Summary

This chapter addressed some questions about how people acquire the goals they pursue. Some of these are instincts that come with our genetic inheritance, but others are subgoals that we construct to achieve other goals that we already have. I also conjectured that some of our highest-level goals are produced by special machinery that lead each person to try to adopt the values of other persons who become what I call that person’s “Imprimers.”

Imprimers are parents, friends, or acquaintances to whom a person becomes 'attached,' because they respond actively to one's needs—and they then can induce special feelings in us, such as guiltiness, shame, and pride. At first, those Imprimers must be actually present, but older children form ‘mental models’ of them, and can use these to evaluate goals when those imprimers no longer are on the scene. Eventually, these models later develop into what we call by names like conscience, values, ideals, and ethics.

The next chapter will look more closely at the clusters of feelings and thought that we know by such names as hurting, grief, and suffering—to see how they might be understood as varieties of ways to think.

(I should note that this chapter’s ideas about Imprimers are only theories of mine, and don’t yet appear in psychology books. These ideas might be right but they also might not.)

[1] Michael Lewis, “Self-conscious Emotions,” American Scientist vol. 83, Jan 1995.

[2] http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/a8rh/

[3]This could relate to some psychoanalytic theories, which argue that such objects might help to make transition from early attachments to other kinds of relationships. See, for example, www.mythosandlogos.com/Klein.htm.

[4] See §Memes: Dawkins, Henson, Blackmore.

[5][john bowlby, attachment, basic books, n.y. 1973 p217]

[6] ibid. Bowlby bases this on some research of H.R. Schaffer and P. E. Emerson, ‘The development of social attachments in infancy,’ Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev., 29, 3, 1-77, 1964.

[7] ”John Bowlby, Separation p26. Basic Books, N.Y. 1973 ISBN 465-07691-2

[8] Harry Harlow, American Psychologist, 13, 573-685, 1958, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/love.htm.

[9] Jane van Lawick-Goodall, ‘The behavior of Free-living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve,’ Anim. Behav. Monogr. I: 161-311, 1968

[10] In 1973, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen shared a Nobel Prize for these and other discoveries.

[11]There also is some evidence that imprinting resembles addiction. For example, Jaak Panksepp's [1988] experiments suggest that separation-distress may be similar to pain, because it is relieved by opiods. Howard Hoffman [1994] speculates that an object can become an Imprimer when certain aspects of its motion or shape arouse an innate mechanism that releases endorphins in the imprintee’s brain, and he conjectures that the resulting feelings of pleasure or comfort then somehow cause the object to be classified as 'familiar' enough to overcome other fearful reactions. In §9-x-Pleasure I'll suggest that such feelings may play a somewhat less direct role.

[12] Y. Spencer-Booth and R. A. Hinde, Animal Behavior, 19, 174-191 and 595-605, 1971

[13] S. Seay, 1964

[14][see chapter 4 of digging dinosaurs, john r. horner and james gorman, harper and row, 1998, isbn -06-097314-5.]

[15] For example, see Charles A. Nelson’s article at http://www.biac.duke.edu/education/courses/spring03/cogdev/readings/C.A.%20Nelson%20(2001).pdf

[16] Francesca Acerra, Yves Burnod and Scania de Schonen, http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/Proceedings/esann/esannpdf/es1999-22.pdf

[17] Meltzoff and Moore (1977) appear to have shown that infants can imitate lip protrusion, mouth opening, tongue protrusion, and finger movement. See http://ilabs.washington.edu/meltzoff/pdf/97Meltzoff_Moore_FacialImit.pdf

[18] "Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour," Vol I, p132, Harvard Univ. Press, 1970

[19] Multiple attachments are reported in Schaffer, H.R. and Emerson P.E. (1964) The development of social attachments in infancy, Monographs of Social Research in Child Development 29: no. 94. However, I could not find any studies of the long-term effects of having several Imprimers.

[20]From a 1961 letter to Mrs. H. L. Austin