2021 Reflection

今年花了不少时间重新思考生命中重要的事情，以及修复和重建自己的支持系统，真的非常感恩家人朋友们的爱。面对重要的决策，我的原则仍然是：对自己保持绝对诚实，要勇敢地直面自己的愿望和判断，并坦然接受它的所有后果，这样一切才会变得轻松。

不断探索打动人心的工作

• 高水准的产品研究只有30%是定性和定量的调研分析，剩下的70%其实在于理清哪些关键的战略和方向性问题最需要被回答，什么信息点在此刻最有助于推动产品决策，该如何用数据讲一个打动人心的故事，以及如何和团队建立彼此信任的合作关系。后面的70%让我觉得这份工作像是一个充满未知的冒险，可以尽情地感受心流的时刻，像是时时刻刻在玩，永不疲倦。

• 下半年新加入的Google电商团队更侧重于Researchers as Strategists的团队结构，也对我的角色提出了更高的要求和挑战。现在负责的产品领域和以往相比有更多的未知和可探索的空间，是一个特别需要提出好问题的problem space。希望能更加独当一面，为团队提供准确实用的用户洞察和产品战略方向的建议，以及在关键的产品决策中持续发声和推动讨论。

认识自己，保持创作

• 2021年比以往任何时刻都更清晰地看到了自己性格的利弊，意识到几乎所有的特质都有两面性。比如自己（1）很重视通过多元的体验和交流获得做事的灵感，但也因此不够自律管理好时间和坚持重复性的训练（2）只想花时间做自己有热情和充满挑战的事，但也因此总回避面对一些不那么光鲜但也重要的事，甚至有时不懂得感恩他人在这方面所付出的努力。

• 在中英文的互联网上有很多创作者（精神偶像）深深地影响着我的价值观。感谢他们给予的灵感和陪伴，在状态不佳的日子里听喜欢的播客和读文章真的很治愈。受他们的影响，我也坚信创作的时刻才真正认识和定义自己，要找到自己的声音。

互相滋养的爱需要认知和练习

• 什么是真实的爱？当彼此都很清楚为什么对方是对自己而言最特别和无可替代时，才会拥有真实，忠诚和互相滋养的爱。想要做到这点就要先足够了解自己，有能力真正看见对方，能有效沟通和理解彼此，还要在对的时机相遇并懂得珍惜对方，好像确实需要相信命运。

• 如何保持健康的亲密关系？最重要的确实就是沟通和理解。对我而言，想要练习直面（而非回避）冲突，对自己的感受保持诚实，更理解对方表达爱的方式，感受和珍惜对方带来的独特体验，以及对 trade-offs 保持信念感。

今年有很多可爱的朋友帮我慢慢找回自信和能量，很感谢他们的爱和善意。记录一段昊神的话（珍藏在小本本上了）：“Annie has a curious and also an artistic mind ... brings fresh and new perspectives to our friend group and is always out there trying new things ... doesn’t want to have a boring life and is trying to make not only her life but everyone around her interesting.”

祝你2022健康，快乐。

Dec 31, 2021 at 17 Mile Drive, Monterey

The Social Psychology of Emotion in Inside Out

I was embarrassingly tearing up in the classroom when I watched the Pixar movie Inside Out in our final lecture of Social Psychology of Emotion. As a psychology student, I can definitely appreciate the thoughtfulness behind the production of Inside Out. With the five basic emotions as the main characters, the level of scientific rigor is truly admirable. Interestingly, during the planning phase of the production, the team consulted Paul Ekman, a well-known emotion psychologist focused on facial expression, and Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, who explores the science behind happiness, compassion, love, power, and social class. Notably, these two scholars are the foundational psychologists in developing theories on the expression of emotions.

Basic Emotions Theory by Ekman and Keltner

Paul Ekman initially proposes 6 basic emotions, which includes fear, anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness. He later developed the Basic Emotions Theory (BET), where these basic emotions have brief patterns of facial behaviour that are distinct and serve as signals of the senders’ current state, intentions, and assessment of situation. Moreover, these basic emotions also manifest some degree of cross-cultural universality and have evolutionary roots to help us with better adaptation in life.

Whereas Dacher Keltner proposes a multimodal approach to the Basic Emotions Theory (BET), where he believes emotions are about actions. The expression of emotion should manifest in multiple modalities, such as facial muscle movement, voice, bodily movements, and gesture, since emotions cannot happen in isolation.

Sadness can strengthen relationships

Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness in Inside Out

To start off with the definition of emotion: “Emotion is an inferred complex sequence of reactions to a stimulus [including] cognitive evaluations, subjective changes, autonomic and neural arousal, impulses to action, and behaviour designed to have an effect upon the stimulus that initiated the complex sequence” (Plutchik, 1982).

