Applied Psychology for Nurses - Mary F. Porter (top 10 best books of all time TXT) 📗

with some vague or well-defined feeling of annoyance or satisfaction, of displeasure or pleasure. If all goes well, the latter; if not, the former.

Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Will.—I cannot will without a feeling accompaniment, pleasant or unpleasant. I may be using my will only in carrying out what intellect advises. But we found that intellect’s operations are always affective, i. e., have some feeling of pleasure or pain. And the very act of will itself is a pleasant one and much easier if it is making me do what I want to do; it is a vaguely or actively unpleasant one if it is making me act against desire. In the end, however, if I act against desire in pursuance of reason or a sense of duty, the feeling of pleasure in the victory of my better self is asserted. And feeling cannot be separated from will.

Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Action.—I cannot do anything without a feeling of comfort or discomfort, happiness or unhappiness. Try it for yourself when you are feeding a patient, making a bed, giving a bath or massage, preparing a hypodermic. Other things being normal, if you are performing the task perfectly, the feeling of satisfaction, of pleasure, of the very ability to work effectively, with speed and accuracy and nicety, comes with the doing. If you are bungling, there is a pervading sense of dissatisfaction, of unpleasantness. In the automatic or semi-automatic action a great economy of nature has conservatively put feeling at the absolute minimum; but it has not eradicated it. As you walk across the ward, though your predominating thought and feeling may be elsewhere, there is a sense of pleasure or displeasure in the very movement. If your body is fresh and you are of an energetic type and in happy frame of mind, a pervasive feeling of satisfaction is experienced. If tired or discouraged or sore from unaccustomed exercise, every step registers protest.

Thus we find by experiment that there is no thought we have, no single conscious movement or action, nor any expression of the will, but is accompanied with what the psychologist broadly terms pleasure or pain. So emotion, the first expression of mentality, is never absent from any mental or physical act. It permeates all we do, as well as all we think and will, with the partial exception of automatic action, above indicated.

The Beginning of Reason

We found feeling by far the strongest factor in producing action in babyhood and childhood. Our instinctive doing, we learned, is the result of a race impulse. Will acts chiefly at emotion’s bidding. But very early the baby’s experience operates as a partial check to feeling’s exclusive sway. It keeps him from touching the fire, no matter how its brightness attracts. It may be merely the sense memory of hurt when fingers and that bright thing came together; and one such impression will probably prevent him from ever again touching it. Or it may be the brain-cell’s retention of the painful feeling of slapped hands when the fingers reaching out to the flame had not yet quite touched. These punishment experiences are only effective in many children after more or less repetition has set up an automatic prohibition from brain to motor nerves; but right here intellect begins to assert itself in the form of sense memory. The baby does not reason about the matter. His nerve-cells simply remember pain, and that particular brightness and glow, and finger touch—or that reaching out to the glow—and slapped hands, as occurring together. In the same way he early connects pleasure with the taste of certain forbidden things. He does not know they are sweet. He only knows “I want.” Even here his desire to taste may be checked in action by a vivid memory of what happened when he tasted that other time, and was spanked or put in his little room all alone with only milk and bread to eat for a long time.

Later on the child may think, from cause to effect, thus: “Sweet, good, want, taste, spank, hurt (or no dinner, all by self, lonely), spank hurt more than sweets good. Not taste.” But long before he can work this out, consciously, two distinct memories, one of pleasure and one of pain, are aroused by the sight of the sweet. And what he will do with it depends upon which memory is stronger. In other words, his action is governed altogether by his feeling, though memory, which is an intellectual factor, supplies the material for feeling.

Development of Reason and Will

Later still, when the child is older, we may have somewhat the following mechanism: “Sweets, good, want, taste; spank, hurt; don’t care, spank not hurt much, maybe never found put, sweets very good.”

Now the child is reasoning and choosing between two courses of action, don’t and do. His decision will depend upon whether immediate satisfaction of desire is stronger than the deferred satisfaction of being good, and the fear of punishment. He probably prefers to take a chance, and even if the worst comes, weighs it with the other worst, not having the sweet—and takes the “bird in the hand.” He has reasoned, and has chosen between two emotions the one which his judgment says is the more desirable; and his will carries out the decision of his reasoning. His chief end in life is still to get the most immediate pleasure. Still later in child-life, much later, perhaps, his decision about the jam is based on neither love of it nor fear of punishment, but—despite his still sweet tooth—on a reasoned conclusion that if he eats jam now he may be sick, or he may spoil his appetite for dinner; or on a consideration that sweets between meals are not best on dietetic principles; and will very readily backs up the result of his reasoning. Though his determination is largely based upon feeling, reason has chosen between feelings, between immediate desire to have, and desire to avoid future discomfort. Reason is triumphant over present desire.

