The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of emotion. Our thesis is that emotional experience is a type of perceptual experience. Agents perceive emotionally the world whose objects and situations present to them as being relevant to their well-being and they do it by means of practical relations towards their environment. Our proposal attempts to avoid, in this way, the problem of some classical theories of emotions such as James’s theory of emotions as feelings and cognitivist theories (...) of emotions (Deigh 2004). Moreover, contrary to what we call priopioceptive theories of emotions (Damasio1994, Prinz 2004), our theory is an ecological approach, according to which the world belongs to the conditions of individuation of emotional episodes. (shrink)

Emoția a fost exclusă din cunoaștere încă din antichitate, când Democrit afirma că „Medicamentul vindecă bolile corpului, înțelepciunea eliberează sufletul de emoții”. O astfel de opinie spune că „rațiunea ar trebui să fie maestrul pasiunii”. Cea mai cunoscută declarație inversată aparține lui Hume, conform căruia rațiunea este și ar trebui să fie sclavul pasiunilor. Emoțiile au fost recunoscute ca amenințări la luarea deciziilor raționale și epistemice, corelându-se emoțiile cu voința sau dorința (emoțiile ar fi un mijloc prin care voința sau (...) dorința pot denatura rațiunea sau percepția sau un proces rațional). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11004.69762 . (shrink)

Purpose. The research is aimed at determining the influence of negative ethical emotions on social life and the activity of the individual, which involves solving the following problems: a) to find out approaches to the typology of ethical emotions, b) to highlight individual negative ethical emotions and to determine their ability to influence human behaviour. Theoretical basis. The theoretical and methodological basis of the research is the recognition of the significant influence of negative emotions on human activity in society. In (...) this regard, it is proposed to consider them as a complex multidisciplinary phenomenon, which is predetermined by both social and personal factors of origin and has a certain specificity of objectification. Originality. The authors determined that in addition to destructive effects on a person of negative emotions, they can also have a constructive effect on person’s behaviour, due primarily to the fact that a person does not want to experience these emotions and therefore tries to avoid situations they cause. Conclusions. The ethical emotions of guilt, embarrassment, anger, disgust and contempt can affect, through the cognitive aspect of the emotional process, the decision-making process of people when they predict situations in which they risk to feel such emotions. So the emotion of guilt creates a constructive setup aimed at correcting inappropriate social norms of human behaviour. The emotion of embarrassment motivates a person to behave more benevolently in society in order to integrate in it and get its approval, thus encouraging the person to adhere to social and moral agreements and norms. The emotion of anger motivates a person to act to eliminate injustice, herewith not only in relation to himself, but also in relation to others. Rejecting those people who cause moral and social aversion, society creates a system of punishments and rewards that acts as a strong deterrent to the socio-cultural behaviour. The emotion of contempt performs the function of preventing punishment in relation to the despised individual. (shrink)

Starting from the sensuous perception of what is seen, an attempt is made at re-casting a Husserlian theory of constitution of the object of intuition, as one leaves the natural attitude through a transcendental method, by positing several theses so as to avoid the aporias of philosophical binary oppositions such as rationalism and empiri-cism, realism and idealism, logicism and psychologism, subjectivism and objectivism, transcendentalism and ontologism, metaphysics and positivism. Throughout fifty-five theses on constitution, the Husserlian proposal of continuously reforming philosophizing (...) by transcendental reduction is revisited, leaving the latter incomplete as new conversions are required by noetic-noematic correlations between world and consciousness. (shrink)

Emoția poate fi diferită de alte constructe similare, precum sentimentele (nu toate sentimentele includ emoția); stările sufletești (durează mult mai mult decât emoțiile, sunt mai puțin intense și adesea lipsite de stimul contextual), sau afectul (experiența sentimentului sau a emoției). Platon, în Republica, propune trei componente de bază ale minții umane: raționamentul, dorința și părțile emotive. Pentru Aristotel emoțiile au fost importante în viața morală, o componentă esențială a virtuții. Stoicii au evidențiat importanța emoțiilor în judecată (în teoriile stoice, emoțiile (...) sunt considerate o piedică pentru rațiune, și deci pentru virtute). DOI 10.13140/RG.2.2.24223.30884. (shrink)

