Structure in Thought and Feeling

Susan Aylwin

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317616450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Kognitive Psychologie & Kognition

How does a person's way of thinking influence their personality, their values and their choice of career? In this important study, originally published in 1985, Susan Aylwin uses such questions as a starting point for elucidating the relationship between thought and feeling.

Three modes of thought are compared in detail: inner speech, visual imagery and enactive imagery – the last being an important addition to our understanding of mental representations. The structural characteristics of all three types are analysed using an association technique. Their affective aspects are then explored through a variety of means, including the analysis of daydreams, an examination of the evaluative complements of categorizing, the study of cognitive style, an exploration of such social feelings as embarrassment, and the experiential study of strong emotion. The author ends by integrating her findings, showing how thought and feeling are related aspects of the temporal organization of consciousness.

Structure in Thought and Feeling is written in a lively and accessible style, and brings a refreshing perspective to many issues of central concern to psychologists interested in cognition, emotion, personality and psychotherapy.

Part 1

The three forms of representation

1

Introduction

This book is about the relationship between thought and feeling; which is not a simple matter.

At their closest, thought and feeling are inextricably linked. Many cultures account for the beginning of all things by saying that first there was chaos, and then the chaos was partitioned into two: an upper part called sky or heaven, and a lower part called earth. At a single stroke the universe acquired both structure and value. The imposition of a cognitive opposition had direct affective complements: there was then a spatially higher part, which was also the spiritually better part, with human beings, for complicated reasons, being confined to the spatially and morally lower part. In such mythological accounts the same structure, opposition, has both cognitive and affective aspects.

An equally close relationship between thought and feeling is found in the experience of insight. Here the excitement accompanying the cognitive content is what tells the thinker the idea is a good one. At the moment of insight, truth is as much a matter of feeling as it is of thought. Polanyi (1958) assigns these ‘intellectual passions’ a vital role in science because they indicate what is scientifically important. Unguided by them, he says, research would spread out into a desert of trivialities.

The relationship is not always so close. Often thought and feeling come far enough apart for one to be seen as the cause of the other. Some people tell themselves how awful they are, and how hopeless their life is, and manage to think themselves into depression (Beck, 1963). The relationship may work both ways here, and people can sometimes be helped to think their way out of depression again, using one of the techniques of cognitive behaviour therapy.

The thoughts cannot always be assumed to lead the feelings however. Wolpe (1978a and b) describes how some patients remain phobic even though they know, rationally, that the object of their terror will not harm them. Here feeling is immune to cognitive interference, either because the feelings come first, or because thought and feeling are simply separate. Zajonc (1980) has recently suggested that in many situations affective processing has primacy over cognitive processing, and that in some situations the two may be virtually independent of each other.

Sometimes thought and feeling are the two inseparable facets of a single process; sometimes one causes the other; sometimes they are separate. When a number of accounts can be given of the relationship between two things, it is safest to assume that the relationship is complex. There are many ways of thinking and many ways of feeling, and there may be many kinds of relationship between them.

An anchoring of terms

Ryle (1949), in discussing the word emotion, lets the term range freely over a number of common-sense equivalents. In the present work the meaning of the term feeling is allowed to range freely in a similar way and over much of the same territory. Feeling may thus refer to evaluations, motives, personality traits, emotions; and generally to any of the loose aggregate of phenomena which psychologists normally class as ‘affective’.

In everyday speech the term thinking has almost as many uses as does feeling. However, with the meaning of one term left open it is as well to have some stringency in the definition of the other. The empirical work that follows looks at thinking in terms of the different kinds of representation that may be used in the thought process. This has the effect of anchoring the cognitive end of the relationship between thought and feeling in a substantial body of research on the topic of representations.

The developmental evidence suggests that there are three main forms of representation: enactive, visual and verbal, each originating in a different period of childhood.

At first the child’s world is known to him principally by the habitual actions he uses for coping with it. In time there is added a technique of representation through imagery that is relatively free of action. Gradually there is added a new and powerful method of translating action and image into language, providing still a third system of representation. (Bruner, 1966, p. 1)

The three systems of representation begin as ways of interacting with the real world, and gradually become internalized, so that as adults we have three different though interconnected forms of representation available to us: inner speech, or verbal representation; visual imagery or ‘pictures in the mind’s eye’; and enactive imagery, a kind of imagined action or role play.¹

All three are available for a wide variety of tasks. When reading a novel some people will mutter the words to themselves under their breath and rely mainly on inner speech; some will follow the plot through pictures in their mind’s eye; and some wall identify with the hero or heroine and follow the plot through imagined action. Most people can switch their strategy depending on what they are reading: verbal representation for abstract and technical matters; visual and enactive representations for good escapist fiction.

One of the advantages of elaborating thinking in terms of different forms of representation is that much of recent cognitive psychology has also been concerned with the topic of representation. This cognitive work has focused on the topic at two different levels: an abstract level, concerned with the representation of meaning in semantic memory; and a phenomenal or holistic level, concerned with the surface properties of the different forms of representation. Both these approaches will turn out to be useful in exploring the relationships between thought and feeling.

The research on representations at both levels has been in a primarily cognitive tradition, with relatively little reference to affective phenomena.² Some additional idea is therefore needed as an intellectual springboard to project an initial tentative link between thought and feeling. The notion of cognitive style is useful here.

