The idea of Culture led by Social Sciences presents emotions as if they were difficult to measure, and consequently, from the point of view of the interpretation of Cultural Practices, bothering. The secondarysation (and even, the marginalisation) of emotions among the interpretaive arguments, is linked to a linear and diachronical perspective on the social fact, more than to a forgotten aspect. The traditional ethnographer’s incapacity on including emotional worlds in their reaserches produces traces of a fake objectivity and (...) it is the source of important inexactitudes (or even falsations). -/- Along three reaserches about Urban Culture, introduced in the context of the Sociocultural Process Workshop of the La Universidad del Zulia (“The Affective Dispositifs of Hugo Chávez’ Phenomenom”, “The Opprobium Laberynth: Sexual Chanceros in Maracaibo” and “Walking Throught the Night, Things Get Confused. Reflections about Transgendered, Body and Power in Maracaibo”), it is possible to see conditions for resolving some aspects obout meaning/sense and emotions/intellect tensions, using the body as an emotional territory and as an ethnographical resource. Those reaserches try to evaluate the affective consistence of the urban territory, from the transgendered’s street fronteers, from chanceros and from the “no deviated” society, until the Chávez’ phenomenom, throught the corporal imago between the subjects and the reaserchers. -/- At the end, it is possible to conclude about some useful principles of the idea of Culture that sees the body as a bridge to the missed subjectivity of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues that Deonna and Teroni's attitudinal theory of emotions faces two serious problems. The first is that their master argument fails to establish the central tenet of the theory, namely, that the formal objects of emotions do not feature in the content of emotions. The second is that the attitudinal theory itself is vulnerable to a dilemma. By pointing out these problems, our paper provides indirect support to the main competitor of the attitudinal theory, namely, (...) the perceptual theory of emotions. (shrink)

In The Face of Emotions, which was Carroll Izard’s first major attempt at elaborating his differential emotions theory (DET), he stated that the book “presents a theoretical framework for the study of emotions and their role in personality and interpersonal processes.” Yet, over the years, his contribution to personality theory has generally been overshadowed by the attention focused on his views on facial expressions and the structure of emotions. This article will begin with a brief overview (...) of the DET perspective on personality development. Then, it will examine how the DET framework can be used to organize recent findings from three lines of research on adult personality. It will conclude with suggestions for future research as well as some personal recollections. (shrink)

Elaborating on the notions that humans possess different modalities of decision-making and that these are often influenced by moral considerations, we conducted an experimental investigation of the Trolley Problem. We presented the participants with two standard scenarios (‹lever’ and ‹stranger’) either in the usual or in reversed order. We observe that responses to the lever scenario, which result from (moral) reasoning, are affected by our manipulation; whereas responses to the stranger scenario, triggered by moral emotions, are unaffected. Furthermore, when (...) asked to express general moral opinions on the themes of the Trolley Problem, about half of the participants reveal some inconsistency with the responses they had previously given. (shrink)

Emotions and personhood are important notions within the field of mental health care. How they are related is less evident. This book provides a framework for understanding the important and complex relationship between our emotional wellbeing and our sense of self, drawing on psychopathology, philosophy, and phenomenology.

Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like geological upheavals in a landscape, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain and prone to reversal. Are they simply, as some have claimed, animal energies or impulses with no connection to our thoughts? Or are they rather suffused with intelligence and discernment, and thus a source of deep awareness and understanding? In this compelling book, Martha C. Nussbaum presents a powerful argument for treating emotions not as alien (...) forces but as highly discriminating responses to what is of value and importance. She explores and illuminates the structure of a wide range of emotions, in particular compassion and love, showing that there can be no adequate ethical theory without an adequate theory of the emotions. This involves understanding their cultural sources, their history in infancy and childhood, and their sometimes unpredictable and disorderly operations in our daily lives. (shrink)

