Online research in philosophy

Over the last few years, there has been a surge of work in a new field called “moral psychology”, which uses experimental methods to test the psychological processes underlying human moral activity. In this paper, I shall follow this line of approach with the aim of working out a model of how people form value judgements and how they are motivated to act morally. I call this model an “affective picture”: ‘picture’ because it remains strictly at the descriptive level and (...) ‘affective’ because it has an important role for affects and emotions. This affective picture is grounded on a number of plausible and empirically supported hypotheses. The main idea is that we should distinguish between various kinds of value judgements by focusing on the sort of state of mind people find themselves in while uttering a judgement. “Reasoned judgements” are products of rational considerations and are based on preliminary acceptance of norms and values. On the contrary, “basic value judgements” are affective, primitive and non-reflective ways of assessing the world. As we shall see, this analysis has some consequences for the traditional internalism-externalism debate in philosophy; it highlights the fact that motivation is primarily linked to “basic value judgements” and that the judgements we openly defend might not have a particular effect on our actions, unless we are inclined to have an emotional attitude that conforms to them. (shrink)

Employee attributions and emotional reactions to unethical behavior of top leaders in an organization recently involved in a highly publicized ethics scandal were examined. Participants (n = 76) from a large southern California government agency completed an ethical climate assessment. Secondary data analysis was performed on the written commentary to an open-ended question seeking employees' perceptions of the ethical climate. Employees attributed the organization's poor ethical leadership to a number of causes, including: lack of moral reasoning, breaches of trust, (...) hypocrisy, and poor ethical behavior role modeling. Emotional reactions to corruption included cynicism, optimism, pessimism, paranoia and fear, and were targeted at top leaders, organizational practices (i.e., the old boy network, nepotism, and cronyism) and ethics interventions. Implications for leadership training and other organizational ethics interventions are discussed. (shrink)

Gut Reactions is an interdisciplinary defense of the claim that emotions are perceptions of changes in the body. This thesis, pioneered by William James and resuscitated by Antonio Damasio, has been widely criticized for failing to acknowledge that emotions are meaningful insofar as they represent concerns, not respiratory function and blood pressure. Fear represents danger, sadness represents loss. To explain this fact, many researchers conclude that emotions must involve judgments regarding one's relationship to the environment. Prinz offers a new unified (...) account of the emotions that reconciles these two theories. He argues that emotions are embodied appraisals--they are perceptions of the body, but, through the body, they also allow us to literally perceive danger, loss, and other matters of concern. The basic idea behind embodied appraisal theory is captured in the familiar notion of a "gut reaction," which has been overlooked by much emotion research. Using recent work in semantics, Prinz show how emotions can be meaningful without incorporating judgments or other cognitive states. Criticizing those who think that some emotions are social constructions, while others can be explained by evolutionary psychology, Prinz argues that all emotions are the same kind of phenomena, involving both nature and nurture. Prinz also distinguishes emotions from other affective states, such as motivations and moods, and offers a theory of emotional valence (what makes some emotions good and others bad). Ultimately, his theory of emotion consciousness is inspired by recent research on the neural correlates of conscious vision. Drawing a parallel between emotion consciousness and visual consciousness, Prinz shows that emotion is a form of perception in the fullest sense. Where vision reveals the identity of objects in a given situation, emotion reveals how that situation bears on our well-being. (shrink)

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)

I have long been interested in the expression of emotion in music and in the response this calls forth from the listener. One such response is a mirroring or echoing one; sad music tends to make (some) listeners feel sad and happy music to make them happy. This mirroring reaction is brought about by what I have called emotional contagion. We tend to resonate with the emotional tenor of the music, much as we catch the emotional (...) ambience emanating from other people. Reflecting on the musical case not only enhances understanding of the listener’s response, it provides a novel objection to the cognitive theory of the emotions favored by many philosophers and invites critical consideration of the models for human-to-human emotional contagion proposed by psychologists. As I try to show, the most common accounts of emotional contagion should be developed and refined in light of analysis of emotional contagion in the musical case, which recommends, for example, that we distinguish attention from non-attentional modes of emotional transmission and, in general, avoid defining the phenomenon reductively in terms of the routes and mechanisms of communication. (shrink)

Charles Darwin is generally credited with having formulated the first systematic attempt to explain the evolutionary origins and function of the expression of emotions in animals and humans. His ingenious theory, however, was burdened with popular misconceptions about human phylogenetic heritage and bore the philosophical and theoretical deficiencies of the brain science of his era that his successors strove to overcome. In their attempts to rectify Darwin?s errors, William James, James Mark Baldwin and John Dewey each made important contributions to (...) a theory of emotion, which attempted to put it on a more secure philosophical and scientific footing. My contention is that Dewey and his collaborator, infant experimentalist Myrtle McGraw, succeeded where their contemporaries failed. They pointed the way out of the morass of recapitulationism, and showed how a developmental theory of consciousness, mind and emotion could be formulated that avoided the epistemological and ontological pitfalls of Darwin?s theory. Drawing on an extensive body of research from contemporary experimental studies of infant development, this essay attempts to put the questions raised by these historical figures about the structure, function and value of emotions in a theoretical framework. A developmental theory is proposed about the complex, interacting neurobiological and neurobehavioral factors that contribute to human emotional development. This theory identifies the possible relationships among emotions, consciousness and mind and how their co-development influences the capacity of young children to form moral judgments. (shrink)

Based on the belief that computational modeling (thinking in terms of representation and computations) can help to clarify controversial issues in emotion theory, this article examines emotional experience from the perspective of the Computational Belief–Desire Theory of Emotion (CBDTE), a computational explication of the belief–desire theory of emotion. It is argued that CBDTE provides plausible answers to central explanatory challenges posed by emotional experience, including: the phenomenal quality,intensity and object-directedness of emotional experience, the function of emotional (...) experience and its relation to cognition and motivation, and the relation between emotional experience and emotion. In addition, CBDTE avoids most objections that have been raised against cognitive theories of emotion. A remaining objection, that beliefs are not necessary for the emotions covered by CBDTE, is rejected as empirically unsupported. (shrink)

Philosophical and empirical moral psychologists claim that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for moral judgment. The aim of this paper is to assess the evidence in favor of both claims and to show how a moderate rationalist position about moral judgment can be defended nonetheless. The experimental evidence for both the necessity- and the sufficiency-thesis concerning the connection between emotional reactions and moral judgment is presented. I argue that a rationalist about moral judgment can be happy to accept (...) the necessity-thesis. My argument draws on the idea that emotions play the same role for moral judgment that perceptions play for ordinary judgments about the external world. I develop a rationalist interpretation of the sufficiency-thesis and show that it can successfully account for the available empirical evidence. The general idea is that the rationalist can accept the claim that emotional reactions are sufficient for moral judgment just in case a subject’s emotional reaction towards an action in question causes the judgment in a way that can be reflectively endorsed under conditions of full information and rationality. This idea is spelled out in some detail and it is argued that a moral agent is entitled to her endorsement if the way she arrives at her judgment reliably leads to correct moral beliefs, and that this reliability can be established if the subject’s emotional reaction picks up on the morally relevant aspects of the situation. (shrink)

Gut Reactions is an interdisciplinary defense of the claim that emotions are perceptions of changes in the body.

