1 / 22

Are there any unconscious emotions? An enactive approach.

Are there any unconscious emotions? An enactive approach. KNEW 2013 Leon Ciechanowski Warsaw University , Philosophy Department ; University of Social Sciences and Humanities , Psychology Department. Emotions. Crucial for social interactions and behaviour Play a vital role in:

badrani
Download Presentation

Are there any unconscious emotions? An enactive approach.

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Are there any unconscious emotions? An enactive approach. KNEW 2013 Leon Ciechanowski Warsaw University, PhilosophyDepartment; University of Social Sciences and Humanities, PsychologyDepartment

  2. Emotions • Crucialfor socialinteractions and behaviour • Play a vital role in: • Cognition: the role of affect (e.g., Duncan & Barrett, 2007) • Socialcognition and intelligence; e.g., (Björkqvist, Österman& Kaukiainen,2000) – empathyregulatessocialbehaviour

  3. Structure of the talk Emotionscan be unconscious Emotionscannot be unconscious Enactiveapproach to unconsciousemotions The casestudy of empathy (sociallysignificantemotion) Evaluation and summary

  4. Claims of the talk Thereareatleastsomeelements of emotionsthatareunconscious The disputeoverunconsciousemotionsdepends on the assumeddefinition of emotion Theremay be a groundwhere we couldsolve the dispute Therearesomeproblems with thesegrounds

  5. Emotionscan be unconscious Zajonc (1994) – free-floating anxiety phenomenon Winkielman, Berridge and Wilbarger (2005) – rejection of ’what-it’s-like’ aspect of emotion. ”Conscious aspects of emotion probably emerge from a hierarchy of unconscious emotional processes…” (2005: p. 336)

  6. Emotionscan be unconscious Winkielman, Berridge& Wilbarger(2005b)

  7. Emotionscan be unconscious • Winkielman, Berridge& Wilbarger (2005b)

  8. Emotionscan be unconscious • Winkielman, Berridge& Wilbarger (2005b)

  9. Emotionscannotbe unconscious • Clore (1994) – we mistake emotionsfor unconscious affects or moods • Emotionsrequirefeelings and theseareconscious by definition: • Traditionalaccounts (James-Lange theory) • Cognitivetheories of emotions • A ’middleway’ – Joseph LeDoux (1994; 1995); Antonio Damasio (1994; 1999)

  10. Definitions of emotions • The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology: • “A reaction, both psychological and physical, subjectively experienced as strong feelings, many of which prepare the body for immediate action” • Encyclopaedia Britannica: • “emotion, a complex experience of consciousness, bodily sensation, and behaviour that reflects the personal significance of a thing, an event, or a state of affairs.”

  11. Definitions of emotions • The MIT Encyclopedia Of The Cognitive Sciences: • “An emotion is a psychological state or process that functions in the management of goals. It is typically elicited by evaluating an event as relevant to a goal; it is positive when the goal is advanced, negative when the goal is impeded. The core of an emotion is readiness to act in a certain way…; it is an urgency, or prioritization, of some goals and plans rather than others. Emotions can interruptongoingaction; also they prioritize certain kinds of social interaction, prompting, for instance, cooperation or conflict.”

  12. Enactiveapproach to unconsciousemotions • Emotions do not simply go alongaction-reactionpatterns. • Emotional content and feelings emerge due to performing action patterns constrained by environmental affordances. • Twotypes of intentionality of emotions: • emotions directed toward our bodies • emotions directed toward the world

  13. Enactiveapproach to unconsciousemotions • Emotion: • a monitoring process that informs an organism about its surrounding affordances and whether the organism is successful in using them. • providesmotivated patterns for the realization of a self-organizational balance. • is not reducible to a homeostatic seeking reorganization of patterns. • consists of many motivations, that are arranged, balanced and chosen by an individual.

