RÉSUMÉ. Cet article examine plusieurs façons de comprendre les émotions comme des réactions évaluatives. Il existe un consensus dans les sciences affectives qui veut que les émotions paradigmatiques soient faites de quatre composants : catégorisation du stimulus, tendances à l’action, changements corporels et aspect phénoménal. L’article expose les quatre principales théories dans la philosophie contemporaine des émotions et montre qu’elles ont tendance à se focaliser sur l’un ou l’autre des quatre composants des émotions pour expliquer leur nature évaluative. La conclusion (...) est qu’il est possible de rendre compte des émotions comme réactions évaluatives à ces quatre niveaux et que, pour cette raison, les conceptions présentées sont plus complémentaires qu’on ne le suppose généralement. ABSTRACT. This article examines several ways of understanding emotions as evaluative reactions. There is a consensus in affective sciences that paradigmatic emotions are made up of four components: appraisal process, action tendencies, bodily changes, and phenomenal character. The article outlines the four main theories in contemporary philosophy of emotions and shows that they tend to focus on one of the four components of emotions to explain their evaluative nature. The conclusion is that it is possible to account for emotions as evaluative reactions through the four components and that, for this reason, the theories presented are more complementary than is generally assumed. (shrink)

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. I discuss cases involving emotional reactions, ways of clothing, speaking, or (...) behaving that are not intended for communication but whose effects on the audience are controllable to some extent. I show why prevailing code and Gricean models cannot explain them and how my Extended Gricean Model does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean'. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer. (shrink)

In this response, I suggest that the focus of “emotion” researchers should be more on striving to develop a science of brain and behavior than on deciding what is the proper status of emotion. Because structure and function are closely intertwined in biological systems, advancing our understanding of complex behaviors will necessitate researching their brain substrates.

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)

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)

In this special section, three target articles present three different perspectives on emotion and how it is implemented in the human brain. Fundamental issues are discussed such as the nature and organization of emotion’s representation in the brain and the best approaches for elucidating emotion’s neural basis. Comments and author replies further discuss these issues and explore their interconnections. A common theme of the target articles and commentaries is that multiple approaches and perspectives must be integrated across all levels of (...) analysis to understand the neural basis of emotion. (shrink)

Some thoughts on the nature of networks, the prevalence of emotional experiences, and the importance of new questions.

Over the last century, emotion research has been beset by the problem of major disagreements with respect to the definition of the phenomenon and an abundance of different theories. Arguably, these divergences have had adverse effects on theory development, on the theoretical foundations of empirical research, and on knowledge accumulation in the study of emotion. Similar problems have been encountered in other areas of behavioural science. Increasingly, there have been calls to work towards some form of theory integration. In contrast, (...) here an effort is made to show that a reasonable degree of theory convergence in the area of emotion science can be attained by adopting a design feature-based working definition of emotion and highlighting the basic agreement on the components of the dynamic emotion process. The aim is to invite constructive discussion on communalities and divergences between different theories and foster the development of more complementary theoretical frameworks to guide future empirical research. (shrink)

What psychological mechanisms enable people to reappraise a situation to change its emotional impact? We propose that reappraisal works by shifting appraisal outcomes—abstract representations of ho...

This comment considers some potential implications of both the appraisal approaches and the framework proposed by Mascolo in regard to a mechanism that is particularly important for development: le...

Modeling emotion processes remains a conceptual and methodological challenge in affective sciences. In responding to the other target articles in this special section on “Emotion and the Brain” and the comments on our article, we address the issue of potentially separate brain networks subserving the functions of the different emotion components. In particular, we discuss the suggested role of component synchronization in producing information integration for the dynamic emergence of a coherent emotion process, as well as the links between incentive (...) salience and concern-relevance in the elicitation of emotion. (shrink)

The distinction between attackers and defenders might help refine the understanding of the role of emotions in conflicts. Here, we briefly discuss differences between attackers and defenders in terms of appraisals, action tendencies, emotional preferences, and brain activities. Finally, we outline how attackers and defenders may differ in their response to emotion-based interventions that aim to promote conflict resolution.