Online research in philosophy

The target article developed a dynamic systems framework that viewed the causal basis of emotion as a self-organizing process giving rise to cognitive appraisal concurrently. Commentators on the article evaluated this framework and the principles and mechanisms it incorporated. They also suggested additional principles, mechanisms, modeling strategies, and phenomena related to emotion and appraisal, in place of or extending from those already proposed. There was general agreement that nonlinear causal processes are fundamental to the psychology and neurobiology of emotion.

Efforts to bridge emotion theory with neurobiology can be facilitated by dynamic systems (DS) modeling. DS principles stipulate higher-order wholes emerging from lower-order constituents through bidirectional causal processes – offering a common language for psychological and neurobiological models. After identifying some limitations of mainstream emotion theory, I apply DS principles to emotion–cognition relations. I then present a psychological model based on this reconceptualization, identifying trigger, self-amplification, and self-stabilization phases of emotion-appraisal states, leading to consolidating traits. The article goes on to (...) describe neural structures and functions involved in appraisal and emotion, as well as DS mechanisms of integration by which they interact. These mechanisms include nested feedback interactions, global effects of neuromodulation, vertical integration, action-monitoring, and synaptic plasticity, and they are modeled in terms of both functional integration and temporal synchronization. I end by elaborating the psychological model of emotion–appraisal states with reference to neural processes. Key Words: appraisal; bidirectional causality; cognition; dynamic systems; emotion; neurobiology; part–whole relations; self-organization. (shrink)

Some dynamic systems approaches posit discontinuous changes, even universal stages, in development. Conversely, Thelen and colleagues see development as gradual because it relies on real-time interactions among many components. Yet their new model hinges on one parameter, neural cooperativity, that should change discontinuously because it engenders new skills that catalyze neural connectivity. In fact, research on cortical connectivity finds development to be discontinuous, and possibly stage-like, based on experience-dependent and experience-independent factors.

Rolls demonstrates how reward/punishment systems are key mediators of cognitive appraisal, and this suggests a fundamental, causal role for emotion in thought and behaviour. However, this causal role for emotion seems to drop out of Rolls's model of consciousness, to be replaced by the old idea that emotion is essentially epiphenomenal. We suggest a modification to Rolls's model in which cognition and emotion activate each other reciprocally, both in appraisal and consciousness, thus allowing emotion to maintain its causal status where (...) it matters most. (shrink)