When information activated in memory involves emotional associations, the ability to shift attention away from an emotional cue is impaired compared to an emotionally neutral cue. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how emotional stimuli modulate attentional processes, and how this is reflected in localised brain electrical activity. Eight emotion and eight neutral words served as cues in a covert attention spatial orienting task. The cues were either valid or invalid indicators of which hemifield the target (...) would be presented to. In the remaining trials, no cue was presented prior to the target. Twenty subjects were instructed to manually respond to the target as fast as possible. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed an enhanced P3 component to the emotion words. The ERPs to the target showed enhanced P1 and P3 components on invalid trials, with emotional cues. There were faster reaction times (RTs) to validly cued targets, but only when the emotion words served as cues. The results demonstrated that the emotional cues elicited sustained focused attention, facilitating an engage mechanism of spatial orienting. (shrink)

Humans perceive time with millisecond precision. However, when experiencing negative or fearful events, time appears to slow down and aversive events are judged to last longer than neutral or positive events of equal duration. Feelings of control have been shown to attenuate increases in arousal triggered by anxiety-provoking events. Here, we tested whether feelings of control can go as far as influencing people’s perception of the world, by modulating the perceived duration of aversive events. Observers judged the duration of images (...) depicting positive or negative content, and we manipulated the amount of control experienced by participants. Crucially, participants never had any real control over events. All control was illusory. Results showed that when participants experienced low levels of control, negative images were judged as lasting longer than positive images. However, when participants illusorily experienced high levels of control, they no longer experienced aversive negative images as lasting longer than positive images. (shrink)

Anger has potential epistemic value in the way that it can facilitate a process of our coming to have knowledge and understanding regarding the issue about which we are angry. The nature of anger, however, may nevertheless be such that it ultimately undermines this very process. Common non-philosophical complaints about anger, for instance, often target the angry person as being somehow irrational, where an unformulated assumption is that her anger undermines her capacity to rationally engage with the issue about which (...) she is angry. Call this assumption the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger. Such a charge is pernicious when levelled at the anger of those in positions of marginalisation or oppression, where it can threaten to silence voices on the very issue of the injustices that they face. In this paper I thus provide a much-needed interrogation of this charge. Firstly, and drawing on empirical literature on the effects of anger on decision-making, I flesh out the charge and why it poses a threat to how the epistemic value of anger has been defended. Secondly, I argue that the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger can nevertheless be unwarranted, at least within a common context of political anger. (shrink)

Matravers examines how emotions form the bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; and we may experience emotions toward, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. Matravers shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. He carries out a critical survey of various accounts (...) of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defense of a controversial view about musical expression: that music works by expressing the emotions it causes its listeners to feel. (shrink)

The present study examines 1- to 5-year-old children’s emotion socialization in an early childhood educational setting (a preschool) in Sweden. Specifically, it examines social situations where teachers respond to children’s negative emotional expressions and negatively emotionally charged social acts, characterized by anger, irritation and distress. Data consist of 14 hours of video observations of daily activities, recorded in a public Swedish preschool, located in a suburban middle-class area and include 35 children and five preschool teachers. By adopting a (...) sociocultural perspective on children’s development and socialization, the study examines the communicative practices through which the expressions of negative emotions are responded to and the norms and values that are communicated through these practices. The data are analysed by using multimodal analysis of interaction that provides a tool for detailed analysis of participants’ verbal and embodied actions and sense-making. The analyses show that teachers responded to children’s negatively charged emotional expressions as social acts (that were normatively evaluated) and the adults instructed children how to modify their social conduct (rather than deploying explicit discussions about emotions). The teachers used communicative genres that prioritized general moral principles and implemented the non-negotiability of norms over individual children’s emotional-volitional perspectives and individual preferences. The teachers’ instructive socializing activities were characterized by movement between multiple temporal horizons, i.e., general (emotional) discourse that transcended the here-and-now, and specific instructions targeting the children’s conduct in a current situation. The study discusses how emotion socialization can be related to the institutional characteristics and collective participatory social conditions of early childhood education. (shrink)