Neste artigo, pretendemos defender a tese segundo a qual julgamentos sociais se iniciam com a percepção emocional e com o processamento de informações emocionais no reconhecimento de expressões faciais. Para tanto, revisaremos modelos que discutem (i) os mecanismos pelos quais as expressões faciais são codificadas para transmitir informações e ser percebidas pelos outros, (ii) os mecanismos perceptivos de decodificação e categorização de expressões faciais e, por fim, (iii) os mecanismos pelos quais o reconhecimento de expressões faciais geram respostas emocionais e (...) ajustes comportamentais e, por fim, (iv) a eficiência de nosso sistema perceptual na decodificação desses processos. Com essa discussão, nossa intenção é a de (i) explicitar em que sentido nossa percepção emocional de expressões faciais é u m dos principais mecanismos evolutivos de regulação da vida e que (ii) o processamento de informações emocionais é um poderoso instrumento para assegurar a sobrevivência e sustentar razoáveis interações sociais. (shrink)

The Darwin-Hecker hypothesis, viz. that laughter induced by tickling and humor share common underlying mechanisms, is so-called in part because of a quotation attributed to Ewald Hecker. However, a German counterpart of the quotation does not appear in the location cited. Some textual sleuthing is undertaken to find out what Hecker actually wrote and where he wrote it.

Pre-theoretically, it seems obvious that there are deep and multifarious relations between memory and emotions. On the one hand, a large chunk of our affective lives concerns the good and bad events that happened to us and that we preserve in memory. This is one amongst the many ways in which memory is relevant to the nature and causation of emotions. What does recent research teach us about these relations? § 1 surveys some key issues in this regard. On the (...) other hand, which events we happen to preserve in memory very much depends on how we affectively reacted to them when they took place. Emotions are relevant to the nature and causation of memory in this and many other ways. Key issues regarding these relations are surveyed in § 2. (shrink)

It is a common assumption amongst theorists that the phenomenon of animal emotion supports the affect program theory of emotion. I argue that this assumption is mistaken by exploring two cases of animal emotion from studies in ethology: aggression in chimpanzees and fear in piping plovers. While the affect program theory fails to account for the cognitive complexity involved in each case, I do not argue for a cognitive theory of emotion. Instead, I suggest that paying attention to animal emotions (...) helps the emotion theorist avoid the dichotomy between the extreme versions of the affect program theory and cognitive theories. ‡My thanks to Bart Moffatt, Ben Schulz, Jessica Slind, Katie Plasiance, Ken Waters, Mark Borrello, Susan Hawthorne, and Toben Lafrancois for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Dans le contexte épistémologique, deux questions ont une pertinence particulière : « les émotions sont-elles connues ? » et « une théorie uniforme des émotions est-elle nécessaire pour évaluer l'état épistémologique des émotions ? ». Une interprétation restrictive de la « connaissance » exige que les théories aient un contenu propositionnel. Dans un tel cas, les émotions sont généralement assimilées à des croyances ou à des jugements normatifs. Des interprétations plus libérales de la « connaissance » incluent également des théories (...) qui interprètent les émotions sur le modèle de perception. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16339.09762 . (shrink)

L'émotion peut être différente d'autres constructions similaires telles que les sentiments (tous les sentiments n'incluent pas l'émotion ; les humeurs (elles durent beaucoup plus longtemps que les émotions, sont moins intenses et souvent dépourvues de stimulus contextuel) ou affect (expérience des sentiments ou des émotions). Au début de l'ère moderne, les émotions ont été abordées dans les œuvres des philosophes tels que René Descartes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes et David Hume. . Les émotions étaient considérées comme adaptatives et, (...) en sec. 18, ont été étudiés principalement dans une perspective psychiatrique empirique. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21498.93127. (shrink)

