Emotions are viewed as having evolved through their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life-tasks. Each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology, and antecedent events. Each emotion also has characteristics in common with other emotions: rapid onset, short duration, unbidden occurrence, automatic appraisal, and coherence among responses. These shared and unique characteristics are the product of our evolution, and distinguish emotions from other affective phenomena.

The narratives studied by schema-based models or story grammars are generally simpler than those found in literary texts, such as short stones or novels. Literary narratives are indeterminate, exhibiting conflicts between schemata and frequent ambiguities in the status of narrative elements. An account of the process of comprehending such complex narratives is beyond the reach of purely cognitive models. It is argued that during comprehension response is controlled by affect, which directs the creation of schemata more adequate to the text. (...) Several properties of affect that make it appropriate for this model of narrative are discussed. A short story by Virginia Woolf is analysed in the light of the proposed model. A study with readers of the story is described, which illustrates the process of schema formation: Shifts in the relative importance of story phrases across the reading and the comments made by readers point to a process of schema creation under the control of affect. It is argued that affect may play a more productive role in cognitive processes than is generally acknowledged. (shrink)

Modern emotion theories emphasise the adaptive value of emotions. Emotions are by no means always helpful, however. They often must be regulated. The study of emotion regulation has its origins in the psychoanalytic and stress and coping traditions. Recently, increased interest in emotion regulation has led to crucial boundary ambiguities that now threaten progress in this domain. It is argued that distinctions need to be made between (1) regulation of emotion and regulation by emotion; (2) emotion regulation in self and (...) emotion regulation in others; and (3) conscious and nonconscious emotion regulation. Using a process model of emotion generation, this review considers promising research on basic processes and individual differences in emotion regulation and poses five theoretical challenges. (shrink)

In this article we outline the history, elements, and variations of functional accounts of emotions. Summarising diverse theories and observations, we propose that functional accounts of emotions: (1) address why humans have emotions; (2) define emotions as solutions to problems and opportunities related to physical and social survival; (3) treat emotions as systems of interrelated components; and (4) focus on the beneficial consequences of emotions. This conceptual approach to emotion is complemented by several empirical strategies, including the study of emotion (...) dysfunction, the effects of emotions on others, and the relations between emotions and personal and social outcomes. We conclude by considering how functional accounts of emotion vary, including in terms of their level of analysis, specificity, manner of organisation, and range of focus, and the implications functional accounts have for the study of emotion. (shrink)

In “Emergent Ghosts of the Emotion Machine,” James Coan neglects emotion displays involved in social communication and activity in central neurochemical systems associated with drug-induced changes in feelings and desires. Also, he fails to recognize that emotions are not rigidly bound to action tendencies, but rather have evolved internal signals to afford flexibility of response. Emotion indices naturally lack close coordination because different aspects—physiological arousal, expressive display, subjective experience—are differentially accessible to the responder and interaction partner, and therefore undergo different (...) social learning histories. Emotions are entities both at the biological level, involving special-purpose primes, and at the ecological level, involving displays reflecting communicative demands characteristic of a species. Language, not emotion, is the ghost in the machine. (shrink)

I reject Lindquist et al.'s implicit claim that all emotion theories other than constructionist ones subscribe to a “brain locationist” approach. The neural mechanisms underlying relevance detection, reward, attention, conceptualization, or language use are consistent with many theories of emotion, in particular componential appraisal theories. I also question the authors' claim that the meta-analysis they report provides support for thespecificassumptions of constructionist theories.

Many situations in human life present choices between (a) narrowly preferred particular alternatives and (b) narrowly less preferred (or aversive) particular alternatives that nevertheless form part of highly preferred abstract behavioral patterns. Such alternatives characterize problems of self-control. For example, at any given moment, a person may accept alcoholic drinks yet also prefer being sober to being drunk over the next few days. Other situations present choices between (a) alternatives beneficial to an individual and (b) alternatives that are less beneficial (...) (or harmful) to the individual that would nevertheless be beneficial if chosen by many individuals. Such alternatives characterize problems of social cooperation; choices of the latter alternative are generally considered to be altruistic. Altruism, like self-control, is a valuable temporally-extended pattern of behavior. Like self-control, altruism may be learned and maintained over an individual's lifetime. It needs no special inherited mechanism. Individual acts of altruism, each of which may be of no benefit (or of possible harm) to the actor, may nevertheless be beneficial when repeated over time. However, because each selfish decision is individually preferred to each altruistic decision, people can benefit from altruistic behavior only when they are committed to an altruistic pattern of acts and refuse to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Rachlin's thought-provoking analysis could be strengthened by greater openness to evolutionary interpretation and the use of the directed attention concept as a component of self-control. His contribution to the understanding of prosocial behavior would also benefit from abandoning the traditional (and excessively restrictive) definition of altruism.