Cognitive style

The idea of cognitive style is rooted in the psychoanalytic tradition, from which it arose as a way of explaining how the impulsive and passionate id could be controlled by the more intellectual and reality-orientated ego. Klein (1958) describes cognitive styles as involving particular patterns of cognitive structures, with the structures being responsible both for making sense of reality and for channelling instinctual energy into it. Cognitive styles thus involve the idea of structural relationships between thought and feeling.

Within cognitive style research itself, the structural component remained rudimentary, and was never articulated further than Rapaport’s reference to ‘information; habits; concepts; anticipatory, grammatical, syntactic, and other logical patterns, etc.’ (1959, p. 126). Many changes have taken place in psychological theory since he was writing, and it may now be possible to interpret the structures underlying cognitive styles in a new way, in terms of the structures used to describe the organization of semantic memory. This provides the following interrelated set of ideas which serve as the starting-point for the empirical work.

Firstly: verbal, visual and enactive modes of thought may utilize different kinds of cognitive structures.

Secondly: if these structures do have the dual cognitive and affective role assigned to them in the cognitive style tradition, then the different cognitive structures should have particular kinds of affects and feelings associated with them. More generally this means that there should be systematic and structural relationships between thought and feeling in the three forms of representation.

Thirdly: there may be ‘representational styles’ just as there are cognitive styles of other kinds, with people showing biases in the use they make of the three forms of thought.

Fourthly: these representational biases should be associated with particular styles in personality. Verbalizers, visualizers and enactive imagers should be different kinds of people, with distinct personality characteristics.

The empirical exploration of these interconnected ideas has required the detailed qualitative examination of both cognitive representations and affective experiences, using relatively simple observational and descriptive techniques. It has seemed important to observe what there is first, and to quantify it afterwards; and much of the work that follows therefore uses initial qualitative analyses, followed by quantification.³

Plan of the book

The book is divided into three parts. Part one is mainly concerned with comparisons between verbal, visual and enactive representations: chapter 2 provides background sketches of some of the things already known about each mode of thought; and chapter 3 elucidates the characteristic cognitive structures of each form of representation, using a modified free-association technique. It also examines the problematic notion of structure, and suggests that structures be seen as describing patterns of temporal organization. Chapter 4 sketches the affective concomitants of these cognitive structures by looking at day-dreams which occur in verbal, visual and enactive modes. As a more formal approach to the same general topic, chapter 5 describes some work with the Modes of Thought Questionnaire, which assesses representational biases on the basis of cognitive structures; and chapter 6 uses this questionnaire to relate the structures to personality.

Part two takes up affective issues specific to particular modes of thought. Chapter 7 looks at evaluative aspects of the hierarchical organization of inner speech; chapter 8 explores the affective consequences of an important visual structure – the relationship between object and environment; and chapter 9 examines the strong emotions important in enactive imagery.

Part three returns to general issues and attempts to integrate the findings. It consists of two chapters. Chapter 10 reviews what has been discovered of the relationships between thought and feeling in the three forms of representation, and makes some suggestions about how they can be accommodated within a unified theory. The final chapter considers the three forms of representation as integrated aspects of a single cognitive system. It looks at the accounts of reality given by the three modes of thought, and at how science equilibrates them against each other.

2

Preliminary sketches of the three modes of thought

Speech, vision and action are the three main ways human beings have of interacting with, making sense of, and contributing to their world. Verbal, visual and enactive modes of thought are their internalized versions.

All three forms of representation have been proposed, at one time or another, as the main bearer of meaning, though it is only for language that there exists any detailed account of semantic structure. Within visual imagery there are heated debates about structure; and for enactive imagery there is no coherent body of work at all. It may be that action, as the foundation of all later cognitive development, is buried deepest and is the most difficult to articulate.

This chapter reviews some of the general characteristics of the three forms of representation, focusing where possible on two kinds of properties: the affective aspects of the representations, which usually emerge in the context of psychotherapeutic work; and the structural features, which will be important later in elaborating the notion of cognitive style. Though some work has been done on comparing the three forms of thought, it is convenient at this stage to consider each mode of representation separately.

Inner speech

Intuition suggests that inner speech is quieter and often less polite than outer speech, but is fundamentally the same sort of thing. Internalized verbal representation is derived from external language, and thus shares many of the same properties. For example, inner speech, like the external form, can be seen as having a linear and sequential organization, which makes it useful for coding information organized in the same way (Paivio and Csapo, 1969). It is also seen as being conceptual and abstract in nature: internal words, like external ones, refer to general classes of objects and events, and can be useful for remembering abstract information (Paivio and Foth, 1970).

The internalization of speech occurs at about school age. A transitional stage is egocentric speech, where children talk out loud, but to themselves rather than to anyone else (Piaget, 1959). It is a short step from talking to oneself outside the head to talking to oneself inside it.

Inner speech has an important self-directive function (Luria, 1961), in that people use it to tell themselves what they ought to do. Children also do this out loud. Adults only do it out loud if there is no one else listening, or if they are thinking about something very difficult.

Adults may also talk to themselves in negative and non-coping ways. Hollon and Kendall’s work (1980) indicates that many depressed people tell themselves such things as, ‘I feel like I’m up against the world’, ‘I’m no g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 The three forms of representation
• Part 2 Particular evaluative issues
• Part 3 Integrations
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index of names
• Index of subjects