Abstract
Our analysis starts with a definition of emotions and how they work. We illustrate our discussion with examples, primarily related to anger. We devote special attention to the feelings that characterize our emotional experience, relying on ‘alexithymia’, a clinical condition, to argue for a perceptual theory of emotion in which emotional feelings are the means by which we identify and recognize our emotions. Finally, we consider the role of valence in the mechanism of the emotions, i.e. the way in which emotions are generated, lead to the motivation to end/modify a situation that is perceived as negative or to prolong/reiterate a situation that is perceived as positive, and produce behaviours congruent with this motivation. Here we show that because emotions have multiple and ambiguous valences, one cannot rely on valence to determine, in abstraction, what motivation and behaviour a given emotion will trigger.
Authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order; this article was truly cooperative.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This sense of the term ‘affective’ played an important – if sometimes ambiguous – role in the psychological lexicon starting from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards (cf. Wassmann 2008).
- 2.
The overlap in notions such as ‘temperament’ and ‘character’ provides insight into the common psychological lexicon. The notion of ‘temperament’ preceded that of ‘character’ in the history of philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. It indicated innate and constitutive factors that tacitly drive individual behaviour and emotional dispositions. The notion of ‘character’ instead indicated the factors that predispose people to react in certain ways: habits, individual choices and environmental conditioning which influence temperament. In the contemporary literature, the notions of ‘temperament’ and ‘character’ have not disappeared altogether from the psychological lexicon, but form part of the construct of personality. For an overview, cf. e.g. Ewald 1924; Strelau 1998; Kagan and Snidman 2004.
- 3.
The issue of whether knowledge is always required for appraisal and of when it is/is not part of the appraisal process was the subject of a thorny dispute that exploded in the ’80s (also as a result of the publication of Zajonc’s article Feeling and Thinking in 1980) and still continues today. For a brief review cf. Prinz 2004, p. 33ff.
- 4.
In philosophy the issue of whether an emotion is or is not appropriate is most often considered in relation to a moral context, that is, whether specific emotions are or are not morally appropriate in specific contexts. For a discussion of what ‘appropriateness’ exactly means in this context cf. e.g. D’Arms and Jacobson 2000.
- 5.
Already Darwin [1872] (1965) regarded postures, movements, bodily and facial expressions as equivalent reactions to specific emotions – i.e., in more contemporary language, as equivalent behavioural patterns corresponding to an emotion. In his view, the fact that humans and animals share similar reactions to the same emotions is, on the one hand, a sign that they are innate or instinctive and, on the other hand, further proof that humans and animals share a common phylogenetic origin. Most notoriously, it was Paul Ekman who, following Darwin, Tomkins (1962, 1963) and Frijda’s line of research (Frijda 1986), argued that emotions are ‘affect programs’ (he takes this notion from Tomkins), i.e. evolutionarily determined responses to environmental situations characterized by a number of distinctive features, which include physiological changes, facial expressions, assessments, behavioural reactions and dispositions (cf. e.g. Ekman 2003).
- 6.
In fact, emotions give rise to spontaneous and immediate action tendencies that are part of an emotional episode. Skeletal and muscular signals also derive from action programs elicited by emotions.
- 7.
We get to experience our emotions through the feelings that characterize them. This does not mean, however, that we cannot have emotions in the absence of bodily feelings. Indeed, as suggested for example by Damasio, the brain centres typically associated with the bodily changes that occur during emotion episodes can also be activated in the absence of bodily signals just by remembering the bodily changes that occurred in previous occasions. This mechanism is called an “as-if-loop” (Damasio 1994, p. 155ff).
- 8.
Given their emotional impairment, alexithymics even have difficulties with tasks that indirectly involve emotions, e.g. tasks that require empathy, mindreading capacities or, more generally, social competencies. However, they exhibit normal intelligence as well as fully developed linguistic and logical capacities. Cf., i.a., Wotschak and Klann-Delius 2013.
- 9.
Cf. e.g. the list of properties that identify positive and negative emotions given by Solomon, Stone (2002, p. 418); some of the features reported in this list were omitted on purpose from the example and will be considered below.
- 10.
These criteria for assessing whether an emotion is positive or negative represent a simplified summary of the review of various conceptions of valence proposed by Prinz 2004, pp. 167ff and Colombetti 2005. These criteria are uniquely of a psychological kind. In fact, emotions can be classified as positive or negative also from a moral/social point of view – i.e. depending on whether they foster or hinder moral/prosocial actions. These two criteria can easily give rise to contradictory outcomes: an emotion that is positive from a psychological viewpoint can be negative from a moral or from a social viewpoint. On the distinction between these two criteria cf. e.g. Ben-Ze’ev (2000, pp. 103) and Kristjánsson (2003, p. 356ff).
