Emotions imply a revision of our beliefs inasmuch as they are triggered by a discrepancy between our expectancies and new situations. I will study the converse relation: how emotions, particularly recurrent emotions that reappear in similar situations in the long term, are incentives to revise not only our beliefs but also the order of priorities between their related desires. Understanding how affects can revise both beliefs—under their committing aspect—and the order of desires, implies seeing the dynamics of (...) affects as interacting with external dynamics and the order of priorities as a weak one. These philosophical considerations shed new light on the diversity of emotions, on their different temporalities, and on the paradox of emotional sharing. (shrink)

Goldstein reveals the beliefs underlying political psychology, thereby siding with the position of radical constructivism. I argue that the epistemological implications presented in the article ….

Equally important, he offers much insight into why our own environmental policies have failed and what we can do to better manage our resources.

There is an important gap in philosophical, clinical and bioethical conceptions of decision-making capacity. These fields recognize that when traumatic life circumstances occur, people not only feel afraid and demoralized, but may develop catastrophic thinking and other beliefs that can lead to poor judgment. Yet there has been no articulation of the ways in which such beliefs may actually derail decision-making capacity. In particular, certain emotionally grounded beliefs are systematically unresponsive to evidence, and this can block the (...) ability to deliberate about alternatives. People who meet medico-legal criteria for decision-making capacity can react to health and personal crises with such capacity-derailing reactions. One aspect of this is that a person who is otherwise cognitively intact may be unable to appreciate her own future quality of life while in this complex state of mind. This raises troubling ethical challenges. We cannot rely on the current standard assessment of cognition to determine decisional rights in medical and other settings. We need to understand better how emotionally grounded beliefs interfere with decision-making capacity, in order to identify when caregivers have an obligation to intervene. (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 commentary challenges Rogers & McClelland (R&M) to use their model to account for delusional belief formation and maintenance. The gradual development of delusions and the nature of disconnectivity in Capgras delusions are used to illustrate the role of emotional salience in delusions. It is not clear how this kind of emotional saliency can be represented within the current architecture.

Despite the centrality of emotion regulation in psychiatric disorders such as depression, there is a lack of experimental studies examining the psychological factors that influence emotion regulation in individuals with depressive symptoms. Participants with current depressive symptoms were randomly assigned to an experimental manipulation promoting more malleable emotion beliefs or the control condition. Participants underwent a negative emotion induction and reported on their affect and emotion regulation during the induction. Individuals who received the experimental (...) manipulation reported greater cognitive reappraisal and greater emotion recovery. Experimental manipulations that can enhance emotion regulation and emotion recovery possess significant promise as a preliminary step in developing brief interventions that can overcome formal barriers to care. (shrink)

Based on the belief that computational modeling (thinking in terms of representation and computations) can help to clarify controversial issues in emotion theory, this article examines emotional experience from the perspective of the Computational Belief–Desire Theory of Emotion (CBDTE), a computational explication of the belief–desire theory of emotion. It is argued that CBDTE provides plausible answers to central explanatory challenges posed by emotional experience, including: the phenomenal quality,intensity and object-directedness of emotional experience, the function of emotional experience (...) and its relation to cognition and motivation, and the relation between emotional experience and emotion. In addition, CBDTE avoids most objections that have been raised against cognitive theories of emotion. A remaining objection, that beliefs are not necessary for the emotions covered by CBDTE, is rejected as empirically unsupported. (shrink)

It is commonly held that (i) beliefs are revisable in the face of counter‐evidence and (ii) beliefs are connected to actions in reliable and predictable ways. Given such a view, many argue that if a mental state fails to respond to evidence or doesn't result in the kind of behavior typical or expected of belief, it is not a belief after all, but a different state. Yet, one finds seeming counter examples of resilient beliefs that fail to (...) respond to evidence, or that do not connect to action in the way that is expected. I offer a view of belief that does not force us to exclude states as realbeliefs that we pre‐reflectively think of as beliefs, and that does not require us to “outsource” the work belief seems to do to other mental states. I propose that we view belief as a type of emotion where emotions are understood a irreducibly blended states, containing representational, motivational and phenomenological elements. (shrink)