In the past two to three decades health behavior scientists have increasingly emphasized affect-related concepts in their attempts to understand and facilitate change in important health behaviors, such as smoking, eating, physical activity, substance abuse, and sex. This article provides a narrative review of this burgeoning literature, including relevant theory and research on affective response, incidental affect, affect processing, and affectively charged motivation. An integrative dual-processing framework is presented that suggests pathways through which affect-related concepts may interrelate to influence health (...) behavior. (shrink)

Emotional intelligence is the ability of individuals to recognize their own and others' emotions, to discern between different feelings and to label them correctly, using emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and to manage and adjust emotions to adapt to the environment or to achieve their own goals. There are several models that aim to measure emotional intelligence levels. Goleman's original model is a mixed model that combines abilities with traits. A trait model was developed by Konstantinos V. Petrides (...) in 2001, with a focus on self-knowledge, and an ability model was developed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 2004 focusing on social relationship. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.13623.75685. (shrink)

In the epistemological context, two questions have a special relevance: "are emotions knowledge?" and "is a uniform theory of emotions necessary to evaluate the epistemological state of emotions?". A restrictive interpretation of "knowledge" requires theories to have propositional content. In such a case, emotions are usually assimilated to normative beliefs or judgments. More liberal interpretations of "knowledge" also include theories that interpret emotions on the perception model. A minimal definition of cognitive theories of emotions includes the assertion that emotions are (...) intentional. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11326.72004. (shrink)

Evidence from life science, cognitive science, and philosophy supports the hypothesis that knowledge is a central norm of the human practice of assertion. However, to date, the experimental evidence supporting this hypothesis is limited to American anglophones. If the hypothesis is correct, then such findings will not be limited to one language or culture. Instead, we should find a strong connection between knowledge and assertability across human languages and cultures. To begin testing this prediction, we conducted three experiments on Koreans (...) in Korean. In each case, the findings replicated prior results observed in Americans and were corroborated by key findings from new replication studies on Americans using materials back-translated from Korean. These findings support the theory that there is a core, cross-culturally robust human practice of assertion and that, according to the rules of this practice, assertions should express knowledge. (shrink)

A key feature of facial behavior is its dynamic quality. However, most previous research has been limited to the use of static images of prototypical expressive patterns. This article explores the role of facial dynamics in the perception of emotions, reviewing relevant empirical evidence demonstrating that dynamic information improves coherence in the identification of affect (particularly for degraded and subtle stimuli), leads to higher emotion judgments (i.e., intensity and arousal), and helps to differentiate between genuine and fake expressions. The findings (...) underline that using static expressions not only poses problems of ecological validity, but also limits our understanding of what facial activity does. Implications for future research on facial activity, particularly for social neuroscience and affective computing, are discussed. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists often claim that moral agency is connected with the ability to feel, understand, and deploy moral emotions. In this chapter, I investigate the nature of these emotions and their connection with moral agency. First, I examine the degree to which these emotional capacities are innate and/or ‘basic’ in a philosophically important sense. I examine three senses in which an emotion might be basic: developmental, compositional, and phylogenetic. After considering the evidence for basic emotion, I conclude that emotions (...) are not basic in a philosophically important sense. Emotions, I argue, are best understood as socially constructed concepts. I then investigate whether these emotions are necessary for moral agency. In order to do this I examine the philosophical and psychological literature on psychopathy and autism (two conditions defined in terms of empathic and emotional deficits). Persons with psychopathy appear incapable of distinguishing moral from non-moral norms. Additionally, while persons with autism often struggle to develop their empathic capacities, they are capable of understanding and deploying moral emotions like guilt and shame. I conclude that, in line with the conceptual act theories of emotion, that only contagion-based empathy is necessary for the acquisition of moral concepts. (shrink)

