The representation of events, in primates at any rate, is a separate process from their emotional evaluation. The same holds for cognitive evaluation. Here too representation and evaluation are separate operations. Acknowledging the symmetry leads to the notion of free representation.

The current study aims to examine how the intense emotions experienced by different Israeli groups during the 2006 Second Lebanon War affected their perceptions of risk. Two weeks after the end of the war, a questionnaire was distributed among 205 people. Some were from the north and had been directly affected by the rocket attacks; others were from the center of Israel. The questionnaires, based on Lerner et al. (2003), measured emotions and perceived risk. The results show significant differences between (...) those living in the north and those in the center of Israel. As expected, people living in the north reported more emotional difficulties during the war, greater perceived risk, and more pessimism in comparison to the center group. Moreover, the results point to significant differences between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs regarding emotions and perceived risk. In addition, the study results show a positive relation between anger and perceived risk. (shrink)

Conceptual space is proposed as an intermediate representation level between the psychological and the neurobiological levels of descriptions of appraisal and emotions. The main advantage of the proposed intermediate representation is that the appraisal and emotions dynamics are described by using the terms of geometry.

This commentary makes three points: (1) There may be no clear-cut distinction between emotion and appraisal “constituents” at neural and psychological levels. (2) The microdevelopment of an emotional interpretation contains a complex microdevelopment of affect. (3) Neurophenomenology is a promising research program for testing Lewis's hypotheses about the neurodynamics of emotion-appraisal amalgams.

The role of emotions in ethics is often taken by philosophers and others as antithetical to rationality. On the most basic level (in undergraduate philosophy exams and elsewhere), stating an opinion in the form "I feel that p" can be a way of sidestepping the demand for reasons. But emotions can sometimes also be seen as supplying reasons for moral judgment to the extent that they involve evaluations--and a way of communicating them across different moral perspectives.

The aim of appraisal theory in the psychology of emotion is to identify the features of the emotion-eliciting situation that lead to the production of one emotion rather than another². A model of emotional appraisal takes the form of a set of dimensions against which potentially emotion-eliciting situations are assessed. The dimensions of the emotion hyperspace might include, for example, whether the eliciting situation fulfills or frustrates the subject’s goals or whether an actor in the eliciting situation has violated a (...) norm. Richard Lazarus’s well-known model of emotional appraisal has six dimensions, and the regions of the resulting hyperspace that correspond to particular emotions are summarized by Lazarus as the ‘core relational themes’ of those emotions. Anger, for examples, is elicited by the core relational theme ‘a demeaning offence against me and mine’, sadness by ‘having experienced an irrevocable loss’ and guilt by ‘having transgressed a moral imperative’ (Lazarus, 1991). (shrink)

Cambridge University Press, 2003 Review by Dina Mendonça, Ph.D. on Jun 12th 2005 Volume: 9, Number: 23.

This chapter supposes that certain bads are necessary for substantial goods, and poses the question of how one ought to react emotionally to such bads. In recent work, Robert Adams is naturally read as contending that one ought to exhibit positive emotions such as gladness towards certain ‘necessary evils’. A rationale he suggests for this view is that love for a person, which involves viewing the beloved as good, requires being glad about what is necessary for her to exist, even (...) if it is something bad such as a war that should be hated considered apart from being required for her existence. I critically discuss this argument, aiming to enrich understanding of the implications of the normativity of love for proper emotions towards necessary evil. (shrink)