There is the intuition that some emotions do not sustain a cognitively demanding reading of their representational content. However, it is not evident how to articulate that intuition—and the mere claim that the content of those emotions is not conceptual (or, alternatively, that it is non-conceptual; see, for instance, Tappolet, 2016) does not shed light on the specific way in which those emotions represent. We, therefore, develop a proposal with the aim of giving substance to the claim (...) that emotions involve non-conceptual mental content. The thesis that we defend entails that certain emotions are intrinsically motivational, specifically that their content is action-oriented and presents the world in terms of intrinsically motivational possibilities for action. Then we delve into the way this thesis stands in regard to views according to which the essence of emotions lies in the attitude rather than in the content (Deonna & Teroni, 2012, 2015), or others in which emotions have to do with action-readiness rather than with action itself (Scarantino, 2014)—as well as in regard to doubts on the very notion of non-conceptual content. Finally, we examine some consequences deriving from the proposal (having to do with the so-called irrationality of some emotions and the notion of basic emotion, among others) and its position relative to notable approaches to emotion (cognitive, perceptual, attitudinal and motivational). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to advance, within the framework of enactivism, towards a more radically embodied and situated theory of emotions and, in general, of affectivity. Its starting point is that of discussing the well-established notion of bodily resonance (Fuchs 2013, Fuchs & Koch 2014, Fuchs 2018) and the primordial affectivity approach (Colombetti 2014). I will incorporate John Dewey’s theory of emotions, and recent models and empirical finding from cognitive science on the relation between perception and (...) bodily activity (Azzalini, Rebollo & Tallon-Baudry 2019; Allen et al. 2019). The novel element proposed in this paper is taking into consideration the role of bodily oscillatory activity in the perceptual side of cognition through phenomena of relative coordination. This concept from dynamical systems theory allows for an enactivist view of emotions as temporal episodes triggered by a tension that affects the rhythmic interaction between brain, body, and environment. By defending the importance of this enacted rhythm, the body emerges as a truly active agent, gating and modulating affectivity during all the stages of the sensorimotor circuit from perception to action. (shrink)

Although apparently irrational, people with seemingly high moral standards routinely make immoral decisions or engage in morally questionable behavior. It appears as if under certain circumstances, people become in some enigmatic way blind to the immoral aspects of what they are doing or consequences of their immoral actions. This article focuses and reports on a psychoanalytic inquiry into the role of emotions and the unconscious management of unwanted emotions in promoting moral blindness. Emotions are essential to the (...) conscience, self-sanctioning, and advancement of moral behavior. Notwithstanding moral ideations, a sufficiently strong counterwill may create incongruence between moral intentions and actual desires or behavior. The unwelcome experience of acute moral emotions such as guilt and anxiety is likely to activate a range of psychological defense mechanisms and unconscious processes to manage these emotions. It is argued that the management of these emotions through undue avoidance, inappropriate regulation, or lack of regulation, can bypass self-sanctioning. As result, the condition of moral blindness can develop or be sustained. The psychoanalytic explanations offered contribute to the understanding as to how emotions in combination with the unconscious mind can cause moral blindness in any person, notwithstanding high moral standards and good intentions. Improved understanding of moral blindness represents an important scientific step in improved understanding of our moral and immoral selves, with all its complexities, conflicts, and contradictions. (shrink)

In this paper, we first review recent arguments about the direct perception of the intentions and emotions of others, emphasizing the role of embodied interaction. We then consider a possible objection to the direct perception hypothesis from social psychology, related to phenomena like ‘dehumanization’ and ‘implicit racial bias’, which manifest themselves on a basic bodily level. On the background of such data, one might object that social perception cannot be direct since it depends on and can in fact be (...) interrupted by a set of cultural beliefs. We argue, however, that far from threatening the idea of direct perception, these findings clearly contradict the idea of hardwired theory of mind modules. More generally, we suggest that in order to further the understanding of social cognition we must take seriously insights about in-group and out-group distinctions and related phenomena, all of which are currently neglected in the mainstream social cognition literature. (shrink)

In this paper, I review the primary arguments for the traditional position that holds emotions as antagonistic to moral judgments. I argue that this position is untenable given the information about emotions and emotional processes that has emerged in the psychological literature of recent years. I then offer a theoret- ical model of emotive moral judgment that takes a closer look at how emotions, specifically empathy, play an integral role in the process of moral judgment. I argue (...) that emotions should not be dismissed as irrelevant or harmful to moral evaluations, but that affect can actually aid moral deliberations. The emphasis here will be on moral judgments (i.e., judgments concerning the rightness or wrongness of situations, actions, or individuals); I will not deal directly with the otherwise important issue of the role of emotions in moral behavior. The em- phasis will also be on empathy, as it seems to be the most prototypical moral emotion and is certainly the most widely discussed. (shrink)