Many believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. This paper focuses on epistemic aspects of the putative link between emotions and value by asking two related questions. First, how exactly are emotions supposed to latch onto or track values? And second, how well suited are emotions to detecting or learning about values? To answer the first question, the paper develops the heuristics-model of emotions. This approach models emotions as sui generis heuristics of value. The empirical plausibility of the heuristics-model (...) is demonstrated using evidence from experimental psychology, evolutionary anthropology and neuroscience. The model is used then to answer the second question. If emotions are indeed heuristics of value, then it follows that emotions can be an important and useful source of information about value. However, emotions will not be epistemically superior in the sense of being the highest court of appeal for the justification of axiological beliefs (the latter view is referred to as the Epistemic Dependence Thesis, or EDT for short). The paper applies the heuristics-model to celebrated cases from the philosophy of emotions literature arguing that while the heuristics-model offers a good explanation of typical patterns of emotional reactions in such cases, advocates of EDT will have a hard time accounting for these patterns. The paper also shows that the conclusions drawn from special cases generalize. The paper ends by arguing that skepticism about the metaethical significance of emotions is compatible with a commitment to the importance of emotions in first-order normative ethics. (shrink)

The concept of Developmental Norm of Reaction is explored as a nexus between allometry, ontogeny, and phenotypic plasticity.

Our objective was to explore the relationships between adult attachment and various aspects of emotional awareness, including alexithymia and level of emotional awareness. Participants were 112 university students who completed the Attachment Style Questionnaire, the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ), and the Level of Emotional Awareness Scale. We found that alexithymia was positively related to the avoidant attachment style and negatively with the anxious attachment style. Anxious style-but not avoidance-was also related to the level of emotional awareness. (...) An analysis of the four attachment categories revealed subtle differences regarding the subscales of the BVAQ. Findings are discussed with reference to internal working models of self and others, highlighting the relationship between emotional awareness impairment and interpersonal behaviour. Keywords: alexithymia; emotional awareness; attachment; internal working model; BVAQ; LEAS (Published: 7 March 2012) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2012, 2 : 10744 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.10744. (shrink)

This article addresses the emergence of human personality in evolution. The mechanisms of natural and sexual selection developed by Darwin are not sufficient to explain the sense of self. Therefore we attempt to trace the evolutionary process back to a form of selection termed “emotional selection.” This involves reconstructing selection out of subjective qualities and showing how emotions enable human forms of life that are relevant for the cultural level of cooperation that marks our species. We see a paradigm (...) shift in the concept of emotional selection that binds emotion and evolution closer together, thus closing the explanatory gap between classical ethology and modern evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, (...) we investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data. (shrink)

Shame, the Holocaust, and dark times -- Locating moral shame -- Film, literature, and the ramification of shame -- Beyond shame : emotional reaction and moral response.

I examine emotional reactions to wrongdoing to determine whether they offer support for retributivism. It is often thought that victims desire to see their victimizer suffer and that this reaction offers support for retributivism. After rejecting several attempts to use different theories of emotion and different approaches to using emotions to justify retributivism, I find that, assuming a cognitive theory of emotion is correct, emotions can be used as heuristic guides much as suggested by Michael Moore. Applying this (...) method to the actual emotional reactions of victims' relatives, however, does not find support for retributivism. Instead, it suggests punishment should be understood as part of a process of recovery with a complex set of demands. Retributive concerns can play a role in the process, but they don't have the priority that retributivism requires. (shrink)

Despite the growing appreciation of the relevance of affect to cognition, analogy researchers have paid remarkably little attention to emotion. This paper discusses three general classes of analogy that involve emotions. The most straightforward are analogies and metaphors about emotions, for example "Love is a rose and you better not pick it." Much more interesting are analogies that involve the transfer of emotions, for example in empathy in which people understand the emotions of others by imagining their own emotional (...) reactions in similar situations. Finally, there are analogies that generate emotions, for example analogical jokes that generate emotions such as surprise and amusement. (shrink)

The ancient Stoics notoriously argued, with thoroughness and force, that all ordinary “emotions” (passions, mental affections: in Greek, pãyh) are thoroughly bad states of mind, not to be indulged in by anyone, under any circumstances: anger, resentment, gloating; pity, sympathy, grief; delight, glee, pleasure; impassioned love (i.e. ¶rvw), agitated desires of any kind, fear; disappointment, regret, all sorts of sorrow; hatred, contempt, schadenfreude. Early on in the history of Stoicism, however, apparently in order to avoid the objection that human nature (...) itself demands and indeed justifies—under certain circumstances at any rate—emotional attachments to or aversions from, and reactions to, some persons, things, and happenings, they introduced a theory of what came to be called eÈpãyeiai, good and acceptable ways of feeling or being affected. For short I will render these in English by “good feelings.”1 They divided these into three generic kinds, which they dubbed “joy” (xarã), “wish” (boÊlhsiw) and “caution” (eÈlãbeia). They ranged these alongside, and set them in sharp contrast to, three of the four highest genera into which they divided the normal human emotions: “pleasure” (≤donÆ), i.e., being pleased about something,2 “appetitive desire” (§piyuµ€a), and “fear” (fÒbow), respectively. The Stoics maintained that, though ordinary, familiar human emotions such as these last-named ones were always bad, the three sorts of “good feeling,” and their more specific variations (since these three are only the basic genera into which lots of other good ways of feeling will fall), were not merely free from the grounds of criticism on which ordinary emotions were rejected, and so were perfectly acceptable. The fully perfected human being (the “wise person”) would indeed regularly be subject to them. (shrink)

Surprise has been characterized has an emotional reaction to an upset belief having a heuristic role and playing a criterial role for belief ascription. The discussion of cases of diachronic and synchronic violations of coherence suggests that surprise plays an epistemic role and provides subjects with some sort of phenomenological access to their subpersonal doxastic states. Lack of surprise seems not to have the same epistemic power. A distinction between belief and expectation is introduced in order to account (...) for some aspects of surprise: expectations are construed as volatile representations that tie belief to action. In the cases in which action is not involved, general, “ideological,” expectations are generate in strict connection with the context and with the possibilities of action. (shrink)

One stream in contemporary philosophical and psychological study of the emotions argues that they are perceptual capacities. The present project is to compare and contrast two possible models of emotional perception. The central difference between these models is the notion of modularity, and the corresponding overall view of the nature of the mind, that they use. One model uses classic, Fodorian modules, which S.L. Hurley characterizes as “vertical”. The other model uses “horizontal” modules. I suggest some empirical tests that (...) might adjudicate between these different kinds of emotional modularity, and hence between these two models of emotional perception. I conclude with some remarks about the extent of the relevance of this issue. (shrink)

I will argue that the fairly common assumption that brain imaging may compromise people’s privacy in an undesirable way only if moral crimes are committed is false. Sometimes persons’ privacy is compromised because of failures of privacy. A normal emotional reaction to failures of privacy is embarrassment and shame, not moral resentment like in the cases of violations of right to privacy. I will claim that if (1) neuroimaging will provide all kinds of information about persons’ inner life (...) and not only information that is intentionally searched for, and (2) there will be more and more application fields of fMRI and more and more people whose brains will be scanned (without any coercion), then, in the future, shame may be an unfortunately common feeling in our culture. This is because failures of privacy may dramatically increase. A person may feel shame strongly and long, especially if his failure is witnessed by people who he considers relatively important, but less than perfectly trustworthy. (shrink)