In the beginning of Inside Out, Sadness feels that she is not doing any good and only makes things worse in improving and regulating Riley’s emotion. From time to time, Joy tries her best to stop Sadness from touching any memory balls and thus stop “contaminating” happy memories into sad ones. However, the culminating moment (and turning point) in the film is when Joy realizes Sadness evokes reaction from the surrounding and makes other people come help Riley out of the situation.

In the scene where Riley is sad because she has lost a hockey match, her sadness actually makes her parents come out to support her. When her friends later come over to celebrate with her, she is now happy and full of joy. This is a great example of how emotion actually helps evoke a set of complex reactions that help regulate and improve the situation for Riley. From then on, Joy begins to recognize the importance of all five basic emotions instead of trying to get rid of Sadness because it seems “useless.” From a scientific perspective, Keltner proposes that sadness is actually an emotion that can strengthen relationships. Although Joy does play a major role in controlling and regulating the other four emotions, they each have their own job and functionality as a team.

A healthy psychological state is a team sport

Look Out from the “Emotion Headquarter”

In the emotion literature, there are two approaches to understand emotion: the categorical approach, where emotions are distinct entities as in Inside Out, and the dimensional approach, where emotions are defined based on three core dimensions (i.e. valence, activation, and arousal).

In Inside Out, the film applies the categorical approach to define emotion, but at the end of the plot where Riley plays hockey in a team, all of the emotions (i.e. Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear) are activated to perform as a team at that moment. Thus, emotions actually function in a more complex way than simply having the five emotion types function separately at work. In fact, most emotions encompasses more than the dominant type and may shift as we navigate through the situation. For example, an initial sad memory may actually help evoke care from other people, thus strengthening relationships and turn the event into a happy and joyful ending. Inside Out is able to depict this complexity through careful design of the visual depiction, which is really admirable and scientifically accurate.

Visualization of human memory and personality formation

The visualization of how human memory regulate and develop is truly mind-blowing in Inside Out. Just as how the human brain works in reality, Pixar is able to narrates how our personality is supported by several core events and memories, and that each piece of memory is a “memory ball” with a more dominant emotion. I especially love the depiction of the long term memory database in the film, where there are “memory cleaners” who get rid of old and dysfunctional memory balls to maintain a healthy state of memory storage.

From a developmental perspective, the first emotion that Riley born with is happiness, but more accurately, within 30 seconds, other emotions kick in and the baby begins to cry — as part of the developmental process to grow and perceive the world based on these distinct but cooperatively emotion types.

Riley’s Imaginary Friend Bing Bong in the Long Term Memory Database

Long Term Memory Database

Our core memory transforms and helps us grow

Moreover, as in our emotion regulation lecture, when Riley’s emotional state has a breakdown, some of the core memories and islands get destroyed. As much as we lament the disappearance of childhood fun times and our imaginary friends, it is quite true that these may all fade as we grow up and we will meet new adventures down in the journey. Some old memories must go, as we need to build resiliency through each phase of human development from a child, a teenager to a fully grown adult.

Understanding humans inside out is to build empathy

Recall Happy Memory from a “Memory Ball”

Lastly, I love the last scene where we can now take a peak in different characters’ minds inside out, from the teacher, the pizza server, the teenage boy, and even the cat on the street. Recognizing and trying to understand others’ emotional state is part of our ability to empathize with the world. When we attempt to listen, observe, and understand how others navigate the jungle through managing the five emotions in their own heads, we reach a better and more in-depth understanding of each other. The world is more interesting precisely because we have complex and functional emotions at work all the time. Thank you Inside Out for doing such a great job in bridging all this in a fun and accessible way for a broad set of audience.

Value of the Ordinary

This semester, I take a year-long course on Chaucer's literature and we were assigned to read the Canterbury Tales for the spring term. We are now at the Miller's Tale from the first fragment, but I found it quite difficult to appreciate the value behind these medieval comedic stories, where its narration of the ordinary people and their lives are filled with jokes (and sadly I do not find it funny in anyways), adulteries, and superficial horseplays. The style of Medieval conversations for the lower class uses plenty of coarse and even "bawdy" language in their dialogue and storytelling.

Canterbury tales mural by Ezra Winter. North Reading Room, west wall, Library of Congress John Adams Building, Washington, D.C.

