Subjective and psychophysiological emotional responses to music from two different cultures were compared within these two cultures. Two identical experiments were conducted: the first in the Congolese rainforest with an isolated population of Mebenzélé Pygmies without any exposure to Western music and culture, the second with a group of Western music listeners, with no experience with Congolese music. Forty Pygmies and 40 Canadians listened in pairs to 19 music excerpts of 29–99 s in duration in random order (eight from the (...) Pygmy population and 11 Western instrumental excerpts). For both groups, emotion components were continuously measured: subjective feeling (using a two- dimensional valence and arousal rating interface), peripheral physiological activation, and facial expression. While Pygmy music was rated as positive and arousing by Pygmies, ratings of Western music by Westerners covered the range from arousing to calming and from positive to negative. Comparing psychophysiological responses to emotional qualities of Pygmy music across participant groups showed no similarities. However, Western stimuli, rated as high and low arousing by Canadians, created similar responses in both participant groups (with high arousal associated with increases in subjective and physiological activation). Several low-level acoustical features of the music presented (tempo, pitch, and timbre) were shown to affect subjective and physiological arousal similarly in both cultures. Results suggest that while the subjective dimension of emotional valence might be mediated by cultural learning, changes in arousal might involve a more basic, universal response to low-level acoustical characteristics of music. (shrink)

Victims of oppression are often called to let go of their anger in order to facilitate better discussion to bring about the end of their oppression. According to Amia Srinivasan, this constitutes an affective injustice. In this paper, we use research on emotion regulation to shed light on the nature of affective injustice. By drawing on the literature on emotion regulation, we illustrate specifically what kind of work is put upon people who are experiencing affective injustice and why it is (...) damaging. We begin by explaining affective injustice and how it can amount to a call for emotion regulation. Then we explain the various techniques that can be used to regulate emotions and explain how each might be harmful here. In the penultimate section of the paper, we explain how the upshot of this is that victims of affective injustice are left with a dilemma. Either they try to regulate their anger in a way that involves ignoring the fact of their oppression or they regulate it in a way that is likely to be harmful for them. Finally, we consider whether there are any good solutions to this dilemma, and how this issue opens up the possibility for further research into emotion regulation and moral philosophy. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel form of pragmatic encroachment: one that makes a difference to the status of emotion rather than the status of belief. I begin by isolating a distinctive standard in terms of which we can evaluate emotion – one sometimes called “subjective fittingness,” “epistemic justification,” or “warrant.” I then show how this standard for emotion could face a kind of pragmatic encroachment importantly similar to the more familiar encroachment on epistemic standards for belief. Encroachment on warranted emotion (...) is a striking proposal that deserves attention. In fact, there are good reasons to think that encroachment on warranted emotion deserves to be considered the default view for those who already accept pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic status of belief. I support this parity claim by arguing for a principle that establishes a limited coordination between the conditions that warrant emotion and the conditions that justify belief. (shrink)

In emotion research, both conceptual analyses and empirical studies commonly rely on emotion reports. But what do people mean when they say that they are angry, afraid, joyful, etc.? Building on extant theories of emotion, this paper presents four new studies (including a pre-registered replication) measuring the weight of cognitive evaluations, bodily changes, and action tendencies in people’s use of emotion concepts. The results of these studies suggest that the presence or absence of cognitive evaluations has the largest impact on (...) people’s emotion attributions, and that bodily changes and action tendencies are considered to depend on cognitive evaluations. Implications for theories of emotion (concepts) and the interpretation of emotion reports are discussed. (shrink)