The sequelae of individual differences in children's understanding of emotions and of other minds were investigated in a longitudinal study of 46 children. At 40 months, differences in the children's understanding of emotions were not significantly related to their ability to explain behaviour in terms of beliefs within a false belief paradigm. Follow-up in kindergarten showed that early emotion understanding was related to children's positive perception of their peer experiences, to their understanding of mixed emotions, and their (...) moral sensibility as kindergarteners. Early understanding of other minds was, in contrast, related to negative initial perceptions of school, and sensitivity to teacher criticism. These differences in sequelae highlight the importance of differentiating the emotional and cognitive components of social understanding in framing developmental questions. (shrink)

In this book, I make use of an idea from economics to suggest how noble human tendencies might not only have survived the ruthless pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them.

The debate about direct perception encompasses different topics, one of which concerns the richness of the contents of perceptual experiences. Can we directly perceive only low-level properties, like edges, colors etc., or can we perceive high-level properties and entities as well? The aim of the paper is to defend the claim that the content of our perceptual experience can include emotions and also person impressions. Using these examples, an argument is developed to defend a liberal-content view for core examples (...) of social cognition. This view is developed and contrasted with accounts which claim that in the case of registering another person’s emotion while seeing them, we have to describe the relevant content not as the content of a perceptual experience, but of a perceptual belief. The paper defends the view that perceptual experiences can have a rich content yet remain separable from beliefs formed on the basis of the experience. How liberal and enriched the content of a perceptual experience is will depend upon the expertise a person has developed in the field. This is supported by the argument that perceptual experiences can be systematically enriched by perceiving affordances of objects, by pattern recognition or by top-down processes, as analyzed by processes of cognitive penetration or predictive coding. (shrink)

Sometimes emotions excuse. Fear and anger, for example, sometimes excuse under the headings of (respectively) duress and provocation. Although most legal systems draw the line at this point, the list of potentially excusatory emotions outside the law seems to be longer. One can readily imagine cases in which, for example, grief or despair could be cited as part of a case for relaxing or even eliminating our negative verdicts on those who performed admittedly unjustified wrongs. To be sure, (...) the availability of such excuses depends on what wrong one is trying to excuse. No excuse is available in respect of all wrongs. Some wrongs, indeed, are inexcusable. This throws up the interesting question of what makes a particular emotion apt to excuse a particular wrong. Why is fear, for example, more apt to excuse more serious wrongs than, say, pride or shame? This question leads naturally to another. Why are some emotions, such as lust, greed, and envy, apparently not apt to furnish any excuses at all? Can one not be overcome by them? Can they not drive one to wrongdoing as readily as fear and grief? Or is that not the point? (shrink)

This paper discusses recent interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre's early theory of emotions, in particular his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Despite the great interest that Sartre's approach has generated, most interpretations assume that his approach fails because it appears to be focussed on ‘malformed’, ‘irrational’ or ‘distorted’ emotions. I argue that these criticisms adopt a rationalistic or epistemically biassed perspective on emotions that is wrongly applied to Sartre's text. In my defence of Sartre I (...) show that the directional fit of emotions is not towards an evaluatively loaded world which is independently given and, at best, represented by emotions, but towards a world shaped through the impact of emotions themselves. Sartre's idea of emotions ‘magically transforming’ reality for the subject so that the latter is better able to cope with problematic aspects of practically relevant situations encapsulates the world-shaping capacities of emotions, which are thus not reserved for a restricted class of emotions. Recognition of the transformative powers of emotions will also direct attention away from their seemingly representative elements to their normative and practical aspects and offer a new basis for delineating the criteria for judging them. The plausibility of this position is discussed with reference to some of Sartre's examples, such as fear, sadness and horror, but also with reference to Joan Didion's account of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking. (shrink)

