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True Learning Makes One Vulnerable to the Intoxication of Love
Its home is located in the inner World of thought and experience. For its essence, nothing is more quintessentially psychological; an unequivocally subjective phenomenon is not present at birth, but arises out of social experience and interaction. The self-concept is formed within institutional systems, such as the family, school, economy, church, and is constructed from the materials of the culture; and it is affected by immediate social and environmental contexts. In other words, the self-concept achieves its particular shape and form in the matrix of a given culture, social structure, and institutional system. Although the individual’s view of oneself may be internal, what one sees and feels when one things of oneself is largely the product of social life. Therefore, choose to focus your time, energy and conversation around people who inspire, support, and help you to grow and become happy, strong, and wise. The self-concept exercises an important influence on behavior in various social realms. Since the self-concept is acted upon and, in turn, acts upon society, it is relevant to view it as a social product and a social force. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Self-concept is an enduring feature of personality, or more precisely, a stable set of enduring features of personality and a meaning attached to the self as object. While the individual self-esteem may vary from situation to situation, nevertheless there is a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us carries about with one, and which is independent of the objective reasons we have for satisfaction or discontent. At the same time, the individual has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups or persons about whose opinion one cares. One generally shows a different side of oneself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before one’s parents and teachers, may swear and swagger like a pirate among one’s tough young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our superiors and employers as to our intimate friends. Beliefs and attitudes about human relationships formulated in laboratories are the very same ones now commonly adopted in our society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
The foundation of many modern beliefs about human emotions, human relationships, and aliments can be directly traced back to ideas formulated in animal laboratories at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, a significant number of people now seem quite willing to accept the idea that there is a connection between stress, anxiety, and physical ailments. Mass media advertising, especially those commercials marketing a wide range of anti-anxiety or analgesic agents, are but one of many sources that serve to make everyone conscious of this idea. Growing numbers of people, for example, now accept the idea that emotional stress might predispose them to develop heart problems. Yet, at the same time, far fewer seem ready to accept the possibility that the lack of human companionship could do the same thing. In the context of human aliments, stress and anxiety are now generally accepted as bad for one’s health, while human companionship is still generally viewed as irrelevant. These are not distinctions that are consciously taught or even thought about a great deal; rather, they are attitudes deeply embedded in our society. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Sole social reality is interaction. People’s behavior in such interaction is not the result of environmental pressures, stimuli, motives, attitudes, and ideas define the self, define the other, guide one’s own actions by taking the role of the other, and constantly adjust and align those actions with those of the other (as the other person does with regard to oneself). Actual interaction, then, requires an awareness and control of self, an adjustment to the self of the other, and a dynamic and shifting process that cannot be understood by reference to persistent and stable features of personality. Many people are also conditioned to think that sex, drugs, drinking alcoholic beverages, and saying curse words is part of normal development, but it is not necessarily. If one cannot explain social behavior by reference to the stable features of personality, no more can one explain it by reference to the stable features of society. Social system, social structure, culture, social function, and so forth cannot provide an explanation of human behavior. If we went back to teaching children virtue, as a society, then may the youth would not engage in these bad behaviors. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Genuine understanding can only come from comprehending the individuals interpretation of objects, situations, or the actions of others. Does this mean that each interaction is unique and idiosyncratic, there by negating the possibility of generalization? By no means, since it may be possible to discover certain common or general processes that recur in diverse situations. A number of social psychologists have elucidated the nature of such processes. Contrary to implicit social structural assumptions, roles are made rather than played; the individual does not simply follow a role script, but instead, actively defines and interprets one’s situation in response to situational dynamics. Humans adopt rich, vivid, and implicit rules and strategies when interacting with others. Whenever one enters a situation, one takes a line, presenting oneself as a certain type of person. A convincing performance may require certain props, costumes, and setting; some involve solo performances, others term work; some actions go on front stage, others back stage; verbal, facial, and postural behavior are expressed or repressed; and so on. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Social interaction is a matter of self-presentation or impression management. A number of other general social processes have also been shown to characterize interaction: altercasting, negotiation, and the application of various vocabularies of motive, including disclaimers, accounts, that is, excuses and justifications, and techniques of neutralization. True learning makes one vulnerable to the intoxication of love; when one is in love one is learning; the two conditions cannot be separated. The love between teacher and learner is directed not toward possessing each other, but toward caring for the World. It is precisely here that teaching becomes an art, the art of enlarging love to encompass the soul of the World. “We do not belong to the night, nor the darkness. We are children of the light. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. However, since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled, putting on faith and love as a shield, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation (1 Thessalonians 5.4-9).” #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Growth and Development of the Green Grass
Give careful thought to your ways. Although the emotion of love is one of the strongest of which the mind is capable, it can hardly be said to have any proper or peculiar name of expression. The boundaries of a sentiment vary in their permeability by public observation and involvement in one’s feeling. Sentiments expressed in a public or community setting become conventionalized as the individual makes social comparisons about the sentiment’s quality and intensity. Private feeling, secret and isolated from social involvement, is less manageable and loses social significance for lack of validation by others. For example, medieval customs required mourners to show sorrow for a fixed period of time. Public ceremonies tamed grief, shielding mourners from extreme or prolonged sorrow. With privatization of grief, however, the sentiment became idiosyncratic, often insurmountable as the mourner languished persistently. For 350 years medical science ignored relationships between emotions and physical illness because science ignore the study of emotions (since emotions were a reflection of the human soul) and instead focused exclusively on the physical cause of aliments. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
Expression is part and parcel of the feeling. It is believed to be a general law of the mind that along with the fact that inward feeling or consciousness, there is a diffusive action or excitement over the bodily members. A very considerable number of the facts may be brought under the principle. States of pleasure are connected with an increase, and the states of pain with an abatement, of some, or all, of the vital function. Ideas about physical health have been rigidly fixed. Germs are seen as being outside and they somehow get inside the body, leading people to believe that they were the passive victims of external forces in nature. It was widely held that human behavior did not cause disease; rather, humans were victimized by it. In some primitive cultures, even today, people assume that spirits control all their behavior and they have little choice in their own destiny, because it is controlled by good and evil spirits and by fate. Once you were stricken by these foreign invaders, the only logical course of action was to go to a physician and be purged of your illness. Until the late nineteenth century, most people did not believe that they were responsible for their own physical health, a belief that has lingered on into the late twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
Even today, many people still resist the idea that there is a connection between their overeating, their lack of exercise, their smoking, or their loneliness and their health. They still believe that human disease is caused by germs out there and that nothing they do matters. Very similar beliefs about mental disease dominated the nineteenth century thinking. Mental illness was thought to be caused by something foreign to the human body. Since it was a mental problem, it had to involve the human soul, and so the source of these problems was attributed to an invasion of evil spirits or possession by dark emotions. Since the mind was a reflection of the human soul, mental disturbance could only be caused by agents which troubled the soul, namely dark emotions. The attitude toward human emotions followed precisely the same line of thought. Emotions were viewed as a quality of the human soul; they were nonmaterial, and therefore had little to do with physical disease. Like mental disorders, emotional disorders were viewed as an indication of a disturbed soul and show how caused by evil spirits or dark emotions. If a person was emotionally upset, then he or she prayed for spiritual guidance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Feeling management through public rituals allows the discharge of traumatic emotions. In some cultures, is in considered normal for hostile sentiments to be expressed publicly, like a short of live theater play, in noisy but mostly harmless encounters in which antagonists play to their audience, who intervene if a fight becomes too serious. These exaggerated dramas make hostility appear so intense as to be avoided when possible, and provide support for folk beliefs, such as a particular group of people are terrible when they fight. However, as you may know, anger, grief, fear, and embarrassment are unavoidable experiences in social life, but often cannot be discharged or resolved immediately because social controls. Rituals provide a dramatic frame that restimulates distressful emotion but also gives the person a sense of control or distance from the feeling, so that it may be discharged through catharsis. Most modern rituals are insufficiently involving emotion, however, and participants are overdistanced from their distress. An emotional emptiness has developed from a poverty of identifying rituals. Rituals have become and impersonal because we lack agreement on symbols as collective reference points. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