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, in 1723 (Source on Smith's life: E G West, Adam Smith ). He entered Glasgow University in 1737, aged 14. This university still followed some practices of the medieval universities, for example in admitting students at age 14. Its professors still took fees directly from students: that had been the original practice in medieval universities, but in more famous universities rich people had endowed colleges within the university, which paid lecturers' salaries. The Glasgow (...) timetable was still medieval. The main lecture took place at 7.30 am in the cold and dark, at 11 the students were quizzed on the mornings lecture, at 12 there was a lecture on an optional topic. This was the typical student's day in the thirteenth century. But the curriculum was modern: besides philosophy (the main medieval subject) students took Greek and Mathematics. The philosophy was modern. At Glasgow Adam Smith studied under Francis Hutcheson (see extracts from his works in Raphael British Moralists vol.1, p.261ff.)). Hutchison taught in English (not Latin) and was a vivid lecturer. Moral philosophy, or ethics, was a flourishing subject at the time. The main division was between two schools of 'intuitionists' (as they would now be called). To remind you: Ethics is concerned with what is good and bad, better and worse, in human conduct - in the ends we seek, in the actions in which we seek our ends. Intuitionism is the doctrine that in the last analysis we simply 'see' that some way of acting is good or right, or the opposite: that basic ethical assessments cannot be justified by argument, and do not need to be. 'See' of course is a metaphor. Many 18C moral philosophers held that it is reason that 'sees' what is good and right. Hutchison said that it is a moral sense: not reason, and not the bodily senses of vision, hearing etc., but something more like a bodily sense than like reason. On Hutchison's analysis, ethical judgement is a specific kind of emotional reaction to a comtemplated act.. (shrink)

The advances in biotechnology have given rise to a discussion concerning the strong emotional reaction expressed by the public towards biotechnological innovations. This reaction has been named the ‘Yuck-factor’ by several theorists of bioethics. Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President's council on bioethics, has appraised this public reaction as ‘an emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it’.1 Similar arguments have been forwarded by the Catholic Church, several Protestant denominations (...) and the Pro-Life movement. Several bioethicists have, however, opposed the idea of a disgust-based morality.2Recent findings in cognitive science support the view that the strong negative emotions people often experience when faced with biotechnological ideas are not expressions of inner wisdom. The negative emotions may rather be the result of a cognitive violation the biotechnological innovations easily cause.Due to their evolutionary background, people have certain automatic and quick cognitive tendencies routinely used for categorizing and reasoning about nature, usually termed ‘folk biology’. Biotechnological processes like hybridisation and cloning clearly violate several of the cognitive rules people naturally apply for the explanation and categorization of their natural environment.As the cognitive tendencies routinely applied to the explanation of biological world are violated, an emotional response of fear, disgust and of something unnatural being underway is easily provoked. It is suggested in this paper that the reason behind the Yuck-factor is not a deep inner wisdom, but a violation of natural human cognitive tendencies concerning the biological world. (shrink)

During much of the past century, it was widely believed that phonemes--the human speech sounds that constitute words--have no inherent semantic meaning, and that the relationship between a combination of phonemes (a word) and its referent is simply arbitrary. Although recent work has challenged this picture by revealing psychological associations between certain phonemes and particular semantic contents, the precise mechanisms underlying these associations have not been fully elucidated. Here we provide novel evidence that certain phonemes have an inherent, nonarbitrary (...) class='Hi'>emotional quality. Moreover, we show that the perceived emotional valence of certain phoneme combinations depends on a specific acoustic feature--namely, the dynamic shift within the phonemes’ first two frequency components. These data suggest a phoneme-relevant acoustic property influencing the communication of emotion in humans, and provide further evidence against previously held assumptions regarding the structure of human language. This finding has potential applications for a variety of social, educational, clinical, and marketing contexts. (shrink)

The ancient Stoics notoriously argued, with thoroughness and force, that all ordinary “emotions” (passions, mental affections: in Greek, pãyh) are thoroughly bad states of mind, not to be indulged in by anyone, under any circumstances: anger, resentment, gloating; pity, sympathy, grief; delight, glee, pleasure; impassioned love (i.e. ¶rvw), agitated desires of any kind, fear; disappointment, regret, all sorts of sorrow; hatred, contempt, schadenfreude. Early on in the history of Stoicism, however, apparently in order to avoid the objection that human nature (...) itself demands and indeed justifies—under certain circumstances at any rate—emotional attachments to or aversions from, and reactions to, some persons, things, and happenings, they introduced a theory of what came to be called eÈpãyeiai, good and acceptable ways of feeling or being affected. For short I will render these in English by “good feelings.”1 They divided these into three generic kinds, which they dubbed “joy” (xarã), “wish” (boÊlhsiw) and “caution” (eÈlãbeia). They ranged these alongside, and set them in sharp contrast to, three of the four highest genera into which they divided the normal human emotions: “pleasure” (≤donÆ), i.e., being pleased about something,2 “appetitive desire” (§piyuµ€a), and “fear” (fÒbow), respectively. The Stoics maintained that, though ordinary, familiar human emotions such as these last-named ones were always bad, the three sorts of “good feeling,” and their more specific variations (since these three are only the basic genera into which lots of other good ways of feeling will fall), were not merely free from the grounds of criticism on which ordinary emotions were rejected, and so were perfectly acceptable. The fully perfected human being (the “wise person”) would indeed regularly be subject to them.3 Their theory of the perfect human life did not, then, they could claim, require any outrageously unnatural demand, presumably unrealizable in any case, for a life completely without all feelings of involvement in the sweep and flow of life.. (shrink)

I argue that the very act of supposing something contrary to fact, and entertaining some possible consequences, is in itself pleasurable. That is, I contend that it is not solely our emotional reaction to the content of our suppositions that motivates us to suppose, but that it is pleasurable to suppose regardless of the content of the supposition. This position helps explain why we spend so much time entertaining such a wide variety of counterfactual situations (in forms such (...) as pretend play, fantasies, or engagement with fictions). It also helps explain suppositions that are not motivations to act, and why we enjoy entertaining so many suppositions to which we would react neutrally, or even negatively, if they were to be truly the case. It provides the seeds of an answer to the paradox of tragedy: why should we find fictional tragedies pleasurable? An account of our motivations to engage in supposing that relies solely on our reaction to the content of a supposition is incapable of explaining all of the phenomena associated with supposing. A position that the very act of supposing is pleasurable provides a better explanation. (shrink)