The present study examined the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and daily positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in adolescents. 639 participants provided information about emotion malleability beliefs and emotion regulation strategies on the first day of the study and six daily measurements of PA and NA. Emotion malleability beliefs had a positive relationship with PA and a negative relationship with NA. Higher emotion malleability beliefs predicted lower carryover effects of (...) PA and NA across assessment days. We also found that cognitive reappraisal might affect the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and daily affect, such that those who held high levels of malleability beliefs were more likely to engage in cognitive reappraisal and report lower NA and higher PA. The findings of the present study suggest that emotion malleability beliefs could predicate daily emotions and emotion dynamics across days in adolescents. (shrink)

To succeed in self-regulation, people need to believe that it is possible to change behaviour and they also need to use effective means to enable such a change. We propose that this also applies to emotion regulation. In two studies, we found that people were most successful in emotion regulation, the more they believed emotions can be controlled and the more they used an effective emotion regulation strategy – namely, cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive reappraisal moderated the link between (...) beliefs about the controllability of emotion and success in emotion regulation, when reappraisal was measured as a trait or manipulated. Such moderation was found when examining the regulation of disgust elicited by emotion-inducing films, and the regulation of anger elicited by real political events. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice in emotion regulation. (shrink)

The paper argues that our emotions in response to fictional representations are best explained, not as requiring a suspension of disbelief, but as resembling the emotions we feel when we propound a hypothetical case to ourselves, such as the imagined happiness or suffering of ourselves or another. In reading fiction we voluntarily participate in a hypothesis represented by the work. If this explanation is accepted, we can retain the view that beliefs always entail commitment to the reality of what (...) is believed. (shrink)

People’s beliefs about their ability to control their emotions predict a range of important psychological outcomes. It is not clear, however, whether these beliefs are playing a causal role, and if so, why this might be. In the current research, we tested whether avoidance-based emotion regulation explains the link between beliefs and psychological outcomes. In Study 1, a perceived lack of control over emotions predicted poorer psychological health outcomes, and avoidance strategies indirectly explained these links between (...) emotion beliefs and psychological health. In Study 2, we experimentally manipulated participants’ emotion beliefs by leading participants to believe that they struggled or did not struggle with controlling their emotions. Participants in the low regulatory self-efficacy condition reported increased intentions to engage in avoidance strategies over the next month and were more likely to avoid seeking psychological help. When asked if they would participate in follow-up studies, these participants were also more likely to display avoidance-based emotion regulation. These findings provide initial evidence for the causal role of emotion beliefs in avoidance-based emotion regulation, and document their impact on psychological health-related outcomes. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to offer a critical examination of the episte- mological foundations of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). Taking the tension between the basic presupposition between REBT and the ABC cognitive model constituting its core as its cue, the paper focuses on the causal relation between cognition and emotion and tries to argue that, at closer inspection, neither the theoretical, nor the experimental reasons ad- duced in favor of the idea of a determining role (...) of cognition in the appear- ance of mental disturbance actually hold. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotion regulation is a topic of great interest due to its relevance to navigating everyday life, as well as its relevance to psychopathology. Recent research indicates that beliefs about t...

In our everyday psychologising, emotions figure large. When we are trying to explain and predict what a person says and does, that person’s emotions are very much among the objects of our thoughts. Despite this, emotions do not figure large in our philosophical reconstruction of everyday psychological practice—in philosophical accounts of the rational production and control of behaviour. Barry Smith has noted this point: We frequently mention people’s emotional sates when assessing how they behave, when trying to understand why they (...) say and do the things they say and do, and when deciding how to deal with them. A large part of our awareness of others and our ability to make sense of them depends on their emotional make-up and our appreciation of how this affects their thoughts and actions. All of this is missing from the standard accounts of folk psychology, and the key question is why? (2002, 111-2). Before beginning to answer to Smith’s question, I want to say more to characterise the approach in philosophical psychology which he is questioning. There are many detailed philosophical accounts of the rational production and control of behaviour. My aim here isn’t to examine these details, but to characterise a certain species of philosophical psychology—one which holds that one can explain the rational production and control of behaviour in terms of a narrow set of mental state types: belief, desire (and perhaps a few others: perception or intention). Hence my label for this species: ‘Humean psychology’. The orthodox Humean view is that rational agency can be explained adequately by appeal to the agent’s beliefs and desires. So, to borrow an example from Davidson (1978), we can explain a person’s adding salt to the stew by citing her desire that the will stew taste better and her belief that if.. (shrink)