Disgust and Intimacy The aim of the paper is to present the results of preliminary research into the relation between disgust and intimacy. The authors apply current psychological conceptions of the emotions relating to social behaviour, primarily the theory of disgust associated with Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt and Clark McCauley. The research was conducted in a community of students living in student halls in Bratislava. The authors argue that social relationships may influence expressions of core disgust and the animal-nature disgust (...) that is considered to be an earlier stage in the evolutionary development of this emotion. More specifically, people's representations of feelings of disgust towards elicitors linked to certain persons are conditioned by the social categories those persons belong to and the socio-cultural schemas distributed in the given environment. (shrink)

The Feeling Brain — The Thinking Soul Recent advances in neuroscience have dramatically improved our understanding of human emotional states. With the help of new technologies and models, scholars are beginning to unravel the "mystery" of emotional life. Confusions in contemporary emotion studies are due to the traditional model of a person as a rational conscious agent. The paper highlights two problematic aspects of this prevailing model: the relation between emotion and reason and the relation between emotion and consciousness. Firstly, (...) it is claimed that the difference between emotions and thoughts does not transcend their mutual interconnectivity. Secondly, conscious content and emotional responses are both products of specialized emotion systems that operate unconsciously. Both claims are supported by experimental findings and clinical practice. (shrink)

The word “emotion” has named a psychological category and a subject for systematic enquiry only since the 19th century. Before then, relevant mental states were categorised variously as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” The word “emotion” has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French émotion, meaning a physical disturbance. It came into much wider use in 18th-century English, often to refer to mental experiences, becoming a fully fledged theoretical term in the following century, (...) especially through the influence of two Scottish philosopher-physicians, Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. This article relates this intellectual and semantic history to contemporary debates about the usefulness and meaning of “emotion” as a scientific term. (shrink)

Taking our lead from Solomon’s emphasis on the importance of the intentional object of emotion, we review the history of repeated attempts to make this object disappear. We adduce evidence suggesting that in the case of James and Schachter, the intentional object got lost unintentionally. By contrast, modern constructivists seem quite determined to deny the centrality of the intentional object in accounting for the occurrence of emotions. Griffiths, however, downplays the role objects have in emotion noting that these do not (...) qualify as intentional. We argue that these disappearing acts, deliberate or not, generate fruitless debate and add little to the advancement of our understanding of emotion as an adaptive mechanism to cope with events that are relevant to an organism’s life. (shrink)

This paper discusses how major changes in methodology, ideology and the points of view of researchers have given linguistics a new opportunity to study animal semiotics and return to the “animal language” question. The article presents new linguistic perspectives from language theory but also from sociolinguistics, language development studies or the study of sign language. This paper shows how these perspective changes have scientifically modified the way linguists approach animal communication and cleared a path for new study fields such as (...) biosemiotics and zoosemiotics. The second part of this article introduces other significant evolutions in various scientific fields, such as biology, neuroscience or ethology, but also philosophy, and how these changes are going in the same directions as linguistics’. It demonstrates how animal linguistics is without doubt a completely interdisciplinary subject where efficient research is only possible by paradigm changes in all related fields. The last part of the paper introduces some of these possible new study prospects. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology and human sociobiology often reject the mere possibility of symbolic causality. Conversely, theories in which symbolic causality plays a central role tend to be both anti-nativist and anti-evolutionary. This article sketches how these apparent scientific rivals can be reconciled in the study of disgust. First, we argue that there are no good philosophical or evolutionary reasons to assume that symbolic causality is impossible. Then, we examine to what extent symbolic causality can be part of the theoretical toolbox of (...) the evolutionary social sciences. This examination leads to the conclusion that it is possible to make evolutionary sense of Mary Douglas’s theory of disgust, and that her view of symbolic causality can and should inform evolutionary theories of (sociocultural) disgust. (shrink)

In this article we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of mindreading versus embodied cognition approaches to emotion understanding. In the first part of the article we argue that mindreading explanations of how we understand the emotions of others (TT, ST or hybrid) face a version of the frame problem, i.e. the problem of how to limit the scope of the information that is relevant to mindreading. Also, we show that embodied cognition explanations are able to by-pass this problem because they (...) provide a characterization of social understanding as being essentially situated. However, embodied cognition explanations seem to be limited in scope insofar as they do not target the more sophisticated forms of emotion understanding that have traditionally been the main focus of mindreading explanations. In the second part of the article we discuss Goldie’s account of emotion understanding as a possible way to complement embodied cognition approaches without re-introducing the frame problem. We offer two suggestions that might further the integration of Goldie’s account of emotion understanding within the framework of embodied cognition. (shrink)