Judgment

The conclusion or decision that reason has reached we call a judgment. The youth who decides against the sweet between meals, we say, has good judgment. And we base our commendation on the proved fact that sweets are real fuel, giving abundantly of heat and energy, and are not to be eaten as mere pastime when the body is already fully supplied with high calorie food not yet burned up; that if sweets are eaten at irregular intervals and at the call of appetite, and not earned by an adequate output of physical work, the digestive apparatus may become clogged, and an overacid condition of the entire intestinal tract threaten. We call judgment good, then, when it is the result of reasoning with correct or logical premises which correspond with the facts of life. We call it bad when it is the conclusion of incorrect or partial or illogic premises.

A premise “is a proposition laid down, proved, supposed, or assumed, that serves as a ground for argument or for a conclusion; a judgment leading to another judgment as a conclusion” (Standard Dictionary).

Let us illustrate good and bad judgment by following out two lines of reasoning, each quite accurate as such.

I want sweets. Sweets are good for people. They give heat and energy, and I need that, for I am chilly and tired. People say “Don’t eat sweets between meals.” But why? They contain just what I need and the sooner I get them the better.

So I have sweets when I want them. The judgment to take the sweets as desire indicates is entirely logical if we accept all the premises as correct. And they are, so far as they go; but they are partial; and so cannot altogether correspond with the facts of life. Sweets are good for people who expend much physical energy. They prove injurious in more than limited amounts to the bed-ridden, the inactive, or the sluggish. Hence this premise is partial and so far incorrect. Sweets do give heat and energy, true. I am chilly and tired, also true. But why? Because I am already toxic from the sweets and meats I have had throughout my sedentary years. The question is, Do I need any more energy-producing food when I am not burning up what I have? So again the premise is partial. I do need heat and energy, but I already have the material for it, and my mode of life has disorganized my system’s capacity to utilize these foods normally. So now sweets have become a detriment to my well-being. The judgment which determines me to the habit of eating sweets between meals is the result of logic, but of logic spent on tying up premises which do not fit the facts of the case.

One of the most prevalent defects of judgment is illustrated in this common disability to select premises which fit the facts. Ignorance, emotional reasoning, and a defective critical sense probably explain most poor judgments.

The other judgment illustrates the logic of correct, provable premises.

“No, I shall wait until dinner-time. I have no need of so rich a food, for I had an adequate meal at the usual time and have not worked hard enough to justify adding this burden to my digestive apparatus; besides only hard workers with their muscles can afford to eat many sweets. They cause an overacid condition when taken in excess; and any except at mealtimes would be excess for me, with my moderate physical exercise.”

This judgment we call good. Its premises correspond to scientific facts.

But much reasoning must always be done with probable premises, ones which seem to correspond to the facts, but which have yet to be proved. And our judgment from such suppositions cannot be final until we see if it works.

Some few centuries ago supposedly wise men called Christopher Columbus a fool. Of course the world was flat. If it were round man would fall off. It was all spread out and the oceans were its limits. If it should be round, like a ball, as that mad man claimed, then the waters must reach from Europe ’round the sphere and touch Asia; or there might be land out there beyond the ocean’s curve. But it wasn’t round, and the idea of finding a new way to Asia by sailing in the opposite direction was a fool’s delusion.

Their logic was perfect. If the earth was flat, and Asia lay east of Europe, it was madness to sail west to reach it. But they argued from a wrong premise, so their judgment was imperfect—for they did not yet know the facts.

The result of all reasoning is judgment. And judgment is good as the materials of the reasoning process correspond to facts, or are in line with the most probable of the yet unknown. It is poor as the reasoning material fails to meet the facts, or is out of harmony with the most probable of the yet unproved.

It is of no avail, then, to attempt to improve our final judgments as such. We must examine the materials we reason with, then learn to group and compare them logically. And in the very separating of true premises from false, we use and train the judgment we would improve. And this the normal mind can do.

Reaction Proportioned to Stimuli

In the normal mind the emotional or feeling accompaniment of thought and action is proportionate and adequate to the circumstances, i. e., there is a certain feeling, of a certain strength, natural to every thought and act; and when only that strength, not more or less, accompanies the thought or the act, we say, “That man is emotionally stable. His mind is normally balanced.”

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