>So, kidding aside, since behavioural observations are out when it
>comes to evidence, how does one directly observe "psychological states"?
>
I don't know. My dad took me to the zoo once and I observed an elephant
going mad with boredom.
And Rilke once observed a Panther....
His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly. An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.
<http://www.cs.rice.edu/%7Essiyer/minstrels/index_poet_R.html#Rilke>