Recalcitrant emotions, such as fear of flying, are emotions that persist even though they are in tension with the emoter’s considered belief. A widely accepted argument against cognitivist theories of emotion holds that recalcitrant emotions show that emotions are more like sensory states than like thoughts or beliefs. I show that this argument does not succeed: Emotions are usually sensitive to our changing beliefs in a way that is more akin to cognitive states than to sensations. Moreover, (...) empirical evidence strongly suggests that beliefs sometimes behave much like recalcitrant emotions do. (shrink)

Perception is commonly regarded by philosophers as being the only basis of empirical knowledge. I challenge this assumption by investigating how we come to have beliefs about the emotional experiences of ourselves and others, and how we come to have beliefs about the emotional properties of inanimate objects, such as the belief that the church is somber. Before presenting my account of this type of belief formation, I argue that the observation that someone is in a particular emotional (...) state, or the observation that an inanimate object displays an emotional property, should not be subsumed under the rubric of perception. I argue that this subsumption oversimplifies the nature of such observations and leaves too many interesting and important philosophical questions unanswered. In addition to suggesting how these sorts of beliefs are formed, I argue that philosophers should endeavor to include them in their discussions of knowledge, and I examine how three contemporary accounts of knowledge can be expanded to accommodate such beliefs in the capacity of knowledge claims. (shrink)

In 'Knowing That One Knows', Roderick Chisholm suggests that perceptual experiences are the paradigmatic substrates of beliefs of the highest epistemic credibility about the experiences. But perceptual experiences are not the only experiences capable of justifying such higher-order beliefs. In this article I briefly examine the project of generalizing Chisholm's account of the justification of higher-order beliefs to include justification by emotional experience. In the course of doing this, I will argue that Chisholm's account is too closely (...) tied to the perceptual case to be so generalized, and I will briefly indicate some of what is involved in countenancing emotional experiences as epistemic justifiers. (shrink)

In 'Knowing That One Knows', Roderick Chisholm suggests that perceptual experiences are the paradigmatic substrates of beliefs of the highest epistemic credibility about the experiences. But perceptual experiences are not the only experiences capable of justifying such higher-order beliefs. In this article I briefly examine the project of generalizing Chisholm's account of the justification of higher-order beliefs to include justification by emotional experience. In the course of doing this, I will argue that Chisholm's account is too closely (...) tied to the perceptual case to be so generalized, and I will briefly indicate some of what is involved in countenancing emotional experiences as epistemic justifiers. (shrink)

Previous philosophical work on distrust in science has argued that understanding public distrust in science and scientific interventions requires that we pay careful attention not only to epistemic considerations (that is, beliefs about science), but also to values, and the emotional contexts in which assessments of scientific credibility are made. This is likely to be a truncated list of relevant factors for understanding trust/distrust, but these are certainly key areas of concern. The aim of this paper is not to (...) further innumerate the list of relevant factors. Rather, it is to map the ways that these key areas (beliefs, values, and emotions) are related to each other. These are not distinct categories, but rather they interact, making our picture of distrust more complicated than we might otherwise imagine. This discussion will take place in the context of resistance to medical interventions. Notably, Ebola interventions in West Africa, HIV/AIDS testing in South Africa, and vaccines across the world. (shrink)

