Dear Department of Psychology: Moving the emotional/cognitive dynamic regulatory mechanism out of 3000-year-old literary and religious linguistic semantics.

Subject: Moving the emotional/cognitive dynamic regulatory mechanism out of 3000-year-old literary and religious linguistic semantics

Date: 2020-07-07

The greatness of the human life experience emerges from the flames of individual desire arising out of hell’s fiery conflicts on earth. Intention is forged in these fires. Emotional biofeedback aligns our journey with these new intentions. Each succeeding generation will have its own mountains to climb and waters to cross with their own stars to navigate towards. Intent is that guiding star; and it is our emotions that perceive its light. The more joyous the feeling, the more harmonious and powerful the wonders revealed through life’s journey.

Dear Department of Psychology,

First, I want to apologize for the general letter to all of you instead of honoring each of you individually. I did read your research interests and chose only those that I felt would have an interest in re-evaluating the current cognitive/emotional dynamic regulatory mechanism or as it relates to emotions’ evolutionary connection to goal directed behavior and decision making.

For hundreds – or is it thousands – of years science has moved ideas, theories, and paradigms forward. Paradigms accepted and taught for a life time change. That is science. My question is, would you be able to accept a new paradigm if it happened to you? Would you be willing to listen to a new construct of the emotion/cognition relationship that advances into a new arena that which you have known, studied, and maybe even taught for a lifetime?

When Einstein’s theories predicted that gravity would bend light, scientists went back to Newtonian physics and found that it was there all along, had they reason to look. It was Einstein’s understanding of energy-mass equivalency that put science into the nuclear age and changed the world forever.

Not until the illusion of emotions is understood,

will the power of emotions be revealed.

I have attached my article (8700 words) presenting a new paradigm of the emotional/cognitive dynamic regulatory mechanism. I quote “Emotional Regulation: Conceptual and Empirical Foundations”, an article by Prof. James Gross of Stanford University and use his process model for setting the stage and understanding of current emotional regulatory theory. But the key to move this emotional/cognitive dynamic regulatory mechanism forward into a new and different cognitive and linguistic construct lies within the “changes in experiential, behavioral, and neurobiological response systems”. Yes, there is an emotional response, but the significance of this response can only be seen and understood by further processing these “emotional responses” into a cause and effect analysis. I transform this cause and effect analysis into my paper, “Emotions-as-Effect Theory: The Linguistic Semantics of Emotional vs. Cognitive Regulation.”

Since my article is still a draft that entwines with your research interests, you could gather a team of co-authors and use my thesis as a bases for a co-presentation to the academic world from your perspective – assuming you accept that an emotional response is just that: a consequence, a result, an effect with a foundation in evolutionary science rather than in religious and literary linguistic semantics.

My interest really is to move cognitive/emotional science into a new dimension. I hope that my paper gives you a greater understanding of the cognitive/emotional dynamics as it relates to emotions’ evolutionary connection to goal directed behavior and decision making. I trust we can come to an understanding that benefits your current academic world and the future world of cognitive – instead of emotional – regulation for the prevention and intervention of psychopathology and for the establishment and maintenance of mental health and well-being within the individual and within the culture and society of our world as a whole.

Passionately,

Andrew O. Jackson

https://emotional-evolution.com/

Attachment: “Emotions-as-Effect Theory: The Linguistic Semantics of Emotional vs. Cognitive Regulation” (also available at my website, https://emotional-evolution.com/)

Abstract

“Goddess, sing me the anger, of Achilles, Peleus’ son, that fatal anger that brought countless sorrows on the Greeks and sent many valiant souls of warriors down to Hades, leaving their bodies as spoil for dogs and carrion birds: for thus was the will of Zeus brought to fulfilment” (Homer, 800-700/2009). With these beginning words written almost 3000 years ago, Homer’s Iliad linguistically sabotaged hundreds of millions of years of emotional evolution. The civilized arena was staged for aberrant emotion driving destructive behavior. In turn, this destructive behavior arising from emotional dysregulation and disorder required emotional regulation and control. Emotions-as-effect theory reconstructs the evolutionary bases of good- and bad-feeling emotions as the perception, by consciousness, of a biochemical physiology within the body and the brain precipitated by an evolved and nurtured cognitive neural circuitry. Emotions, feelings, and moods are perceptions of an internal state of biology precipitated by cognition. Homer’s emotions, feelings, and moods are a carefully nurtured neurolinguistic cognitive construct of the mind. Contrary to the linguistics of Homer, emotions are not causal, and they are neither destructive nor constructive; rather, they are indicators of the presence of very real destructive and constructive – and causal – cognitive behaviors. The correlations among cognition, a biochemical physiology of the brain and body, good- and bad-feeling emotions, and consciousness are a result of millions of years of evolutionary survival for the health and well-being of the individual. The question is, how will today’s ever-changing technical and political cultures and societies understand, nurture, and develop these same necessary correlations?

Do not fixate on the broken and mangled hand, for it is indeed a soreness to any beholder. The message is not within the hand, nor within the moon and stars at which it points but lies within another Universe that surrounds us – known only through its quiet revelations.