In this response, we clarify several misunderstandings of the understanding/acceptance principle and defend our specific operationalization of that principle. We reiterate the importance of addressing the problem of rational task construal and we elaborate the notion of computational limitations contained in our target article. Our concept of thinking dispositions as variable intentional-level styles of epistemic and behavioral regulation is explained, as is its relation to the rationality debate. Many of the suggestions of the commentators for elaborating two-process models are easily (...) integrated into our generic dual-process account. We further explicate how we view the relation between System 1 and System 2 and evolutionary and normative rationality. We clarify our attempt to fuse the contributions of the cognitive ecologists with the insights of the original heuristics and biases researchers. (shrink)

In this chapter, I outline dynamic models of motivation and emotion. These turn out not to be autonomous subsystems, but, instead, are deeply integrated in the basic interactive dynamic character of living systems. Motivation is a crucial aspect of particular kinds of interactive systems -- systems for which representation is a sister aspect. Emotion is a special kind of partially reflective interaction process, and yields its own emergent motivational aspects. In addition, the overall model accounts for some of the crucial (...) properties of consciousness. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis. In this article, we consider different ways of understanding ExE in philosophy, psychology, and the (...) cognitive sciences. First, we outline the background of the debate and discuss different argumentative strategies for ExE. In particular, we distinguish ExE from cognate but more moderate claims about the embodied and situated nature of cognition and emotion. We then dwell upon two dimensions of ExE: emotions extended by material culture and by the social factors. We conclude by defending ExE against some objections and point to desiderata for future research. (shrink)

One way of studying emotions which is sensitive to cultural differences is to analyze the vocabularies people use to describe their own and other’s emotions, which can be called the local emotionology. Wittgenstein’s concepts of language game and family resemblance can be used in this project. The result of research in this mode is a three-factor account of emotions, involving bodily perturbations, judgments of meanings, and the social force of emotion displays. This treatment of a psychological phenomenon is typical of (...) recent conceptions of psychology as a hybrid science, linking cognitive, cultural, and physiological phenomena. It can be seen as a further development of the cognitive account of emotions that has appeared in the last century. (shrink)

Research on this topic in Europe and North America has reached a new stage. Prior to 1970, historians told a story of progress in which modern individuals gradually gained mastery of emotions. After 1970 this older approach was put into doubt. Since 1990 research into the history of emotions has increasingly relied on a new methodology, based on the assumption that emotion is a domain of effort, and that it is possible to document variance between emotional standards, on the one (...) hand, and the greater or lesser success of individuals in conforming to them, on the other. Emotional standards are now assumed to display a history that is not progressive, but reflects distinctive features of each period. (shrink)

The role of emotion in human action has long been neglected in the philosophy of action. Some prevalent misconceptions of the nature of emotion are responsible for this neglect: emotions are irrational; emotions are passive; and emotions have only an insignificant impact on actions. In this paper we argue that these assumptions about the nature of emotion are problematic and that the neglect of emotion's place in theories of action is untenable. More positively, we argue on the basis of recent (...) research in cognitive neuroscience that emotions may significantly affect action generation as well as action execution and control. Moreover, emotions also play a crucial role in people's explanation of action. We conclude that the concept of emotion deserves a more distinctive and central place in philosophical theories of action. (shrink)

William James’s account of emotions is frequently categorised as a feeling theory of emotions. Consideration of James’s views about sensations, however, reveals that this categorisation is untenable. Instead, many of James’s emotions are more appropriately categorised as instincts. The categorisation of emotions as instincts entails that emotions do have a function–contrary to a criticism often levied against James’s account.

We first present a reconstruction of James’s theory of emotion (JATE) and then argue for four theses: (a) Despite constructivist elements, James’s views are overall in line with basic emotions theory. (b) JATE does not exclude an influence of emotion on intentional action even in its original formulation; nevertheless, this influence is quite limited. It seems possible, however, to repair this problem of the theory. (c) Cannon’s theory of emotion is a centralized version of JATE that inherits from the latter (...) theory a potentially fatal flaw, the insufficient physiological differentiation of emotions. (d) The core claim of JATE, that emotions are bodily feelings, is very likely false. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to account for expressions like “Cantor’s diagonal proof is elegant” or “Euler identity is the most beautiful formula of mathematics”. This type of expressions is common among mathematicians; however, they may result in two kinds of puzzled reactions: first, the non mathematician may find the use of the word ‘beautiful’ strange in this context. Second, the mathematician may try to reinterpret mathematical beauty in terms of the principles and precepts of mathematics itself. I present (...) an account of mathematical beauty that offers a way to avoid these puzzled reactions: mathematical beauty is just a type of “normal” beauty and no reinterpretation is necessary. To support this claim, I devise an aesthetic theory -by using insights and findings from experimental psychology, neurology, philosophical and psychological theories of emotion in art, philosophy of music and philosophy of science- that shows that aesthetic judgments in mathematics are genuine aesthetic judgments. (shrink)