Variability in the emotion regulation (ER) strategies one uses throughout daily life has been suggested to reflect adaptive ER ability and to act as a protective factor in mental health. Moreover, psychological inflexibility and persistent negative affect (or affective inertia) are key features of depression and other forms of mental illness and are often further exacerbated by rigid or overly passive regulatory behaviours. The current study investigated the hypothesis that ER variability might serve as a protective factor against depressive symptoms (...) and affective inertia. Using experience-sampling (N = 213), we tested whether two indictors of ER variability (between- and within-strategy SDs) were related to depressive symptoms and affective inertia. We found that people with higher between-strategy variability and within-strategy variability (specifically for reappraisal and distraction) reported fewer depressive symptoms. Both within- and between-strategy variability were negatively related to negative affective inertia. Between-strategy variability and negative affective inertia had unique effects on depression, when used as simultaneous predictors. Altogether, this study provides further evidence for the utility of ER as a factor buffering against depressive symptoms and particularly for the use of variable ER strategies. (shrink)

For a long time the dominant view on the nature of blame was that to blame someone is to have an emotion toward her, such as anger, resentment or indignation in the case of blaming someone else and guilt in the case of self-blame. Even though this view is still widely held, it has recently come under heavy attack. The aim of this paper is to elaborate the idea that to blame is to have an emotion and to defend the (...) resulting emotion account of blame. (shrink)

Modern emotion theories emphasise the adaptive value of emotions. Emotions are by no means always helpful, however. They often must be regulated. The study of emotion regulation has its origins in the psychoanalytic and stress and coping traditions. Recently, increased interest in emotion regulation has led to crucial boundary ambiguities that now threaten progress in this domain. It is argued that distinctions need to be made between (1) regulation of emotion and regulation by emotion; (2) emotion regulation in self and (...) emotion regulation in others; and (3) conscious and nonconscious emotion regulation. Using a process model of emotion generation, this review considers promising research on basic processes and individual differences in emotion regulation and poses five theoretical challenges. (shrink)

The editors of this unique volume have brought together 24 leading emotion theorists with a wide variety of perspectives to address 12 fundamental questions about the subject.

First published in 1977, Emotion, Thought and Therapy is a study of Hume and Spinoza and the relationship of philosophical theories of the emotions to psychological theories of therapy. Jerome Neu argues that the Spinozists are closer to the truth; that is, that thoughts are of greater importance than feelings in the classification and discrimination of emotional states. He then contends that if the Spinozists are closer to the truth, we have the beginning of an argument to show that Freudian (...) or analytic therapies make philosophic sense. Throughout the book, careful attention is paid to modern discussions in philosophy of mind and psychology, and materials from anthropology and other relevant disciplines are considered. At the centre of the discussion is the notion of ‘thought-dependence’. Therapies for psychological disorders are placed along a spectrum in accordance with the role they assign to thoughts. The Spinozist view of the emotions can be seen as at the extreme thought end of a corresponding spectrum of theories of the emotions. The book suggests that this stream may help explain the spectrum of therapeutic theories and the possibilities that exist for psychological development and change. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy, psychology and counselling. (shrink)

A familiar question in the literature on emotional responses to fiction, originally put forward by Colin Radford, is how such responses can be rational. How can we make sense of pitying Anna Karenina when we know there is no such person? In this paper I argue that contrary to the usual interpretation, the question of rationality has nothing to do with the Paradox of Fiction. Instead, the real problem is why there is a divergence in our normative assessments of emotions (...) in different contexts. I argue that explaining this divergence requires a more nuanced account of the rationality of emotion than has previously been proposed. One advantage of my proposal over alternatives is that it helps to explain one way we can learn emotionally from fiction and imagination. (shrink)

It is a familiar feature of our affective psychology that our moods ‘crystalize’ into emotions, and that our emotions ‘diffuse’ into moods. Providing a detailed philosophical account of these affective shifts, as I will call them, is the central aim of this paper. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of emotion and mood, alongside distinctive ideas from the phenomenologically-inspired writer Robert Musil, a broadly ‘intentional’ and ‘evaluativist’ account will be defended. I argue that we do best to understand important features of these (...) affective shifts – which I document across this paper – in terms of intentional and evaluative aspects of the respective states of moods and emotion. At same the time, the account is pitched at the phenomenological level, as dealing with affective shifts primarily in terms of moods and emotions as experiential states, with respect to which it feels-like-something to be undergoing the relevant affective experience. The paper also applies the intentional-evaluative model of affective shifts to anxiety in more detail, developing the idea that certain patterns of affective shift, particularly those that allow for a kind of ‘emotional release’, can contribute to a subject’s well-being. (shrink)

