Agent Plus Environment

Not your everyday summer job

This summer, I’ve been working for NASA as an intern in the Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars Program. In a one-sentence summary, I’m working with a systems engineering team to develop and integrate the software and hardware needed for both indoor and outdoor tests of autonomous, unmanned multi-vehicle flight control.

But what does that mean, in terms of what I actually do?

It means the past seven weeks have been spent laboring over keyboards, switching between C, C++, Java, and Processing. I’ve carried my lab’s miniature Parking Lot Exploration Rover outside in 105ºF weather to test a navigation algorithm. I’ve learned about PID controls, GPS sensors, and radio communication. I’ve evaluated ground control station software, delved into the depths of an open source flight simulator, and discovered how tricky network protocols can be. I’ve written software for 3D data display programs, data parsers, and communication links. I’ve learned that when you’re one of a team of ten interns, all tackling pieces of the same large project, communication is crucial.

I’m enjoying this internship immensely. Vassar News just released an ego-boosting article about me and my summer, which I suggest you check out.

You’ll be hearing more from me on this subject. Stay tuned.

Emotional intensity and the individual

Let’s say you’re at home. Maybe you’re lounging indolently on the couch, feet up on the brown wood coffee table, television whining at you from across the room. Maybe you’re cooking tonight’s dinner, chopping vegetables with careful strokes, sliding the ever growing pile of peppers and onions and tomatoes into a hissing frying pan. Maybe not. Maybe you’re in another room when the fire alarm sounds, bleep bleep bleep, blaring its cacophonous melody into your generally peaceful home.

How do you react?

Do you scream? Do you calmly turn off the stove, flap a towel at the cloudy air around the smoke detector, and wait patiently for it to detect that there’s not actually a fire? Do you leap up from the couch, tripping over the coffee table in your panic, terrified of burning to death in your own living room?

The strength of your emotional response to this (or any) emotional stimulus is known as emotional intensity. Emotional intensity can be measured with psychological scales, such as the aptly-named Emotional Intensity Scale (EIS) developed by Bachorowski & Braaten (1994) [PDF]. The underlying if obvious assumptions of these scales are that some individuals experience all of their emotions more intensely than other individuals, and all individuals may respond with different strengths to the same stimuli.

Your personality influences your experience of emotions

You may already be familiar with the Big 5 personality factors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (sometimes called Emotional Stability). (If not, look them up.) Robert McFatter, in his 1998 paper Emotional Intensity: Some components and their relations to extraversion and neuroticism [PDF], investigated the relation between temperament and the intensity of positive and negative emotions. (Positive emotions included happiness and pleasure; negative emotions included worry, guilt, anger, and sadness.) McFatter described and tested several models, all of which had slightly different predictions about how neuroticism, extraversion, and positive and negative emotional intensity are correlated.

1. Larsen & Ketelaar model: The measures used to examine emotional intensity in this model tapped frequency of experienced emotions more than the intensity of single (and possibly infrequent) reactions. The model predicts that Extraversion is positively related to positive intensity and unrelated to negative intensity, and that Neuroticism is unrelated to positive intensity and positively related to negative intensity.
2. Larsen & Diener model: This model draws on the theory that the intensity of experienced emotions is used to regulate arousal levels. Arousal level can be tied to Extraversion, so this model predicts that Extraversion is positively related to both positive and negative intensity. Larsen & Diener also predict that Neuroticism is similarly positively correlated with positive and negative intensity.
3. Wallace, Bachorowski, & Newman (WBN) model: Extraversion is suggested to reflect a behavioral approach system and a behavioral inhibition system. Neuroticism is suggested to reflect the reactivity of an arousal system responding to the behavioral approach/inhibition systems that serves to prepare the individual to respond. This model accordingly predicts that Extraversion is positively related to positive intensity and negative related to negative intensity (and thus that Extraversion is overall uncorrelated with overall emotional intensity), and that Neuroticism is positively related to both positive and negative intensity.
4. Gray’s model: This model predicts that the behavioral approach/inhibition systems form dimensions that are rotated roughly thirty degrees from the Extroversion and Neuroticism dimensions, so they don’t line up. The model predicts that Extraversion is positively related to positive intensity but only weakly negatively related to negative intensity. Similarly, Neuroticism is predicted to be weakly positively related to positive intensity, and positively related to negative intensity. Gray’s model, furthermore, suggests that the negative emotions can be subdivided into anger/panic and anxiety/fear categories. These subcategories may have different relations to Extraversion.

Methods, Correlations, Analyses, Results

To test these models, McFatter gave a series of questionnaires to 1553 college students taking introductory psychology classes (596 male). Participants completed the 30-item EIS to examine positive and negative emotional intensity (14 items and 16 items, respectively), the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) for measuring Extraversion and Neuroticism (in addition to subscales for impulsivity and sociability), and a third unrelated questionnaire.

Based on an initial factor analysis of the EIS, negative intensity was separated into two groups: anger/frustration (hereafter referred to as “anger intensity”) and non-anger, such as worry, guilt, and sadness (referred to as “non-anger intensity”). This result supports Gray’s theory that two separate negative emotion systems exist.

Consistent with both Gray’s model and the WBN model, Extraversion was shown to be positively related to positive emotional intensity (r=0.19, P<0.0001), negatively related to non-anger emotional intensity (r=0.18, p<0.0001), and unrelated to anger intensity (r=0.02). In plainer terms, individuals with high Extroversion scores tended to experience more intense positive emotions and less intense negative emotions.

