Philosophy of emotions

1
Philosophy of emotions

• The primacy of affect and cognition in emotion
• 12.11.08
• Mikko Salmela
• mikko.salmela_at_helsinki.fi

2
The problem

• Several emotions appear to emerge without
  thinking and deliberation of the eliciting
  situation recalcitrant and phobic adult human
  emotions as well as the emotions of animals and
  human infants.
• appraisal as a functional term threatens to
  trivialize the claim that emotions involve
  cognition
• Is there a distinct affective system of
  information processing that is functionally and
  anatomically independent from cognition?

3
The Zajonc-Lazarus debate

• Are there independent systems for emotion and
  cognition?
• Can emotion be activated without prior activation
  of cognitive processes?
• Robert Zajonc (1923-) Feeling and thinking.
  Preferences need no inferences, American
  Psychologist (1980) On the primacy of affect,
  American Psychologist (1984)
• Richard Lazarus (1922-2002) Thoughts on the
  relations between emotion and cognition,
  American Psychologist (1982) On the primacy of
  cognition, American Psychologist (1984)

4
Zajoncs arguments

• Empirical evidence we can form likings and
  aversions to objects on the basis of mere
  exposure to them.
• We can like something or be afraid of it before
  we know precisely what it is.
• Emotion constitutes an information processing
  system that is functionally and neuroanatomically
  independent from conscious thinking.
• Separate brain structures, neural pathways, and
  neurotransmitters
• Cold cognition vs. hot cognition
  discriminanda vs. preferanda
• Feeling is a representational system that is
  demarcated and defined by its own special
  representational categories and principles, and
  governed by its own special ways and
  regularities This system operates on
  representational items that are informationally
  less complex than the standard propositional ones
  involved in cognition. (Charland,1996)

5
Lazarus arguments

• Information processing alone cannot constitute
  relational meaning without some kind of
  evaluation of the information for its relevance
  for the subjects well-being.
• Cognitive activity does not imply deliberate
  reflection, rationality, or awareness.
• An appraisal can operate at all levels of
  complexity, from the most primitive and inborn to
  the most symbolic and experience-based.
• All instances of physiological arousal are not
  emotions startle, exposure effect, physical
  sensations
• ZAJONCS RESPONSE Lazarus broad definition of
  cognition is overly inclusive and arbitrary.
• If we accept Lazarus position, all distinctions
  between cognition, perception, and sensation
  disappear (Zajonc, 1984, 179).

6
Resolution Leventhal Scherer

• The issue of the primacy of emotion or cognition
  is a semantic controversy focus on actual
  processes and mechanisms that produce emotions.
• Lazarus all processes of meaning generation are
  cognitive
• Zajonc cognition involves post-perceptual
  transformation of sensory input by mental work
• Three levels of emotional processing
• Sensory motor
• Innate, automatically stimulated expressive-motor
  programs and cerebral activating systems
• Schematic
• Automatic linkage of the current situation to the
  prototype of prior emotional episodes
• Conceptual
• Reflexive evaluation of the current situation in
  terms of propositionally structured information
  and memories.

7
Two-level appraisal theories

• E.g. Lazarus (1991) Power and Dalgleish (1997)
  Elster (1999) Ben-Zeev (2000) Clore and
  Ortony (2000) Smith and Kirby (2001) Scherer
  (2001) Nussbaum (2001).
• The core idea there are two modes or systems for
  the transformation of sensory or semantic input
  into psychological representations of personal
  significance, one conscious, deliberate, and
  under volitional control, the other automatic,
  unconscious, and uncontrollable (Lazarus 1991,
  153).
• Gerald Clore Andrew Ortony Cognition in
  emotions always, sometimes, never? (2000).
• The bottom-up route of online computation vs. the
  top-down route of appraisal reinstatement.
• Associated dichotomies two modes of
  categorization two types of processing and two
  functions of emotions.

8
Clore Ortony (in detail)
There seem to be two fingers on the emotional
trigger one controlled by early perceptual
processes that identify stimuli with emotional
value and activate preparation for action, and a
second controlled by cognitive processes that
verify the stimulus, situate its context, and
appraise its value (Clore Ortony, 2000, 41)
9
Challenges to two-level appraisal theories

• Empirical evidence on two functionally and
  anatomically distinct neural pathways for the
  processing of emotionally relevant information,
  the low road and the high road.
• Antonio Damasio Descartes Error (1994) The
  Feeling of What Happens (1999) Joseph LeDoux
  The Emotional Brain (1995).

Sensory cortex
The high road
Sensory thalamus
Amygdala
The low road
Emotional stimulus
Emotional response
LeDoux 1995, 164
10
The low road the quick and dirty system

• Amygdala as the emotional computer that
  processes the emotional meaning of individual
  stimuli as well as complex situations.
• Operates on crude images of the external world.
• Capable of responding before conscious
  recognition of the stimulus.
• Appraisal mechanism influenced by ancestral and
  individual past.
• Affect programs as modular systems (Fodor)
  cognitively impenetrable, informationally
  encapsulated, domain specific, innately
  specified, opaque, mandatory, and neurally
  hard-wired.

11
The high road the slow and careful system

• More elaborate, propositionally explicable
  representations of the eliciting situation and
  its emotional significance.
• Accessible to consciousness even if need not be
  conscious.
• Flexible both on the input and output side as the
  emotional response depends on reasoning and on
  culturally variable social roles and norms.
• Capable of lasting longer and motivating
  long-term, planned action.

12
Griffiths on two-level appraisal theories

• The hierarchical structure of emotional
  processing provides evidence for the theoretical
  distinction between affect programs and
  cognitively complex emotions.
• The hierarchical structure of emotional
  processing violates against the basic assumption
  of multi-level appraisal theories that instances
  of the same emotion at all levels share the same
  or similar content.
• Low-level appraisals involve action-oriented
  representations that exhibit collapse of the
  attitudes (Millikan)
• Low-level representations differ from high-level
  ones in terms of their impoverished inferential
  role.

13
Cognitivist responses to Griffiths

• Unity of emotional system, in spite of
  hierarchical structure
• Pure affect program is an ideal type as far as
  human emotions are concerned as all our emotions
  are influenced by cultural display rules
  (Solomon).
• The dynamic nature of emotional appraisal
• Emotions can be elicited by low-level appraisals,
  but higher-level appraisals are recruited at
  later stages of emotional response.
• Emotion regulation as an aspect of emotion.
• In examining only the earliest part of an
  emotion sequence, such studies are not in fact
  dealing with real, full blown emotions at all.
  (Clore Ortony)
• Sequential appraisal theory (Scherer) appraisal
  as a continuous process where appraisals are
  followed by reappraisals that revise the
  evaluation result on the basis of more thoroughly
  analysed information.
• The integration of the quick and dirty and the
  slow and careful processing in the emotional
  response.

14
Article 2 Jesse Prinz Emotion,
Psychosemantics, and Embodied Appraisals, in A.
Hatzimoysis (ed) Philosophy and the Emotions.
Cambridge Cambridge University Press (2003),
69-86.

• Questions for reading 
• What problems are involved in noncognitive
  theories of emotion?
• How Zajonc criticized cognitive theories?
• How Lazarus responded to Zajoncs criticism?
• What is The Emotion Problem?
• How is representation understood in informational
  semantics?
• What are embodied appraisals?
• How emotions represent particular objects
  according to Prinz?
• What are calibrating causes?