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Emotional States & The Paranormal

MrRING

Android Futureman
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In one sense, we know that human emotion is a real thing, in that humans experience some emotional states in their life - anger, love, jealousy, obsessions, etc. They haven't been traditionally quantifiable in terms of scientific experimentation, though there is some scientific exploration of emotional states that has begun to occur, as in this 2013 paper at Current Biology:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.056
Traditionally, science is objective and thus separated from all our emotional responses to the world. But, as neurosciences can now describe physiological correlates of emotional states, researchers in other fields are beginning to view emotions as a biological reaction that they can use in many different areas, from medicine to conservation. Michael Gross reports.

The scientific study of emotion is still fraught with peril though, as this article in the Atlantic points out:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...-sciences-struggle-to-define-emotions/385711/

And so the six emotions used in Ekman’s studies came to be known as the “basic emotions” all humans recognize and experience. Some researchers now say there are fewer than six basic emotions, and some say there are more (Ekman himself has now scaled up to 21), but the idea remains the same: Emotions are biologically innate, universal to all humans, and displayed through facial expressions. Ekman, now a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, with his own company called The Paul Ekman Group, was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2009, thanks to this work.

But despite the theory’s prominence, there are scientists who disagree, and the debate over the nature of emotion has been reinvigorated in recent years. While it would be easy to paint the argument as two-sided—pro-universality versus anti-universality, or Ekman’s cronies versus his critics—I found that everyone I spoke to for this article thinks about emotion a little differently.

If we viewed experiencing the paranormal as being directly related to emotional states of mind - not to dismiss the experiences as overheated imagination, but to explore the possibilities of an emotional state being required to properly respond to whatever is happening be it in the mind only or from a paranormal origin - might this not be a new avenue of investigation that might render results worth talking about?
 
Also with those theories hypothesising that external entities are feeding off the recipient's emotions, such as fear (which may also include the aforementioned poltergeists).
 
This academic paper seems to be arguing that emotional states can cause others to experience a paranormal experience, not quite what I'm talking about but it may be of interest:

Feeling spirits: sharing subjective paranormal experience through embodied talk and action​

Rachael Ironside
From the journal Text & Talk

https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2018-0020

Abstract​

This article examines how subjective paranormal experiences are shared and understood through embodied talk and action. Paranormal experiences often possess subjective qualities, regularly experienced as “senses” or “feelings”; however, the ability to share these experiences collectively provides the opportunity to validate such events. Drawing upon video data selected from over 100 hours of recorded footage during UK-based paranormal investigations, this study uses conversation analysis to examine how individuals communicate their experiences to others and through this evoke a way of understanding their experience as potentially paranormal. It is argued that embodied talk and action invite others to not only see the subjective paranormal experiences of others, but to understand and become co-experiencers in these events.
 
And an interesting article coming from an anthropological POV:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_25

Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits​


Part of the Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences book series (THHSS)

Abstract​

The field of ghosts and spirits is pregnant with emotional accounts of misunderstandings, altercations, pain, sadness, discomfort, anxiety, and vulnerability. Many scholars reject personal accounts of the supernatural in view of its ostensible failure to meet the standards of scientific validity and credibility. There is, however, much to consider, given that the experiences in ethnographic fieldwork in these settings comprise complex and multifaceted intersections that deal with the vulnerability of researchers and the “others” we are studying ethnographically. This chapter discusses and unpacks the relatively neglected issue of “vulnerability” that ethnographers face in fieldwork, with an emphasis on the study of ghosts and spirits. I present selected ethnographic fieldwork experiences and critical moments based on my study of spirit possession and everyday religiosity among Muslim families in Singapore and Malaysia. Embracing and reflecting on the relational dimensions of vulnerability not as a “problem,” which needs to be resolved through recourse to “objective” knowledge but rather through meaningful engagement and reflection through such “critical moments,” enables us to revisit and redraw the boundaries of social research and contemporary ethnographic field methods.
 
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