Everyday life suggests that picture seeing is sometimes infused by an emotional charge. However, nobody has addressed the importance of explaining this emotional charge in picture perception. Even our best model of picture perception, the dorsal/ventral account of picture perception, which integrates the most important empirical results coming from our best model on vision in neuroscience, the two visual systems model, lacks a reference to this emotional charge. The aim of the present paper is to offer an account of picture (...) perception that is able to regain and explain this neglected emotional charge. My claim is that, as for face-to-face perception, during picture perception, we are not only in a visual perceptual state, but also in an emotional state, which is directly connected to our visual perceptual state. I also show that it is possible to offer this integration while remaining in the philosophical/empirical framework of the dorsal/ventral account of picture perception, whose explanatory power is confirmed and improved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some More Reflections on Emotions, Thoughts, and TherapyDemian Whiting (bio)Keywordsdepression, pedophilia, phenomenology, noncognitive, treatmentThe primary objective of my paper was to show that where a person's representations of the world are eliciting the wrong emotions then treatment of those problems in emotion cannot be about treating the eliciting representations. And it is worth clarifying two points about my claim here. First, although I take my claim to apply to (...) cases where accurate representations are eliciting the wrong emotions, the same point does, I believe, just as well apply to cases where distorted representations are eliciting the wrong emotion. So, for instance, even if the pedophile mistakenly took an adult to be a child and was aroused by that perception, I think that we would still want to claim that there is here—in addition to a possible disturbance in cognition—a problem in emotion. This is because representations of young children should not elicit feelings of sexual arousal, however distorted those representations may themselves be. Second, it is important to emphasize that the kinds of cases that I have in mind are not cases where a person's emotions contradict the thoughts that the person has about the world. The pedophile's arousal at the thought of young children does not contradict any thoughts that the pedophile has about children. Neither does the person who has a propensity to feel anxious have any thoughts that contradict his anxiety. In fact, I believe that emotions cannot contradict our thoughts, because that would require emotion to have the representational character of thought, and emotions being affective states, or types of feelings, do not have that character of thought. Problems in emotion then have to be described in other ways, such as in terms of an emotion's violation of a moral norm or in terms of an emotion's likely adverse effects on the person's behavior or rationality, and certainly it was in these other ways that I intended the cases that I described to be taken.Now, there are to be found in my paper three ways in which someone may reply to my argument (although only two of these ways take the form of actual responses in the paper). To begin with, it might be claimed that amending problems in emotion must be about altering cognitions, as emotions themselves consist of cognitions. I describe in a note to my paper a number of reasons why I think we should reject cognitive accounts of emotions. I also state in the introduction that a purely affective (and, thereby, noncognitive) account of emotion successfully describes the phenomenology, or experience [End Page 255], of emotion. And I would also want to (therefore) resist David Pugmire's suggestion that sometimes a "person's portrayal of an emotionally charged situation is actually prefigured in their emotion"—if by that Pugmire means that emotions sometimes consist of such thoughts. "Black thoughts" may be "despair's footholds," but I would argue that this means nothing more than the fact that such thoughts often act as a nonconstitutive cause of depression. Finally, I should remark that I do not intend my claim that to evaluate oneself negatively may just consist in feeling low about oneself to be a concession to the cognitive theorist of emotion. This is because the purpose of that claim is not to (confusingly) suggest that our cognitive evaluations may consist of noncognitive emotions, but rather to suggest that it is a mistake to think of our evaluations as being cognitive in nature. According to the noncognitivist project in meta-ethics our evaluations are properly seen as being expressions of our noncognitive attitudes.The second way of responding to my argument is to concede that emotions are noncognitive in nature, but to argue that each particular emotion is triggered by its own special kind of thought (e.g., fear might be thought to be necessarily triggered by perceived dangers, anger by perceived slights). On the face of it, however, the claim that our emotions are necessarily triggered by certain kinds of thoughts looks simply false. Our own observation of how emotions originate, together with the empirical studies that I... (shrink)

Using social information is not indiscriminate and being able to choose what to copy and from whom to copy is critical. Dogs are able to learn socially, to recognize, and respond to dog as well as human emotional expressions, and to make reputation-like inferences based on how people behave towards their owner. Yet, the mechanisms dogs use for obtaining and utilizing social information are still to be fully understood, especially concerning whether emotional cues influence dogs’ social learning. Therefore, our main (...) aim was to test the hypothesis that an emotionally charged interaction with the demonstrator of a “V” detour task prior to testing would affect subjects’ performance, by: changing the value of the information provided by the demonstrator or changing the valence of the learning environment. Our experimental design consisted of three phases: pre-test ; emotional display ; test. Only dogs that failed in pre-test were considered for analysis. We analyzed four dependent variables: success, time to solve the task, latency to reach the fence and matching the side of demonstration. For each, we used four models to investigate the effect of demographic factors; experimental design factors ; behavior of the dog; and side chosen and matching. All models took into account all trials and the first trials only. Our findings corroborate previous studies of social learning, but present no evidence to sustain our hypothesis. We discuss the possibility of our stimuli not being salient enough in a task that involves highly motivating food and relies on long and highly distracting interval between phases. Nevertheless, these results represent an important contribution to the study of dog behavior and social cognition and pave the way for further investigations. (shrink)

A new theory of how the brain constructs emotions that could revolutionize psychology, health care, law enforcement, and our understanding of the human mind Emotions feel automatic, like uncontrollable reactions to things we think and experience. Scientists have long supported this assumption by claiming that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology--and (...) this paradigm shift has far-reaching implications for us all. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and shedding new light on what it means to be human. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain and are universally expressed and recognized. Instead, she has shown that emotion is constructed in the moment, by core systems that interact across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning. This new theory means that you play a much greater role in your emotional life than you ever thought. Its repercussions are already shaking the foundations not only of psychology but also of medicine, the legal system, child-rearing, meditation, and even airport security. Why do emotions feel automatic? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease? How can you make your children more emotionally intelligent? How Emotions Are Made answers these questions and many more, revealing the latest research and intriguing practical applications of the new science of emotion, mind, and brain. (shrink)

Nicholas Makins argues persuasively that medical decisions should be made with consideration for patients’ higher order risk attitudes.1 I will argue that an understanding of risk attitudes in medical decision-making is incomplete without critical engagement with emotions and affects (feelings associated with something good or bad). The primary aim of this commentary is to emphasise that clinical decisions are often emotionally charged, and it is crucial to engage closely with emotions and affects that shape these decisions, particularly when (...) navigating complex and uncertain situations. In the face of uncertainty, emotions such as fear, sadness or anxiety play a significant role in risk attitudes and medical decisions. I contend that recognising risk as a feeling is crucial to respecting patients’ values, preferences and decisions in light of the substantial body of research on risk perception and attitudes that suggests individuals make decisions based not only on what they think, but also on how they feel. In recent years, scholars have begun to acknowledge the value of emotions in understanding medical decisions and healthcare decision-making processes,2 especially under uncertainty. Furthermore, some philosophers and social scientists in field of risk research acknowledge emotions as both affective and cognitive in nature, and influence risk perceptions and attitudes.3 Risk …. (shrink)