The discipline of affective neuroscience is concerned with the underlying neural substrates of emotion and mood. This review presents an historical overview of the pioneering work in affective neuroscience of James and Lange, Cannon and Bard, and Hess, Papez, and MacLean before summarizing the current state of research on the brain regions identified by these seminal researchers. We also discuss the more recent strides made in the field of affective neuroscience. A final section considers different hypothetical organizations of affective neuroanatomy (...) and highlights future directions for the discipline. (shrink)

Although there have been a growing number of studies focusing on dog welfare, the research field concerning dog positive emotion assessment remains mostly unexplored. This paper aims to provide a state-of-the-art review and summary of the scattered and disperse research on dog positive emotion assessment. The review notably details the current advancement in the dog positive emotion research, what approaches, measures, methods, and techniques have been implemented so far in emotion perception, processing, and response assessment. Moreover, we propose possible future (...) research directions for short-term emotion as well as longer-term emotional states assessment in dogs. The review ends by identifying and addressing some methodological limitations and by pointing out further methodological research needs. (shrink)

Literary analysis of the blush in Austen's novels identifies three themes, namely the potential ambiguity of a blush, its association with modesty, and its erotic and gendered nature, issues that scarcely figure in current psychological explanations of the phenomenon. I examine these themes and compare them with current psychological accounts which assign a central place to embarrassment and, more specifically, emphasise either unwanted social attention, exposure of the self, or the blush's signalling function. Analysis of Austen's work suggests that greater (...) attention should be paid to self-consciousness as it relates to threats to reputation, to the erotic dimension of the blush, and to potential gender differences. It should encourage researchers to be aware of limitations of psychological accounts and to expand their range of sources of information in order to enhance understanding of this elusive phenomenon. (shrink)

Little is known about the circumstances that give rise to blushing and there have been no systematic attempts to classify and analyze the types of situations where it occurs. The study reported here analyzes a sample of recollections of occasions and a selection of literary episodes. The two sources of evidence yield somewhat different patterns but prominent themes in both are being the centre of attention, whether this is positive, neutral or negative, and the disclosure, or threat of exposure, of (...) a private or sensitive topic. Inspection of example suggests that a blush is associated with self-consciousness. More specifically, it is elicited when circumstances cause someone to take another's perspective on the self, and this generates awareness of a discrepancy between his or her position and this position as it appears to the other. A blush does not require that the other take an adverse view of the actor's position. The blush shows sensitivity to the opinions of others and it is its capacity to communicate this that makes it effective in deflecting aggressive or rejecting responses from others. (shrink)

The state of the body is central to guiding motivational behaviours. Here we discuss how afferent information from face and viscera influence the processing and communication of emotional states. We highlight (a) the fine-grained impact that facial muscular and patterned visceral responses exert on emotional appraisal and communicative signals; (b) short-term changes in visceral state that bias brain responses to emotive stimuli; (c) the commonality of brain pathways and substrates mediating short- and long-term bodily effects on emotional processes; (d) how (...) topographically distinct representations of different bodily states are coupled to reported feelings associated with subtypes of disgust; and (e) how pupil signals contribute to affective exchange. Integrating these observations enriches our understanding of emotional processes and psychopathology. (shrink)

