Venue:   Dennis’s home in Sherburn.        Chair:  John

Members present:   Dennis, Wendy and John [but most worthwhile nonetheless!]

Apologies:   Rosemary and Christine

Report of the last meeting:   That meeting was cancelled as no suitable venue was available.  A report of the meeting before is on our website.

Matters discussed:

1]   Our thanks went once again to Dennis and Sandra for providing us with a venue and refreshments.

2]   For our next meeting we discussed whether or not we wished to meet on the 20^th December, so close to Christmas, and the unanimous feeling was that we did not.  Our next meeting will, therefore, take place in January   

3]   Our topic for the meeting was emotions but as it is so topical and important we discussed not so much the issues on both sides but the psychology of the values and behaviour of the politicians involved on both sides.  In terms of sides it is clear that this is not the usual division of left versus right but an ideological rather than rational divide within parties and the general public as to what type of country they wish to live in.

4]   This led us on to the discussion of a field in psychology whose importance is often underrated but which affects us all in some way, that of institutional psychology.  It is often referred to as occupational psychology but consists of far more than just that branch and studies how organisations actually work rather than how formal structures and processes assume that they do.  This is true regardless of the size and complexity of the organisation ranging from small committees to very large organisations.  Our discussion ranged from working lifetime experiences to the experiences of former school govenores.        

5]   As ever we digressed again and discussed the differences between child prodigies, geniuses and the wisdom even cruelty of what psychologists often term the ‘hothousing’, of their young children by ambitious parents.

6]   We then got on to the actual topic for the meeting which was, ‘Emotions’.  Most of the content for this topic is taken from the ‘Great Courses – Psychology’ series but there is much material of interest on this topic available on You Tube.  For those who may be interested there are below the URLs to two interesting Harvard University lectures:

11. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UySWKNjw5Y

12. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part II

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5IrSEIPdwk

7]   Using our own resources we began watching the 30 minute video from our course entitled ‘Emotions’, which seeks to define what they are, show why they are important and to looks at why ‘Emotional Intelligence’ is an important set of skills to develop for our later use in social situations.  By then, however, we had run out of time and must continue with this most interesting topic at our next meeting.

Below is a table of the emotions that psychologists that psychologists have claimed to have discovered and studied:

Emotion annotation and representation language

 The emotion annotation and representation language (EARL) proposed by the Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion (HUMAINE) classifies 48 emotions

Next meeting:   This will take place on the 17^th January, 2020 between 2 and 4pm at Dennis’s home in Sherburn