We only have shallow feelings for romantic love, religious reverence, and esthetic sentiments. Because we do not sense that others share the same feeling and meaning. Emotions are serviceable habits and are expressed in a manner designed to effectively communicate to others what is being felt inside. Emotional expression serves definite purposes: they mobilize people into some definite course of actions, and/or they communicate a specific message to other people which leads them to behave in a certain fashion. The emotion of love is an exception to all the general rules—it is the strongest of all emotions, and yet it is the only one that has no peculiar means of expression. And, as you may know, emotions can significantly affect our physical and mental well-being. It is not betwixing that men and women, beset by emotional stresses, turn and go to faith healers and to others who recognize the reality of these unsettling states. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in cries, in efforts to hide or escape, in palpitations and trembling and these are just the manifestations that would accompany an actual experience of the evil feared. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
The destructive passions are shown in a general tension of the muscular system, in gnashing of the teeth, beating on the chest like a bongo, clapping of the hands, and protrusion of the claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils in growls; and these are weaker forms of the actions that accompany killing of prey. The general law is that feeling passing a certain pitch, habitually vents itself in bodily action, and an overflow of nerve-force undirected by any motive, will manifestly take first the most habitual routes. If these emotions are to expressed and resolved, they start affecting the internal system. I grew up in a small farming town where water is the lifeblood of the community, and 30 percent of our water came from the snow melt, which was declining. The people in our society are constantly watching, worrying, and praying over the rain, irrigation rights, and water in general. People in our community are so preoccupied with the rain because it is a matter of survival. Under the stress and strain of our climate, sometime people were not always at their best. The city council, mayor and governor squabble over people who water their lawns, and they turned to the television news media to request that people report and confront their neighbors over water waste. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
Sentiments are not differentiated through innate bodily patterning, but through interpretation of feeling according to cultural vocabularies of labels and meanings. It was innocent enough at first, but over the years people started targeting people with green lawns and would quarrel over water. Two mean who lived in our community who I will call Sam and Dean had a disagreement over water, and the two men allowed their disagreement to turn into resentment and then arguments—even to the point of threats. One August morning both men felt they were short of water and that it was being stolen. Angry words were exchanged; a scuffle ensured. Dean was a great man with a lot of strength, and Sam was equally yoked and tenacious. In the heat of the moment, the men had a fist fight. The next morning, Sam called the city out to issue Dean a fine for wasting water. However, Dean was economically challenged and because the fines kept adding it, his water was shut off. These two neighbors and best friends had fallen captive to their anger and let it destroy their lives. We should learn to resolve our differences early on, lest the passions of them moment escalate into physical or emotional cruelty, and we fall captive to our anger. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The social processes that create and shape love, hatred, envy, and other sentiments only enhance the richness and meaning of life. Make full haste to reduce arguments, eliminate ridicule, do away with criticism, and remove resentment and anger. We cannot afford to let such dangerous passions ruminate—not even one day. The lack of human companionship, the sudden loss of love, and chronic human loneliness are significant contributions to serious diseases (including cardiovascular disease) and premature death. The Savior asks us to forsake and combat evil in all its forms, and although we must forgive a neighbor who injures us, we should still work constructively to prevent that injury from being repeated. Forgiveness does not require us to accept or tolerate evil. It does not require us to ignore the wrong that we see in the World around us or in our own lives. However, as we abstain from sin, we must not allow hatred or anger to control our thoughts nor actions. Good human contact can alter and even eliminate the usual cardiac responses to fear and physical pain, and it can significantly influence the human ability to resist infectious diseases. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Forgiveness means that problems of the past no longer dictate our destinies, and we can focus on the future with God’s love in our hearts. “I will give you honor and praise among all the peoples of the Earth, when I restore your fortunes, before your eyes,” says the Lord (Zephaniah 3.20). May the seeds of unforgiveness that haunted my neighbors never be allowed to take root in our homes. May we pray to our Heavenly Father to help us overcome foolish id, resentment, and pettiness. May God help us to forgive and love, so that we may be friends with our Savior, others, and ourselves. All knowing, God grieves even at the mere thought of evil. Dear Lord, we are sorry that we have been naughty and disobeyed. Please forgive us for disobeying and help us to listen to your commandments. Thank you for loving us and removing our sins that weigh heavily on our conscience. There is more righteousness in the World and thank you for your compassion, grace, and everlasting life. And please grant from your divine mysteries all your mercies. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
I Have Been Struck by the Way that Most People Finally Say Good-Bye!
