Too Many Whats? Part II. Attending To The Wrong Stressors

I'm interested in sources and varieties of executive dysfunction. I'm starting out by examining maladaptive biases of attention through simple concept analysis. Here's the starting point: What words or phrases make sense in place of X in these sentences?

• I'm facing too many X at once.
• I've been dealing with X for too long without a break.
• I perceive the presence of important X too readily.
• I find myself systematically dealing with the wrong X.

I introduced this problem in my last post and didn't make much conceptual progress besides listing a bunch of Xs. Well now I've got a bigger list of Xs broken into clusters and the clusters have descriptive labels.

There are lots of words that fit, and I think they can all be called difficult situations or stressors. The situations and the stressors can both be perplexing, embarrassing, threatening, worrying, or otherwise producing pain or unpleasant emotions. Synonyms for "situations" like events, developments, and incidents also fit in for X. "Issues" and "matters" both fit in for X, and maybe those are kind of like synonyms for stressors?

If a situation is only a little bad, then we focus on the small things that are wrong and we talk of complications, tricky details, and intricacies. When situations are moderately bad, we call them predicaments, problems, troubles, and quandaries. When situations are pretty bad, we call them crises, disasters, and emergencies. There are situations worse than those, like catastrophes, but they don't stand in for X in all of the above sentences, because they're not ever going to be the wrong situations to focus on.

Now we've touched on difficult situations. How about stressors? These can also be situations, but they're categorized by the emotions that we have in response to them.

Stressors producing annoyance are called annoyances, disturbances, nuisances, messes, and inconveniences. Annoyance is sometimes a reaction to low-level pain and sometimes it's a reaction to being interrupted (and if psychologist/behavioral economist George Ainslie is right, being interrupted from appreciating one's baseline utility level is the very mechanism of pain, though I doubt it). If we internally use a decision process, like a POMDP, as a model of the cause of our annoyance, then the stressor is called a pest, among other names.

Stressors producing anger or fear are called dangers, hazards, threats, attacks, personal offenses, harassments, and torments. If we model the stressor with a decision process, it's called an enemy. If we throw disgust into the mix of anger and fear, we've got terrors, horrors, and good old fashioned offenses against god and nature. If we model these with a decision process, they might be called monsters. These things with a disgust component, the horrors and monsters, they make me think of varieties of moral outrage, like conservative puritanism and liberal social justice.

Actually, fear comes in a few forms, doesn't it? There's angry fear, like the response to threats and offenses and horrors that we just mentioned, and there's surprised fear, like when someone says boo (the causes of which probably won't fit in for X above, since they're surprises and not things we could focus too readily on in anticipation), and there's sad fear, like dread from a painful situation you can't escape, and there's anxious fear. Anxious stressors might be called perils or risks. I'm not sure about the names of stressors that produce dread. Maybe dread is just fear without anger when you can't fight back, and the causes of dread are the same dangers, hazards, threats, et cetera.

Stressors producing perplexity are questions, doubts, and confusions. Perplexity is one of those epistemic emotions like surprise and credence that's much less visceral and hedonic than other social emotions, but it's still the sort of thing you can focus on too much, to the detriment of your executive function.

Stressors producing shame are self-doubts and embarrassments. It's interesting that this cluster has the word doubt in it also, no? I don't think perplexity is like shame at all. There's a puzzle for you. What are the doubts that produce perplexity about, if doubts about self-adequacy produce shame? Maybe perplexity doubts are about how to perform, rather than whether to risk performing.

Alongside things that produce emotions, names for emotion-like things fit pretty well in place of X also: pains, negative feelings, and intrusive thoughts.

I don't have names for the emotions produced by the next three stressor groups. What emotions do you feel when you're impeded, conflicted, or burdened?

1. When we're prevented from doing one thing that we want, the stressors are obstacles, difficulties, defeaters, drawbacks, hindrances, impediments. Maybe that's sadness? Or anxiety? Or a second class of annoyance.

2. When we're prevented from doing either of two contrary things, the stressors are called binds, constraints, and dilemmas. When these stressors are non-physical, we call them conflicting desiderata, conflicting deontological prescriptions, conflicting social expectations, and informal contradictions. Maybe that's anxiety? It also sounds like sadness.

3. Sometimes our stressors are specifications of necessary work that come to us from conscience or external social authority. These are burdens, obligations, demands, onuses, and hard jobs. If annoyance is a response to low-level pain or interruptions, what do you call the response to being chronically interrupted or chronically in moderate pain? I don't know. Maybe burnout. I know that's not a standard emotion. It could just be sadness or anxiety again.

If there's not a super obvious associated emotion, maybe they should just be called difficult situations and not stressors.

I've got just a few more clusters of things that can fit in for X. Each of these clusters seems to refer regularly to two classes of stressor: the situations are differently stressful if they're directly affecting you or if it's just your job to fix broken situations that otherwise wouldn't directly affect you.

You can deal with defects, errors, failures, faults, mistakes, and malfunctions. 

You can deal with wrongdoings, infractions, and sins. 

You can deal with scheduling conflicts, time constraints, resource shortages, and resource demands. 

You can deal with interpersonal conflicts, disputes, controversies, misunderstandings, bad arguments, altercations, and disagreements.

When these directly affect you, maybe the associated emotions are sadness, shame, burnout, and anger, respectively.

But you've already named the stressors associated with those, Preinfarction! What's the difference between these stressors and the previous ones? Where's your rigor, Pre? Where's your ontological commitment to categorizing concepts per genus et differentiam?

Now I am all done and completely satisfied with the product of my efforts.