BackgroundIn recent years, there have been many studies using the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS) to investigate individual differences in primary emotion traits. However, in contrast to other primary emotion traits proposed by Jaak Panksepp and colleagues, there is a considerable lack of research on the LUST (L) dimension – defined as an individual’s capacity to attain sexual desire and satisfaction – a circumstance mainly caused by its exclusion from the ANPS. Therefore, this study aims to take a first step (...) toward the development of a standardized self-rate measurement for the L-disposition. For this purpose, two versions of the L-scales (L-12 and L-5) were developed and evaluated regarding reliability and aspects of validity.Materials and MethodsAfter a pilot study (N= 204; female: 81%) with an initial 20-item pool item reductions were conducted. This led to the construction of a 12-item (L-12) version and a 5-item version (L-5), which were assessed in a second sample consisting of 371 German-speaking healthy adults (58.50% female) aged 18–69 years (M= 28;SD= 9.75). Aspects of external validity were assessed by investigation of correlations with the ANPS, psychiatric symptoms (Brief Symptom Inventory-18), attachment security (Adult Attachment Scales) and personality functioning (Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics Structure Questionnaire). To evaluate structural validity, both L-scales were investigated via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).ResultsCronbach’s α indicated excellent internal consistency regarding L-12 (α = 0.90), while L-5 showed acceptable reliability (α = 0.82). CFA of a bifactor model of the L-12 indicated excellent model fit. Moreover, an excellent model fit was observed regarding a single factor model of L-5. For both scales small to moderate positive correlations were observed with SEEKING, PLAY, and secure attachment, while they exhibited small to moderate negative correlations with SADNESS, insecure attachment, lower personality functioning, and increased psychiatric symptom load.ConclusionBoth newly developed scales exhibit satisfying psychometric properties, indicating high reliability, good structural validity and plausible correlations with external criteria. Hence, this study poses an important step toward the operationalization of the LUST concept. However, more research is needed in particular with respect to the scale’s external validity and its applicability in clinical populations. (shrink)

Evolutionary approaches to the emotions have traditionally focused on a subset of emotions that are shared with other species, characterized by distinct signals, and designed to solve a few key adaptive problems. By contrast, an evolutionary psychological approach broadens the range of adaptive problems emotions have evolved to solve, includes emotions that lack distinctive signals and are unique to humans, and synthesizes an evolutionary approach with an information-processing perspective. On this view, emotions are superordinate mechanisms (...) that evolved to coordinate the activity of other programs in the solution of adaptive problems. We illustrate the heuristic value of this approach by furnishing novel hypotheses for disgust and sexual arousal and highlighting unexplored areas of research. (shrink)

This article is a review of Frans de Waal's book Mama's Lust Hugs. Animal Emotions and what They Tell Us about Ourselves, which was released in Polnad in 2019. The book deals with the problem of animal emotionality. One of the conclusions reached by the author and which was emphasized in the review is the thesis that there is no such thing as unique human emotions that animals would not have. Emotions are universal; they are shared (...) both by humans and animals. The review noted that although the book is interesting, it is not new in terms of content, because it deals with issues that de Waal wrote about many times in his earlier publications. On the other hand, thanks to the collection and inclusion in one book of the issues related to emotionality in animals, the publication can be a good starting point for reflection not only on animals, but also on humans and their place in the world. It puts the reader in facing the question of human nature. For this reason, what has been tried to show in the review, Frans de Waal's book is a good example of how scientific issues lead to philosophical reflections. (shrink)

The author argues that Peirce, James, and Dewey propose a version of emotional cognitivism. He goes on to highlight certain features of human emotions, conceived in this light, above all emotional reflexivity. Given the highly fallible character of our emotional judgments, the reference to the “I,” in addition to that to the object, can hardly be overlooked. Deliberative agents are wise to confess, “I am angry,” without eliminating what James identifies as “the intensely objective reference” of such feelings (...) as fear, anger, and rapture. (shrink)

Rami Gabriel and Stephen Asma’s book The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition sketches an ambitious research agenda that centers the explanation and understanding of human experience in our embodied, emotional makeup. It argues for a new evolutionary paradigm that naturalizes the understanding of mind, knowledge, and culture, and emphasizes the affective over the cognitive. I argue that they mischaracterize the role that rationality and philosophical theories of rationality play in understanding and shaping our experience. Furthermore, (...) I argue that the book is insufficiently critical about the emotional origins of the theories it explores, which leads to its uncritical acceptance of androcentric ideas and it all but ignores the great and growing problems of group-based inequality whose roots are in the overriding effect of affect. (shrink)