The final good-bye does not involve words, almost as if words lone are insufficient to communicate their true feelings. The ideas that people gather over time about what a couple is supposed to be like is derived from overt messages and less direct influences from their family, neighborhood, school, ethnic community, racial, religious, and class identity. Management of feeling and expression enhances the functioning of groups by allowing continuity of action, building solidarity among members, and indicating status differences. Expressive control allows collective action to continue without the situation becoming redefined as the interrupted action or novelty that emotional arousal implies. To further highlight this illustration, expressive control suppresses the potential embarrassment in intimate examinations by a medical professional. Nonemotional voice tines and other nonintimate gestures suppress stress, giving the interaction a routine, technical meaning. A similar display rule in public settings shields onlookers from intimate gestures that would disrupt civil comportment. Kissing, fondling, and other gestures between lovers are normally prohibited in public settings. Intimate expressions remind onlookers that they are being excluded from a desirable relationship. Violators of this display rule are usually the young, tourists, and others who disregard public sensitivity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
The most simple and direct type of human communication does not need words. Let us awaken tomorrow with all our zest and seal by embracing and creating life. Sentiment management can build group solidarity. The disruptive effects of envy are controlled universally by belief systems that proscribe envy, and by norms that diminish conditions for envy. These norms require that enviable goods be concealed from observation, that people show humility over good fortune, and that enviable objects or events be shared symbolically or materially. Solidarity can also be enhanced by evocation of humor. Laughter and humor among hospital patents has been observed to be invitations to decrease social distance, emphasizing shared experiences and common definitions of the situation. The liberating effect of joined laughter consists in the consensus that it brings about in a brief span of time. As soon as humans discovered the existence and function of the heart, they recognized that it was influenced by human companionship and love. Most of us have, at one time or another, felt our hearts beating rapidly when we are close to those we love or, occasionally, when we have been offended by others. Many of us have felt our heart sink, as if pressed by some crushing weight, after the loss of loved ones. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
The psychological impact of suddenly finding oneself a patient in a hospital can be devastating. Lying in bed with needles in one’s arms, tubes in one’s chest recording every heartbeat on a television screen, being forces to use a bedpan, threatened with imminent death, rendered totally helpless and dependent on others—the experience is shattering. As his heart blips ominously on a television screen next to his bed, a patient’s life is reduced to a few essentials. What does it all mean? Is he going to die? Would he have done anything differently? The World of the patient’s wife or children or loved ones is also reduced to a few stark essentials, for the man or woman they visit in such a unit may not be alive the next time they come back. What do you say in such circumstances—what can you sat to help—what is important to communicate? The very existence of units that house people faced with the imminent possibility of death helps outline in stark simplicity certain elementary facts about life. One of those is our basic need to communicate. We ought always to thank God for you, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you, and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. Assumptions are ideas which one holds to be true without any proof that they are true—things that are taken for granted. Some people are more gifted at living than others. They do have an effect on those around them, but the process stops there because there is no way of describing in technical terms just what it is they do. Expression management is a continual affirmation of a group’s structure of status and deference. We may claim statuses by displaying affective coolness when greater involvement would ordinarily be expected. Some male groups admire men who can attract and conquer a beautiful woman without becoming involved, or who can engage in homosexual prostitution while displaying affective detachment. Business managers are expected to control their emotional reactions, in contrast to ordinary workers who are not believed to be able to do so. The value of humanistic psychology is not limited to the mentally unwell. Its techniques can be useful in your life, but they should not be used to manipulate other people. Psychology can be most useful in helping you to become more fully human. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
High status includes the power to elicit beneficial and optimistic gestures from subordinates and to inhibit their hostile expressions. Smiling and laughter are usually offered upward in statues hierarchies, ostensibly indicating pleasant, egalitarian relations and concealing status differences temporarily when the later have invited a decrease in social distance. In traditional Far Eastern cultures, a subordinate is expected to conceal anger or sulk when criticized, and to mask these feelings by showing pleasure at being corrected. In contemporary New World societies, women are more likely than men to smile, even when angered or frustrated. Women’s initial facial expression of anger is masked or covered up instantly. Groups manage sentiments through the kinds of information they allow to enter open awareness. Growing numbers of physicians now recognize that the health of the human heart depends not only on such factors as genetics, diet, and exercise, but also to a large extent on the social and emotional healthy of the individual. A fully human person values human beings above material goods, and feels strongly that human rights are far more important than material rights. These also recognize they have a capacity for enjoyment and pleasure, and they try to be real and open in their relationships with others. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