BackgroundTrait anxiety is a pervasive tendency to attend to and experience fears and worries to a disproportionate degree, across various situations. Decreased vulnerability to trait anxiety has been linked to having higher working memory capacity and better emotion regulation; however, the relationship between these factors has not been well-established.ObjectiveThis study sought to determine if participants who undergo emotional working memory training will have significantly lower trait anxiety post-training. The study also sought to determine if emotion regulation mediated the relationship between (...) working memory training and trait anxiety.MethodAn experimental group comprising of 49 participants underwent 20 days of computerized emotional working memory training, which involved viewing a continuous stream of emotionally-charged content on a grid, and then remembering the location and color of items presented on the grid. The control group comprised of 51 participants.ResultsParticipants of the experimental group had significantly lower trait anxiety compared to controls, post-training. Subsequent mediation analysis determined that working memory training capacity gains were significantly related to anxiety reduction as measured by form Y2 of the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Emotion regulation, as measured by the Emotional Regulation Questionnaire, was found not to mediate between working memory capacity gains and trait anxiety reduction.ConclusionWorking memory capacity gains and reductions in levels of trait anxiety were observed following emotional working memory training. The study may therefore be useful in informing interventions targeted at improving working memory capacity, and reducing levels of trait anxiety. Moreover, it proposes for future research to further look into the mediating role of emotion regulation via the development or utilization of more comprehensive measures of emotion regulation. (shrink)

Installation art is one of the most important and provocative developments in the visual arts during the last half century and has become a key focus of artists and of contemporary museums. It is also seen as particularly challenging or even disliked by many viewers, and—due to its unique in situ, immersive setting—is equally regarded as difficult or even beyond the grasp of present methods in empirical aesthetic psychology. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory study with installation art, utilizing (...) a collection of techniques to capture the eclectic, the embodied, and often the emotionally-charged viewing experience. We present results from an investigation of two pieces, both part of Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition “Baroque, Baroque” held at the Belvedere museum in Vienna. These were assessed by pre- and post-viewing questionnaires focusing on emotion, meaning-making, and appraisals, in tandem with mobile eye tracking to consider viewers’ attention to both installed artworks and/or to the museum environment. The data showed differences in participants’ emotional states, appraisals, and visual exploration, which together paint a picture of the aesthetic reactions to the works. These differences also showed how viewers’ appraisal strategies, meaning making, and physical actions facilitated relatively more or less deep engagement with, and enjoyment of, the art. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for museum studies, art education, and theory in empirical aesthetics. (shrink)

I investigate the normative status of an unexamined category of emotions: ‘lyrical’ emotions about the transience of things. Lyrical emotions are often accused of sentimentality—a charge that expresses the idea that they are unfitting responses to their objects. However, when we test the merits of that charge using the standard model of emotion evaluation, a surprising problem emerges: it turns out that we cannot make normative distinctions between episodes of such feelings. Instead, it seems that lyrical emotions are always fitting. (...) Although this claim is counterintuitive, the price of denying it is to hold that such emotions are never fitting—an equally strange result. If this is correct, then the commonplace discourse of sentimentality surrounding lyrical emotions lacks normative moorings. (shrink)

In everyday life, people frequently make decisions based on tacit or explicit forecasts about the emotional consequences associated with the possible choices. We investigated age differences in such forecasts and their accuracy by surveying voters about their expected and, subsequently, their actual emotional responses to the 2008 US presidential election. A sample of 762 Democratic and Republican voters aged 20 to 80 years participated in a web-based study; 346 could be re-contacted two days after the election. Older adults forecasted lower (...) increases in high-arousal emotions (e.g., excitement after winning; anger after losing) and larger increases in low-arousal emotions (e.g., sluggishness after losing) than younger adults. Age differences in actual responses to the election were consistent with forecasts, albeit less pervasive. Additionally, among supporters of the winning candidate, but not among supporters of the losing candidate, forecasting accuracy was enhanced with age, suggesting a positivity effect in affective forecasting. These results add to emerging findings about the role of valence and arousal in emotional ageing and demonstrate age differences in affective forecasting about a real-world event with an emotionally charged outcome. (shrink)

I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I then develop a more controversial assertion: that environments have non-subjective emotional qualities, which organize behavior and help us make sense of the world. I defend this from ecological and related embodied standpoints that take properties to be interrelational outcomes. I also build on conceptions of experience as a cultural phenomenon, one that (...) coheres around shared environmental contours and public emotional concerns, introducing normative constraints (or what might be called “world grammars”). Endorsing this outlook suggests an argument for the view that cultural spaces have affectively charged, non-subjective, normative openings and closures. These openings and closures engender selectively permeable barriers which cordon space without physically preventing entry, as seen with decorative half walls and elevation changes. An area with such barriers may look emotionally hostile to, say, the dispirited homeless who are in fact less welcome there. Outcomes like these might be thought of as “political affordances.” These affordances can be regarded as normative openings and closures that implicitly filter, and hence segregate, according to various social divisions. Although registering political affordances requires more than the detection of ambient arrays, the notion retains core Gibsonian ideas: that affordances are values, that these values are linked with how a space can be used, and that the existence and nature of such affordances is not a subjective matter. (shrink)

Appeals to emotion—pity, fear, popular sentiment, and _ad hominem_ attacks—are commonly used in argumentation. Instead of dismissing these appeals as fallacious wherever they occur, as many do, Walton urges that each use be judged on its merits. He distinguished three main categories of evaluation. First, is it reasonable, even if not conclusive, as an argument? Second, is it weak and therefore open to critical questioning for argument? And third, is it fallacious? The third category is a strong charge that incurs (...) a critical burden to back it up by citing evidence from the given text and context of dialogue. Walton uses fifty-six case studies to demonstrate that the problem of emotional fallacies is much subtler than has been previously believed. Ranging over commercial advertisements, political debates, union-management negotiations, and ethical disputes, the case studies reveal that these four types of appeals, while based on presumptive reasoning that are tentative and subject to default, are not always or necessarily fallacious types of argumentation. (shrink)