While the biomedical model is still theleading paradigm within modern medicine and healthcare, and people with generalised chronicmusculoskeletal pain are frequent users of health careservices, their diagnoses are rated as having thelowest prestige among health care personnel. Anepistemological framework for understanding relationsbetween body, emotions, mind and meaning is presented.An approach based on a phenomenological epistemologyis discussed as a supplement to actions based on thebiomedical model.Within the phenomenological frame of understanding,the body is viewed as a subject and carrier ofmeaning, and therefore (...) chronic pain can be interpretedas a rational reaction to the totality of a person'slife situation. Search for possible hidden individualmeanings in painful muscles presupposes meeting healthpersonnel who view the person within a holistic frameof reference. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide a noetic analysis of emotional trauma. It highlights three essential features of trauma, as well as one non-essential feature, and attempts to make sense of them phenomenologically. The first essential feature of trauma that the paper considers is the disbelief that pervades traumatic experience. When traumatized, we cannot believe that the traumatic event has taken place. This is because we will, not for the event not to have happened—we cannot will something that is in (...) the past—but to believe that it did not happen so as to shield ourselves from our painful emotional response to it. The second essential feature of trauma is our inability to distinctly categorially intuit the central state of affairs around which our trauma revolves. The traumatic situation is literally unthinkable by us, for it is incongruent with both our expectations regarding the subject of the trauma and our horizon of sense more generally. The third essential feature of trauma is the temporal disorientation that it brings about. Such disorientation arises from our prolonged and single-minded attention to an increasingly complex categorial object: the traumatic situation. Finally, the paper considers a non-essential feature of trauma, namely, how traumatic experience can motivate phenomenological and scientific reactions. (shrink)

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we believe that they are fearsome. (...) Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful. Many of these cases involve a conflict between one’s emotion and one’s evaluative judgement. Emotions that are thus conflicting with judgement can be called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The question I am interested in is whether or not recalcitrant emotions amount to emotional illusions, that is, whether or not these cases are sufficiently similar to perceptual illusions to justify the claim that they fall under the same general heading. The answer to this depends on what emotions are. For instance, the view that emotions are evaluative judgments makes it difficult to make room for the claim that emotional errors are perceptual illusions. Fearing an innocuous spider would simply amount to making the error of judging that the spider is fearsome while it is in fact innocuous. This might involve an illusion of some sort, but it certainly does not amount to anything like a perceptual illusion. In this chapter, I argue that recalcitrant emotions are a kind of perceptual illusion.. (shrink)

Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, Jesse Prinz defends the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we (...) are merely expressing our emotions. Prinz argues that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, he turns to a defense of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. Prinz surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and he draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. He also criticizes evidence from animal behavior and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. Prinz concludes that there is no single true morality, but he also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible. Throughout the book, Prinz relates his views to contemporary and historical work in philosophical ethics. His views echo themes in the writings of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, but Prinz supports, extends, and revises these classic theories using the resources of cutting-edge cognitive science. The Emotional Construction of Morals will stimulate and challenge anyone who is curious about the nature and origin of moral values. (shrink)

This paper proposes that self-deception results from the emotional coherence of beliefs with subjective goals. We apply the HOTCO computational model of emotional coherence to simulate a rich case of self-deception from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.We argue that this model is more psychologically realistic than other available accounts of self-deception, and discuss related issues such as wishful thinking, intention, and the division of the self.

The topic of this study is a notion of empathy that is common in philosophy and in the behavioral sciences. It is here referred to as ‘the notion of empathy as emotional sharing’, and it is characterized in terms of three ideas. If a person, S, has empathy with respect to an emotion of another person, O, then (i) S experiences an emotion that is similar to an emotion that O is currently having, (ii) S’s emotion is caused, in (...) a particular way, by the state of O or by S’s entertaining an idea of the state or situation of O, and (iii) S experiences this emotion in a way that does not entail that S is in the corresponding emotional state. The aim of the study is to clarify this notion of empathy by clarifying these three ideas and by tracing the history of their development in philosophy. -/- The study consists of two parts. Part one contains a short and selective account of the history in Western philosophy of the notion of empathy as emotional sharing. In chapter 2 Spinoza’s theory of imitation of affects and Hume’s theory of sympathy are presented. It is argued that these theories only exemplify the second idea characteristic of the notion of empathy as emotional sharing. Chapter 3 contains presentations of Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy, and Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion. These theories are shown to exemplify the second and the third idea. In chapter 4 there are presentations of Edith Stein’s description of Einfühlung, and Max Scheler’s account of empathy and fellow-feeling. It is shown that these accounts contain explicit specifications of the third idea, and it is argued that they also exemplify the second idea. -/- In part two, the three ideas are further clarified and the notion of empathy as emotional sharing is defined. Chapter 5 contains a discussion of the main contemporary philosophical analyses of empathy. Three different views are distinguished: one that construes empathetic emotions as emotional states, one that construes them as imagined emotions, and one that construes them as off-line emotions. The first two views are criticized and rejected. The third is accepted and further developed in chapter 6, which contains a general analysis of the emotions. A distinction is made between two ways of experiencing an emotion, and it is argued that it is possible to have the affective experience characteristic of a particular kind of emotional state without being in that kind of state. In chapter 7, a definition of ‘empathy’ is proposed. This definition contains specifications of the three ideas characteristic of the notion of empathy as emotional sharing, and it shows both how the empathizer’s emotion resembles the emotion of the empathee, and how this emotion is caused and experienced. (shrink)

The word "truth" retains, in common use, traces of origins that link it to trust, troth, and truce, connoting ideas of fidelity, loyalty, and authenticity. The word has become, in contemporary philosophy, encased in a web of technicalities, but we know that a true image is a faithful portrait; a true friend a loyal one. In a novel or a poem, too, we have a feel for what is emotionally true, though we are not concerned with the actuality of events (...) and characters depicted. To have emotions is to care about certain things: we can wonder whether those things are really worth caring about. We can wonder whether our passions reflect who we are, and whether they constitute fitting responses to the vicissitudes of life. So there are two aspects to emotional truth: how well an emotion reflects the threats and promises of the world, and how well it reflects our own individual nature. That is the starting point of this book, which looks first at the analogies and disanalogies between strict propositional truth and a looser, "generic" sense of truth. As applied to emotions, generic truth is closer to those original meanings: as in a portrait's fidelity or friend's loyalty. Taken in this sense, the notion of emotional truth opens up large vistas on areas of life essential to our existence as social beings, and to our concerns with beauty, morality, love, death, sex, knowledge, desire, coherence, and happiness. Each of those topics illustrates some facet of the dominant theme of the book: the crucial but often ambivalent role of our emotions in grounding and yet also sometimes undermining our values. Emotions act, in holistic perspective, as ultimate arbiters of values where different and independently justified standards of value compete. (shrink)

How are we to distinguish between appropriate emotional responses that reveal morally salient reasons and inappropriate emotional responses that reflect our prejudices? It is often assumed that reason – considered as distinct from emotion – will make the distinction. I argue that this view is false, and that the process by which emotional responses are vetted involves ‘emotional self-awareness’. By this, I mean feeling an emotion, being aware of so doing, and feeling some usually subtle (...) class='Hi'>emotional response, often of calm or anxiety, to it, together with a general readiness to feel and acknowledge what emotions one has. Registering and exploring feelings of anxiety that arise in emotional self-awareness helps enable us to detect when emotions and thoughts are inappropriate. Deliberation that is not emotionally open in this way is therefore at an epistemic disadvantage. Furthermore, the attempt to remain unemotional when evaluating one’s emotions can be produced or co-opted by anxiety about one’s feelings of precisely the kind that indicates one’s emotional responses and thoughts are being distorted. (shrink)