In this essay I examine the conceptual relation between emotions and their corresponding evaluations, desires, behavior and goals. Such conceptual relation is of the utmost importance in order to account for the unity or oneness of emotion, for if the different aspects of emotion are linked conceptually, then to have one such aspect would imply having all the others. After I discuss how emotions are related to their corresponding evaluations, desires and behavior, I show how each aspect of emotion is (...) related to the others. Next, I argue that indeed there is such conceptual or quasi-conceptual relation between emotions, evaluations and conative or desiderative states. However, while intentional behavior in terms of actions is conceptually related to some emotions, other times the emotion-specific desires are either non-forward-looking, and thus do not give rise to intentional actions, or they may be overridden, and the resultant behavioral manifestations are not conceptually related to emotion. Next, I argue that emotions are eudaimonistic, in the sense that they are essentially concerned with important goals, concerns and attachments that comprise our conception of the good life and well-being. Finally, I examine the conceptual relation between emotions and their respective goals, and argue that while emotions logically presuppose such goals, the reverse is not the case. (shrink)

Envy and resentment are generally thought to be unpleasant and unethical emotions which ought to be condemned. I argue that both envy and resentment, in some important forms, are moral emotions connected with concern for justice, understood in terms of desert and entitlement. They enable us to recognise injustice, work as a spur to acting against it and connect us to others. Thus, we should accept these emotions as part of the ethical life.

Explanatory accounts of emotion require, among other things, theoretically tractable representations of emotional experience. Common methods for producing such representations have well-known drawbacks, such as observer interference or lack of ecological validity. Literature offers a valuable supplement. It provides detailed instructions for simulating emotions; when successful, it induces empathic emotions. It too involves distortions, through emotion-intensifying idealization and ideological biases. But these also relate to emotion study. There are three levels at which literature bears on emotion research: (1) the individual (...) work; (2) generic and related patterns; and (3) properties found widely across individual works and genres. Even at the third, most general level, literature suggests potentially important hypotheses about our pleasure in emotional simulation and our need to share emotional experiences. (shrink)

It is easy to envision marked progress in biological and physiological approaches to emotion, due to technological advances in imaging and other recording techniques. The future of social-constructionism appears more hazy: Progress will likely depend as much on new ideas as on new empirical discoveries. The most fruitful breeding ground for new ideas is where disciplines meet. Hence, the contributors to this special section represent diverse disciplines: biology, computer science, and the arts, as well as areas more traditionally associated with (...) the social construction of emotion, for example, interpersonal relations, cultural influence, and individual development. (shrink)

Deep appreciation of the relevance of emotion to epistemology requires a rich account of how emotional mental states such as happiness, sadness and desire interact with cognitive states such as belief and doubt. Analytic philosophy since Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell has assumed that such mental states are propositional attitudes, which are relations between a self and a proposition, an abstract entity constituting the meaning of a sentence. This chapter shows the explanatory defects of the doctrine of propositional attitudes, and (...) proposes instead that beliefs, desires, and emotions should be construed naturalistically using current understanding of brain mechanisms. Mental states are patterns of neural activity, not relations between dubious entities such as selves and propositions. From this perspective, it becomes easy to see how cognition and emotion are intertwined, and hence how emotions can be integral to epistemology. I begin by reviewing some of the ways in which emotions are relevant to epistemology: as frequent contributors to the growth of knowledge, as sometime impediments to knowledge acquisition, and as components of knowledge about persons and morality. I then argue that propositional attitudes do not exist, because the selves and the propositions that they purportedly relate do not exist. Thus the doctrine of propositional attitudes is as useless for epistemology as it is for explaining human action. I argue for an alternative construal of mental states as patterns of neural activity, and July 23, 2007 describe how it is possible to give a theoretically rich and empirically supported account of the neurophysiological interconnections of cognition and emotion. Finally, I discuss the epistemological significance of this naturalistic, materialist reconstrual of cognitions and emotions. (shrink)

This paper proposes a theory of how conscious emotional experience is produced by the brain as the result of many interacting brain areas coordinated in working memory. These brain areas integrate perceptions of bodily states of an organism with cognitive appraisals of its current situation. Emotions are neural processes that represent the overall cognitive and somatic state of the organism. Conscious experience arises when neural representations achieve high activation as part of working memory. This theory explains numerous phenomena concerning emotional (...) consciousness, including differentiation, integration, intensity, valence, and change. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 86-89.