Delusions are one of the most classical symptoms described in schizophrenia. However, despite delusions are often emotionally charged, they have been investigated using tasks involving non-affective material, such as the Beads task. In this study we compared 30 patients with schizophrenia experiencing delusions with 32 matched controls in their pattern of responses to two versions of the Beads task within a Bayesian framework. The two versions of the Beads task consisted of one emotional and one neutral, both with (...) ratios of beads of 60:40 and 80:20, considered, respectively, as the “difficult” and “easy” variants of the task. Results indicate that patients showed a greater deviation from the normative model, especially in the 60:40 ratio, suggesting that more inaccurate probability estimations are more likely to occur under uncertainty conditions. Additionally, both patients and controls showed a greater deviation in the emotional version of the task, providing evidence of a reasoning bias modulated by the content of the stimuli. Finally, a positive correlation between patients’ deviation and delusional symptomatology was found. Impairments in the 60:40 ratio with emotional content was related to the amount of disruption in life caused by delusions. These results contribute to the understanding of how cognitive mechanisms interact with characteristics of the task in the context of delusional thinking. These findings might be used to inform improved intervention programs in the domain of inferential reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper, we study discourses of emotion management on the reality television show Survivor. We analyze segments of the program that feature emotionally charged interactional moments and examine how these interactions are interwoven with contestants’ confessional interviews and framed by the narrator’s introductions of the segments. In a two part analysis, we first analyze the talk produced by the contestants and the host as individual texts, using a discourse analytic perspective that focuses on the details of the (...) talk itself. We then consider the ways the talk constitutes a series of layered texts and analyze these texts, using a discourse analytic approach that attends to macro-level and critical perspectives. We conclude that Survivor largely reinforces dominant cultural discourses of emotion management as strategic interactional practice that allow a person to be competitive. Furthermore, the analysis links performances of emotion management to representations of specific aspects of contestants’ social identities. (shrink)

Bentley et al.--O’Brien bypass the relevance of emotions in decision-making, resulting in a possible over-simplification of behavioral types. We propose integrating emotions, both in the north-south axis (in relation to cognition) as well as in the west-east axis (in relation to social influence), by suggesting a Z axis, in charge of registering emotional depth and involvement.

Moral emotions shape the effectiveness of culturally diverse teams. However, these emotions, which are integral to determining ethically responsive patient care and team relationships, typically go unrecognised. The contribution of emotions to moral deliberation is subjugated within the technorational environment of healthcare decision‐making. Contemporary healthcare organisations rely on a multicultural workforce charged with the ethical care of vulnerable people. Limited extant literature examines the role of moral emotions in ethical decision‐making among culturally diverse healthcare teams. Moral emotions are evident (...) in ethnocentric moral perspectives that construct some colleagues' practices as ‘other’. This article examines how moral emotions are evoked when cultural dissonance influences nurses' moral perceptions. We use a qualitative investigation of teamwork within culturally diverse healthcare organisations. We use Haidt's () account of moral emotions to examine practice‐based accounts of 36 internationally educated and 17 New Zealand educated nurses practising in New Zealand. The study provides evidence that moral emotions are frequently elicited by communication and care practices considered ‘foreign’. The main implication is that although safe practice in healthcare organisations is reliant on highly functioning teams, collaboration is challenged by interprofessional power relations of contested culturally shaped values. We address practice‐based strategies that enable engagement with moral emotions to enhance effective teamwork. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the complex issue of the emotive effect of Christian songs. It is based mainly on a literature survey, using sources both from Christian hymnology and musicology. It also uses illustrative examples from three informal surveys in congregations on the reasons particular songs are favourites. The point is made that exploring this issue scientifically is very complex as there are so many variables in people’s appreciation of songs. Some of these elements are discussed, such as the (...) effect of the external setting in which people experience a song, factors important in the appreciation of a text, such as poetic quality and knowledge of the author’s background. Other factors are the emotive quality and level of difficulty of a tune and in what time this style was popular. Then there are the internal factors, such as the link of a song with group identity and special memories. Some of the survey results corroborate the pointers in the literature for what makes certain songs particularly emotionally appealing. Some of these were a preference for musical styles popular in one’s youth, the importance of relationships with significant others for forming favourites and the important element of memory in the emotional impact of songs. Concluding pointers for worship include motivating for different styles of music in worship and carefully finding those songs in each new musical genre, which have the potential for sustaining today’s youth into the future.Contribution: This article makes a contribution in what is a complex and often emotionally charged issue in congregations: Worship styles and musical preferences. It argues for the importance of using different musical styles and bringing the generations together. (shrink)

In the past two to three decades health behavior scientists have increasingly emphasized affect-related concepts (including, but not limited to emotion) in their attempts to understand and facilitate change in important health behaviors, such as smoking, eating, physical activity, substance abuse, and sex. This article provides a narrative review of this burgeoning literature, including relevant theory and research on affective response (e.g., hedonic response to eating and drug use), incidental affect (e.g., work-related stress as a determinant of alcohol use), affect (...) processing (e.g., anticipated regret for illicit sex or skipping an exercise session), and affectively charged motivation (e.g., cigarette craving). An integrative dual-processing framework is presented that suggests pathways through which affect-related concepts may interrelate to influence health behavior. (shrink)

In this chapter on time‐the emotional asymmetry, the author addresses two questions concerning future‐bias. The first is with respect to the sorts of things are people future‐biased. Do people want all things that they regard as bad to be in the past, or just some of them? Second, are people justified in being future‐biased? The second question has received a good deal of attention from philosophers. The author aims to survey different answers to the question, and to give a sense (...) of how things presently lie. A section presents some poor arguments for future‐bias, including discussions on the shrinking block theory of time. It is also said that, even if four‐dimensionalism is false, a charge of arbitrariness can be leveled at future‐bias. Finally, the chapter presents a discussion on some incoherence arguments against future‐bias. (shrink)

