thoughts on bearing pain
I've been away from LJ for some time in an attempt to be more focused on the things I actually needed to be doing/ am paid to do. One of these things was to teach an intensive summer version of Experimental Psychology, a course required for Psych majors at UW Madison. Happily, my students finished their final oral presentations today and I am keeping my fingers crossed that even my most "needy" student will get a C and not have to repeat. I try to walk a fine line of being fair but also being compassionate...sometimes it's hard. The idea of having so much power over somebody else's suffering and even the course of their future is troubling to me at times. Try as hard as we might, there is a lot about grading papers that is subjective. In this case, a D means repeating, whereas a C is a crappy grade that would make it hard to get into grad school but would at least allow somebody to get the B.A. they've been pursuing.
On a surprisingly related note, I am also being paid to design an experiment that assesses individual differences in ability to withhold a learned, prepotent response that is normally negatively reinforcing (i.e. an escape response that turns off a threat or a noxious stimulus). This is relevant to the field of addiction, and relevant to the idea of existential courage in general. People who more likely to become addicted to substances and people who *are* addicted are prone to try to try to escape from their own negative feelings of distress/anxiety/frustration. An overlearned escape response and/or super-strong drive toward experiential avoidance typically makes it hard to use the data conveyed by negative feelings in an adaptive manner, *or* just to ride out the wave of negative emotion when that is the most responsible option.
To me, this raises the interesting question of what is it about the brain and/or consciousness that makes a given level of negative stimulation (emotional/physical) so much more aversive to certain individuals. It does seem clear that there are different circuits involved in assigning value/meaning to painful situations as opposed to simply registering pain. As an example of this disjunct in my own life, I was very afraid of the *unknown course* of labor pain my first time around and that fear-of-upredictable-pain was far more aversive then the actual pain. I was afraid the quality or intensity of the pain would change suddenly, erratically and unexpectedly--and I tried desperately to convey my fear of the pain/get reassurance from others, but I didn't know how. I think I will be much better able to embrace the pain of birth if I am blessed with another baby in the future. I didn't have any pain medication the first time, but I accepted an allergy medication that had a sedative effect and was enough to take the edge off of my terror. Of course, I blame that med for SP developing jaundice.
The idea of the costs of honing a taste for experiential avoidance (i.e., in precluding tendencies toward more adaptive emotion-driven behavior and/or precluding responsible nonindulgence in contextually inappropriate negative reinforcement) leaves me with a figment of an idea related to child guidance. Namely, are we robbing kids of important learning experiences if we foster their experiential avoidance by "saving" them from enduring the little and sometimes not-so-little discomforts (mental and physical) of daily life? Mind you, I am not advocating walking on hot coals, sleeping on nails, or Catholic style self-flagellation--or flagellation by others :-< I am far from being a masochist, but I do know that I get a certain self-generated reinforcement out of accepting and bravely bearing painful but necessary circumstances and I admire this resolve in others as well. THis wasn't always the case, though.
Finally, in applying all of this to the grading situation, if I lean more toward the C of a on a borderline low C vs. high D level paper, then I worry that I am being motivated to save *myself* from the negative emotion of knowing what somebody will have to endure and not being fair/objective enough...but I also know that the individual in question did a lot to override their own habitual drive toward experiential avoidance in order to stick with the class when the going got tough...and I want to reward this choice.
On a surprisingly related note, I am also being paid to design an experiment that assesses individual differences in ability to withhold a learned, prepotent response that is normally negatively reinforcing (i.e. an escape response that turns off a threat or a noxious stimulus). This is relevant to the field of addiction, and relevant to the idea of existential courage in general. People who more likely to become addicted to substances and people who *are* addicted are prone to try to try to escape from their own negative feelings of distress/anxiety/frustration. An overlearned escape response and/or super-strong drive toward experiential avoidance typically makes it hard to use the data conveyed by negative feelings in an adaptive manner, *or* just to ride out the wave of negative emotion when that is the most responsible option.
To me, this raises the interesting question of what is it about the brain and/or consciousness that makes a given level of negative stimulation (emotional/physical) so much more aversive to certain individuals. It does seem clear that there are different circuits involved in assigning value/meaning to painful situations as opposed to simply registering pain. As an example of this disjunct in my own life, I was very afraid of the *unknown course* of labor pain my first time around and that fear-of-upredictable-pain was far more aversive then the actual pain. I was afraid the quality or intensity of the pain would change suddenly, erratically and unexpectedly--and I tried desperately to convey my fear of the pain/get reassurance from others, but I didn't know how. I think I will be much better able to embrace the pain of birth if I am blessed with another baby in the future. I didn't have any pain medication the first time, but I accepted an allergy medication that had a sedative effect and was enough to take the edge off of my terror. Of course, I blame that med for SP developing jaundice.
The idea of the costs of honing a taste for experiential avoidance (i.e., in precluding tendencies toward more adaptive emotion-driven behavior and/or precluding responsible nonindulgence in contextually inappropriate negative reinforcement) leaves me with a figment of an idea related to child guidance. Namely, are we robbing kids of important learning experiences if we foster their experiential avoidance by "saving" them from enduring the little and sometimes not-so-little discomforts (mental and physical) of daily life? Mind you, I am not advocating walking on hot coals, sleeping on nails, or Catholic style self-flagellation--or flagellation by others :-< I am far from being a masochist, but I do know that I get a certain self-generated reinforcement out of accepting and bravely bearing painful but necessary circumstances and I admire this resolve in others as well. THis wasn't always the case, though.
Finally, in applying all of this to the grading situation, if I lean more toward the C of a on a borderline low C vs. high D level paper, then I worry that I am being motivated to save *myself* from the negative emotion of knowing what somebody will have to endure and not being fair/objective enough...but I also know that the individual in question did a lot to override their own habitual drive toward experiential avoidance in order to stick with the class when the going got tough...and I want to reward this choice.