This paper argues that an emotion is a state of affectively perceiving its intentional object as falling under a “thick affective concept” A, a concept that combines cognitive and affective aspects in a way that cannot be pulled apart. For example, in a state of pity an object is seen as pitiful, where to see something as pitiful is to be in a state that is both cognitive and affective. One way of expressing an emotion is to assert that the (...) intentional object of the emotion falls under the thick affective concept distinctive of the emotion. I argue that the most basic kind of moral judgment is in this category. It has the form “That is A” (pitiful, contemptible, rude, etc.). Such judgments combine the features of cognitivism and motivational judgment internalism, an advantage that explains why we find moral weakness problematic in spite of its ubiquity. I then outline a process I call “thinning” the judgment, which explains how moral strength, weakness, and apathy arise. I argue that this process is necessary for moral reasoning and communication, in spite of its disadvantage in disengaging the agent's motivating emotion from the judgment. (shrink)

Day-to-day life is inundated with attempts to control emotions and a wealth of research has examined what strategies people use and how effective these strategies are. However, until more recently, research has often neglected more basic questions such as whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions (i.e. emotion regulation choice). In an effort to identify what we know and what we need to know, we systematically reviewed studies that examined potential determinants of whether and how people choose to (...) regulate their emotions. Eighteen determinants were identified across 219 studies and were categorised as being affective, cognitive, motivational, individual or social-cultural in nature. Where there were sufficient primary studies, meta-analysis was used to quantify the size of the associations between potential determinants and measures of whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions. Based on the findings, we propose that people’s decisions about whether and how to regulate their emotions are determined by factors relating to the individual doing the regulating, the emotion that is being regulated, and both the immediate situation and the broader social context in which the regulation is taking place. (shrink)

Accounts of happiness in the philosophical literature see it as either a judgment of satisfaction with one’s life or as a balance of positive over negative feelings or emotional states. There are sound objections to both types of account, although each captures part of what happiness is. Seeing it as an emotion allows us to incorporate both features of the accounts thought to be incompatible. Emotions are analyzed as multicomponent states including judgments, feelings, physical symptoms, and behavioral dispositions. It is (...) shown that prototypical happiness contains all these components, and each is explicated. The concept of happiness, like the concepts of other emotions, is a cluster concept. The features of such concepts are made clear. Happiness is shown to be similar to other emotions in many respects, including the phenomenon of adaptation, the “paradox of happiness,” and the existence of both paradigm and borderline instances. The account allows us to capture all that was right in earlier accounts while avoiding objections to them. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that (...) emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling the right way. (shrink)

This daily diary study examined the within-person coupling between four emotion regulation strategies and both subjective well-being and perceived stress in daily life of geriatric nurses. Participants (N = 89) described how they regulated their emotions in terms of cognitive reappraisal and suppression. They also indicated their subjective well-being and level of perceived stress each day over three weeks. At the within-person level, cognitive reappraisal intended to increase positive emotions was positively associated with higher subjective well-being and negatively associated with (...) perceived stress. Suppression of the expression of positive emotions was negatively associated with subjective well-being and positively associated with perceived stress. However, cognitive reappraisal intended to down-regulate negative emotions and suppression as a strategy to inhibit the expression of negative emotions were not associated with daily well-being or perceived stress. Off-days were rated as days with higher subjective well-being and lower perceived stress in contrast to working days. At the between-person level, individuals who reported more daily negative affect reported increased suppression of positive emotions, corroborating the within-person findings. Moreover, findings indicated that nurses with more years of experience in the job reported higher subjective well-being and less perceived stress. These results provide insights into important daily emotional processes of geriatric nurses, both at workdays and in their leisure time. (shrink)

In Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre highlights how emotions can transform our perspective on the world in ways that might make our situations more bearable when we cannot see an easy or happy way out. The point of this chapter is to spell out and discuss Sartre’s theory of emotion as presented in the Sketch with two aims in mind. The first is to show that although emotions have the power to transform our perspectives on the world (...) in ways described by Sartre, Sartre is mistaken to think emotions comprise the cognitive transformations in question. The second aim is to show why on one plausible way of thinking about the relationship holding between emotions and the cognitive transformations they help to bring about, emotions turn out to be the very sort of things that Sartre claims at the outset they are not, namely types of bodily feelings or sensations, a view of emotion that can be accredited to William James. (shrink)

Philosophy, Music and Emotion explores two issues which have been intensively debated in contemporary philosophy: the nature of music's power to express emotion, and the nature of emotion itself. It shows how closely the two topics are related and provides a radically new account of what it means to say that music 'expresses emotion'. Geoffrey Madell maintains that most current accounts of musical expressiveness are fundamentally misguided. He attributes this fact to the influence of a famous argument of the nineteenth-century (...) critic Hanslick, and also to the dominant 'cognitivist' approach to the nature of emotion, which sees the essence of emotion to be the entertaining of evaluative judgements and beliefs of a certain sort, an account very much in accord with Hanslick's position. Such an approach results either in the unpersuasive view that musical expressiveness is somehow akin to human expressive gesture, or in the view that music arouses feelings which have no specific object and, unavoidably, no necessary connection with the music.The book argues that the 'cognitivist' account of the nature of emotion is quite false and that it needs to be replaced with a conception of emotions as states of feeling towards - states of intentional feeling - whose objects are often evaluatively characterised states of affairs; however, in the context of the emotions that are aroused by music these objects are always musical events or states. Central to this bold analysis of emotion is a new account of two closely connected mental states, those of desire and of pleasure, and of what role these states have in human motivation and value. (shrink)

Background. Studies on teacher emotion have steadily become more prominent. However, it has been observed that scholarship on teacher emotion has been dominated by contributions from Western societies. In the absence of a critical mass of empirical research generated from within the region such as Asia, lack of knowledge and capacity to inform policy and practice in teacher education and evaluation mechanism. Methods. The current study sought to mirror the patterns of knowledge production in teacher emotion in terms of research (...) topics, types and methods and how they have evolved over time in Asia between 1989 and 2018. By using a descriptive quantitative analysis approach, we review a corpus of 154 articles on teacher emotion published in peer-review journals in Asia. It began with a systematic search in seven widely used electronic databases for abstracts of potentially relevant studies. Results. As observed, the trend represents a sea change in the volume of publications in Asia although the overall volume of research is still relatively low. Results also identify that although quantitative methods were most commonly used, the findings reveal a more balanced distribution since 1993. Furthermore, the use of qualitative and mixed methods of research has undergone a marked increase in the past ten years. However, as the majority of articles were exploratory-oriented, intervention and experimental studies were largely lacking, which resulted in the ‘so-what’ story being missing. Conclusions. A functionalist perspective suggests that knowledge production in teacher emotion research in Asia is either at the late first stage or the emerging second stage. Recommendations have been provided based on the major results and challenges. (shrink)

I ARGUE THAT SPINOZA’S DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF ’CONATION’ IS A CONSISTENT ANALYSIS BASED UPON HIS CLAIM THAT TELEOLOGICAL OR FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION IS EITHER REDUCIBLE TO CAUSAL EXPLANATION (IN TERMS OF DRIVES) OR IS NOT GENUINELY EXPLANATORY. SEVERAL IMPORTANT CONSEQUENCES OF THIS FOR SPINOZA’S ACCOUNT OF HUMAN APPETITION ARE PURSUED, AND SOME CONSEQUENCES FOR HIS POLITICAL THEORY ARE MENTIONED IN CLOSING.

Music is universal at least partly because it expresses emotion and regulates affect. Associations between music and emotion have been examined regularly by music psychologists. Here, we review recent findings in three areas: the communication and perception of emotion in music, the emotional consequences of music listening, and predictors of music preferences.

Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent decades, scientists are poised to answer this question. In this target article, we present a meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion. We compare the locationist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological constructionist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories (...) are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain–emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. Instead, we found evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind: A set of interacting brain regions commonly involved in basic psychological operations of both an emotional and non-emotional nature are active during emotion experience and perception across a range of discrete emotion categories. (shrink)

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)

I start with a brief look at what the classic British intuitionists (Ewing, Broad, Ross) had to say about the relation between judgment and emotion. I then look at some more recent work in the intuitionist tradition and try to develop a conception of moral emotion as a form of practical seeming, suggesting that some moral intuitions are exactly that sort of emotion. My general theme is that the standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake and that intuitionism (...) can happily accommodate the results of recent work in empirical moral psychology. (shrink)

In this urbane and witty book, Ronald de Sousa disputes the widespread notion that reason and emotion are natural antagonists.

Emotion experience has failed to date to gain a central place in the study of consciousness. This special issue of the _Journal of Consciousness Studies_ presents the most recent views on the matter, with discussions of several aspects of emotion experience. Contributors from different disciplines address links between feelings, brain, body and world. What happens in the brain and in the body when we have feelings? How do feelings relate to our understanding of the world? The contributors also analyse emotion (...) experience per se — the character of moods, the role of emotion experience in demarcating the class of emotion, the alleged positive and negative character of affect, its embodied feel and its relation to action. (shrink)

This study investigated whether age and/or differences in hearing sensitivity influence the perception of the emotion dimensions arousal (calm vs. aroused) and valence (positive vs. negative attitude) in conversational speech. To that end, this study specifically focused on the relationship between participants’ ratings of short affective utterances and the utterances’ acoustic parameters (pitch, intensity, and articulation rate) known to be associated with the emotion dimensions arousal and valence. Stimuli consisted of short utterances taken from a corpus of conversational speech. In (...) two rating tasks, younger and older adults either rated arousal or valence using a 5-point scale. Mean intensity was found to be the main cue participants used in the arousal task (i.e., higher mean intensity cueing higher levels of arousal) while mean F 0 was the main cue in the valence task (i.e., higher mean F 0 being interpreted as more negative). Even though there were no overall age group differences in arousal or valence ratings, compared to younger adults, older adults responded less strongly to mean intensity differences cueing arousal and responded more strongly to differences in mean F 0 cueing valence. Individual hearing sensitivity among the older adults did not modify the use of mean intensity as an arousal cue. However, individual hearing sensitivity generally affected valence ratings and modified the use of mean F 0. We conclude that age differences in the interpretation of mean F 0 as a cue for valence are likely due to age-related hearing loss, whereas age differences in rating arousal do not seem to be driven by hearing sensitivity differences between age groups (as measured by pure-tone audiometry). (shrink)

