Abstract

In The Emotional Mind, Asma and Gabriel (2019) develop their grand vision of affect. Their goal is to demonstrate the foundational and pervasive nature of emotion in the mind, culture and society through the embodied, embedded, and enactive process of evolution. The book discusses how affective adaptation supports or leads diverse facets of human psychology and society. In this paper, however, I raise three critical questions about Asma and Gabriel’s approach to emotion: (1) whether emotion is a natural kind, (2) whether internalized self-critical emotions came to exist through the adaptive and interactive process of decoupling, and (3) whether the variance and integrity of the tripartite layers of the mind can be maintained.