Animals have always been important for human life due to the ecological, cultural and economic functions that they represent. This has allowed building several kinds of relationships that have promoted different emotions in human societies. The objective of this review was to identify the main emotions that humans show towards wildlife species and the impact of such emotions on animal populations’ management. We reviewed academic databases to identify previous studies on this topic worldwide. An analysis (...) of the emotions on wildlife and factors causing them is described here. We identified a controversy about these emotions. Large predators such as wolves, coyotes, bears, big felids, as well as reptiles such as snakes and geckos promote mainly anger, fear, and disgust. This is likely due to the perceptions, beliefs and experiences that societies have historically built around them. However, in some social groups these animals have promoted emotions such as happiness due to their values for people. Likewise, sadness is an emotion expressed for the threatening situations that animals are facing nowadays. Furthermore, we associated the conservation status of wildlife species identified in the study with human emotions to discuss their relevance for emerging conservation strategies, particularly focused on endangered species promoting ambiguous emotions in different social groups. (shrink)

"This book provides a unique phenomenological dialogue between psychology and philosophy on the origin of bioethics that shows the importance of bringing emotions into bioethical discourse. By addressing personal, interpersonal, and societal problems as dynamically interconnected in bioethical problems she helps us to renew our sense of responsibility toward a good quality of life. This interdisciplinary book is invaluable reading for students of health science, psychology, and philosophy, as well as for those interested in the link between emotions (...) and bioethical discourse from both a psychological and philosophical perspective"--. (shrink)

Certain emotional processes “bypass the will” and even awareness, whereas others arise due to the deliberative evaluation of objects, states, and events. It is important to differentiate between the automatic versus reflective origins of emotional processes, and sensory versus conceptual bases of diverse negative and positive emotions. A taxonomy of emotions based on different origins is presented. This taxonomy distinguishes between negative and positive automatic versus reflective emotions. The automatic emotions are connected with the (a) homeostatic (...) and (b) hedonistic regulatory mechanisms. The reflective emotions—uniquely human—are described in reference to deliberative processes and appraisals based on two types of conceptual and verbalized evaluative standards: (a) ideal self-standards and (b) general, axiological standards of good and evil. (shrink)

Until now, adult crying has received relatively little interest from investigators, whereas in the popular media there are many strong claims about crying of which the scientific basis is not clear. In this review, we provide an overview of the current state of the scientific literature with respect to crying. We identify gaps in knowledge and propose questions for future research. The following topics receive special attention: Ontogenetic development, antecedents, individual and gender differences, and the intra- and interindividual effects of (...) crying. We conclude that the study of crying may help us obtain better insight into human nature, that is, not only our emotional, but also social, and moral functioning. (shrink)

Essays culled from two former books by the leading French exponent of this philosophy.

Despite the fact that human daily emotions are co-occurring by nature, most neuroscience studies have primarily adopted a univariate approach to identify the neural representation of emotion (emotion experience within a single emotion category) without adequate consideration of the co-occurrence of different emotions (emotion experience across different emotion categories simultaneously). To investigate the neural representations of multivariate emotion experience, this study employed the inter-situation representational similarity analysis (RSA) method. Researchers used an EEG dataset of 78 participants who (...) watched 28 video clips and rated their experience on eight emotion categories. The EEG-based electrophysiological representation was extracted as the power spectral density (PSD) feature per channel in the five frequency bands. The inter-situation RSA method revealed significant correlations between the multivariate emotion experience ratings and PSD features in the Alpha and Beta bands, primarily over the frontal and parietal-occipital brain regions. The study found the identified EEG representations to be reliable with sufficient situations and participants. Moreover, through a series of ablation analyses, the inter-situation RSA further demonstrated the stability and specificity of the EEG representations for multivariate emotion experience. These findings highlight the importance of adopting a multivariate perspective for a comprehensive understanding of the neural representation of human emotion experience. (shrink)

Because of the complexity of human emotional responses, invariants must be sought not in the responses themselves, but in their generating mechanisms. Lindquist et al. show that functional locationism is a theoretical dead end; their proposed mechanistic framework is a first step toward better models of emotional behavior. We caution, however, that emotions may still be quasi-naturalperceptualtypes.

Much has been said on particular feelings that appear in Nietzsche's works, such as pity, revenge, altruism, guilt, shame, and ressentiment. But there has not been a significant study on Nietzsche's overall teachings on feeling and emotion. What does Nietzsche mean by feeling and the related phenomena? Out of such disparate types of feelings and disparate reflections by Nietzsche on them, can one make sense or can one speak of a theory of feelings in Nietzsche? If so, how does this (...) theory fit with his philosophy of value? On the other hand, how do his teachings relate to some of the later concepts of his philosophy such as the overhuman, the will to power and the eternal return of the same? While the book will contextualize Nietzsche's emotive theory in relation to other emotive theories in the history of ideas, it will also explore Nietzsche's influence on later generations in this area. (shrink)

Contingent transcranialists claim that the physical mechanisms of mind are not exclusively intracranial and that genuine cognitive systems can extend into cognizers' physical and socio-cultural environments. They further claim that extended cognitive systems must include the deep functional integration of external environmental resources with internal neural resources. They have found it difficult, however, to explicate the precise nature of such deep functional integration and provide compelling examples of it. Contingent intracranialists deny that extracranial resources can be components of genuine extended (...) cognitive systems. They claim that transcranialists fallaciously conflate coupling with constitution and construe cognition as extending always from brains into world rather than world into brains. By using insights from recent research in developmental psychology and by explicating the nature of one form that deep functional integration can take, I argue that (i) transcranialists do not fallaciously conflate coupling wth constitution, and (ii) human emotional ontogenesis is a world-to-brain transcranial achievement. Jennifer Greenwood is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, University of Queensland. (shrink)

Derk Pereboom’s book, Wrongdoing & the Human Emotions, addresses how we ought to respond to wrongdoing given the lack of basic-desert moral responsibility, falsity of retributivism, and the metaphysical and moral problems with moral anger. The book is outstanding. Pereboom’s arguments are important, interesting, powerful, and very well-written. Despite this, his specific arguments fail because basic-desert responsibility-skepticism makes non-consequentialism is false.