This paper proposes and develops the feelings of goals hypothesis (FGH). It has two aims: first, to describe the evolutionary function of emotional feelings (EFs), and second, to describe the content and the format of EFs. According to FGH, the evolutionary function of EFs is to enable motoric flexibility. Specifically, EFs are a component of a psychological mechanism that permits differential motoric reactions to the same stimulus. Further, according to FGH, EF is a special type of mental representation with the (...) content of an action goal, and with a non-motoric, non-conceptual format. This paper thoroughly clarifies the assumptions underlying FGH and discusses its theoretical implications and empirical predictions. (shrink)

It is surprising how far one can get by thinking things through. (Alec Fisher [2004], The logic of real arguments, p. 1)In the first part of the article, the central role of theory in emotion psych...

Emotions have traditionally been viewed as intrapersonal phenomena. Over the past decades, theory and research have shifted toward a more social perspective that emphasizes the role of emotional ex...

Paul Ekman's view of the emotions is, we argue, pervasive in psychology and is explicitly shaped to be compatible with evolutionary thinking. Yet, strangely, jealousy and parental love, two emotions that figure prominently in evolutionary psychology, are absent from Ekman's list of the emotions. In this paper we examine why Ekman believes this exclusion is necessary, and what this implies about the limits of his conception of emotion. We propose an alternative way of thinking about emotion that does not exclude (...) jealousy and parental love. (shrink)

Prior evidence has shown that aversive emotional states are characterised by an attentional bias towards aversive events. The present study investigated whether aversive emotions also bias attention towards stimuli that represent means by which the emotion can be alleviated. We induced disgust by having participants touch fake disgusting objects. Participants in the control condition touched non-disgusting objects. The results of a subsequent dot-probe task revealed that attention was oriented to disgusting pictures irrespective of condition. However, participants in the disgust condition (...) also oriented towards pictures representing cleanliness. These findings suggest that the deployment of attention in aversive emotional states is not purely stimulus driven but is also guided by the goal to alleviate this emotional state. (shrink)

Primary affects exist at an ecological-communicative level of analysis, and therefore are not identifiable with specific brain regions. The constructionist view favored in the target article, that emotions emerge from “more basic psychological processes,” does not specify the nature of these processes. These more basic processes may actually involve specific neurochemical systems, that is, primary motivational-emotional systems (primes), associated with specific feelings and desires that combine to form the “cocktail” of experienced emotion.

Lindquist et al. convincingly argue that the brain implements psychological operations that are constitutive of emotion rather than modules subserving discrete emotions. However, thenatureof such psychological operations is open to debate. I argue that considering appraisal theories may provide alternative interpretations of the neuroimaging data with respect to the psychological operations involved.

This article reports two studies investigating the relationship between emotional feelings and respiration. In the first study, participants were asked to produce an emotion of either joy, anger, fear or sadness and to describe the breathing pattern that fit best with the generated emotion. Results revealed that breathing patterns reported during voluntary production of emotion were (a) comparable to those objectively recorded in psychophysiological experiments on emotion arousal, (b) consistently similar across individuals, and (c) clearly differentiated among joy, anger, fear, (...) and sadness. A second study used breathing instructions based on Study 1's results to investigate the impact of the manipulation of respiration on emotional feeling state. A cover story was used so that participants could not guess the actual purpose of the study. This manipulation produced significant emotional feeling states that were differentiated according to the type of breathing pattern. The implications of these findings for emotion theories based on peripheral feedback and for emotion regulation are discussed. (shrink)

This study renews the classical concept of subliminal perception by investigating the impact of subliminal flicker from fluorescent lighting on affect and cognitive performance. It was predicted that low compared to high frequency lighting would evoke larger changes in affective states and also impair cognitive performance. Subjects reported high rather than low frequency lighting to be more pleasant, which, in turn, enhanced their problem solving performance. This suggests that sensory processing can take place outside of conscious awareness resulting in conscious (...) emotional consequences; indicating a role of affect in subliminal/implicit perception, and that positive affect may facilitate cognitive task performance. (shrink)

In addition to active wake, emotions are generated and experienced in a variety of functionally different states such as those of sleep, during which external stimulation and cognitive control are lacking. The neural basis of emotions can be specified by regarding the multitude of emotion-related brain states, as well as the distinct neuro- and psychodynamic stages (generation and regulation) of emotional experience.

Much research in the field of emotions has shown that people differ in the cues that they use to perceive their own emotions. People who are more responsive to personal cues (personal cuers) make use of cues arising from their own bodies and behavior; people who are less responsive to personal cues (situational cuers) make use of cues arising from the world around them. An evolutionary explanation of this well-documented phenomenon is that it occurs because of the operation of a (...) cognitive module designed to enable the organism to predict its own impending behavior. This theory suggests that situational cuers would be people for whom external factors are the best source of information about their own future behavior, whereas personal cuers are people for whom cues about themselves are the best source of information about their own future behavior. Such a view is founded in the New Realist philosophy of the early twentieth century, a philosophy that affected psychology through the work of E. C. Tolman and J. J. Gibson. (shrink)