Why does cinema exert such power over our emotions? Many have wanted to answer by appeal to the idea that film sustains some illusion concerning the events it narrates. I compare three such views: that film sustains the illusion that those events are before us; that it sustains that illusion, but only partially; and that, though viewers are always fully aware of seeing pictures, those pictures are experienced as the moving photographic record of the narrated events. I identify these positions’ (...) successes and failures in explaining film’s emotional power, and various ways in which the issue between them might be tested further. (shrink)

This paper consists in a critical review of Peter Goldie's book, The Emotion. A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Goldie is right to distinguish between long-term emotions and emotional experiences. And he is also right to reject the view that emotions are reducible to 'feelingless' states plus some extra feelings. However, Goldie's own account in terms of "feeling towards" is problematic. Goldie would have been better advised to claim that emotional experiences are necessarily emotional representations (...) of something as being F (disgusting, attractive, admirable, etc.), that is, that emotional experiences are apprehensions or representations of evaluative features. (shrink)

In this book Mark Wynn argues that the landscape of philosophical theology looks rather different from the perspective of a re-conceived theory of emotion. In matters of religion, we do not need to opt for objective content over emotional form or vice versa. On the contrary, these strategies are mistaken at root, since form and content are not properly separable here - because 'inwardness' may contribute to 'thought-content', or because (to use the vocabulary of the book) emotional feelings (...) can themselves constitute thoughts; or because, to put the point a further way, in religious contexts, perception and conception are often infused by feeling. Wynn uses this perspective to forge a distinctive approach to a range of established topics in philosophy of religion, notably: religious experience; the problem of evil; the relationship of religion and ethics, and religion and art; and in general, the connection of 'feeling' to doctrine and tradition. (shrink)

CHAPTER Emotional Cognition An introduction Simon C. Moore and Mike Oaksford There has been a marked shift in the perceived role of emotion in human ...

What does it mean to say that an emotional response fits the situation? This question cannot be answered simply by specifying the core relational theme (loss or risk, say) associated with each emotion: we must also explain what constitutes an emotionally significant loss or risk. It is sometimes suggested that emotionally significant situations are those that bear on the subject’s interests or concerns. I accept that this claim is plausible for some emotional responses, and I propose a particular (...) way of interpreting it. I suggest that, for many emotions, emotional significance is determined by the subject’s likes and dislikes – that is, settled dispositions to find a certain situation pleasant or distressing. I contrast this account with other preference-based accounts and with an account that appeals to the subject’s interests. I argue that we should prefer the likes-based account to these rival views. (shrink)

Emotional Truth is de Sousa's second book on emotion. The Rationality of Emotion (1987) is to be counted among the classics in the now thriving field of the philosophy of emotion. Emotional Truth is a natural sequel; it not only expands on some of the ideas presented in de Sousa's older book, but presents new highly stimulating and often intriguing ideas as well. De Sousa's writing, although at times a bit hard to follow and unnecessarily technical, is insightful, (...) witty and elegant. De Sousa is a wonderfully creative writer, and like many creative writers, he sometimes privileges depth over rigor. On the one hand, this is a major shortcoming; on the other hand, this is a great spur for further research. Although not everyone will be happy with the book, Emotional Truth is a must-read for anyone serious about research on emotion. (shrink)

Bill Seeley suggests that what follows from research into crossmodal perception for expression and emotion in the arts is that there is an emotional contour (i.e., a contour constitutive of the content of an emotion and potentially realizable across a range of media). As a response of sorts, I speculate as to what this might hold for philosophical and empirical enquiry into expression and emotion across the arts as well as into the nature of the emotions themselves.

The neurobiological systems that mediate the basic emotions are beginning to be understood. They appear to be constituted of genetically coded, but experientially refined executive circuits situated in subcortical areas of the brain which can coordinate the behavioral, physiological and psychological processes that need to be recruited to cope with a variety of primal survival needs (i.e., they signal evolutionary fitness issues). These birthrights allow newborn organisms to begin navigating the complexities of the world and to learn about the values (...) and contingencies of the environment. Some of these systems have been identified and characterized using modern neuroscientific and psychobiological tools. The fundamental emotional systems can now be defined by the functional psychobiological characteristics of the underlying circuitries ? characteristics which help coordinate behavioral, physiological and psychological aspects of emotionality, including the valenced affective feeling states that provide fundamental values for the guidance of behavior. The various emotional circuits are coordinated by different neuropeptides, and the arousal of each system may generate distinct affective/neurodynamic states and imbalances may lead to various psychiatric disorders. The aim of this essay is to discuss the underlying conceptual issues that must be addressed for additional progress in understanding the nature of primary process affective consciousness. (shrink)

The phenomena of human consciousness and subjectivity are explored from the perspective of affect-logic, a comprehensive meta-theory of the interactions between emotion and cognition based mainly on cognitive and social psychology, psychopathology, neurobiology Piaget?s genetic epistemology, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary science. According to this theory, overt or covert affective-cognitive interactions are obligatorily present in all mental activity, seemingly ?neutral? thinking included. Emotions continually exert numerous so-called operator-effects, both linear and nonlinear, on attention, on memory and on comprehensive thought, or logic in (...) a broad sense. They deeply ?affect? also consciousness and subjectivity, as showed by the analysis of four crucially involved phenomena, namely (1) attention, (2) abstraction, (3) language, and (4) the prevailing affective state. The conclusion is that neither consciousness nor subjectiovity can be adequately understood without fully considering their emotional aspects. (shrink)

Some attempts to understand emotion have failed to account for important features of our emotional experience ? notably, the experience of gaining insight when we express our emotions. In this essay I will hold that if we properly understand emotions, then we see that the expression of emotion contributes to the growth of consciousness by providing a process wherein consciousness can recognize and reclaim its inherent wholeness, and thereby overcome fragmentation. Hence, in this essay I will strive to: (1) (...) demonstrate that we do get insight when we express our emotions, (2) offer a suggestion as to why this feature is often overlooked, (3) propose a model for understanding the emotions that helps to explain this holistic feature of emotion, and (4) show how this insight into the nature of emotion contributes to our understanding of the growth of consciousness. (shrink)

Following some initial interrogations on the experiential and creative nature of symbolic-metaphorical processes (e.g. Gendlin, 1997a; Gruber, 1988) and some work on the production and interpretation of linguistically novel metaphors (e.g. Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff & Turner, 1989), we propose a new, `emotional-experiential' perspective on creative metaphors — perhaps, the most historically and sociologically important type of symbolic constructions. The emotional-experiential perspective accounts for the production and interpretation of creative metaphors through idiosyncratic emotion-based associations. Introspective, laboratory, and illustrative case (...) study evidence from several Western cultures is provided. Implications for broad issues concerning creative metaphor and symbolization are discussed. (shrink)

How much can we shape the emotions we experience? Or to put it another way, how plastic are our emotions? It is clear that the exercise of identifying the degree of plasticity of emotion is futile without a prior specification of what can be plastic, so we first propose an analysis of the components of emotions. We will then turn to empirical data that might be used to assess the degree of plasticity of emotions.

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)

Background mood differs from focal emotions in that it is an inchoate “bodily felt sense” rather than full fledged emotional syndromes such as anger, sadness, etc. Microanalysis of a Focusing therapy session is made to illustrate how the cultivation and maintenance of background mood with its characteristic double vision is essential to emotional creativity.