The suggestion that at least some emotions are modular captures a number of our intuitions about emotions: they are generally fast responses to a stimulus, they are involuntary, and they are easily distinguished from one another; we simply know that, for example, anger feels different than fear. Candidates for modular emotions are usually the so-called “basic” emotions - anger and fear are good examples of these. Defenders of emotion theories that focus on basic emotions, such (...) as Paul Ekman in psychology and Paul Griffiths in philosophy, emphasize the advantages of theories that stress the evolutionary continuity of emotional expression and link emotions to the activity of neural circuits that are similar in human beings and other animals.In this paper, however, I will examine arguments for the discontinuity of emotions in human beings, as compared with other animals. Owing to a combination of cultural practices and neuroanatomy, both our emotional “wiring” and our emotions are unique. (shrink)

In both the philosophy and psychology of emotion there is disagreement regarding the role of biology/genetics and culture/sociality in emotional development and experience. Using recent insights from developmental psychology and biology, and particularly recent developments in metaphysics of mind, I argue that distinctly human emotionality requires the complex interaction of both. Human neonates and caregivers are genetically preadapted to enable emotional ontogenesis in the context only of a complexly interdependent linguistically-mediated social relationship. This relationship provides the requisite sensory-perceptual (...) stimulation to excite intracellular genetic activity and the resultant development/maturation of emotion-related neural substrata. This genetic preadaptation and the close linguistically-mediated social relationship together provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the gradual development of human adult emotionality. (shrink)

Emotional recognition has arisen as an essential field of study that can expose a variety of valuable inputs. Emotion can be articulated in several means that can be seen, like speech and facial expressions, written text, and gestures. Emotion recognition in a text document is fundamentally a content-based classification issue, including notions from natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning fields. Hence, in this study, deep learning assisted semantic text analysis (DLSTA) has been proposed for human emotion detection using (...) big data. Emotion detection from textual sources can be done utilizing notions of Natural Language Processing. Word embeddings are extensively utilized for several NLP tasks, like machine translation, sentiment analysis, and question answering. NLP techniques improve the performance of learning-based methods by incorporating the semantic and syntactic features of the text. The numerical outcomes demonstrate that the suggested method achieves an expressively superior quality of human emotion detection rate of 97.22% and the classification accuracy rate of 98.02% with different state-of-the-art methods and can be enhanced by other emotional word embeddings. (shrink)

Within the second book of his Rhetoric, intent upon the art of persuasion, Aristotle sets forth theearliest known methodical explication of human emotions. This placement seems rather peculiar,given the importance of emotional dispositions in both Aristotle’s theory of moral virtues and in hismoral psychology. One would expect to find a full account of the emotions in his extensivetreatment of virtues as it appears in his ethical treatises, or as part of his psychological system in DeAnima. In none (...) of these places, however, does a systematic treatment of this part of Aristotle’spsychology emerge as it does in the Rhetoric. Such is a surprising, seemingly unusual phenomenonin consideration of Aristotle’s extreme care for and obsession with organization and categorization.Earnest analysis, however, reveals the intricate ingeniousness of Aristotle’s innovative project.Emotion, based upon the interplay between what Aristotle deems to be the ‘uniquely human’rational and irrational parts of the human soul, involves Being and Being’s cognition of itself, andits dialectical encounter with the faculty of pure reason. Within this encounter is born humanemotion.According to this formula, emotion is a phenomenon that is linked to concrete human existencewhile at the same time being fundamentally involved with cognition. Emotion bridges the gapbetween the this-worldliness of the human and his keen logic as a rational being. Such anunderstanding allows Aristotle to assert that emotional appeal, which often stands at the core ofrhetoric, is not necessarily a way of tricking people or avoiding critical response, but can be used topersuade by bringing facts to people’s awareness. Through his novel rhetoric of emotion, Aristotlenot only sheds light on the human condition, he brings rhetoric itself into the realm of the rationaland the valid as a suitable means of human discourse. (shrink)

Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

Rolls shares important data on hunger, thirst, sexuality, and learned behaviors, but is it pertinent to understanding the fundamental nature of emotionality? Important as such work is for understanding the motivated behaviors of animals, Rolls builds a constructivist theory of emotions and primary-process affective consciousness without considering past evidence on specific types of emotional tendencies and their diverse neural substrates.