During this week's office hour, I asked my professor "what’s the value of comedy, beside serving as a satire and reflecting the state of society at the time? It seems like tragedy has more 'literary value,’ because the themes in tragedy seemed more eternal in humanity research." My professor replied, "the value of comedy lies exactly in the narration of the ordinary. Comedy reflects the social convention at the time, the thoughts, the emotions, the constraints, and the dialogue of the average people … the 'invisible' population from heroic or epic stories. The experience of the ordinary people may be a 'truer' reflection of the society in the history, as opposed to the exciting and heroic stories of the knights and kings. The ordinary has its own unique value, although it is not so easy to appreciate and resonate with what they cared about at the time." I silently agreed and I thought because the value of the ordinary is often "invisible" and "not-so-exciting-to-recount", it is often undervalued and out of sight.

In our modern society, along with our limited attention and mental resources, it is the wisest to place our attention on the more "significant" things and events, rather than spending time on the relatively trivial and mundane. With this mindset, it is great that we can act more efficiently, by attending to the most important and the most "valuable" aspects of the world. But with this focused and "filtered" mindset, we are also vulnerable to overlook the value of the ordinary, the "not-so-significant" events, and the trivial every day life that occupies a huge portion of our daily experience. A hundred years from now, the part of our experience that does not fit into the category of having "historical significance" may be forgotten and become irrelevant for the future, just as how we may find it difficult to appreciate the mundane life of the average medieval people narrated by Chaucer. 

The Beauty of Emotion Narrative

A film review of “Call Me by Your Name”, directed by Luca Guadagnino, 2018

On a bright summer day in northern Italy, the 17-year-old Elio puts on his sun glasses and lies on a chair in the yard with sunlight washes over him. A typical pleasant summer afternoon with cheerful music, hot air, shiny green leaves, and cool water in the pond. Orange trees have filled the garden, leaving plenty of space for shades and gentle breeze. 

Elio writes music. Delightful and simple tones are the most beloved in the film, partly because it suits the best with the relaxation (and perhaps idleness) of the day to day life in the villa. He is having the best time in his youth, enjoying the glittering days of inspiration and exploration.

Things have changed once Oliver, a charming visiting scholar, arrives to spend the summer with his family. Every eye contact, body movement, and slip of word between the two becomes hint for emotion narratives. There are different phases of emotional development between the two protagonists. Elio and Oliver first begin with careful exploration of each other, where both of them are aware of the emotional tension, but will not disclose it. The awakening desire for sensual pleasure gradually dominates Elio, where he craves deeply for Oliver, for an unexplored territory and sensation in his life. These subtle desire are narrated in a very open and unsophisticated way that guides the viewers to appreciate the authentic desire and sensibility of human experience.

As a viewer, the mundane day to day narration of their summer seems perfectly ordinary. But it is evident that Guadagnino embeds complex emotional tension within the simple family dialogue. By gradually unveiling the relationship of Elio and Oliver, Guadagnino in fact investigates the nature of love, emotion, and relationship, as well as their influence on human experience as a whole.

Specifically, Guadagnino conveys a stance on the significance of having courage to confront your own awakening desire in life, because there is nothing to be shameful of when you encounter your true emotion. As Mr. Perlman says to Elio, “you had a beautiful friendship...Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you.” Encountering and embracing your true desire and emotion is a courageous thing to do, and it is incredibly beautiful too." 

In every stage of our growth, we gingerly perceive, silently observe, and sometimes reluctantly constrain our emotion toward a relationship, a desire, or an experience. Instead of snuffing the flame at the root, Mr. Perlman reminds us to all be gentle to these precious moment of emotion awakening. As Perlman points out “withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better...to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!” Indeed, we value emotion and regard it as a unique human experience that distinguish us from the crowd. The process of emotional exploration guides us to understand ourselves, our identity and our value. When Oliver and Elio initiate their jargon of “call me by your name” and repeatedly call each other “Elio” and “Oliver”, the intimate affection leads to something symbolic and abstract that represent their hearts.

Interestingly, in Chaucer’s writing, he also repeatedly mentions that “love is the greatest law above all”. However, in this film, neither the fidelity of love nor the promise of love matters that much. It is the emotion within human affection that moves us and guides the growth of the protagonists. Love can be arbitrary, demonstrated in the final phone call from Oliver, telling Elio that he will get married soon. Love hurts. But love, as well as other types of emotion, has the power to move us and reminds us of its preciousness.

Lastly, the title “call me by your name” is a hint of intimacy for those who are engaged in a deep relationship. It serves as a symbol that suggests a blurring line between “you” and “me”, which is referred by the blurring identity between the two names. Eventually, Guadagnino reminds us to never devalue the beauty of emotion, the confusing moment of ambiguity, and the precious awakening moment of desire.