- 11.
The mechanism of emotions as we have described it here should be considered a subpart of the ‘machinery’ mentioned by Damasio.
References
Al-Shawaf, L., Conroy-Beam, D., Asao, K., & Buss, D. M. (2015). Human emotions: An evolutionary psychological perspective. Emotion Review, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073914565518.
Arnold, M. B. (1960). Emotion and personality. Psychological aspects (Vol. 1). New York: Columbia University Press.
Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2000). The subtlety of emotions. Cambridge/London: MIT Press.
Clore, G. L. (1994). Why emotions require cognition. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions (pp. 181–191). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clore, E. L., & Ortony, A. (2000). Cognition in emotion: Always, sometimes, or never? In R. D. Lane & L. Nadel (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience of emotion (pp. 24–25). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Clore, G. L., & Ortony, A. (2008). Appraisal theories: How cognition shapes affect into emotion. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 628–642). New York: The Guilford Press.
Colombetti, G. (2005). Appraising valence. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12(8–10), 103–126.
Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 655–666.
Craig, A. D. (2008). Interoception and emotion: A neuroanatomical perspective. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (3rd ed., pp. 272–288). New York/London: The Guilford Press.
D’Arms, J., & Jacobson, D. (2000). The moralistic fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of emotions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61(1), 65–90.
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Avon books.
Damasio, A. R. (2000). A second chance for emotion. In R. D. Lane & L. Nadel (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience of emotions (pp. 12–23). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Darwin, C. [1872](1965). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Deigh, J. (2004). Primitive emotions. In R. C. Solomon (Ed.), Thinking about feeling: Contemporary philosophers on emotions (pp. 9–27). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dellantonio, S., & Pastore, L. (2017). Internal perception. The role of bodily information in concepts and word mastery. Berlin: Springer.
Dixon, T. (2003). From passions to emotions: The creation of a secular psychological category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dixon, T. (2012). “Emotion”: The history of a keyword in crisis. Emotion Review, 4(4), 338–344.
Ekman, P. (1999). Basic emotions. In T. Dalgleish & M. Power (Eds.), Handbook of cognition and emotion (pp. 45–60). Chichester: Wiley.
Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life. New York: Times Book.
Elster, J. (1999). Strong feelings. Emotion, addiction and human behavior. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press.
Ewald, G. (1924). Temperament und Charakter. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. I. (2001). Positive emotions. In T. J. Mayne & G. A. Bonanno (Eds.), Emotions: Current issues and future directions (pp. 123–151). New York/London: The Guilford Press.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Cohn, M. A. (2004). Positive emotions. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 777–796). New York: The Guilford Press.
Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frijda, N. H. (1994). Varieties of affect: Emotion and episodes, moods and sentiments. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions (pp. 59–67). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gervais, M., & Fessler, D. (2017). On the deep structure of social affect: Attitudes, emotions, sentiments, and the case of “contempt”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, E225. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X16000352.
Goldie, P. (2002). Emotions, feelings and intentionality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 235–254.
Goldsmith, H. H. (1994). Parsing the emotional domain form a developmental perspective. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions (pp. 68–73). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grabe, H. J., Spitzer, G., & Freyberger, H. J. (2001). Alexithymia and the temperament and character model of personality. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 70, 261–267.
Isen, A. M. (2004). Positive affect and decision making. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 417–435). New York: The Guilford Press.
James, W. (1884). What is an emotion? Mind, 9(34), 188–205.
Kagan, J., & Snidman, N. (2004). The long shadow of temperament. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kristjánsson, K. (2003). On the very idea of “negative emotions”. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(4), 351–364.
Krystal, H. (1988). Integration and self-healing: Affect, trauma, alexithymia. Hillsdale: The Analytic Press.
Lambie, J. A., & Marcel, A. J. (2002). Consciousness and the varieties of emotion experience: A theoretical framework. Psychological Review, 119, 219–259.
Lane, R. D., & Schwartz, G. E. (1987). Levels of emotional awareness: A cognitive-developmental theory and its application to psychopathology. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 144, 133–143.
Lane, R. D., Ahern, G. L., Schwartz, G. E., & Kaszniak, A. W. (1997). Is alexithymia the emotional equivalent of blindsight? Biological Psychiatry, 42, 834–844.
