Emotional Frames of Reference and Language Processing
A series of sentences, a story, even a video have very different meanings when the emotional frame of reference is hidden from the person attempting to "translate" the experience into something meaningful.
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archive Older browse past shows Newer July 8, 2016 friday's show
Kristen Uroda for NPR Frame of Reference We all carry an invisible frame of reference in our heads that filters our experience. Alix and Hanna talk to a woman who gets a glimpse of what she's been missing and then loses it. Click on the image above to get the coloring page version of the episode art!
This episode looks at the role our frame of reference plays in how we feel about our lives. The main story is about a recent experiment that took place at Harvard. Researchers wanted to see if they could get people with Aspergers to see emotional and social cues in the same way that neurotypical people do if they stimulated the brain with magnets (a treatment called TMS). They found that some of the subjects in the study were able to see social cues in the world around them that had been entirely invisible to them before, but only for a brief window of time. We speak extensively with one of the people with Aspergers that took part in the study. Then Alix chats with Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj about their shared experience of grappling with a frame of reference inherited from their parents.
Bonus Content:
NPR's health blog, Shots, will be producing special bonus content that explores the theme of each Invisibilia episode. The links below will go live as each feature is published or sign up for our newsletter to get it all delivered to your inbox on Mondays!
This week, Alix Spiegel brings us the story of Kim, a physician whose sense of herself and the world was transformed, for better and worse, at age 54 by a brief encounter with a powerful magnet. And Robin Marantz Henig introduces us to the mother of an autistic teen who moved mountains to get her son an untested treatment she thought might help him only to have him reject it. Henig explores in Shots why scientists studying the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation in autism warn that the treatment is not yet ready for prime time.
Listen with friends! Host your own listening party using this guide from Generation Listen, including conversation starters to spark your discussion, snack ideas, a music playlist and more. You can find conversation catalysts specific to this episode here. Have fun!
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In certain ways, we who are Bible translators, are hampered by our lack of understanding of the emotional cues in our source texts and cultures. Like sufferers of Aspergers Syndrome, we must learn coping-mechanisms to attempt to engineer an escape moments of escape from our own frames of reference. We are also often as unaware of the emotional cues in the target audience's text that we help produce. The lack becomes especially acute in regards to various types of irony, sarcasm, double-entendre and humor en the Bible. These are powerful rhetorical devices and it would be unreasonable that Holy Scripture would eschew such devices. I have sometimes heard Bible translators or scholars deny the presence of irony in the Bible, for example. The reasoning may come from a certain understanding of scriptural inerrancy on the one hand, or of scriptural perspicacity on the other.
Nice thoughts Yancy and a very useful comparison. I am reminded of a presentation at the Bible Translation 2015 Conference in Dallas, TX titled "Translating emotion in the Sign language Bible" by Shadrack Kakui and Josh Cadd. I really enjoyed the presentation and I perceived that there were quite a bit of cross fertilizing discussions resulting from it.