Temporality underpins how living systems coordinate and function. Unlike measures that use mathematical conventions, lived temporalities grant functional cohesion to organisms-in-the-world. In foxtail grasses, for example, self-maintenance meshes endogenous processes with exogenous rhythms. In embrained animals, temporalities can contribute to learning. And cowbirds coordinate in a soundscape that includes conspecifics: social learning allows them to connect copulating with past events such that females exert ‘long-distance’ control over male singing. Using Howard Pattee’s work, we compare the foxtail’s self-maintenance, gender-based cowbird learning (...) and how humans manage multi-scalar activity. We argue that, while all living things coordinate, temporal ranging is typical of vertebrates. As primates, humans too use temporal ranging – they can draw on social learning, anticipate winter and manage coordinated action. However language behaviour grants new control over the scales of time. People connect the impersonal to lived experience in narratives, as they draw on autobiography and enact cultural practices. Humans become singular individuals who use temporal experience to manage affect, relationships, beliefs, fictions, and knowledge. Individual subjectivity permits collaborative and competitive activity based on linking events with quite different histories. As a result, alone of the vertebrates, we claim that humans become time-rangers. (shrink)

Whereas Darwin insisted upon the continuity of human and nonhuman animals, more recent students of animal behavior have largely assumed discontinuity. Lloyd Morgan was a pivotal figure in this transformation. His "canon, " although intended to underpin a psychological approach to animals, has been persistently misunderstood to be a stark prohibition of anthropomorphic description. His extension to animals of the terms "behavior" and "trial-and-error, " previously restricted to human psychology, again largely unwittingly devalued their original meaning and widened the gulf (...) between animals and humans. His insistence that knowledge of animal psychology could be trusted solely to "qualified" observers initiated the exclusion from science of the informal and intimate knowledge of animals gained by pet owners, animal trainers, and other scientific outsiders. The presumption, however, that animals, in contrast to people. are to be understood solely as "strangers, " begs, rather than addresses, the question of animal-human continuity. (shrink)

The strong predominance of right-handedness appears to be a uniquely human characteristic, whereas the left-cerebral dominance for vocalization occurs in many species, including frogs, birds, and mammals. Right-handedness may have arisen because of an association between manual gestures and vocalization in the evolution of language. I argue that language evolved from manual gestures, gradually incorporating vocal elements. The transition may be traced through changes in the function of Broca's area. Its homologue in monkeys has nothing to do with vocal control, (...) but contains the so-called “mirror neurons,” the code for both the production of manual reaching movements and the perception of the same movements performed by others. This system is bilateral in monkeys, but predominantly left-hemispheric in humans, and in humans is involved with vocalization as well as manual actions. There is evidence that Broca's area is enlarged on the left side in Homo habilis, suggesting that a link between gesture and vocalization may go back at least two million years, although other evidence suggests that speech may not have become fully autonomous until Homo sapiens appeared some 170,000 years ago, or perhaps even later. The removal of manual gesture as a necessary component of language may explain the rapid advance of technology, allowing late migrations of Homo sapiens from Africa to replace all other hominids in other parts of the world, including the Neanderthals in Europe and Homo erectus in Asia. Nevertheless, the long association of vocalization with manual gesture left us a legacy of right-handedness. Key Words: cerebral dominance; gestures; handedness; hominids; language evolution; primates; speech; vocalization. (shrink)

According to the so-called transparency thesis, what is disgusting in nature cannot but be disgusting in art. This paper critically discusses the arguments that have been put forward in favour of the transparency thesis, starting with Korsmeyer's (2011) sensory view of disgust. As an alternative, it offers an account of the relationship between disgust and representation that explains, at least in part, whatever truth there is in the transparency thesis. Such an account appeals to a distinction between object-centric and situation-centric (...) emotions. (shrink)

Introduzione Lo studio delle emozioni è stato caratterizzato per molti anni da una netta separazione fra mente e corpo. Negli anni Sessanta e Settanta – l’epoca aurea del cognitivismo – le teorie delle emozioni si occupavano soprattutto degli antecedenti cognitivi dell’emozione, le cosiddette “valutazioni”. I processi corporei erano visti essenzialmente come sottoprodotti della cognizione, e come troppo poco specifici per poter contribuire alla varietà dell’esperienza emotiva. La cognizione e...