Lane, R. D., Weihs, K. L., Herring, A., Hishaw, A., & Smith, R. (2015). Affective agnosia: Expansion of the alexithymia construct and a new opportunity to integrate and extend Freud’s legacy. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 55, 594–611.
Lange, C. G. [1885] (1912). The mechanism of the emotion. In B. Rand (Ed.), The classical psychologists (pp. 672–684). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Lange, C.G. [1885] (1922). The emotions. A psychophysiological study. In K. Dunlap (Ed.), The emotions. Volume 1 (pp. 32–90). Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lazarus, R. S. (1994a). The stable and the unstable in emotion. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions (pp. 79–85). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lazarus, R. S. (1994b). The stable and the unstable in emotion. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotions: Fundamental questions (pp. 208–214). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The emotional brain. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Lemerise, E. A., & Dodge, K. A. (2008). The development of anger and hostile interactions. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 730–741). New York: The Guilford Press.
Lyons, W. (1980). Emotion. Cambridge/London: Cambridge University Press.
Mac Laren, K. (2006). Emotional disorder and the mind/body problem: A case study of alexithymia. Chiasmi International, 8, 139–155.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2003). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge: Cambrigde University Press.
Ortony, A., Clore, G. L., & Collins, A. (1988). The cognitive structure of emotions. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Plamper, J. (2012). Geschichte und Gefühl. Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte. München: Siedler.
Primmer, J. (2013). Understanding the dimensional nature of alexithymia. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20, 111–131.
Prinz, J. J. (2004). Gut reactions: A perceptual theory of emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of being. Phenomenology, psychiatry, and the sense of reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ridderinkhof, R. K. (2017). Emotion in action: A predictive processing perspective and theoretical synthesis. Emotion Review, 9(4), 319–325. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916661765.
Roseman, I. J., & Smith, C. A. (2001). Appraisal theory. Overview, assumptions, varieties, controversies. In K. R. Scherer, A. Schorr, & T. Johnstone (Eds.), Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research (pp. 3–19). New York: Oxford University Press.
Scarantino, A. (2012). How to define emotions scientifically. Emotion Review, 4(2), 358–368.
Scherer, K. R. (1994). An emotion’s occurrence depends on the relevance of an event to the organism’s goal/need hierarchy. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions (pp. 227–231). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schuetze, P. (2019). The moral adequacy of emotions. Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 10(1), 33–48. https://doi.org/10.4453/rifp.2019.0003
Sifneos, P. E. (1972). Short-term psychotherapy and emotional crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Solomon, R. C. (2004). Emotions, thoughts, and feelings: Emotions as engagements with the world. In R. C. Solomon (Ed.), Thinking about feeling: Contemporary philosophers on emotions (pp. 76–88). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Solomon, R. C., & Stone, L. D. (2002). On “positive” and “negative” emotions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 32, 417–435. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00196.
Stephan, A. (2017a). Moods in layers. Philosophia, 45, 1481–1495.
Stephan, A. (2017b). On the adequacy of emotions and existential feelings. Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 8(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.4453/rifp.2017.0001.
Strelau, J. (1998). Temperament. A psychological perspective. New York/Boston/Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Taylor, G. J., Bagby, R. M., & Parker, J. D. A. (1997). Disorders of affect regulation. Alexithymia in medical and psychiatric illness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tomkins, S. S. (1962). Affect, imagery and consciousness (Vol. 1). New York: Springer.
Tomkins, S. S. (1963). Affect, imagery and consciousness (Vol. 2). New York: Springer.
Tugade, M. M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2007). Regulation of positive emotions: Emotion regulation strategies that promote resilience. Journal of Happiness Studies, 8(3), 311–333.
Wassmann, C. (2008). Physiological optics, cognition and emotion: A novel look at the early work of Wilhelm Wundt. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 64(2), 213–249.
Wassmann, C. (2017). Forgotten origins, occluded meanings: Translation of emotion terms. Emotion Review, 9(2), 163–171.
Wotschak, C., & Klann-Delius, G. (2013). Alexithymia and the conceptualization of emotions: A study of language use and semantic knowledge. Journal of Research in Personality, 47(5), 514–523. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2013.01.011.
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking. Preferences need no inference. American Psychologist, 35(2), 151–175.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pastore, L., Dellantonio, S. (2021). Anger Issues: The Nature and Complexity of Emotions and Emotional Valence. In: Giacomoni, P., Valentini, N., Dellantonio, S. (eds) The Dark Side: Philosophical Reflections on the “Negative Emotions”. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55123-0_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55123-0_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-55122-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-55123-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)