This paper discusses the debate over whether emotional expressions are spontaneous or intentional actions. We describe a variety of empirical evidence supporting these two possibilities. But we argue that the spontaneous-intentional distinction fails to explain the psychological dynamics of emotional expressions. We claim that a complex systems perspective on intentions, as self-organized critical states, may yield a unified view of emotional expressions as a consequence of situated action. This account simultaneously acknowledges the embodied status of environment, evolution, (...) culture and mind in theories of emotion. (shrink)

This paper discusses the debate over whether emotional expressions are spontaneous or intentional actions. We describe a variety of empirical evidence supporting these two possibilities. But we argue that the spontaneous-intentional distinction fails to explain the psychological dynamics of emotional expressions. We claim that a complex systems perspective on intentions, as self-organized critical states, may yield a unified view of emotional expressions as a consequence of situated action. This account simultaneously acknowledges the embodied status of environment, evolution, (...) culture and mind in theories of emotion. (shrink)

It has been reported that, on average, most adults recall first memories formed around age 3.5. In general, most first memories are positive. However, whether these first memories tend to be visual or verbal and whether the period for childhood amnesia (CA) is greater for visual or verbal or for positive versus negative memories has not been determined. Because negative, stressful experiences disrupt memory and can injure memory centers such as the hippocampus and amygdala, and since adults who were traumatized (...) or abused during childhood (TA) reportedly suffer memory disturbances, it was hypothesized that those with a history of early trauma might suffer from a lengthier childhood amnesia and form their first recallable memories at a later age as compared to the general population (GP). Because the right hemisphere matures earlier than the language-dominant left hemisphere, and is dominant for visual and emotional memory, as well as the stress reponse, it was hypothesized that first recallable memories would be visual rather than verbal. Lastly, since stress can injure the brain and disrupt memory, it was hypothesized that the traumatized group would demonstrate memory and intellectual disturbances associated with right hemisphere injury as based on WAIS-R, Wechsler Memory Scale, and facial-memory testing. All hypotheses were supported. Positive and visual memories are formed before negative and verbal memories. TA CA offset, on average, is at age 6.1 versus 3.5 for GPs. TA PIQ (performance IQ), short-term visual memory, and facial memory were significantly reduced. (shrink)

In our everyday psychologising, emotions figure large. When we are trying to explain and predict what a person says and does, that person’s emotions are very much among the objects of our thoughts. Despite this, emotions do not figure large in our philosophical reconstruction of everyday psychological practice—in philosophical accounts of the rational production and control of behaviour. Barry Smith has noted this point: We frequently mention people’s emotional sates when assessing how they behave, when trying to understand why (...) they say and do the things they say and do, and when deciding how to deal with them. A large part of our awareness of others and our ability to make sense of them depends on their emotional make-up and our appreciation of how this affects their thoughts and actions. All of this is missing from the standard accounts of folk psychology, and the key question is why? (2002, 111-2). Before beginning to answer to Smith’s question, I want to say more to characterise the approach in philosophical psychology which he is questioning. There are many detailed philosophical accounts of the rational production and control of behaviour. My aim here isn’t to examine these details, but to characterise a certain species of philosophical psychology—one which holds that one can explain the rational production and control of behaviour in terms of a narrow set of mental state types: belief, desire (and perhaps a few others: perception or intention). Hence my label for this species: ‘Humean psychology’. The orthodox Humean view is that rational agency can be explained adequately by appeal to the agent’s beliefs and desires. So, to borrow an example from Davidson (1978), we can explain a person’s adding salt to the stew by citing her desire that the will stew taste better and her belief that if.. (shrink)

Two putative functions of emotion experience ? its roles in intentional action and in social understanding ? were investigated using a group of individuals (repressors) known to have impaired anxiety experience. Repressors, low-anxious, high-anxious, and defensive high-anxious individuals were asked to give a public presentation, and then given the opportunity to avoid the presentation. Repressors were the group most likely to avoid giving the presentation, but were the least likely to give an emotional explanation for their avoidance. By contrast, (...) they were not less likely than other groups to provide negative emotional explanations of another person?s behaviour in a film clip. We concluded that: (1) repressors are impaired in self- but not in other-explanation using emotion, implying that ?simulation? is not the method used by repressors to ground their folk psychology, (2) the intentional avoidance shown by repressors is indicative of some intact first-order phenomenal anxiety experience but that they lack second-order awareness of this anxiety experience. (shrink)

Semifactual thinking about what might have been the same, e.g., ''even if Philip had not chosen the chocolate ice-cream sundae, he would have developed an allergic reaction'' has been neglected compared to counterfactual thinking about what might have been different, e.g., ''if only Philip had not chosen the chocolate ice-cream sundae, he would not have developed an allergic reaction''. We report the first systematic comparison of the two sorts of thinking in two experiments. The first experiment showed that (...) counterfactual ''if only'' thoughts about an antecedent event lead people to judge the event to be more causally related to the outcome, whereas semifactual ''even if'' thoughts lead people to judge the antecedent event to be less causally related to the outcome. In addition, the experiment showed that generating counterfactual ''if only'' thoughts increases emotional reactions such as regret, whereas generating semifactual ''even if'' thoughts decreases such reactions. The second experiment, along with a replication experiment, showed that when people complete ''if only'' and ''even if'' sentence stems, they focus on different alternative antecedents to the outcome: ''if only'' thoughts focus on alternatives that would undo the outcome whereas ''even if'' thoughts focus on alternatives that would not undo it, from among a set of available alternative antecedents in which either all, some, or none would undo the outcome. The implications of the results for theories of thinking about what might have been are discussed. (shrink)

Three kinds of emotional consciousness are distinguished in this article: feeling awareness, intellectual awareness, and bare awareness. All are important to three moral properties that emotions may have: epistemic, practical, and relational. The bulk of this article is devoted to the third dimension of moral value, that emotions are constitutive of personal relationships such as friendship, enmity, good and bad parenthood, and collegiality. The conception of emotions as concern-based construals (Roberts, 2003) is put to work to explain how felt (...) and intellectually conscious emotions are constitutive of the qualities of such relationships. The relational value of emotions interacts with their epistemic and practical values. (shrink)

Recent work in cognitive science provides overwhelming evidence for a link between emotion and moral judgment. I review ?ndings from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and research on psychopathology and conclude that emotions are not merely correlated with moral judgments but they are also, in some sense, both necessary and suf?cient. I then use these ?ndings along with some anthropological observations to support several philosophical theories: ?rst, I argue that sentimentalism is true: to judge that something is wrong is to have a (...) sentiment of disapprobation towards it. Second, I argue that moral facts are response-dependent: the bad just is that which cases disapprobation in a community of moralizers. Third, I argue that a form of motivational internalism is true: ordinary moral judgments are intrinsically motivating, and all non-motivating moral judgments are parasitic on these. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally tried to understand the emotions and their bearing on rationality and moral motivation by assimilating emotion to other categories such as sensation, judgment, and desire. In recent years, moving away from the Cartesian identification of emotions with particular sensations, many philosophers have embraced "judgmentalism," the view that emotions are essentially evaluative judgments or beliefs, with only an accidental connection to the feelings and impulses we intuitively take as "emotional." Anger, for instance, either is or entails the (...) belief that one has been wronged and that the source of injury or offense deserves punishment. (shrink)

Roger Scruton appears to have been the first to argue for and articulate an anti-realist theory of aesthetic properties. In the case of emotional qualities of music, his principal argument against realism is unsound and cannot, I believe, be repaired. Nevertheless an anti-realist view of emotional qualities of music is in my view correct and I defend Scruton's insight against a rival realist conception. However, I prefer a rather different form of anti-realism to Scruton's.