Saltzstein and Kasachkoff (2004) critique the social intuitionist model (Haidt, 2001), but the model that they critique is a stripped-down version that should be called the “possum” model. They make three charges about the possum model that are not true about the social intuitionist model: that it includes no role for reasoning, that it reduces social influence to compliance, and that it does not take a developmental perspective. After I defend the honor of the social intuitionist model, I raise two (...) areas of legitimate dispute: the scope and nature of moral reasoning, and the usefulness of appealing to innate ideas, rather than to learning and reasoning, as the origin of moral knowledge. I present three clusters of innate moral intuitions, related to sympathy, hierarchy, and reciprocity. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the question of how emotional qualities can be attributed to musical timbre, an acoustic feature that has proven challenging to explain using traditional accounts of musical emotions. I begin presenting the notion of musical expressiveness, as it has been conceived by cognitivists to account for the emotional quality of various musical elements like melody and rhythm. However, I also point out some limitations in these accounts, which hinder their ability to fully elucidate the emotional expressiveness (...) of timbre, especially when considering it as a result of non-cognitively mediated processes. Consequently, I explore the link between timbre and atmosphere by reviewing anecdotal sources that have characterized timbre in terms of atmosphere. The goal here is to determine if these characterizations should be seen as merely allusive and metaphoric expressions or if they genuinely reveal essential properties of timbre. To achieve this goal, I delve deeper into the notion of atmosphere, and I show that it shares several key traits with the notion of musical emotions as conceived in the cognitivist’s account. Both musical emotions and atmospheres are affectively charged externalities that are apprehended by the subject without cognitive mediation. Drawing from this insight, I conclude that the notion of atmosphere can serve as a valuable tool in explaining the emotional expressivity of timbre without invoking the resemblance-based mechanisms often found in cognitive accounts of expressiveness. (shrink)

Emotion regulation is an umbrella term to describe interactive, goal-dependent explicit and implicit processes that are intended to help an individual manage and shift an emotional experience. The primary window for appropriate emotion regulation development occurs during the infant, toddler, and preschool years. Atypical emotion regulation development is considered a risk factor for mental health problems and has been implicated as a primary mechanism underlying childhood pathologies. Current treatments are predominantly verbal- and behavioral-based and lack the opportunity to practice in-the-moment (...) management of emotionally charged situations. There is also an absence of caregiver-child interaction in these treatment strategies. Based on behavioral and neural support for music as a therapeutic mechanism, the incorporation of intentional music experiences, facilitated by a music therapist, may be one way to address these limitations. Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation is an interactive therapist-child music-based intervention for emotion regulation development practice in preschoolers. The Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation intervention uses the deliberate contour and temporal structure of a music therapy session to mirror the changing flow of the caregiver-child interaction through the alternation of high arousal and low arousal music experiences. The purpose of this paper is to describe the Therapeutic Function of Music, a theory-based description of the structural characteristics for a music-based stimulus to musically facilitate developmentally appropriate high arousal and low arousal in-the-moment emotion regulation experiences. The Therapeutic Function of Music analysis is based on a review of the music theory, music neuroscience, and music development literature and provides a preliminary model of the structural characteristics of the music as a core component of the Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation intervention. (shrink)

For creatures like us, entertaining possible future scenarios of how our life might play out is often accompanied or “charged” with emotions like hope and anxiety. What will interest me in this article is whether the epistemic profile of hope and anxiety, and in particular the fact that they are directed at uncertain outcomes, might pose a threat to the stability of their valence. Hope and anxiety are not emotions which relate us to evaluative properties of actual events, they (...) relate us to evaluative properties of relevant possibilities (Gordon, 1969; Kurth, 2018; Benton, 2019). I will present and discuss two philosophical accounts according to which hope and anxiety do not have a proprietary and consistent valence. According to the first account, anxiety is an intrinsically ambivalent emotion, as a result of involving an awareness of conflicting possibilities or ways in which the future might unfold (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2015). According to the second, hope is not a strictly positive emotion, as certain specific occurrences of hope are negatively valenced (Stockdale, 2019). Finally, I argue that an evaluative theory of valence helps us clearly conceive of hope and anxiety as two polar opposite experiences of uncertainty. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of perceiving Kitsch art and elaborates on the philosophical approaches taken to better understand all intellectual contexts surrounding the term, aiming to endorse its aesthetic aspect and assert its rightness to be subsumed under the notion of high art, the researchers sought to argue that besides the claim that the main issue of reading Kitsch was laid on miss-perceiving it, by means it was a problem of perception, we add to this assertion that it was (...) also a problem of _misinterpretation_, that critics have constrained their judgments on Kitsch art by narrowed and prejudiced contentions while many aesthetic theories can ascertain its aesthetic existence at the time, and the most crucial one is the theories on aesthetic emotions, for it was the emotional charge of Kitsch paintings which the critics used to reject and vastly criticize to deny its ability to conceive any aesthetic features. (shrink)

Actions expressing strong emotions such as anger can be appropriate responses when an agent judges a serious injustice to have been committed. Certainly, a woman can experience these conditions and express herself through actions such as gesturing aggressively, gritting her teeth, or lashing out verbally. If she is consequently labeled “crazy,” “hysterical,” or “a bitch,” what has gone awry? This paper offers an analysis of the common charge of inappropriateness in the case of women’s actions expressing emotion. To begin, I (...) will present core normative distinctions that define appropriate emotional expression. Following this, the “double-bind” of women’s actions expressing emotion will be explored with reference to the conflicting normative practices outlined in the first section of the paper. Put briefly, when a female agent surpasses gendered behavioral expectations, she is seen as having failed what can be called the first test of social coping. The perception of this failure shuts down further avenues for interpreting her behavior. Instead, the social inappropriateness of her emotion is used as further proof of irrationality. The arguments of the second section leave no doubt that gendered norms in the case of actions expressing emotions must be rejected both on epistemological and moral grounds. The final section of the paper explores epistemically and ethically viable alternatives for deciding the rational appropriateness of actions expressing emotion. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that research findings in empirical moral psychology spell trouble for Kantian ethics. Sometimes the charge is merely that Kantianism is mistaken about the role of emotions in human action, but it has also been argued that empirical moral psychology ‘debunks’ Kantian ethics as the product of precisely the emotion-driven processes it fails to acknowledge. In this essay I argue for a negative and a positive thesis. The negative thesis is that the ‘debunking’ argument against Kantian ethics (...) is invalid because it begs the central question. The positive thesis is that, because the empirical facts about human moral psychology are morally significant, Kantians can and should wholeheartedly embrace the current interest in this area of empirical research. As Kant himself emphasized, it is an indirect, imperfect duty to use available knowledge of morally relevant empirical psychological conditions and to put this in the service of moral agency. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that social networking sites (SNSs) are emotion technologies that promote a highly charged emotional environment where intrinsic emotion regulation is significantly weakened, and people's emotions are more strongly modulated by other people and by the technology itself. I show that these features of social media promote a simplistic emotional outlook which is an obstacle to the development and maintenance of virtue. In addition, I focus on the mechanisms that promote group-based anger and thus give (...) rise to affective polarisation. In the final section, after a discussion of the positive value of some forms of anger, I argue that SNSs should not be designed to prohibit or suppress anger, but that its encouragement should also be avoided. I conclude with a suggestion about how this might be achieved. (shrink)

