Chapter 8 Emotion Postscript
Greetings all,
As you think about Chapter 8 on Emotion
and how distinctly emotion is tied to our psychological lives, I want to
share a couple of brief videos that can hopefully drive home the point
that we are emotional beings.
This is just a recent Toyota commercial
but notice that in a mere 30 seconds the commercial captures emotional
themes that resonate and likely, produce emotions in you. And this is
while they're trying to sell you something.
The emotional power of images and voices and music all brought together in 30 seconds.
This is a short clip from the animated movie Wall-E. Watch the clip.
And now begin to ask yourself why you
see the robots as possessing eyes or faces. There is no good reason to
think they have (human) eyes or faces, let alone, anger or concern on
those "faces."
Yet we do. Why?
Some psychologists in the Evolutionary
approach will tell you that evolution has hard-wired facial and emotion
detection software into our species. Detecting eyes and emotion has
helped our species survive and reproduce. And if some robots like Wall-E
and Eve, trip our facial/emotion detection software, we'll recognize
their eyes and emotions.
Now watch the clip again and ask why you see Wall-E, who doesn't really have a "head" to speak of, possesses eyes.