People who are fully human are willing to risk another person’s reaction to his or her open expression of feelings. They use openness and authenticity, not to manipulate or control, but to share knowledge of oneself with others. Hatred is sustained by emphasizing an enemy’s perceived negative qualities, overlooking or explaining away anything favorable, and then directing hatred toward this contrast conception. Love between parents and their grown children may be strengthened by limited contact that allows earlier conflicts to be forgotten. Generational gaps in attitudes and behavior are accentuated by accurate knowledge about each other, weakening love bonds. Selective recall is sometimes a conscious feeling-management technique. College men reported control over jealousy by prohibiting any mention of their girlfriends’ previous lovers. The couple jointly censured anyone who indiscreetly disclosed information about the woman’s earlier relationships. Sentiments are managed by sensitivity and avoidance within the social framework of memory. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you to, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders so that you will not be dependent on anybody (1 Thessalonians 4.11).” #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
When faces with danger or the threat of danger, human beings can derive an enormous sense of comfort from their fellow humans. Whether the danger is artificially contrived in a laboratory or part of the infinite variety of real life stresses, human beings instinctively seek out each other’s company in adverse circumstances. In all our distress and persecution, we are encouraged about you because of your faith. For now, we really live, since you are standing firm in the Lord. How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we have in the presence of our God because of you? Night and day, we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith. Now may our God and Father himself clear the way for us to come to you. May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and virtuous in the presence of our God and Father. When someone’s life is in mortal peril, the medical effectiveness of proper care is well documented. Incidence of sudden death dropped by 56 percent in hospitals that are trained to properly treat a person’s symptoms and offer emotional support. Also, it is clear that the heart of human relationships and human love ultimately moves belong anything that can be objectively described or measured. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
Keeping His Covenant to Love a Thousand Generations
We evoke, suppress, and transform our sentiments. It reminds me of that song by 24hrs called What You Like. “I would not mind if you stay the night. Send your first and last name for the flight. Don’t confuse me with all the hype. I’m your type, I know what you like. On the Instagram I see all the likes.” Instagram is a social media site where people post pictures on like a rotisserie, and as you move along the rotisserie of pictures, you can scroll past or like them. If you are not readily curious about other people, be patient with yourself. There are powerful reasons why you have not been able to protect and develop your natural capacity for curiosity. As we become more aware of ourselves as individual, in noncouple relationships, this allows us to develop awareness about ourselves in how we connect with friends, family, children, parents, siblings, coworkers, and others and this is an important part of learning who we are successfully. Be just and walk uprightly before God; and observe to do good continually, keep the commandments of the Lord our God. God never made a promise that was too good to be true. Know that God is faithful, keeping his covenant to love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
Expression management is the intentional display of gestures that differ from inner feeling. Feeling management modifies the cognitive and somatic experience of a sentiment. Both types of affective control are guided by normative and strategic considerations in social relationships. For example, a wife may believe that she no longer loves her husband as much as she thinks she should. She may increase her expressions of affection toward him so as to conceal her loss of feeling (individual expression management), or may try to regenerate her love feelings by thinking about his virtues and his love for her (individual feeling management). If she tells him that her love is waning, they may decide to just keep up public appearances of affection (collective expression management), or may attempt to revitalize love by seeking new experiences together (collective feeling management). Expression management is guided by conscious strategies to convey a certain impression of ourselves to a social audience, and by our more habitual following of display rules, cultural norms for appropriate expressions in a given situation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Expression control can be observed even in one-year-old children, who make visible efforts to hold back tears or who smile as a social greeting. Four-year-olds can pose facial expressions upon request and are soon able to explain many norms about situational appropriate affective expression. We often qualify a facial expression by adding a further expression as a comment on the first, such as blending a smile into an angry look. We also modulate a facial expression, show more or less intensity than we actually feel. We falsify our facial expressions in several ways. We may simulate a feeling when we have none. We may show an impassive, neutral face to conceal an inner feeling. Finally, we often mask an expression that we do feel with another expression that we do not feel. This typology may be extended to the analysis of nonfacial gestures, voice tones, postures, and other expressive cues. Failures to communicate successfully in past relationships can cause people to set up rigid rules for their new relational efforts. This can happen when someone feels inadequate, attacked, or betrayed in an earlier relationship. We modify our interpretations of a relationship and may also alter our bodily sensations and reactions to the person. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