Why is it that we respond emotionally to plays, movies, and novels and feel moved by characters and situations that we know do not exist? This question, which constitutes the kernel of the debate on »the paradox of fiction«, speaks to the perennial themes of philosophy, and remains of interest to this day. But does this question entail a paradox? A significant group of analytic philosophers have indeed thought so. Since the publication of Colin Radford's celebrated paper »How Can We (...) Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?« (1975), the number of proposals to solve, explain, reformulate, dismiss or even revitalize this apparent paradox has continued to proliferate. In line with recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, in this paper I will argue against the sustainability of the paradox, claiming that the only reasonable way to continue our discussions about it consists in using it as a heuristic tool to shed light on problems regarding our involvement with fiction. Against this background, I will then focus on one of the problems related to how our emotional responses to fiction contribute to our appreciation of it. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first section shows the parallel evolution of the paradox of fiction and the analytic philosophy of emotion. Here I claim that, although the paradox is epistemically flawed, since one of its premises is rooted in a limited view on the emotions typical of early cognitiv-ism, the discussions it provokes are still epistemically useful. As Robert Stecker (2011, 295), among others, has pointed out, the paradox was formulated during the heyday of cognitive theories of the emotions in which emotion necessarily requires belief. Today, however, only few authors would endorse this premise. If emotion does not always require belief (as the majority of authors in the contemporary debate admit), let alone belief about the existence of the object towards which it is directed, then there is no reason to speak of a paradox. From this first conclusion, however, it does not follow that the paradox is completely without use from the epistemic point of view. A glimpse at the topics touched on during the discussions about how to solve, reformulate, or negate the paradox reveals their value in shedding light on the interrelation between emotion and fiction. The second section elaborates a phenomenologically inspired cognitive account of the emotions by focusing on their cognitive bases, their influence on Emotion in the Appreciation of Fiction 205 cognitions, and their cognitive function. In this model, emotions are responsible for indicating values, for showing what matters to us, and for being appropriate to their objects. My claim is that this view applies not only to reality, but also to our involvement with fiction. In the final section I draw on this account to focus on one kind of appreciation of fiction which necessarily requires our emotional involvement. Following an idea put forward by Susan Feagin (1996, 1), I employ the concept of »appre-ciation« to refer to a set of abilities exercised with the aim of extracting value from the work. There is a long tradition in aesthetics that condemns any focus on the emotions in the appreciation of art and fiction, and defends the necessity of aesthetic appreciation without emotional influence. To refer to this negative attitude towards the emotions, I will borrow an expression coined by Susan Feagin (2013, 636), who refers to »the intellectualized view of appreciation«. Against this widespread view, I will argue that some aspects of the fiction can only be appreciated with the help of our emotions. The cognitive approach developed in the previous section can explain how the emotions might in fact play a significant role in the appreciation of art and fiction. Attention will be paid to three activities involved in appreciation, for all of which emotion is crucial: processing relevant information about the fictional world, understanding aspects of it, and becoming acquainted with the values it presents. My aim here is to argue that there are particular aspects of the fictional world that can only be appreciated if recipients have the appropriate emotions. (shrink)

Awe has traditionally been considered a religious or spiritual emotion, yet scientists often report that awe motivates them to answer questions about the natural world, and to do so in naturalistic terms. Indeed, awe may be closely related to scientific discovery and theoretical advance. Awe is typically triggered by something vast (either literally or metaphorically) and initiates processes of accommodation, in which existing mental schemas are revised to make sense of the awe‐inspiring stimuli. This process of accommodation is essential for (...) the kind of belief revision that characterizes scientific reasoning and theory change. Across six studies, we find that the tendency to experience awe is positively associated with scientific thinking, and that this association is not shared by other positive emotions. Specifically, we show that the disposition to experience awe predicts a more accurate understanding of how science works, rejection of creationism, and rejection of unwarranted teleological explanations more broadly. (shrink)

Emotion is conceptualised as an emergent, dynamic process based on an individual's subjective appraisal of significant events. It is argued that theoretical models of emotion need to propose an architecture that reflects the essential nature and functions of emotion as a psychobiological and cultural adaptation mechanism. One proposal for such a model and its underlying dynamic architecture, the component process model, is briefly sketched and compared with some of its major competitors. Recent empirical evidence in support of the model is (...) reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the dynamic aspect of emotion processes, in particular the sequence of appraisal checks and the synchronisation of response systems, as well as the capacity of the model to predict individual differences in emotional responding. (shrink)

In this article I argue that characterizations of anger as a hostile emotion may be mistaken. My project is empirically informed and is partly descriptive, partly diagnostic. It is descriptive in that I am concerned with what anger is, and how it tends to manifest, rather than with what anger should be or how moral anger is manifested. The orthodox view on anger takes it to be, descriptively, an emotion that aims for retribution. This view fits well with anger being (...) a hostile emotion, as retribution is punitive. I will argue that a different view of anger deserves our attention. On this alternative view, anger aims for recognition of harms done, rather than for the punishment of those who have committed them. I argue that we have reason to favour a strong view that excludes retribution from anger’s main aims. In addition, I offer a diagnosis of the reasons that led the retributive view of anger to become, and remain, orthodoxy. This diagnosis provides indirect reason to give my descriptive proposal serious consideration, for it highlights that the orthodox view has dominated folk and philosophical conceptions of anger for reasons that do not speak in favour of the view’s veracity. The view that anger is a hostile emotion will therefore emerge as in need of serious scrutiny. (shrink)