Derek Parfit's “reductionist” account of personal identity (including the rejection of anything like a soul) is coupled with the rejection of a commonsensical intuition of essential self-unity, as in his defense of the counter-intuitive claim that “identity does not matter.” His argument for this claim is based on reflection on the possibility of personal fission. To the contrary, Simon Blackburn claims that the “unity reaction” to fission has an absolute grip on practical reasoning. Now David Lewis denied Parfit's claim (...) that reductionism contravenes common sense, so I revisit the debate between Parfit and Lewis, showing why Parfit wins it. Is reductionism about persons then inherently at odds with the unity reaction? Not necessarily; David Velleman presents a reductionist theory according to which fission does not conflict with the unity reaction. Nonetheless, relying on the distinction between person level descriptions of first-person states and the first-person perspective itself, I argue that Velleman's theory does not eliminate fission-based conflict with the unity reaction. Footnotesa * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the philosophy departments at Rutgers University and Bowling Green State University. I am indebted to many members of these audiences, and to the other contributors to this volume, for their comments—especially Frank Arntzenius, Michael Bradie, David Copp, John Finnis, Jerry Fodor, Brian Loar, Barry Loewer, Colin McGinn, Fred Miller, Mark Moyer, David Oderberg, Marya Schechtman, David Schmidtz, David Sobel, and Sara Worley. Special thanks to David Sanford. I am also grateful to graduate students in my seminar at Bowling Green during the spring of 2003, for urging me to take seriously the grip of the unity reaction; I am especially grateful for the comments of Nico Maloberti, Jonathan Miller, John Milliken, Robyn Peabody, Jennifer Sproul, Jessica Teaman, and Sherisse Webb. (shrink)

The James–Lange theory considers emotional feelings as perceptions of physiological body changes. This approach has recently resurfaced and modified in both neuroscientific and philosophical concepts of embodiment of emotional feelings. In addition to the body, the role of the environment in emotional feeling needs to be considered. I here claim that the environment has not merely an indirect and thus instrumental role on emotional feelings via the body and its sensorimotor and vegetative functions. Instead, the environment (...) may have a direct and non-instrumental, i.e., constitutional role in emotional feelings; this implies that the environment itself in the gestalt of the person–environment relation is constitutive of emotional feeling rather than the bodily representation of the environment. Since the person–environment relation is crucial in this approach, I call it the relational concept of emotional feeling. After introducing the relational concept of emotional feeling, the present paper investigates the neurophilosophical question whether current neuroimaging data on human emotion processing and anatomical connectivity are empirically better compatible with the “relational” or the “embodied” concept of emotional feeling. These data lend support to the empirical assumption that neural activity in subcortical and cortical midline regions code the relationship between intero- and exteroceptive stimuli in a relational mode, i.e. their actual balance, rather than in a translational mode, i.e., by translating extero- into interoceptive stimulus changes. Such intero-exteroceptive relational mode of neural coding may have implications for the characterization of emotional feeling with regard to phenomenal consciousness and intentionality. I therefore conclude that the here advanced relational concept of emotional feeling may be considered neurophilosophically more plausible and better compatible with current neuroscientific data than the embodied concept as presupposed in the James–Lange theory and its modern neuroscientific and philosophical versions. (shrink)

Recent research has yielded an explosion of literature that establishes a strong connection between emotional and cognitive processes. Most notably, Antonio Damasio draws an intimate connection between emotion and cognition in practical decision making. Damasio presents a "somatic marker" hypothesis which explains how emotions are biologically indispensable to decisions. His research on patients with frontal lobe damage indicates that feelings normally accompany response options and operate as a biasing device to dictate choice. What Damasio's hypothesis lacks is a theoretical (...) model of decision making which can advance the conceptual connection between emotional and cognitive decision making processes. In this paper we combine Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis with the coherence theory of decision put forward by Thagard and Millgram. The juxtaposition of Damasio's hypothesis with a cognitive theory of decision making leads to a new and better theory of emotional decisions. (shrink)

This study examines factors impacting ethical behavior of 103 hospital nurses. The level of emotional intelligence and ethical behavior of peers had a significant impact on ethical behavior of nurses. Independence climate had a significant impact on ethical behavior of nurses. Other ethical climate types such as professional, caring, rules, instrumental, and efficiency did not impact ethical behavior of respondents. Implications of this study for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

I criticize Rolls's account of what makes emotional states conscious.

This book will undoubtedly be useful to scholars and graduate students interested in the relationships between self-consciousness, emotion, the brain, and the...

Some films scare us; some make us cry; some thrill us. Some of the most interesting films, however, leave us suspended between feelings – both joyous and sad, or angry and serene. This paper attempts to explain how this can happen and why it is important. I look closely at one film that creates and exploits these conflicted responses. I argue that cases of conflict in film illuminate a pair of vexing questions about emotion in film: (1) To what extent (...) are emotional responses rational, or in need of rationalization?; and (2) What relationship is there between emotional response and value (moral, filmic, or otherwise)? Conflict, I argue, can be revealing, and can help us better understand emotional responses to narrative film1 in general. The paper is divided into four sections. First, I sketch a theory of emotional engagement that makes sense of the notion of a “conflicted emotional response” to a film. Second, I turn to a particular case of a film that produces this sort of conflict, Fritz Lang’s M (1931), and show that the conflict engendered by that film is both more significant and less unusual than it may appear. In the final two sections, I argue that there is no need to rationalize or make consistent such mixed emotional responses, and that there is real moral, aesthetic, and cognitive value to be had from such conflict. (shrink)

Actions expressing emotions (such as caressing the clothes of one's dead friend in grief, or tearing apart a photograph out of jealousy) pose a notorious challenge to action theorists. They are thought to be intentional in that they are in some sense under the agent's control. They are not thought to be done for a reason, however, because they cannot be explained by considerations that favor them from the agent's point of view. This seems to be the case, at least, (...) if one subscribes to the Davidsonian standard model of action explanation. So far, philosophers have had three different reactions to this challenge. Rationalists insist that such actions can be rationalized by re-interpreting them. Arationalists insist that there simply is no reasoning process moving agents in emotional states to act. A third reaction questions the intentionality of such actions altogether. All three reactions, however, share the assumption underlying the standard account: if an agent is thought to act for a reason - and hence acts intentionally - he must entertain a desire and some means-end belief reflecting his reasoning process about how to attain what he desires by acting. In this paper, I try to show that this reflective reasoning mechanism is only one way to rationalize an action. Another way is by tracing an action to an unreflective valuing stance respresenting reasons the agent has from his point of view. Emotions are attitudes that help to grasp reasons the agent has. Since emotions come with a strong motivational potential they move the agent to act expressively. But the agent typically allows himself to do so, thereby monitoring the way in which he does it. To the extent that the agent unreflectively acts on a motive that is itself representative of his point of view, his expressive actions can be regarded as rationalizable. (shrink)

