. This article's abstract states: "The study examined whether the positive emotions experienced during multimedia learning facilitate cognitive process that leads to better learning performance and satisfaction. Positive emotions were experimentally induced before a multimedia based learning by means of self-referencing mood induction procedure (positive or neutral emotions) and during the learning by the aesthetic design of the learning materials (good or neutral design). The result of the experiment shows that there is significant effect of emotions on their transfer test, mental effort investment, as well as level of satisfaction. It also indicates that positive emotions can be generated by the instructional design that may be able to affect learners’ experience and performance. The study implies that positive emotions should be considered as important factors in instructional design. Also, emotional design principles should be studied in more detail for better instructional material design."
The link to download the study is: http://create.alt.ed.nyu.edu/courses/2015/reading/Um_Song_Plass_ED-MEDIA_07.pdf
4 comments:
I am immediately struck by that claim as well, "no neutral emotions". If we think of positive and negative emotions as possessing an ability to exist at variant degrees while maintaining inherent functional capacity; (as in gradations rather than distinct divisions) then it might follow that along this continuum from negative to positve exists a zero; this may serve us well when considering a neutral emotion.
I entertained a similar contunuum-based thought as Keane. But notice: we have good and bad acts (and they, too, come in degrees), yet we don't consider those that are neither as neutral, morally speaking, just not on the scale. So perhaps it is the same with emotions -- zero is merely a limit against which we measure these (diminishing) qualities, not a place-holder for one of them.
Yes, I see, I think. If "neutral" or ambivalent emotions do in fact exist: how do we measure a degree of worth or value if they are not on the scale? Do we invent an entirely different system to gauge uncertainty?
My suggestion is that neutral emotions do not exist (just as "zero" does not mark a point along the continuum of moral acts). "Ambivalent" emtotions are perhaps simply too low on the scale (or an inchoate combination of emotions) to be measured accurately.
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