While the influence of emotion on individuals'' ethical decisions has been identified by numerous researchers, little is known about how emotions influence individuals'' ethical decision process. Thus, it is not clear whether different emotions promote and/or discourage ethical decision-making in the workplace. To address this gap, this paper develops a model that illustrates how emotion affects the components of individuals'' ethical decision-making process. The model is developed by integrating research findings that consider the two dimensions of emotion, arousal and feeling (...) state, into an applied cognitive-developmental perspective on the process of ethical decision-making. The model demonstrates that certain emotional states influence the individual''s propensity to identify ethical dilemmas, facilitate the formation of the individual''s prescriptive judgments at sophisticated levels of moral development, lead to ethical decision choices that are consistent with the individual''s prescriptive judgements, and promote the individual''s compliance with his or her ethical decision choices. In particular, the model suggests that individuals experiencing arousal and positive affect resolve ethical dilemmas in a manner consistent with more sophisticated cognitive moral structures. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This volume addresses the question of what it is like to be depressed. Despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted into the causes and treatment of depression, the experience of depression remains poorly understood. Indeed, many depression memoirs state that the experience is impossible for others to understand. However, it is at least clear that changes in emotion, mood, and bodily feeling are central to all forms of depression, and these are the book's principal focus. In recent (...) years, there has been a great deal of valuable philosophical and interdisciplinary research on the emotions, complemented by new developments in philosophy of psychiatry and scientifically-informed phenomenology. The book draws on all these areas, in order to offer a range of novel insights into the nature of depression experiences. To do so, it brings together a distinguished group of philosophers, psychiatrists, anthropologists, clinical psychologists and neuroscientists, all of whom have made important contributions to current research on emotion and/or psychiatric illness. (shrink)

The objective of this doctoral dissertation is to interpret the explanation of akrasia that the Dutch philosopher Benedictus Spinoza (1632-1677) gives in his work The Ethics. One is said to act acratically when one intentionally performs an action that one judges to be worse than another action which one believes one might perform instead. In order to interpret Spinoza’s explanation of akrasia, a large part of this dissertation investigates Spinoza’s theory of emotion. The first chapter is introductory and outlines Spinoza’s (...) categorisation of mental states and his conception of the relation between the mind and the body. The second chapter deals with Spinoza’s epistemology and the relation between cognitive mental states and states of the brain. The third chapter argues that Spinoza holds that emotions are non-cognitive mental states that are caused by cognitive mental states. The fourth chapter interprets Spinoza’s discussion of the emotions of Joy and Sadness insofar as they are mental states. The fifth chapter suggests that when Spinoza says that the power of our body is increased or decreased when we are joyful or sad, he means that when we are joyful or sad then, at the same time, our heart and perhaps the organs of our digestive system are affected in such a way that our bodily health is increased or decreased. The sixth chapter points to three problems that concern Spinoza’s definitions of the psychophysical states of pleasure, pain, cheerfulness and melancholy, and offers slightly altered definitions of these states. The seventh chapter interprets the various aspects of Spinoza’s conception of the emotion of Desire, both insofar as it is a state of the mind and insofar it is a state of the body, as well as the relation between the emotion of Desire and man’s striving for self-preservation. The eighth chapter discusses what Spinoza writes on the strength of emotions and the way in which we make value judgments in order to finally interpret why it is, according to Spinoza, that ‘we so often see the better for ourselves but follow the worse’. (shrink)

