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.

It’s raining.

Fat, corpulent water globules cascade from the sky. Plop, plop. A drop, and a few of its compatriots, dribble down the inside of your collar. They’re cold. Wet, and unpleasant. The drops slither down your neck.

“Take my cloak,” he [Lord Golden] suggested.

“It would only get as wet as the rest of me. I’ll change into dry things when I get back.” [Fitz]

He didn’t tell me to be careful, but it was in his look. I nodded to it, steeled myself, and walked out into the pouring rain. It was every bit as cold and unpleasant as I expected it to be. I stood, eyes squinted and shoulders hunched to it, peering out through the gray downpour. Then I took a breath and resolutely changed my expectations. As Black Rolf had once shown me, much discomfort was based on human expectations. As a man, I expected to be warm and dry when I chose to be. Animals did not harbor any such beliefs. So it was raining. That part of me that was wolf could accept that. Rain meant being cold and wet. Once I acknowledged that and stopped comparing it to what I wished it to be, the conditions were far more tolerable. I set out.

— Fool’s Errand, Robin Hobb

Keep it in perspective

Keep what in perspective? Well, everything, but particularly the bad things, the frustrating things, and the irritating things. So it’s raining. So you cut your finger slicing potatoes. So it’s ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit and humid. You are in some set of circumstances and you wish to be in some other set of circumstances. You wish to be dry. You wish your finger didn’t hurt. You wish to be cool and comfortable without drops of sweat sliding down your neck.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where wishes change the world’s physical properties. We have limited control over our environments. We have slightly more control over our reactions to our environments.

“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes that see reality.” —Nikos Kazantzakis

What you expect significantly influences how you will perceive your circumstances. The thing is, a lot of times, we don’t explicitly set out our expectations. You leave the air-conditioned building with the continued implicit expectation that you’ll be cool and comfortable, and when that blast of muggy, sticky air hits you, it hits you twice as hard because you’re expecting something else.

What can you do about this? Try explicitly setting up your expectations. It may help prevent the disappointment of being wrong (and feeling unpleasant). Instead of thinking “Aaugh, I’m getting wet and the rain is cold, why can’t I be warm and dry?” try thinking “Okay, I’m going out in the rain so I’ll be wet and cold. That’s just how rain is.” Keep in mind that this works both ways–sure, you can set yourself up to expect to feel better about your circumstances, but you can also easily set yourself up to expect to feel worse.

As a final note, I’m sharing to a quote I occasionally turn to as a reminder to keep things in perspective, from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (on the subject of pop music):

“Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?”

Are you miserable because of your circumstances, or are your circumstances miserable because of your misery?

Words are still great.

Having devoured the remainder of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and started on The Scar, I thought I ought to share my continued collection of wordly wonders. (Don’t forget to check out the first half of the list!) Some novel, some familiar but infrequently encountered and marvelous, and all commendable to have in one’s vernacular.

• palimpsest
• bonhomie
• jurisprudence
• desquamate
• abbatoir
• ululate
• prurient
• efflorescence
• phalanx
• salvo
• etiolate
• scurrilous
• conniption
• rictus
• ordure
• priapic
• agglutination
• ossified
• puissance
• stygian
• protuberant
• obstreperously
• pudenda
• phlogistic
• opprobrium
• aggrandizement
• tinnitus

Oh, and I have to ask: Do you have any favored words–unusual, rare, or just plain fun to say? I’d like to discover more!

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]

Habits are hard to break

Right now, I have no blue bin in which to pile my cardboard, glass bottles, and tin cans. Checkout clerks look puzzled when I say, “I brought my own bags.” My apartment complex advertises its own convenient trash compactor.

It wasn’t until I was faced with a lack of “Be Green!” signs and a deficiency of bins for recyclables inseparably paired with every trash can in sight that I realized just how ingrained in me this behavior is. Yes, that’s right, I am trained to recycle.

I’m okay with that. I like recycling. It leads me to wonder, though, what other behaviors I’ve picked up without consciously deciding to do so–I’m sure there are plenty of them. Which won’t I notice until some outside event disrupts my pattern of behavior? Which habits are good habits; which exist as conventions simply because nobody has bothered to change them?

Regardless, I’ll take my five-cent discount for each reusable shopping bag, thanks.

Words are great.

The vocabulary I habitually utilize hardly taps the well of words available in the English language. This isn’t news: most people fail to employ the full range of lexical jewels stashed in their thesauruses. As such, I’m delighted to announce that the book I’m reading now is full of fantastic words.

I’m reading Perdido Street Station. No lie: The man who wrote this book, China Miéville, has a lexicon just as prodigious as the world he paints. Here are a few novel and infrequently seen words I’ve espied thus far:

• detumescing
• veldt
• sciolist
• eidolon
• vertiginous
• aesthete
• bombastic
• moribund
• inveigled
• oneiric
• febrile
• necrotic
• pusillanimous
• bivouac
• chthonic
• dissident
• querulous
• inchoate
• paean
• patina
• desiccate
• moniker
• nacre
• solipsistic
• autotelic
• liminal
• deracinate
• sepulchral

Aren’t these splendid? I didn’t start taking notes on words until a hundred pages in, and I’ve got several hundred pages to go. Just think what wordly wonders I may encounter next!

I read a lot (when I have time). On Monday and Tuesday, I consumed Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. Yesterday, I started K. J. Parker’s Devices and Desires. Tomorrow… well, I keep this lengthy list of books I want to read. I also keep a list of books I’ve already read (it comes in handy when people ask me for recommendations, or, as was the case nearly four years ago, when a college application asks me to provide a list of all the books I’ve read in the past year). Add these lists together: The result is a page full of great books.

Next time you’re perusing the shelves, stumped on which pages to turn next, look at a few of my favorites. Maybe you’ll be inspired! I’ll update the list periodically, so be sure to check back!