Affectivity versus affective neutrality is a choice faced by individual and groups in forming a given relationship. When should impulses be gratified freely, and when should they be subordinated to social interest? Normative and strategic considerations induce us to reflect upon feeling and alter it. In an experimental study, subjects used strategies of cognitive detachment or involvement to self-regulate their affective reactions to filmed stressful situations, and thus altered their bodily reactions, such as heart rate and skin conductance. We all have certain images of ourselves or stories we tell to ourselves and others about who we are. Usually, this is a combination of who we want to be and who we really are. Sometimes, we also tell the story of ourselves in a very negative light, emphasizing what we cannot do, or what we always do wrong, or the mistakes we have made and cannot let go of. Perhaps many of us do not know what we are feeling in our conscious mind, but our body tell us by creating physical pain, jumpiness, numbness, or others signs of distress. However, our bodies are also designed to let us know when we are starting to get comfortable with a new idea or behavior or interaction. This may be indicated by a pleasant sensation of our muscles relaxing, or an overall sensation of lightness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Feeling rules are social guidelines that delineate a range of appropriate feeling for a situation or relationship. For example, a brother should love or like his sister, but should feel neither hatred nor romantic passion toward her. We discuss our feelings as if rights and obligations apply to them, and react with approval r disapproval to signs of each others’ feelings. We try to make our feelings coincide with feeling rules by doing cognitive, bodily, or expressive work. If we have no reason to feel ashamed in front of a person, for example, we may try to change our imagination of how they thing of us (cognitive), or try not to wince inside when we see them coming (bodily), or try not to look away or blush as they pass us (expressive). Some people use an idealized past relationship to keep all the possible later partners at a distance. This is often the case when one person finds another person like oneself, and experiences playing hard to get maneuvers as a way to stay safe and because it is tantalizing. Both during and after the relationship, the couple may idealize everything about the former partner, and the relationship without recognizing that what they are idealizing is the perfect mirror image. God will finish what he started and it may be a good idea to hold on and wait for your gold standard. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
Angels in the Early Morning Stand at Your Gate
When you do not get everything you need, the deprivation can help you become very resourceful by learning some great survival skills, like not passively waiting for someone else to provide for you. Generalization of a sentiment allows a person to make sense out of a new relationship by analogy to a more familiar one. Compassion, liking, shame, and other sentiments in adulthood are generalized from childhood primary group relations. Religious sentiments are generalized from family clan relationships, so that a deity (God) may be imputed moral authority, perpetual dependence by worshippers, and will be visualized as exacting but benevolent, like elders to a child. No person can be saved, accord to the words of God, save they shall have faith in his name; wherefore, if these things have ceased, then has faith ceased also; and awful is the state of humanity, for they are as though there had been no redemption made. However, if a person has faith one must also have faith; for without faith there cannot be any hope. Pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that you may be filled with this love, which he has bestowed upon all who are true. So, when God shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure. Amen. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
When individuals are pushed into a place where one has to keep oneself alert to avoid being hurt, one often develops excellent observation skills and survival instincts. These individuals tend to see what is going on around them faster then those who grew up protected by the adults in their lives. If one has witnessed a lot of dysfunctional behavior, it may have helped the individual learn how to avoid potentially harmful situations and people. If one’s parents were harsh and not protective, it may cause individuals to have strengthened their determination to be healthier in one’s own adult life. The selective combination of person symbols into a sentiment may cumulate across many relationships. Romantic love, for instance, may incorporate a selection of emotional reactions from previous relationship. As a composite of previous loves, romantic attraction is felt when a partner is found who reintegrates favorite aspects of family members, friends, and earlier romantic lovers. Romance’s intensity is increased by the sudden discovery in one person of these formerly separate, desired qualities associated with previous lovers. This discovery evokes the set of earlier love responses simultaneously. Religious feeling may develop similarly through summation of different sensations, memories, and other affective elements into a sentiment. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Religious sentiment builds from a merger of feelings experiences in collective singing, esthetic responses to music and religious adornments, emulations of the service leader’s example, the facial and gestural expression of other worshippers, and other sensations and impressions across many episodes of worship. “Pray for those who are lost that repentance may come unto them. However, behold, I fear lest the Spirit has ceased striving with them; and in this part of the land they are also seeking to put own all power and authority which comes from God; and they are denying the Holy Ghost (Moroni 8.28).” You may have many more strengths that you are not aware of because of having been less fortunate than other children in how you were nurtured and raised. Keep in mind that within our vulnerabilities is structure that has been erected by the architect of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid, its compartments are beautiful, as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order and its defenses are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the individual may greatly aspire to such a title. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
