Qualitative Feel and Emotion

1. Qualitative Feel and Emotion Nancy Alvarado

2. What is Emotion? • Emotion has four aspects: • Feelings (feels, qualia) • Biological states – physiological arousal • Function – motivation, coping, social regulation • Expression – communication • Emotion is not any one of these aspects, but a construct that includes all of them. • Emotion occurs as a coordinated, synchronized response process.

3. Three Ways of Measuring Emotion • Behavior – crying, laughing, facial expression, approach/avoidance, aggression • Physiology – blood pressure, heart rate, gsr, neural imagining • Cognition – self report but also effects on cognitive processes observed indirectly. • Emotion affects perception, attention, memory, decision-making, judgments.

4. Social Construction of Emotion • Western cultures think and talk about emotion very differently than non-Western cultures: • Not as mind-oriented or mentalistic – internal states not described in terms of emotion. • More likely to describe physical symptoms and to refer to negative affect using pain metaphors or illness. • Who may talk about emotion is linked to social class or status – such as Wolof griots

5. Some Incorrect Folk Beliefs • Women are more emotional than men. • Emotions cannot be controlled – “the heart wants what it wants.” • It is bad or unhealthy to suppress emotion or to fail to express it. • Expressing emotion is cathartic, a release that diminishes the emotion. • Some people feel more deeply than others.

6. Cognitive Science and Emotion • Western views of emotion have been enshrined in the theories. • Physical aspects of the construct are deemphasized because computers are not embodied in the same way as people. • Models that are easiest to implement have been emphasized, others ignored. • Damasio, Clore, Lang (Grey)

7. Zombies (Robots) • Some claim that it is the ability to feel emotion that makes us uniquely human. • Rodney Brooks, representationalist, disagrees: http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/show.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/02/hardtalk/brooks19aug.ram (may require download of RealPlayer (free) from their website) http://alicebot.org/

8. Emotion & Consciousness • Emotion is not strictly a phenomenon of consciousness, although its self-report is. • Implicit vs explicit emotions • Effects on motivation, memory, decision, other cognition can be set aside when emotion is consciously experienced. • Moods vs emotions • Long-lasting vs short duration • Non-conscious vs conscious • Unattributed vs attributed cause

9. Damasio’s Marker Theory • Another way of saying that emotion is constructed. • Not socially constructed but biologically constructed. • Inputs suggested by Damasio can probably be expanded to include aspects suggested by appraisal theory (Arnold, Lazarus, Scherer). • Damasio’s theory appeals to those who describe emotional experience in perceptual terms.

10. Problems with Dennett’s View • Is emotion an “artifact of our immersion in human culture” as consciousness is? • Persons with alexithymia still experience emotion. • Children experience emotion despite limited vocabularies for describing internal states. • Despite hypocognition and hypercognition, the same basic emotions appear across cultures – Inuit do feel anger.

11. Access vs Phenomenal Consciousness • Without phenomenal consciousness, emotion has no effectiveness as a motivator of human behavior. • We can prove that phenomenal consciousness exists by observing its impact on behavior. • Access consciousness appears to be optional. • But perceptual accounts focus mostly on access consciousness not phenomenal. Emotion works the opposite way.

12. Functional Approaches • What does emotion do? • It is part of what it means to be human. • Emotion makes life “worth living” by giving value to experiences. • Emotion permits us to respond flexibly to our environment, avoiding bad, approaching good. • Emotion guides inter-personal relationships. • Emotional is necessary to cognitive development because adult-child interaction is facilitated (Kismet).