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Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay
Universidad de Guanajuato

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.00 
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Pedagogy of the Global Anxieties

Anxiety caused by the psychosocial reality of war, pandemic, natural disasters, or poverty, among other factors, may be studied from two kinds of methodological premises: first, the deep and unencumbered perception of anxiety as a metacognitive process indicating diminution in energy levels and normative expression or behaviors of individuals. The subject finds oneself in a situation that is out of sync with the environment, and experiences low emotive valence. Anxiety is cognitively visible as a state of depression that continues to intimidate and demoralize the person. It represents a dispirited state of the individual as it encounters a world of depleted resources, and as it constantly fears for its existence or survival. The collective cognitive fear that underlays human survival also creates preconditions for global anxiety. Global anxiety is a global category – an obscure, introspective moment in the lives of peoples within a territory or among migrant populations across frontiers. Secondly, it could indicate toward historically localized expressions and as such anxiety could be studied pluralistically – as its pre-conditions arise in times and locations. Yet on the whole, if we were to analyse the causal variants or consequences of anxieties on a quantitative scale, we could possibly determine how conditions conducive to emotional redressal could be procured or administered for well-being and the Human devolopment index. In either case, the need to identify, analyze and alleviate the pressures and tensions causing anxiousness, and to diminish or palliate physiological conditions that induce anxiety remain our conscious rudder for anxiety studies.

Emotive Binaries

What kind of interdisciplinary approaches to anxieties could help us understand and consider the fuller range or ambit of any anxiety disorder emotion. Interdisciplinary methodology has the potential of explaining the complete circumplex of emotions, first suggested by Russell (1980). Any emotive condition (or dysfunction) is capable of being viewed through its affective other, or valence or alteredness. I refer to the circumplex model to suggest  how anxiety is cognitively manifested: such dysfunctional behaviors have been considered in great detail by the studies of Russell (1980), Frijda (1986) and others. Frijda’s works are most impactful in this regard till date and also contains a description of what Frijda calls arousal. Indeed, arousal is an indispensable factor for the evocation of emotions, including ‘basic emotion states’ (Ekman 1977), like that of fear or anxiety. Barrett (2014) also develops an architecture of arousal. We may propose however to include the insights into emotions available in traditions of emotion studies from very different philosophical or analytical traditions. The same emotional traumas could be aroused and contemplated in a positive state of affects – so that the emotion or affect may harbor an intrinsic potential to transform and get aroused as its altered affect on the circumplex scale. ‘Valence’ is crucial here and is directly related to the dramatic practice of potentializing optimal feelings of well-being and self-esteem, and in general, developing the ability to negotiate with negatively valenced states of depression or traumatic withdrawal. Anxieties of global nature could be seen in this context of our Eastern, Indian psychosocial systems, as posing these great potential questions on alleviatory mechanisms for procurement of well-being or of humane states of feeling (Mukhopadhyay forthcoming 2023). Anxiety studies will therefore find its fuller purpose in the knowledge of ‘transforming’ valences of physiologically built-in emotive conditions or potentials of our psychosomatic architecture. How much such transformative potentials effect emotive base change in the synaptic neurodynamic processes may thus be considered in neurosciences of the future. Levitt asked in a very relevant manner: Does the pattern of physiological reaction differ among emotional states; can these patterns be used to differentiate among the emotions? (Levitt 2015). I believe that these are very important questions for the analysis of anxiety and fear – that should be raised, even if it were in a rather inchoate form, in contemporary Applied Psychology and psychosocial behaviorism. They point to the need for a re-consideration of the Basic Emotion paradigm in psychology and replace it with a ‘basic dynamic circumplex emotion model’ which looks at how emotion potentials are capable of being triggered or aroused and modified in their nature as sources of their own medicine. Feelings caused by trauma could also be a source of self-transformational cure of the trauma – of looking at how trauma could also contain itself, like a protean emotion entity, and therefore be cultivated by practice to be contemplated as its altered and therapeutic other, on a binary scale of crisis management within the retinue of self-induced therapies.

Political Emotion

The search for wellness, mental health, mindfulness and freedom could be therefore re-stated in terms of the primacy of the dynamic architectonics that build human emotions and make them so valuable. Not the nature of the emotion and not merely the category of emotion or the Basic Emotion itself – is what now appears to us to matter. In its place what is in focus is the question of a dynamic alteration in the circuit of appraisals.  The global anxieties are best resolved in terms of a politics or praxis whose root actions include policy decisions in favor of positive emotive arousal in matters of decisions involving life-transformations. The foundations of this kind of political thinking is already evident in the knowledge of transformations of the kind that change the perception of a prosocial need from conflict to peace and self-abnegatory activism. The instances set by Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the last century – have been overwhelmingly confirmed in the political actions of Pepe Mujica – the former President of Uruguay, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the current President and leader of the 4th Transformation in Mexico. The ardent fervor of their activism is executed in movements that explore the transformation and containment of anxieties through their exploration in alternate expressions of self-abnegation and the emotional freedom of the individual. This is our take away from the re-evaluation of emotional praxis for the contemporary world.

Reference                               

Barrett, L. F. & Russell, J. A. (Eds.). (2014). The psychological construction of emotion. Guilford Publications.

Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge University Press.

Levitt, E. E. (2015). The psychology of anxiety. Routledge.

Russell JA. A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1980;39:1161–1178.  

Mukhopadhyay Tirtha Prasad. Emotion According to the Ancients and the Ancients According to Emotions in “Emotion, Communication, Interaction: Emerging Perspectives” edited by Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay and Shoji Nagataki. Taylor and Francis. Forthcoming.