Learning to live together is the central concern of education everywhere in the world. Traditional sporting games provide interpersonal experiences that shape miniature communities charged with emotional meanings. The objective of this study was to analyze the ethnomotor features of TSG in three Catalan-speaking Autonomous Communities and to interpret them for constructing emotional communities. The study followed a phenomenological-interpretative paradigm. The identification of TSG was done by a hermeneutic methodological approach by using an exhaustive exploratory documentary research. We studied (...) 503 games collected in the Dictionary Català-Valencià-Balear de Alcover and Moll. Instruments and procedure: A database was built up with information about the internal and external logic of the games. The validity of the information was confirmed by means of a concordance test between the researchers. Data processing was carried out by means of classification trees, identifying the predictive variables of the types of TSG. Most of the TSGs were sociomotor games. The classification tree identified four explanatory variables. Three variables were internal traits, and one variable corresponded to external logic. Features of the TSG of the Catalan-speaking Autonomous Communities build original emotional communities. The ethnomotor regularities triggered emotional experiences associated with pleasure for living together ; domesticating of aggressiveness over opponents ; developing sustainability ; educating the competition ; and interpersonal well-being based on the community. (shrink)

Long-term memory manages its contents to facilitate adaptive behaviour, amplifying representations of information relevant to current goals and expediting forgetting of information that competes with relevant memory traces. Both mnemonic selection and inhibition maintain congruence between the contents of long-term memory and an organism’s priorities. However, the capacity of these processes to modulate affective mnemonic representations remains ambiguous. Three empirical experiments investigated the consequences of mnemonic selection and inhibition on affectively charged and neutral mnemonic representations using an adapted retrieval (...) practice paradigm. Participants encoded neutral cue words and affectively negative or neutral associates and then selectively retrieved a subset of these associates multiple times. The consequences of selection and inhibitory processes engaged during selective retrieval were evaluated on a final memory test in which recall for all studied associates was probed. Analyses of memory recall indicated that both affectively neutral and negative mnemonic representations experienced similar levels of enhancement and impairment following selective retrieval, demonstrating the susceptibility of affectively salient memories to these mnemonic processes. These findings indicate that although affective memories may be more strongly encoded in memory, they remain amenable to inhibition and flexibly adaptable to the evolving needs of the organism. (shrink)

Antti Kauppinen Les philosophes se sont efforcés de montrer que nous devons être vertueux pour être heureux. Mais tant que nous nous en tenons à la compréhension moderne du bonheur comme quelque chose de vécu par un sujet – et je soutiens contre les eudaimonistes contemporains que nous devrions effectivement le faire – il peut au mieux exister un lien de causalité contingent entre la vertu et le bonheur. Néanmoins, nous avons de bonnes raisons de penser qu’être vertueux est non (...) accidentellement propice au bonheur. Pourquoi? Premièrement, le bonheur est, sommairement, la condition expérientielle de jouir d’états phénoménaux affectifs principalement positifs concernant des choses qui sont subjectivement importantes pour nous. Je soutiens que ce sentimentalisme à propos du bonheur a plusieurs avantages par rapport à la conception de Daniel Haybron comme état émotionnel. Deuxièmement, dans la mesure où nous sommes vertueux, nous pouvons identifier correctement ce qui vaut la peine d’être fait dans notre situation particulière et nous la poursuivrons habilement. En même temps, nous ne sommes pas dérangés par des choses qui ne valent pas la peine d’être prises en charge ou de s’inquiéter. Par conséquent, les personnes vertueuses sont susceptibles de profiter d’émotions positives centrales liées au succès et à l’approbation des autres, et d’éviter les émotions négatives communes liées à la comparaison sociale ou à l’avarice. Bien que leur bonheur soit encore en partie une question de chance, il l’est dans une moindre mesure que pour le reste d’entre nous. (shrink)

From some perspectives, it seems obvious that emotions and feelings must be both reasonable and morally significant: from others, it may seem as obvious that they cannot be. This paper seeks to advance discussion of ethical implications of the currently contested issue of the relationship of reason to feeling and emotion via reflection upon various examples of affectively charged moral dilemma. This discussion also proceeds by way of critical consideration of recent empirical enquiry into these issues in the literature (...) of so-called emotional intelligence. In this regard, despite ambiguities in their accounts of the relationship of reason to emotion, advocates of emotional intelligence generally incline to therapeutic conceptions of emotional health which are not inconsistent with currently fashionable cognitivist accounts of feeling and emotion. All the same, it is arguable that therapeutic or other strategies which overplay the possibility of cognitive or other resolution of emotional conflict are prey to certain difficulties. First, they underemphasise those passive but identity-constitutive aspects of affect which are not obviously rationally accountable. Secondly, they insufficiently recognise the extent to which emotional conflicts can be significantly implicated in moral diversity. In view of either or both of these points, they may fail to appreciate the moral inappropriateness of attempts to resolve certain forms of emotional conflict or tension. (shrink)

