We defend a functionalist approach to emotion that begins by focusing on emotions as central states with causal connections to behavior and to other cognitive states. The approach brackets the conscious experience of emotion, lists plausible features that emotions exhibit, and argues that alternative schemes are unpromising candidates. We conclude with the benefits of our approach: one can study emotions in animals; one can look in the brain for the implementation of specific features; and one ends up with an architecture (...) of the mind in which emotions are fully accommodated through their relations to the rest of cognition. Our article focuses on arguing for this general approach; as such, it is an essay in the philosophy of emotion rather than in the psychology or neuroscience of emotion. (shrink)

By the late 1990s, several converging trends in economics, psychology, and neuroscience had set the stage for the birth of a new scientific field known as “neuroeconomics”. Without the availability of an extensive variety of experimental designs for dealing with individual and social decision-making provided by experimental economics and psychology, many neuroeconomics studies could not have been developed. At the same time, without the significant progress made in neuroscience for grasping and understanding brain functioning, neuroeconomics would have never seen the (...) light of day. The paper is an overview of the main significant advances in the knowledge of brain functioning by neuroscience that have contributed to the emergence of neuroeconomics and its rise over the past two decades. These advances are grouped over three non-independent topics referred to as the “emo-rational” brain, “social” brain, and “computational” brain. For each topic, it emphasizes findings considered as critical to the birth and development of neuroeconomics while highlighting some of prominent questions about which knowledge should be improved by future research. In parallel, it shows that the boundaries between neuroeconomics and several recent sub-fields of cognitive neuroscience, such as affective, social, and more generally, decision neuroscience, are rather porous. (shrink)

Although emotion is closely associated with motivation, and interacts with perception, cognition, and action, many conceptualizations still treat emotion as separate from these domains. Here, a comparative/evolutionary anatomy framework is presented to motivate the idea that long-range, distributed circuits involving the midbrain, thalamus, and forebrain are central to emotional processing. It is proposed that emotion can be understood in terms of large-scale network interactions spanning the neuroaxis that form “functionally integrated systems.” At the broadest level, the argument is made that (...) we need to move beyond a Newtonian view of causation to one involving complex systems where bidirectional influences and nonlinearities abound. Therefore, understanding interactions between subsystems and signal integration becomes central to unraveling the organization of the emotional brain. (shrink)

While life in general can be explained by the mechanisms of physics, chemistry and biology, to many scientists and philosophers it appears that when it comes to explaining consciousness, there is what the philosopher Joseph Levine called an “explanatory gap” between the physical brain and subjective experiences. Here we deduce the living and neural features behind primary consciousness within a naturalistic biological framework, identify which animal taxa have these features (the vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod molluscs), then reconstruct when consciousness first (...) evolved and consider its adaptive value. We theorize that consciousness is based on all the complex system features of life, plus the even more complex features of elaborate brains. We argue that the main reason why the explanatory gap between the brain and experience has been so refractory to scientific explanation is that it arises from both life and from varied and diverse brains and brain regions, so bridging the gap requires a complex, multifactorial account that includes the great diversity of consciousness, its personal nature that stems from embodied life, and the special neural features that make consciousness unique in nature. (shrink)

The functional theory of boredom maintains that boredom ought to be defined in terms of its role in our mental and behavioral economy. Although the functional theory has recently received considerable attention, presentations of this theory have not specified with sufficient precision either its commitments or its consequences for the ontology of boredom. This essay offers an in-depth examination of the functional theory. It explains what boredom is according to the functional view; it shows how the functional theory can account (...) for the known characteristics of boredom; and it articulates the theory’s basic commitments, virtues, and limitations. Ultimately, by furthering our understanding of the functional theory of boredom, the essay contributes to a better theoretical grounding of boredom. (shrink)

We call affective brainocentrism the tendency to privilege the brain over other parts of the organism when defining or explaining emotions. We distinguish two versions of this tendency. According to brain-sufficient, emotional states are entirely realized by brain processes. According to brain-master, emotional states are realized by both brain and bodily processes, but the latter are entirely driven by the brain: the brain is the master regulator of bodily processes. We argue that both these claims are problematic, and we draw (...) on physiological accounts of stress to make our main case. These accounts illustrate the existence of complex interactions between the brain and endocrine systems, the immune system, the enteric nervous system, and even gut microbiota. We argue that, because of these complex brain–body interactions, the brain cannot be isolated and identified as the basis of stress. We also mention recent evidence suggesting that complex brain–body interactions characterize the physiology of depression and anxiety. Finally, we call for an alternative dynamical, systemic, and embodied approach to the study of the physiology of emotions that does not privilege the brain, but rather aims at understanding how mutually regulating brain and bodily processes jointly realize a variety of emotional states. (shrink)

Causal mediation mechanisms are well supported by available experimental evidence and provide a practicable way to reductive physicalism. According to the causal mediation account of mechanistic explanation, descriptions as diverse as ‘black-box’ phenomena, mechanistic sketches and schemas mixing physically interpreted and operationalized biological, psychological and social variables, and detailed descriptions of mechanisms refer to the same causal structure circumscribed within the spatiotemporal boundaries of a replicable experimental setup. The coreference of coarser- and finer-grained descriptions of causal structures opens new possibilities (...) for testing the reductive physicalism conjecture. I discuss experimental designs supporting the causal mediation account and show how recent studies demonstrating the biological mediation of mind-mind causal processes can provide evidence for reductive physicalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Fine examination of our accumulated cultural knowledge is especially helpful in studying the emotions, which are only tangentially accessible to experimental manipulation. Here I use the six properties of emotions that Elster has summarized to suggest how they show a need for changes in the science of motivation. The apparent adaptive purpose of emotions lies in their action tendencies – what they add to the cold calculation of advantage. Subjectively they stand out by their intrusiveness, the duration of which (...) often has a half-life. Emotions each have a valence, which suggests that they are not only motivating but also motivated, an implication that requires re-examination of how negativity works. Emotions are also experienced as ‘triggered’, but are so malleable that triggering cannot mean a simple conditioned reflexiveness. Emotions are not only triggered – or motivated – by beliefs, but motivate beliefs in turn, and can be fed back on themselves in a ‘wildfire’ phenomenon. These feedback effects are further evidence against emotions being reflexive. With regard to the three great revolutions, I argue that enthusiasm differs from romantic love only in its object, and urgency comes from the dysphoria of using response suppression for self-control. I can add nothing further to Elster’s masterful history. (shrink)

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer or Luiz Pessoa. Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. But our version of functionalism (...) is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions. (shrink)

Авторами розглянуто особливості впливу моральних емоцій з позитивною валентністю на процес прийняття економічними агентами управлінських рішень в ситуаціях соціальних взаємодій. Обґрунтовано, що позитивні моральні емоції мають значення при виборі підприємцями моделі соціально-економічної поведінки, що дає змогу за допомогою механізмів винагороди та взаємності заохочувати та підтримувати реалізацію моральних та інших соціальних норм. Встановлено, що очікування появи емоції подяки або захоплення в оточуючих, і навіть переживання самим індивідом емоції шляхетності впливає на процес прийняття рішень в контексті того, що позитивні емоції часто призводять (...) до збільшення вигоди економічних агентів і пов'язані з рівнем їхнього добробуту. (shrink)