How can we motivate ourselves to do what we think we ought? How can we deliberate about personal values and priorities? Bennett Helm argues that standard philosophical answers to these questions presuppose a sharp distinction between cognition and conation that undermines an adequate understanding of values and their connection to motivation and deliberation. Rejecting this distinction, Helm argues that emotions are fundamental to any account of value and motivation, and he develops a detailed alternative theory both of emotions, desires, and (...) evaluative judgments and of their rational interconnections. The result is an innovative theory of practical rationality and of how we can control not only what we do but also what we value and who we are as persons. (shrink)

Engineers are normally seen as the archetype of people who make decisions in a rational and quantitative way. However, technological design is not value neutral. The way a technology is designed determines its possibilities, which can, for better or for worse, have consequences for human wellbeing. This leads various scholars to the claim that engineers should explicitly take into account ethical considerations. They are at the cradle of new technological developments and can thereby influence the possible risks and benefits more (...) directly than anybody else. I have argued elsewhere that emotions are an indispensable source of ethical insight into ethical aspects of risk. In this paper I will argue that this means that engineers should also include emotional reflection into their work. This requires a new understanding of the competencies of engineers: they should not be unemotional calculators; quite the opposite, they should work to cultivate their moral emotions and sensitivity, in order to be engaged in morally responsible engineering. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present the disagreement between Moran and Walton on the nature of our affective responses to fiction and to defend a view on the issue which is opposed to Moran's account and improves on Walton's. Moran takes imagination-based affective responses to be instances of genuine emotion and treats them as episodes with an emotional attitude towards their contents. I argue against the existence of such attitudes, and that the affective element of such responses (...) should rather be taken to be part of what is imagined. In this respect, I follow Walton; and I also agree with the latter that our affective responses to fiction are, as a consequence, not instances of real emotion. However, this gives rise to the challenge to be more specific about the nature of our responses and explain how they can still involve a phenomenologically salient affective element, given that propositionally imagining that one feels a certain emotion is ruled out because it may be done in a dispassionate way. The answer - already suggested, but not properly spelled out by Walton - is that affectively responding to some fictional element consists in imaginatively re- presenting an experience of emotional feeling towards it. The central thought is that the conscious and imaginative representation of the affective character of an instance of genuine emotion itself involves the respective phenomenologically salient affective element, despite not instantiating it. (shrink)

This paper addresses two questions: first, when making decisions about what to do, does the mere fact that we will feel regretful or guilty or proud afterward give us reason to act? I argue that these emotions of self-assessment give us little or no reason to act. The second question concerns emotional valence--how desirable or undesirable our emotions are. What is it that determines the valence of an emotion like regret? I argue that the valence of emotions, and indeed (...) of feelings like pain more broadly, is a function of the sensations they involve. As I suggest, understanding the point about emotional valence helps us answer the first question about anticipated emotions. The paper concludes with a discussion of death-bed regrets, and of whether teenagers should listen to their annoying parents. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the explanation of human cooperative behaviour, examining the implications of Brian Skyrms’ modelling of the prisoner’s dilemma (PD). Augmenting a PD with signalling strategies promotes cooperation, but a challenge that must be addressed is what prevents signals being subverted by deceptive behaviour. Empirical results suggest that emotional displays can play a signalling role and, to some extent, are secure from subversion. I examine proximate explanations and then offer an evolutionary explanation for the translucency of (...) class='Hi'>emotional displays. Selection acts on the basis of lifetime fitness consequences and, crucially for my argument, the intensity of selection decreases over the course of a lifetime. Hence we tend to possess traits that promote survival when young and, with regard to emotional displays, translucency allows successful maturation over our protracted period of nurturing by close kin. This is due to the vital role played by emotional interactions in the normal cognitive and social development of Homo sapiens. (shrink)

Originally conceptualised as a set of capacities for understanding and managing emotions, emotional intelligence (EI) has become associated, mainly due to the work of Daniel Goleman, with life success skills, prosocial attitudes and moral and civic virtues. But EI, which may not in itself be teachable, need not lead to these outcomes, which may not necessarily converge. Also, what counts as life success, prosocial attitudes and moral and civic virtues can only be determined, if at all, by facing the (...) value questions involved as value questions, not by conflating them with applied science. (shrink)

We sometimes experience emotions which are directed at past events (or situations) which we witnessed at the time when they occurred (or obtained). The present paper explores the role which such "autobiographically past-directed emotions" (or "APD-emotions") play in a subject's mental life. A defender of the "Memory-Claim" holds that an APD-emotion is a memory, namely a memory of the emotion which the subject experienced at the time when the event originally occurred (or the situation obtained) towards which the APD-emotion is (...) directed. On this view, APD-emotions might play an important role in our acquiring knowledge about our own past emotions, which renders the view rather attractive. However, as I show in the present paper, none of the various possible versions of the Memory-Claim are tenable. This leaves us with the "Universal-New-Emotion-Claim", according to which all APD-emotions are new emotional responses to the past events (or situations) towards which the relevant APD-emotions are directed. Further consideration of the "Universal-New-Emotion-Claim" shows that while APD-emotions do not play the epistemological role they could have played had some version of the Memory-Claim turned out to be true, a subject's APD-emotions nevertheless do play a vital role in a subject's mental life: they help the subject to develop a balanced sense of self. (shrink)

This study investigates factors impacting perceptions of ethical conduct of peers of 293 students in four US universities. Self-reported ethical behavior and recognition of emotions in others (a dimension of emotional intelligence) impacted perception of ethical behavior of peers. None of the other dimensions of emotional intelligence were significant. Age, Race, Sex, GPA, or type of major (business versus nonbusiness) did not impact perception of ethical behavior of peers. Implications of the results of the study for business schools (...) and industry professionals are discussed. (shrink)

Mammalian brains contain a variety of self-centered socio-emotional systems. An understanding of how they interact with more recent cognitive structures may be essential for understanding empathy. Preston & de Waal have neglected this vast territory of proximal brain issues in their analysis.

Trustful interaction serves the interests of those involved. Thus, one could reason that trust itself may be analyzed as part of rational, goaloriented action. In contrast, common sense tells us that trust is an emotion and is, therefore, independent of rational deliberation to some extent. I will argue that we are right in trusting our common sense. My argument is conceptual in nature, referring to the common distinction between trust and pure reliance. An emotional attitude may be understood as (...) some general pattern in the way the world or some part of the world is perceived by an individual. Trust may be characterized by such a pattern. I shall focus on two central features of a trusting attitude. First, trust involves a participant attitude (Strawson) toward the person being trusted. Second, a situation of trust is perceived by a trusting person as one in which shared values or norms motivate both his own actions as well as those of the person being trusted. As an emotional attitude, trust is, to some extent, independent of objective information. It determines what a trusting person will believe and how various outcomes are evaluated. Hence, trust is quite different from rational belief and the problem with trust is not adequately met in minimizing risk by supplying extensive information or some mechanism of sanctioning. Trust is an attitude that enables us to cope with risk in a certain way. If we want to promote trustful interaction, we must form our institutions in ways that allow individuals to experience their interest and values as shared and, thus, to develop a trusting attitude. (shrink)