In addition to consistency and personal symbols of sentiments, a child learns to apply a sentiment as an interactional technique and resource. The strategic effect of its expression become part of the sentiment’s social meaning. For example, shame or guilt are often learned as defensive tactics that deter punishment when they are displayed. Sentiments are learned not only as ideals, but also as practical resources for interaction, depending on how others respond to the child’s various attempts at strategic expression. Children’s humor is initially a private enjoyment of incongruous symbolic relations among familiar objects. If people are responsive and socially rewarding, children learn to initiate joking and clowning as a social affective resource. Sentiments are socialized to some degree outside the primary group, through impersonal media such as books, films, and music. A content analysis of manners books found that books addressed to the youngest children stressed polite overt behavior and the ideal outcomes of friendships. Greetings, honesty, and other overt, ideals means to build friendships were described. In contrast, books for adolescents emphasized social techniques and less ideal outcomes. Selfishness and jealousy were portrayed as facts of human nature. The books recommended pretenses, concealment of eagerness, skillful avoidance of undesired friends, and other strategies as effective for friendship and romance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
The best love is the kind that awakens the soul; that makes us reach for more, that plants fire in our hearts and bring peace to our minds. It is fairly common to react to old memories by lapsing into old, dysfunctional forms of trying to protect yourself. When you were a vulnerable little child, you may have tired to protect yourself from your pain, fear, or stress by one of the universal, instinctive responses to danger; that is, to become defensive, try to escape, or become numb. Now that you are an adult, your tactics of self-protection many not be as obvious as your childhood responses were. Impersonal media are especially influential in a complex, literate society such as ours, but are not a new socialization process. The influential love films, Love Triangle (a Markiss McFadden film), Home Again, Romeo Must Die, and Queen of the Damned, Stuck in Love, Fear and Legally Blonde socialized audiences into turbulent suffering and ecstasy to be experienced in courtly love that is compressed into two hours on the screen. Stages of love—hesitation, pleading, acceptance, and love service—were described. A list of love’s rules was followed by case studies of happy and ill-fated love affairs. These films have become the paradigm for modern romantic love. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Impersonal media socialize a diversity of sentiments. Lovelorn advice columns, religious tracts, guides to living, and other media are directed to shape our definition and expression of sentiments. Popular psychology books instruct us how to open up to grief, overcome shyness, read others’ body language for erotic attraction, and how to say no without feeling guilty. Most popular songs like I Refuse by Aaliyah, Unusual You by Britney Spears, Stars are Blind by Paris Hilton, Halo by Beyonce, Faking It by Calvin Harris, Cry for You by Marilyn Manson and Korn, Number One by Dev, We’re All We Need by Above and Beyond featuring Zoe Johnston, Angel by Anita Baker, If Only You Knew by Pattie Labelle and Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller are just a few examples of the many popular songs about love. Their lyrics provide love’s vocabulary and the symbols through which it can be recognized. Music arouses appropriate moods as one hears how falling in love feels and what course love follows. Novels like House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and So You Call Yourself a Man by Carl Weber depicts vividly how sentiments begin, develop, and end in a relationship. “My love, do you know that your eyes are like stars brightly beaming? I bring your and sing you a moonlight serenade (Midnight Serenade by Glenn Miller).” #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Stop Running from Maturity
It is curious that common people so thoroughly enjoy such smutty talk, and that it is a never-lacking activity of cheerful humor. Shame, sorrow, and other sentiments in a cultural vocabulary become abilities and resources of individuals through socialization processes. How do people learn to interpret sensations and gestures as a sentiment, as a socialized feeling which has been raised by thought and intercourse out of its merely instinctive state and become properly human? Affective socialization had been neglected by sociology and psychology. Empathy is not only the simple emotional contagion, but also a self-conscious effort to share and accurately comprehend another person’s feelings, thoughts, and their causes. Because family and friendship groups promote entering into sharing the minds of others, sentiments are socialized within primary groups. Intimacy, self-disclosure, small size, and enduring interaction facilitate empathy among members. A rudimentary empathy can be observed in newborn infants who will cry upon hearing another baby crying. An emotional contagion of crying often sweeps through maternity wards and nurseries. This arousal is an unself-conscious empathy. Infants have not differentiated self from other people; therefore, they respond to crying as though they themselves were in distress. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Newborn infants hearing tape-recorded crying were most likely to cry when the recording resembled their own cry. This developing empathy is important in the emotional contagion, and probably also is a basis for spontaneous feeling within enduring sentiments. By one year of age, the child is cognitively aware of other people as distinct physical entities, but self remains merged with others affectively. The toddler who encounters a crying child may seek to be comforted by his or her own mother instead of trying to help. If the toddler does help, he or she egocentrically offers whatever he or she oneself finds most comforting, such as a favorite toy or bringing over his or her own mother. The toddler’s interest in the other child is transitory and inconsistent. Children express their growing self-control by climbing, touching, exploring, and trying to do things for themselves. Parents can foster a sense of autonomy by encouraging children to try new skills. However, the child’s first efforts can be made crude. Often, they result in spilling, falling, wetting, and other accidents. Wetting the bed might be normal for a child, but as an adult it is considered a dishonorable discharge. Thus, parents who ridicule or overprotect their children may cause them to doubt their abilities and feel shameful about their actions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
The looking-glass self includes the imagination of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of the child’s judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification. Leo, who just turned one a few months ago brushes his own hair on occasion. In addition, the vestiges of guilt first appear at four or five years of age when children use speech—first aloud, then covertly—to discuss and regulate their own actions. A child’s first fears are over darkness, loud noises, and other material threats, but these are supplanted by social fears, such as shame and embarrassment. Self-feeling becomes extended to objects as a sense of appropriation organized around concepts of mine and my. This sense of possession is basic to the development of jealousy and envy as self-related sentiments. As children view themselves as someone who arouses definite feelings and thought in other people, the child reflects upon one’s impulses and thoughts. The child considers how others would react to them when expressed, and shapes them so as to arouse a desired response from the other. Introspection develops from this selective communication with a view to the other’s response, while also reacting one’s own impulses and thoughts from the other’s standpoint. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The child gradually learns to take into account the relations that other people have with one another. This occurs by playing organized games, in which the child has to keep in mind the roles of all other players, including their potential responses toward one another. The parallel affective development is the awareness that the other person has sentiments in life circumstances that transcend the immediate situation and that may differ from the child’s own sentiment. Thus, the child can understand that two of his or her best friends dislike each other, or that his or her sibling is jealous about a new romantic relationship. Heightened capacities for imagination and reasoning allow the adolescent to feel sentiments toward abstract objects, such as patriotism for nation, reverence for a deity, or compassion for the plight of a class of people. Children may also feel sentiments for persons with whom they have not interacted. However, young children cannot comprehend the irreversible permanence of death, or the special tragedy of permanence, reversibility, and contingency. Persons who fail to develop a sense of identity suffer from role confusion, an uncertainty about who they are and where they are going. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
A child learns sentiments be learning to see them as social objects from the standpoint of other person in the family or friendship groups. One process is a complex type of learning in which one aspect of a sentiment (such as a gesture or feeling) is learned as being consistent with other aspects (such as a situation or the sentiment’s name). To be told “You do not sound like you are sorry,” or “Now that is acting more like a friend” can be gradually inferred. We know our own emotions by observations of our gestures and actions, but more importantly, perhaps, by what other people observe and report to us, directly or indirectly by their responses and gestures to the gestures we have made. There is a quality called generativity, which is expressed by caring about oneself, one’s children, and future generations. Generativity may be achieved by guiding one’s own children or by helping other children (as a teacher, clergy member, or coach, for instance). Language allows us to convert the brute quality of feelings into conscious emotions. Only as emotions are presented through some symbol system do they become communicable and hence social. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Childhood amnesia, our lack of memory about many early experiences, may result from our lack of language in our earliest years. For want of categories, affective and other experiences are soon filtered out of memory. A person who has lived fully and responsibly develops a sense of integrity (self-respect). This allows people to age with dignity. No one wants to regret previous life events because they will experience despair (heartache and remorse). Life is not supposed to feel like failure nor a sense of knowing it is too late to reverse what has been done. Aging should not become a source of fear and depression. That is why people who are not able to do what they want in life, at the moment, find things to focus on so they are being productive and can look back over their time and see it as a period of enrichment. If we follow the Holy Spirit, we will become humble, meek, agreeable, patient, full of love and able to endure suffering. Having faith on the Lord; having a hope that you shall receive eternal life; having the love of God always in our hearts, that we may be lifted up on the last day and enter into his rest. And may the Lord grant unto you repentance, that you may not bring down his wrath upon you, that you may not be bound down by the chains of hell, that you may not suffer the second death (Alma 13.29-30).” #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Randolph Harris II International Institute 