Transcript Qualitative Feel and Emotion

Qualitative Feel and
Emotion
Nancy Alvarado
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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/
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
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.
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.
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.
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).