Emotion theories in present philosophical discussion propose different models of relationship between feeling and appraisal. The multicomponent model considers appraisal as separate component and distinguishes it from feeling and physiological body changes thus presupposing what may be called 'disembodied' and 'disembedded' appraisal as representational. The recently emerged concept of enactment, in contrast, argues that appraisal is closely linked to feeling and physiological body changes presupposing what can be called 'embodied' and 'embedded' appraisal as relational. The aim of the paper is (...) to investigate which concept of appraisal, the 'disembedded' or the 'embedded' one, is better compatible with current neuroimaging data on emotion processing and thus neurophilosophically more tenable. The 'disembodied' and 'disembedded' concept implies distinct and independent brain regions underlying feeling and appraisal whereas 'embodied' and 'embedded' appraisal implies overlapping and dependent brain regions. Recent neuroimaging studies demonstrate that medial and lateral prefrontal cortical regions are involved in both feeling and appraisal and that there seems to be reciprocal modulation between these regions. Though preliminary, these data suggest that feeling and appraisal are associated with different patterns of neural activity across overlapping and interdependent brain regions. I therefore conclude that current neuroscientific evidence is rather in favor of the 'embodied' and 'embedded' concept of appraisal as relational than the one of 'disembodied' and 'disembedded' appraisal as representational that is presupposed in current multicomponent theories of emotions. (shrink)

What is the difference between an emotional appraisal and a dispassionate judgement? It has been suggested that emotional appraisals are states of a special kind that play a distinctive role in our psychology; it has also been suggested that emotional appraisals have a distinctive kind of content. In this paper, I explore the links between the function and content of an emotional appraisal, making use of a teleosemantic account of intentional content that I have developed elsewhere.

In one of the most frequently quoted passages in the history of emotion research, William James (1884: 189f) announces that emotions occur when the perception of an exciting fact causes a collection of bodily changes, and “our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” The same idea occurred to Carl Lange (1984) around the same time. These authors were not the first to draw a link between the emotions and the body. Indeed, this had been a (...) central theme of Descartes’ exquisite opus, The Passions of the Soul. But James and Lange wanted to push things farther than most, suggesting that emotions are exhausted by bodily changes or perceptions thereof. Other kinds of mental episodes might co-occur when we have an emotion state. For James, an emotion follows an exciting perception. But the exciting perception is not a part of the emotion it excited (Ellsworth, 1994, reads James differently, but see Reisenzein et al.’s 1995 convincing response). The majority of contemporary emotion researchers, especially those in philosophy, find this suggestion completely untenable. Surely, emotions involve something more. At their core, emotions are more like judgments or thoughts, than perceptions. They evaluate, assess, or appraise. Emotions are amendable to rational assessment; they report, correctly or incorrectly, on how we are faring in the world. Within this general consensus, there is a further debate about whether the body should figure into a theory of emotions at all. Perhaps James and Lange offer a theory that is not merely incomplete, but entirely off base. Where they view judgments as contingent and non-constitutive concomitants of emotions, it is actually bodily perceptions that deserve this demotion. Perhaps emotions can be, and often are, disembodied in some fundamental sense. (shrink)

We live our lives through our emotions, writes Robert Solomon, and it is our emotions that give our lives meaning. What interests or fascinates us, who we love, what angers us, what moves us, what bores us--all of this defines us, gives us character, constitutes who we are. In True to Our Feelings, Solomon illuminates the rich life of the emotions--why we don't really understand them, what they really are, and how they make us human and give meaning to life. (...) Emotions have recently become a highly fashionable area of research in the sciences, with brain imaging uncovering valuable clues as to how we experience our feelings. But while Solomon provides a guide to this cutting-edge research, as well as to what others--philosophers and psychologists--have said on the subject, he also emphasizes the personal and ethical character of our emotions. He shows that emotions are not something that happen to us, nor are they irrational in the literal sense--rather, they are judgements we make about the world, and they are strategies for living in it. Fear, anger, love, guilt, jealousy, compassion--they are all essential to our values, to living happily, healthily, and well. Solomon highlights some of the dramatic ways that emotions fit into our ethics and our sense of the good life, how we can make our emotional lives more coherent with our values and be more "true to our feelings" and cultivate emotional integrity. The story of our lives is the story of our passions. We fall in love, we are gripped by scientific curiosity and religious fervor, we fear death and grieve for others, we humble ourselves in envy, jealousy, and resentment. In this remarkable book, Robert Solomon shares his fascination with the emotions and illuminates our passions in an exciting new way. (shrink)