Neuroticism, on the other hand, was shown to be positively related to all three kinds of emotional intensity, though less strongly to positive intensity (r=0.18, p<0.0001) than to non-anger or anger intensity (r=0.56,p<0.0001 and r=0.45,p<0.0001, respectively). That is to say, individuals with high Neuroticism scores tended to report experiencing more intense emotions overall. This is consistent with Gray's model.

A couple other interesting results:

Females reported significantly higher emotional intensity than males overall, with the largest difference seen in negative intensity (0.411, p<0.0001).

The positive relation between Extraversion and emotional intensity was stronger among people with a high Neuroticism score.

Neuroticism and emotional intensity

It’s hard to tell without reading a pile of psychology papers, but the fact that Neuroticism was positively related to positive emotional intensity was surprising. Previous results found a negative relation, though several of these had measured emotional intensity with a different scale–one that seemed to confound frequency and intensity of the experienced emotions. The WBN model, relatedly, claimed that Neuroticism reflected general emotional reactivity. (Recall the personality factor’s other name: Emotional Stability.) So McFatter investigated.

He found that when looking at the difference of the positive intensity and negative intensity scores, the relative emotional intensity was negatively related to Neuroticism, as in those previous studies. However, when examined on their own with the other variables controlled, the relations of both positive and negative intensity to Neuroticism were positive. The WBN model only explained a portion of the story.

McFatter’s results, overall, support Gray’s model and the WBN model, suggesting that the variations in positive and negative emotional intensity may be the result of separate emotion systems, but that they do have some common variation that may best be explained by their relations to Neuroticism.

References:
McFatter, R. (1998). Emotional Intensity: Some components and their relations to extraversion and neuroticism. Person. individ. Diff., 24(6): 747-758. [PDF]

I said I’d return to discuss a sutra that Khenpo Kalsang translated during the Tibetan monastery retreat I attended. Here’s the scoop:

The self is a delusion

Khenpo Kalsang translated a sutra called Advice to a king for the group of us who were staying at the monastery. The sutra told the story of a king who encountered the Buddha and wished to kill him. The Buddha asked the king, “Conflict and fighting and killing cause exhaustion and suffering in this life. Why would you enjoy this?” The king, considering this, responded that he enjoyed fighting because he always conquered his enemies. The Buddha said, “Great king, these are very minor enemies–insignificant! There are much greater enemies that you should fight.” He explained that the greatest enemy was not another man, or another country, but the clinging of self. He explained how one could fight this enemy with the six perfections and with selflessness. The king is convinced, and instead of killing the Buddha, becomes devoted to him.

The clinging of self, or self-cherishing, is one of the defilements. This means it is a cause of suffering (recall that if you manage to become free from suffering and the causes of suffering, you’ll eventually reach nirvana). Simply put, one develops an attachment to the five aggregates (body, mind, feeling, perceptions, activities), and one fears losing the parts of the self through death, illness, hunger, cold, and so on. This is a problem. The way to triumph over self-clinging is to realize that the self, the “I,” does not exist in reality.

The gist of the argument presented in this sutra is this: the self is a delusion because it is a construct based on the aggregates. We have names: names are labels, and so the name is not a self. The body is also not the self, because the flesh and blood are just like the walls of a house: that is, a combination of elements that are, if you break them down enough, no different than the elements that make up the walls of a house. The mind is not the self, because it has no matter form. Because self-clinging is based on these three things (name, body, mind), through this analysis, the personal self cannot be found. It’s a delusion.

Something is missing here. Simply being unable to pinpoint the exact location of the self doesn’t mean it’s entirely a delusion. I’d agree, based on other readings, that there is no one physical thing responsible for the sensation of selfhood. There is no single structure in the brain that we can point to and say this is where “I” am. This is the where consciousness happens. But that’s all the argument can say: that no one thing is responsible. The self could just be an amalgamation of things: the body, the mind, the interactions of these with the world. The five aggregates that compose a person. The agent and the environment. The self could just be the name we give this combination of things.

Other sutras and other pieces of the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy may better explain this delusion. But even if they do, I may still just fundamentally disagree with pieces of the philosophy. (E.g., that dualistic bit about the mind having no matter form.)

The take away message may be this: Whether or not the self is a delusion depends on your definition of “self.” Go figure.

We’re in the dark

Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background (radiation leftover from the universe’s early hot and dense state) support the hypothesis that dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of everything in existence.

But what’s the matter?

Isn’t it fascinating and mind-boggling that we have almost no idea what the majority of the stuff in our universe is? There are dark matter and dark energy are not rather than explain what these mysterious stuffs are. E.g., dark matter is not just dark clouds of normal matter (called baryonic matter); it is not antimatter; it is not huge black holes. But it is 25% of the universe.

Current research on dark energy hasn’t faired better: Is it a property of space, as suggested by Einstein’s cosmological constant? Perhaps it’s a result of the quantum mechanics of space; maybe it’s a new kind of energy field. It’s also possible that Einstein was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time a seemingly brilliant solution, explaining everything known at the time, was later replaced. Think “ether.” Think “animal spirits.” Think “caloric fluid.” That said, there’s nothing better to replace it yet. At least this time we’re acknowledging the fact that the names “dark energy” and “dark matter” refer to stuff we don’t yet understand.

The quest goes on

The Joint Dark Energy Mission, a space probe designed to study dark energy, has been in the works for a while now. The mission is currently in a tight spot as NASA, the Department of Energy, and the European Space Agency tussle over who’s in charge of which parts of the probe and who’s paying for what. Don’t you love international politics? A lot of people, such as the folks at the Cosmic Variance blog are up in arms about the disagreements–can’t we all just get along and do science?