  14. Empathy strongly correlated with social intelligence; acts as a mitigator of aggression and impacts on our conflict behaviour (Björkqvist, Österman, & Kaukiainen, 2000) empathy deprivation leads to serious disorders(Spitz & Wolf, 1946) the capacity for empathy in children is developed as a result of relations with their mothers(Siegal, 1985) unconsciousaffective (emotional?) processeslead to empathy(Decety & Ickes, 2009; Yamada & Decety, 2009)

  15. Evaluation • conscious vs. unconsciousemotions – a theoreticaldeadlock? • Interoception – a problem • enactivism: it is the emotion’s intentionality that makes us aware of them, and not the interoceptiveelement. • but: enactivist problem of definition of emotion

  16. Whatcan we do? Accept the situation OR Try to find a commonground for differenttheories

  17. Finding a commonground • Piotr Winkielman, Kent Berridge , and ShlomiSher (2011) • what qualitative patterns of functional organization across the cortical and subcortical areas are likely to trigger conscious and unconscious emotion? • theyemploy the “global workspace” model offunctional organization of conscious states (Baars, 1988)

  18. Finding a commonground • Canemotion be unconscious? -> To what extent can various subsets of processors in the neural emotion network operate in an internally coherent fashion, without themselves being integrated with the various other processors in the global workspace?

  19. Finding a commonground • Experimental data: • Rating neutralChineseideographspreceded by subliminal happy or angry faces (Winkielman, Zajonc, & Schwarz, 1997) • Studyingconsumption behavior after exposing participants to several subliminal emotional facial expressions (Winkielman, Berridge, and Wilbarger,2005) • Study on more complex financial decisions (Winkielman, Knutson, Paulus, & Trujillo, 2007).

  20. Finding a commonground • Winkielman, Zajonc, & Schwarz (1997)

  21. Problems of the globalworkspaceapproach maybe we do not talk here about unconscious emotions but about unconscious affect? the difficulty of conclusively establishing the absence of feelings

  22. Thankyou! Bibliography: Baars, B. J. (1988). A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press. Björkqvist, K., Österman, K., & Kaukiainen, A. (2000). Social intelligence − empathy = aggression? Aggression and Violent Behavior, 5(2). Clore, G. L. (1994). Why Emotions Are Never Unconscious. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The Nature of Emotion: fundamental questions. Oxford University Press. Damasio, A. (1994). Descarte’s error. Putnam. Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt. Decety, J., & Ickes, W. (Eds.). (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. The MIT Press. Duncan, S., & Barrett, L. F. (2007). Affect is a form of cognition: A neurobiological analysis. Cognition & emotion, 21(6), 1184–1211. LeDoux, J. E. (1994). Emotional Processing, but Not Emotions, Can Occur Unconsciously. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The Nature of Emotion: fundamental questions. Oxford University Press. LeDoux, J. E. (1995). Emotion: Clues from the brain. Annual review of psychology, 46, 209–35. Siegal, M. (1985). Mother-child relations and the development of empathy: A short-term longitudinal study. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 16(2), 77–86. Solomon, R. C. (2013). emotion. In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/185972/emotion Spitz, R. A., & Wolf, K. M. (1946). Anaclitic depression; an inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. The Psychoanalytic study of the child, 2, 313–42. Strickland, B. R. (Ed.). (2001). The Gale encyclopedia of psychology. Gale Group. Wilson, R., & Keil, F. (Eds.). (1999). The MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences. The MIT Press. Winkielman, P., & Schooler, J. W. (2011). Splitting consciousness: Unconscious, conscious, and metaconscious processes in social cognition. European Review of Social Psychology, 22(1), 1–35. Winkielman, P., Berridge, K. C., & Wilbarger, J. L. (2005a). Emotion, Behavior, and Conscious Experience: Once More without Feeling. In L. F. Barrett, P. M. Niedenthal, & P. Winkielman. (Eds.), Emotion and consciousness. The Guilford Press. Winkielman, P., Berridge, K. C., & Wilbarger, J. L. (2005b). Unconscious affective reactions to masked happy versus angry faces influence consumption behavior and judgments of value. Personality & social psychology bulletin, 31(1), 121–35. Winkielman, P., Knutson, B., Paulus, M., & Trujillo, J. L. (2007). Affective influence on judgments and decisions: Moving towards core mechanisms. Review of General Psychology, 11(2), 179–192. Winkielman, P., Zajonc, R. B., & Schwarz, N. (1997). Subliminal Affective Priming Resists Attributional Interventions. Cognition & Emotion, 11(4), 433–465. Yamada, M., & Decety, J. (2009). Unconscious affective processing and empathy: an investigation of subliminal priming on the detection of painful facial expressions. Pain, 143(1-2), 71–5. Zajonc, R. B. (1994). Evidence for Nonconscious Emotions. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The Nature of Emotion: fundamental questions. Oxford University Press.

More Related