Researchers have highlighted how gendered associations of femininity with emotional labor can complicate professional women’s attempts to exercise managerial authority. However, current understandings of how race and gender intersect in professional women’s emotional labor remain limited. We draw on 132 interviews from eight white women and 13 women of color who are novice principals. White women began the principalship wanting to establish themselves as emotionally supportive leaders who were open to others’ influence. They viewed emotional labor as existing in (...) tension with showing authority as a leader. Over time, however, most white women reported adopting more directive practices. By contrast, women of color reported beginning the principalship with a more directive, take-charge leadership style. They viewed emotional labor and authority as part of a blended project and did not talk about these two aspects of leadership as existing in tension. Over time, their self-reported leadership style changed little. We analyze our findings in light of recent theorizing about gender and intersectionality. (shrink)

La psychologie phénoménologique sartrienne, qui s?attèle à repenser la mé­thode psychologique classique, inopérante et cernée de préjugés et d? a priori chargés, fait de l?émotion un de ses sujets de prédilection. Elle constitue un thème continu du projet philosophique sartrien, de son premier essai à sa dernière somme biographique, traversant divers types d?approches de la réalité-humaine, s?inscrivant toutes dans un projet global d?investigation et de compréhension de l?homme en situation, de l?individu concret dans son époque, dans ses rapports au monde, (...) indissociable d?une pensée de la liberté en construction. La conception de l?émotion élaborée par Sartre est assez constante malgré de nets bouleversements contextuels. Elle sera ballottée de cadres en cadres, passant du statut d?acte de conscience dont la psychologie phénoménologique s?évertue à saisir l?essence, à celui d?une conduite indivi­dualisante du pour-soi au c?ur d?une ontologie phénoménologique à la fonc­tion d?anthropologie fondatrice qui vise à balayer l?entièreté des caractéris­tiques de la conscience. L?émotion deviendra finalement, dans la psychana­lyse existentielle appliquée, le lieu même de la construction de soi dans l?enfance en ce que le choix originel se crée sur base d?un affect en situation qui orientera toute la destinée sociale et affective de l?individu considéré. Au sein du déploiement de ce. (shrink)

This study explored identity conflict dynamics in interpersonal interactions in professionals facing ethically charged situations. Through semi-structured interviews, we conducted a qualitative study among doctors and nurses working for the English National Healthcare Service and analyzed the data with grounded theory approaches. Our findings reveal that identity conflict is triggered by three micro processes, namely cognitive and emotional perspective taking, as well as identifying with the other. In these processes, identity conflict is signaled by emotions and recognized as a (...) clash not only between identities and their values, but also within one identity and its multiple values. Behavioral and psychological outcomes of identity conflict involve seeking peer support, doing reflective practices and identity growth. This article contributes to identity literature by providing a multilevel approach of identity conflict dynamics able to account for both interpersonal and intrapsychic processes, deeply hold values and emotions, as well as crucial behavioral and psychological consequences. (shrink)

This article draws upon affect theory to analyze transformations of garage sale sellers through the exchange of their affectively charged possessions. Garage sales are awash with human emotion; they feature used personal belongings suffused with identities, histories, stories, and memories that are moved along with affect. The objects for sale are “sticky” in that they act as vessels and glue for strands of sentiment to reflexively pass between sellers and buyers, transmitting affective orientations, whether positive or negative. The affective (...) elements of garage sale goods are contagious as they can intersubjectively leap from one body to another. (shrink)

Perceptualism is a prominent theory analyzing emotions as perceptual experiences of value. A longstanding challenge to perceptualism says that emotions cannot be perceptual because they are subject to normative assessments in terms of reasons and rationality while perceptual experiences are not. I defend perceptualism from this charge. My argument begins by distinguishing two forms of normative assessment: fundamental and non-fundamental. Perceptualism is compatible with the latter (i.e., non-fundamental reasons and rationality); even sensory experiences are so assessable. I next argue that (...) emotions are only non-fundamentally assessable. Following this argument, I outline a perceptualist-friendly theory of emotions as non-fundamentally normatively assessable. (shrink)

Fieldwork experiences in the summer of 2003 resulted in confusion regarding the ethical positioning of myself (the interviewer) in relation to the multiple 'actants' that constituted the research subject(s). This paper explores some of these personal issues and conflicts in order to clarify, gain perspective on and critique the nature (and indeed the 'Nature') of my fieldwork. The multiple positioning of participants within networks of agricultural and social ethics is addressed. I borrow Lewis Holloway's idea of relational ethical identity, in (...) order to resituate and rethink the interviews in terms of actor-network theory. This paper argues that ethical identities and ethical 'natures' can be understood as relationally constructed and constituted within networks. The ways in which notions of (un)ethical agricultural relations shaped each interview experience are also explored. Specifically, how did my ideas of (un)ethical farming influence my 'ethical take' on how different farmers operated? I also argue that all encounters are ethically charged and, as such, encounters result in emotional tensions. (shrink)

The penultimate chapter of The Realm of Reason discusses the relation between the author's moral rationalism and a thorough moral realism and the question of whether a moral rationalist can hold that moral properties are sometimes involved in causal explanations. In reply, The author introduces what he calls the Eirenic Combination, which holds that causal explanation of a priori moral beliefs by moral facts is excluded by the a priori status of those beliefs; but this is compatible with the moral (...) properties mentioned in the a priori principles playing a significant part in empirical explanations, which they sometimes do. He then defends his moral rationalism against the charge that it is incompatible with the extensive role moral emotions play in our ordinary first‐level moral thought. (shrink)

