Talk:Interest (emotion)

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Hi, [1] I have just seen your edit and below is my reply to it. Only after I have finished writing my reply, I found out you are not male, but female and I want to apologize to you for writing it as if you were another guy fighting with me over the edit. Anyway, here it is:

Just two premises and one logical conclusion:

Premise #1: Higher mental processes (such as processing cognitions, thoughts, logical premises, words, such as the ones you are reading just now) occur without this being shown on your face and occur independently of what is shown on your face. (For example, you can process the words cognitively while at the same time on your face will not be shown that any higher mental process is going on inside your head, while the emotional processes are always shown on your face. In other words, while I can not know what, if any, cognition processing is going on inside your head, I can always see if you are - while reading the words and thinking about them - either interested in them, disgusted by them, angry at them, sad, happy, or maybe scared)

Premise #2: If you are genuinely interested in something, it shows on your face, just the way it shows on your face if you are happy or sad or angry or scared or disgusted... unless you try to suppress the facial expressions, of course. (Just for example, if a woman is genuinely interested in you, then her pupils get slightly dilated, which is why in many societies in past plant called Belladonna (more precisely the chemical compound Atropine in it) was used by women to artificially produce the effect of dilated pupils in order to show as if they are interested in her husband-to-be and not only interested in the money on his bank account and the interests from it :) ) Isn't it interesting that linguistically it does seem as if in English speaking world they ARE most interested in money coming from bank accounts (because in other languages the bank interests are not called by the same name as the emotion itself that people feel towards them)?

Conclusion: Interest is emotion.

References:

http://books.google.com/books?id=J2YQAAAACAAJ

http://www.dynam-it.com/lennart/pdf/What%20Makes%20Something%20Interestin1.pdf

William James published in 1884 study mentions interest as an example of an emotion that he could not see how it is shown on the human face. {my comment: Obviously James was not aware of seeing dilated pupils in women who were interested in him ;) }

James has had a strong influence on the subsequent study of emotion, and it seems that, over the years, interest was demoted from being an (nonstandard) emotion at all.

Facial expression (Reeve, 1993) and vocal tone are correlated with interest, and interest can be distinguished from other emotions on the basis of such bodily cues.

Subjectively, it is clearly distinguished from enjoyment, as Silvia shows.

DancingPhilosopher 11:30, 21 February 2008 (UTC) P.S. Here is what I wrote about the plant Belladonna and origin of its name (before I found out that the plant already has an article on it under different name, so I will have to do the redirect).

Belladonna firstly refers to plant Atropa belladonna (LINN.) family N.O. Solanaceae. The plant was named so from the Italian expression "bella donna" meaning "beautiful woman" because its juice was used by the Italian ladies for dilating their pupils and making appearances as if they are genuinely interested even when they were not really interested in a persons themselves, but in the wealth they had.