In the current chapter, I examined the relationship between the cerebellum, emotion, and morality with evidence from large-scale neuroimaging data analysis. Although the aforementioned relationship has not been well studied in neuroscience, recent studies have shown that the cerebellum is closely associated with emotional and social processes at the neural level. Also, debates in the field of moral philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have supported the importance of emotion in moral functioning. Thus, I explored the potentially important but less-studies topic with (...) NeuroSynth, a tool for large-scale brain image analysis, while addressing issues associated with reverse inference. The result from analysis demonstrated that brain regions in the cerebellum, the right Crus I and Crus II in particular, were specifically associated with morality in general. I discussed the potential implications of the finding based on clinical and functional neuroimaging studies of the cerebellum, emotional functioning, and neural networks for diverse psychological processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore Unamuno’s narrative fictions as thought experiments about self and emotion. I begin by developing a notion of thought experiment consequent with his understanding of philosophy as a form of literature. Next, I focus on the philosophy of the emotions implicit in his major essay Del Sentimiento trágico de la vida. The third section offers a case study in the form of envy in the novel Abel Sánchez. The final section addresses different forms of knowledge about (...) the emotions conveyed by Unamuno’s fictional works. (shrink)

Perceptual theories of emotion purport to avoid the problems of traditional cognitivism and noncognitivism by modelling emotion on perception, which shares the most conspicuous dimensions of emotion, intentionality and phenomenality. In this paper, I shall reconstrue and discuss four key arguments that perceptual theorists have presented in order to show that emotion is a kind of perception, or that there are close analogies between emotion and perception. These arguments are, from stronger to weaker claims: the perceptual system argument; the argument (...) from noninferential structure; the argument from epistemic role; and the argument from phenomenology. I argue that, while the arguments in favour of assimilating emotion to perception fail, the analogies between emotion and perception are not as close as perceptual theorists suggest even if some emotions resemble perception more than others, thanks to the two-levelled structure of emotional processing. (shrink)

The long debate -- Aesthetics and ethics : basic concepts -- A conceptual map -- Autonomism -- Artistic and critical practices -- Questions of character -- The cognitive argument : the epistemic claim -- The cognitive argument : the aesthetic claim -- Emotion and imagination -- The merited response argument.

Inside Out develops novel cinematic means for representing memory, emotion and imagination, their interior relationships and their social expression. Its unique animated language both playfully represents pre-teenage metacognition, and is itself a manner of metacognitive interrogation. Inside Out motivates this language to ask two questions: an explicit question regarding the social function of sadness, and a more implicit question regarding how one can identify agency, and thereby a sense of developing selfhood, between one’s memories, emotions, facets of personality, and future-thinking (...) imagination. Both the complexity of the language Inside Out develops to ask these questions, and the complicated answers the film provides, ultimately serve as a manner of recognition of the effortfulness of finding one’s place in the world. This article talks sequentially through the complex representative systems Inside Out advances in order to pay homage to the ways in which metacognitive cinema – as well as discussions and hermeneutic readings around that cinema – can make viewers feel recognised for invisible, internal labour that is existentially difficult to share due to its very interiority; an interiority that is reconstructed in imaginative processes such as autobiographical reminiscence, and filmic animation. (shrink)

Our daily lives unfold continuously, yet our memories are organised into distinct events, situated in a specific context of space and time, and chunked when this context changes (at event boundaries). Previous research showed that this process, termed event segmentation, enhances object-context binding but impairs temporal order memory. Physiologically, peaks in pupil dilation index event segmentation, similar to emotion-induced bursts of autonomic arousal. Emotional arousal also modulates object-context binding and temporal order memory. Yet, these two critical factors have not been (...) systematically studied together. To address this gap, we ran a behavioural experiment using a paradigm validated to study event segmentation and extended it with emotion manipulation. During encoding, we sequentially presented greyscale objects embedded in coloured frames (colour changes defining events), with a neutral or aversive sound. During retrieval, we tested participants’ memory of temporal order memory and object-colour binding. We found opposite effects of emotion and event segmentation on episodic memory. While event segmentation enhanced object-context binding, emotion impaired it. On the contrary, event segmentation impaired temporal order memory, but emotion enhanced it. These findings increase our understanding of episodic memory organisation in laboratory settings, and potentially in real life with perceptual changes and emotion fluctuations constantly interacting. (shrink)