Constitutivists about one's cognitive access to one's mental states often hold that for any rational subject S and mental state M falling into some specified range of types, necessarily, if S believes that she has M, then S has M. Some argue that such a principle applies to beliefs about all types of mental state. Others are more cautious, but offer no criterion by which the principle's range could be determined. In this paper I begin to develop such a (...) criterion, arguing that although the principle applies when M is a belief, it does not apply when M is an emotion. I account for this asymmetry by focusing on differences in the commitments that belief and emotion conceptually involve, and briefly sketch out a psychological explanation of those differences. I conclude that one can reasonably split one's epistemological loyalties between constitutivism regarding meta-beliefs and non- constitutivism regarding beliefs about one's emotions. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a growing willingness in the evolutionary cognitive science of religion to embrace an inclusive, theoretically pluralistic approach and the emergence of a broad consensus around some key themes that collectively constitute a central theoretical core of the field. Nevertheless, ECSR still raises serious problems for some in the humanities. In exploring the reasons for the perception of conflict between humanistic and cognitive evolutionary approaches to religion, I suggest that both ECSR’s default account of the origins of (...) religion and religion’s role in social bonding rely upon notions of culturally unmediated universal cognitive mechanisms that preclude alternative humanistic explanations. I subsequently suggest that the gap between humanistic approaches and the evolutionary study of religion more broadly conceived may be narrowed by further expanding ECSR to include recent research into the brain opioid theory of social attachment, which emphasises the emotional rather than cognitive basis of religion’s social bonding functions. Finally, I outline a possible evolutionary account of the earliest forms of religious ideas and practices, which decouples the origins of religion from the evolution of specialised cognitive machinery and which humanists are likely to find more amenable than mainstream ECSR. (shrink)

Sarah Waller proposes that cognitive therapists and philosophical counselors ought to consider the feelings of the client of paramount importance in belief system change rather than the rationality of the belief system. I offer an alternative strategy of counseling that reinstates the place of rational belief revision while still respecting the importance of emotions. Waller claims that, because of the problem of under-determination, the counseling goal of rational belief revision can be trumped by the goal of improved client affect. I (...) suggest that, if we consider a different ontology for the domain of counseling - one whose objects are dialogues (the goal of counseling becomes greater information of dialogues), we can accommodate a place for emotions in rational belief revision. I then note some limitations of the new proposal and the possibility of incommensurability in the comparison of our different views. (shrink)

In this article I explore a tantalising definition of cinematic belief as a belief without belief by briefly considering the way in which film theory and film-philosophy have engaged with the question of belief in cinema. I also take into account Simon Critchley’s discussion of religious belief in The Faith of the Faithless (2012) within the context of anthropological studies of religion such as that by Émile Durkheim. In addition, I discuss Sigmund Freud’s 1927 reflection on religion in “The Future (...) of an Illusion”. I then show that this line of thought can be linked to the philosophical discussion around the so-called paradox of fiction and introduce the idea that belief can be understood itself as an emotion or mood. I argue in favour of the solution to the paradox that claims that emotions experienced in response to fictional entities are quasi-emotions but radicalise this claim by showing that this must imply that all emotions are in fact structured like quasi-emotions and that we do not require an essentialist understanding of emotion in the first place. Throughout I use the example of the various cinematic representations of the life of St Francis to flesh out the argument, including Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio / Francesco, God’s Jester / The Flowers of St Francis (1950) but particularly Franco Zeffirelli’s much maligned Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972). (shrink)

In the last 10 years, emotional intelligence has become a current issue of research in psychology, and there are indicators to consider that emotional intelligence should be analyzed to help the coach to behave effectively during competitions. According to Boardley’s (2018) revised model of coaching efficacy, coaches’ emotional intelligence is predictive of their efficacy beliefs, which, in turn, is predictive of coaching behavior. However, little is known about the mediating effects of coaching efficacy dimensions on the relationships between coach’s (...) emotional intelligence and reactive behaviors in competitive settings. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine mediating effects of coaching efficacy dimensions on the relationship between emotional intelligence and coaches’ reactive behaviors during a game using a multimethod approach. Participants were 258 coaches of youth football players aged 9 to 17 years old. Observations in situ using Coaching Behavior Assessment System were carried on 258 football games during two seasons. At the end of each game, coaches completed the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale and the Coaching Efficacy Scale. Structural equation modelling analyses revealed that motivation efficacy and character building mediated the relationship between regulation of emotion and positive and negative coaches’ reactions during game. Specifically, motivation efficacy mediated the association between regulation of emotion and positive coaches’ reactions, and the relationship between regulation of emotion and negative coaches’ reactions were mediated by motivation efficacy and character building. In addition, coaching level moderated the relationships between emotional intelligence, self-efficacy and coaches’ reactive behaviors. Findings of the present study showed that coaching efficacy dimensions (i.e., motivation efficacy and character building) that have the capacity to influence their confidence in ability to affect the psychological mood and positive attitude of athletes, transfer the effects of emotional intelligence (i.e., regulation of emotion) on coaches’ verbal reactions during a youth soccer game. Specifically, a coach who feels competent to regulate their own emotions would perceive high beliefs of efficacy to motivate and to build character of their athletes, and this insight has an impact on their positive verbal reactions in response to athletes’ performances. (shrink)