Philosophical cognitivists have argued for more than four decades that emotions are special types of judgments. Anti-cognitivists have provided a series of counterexamples aiming to show that identifying emotions with judgments overintellectualizes the emotions. I provide a novel counterexample that makes the overintellectualization charge especially vivid. I discuss neurophysiological evidence to the effect that the fear system can be activated by stimuli the subject is unaware of seeing. To emphasize the analogy with blind sight , I call this phenomenon blind (...) fright . Cognitivists may reply that blindfright is nothing but an unconscious judgment subcortically elicited. This reply is in line with the strategy commonly employed by cognitivists against their critics. I call it the Elastic Strategy, because it consists of ‘stretching’ the notion of judgment in order to accommodate counterexamples. This strategy, I argue, turns cognitivism into a theory that is at worst unfalsifiable and at best trivially true. The final portion of my article aims to rescue cognitivism from the damage done by the Elastic Strategy. I distinguish three varieties of cognitivism, one concerned with what emotions essentially are (Constitutive Cognitivism), one concerned with what causes emotions (Etiological Cognitivism) and one concerned with what emotions represent (Representational Cognitivism). I conclude that what cognitivism has to offer to emotion theory are primarily insights concerning the causes and representational content of emotions. The constitutive identification of emotions with judgments, on the other hand, does more harm than good. (shrink)

Deficits in the ability to read the emotions of others have been demonstrated in mental disorders, such as dissociation and schizophrenia, which involve a distorted sense of self. This study examined whether weakened self-referential source memory, being unable to remember whether a piece of information has been processed with reference to oneself, is linked to ineffective emotion recognition. In two samples from a college and community, we quantified the participants’ ability to remember the self-generated versus non-self-generated origins of sentences they (...) had previously read or partially generated. We also measured their ability to read others’ emotions accurately when viewing photos of people in affect-charged situations. Multinomial processing tree modelling was applied to obtain a measure of self-referential source memory that was not biased by non-mnemonic factors. Our first experiment with college participants revealed a positive correlation between correctly remembering the origins of sentences and accurately recognising the emotions of others. This correlation was successfully replicated in the second experiment with community participants. The current study offers evidence of a link between self-referential source memory and emotion recognition. (shrink)

Chapter 2 of the Philosophy of Happiness book by Martin Janello. Please see the Table of Contents for its contextual order. An audio version of this and all other sections of the book, an entire on-line review copy, and a host of other pertinent materials are available without charge at the referenced website.

Through emotionally charged portraits and richly layered interior views, the photographs of Chicago-based artist Paul D Amato provide a genuine and complex perspective on life in some of the most challenging and troubled neighborhoods in the nation. This publication is supported in part by grants from the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.".

In this article, I reply to the charge, made in Analysis by Anthony Hatzimoysis, that my criticism of Sartre's Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions is unwarranted. I argued that Sartre offers two lines of reasoning about emotional experience that are in clear conflict with each other. Hatzimoysis counters that we can and should read Sartre's text in a way that avoids attributing inconsistency to Sartre. In response, I argue that Hatzimoysis' suggestion about how one might read the text (...) does not in fact remove the central inconsistency. Pace Hatzimoysis, the inconsistency that I identified remains. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Education in the Virtues: Tragic Emotions and the Artistic ImaginationDerek L. Penwell (bio)IntroductionThe profoundly thoughtful—not to mention extensive—character of the scholarship historically applied to the nature of the difference between Plato and Aristotle on the issue of the tragic emotions raises the obvious question: What new is there left to say? In this article I seek to hold together two separate issues that have occupied much of the scholarship (...) on this topic but that typically have not been considered together: (1) What is the moral value of the tragic emotions? and (2) If the tragic emotions are morally significant, how can we engage tragedy without viewing it instrumentally? By approaching the tragic emotions in this way, I hope to suggest an Aristotelian analysis of tragedy that appreciates tragedy's ability to expand our resources for confronting an often chaotic world, while at the same time avoiding the notion of art as merely useful in the pursuit of larger moral projects.Plato, in Republic X, offers his seminal critique of art and the artist in relationship to the ideal republic. In particular, poetry comes under harsh criticism for encouraging emotions, which, according to Plato, ought to be kept under strict control. In the end, Plato reluctantly declares that poets must be banished as a way of preserving the order and moral integrity of the republic. Poetry, if permitted, will make "pleasure and pain the twin kings in your city in place of established custom and the thing which has always been generally accepted as best—reason."1Aristotle challenges his old teacher, Plato, in his treatise on tragedy in the Poetics. To say that Aristotle challenges Plato, however, is not say that he confronts Plato directly; rather the scope of Aristotle's argument addresses the issue of poetry, which Plato had denounced in the Republic. Specifically, Aristotle calls into question Plato's account of the value of the emotions. [End Page 9] Whereas Plato contends that emotions are a potentially disruptive force, the power of which must always be controlled by reason, Aristotle maintains, as I will argue, that the cultivation of the appropriate emotional response (that is, the correct emotional response at the correct time) is essential to the development of virtue. Moreover, according to Aristotle's view, the cultivation of appropriate emotional response has implications not only for the development of individual virtue but also for the health of the body politic.I must be careful to point out that I am not attempting to elicit Aristotle's endorsement for a view that says reason is not somehow responsible for properly informing the emotions. Aristotle's position with respect to emotions—while different from Plato's in the belief that emotions can be educated—still identifies reason both as the faculty that differentiates us as a species as well as the faculty that occupies the primary place in establishing knowledge and directing action. My goal in the first section of this article is much more modest: I only wish to argue that an Aristotelian critique of Plato on emotions suggests the beginnings of a way of viewing emotions, such that emotions have a significant role to play in moral development.2However, the nature of Aristotle's argument in his implicit response to Plato raises the important question of whether the view of art he advances (in particular, of tragedy) is purely an instrumental one—a question to which I will attend in the second section. Does Aristotle understand art as a tool in the service of some higher good, such as moral education? Art, if this is the case, loses its integrity as an end in itself. Inasmuch as Aristotle believes that art is conducive to moral education, he is in danger of being charged with inhabiting the dubious aesthetic stance that art is always the means to some higher end. That is to say, it could be argued that the theory of art that Aristotle places on offer is what R. W. Beardsmore calls moralism3 and what Berys Gaut calls ethicism.4 Moralism at its most radical is the aesthetic position that finds art as merely a useful tool in dressing... (shrink)