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Are our emotional feelings relational? A neurophilosophical investigation of the James–Lange theory

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. It should also be pointed out that feelings cannot be considered to be conscious perceptions of the neural activity in those brain regions that induce emotion as for instance LeDoux assumes. We cannot become conscious of neural activity in the first-order emotion regions (see also Bennett and Hacker 2003, 208) since we remain principally unable to perceive our brain’s neural activity as such which I recently called “autoepistemic limitation” (Northoff 2004; Northoff and Musholt 2006).

  2. Prinz (2004, 57) also argues for the semantic dimension of the body, our body is not only somatic but also semantic since it is the body itself that is supposed to represent the environment in its physiological bodily changes. He here presupposes a naturalized concept of representation which makes its delegation to higher-order cognitive faculties superfluous. This however also implies that he does not consider subjective experience and feeling to be central for emotion which in turn implies that feelings remain disembedded since the environment as a merely representational but not constitutive role. Furthermore it implies that his concept presupposes a different meaning of embodiment when he speaks of “embodied emotion” since his notion of embodiment refers only to the Koerper but not to the subjectively experienced body, the “lived body”.

  3. The here advanced relational concept may be considered an extension of the embodied approach by Colombetti and Thompson, who also emphasize the situated, extended and thus embedded nature of emotional feeling. Since the main focus here is on the neurophilosophical aspect, I cannot go into the philosophical details about the relational approach (see below for the discussion of some philosophical implications and Northoff 2004 for a general outline). See also Ben-Ze’ev (1993, 81–99) who advocates a relational approach to perception and, in some part, also to emotion (see Ben-Ze’ev 2000).

  4. This is well compatible with the relational approach to meaning and personal significance as suggested by Ben-Ze’ev (1993, 2000) that undercuts the traditional assumption that higher-order cognitive functions are necessary to give meaning and personal significance to otherwise meaningless and personally insignificant sense data.

  5. One may off course argue that we can have subjective experience without emotion in for instance so-called “cold” cognitions. “Cold” cognitions may however be considered just as an extreme case on a continuum in the relationship between emotion and cognition where feelings may still be involved in the background though being maximally suppressed.

  6. Taken together, Goldie (2002, 252) characterizes emotional feelings by both their phenomenal and intentional nature which he considers to be intrinsically and “inextricably linked” with each other. The conditions for such linkage between phenomenality and intentionality in emotional feelings remain however unclear. Empirically, I assume intero-exteroceptive relational coding which, conceptually, may implicate constitution of a personal point of view (see above), to be crucially involved in intrinsically linking phenomenal and intentional features in emotional feelings. This however is a rather speculative hypothesis that needs both empirical and conceptual elaboration.

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Acknowledgment

I am thankful to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments as well as Peter Goldie and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev for stimulating discussions about the philosophy of emotions.

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Northoff, G. Are our emotional feelings relational? A neurophilosophical investigation of the James–Lange theory. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 501–527 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9086-2

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