An integrative explanation proposes that culture and gender interact to produce fundamentally different patterns of association between positive and negative emotions. People in independent-based cultures (e.g. the United States) experience emotions in oppositional (i.e. bipolar) ways, whereas people in interdependent-based cultures (e.g. China) experience emotions in dialectic ways. These patterns are stronger for women than men in both cultures. In support of the theory, Study 1 showed that positive and negative emotions are strongly correlated inversely for American women and weakly (...) correlated inversely for American men, but strongly correlated positively for Chinese women and weakly correlated positively for Chinese men. In Study 2, findings for Koreans, although mixed, were closer to the results for Chinese. (shrink)

The target article sketched and explored a mechanism (action-oriented predictive processing) most plausibly associated with core forms of cortical processing. In assessing the attractions and pitfalls of the proposal we should keep that element distinct from larger, though interlocking, issues concerning the nature of adaptive organization in general.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2008.

Richard Cytowic has done considerable service to the scientific study of synesthesia, conducting important research and publishing two recent books on the subject. The study of synesthesia raises interesting questions about scientific method, both because of the negative reception it received initially--often being viewed as tainted by a reliance upon introspective reports--and because of the connections Cytowic has found between synesthetic perception and the limbic system, thereby possibly undermining some of the claims to objectivity in perception and scientific method. I (...) dispute some of the more extreme methodological conclusions Cytowic draws from his work and reinforce others by reference to different arguments current within the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Emotion scientists often take an ambivalent stance concerning the role of language in a science of emotion. However, it is important for emotion researchers to contemplate some of the consequences of current practices for their theory building. There is a danger of an overreliance on the English language as a transparent window into emotion categories. More consideration has to be given to cross-linguistic comparison in the future so that models of language acquisition and of the language–cognition interface fit better the (...) extant variation found in today’s peoples. (shrink)

This paper holds an evolutionary approach to musical semantics. Revolving around the nature/nurture dichotomy, it considers the role of the dispositional machinery to respond to sounding stimuli. Conceiving of music as organized sound, it stresses the dynamic tension between music as a collection of vibrational events and their potential of being structured. This structuring, however, is not gratuitous. It depends on levels of processing that rely on evolutionary older levels of reacting to the sounds as well as higher-level functions of (...) the brain, which allow listeners to emancipate themselves from mere acoustic processing of sounds to the level of epistemic interactions with the sounding music. These interactions are partly autonomous and partly constrained, but they all stress the realization of systemic cognition in the context of a living system‘s interactions with the environment. As such, listeners can be conceived as adaptive devices, which can build up new semiotic linkages with the sounding world. (shrink)

The relationship between emotions and argumentation is not always clear. I attempt to clarify this issue by referring to three basic questions: (1) Do emotions constitute a certain kind of argumentation?; (2) Do emotions constitute rational argumentation?; (3) Do emotions constitute efficient argumentation? I will claim that there are many circumstances in which the answer to these questions is positive. After describing such circumstances, the educational implications of the connection between emotions and argumentation will be indicated.

Emotions are understood sociologically as experiences of involvement. Emotion regulation influences the type, incidence, and expression of emotions. Regulation occurs through physical processes prior to an emotions episode, through social interaction in which a person’s emotions are modified due to the reactions of others to them, and by a person’s self-modification or management of emotions which they are consciously aware of. This article goes on to show that there are emotions which the emoting subject is not consciously aware of. Therefore, (...) a certain class of emotions function by foregrounding external objects of attention while remaining outside the emoting subject’s consciousness. The nature and significance of such backgrounded emotions beyond explicit emotion regulation are explored through consideration of their role in theory choice in science and in trust relations. (shrink)

When researchers think about the interaction between language and emotion, they typically focus on descriptive emotion words. This review demonstrates that emotion can interact with language at many levels of structure, from the sound patterns of a language to its lexicon and grammar, and beyond to how it appears in conversation and discourse. Findings are considered from diverse subfields across the language sciences, including cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis. Taken together, it is clear that emotional expression is (...) finely tuned to language-specific structures. Future emotion research can better exploit cross-linguistic variation to unravel possible universal principles operating between language and emotion. (shrink)

In the decision-making and rationality research field, rational decision theory (RDT) has always been the main framework, thanks to the elegance and complexity of its mathematical tools. Unfortunately, the formal refinement of the theory is not accompanied by a satisfying predictive accuracy, thus there is a big gap between what is predicted by the theory and the behaviour of real subjects. Here we propose a new foundation of the RDT, which has to be based on a cognitive architecture for reason-based (...) agents, acting on the basis of their beliefs in order to achieve their goals. The decision process is a cognitive evaluation of conflicting goals, based on different beliefs and values, but also on emotions and desires. We refer to a cognitive analysis of emotions and we integrate them in this more general RDT. (shrink)