According to Discrete Emotion Theory, a number of emotions are distinguishable on the basis of neural, physiological, behavioral and expressive features. Critics of this view emphasize the variability and context-sensitivity of emotions. This paper discusses some of these criticisms, and argues that they do not undermine the claim that emotions are discrete. This paper also presents some works in dynamical affective science, and argues that to conceive of discrete emotions as self-organizing and softly assembled patterns of various processes accounts more (...) naturally than traditional Discrete Emotion Theory for the variability and context-sensitivity of emotions. (shrink)

Researchers have proposed that blocking facial feedback via glabellar-region botulinum toxin injections can reduce depression. Random-effects meta-analyses of studies that administered GBTX...

Which nonhuman animals experience conscious pain?1 This question is central to the debate about animal welfare, as well as being of basic interest to scientists and philosophers of mind. Nociception—the capacity to sense noxious stimuli—is one of the most primitive sensory capacities. Neurons functionally specialized for nociception have been described in invertebrates such as the leech Hirudo medicinalis and the marine snail Aplysia californica (Walters 1996). Is all nociception accompanied by conscious pain, even in relatively primitive animals such as Aplysia, (...) or is it the case, as some philosophers continue to maintain, that conscious experiences are the exclu- sive province of human beings? What philosophical and scientific resources are presently available for assessing claims lying between these extremes? (shrink)

The peripersonal space is an adaptive and flexible interface between the body and the environment that fulfills a dual-motor function: preparing the body for voluntary object-oriented actions to interact with incentive stimuli and preparing the body for defensive responses when facing potentially harmful stimuli. In this position article, we provide arguments for the sensorimotor rooting of the peripersonal space representation and highlight the variables that contribute to its flexible and adaptive characteristics. We also demonstrate that peripersonal space represents a mediation (...) zone between the body and the environment contributing to not only the control of goal-directed actions but also the organization of social life. The whole of the data presented and discussed led us to the proposal of a new theoretical framework linking the peripersonal action space and the interpersonal social space and we highlight how this theoretical framework can account for social behaviors in populations with socio-emotional deficits. (shrink)

Kathleen Higgins (2012) claims that emotional responses to music are mostly social constructs, derived from the cultural transmission of musical knowledge. I agree with this general idea, but question Higgins’ ethnocentric and narrow view, which reduces music mainly to the art of combining sounds to produce beauty of form and expression of emotion. Instead, I propose that the distinctive and unique behavior of active music-making evolved culturally to serve a range of adaptive functions in the social environments humans used to (...) live in before the age of playback. Consequently, emotions perceived and induced via music should be studied in such “original” contexts. (shrink)

‘Wrongdoing does not remain isolated in time’. In February 2013 the McAleese Report confirmed that more than 11,000 women and girls were incarcerated in Ireland’s Magdalen laundries between 1922 and 1996. These women were arguably the scapegoats of Ireland’s national shame as it struggled to develop its identity as a morally pure state following independence, of familial shame as communities fought to hide abuse and illegitimacy, and of male shame, as men sought to have their cake and eat it. What (...) does ‘atonement’ – a concept that embodies connection and integration mean in the context of shame – a state that signifies rupture, separation and isolation? This paper will explore the role of shame in the dis-integration of relationships and lives and ask whether the Christian concept of atonement can be utilized to put this right. In a moral climate where past abuses in church-run institutions are increasingly coming to light, what value does atonement have in the way we respond to the on-going reverberations of shaming and shameful wrongdoing? (shrink)

We review the jealousy literature and present our Dynamic Functional Model of Jealousy, which argues that jealousy evolved and has its own unique motivational state aimed at preventing others from usurping important relationships. It has a core form that exists in infants and nonhuman animals and an elaborated form in humans that emerges as cognitive sophistication develops. The DFMJ proposes that jealousy is an unfolding process with early and late phases that can be differentially impacted by relationship and personality factors. (...) It also notes the importance of looking at multiple concomitants of jealousy, including action tendencies. We discuss how jealousy fits with current emotion theories and suggest that theories of specific emotions need to be broadened. (shrink)