lowlier
12-17-2010, 04:23 AM
Hi,
In social psychology, there is a concept called "social appraisal". Basically, it says that we use others expressions of emotion to better understand the situation we are confronted with. In other words, from others' emotional expressions we try to infer what they think about the situation - we then use this information to make better sense of our environment. I believe, implicitly, literature is full of this process - some character expressing an emotion and others drawing inferences from that. However, I have a hard time finding passages that describe this process more explicitly. This quote from Dostoyevsky comes close:
“The old woman glanced for a moment at the pledge, but at once stared in the eyes of her uninvited visitor. She looked intently, maliciously and mistrustfully. A minute passed; he even fancied something like a sneer in her eyes, as though she had already guessed everything. He felt that he was losing his head, that he was almost frightened, so frightened that if she were to look like that and not say a word for another half minute, he thought he would have run away from her.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky (2003, p. 79), Crime and Punishment
Do you know of any other quotes showing the same process?
In social psychology, there is a concept called "social appraisal". Basically, it says that we use others expressions of emotion to better understand the situation we are confronted with. In other words, from others' emotional expressions we try to infer what they think about the situation - we then use this information to make better sense of our environment. I believe, implicitly, literature is full of this process - some character expressing an emotion and others drawing inferences from that. However, I have a hard time finding passages that describe this process more explicitly. This quote from Dostoyevsky comes close:
“The old woman glanced for a moment at the pledge, but at once stared in the eyes of her uninvited visitor. She looked intently, maliciously and mistrustfully. A minute passed; he even fancied something like a sneer in her eyes, as though she had already guessed everything. He felt that he was losing his head, that he was almost frightened, so frightened that if she were to look like that and not say a word for another half minute, he thought he would have run away from her.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky (2003, p. 79), Crime and Punishment
Do you know of any other quotes showing the same process?