Over the years, researchers have enriched the postulation that hedonic products generate deeper emotional reactions and feelings in the consumer than functional products. However, recent research empirically proves that hedonic products are more affect-rich only for some consumer segments or for specific consumption contexts. We argue that such inconsistency may derive from the nature of the emotions assessed that is strictly dependent on their empirical measurement and not from the mere existence of emotions themselves. Self-reported methods of evaluating consumer experience, (...) on which prior studies are grounded, only assess conscious emotions the consumer can recognize and report, but not unconscious feelings, happening without individual awareness. The present work takes this challenge by conducting a laboratory experiment in which subjects are exposed to both a utilitarian product and a hedonic product. Physiological measures have been adopted to investigate unconscious emotional responses and self-reported measures to assess conscious emotions toward the products. Specifically, physiological data regarding the subjects’ cardiac activity, respiratory activity, electrodermal activity, and cerebral activity have been collected and complemented with a survey. Results confirm that both functional and hedonic products generate emotional responses in consumers. Further, findings show that when a consumer is exposed to a functional product, the physiological emotional responses are disassociated from the self-reported ones. A diverse pattern is depicted for hedonic products. We suggest an alternative explanation for the apparent lack of affect-rich experiences elicited by functional products and the need to reconsider emotional responses for these products. (shrink)

Abstract. This paper is concerned with the mental processes involved in intentional communication. I describe an agent's cognitive architecture as the set of cognitive dynamics (i.e., sequences of mental states with contents) she may entertain. I then describe intentional communication as one such specific dynamics, arguing against the prevailing view that communication consists in playing a role in a socially shared script. The cognitive capabilities needed for such dynamics are midreading (i.e., the ability to reason upon another individual's mental states), (...) and communicative planning (i.e., the ability to dynamically represent and act in a communicative situation). (shrink)

Happiness is typically reported as an important reason for participating in challenging activities like extreme sport. While in the middle of the activity, however, participants do not seem particularly happy. So where does the happiness come from? The article proposes some answers from a study of facially expressed emotions measured moment-by-moment during a backcountry skiing event. Self-reported emotions were also assessed immediately after the skiing. Participants expressed lower levels of happiness while skiing, compared to when stopping for a break. Moment-to-moment (...) and self-reported measures of emotions were largely unrelated. These findings are explained with reference to the Functional Wellbeing Approach ( Vittersø, 2013 ), which argues that some moment-to-moment feelings are non-evaluative in the sense of being generated directly by the difficulty of an activity. By contrast, retrospective emotional feelings are more complex as they include an evaluation of the overall goals and values associated with the activity as a whole. (shrink)

At the core of pragmatism is the idea of an active projection of experience into the future. William James’s contribution to pragmatism included an emphasis on emotions in the apprehension of possible futures and related processes. After presenting a summary of Jamesian pragmatism, and especially the significance of emotions in it, the article notes the reception of James’s writings in Europe and their influence on European intellectual developments. Max Weber, for instance, studied James closely. He treated James’s approach to religion (...) as a negative example. While Emile Durkheim rejected the individualist approach of James, he nevertheless found much of value in James’s conceptualization of religious experience, including its emotional underpinnings. Discussion below explores the neglected Jamesian quality of Durkheim’s account of religion. It is noted in conclusion that the more recent sociological neglect of James and the failure to appreciate his particular approach in pragmatism, coincided with the rise of Freudian psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Engagement is important to the success of applications, systems and artefacts as diverse as robotics, pedagogy, games, interactive installations, and virtual reality applications. Yet engagement has proved to be remarkably difficult to define as it can take many forms, so many that it is difficult to isolate what these different instantiations have in common. Instead of pursuing an empirical perspective, the human side of engagement, namely, involvement is considered from a broadly Heideggerian perspective. As Heidegger has a deserved reputation for (...) philosophical obscurity, all of the concepts adopted from his work are mapped onto the more familiar languages and vocabularies of psychology, human–computer interaction and cognitive science. It is argued that technology is engaging and our response to it is to be involved (with it). This resulting involvement–engagement dyad is thus an explicitly holistic account recognising roles for affordance, purpose, identity, affect and embodiment. (shrink)

Considering two of the main types of emotions, namely, perceptual emotions and cognitive emotions, in this paper we will examine which of them has a greater explanatory power for solving the frame problem. Additionally, we will analyze which of the main characteristics of perceptual and cognitive emotions type are appropriate when explaining how human beings determine relevance efficiently. We argue, assuming an intermediate position, that both types of emotions offer the necessary tools to explain how human beings solve the frame (...) problem. This is due, on the one hand, to the experiential/corporal character of the perceptual emotions and, on the other hand, to the relationship that cognitive emotions establish with the achievement of goals when facing a determined situation. (shrink)

Este artículo considera el potencial trabajo cooperativo entre los especialistas en retórica y los neurocientíficos, explorando cómo poner en práctica de manera significativa la investigación retórica en el ámbito de las neurociencias.