XiXiDu comments on The Neuroscience of Pleasure - Less Wrong

35 Post author: lukeprog 27 March 2011 11:57PM

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Comment author: XiXiDu 28 March 2011 11:48:52AM *  10 points [-]

Where Do Bad Moods Come From?

What causes bad moods? Why do we sometimes slip into angry fits and melancholy torpors? In general, happy moods have easy explanations – we know why we’re elated. But a bad mood often seems to arrive out of the blue, a gloomy weather pattern that settles in from everywhere all at once. All of a sudden, we find ourselves pissed off without a good reason, which only makes us more pissed off.

[...]

A brand new paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, extends this link between self-control and anger, even as it complicates the ego-depletion model. In a series of clever studies, the Northwestern psychologists David Gal and Wendy Liu demonstrate that the exertion of self-control doesn’t just make it harder for us to contain our own anger – it also make us more interested in watching anger-themed movies, or thinking about anger-related information, or looking an angry facial expressions. In other words, acts of self-control haven’t just exhausted the ego – they actually seem to have pissed it off.

My favorite experiment involved movies. Two hundred and thirty nine subjects were given a choice between a virtuous apple and a hedonistic chocolate bar. (A slim majority chose the apple.) Then, they were offered a selection of movies to watch, from Anger Management (an anger themed film) to Billy Madison (a non-anger themed film.) Interestingly, students were significantly more likely to choose the angry films if they’d first chosen the apple. And it wasn’t just films: another experiment found that people who exercised financial restraint – they chose a gift certificate for groceries over one for spa services – were more interested in looking at angry faces.

What’s driving this effect? Gal and Liu argue that the preference for angry stuff is not simply a result of ego depletion. Instead, they speculate that self-control is inherently aggravating. Perhaps choosing the apple annoys us because our goals have been thwarted – we really wanted the candy bar – or maybe we’re pissed because we feel that our sense of autonomy has been diminished. (If we weren’t so constrained by societal norms and expectations, we would have gorged on chocolate.) The point is that the labor of self-control directly inspires our tendency towards anger, and not indirectly via a worn down prefrontal cortex.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 09 February 2012 08:57:05AM *  3 points [-]

Two hundred and thirty nine subjects were given a choice between a virtuous apple and a hedonistic chocolate bar.

This exemplifies a fallacy that is almost ubiquitous in psychological experiments, and runs right through this paper. The subjects were not offered a choice between a virtuous apple and a hedonistic chocolate bar. They were offered a choice between an apple and a chocolate bar (or of declining either). Personally, I eat about 10 to 20 times (by weight) as much apples as chocolate, because that it what it pleases me to do. Likewise, a choice between groceries and spa services is not a choice between restraint and indulgence. Besides which, any subject smart enough to look at what the offered transaction actually is (which surely includes everyone on LessWrong?) will have the sense to choose the voucher for something they would be spending money on anyway, making it exactly equivalent to being given that sum of money to direct in any they wish. (I see from the paper that they were not actually offered a voucher, but the chance to win one in a raffle. I suppose that keeps the experimental costs down. I wonder if any prizes were actually awarded?)

The fallacy being committed here is of attributing to a stimulus an imagined response of your subjects. To this way of thinking, apples are "virtuous", chocolate is a "temptation", and a spa session is a "luxury". None of these things are true. How the subjects respond to these offers depends on their own purposes, whose existence experimental psychologists generally ignore. They prefer to imagine that they are reaching into the heads of people, tweaking knobs and reading dials. This is pseudoscience and superstition.

Inevitably, the results are the usual statistical mush.

Comment author: AGirlAlone 09 February 2012 07:30:42AM *  0 points [-]

self-control is inherently aggravating

Thanks for pointing it out (by science!)-- a lot of people who wish to perfect their personality should know it. I didn't consciously know it, but developed a mental discipline of acknowledging anger in my tormented teens anyway. People who hold intuitive ideals about "perfection of humanity/personality" should learn neuroscience, lest they suppose that things they ought to do (control themselves) must bring happiness. They may be confused when they experience that anger, and either conclude that they are born sinful/defective, or selfish/negative emotions are to be done away with to achieve perfection.

I really want say: It's OK to feel hurt if you didn't get what you want, even if that's because you did what you should/must. Those who try to make humans completely ethical/self-controlled are turning us into something not human.

But what did I just say? Surely that's an excuse for being impulsive? I want what I want, and I don't want to be called unethical for that. And that humanness part -- if doing whatever you end up deciding by taking "liking, wanting and learning" into account seems to be functional in the past, in meatspace, can't it be utterly disastrous when we have access to Singularity-level power? Shouldn't we sever the lower impulses and go with ethics instead? (But is it, um, fun?) I don't know what should I feel...Hope the one that comes up with FAI first is not going to program it to value ethics strictly above fun...

Comment author: Nisan 28 March 2011 07:47:51PM 0 points [-]

It is interesting to interpret this from the perspective of Internal Family Systems.

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