Abstract

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