The idea that emotional experience is capable of lending immediate prima facie epistemic justification to evaluative belief has been amassing significant philosophical support in recent years. The proposal that it is my anger, say, that justifies my belief that I’ve been wronged putatively provides us with an intuitive and naturalised explanation as to how we receive immediate and defeasible justification for our evaluative beliefs. With many notable advocates in the literature, this justificatory thesis of emotion is fast becoming (...) a central facet in how we conceive of the emotions’ epistemic role with respect to our everyday lives. Interestingly, however, despite the fact that the justificatory thesis is fundamentally an epistemological proposal, comparatively little of the philosophical literature has been dedicated to exploring the epistemological avenues through which emotions might be capable of delivering such an epistemic yield. Accordingly, the central purpose of this thesis is to provide a novel and thorough analysis of how emotional experience might be capable of playing this justificatory role. Here, I present and evaluate three broad models of emotional justification: emotional dogmatism, emotional reliabilism, and agent-based views. Emotional dogmatist views, I argue, fail in virtue of being vulnerable to over-generalisation worries and problematic commitments to the contents of emotional awareness. Emotional reliabilism, while possessing the resources to avoid some objections, is vulnerable to worrisome clairvoyance-style challenges which establish the insufficiency of emotional reliability for epistemic justification. Finally, having learned our lessons from the shortcomings of these views, I argue that an agent-based theory grounded in the development of learned emotional competences provides the most plausible account of how emotional experience can epistemically justify evaluative belief. This discussion, I believe, will both illuminate contemporary discussions of the justificatory thesis of emotion found in the literature, and provide novel insight into the epistemic capacities of the emotions. (shrink)

In the present research we investigated gender-specific beliefs about emotional behaviour. In Study 1, 180 respondents rated the extent to which they agreed with different types of beliefs (prescriptive, descriptive, stereotypical, and contra-stereotypical) regarding the emotional behaviour of men and women. As anticipated, respondents agreed more with descriptive than with prescriptive beliefs, and more with stereotypical than with contra-stereotypical beliefs. However, respondents agreed more with stereotypical beliefs about the emotional behaviour of women than with those (...) about men. These results were replicated in Study 2 with a sample of 75 students and 80 nonstudents. In Study 3, a sample of 279 respondents rated the extent of agreement with the same items, this time with respect to then own emotional behaviour. A similar pattern of results was obtained, although agreement rates were higher than in Study 1 and 2. (shrink)

Emotional reactivity has been implicated in the development and maintenance of anxiety. The metacognitive model suggests that maladaptive metacognitive beliefs may inc...

We investigated people's ability to infer others’ mental states from their emotional reactions, manipulating whether agents wanted, expected, and caused an outcome. Participants recovered agents’ desires throughout. When the agent observed, but did not cause the outcome, participants’ ability to recover the agent's beliefs depended on the evidence they got. When the agent caused the event, participants’ judgments also depended on the probability of the action ; when actions were improbable given the mental states, people failed to recover the (...) agent's beliefs even when they saw her react to both the anticipated and actual outcomes. A Bayesian model captured human performance throughout, consistent with the proposal that people rationally integrate information about others’ actions and emotional reactions to infer their unobservable mental states. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the judgementalist theory of emotion against the argument from recalcitrant emotions. Judgementalism holds that a necessary condition for being in an emotional state is that an evaluative belief is formed. Recalcitrant emotions are emotions that contradict endorsed beliefs and judgements. The argument from recalcitrant emotions states that a judgementalist explanation of recalcitrant emotions results in the absurd conclusion that one would hold two contradictory beliefs. I argue that emotion involves a so-called (...) Spinozan belief-forming process: a process which automatically generates beliefs, without taking all available information into account. The generated beliefs might contradict something one already believes, as the so-called Fragmentation of Belief Hypothesis predicts. Thus the judgementalist explanation of recalcitrant emotions does not lead to an absurd conclusion and therefore the argument from recalcitrant emotions is refuted. (shrink)