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)

The paper is about the conception of free will. It describes arguments and counterarguments for free will. Its main aim is to submit a novel argumentation opposite to traditional arguments regarding, for instance, accounting of free will, emergent free will in complex brain or anthropocentric argument with emergent free will in human reason.

Behavior may be controlled by reactive systems. In a reactive system the motor output is exclusively driven by actual sensory input. An alternative solution to control behavior is given by “cognitive” systems capable of planning ahead. To this end the system has to be equipped with some kind of internal world model. A sensible basis of an internal world model might be a model of the system's own body. I show that a reactive system with the ability to control a (...) body of complex geometry requires only a slight reorganization to form a cognitive system. This implies that the assumption that the evolution of cognitive properties requires the introduction of new, additional modules, namely internal world models, is not justified. Rather, these modules may already have existed before the system obtained cognitive properties. Furthermore, I discuss whether the occurrence of such world models may lead to systems having internal perspective. (shrink)

Dominant approaches to punishment tend to downplay the socio-emotional dimension of perpetrators. This attitude is inconsistent with the body of evidence from social and affective neuroscience and its adjacent disciplines on the crucial role of emotions and emotion-related skills coupled with positive social stimuli in promoting prosocial behavior. Through a literature review of these studies, this article explores and assesses the implications that greater consideration of emotional and social factors in sentencing and correctional practices might have for conventional punitive approaches (...) to crime. It argues that proper attention to these factors within the judgment of offending can challenge the tenets of dominant punitive ideologies and responses to crime. It further emphasizes the higher rationality and effectiveness of a paradigm of justice that aims for the social reintegration of perpetrators through a path to self-reform and change that is based on relational and inclusionary processes in the least confining environments possible to still ensure public safety. Hence, this article supports the pursuit of social rehabilitation as the ultimate goal of criminal justice. (shrink)

We present an analysis of emotional experience in terms of beliefs and desires viewed as its minimal cognitive constituents. We argue that families of emotions can be identified because their members share some of these constituents. To document this claim, we analyze one family of emotions—which includes the feeling of inferiority, admiration, envy, and jealousy—trying to show that the distinctiveness of each emotion is due to the specific compound of beliefs and desires it implies, whereas the kinship among related emotions (...) is due to their sharing of cognitive or motivational components. Finally, we address the gestalt problem, that is, the question of how it is possible that emotions, although consisting of several “atomic” elements, are felt as unitary experiences. (shrink)

We challenge the classic experience/expression dichotomous account of emotions, according to which experiencing and expressing an emotion are two independent processes. By endorsing Dewey's and Mead's accounts of emotions, and capitalizing upon recent empirical findings, we propose that expression is part of the emotional experience. This proposal partly challenges the purely constructivist approach endorsed by the authors of the target article.

Robert Brandom's book Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism does not incorporate the larger views of any of the “pragmatisms” he deliberately invokes, such as those of the classical American pragmatists, apart from an “analytic” cohort of Wittgenstein-inspired pragmatisms that he himself favors.

The main conclusion of this article is that propositional attitudes are physical brain processes that pertain to language. Hence, propositional attitudes cannot be direct manifestations of our mental states, neither direct representations; instead they must be understood as second-order representations. Thus, propositional attitudes cannot serve for explaining our basic mental activity. Otherwise, propositional attitudes must be understood as language shortcuts used for referring to basic mental states, events or processes.