Can an emotion be unconscious? The aim of this paper is to answer this difficult question. Is it possible for an emotion to be a fully lived experience and at the same time remain unknown to the subject? Or, in clearer terms, how can one have a feeling without actually feeling it? At first sight, it seems impossible to imagine the existence of unconscious emotions. If, unlike ideas and other cognitive experiences, the essence of an emotion does not lie (...) in its content but in the way it is experienced, in “the way it feels like,” then the expression “unconscious emotions” itself seems to be a contradiction. However, if we place ourselves from the point of view of the psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious, this statement creates a problem. Most of the unconscious processes revealed in the course of an analysis have strong emotional connotations. A phenomenology of emotions cannot ignore the results and theories brought forth by Freud and his psychoanalysis, whose most important discoveries concern emotions and their impact on the rest of the psychological life of the subject. If unconscious emotions question the limits of phenomenology, my aim in this paper is to show the way phenomenology can take in order to push these limits further. I will start by explaining the way phenomenology traditionally conceives emotions and their relation to other mental phenomena, using mainly Brentano and Husserl’s view on emotions. However, I will show further that there is a way that allows us to conceive the possibility of emotions that do not belong to consciousness. It is the way of a dynamic phenomenology, inspired by the works of Theodor Lipps, which constitute the main philosophical reference in the works of Sigmund Freud. (shrink)

I attempt to show that when someone is, E.G., Angry about something, The events or states that conjointly are causing him to be angry conform to a certain structure, And that from the causal structure underlying his anger it is possible to 'read out' what he is angry about. In this respect, And even in some of the details of the structure, My analysis of being angry about something resembles the belief-Want analysis of intentional action. The chief elements of the (...) causal structure I describe are a belief and an attitude so related in content as to constitute either a wish-Frustration (in the case of negative emotions) or a wish-Satisfaction (in the case of positive emotions). The analysis makes otiose, In those cases for which it is a correct analysis, The mysterious non-Causal relation between an emotion and its 'object' which is invoked by the majority of philosophers now writing on emotions. (shrink)

Mental health chatbots (MHCBs) designed to support individuals in coping with mental health issues are rapidly advancing. Currently, these MHCBs are predominantly used in commercial rather than clinical contexts, but this might change soon. The question is whether this use is ethically desirable. This paper addresses a critical yet understudied concern: assuming that MHCBs cannot have genuine emotions, how this assumption may affect psychotherapy, and consequently the quality of treatment outcomes. We argue that if MHCBs lack emotions, they (...) cannot have genuine (affective) empathy or utilise countertransference. Consequently, this gives reason to worry that MHCBs are (a) more liable to harm and (b) less likely to benefit patients than human therapists. We discuss some responses to this worry and conclude that further empirical research is necessary to determine whether these worries are valid. We conclude that, even if these worries are valid, it does not mean that we should never use MHCBs. By discussing the broader ethical debate on the clinical use of chatbots, we point towards how further research can help us establish ethical boundaries for how we should use mental health chatbots. (shrink)

This article presents the first systematic typological study of emotional expressions involving body parts at the scale of a continent, namely the Australian continent. The role of body parts in figurative descriptions of emotions, a well-established phenomenon across the world, is known to be widespread in Australian languages. This article presents a typology of body-based emotional expressions across a balanced sample of 67 languages, where we found that at least 30 distinct body parts occur in emotional expressions. The belly (...) is by far the most frequent, and a dozen others also have significant representation. The study shows how the properties of these body parts – e.g., whether they are internal organs or visible facial parts – partly determine which historical scenarios led to their linguistic associations with emotions, and in turn, their semantic and figurative properties. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present study describes the development and validation of a facial expression database comprising five different horizontal face angles in dynamic and static presentations. The database includes twelve expression types portrayed by eight Japanese models. This database was inspired by the dimensional and categorical model of emotions: surprise, fear, sadness, anger with open mouth, anger with closed mouth, disgust with open mouth, disgust with closed mouth, excitement, happiness, relaxation, sleepiness, and neutral. The expressions were validated using emotion classification and (...) Affect Grid rating tasks [Russell, Weiss, & Mendelsohn, 1989. Affect Grid: A single-item scale of pleasure and arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 493–502]. The results indicate that most of the expressions were recognised as the intended emotions and could systematically represent affective valence and arousal. Furthermore, face angle and facial motion information influenced emot... (shrink)

The writers of the Huainanzi 淮南子 show that emotions are based on resonance. In this ancient Chinese text, emotional expressions are considered natural phenomena; however, at the same time, they are sometimes evaluated negatively. It states that sometimes, not only emotions stemming from desires but also emotional expressions in daily lives must be controlled. This is due to the following prescriptions stemming from the art of rulership: (1) a ruler must clearly and distinctly recognize a situation. Emotional expressions (...) lose the Quintessential Spirit (jingshen 精神), which mediates the recognition of the situation; and (2) the intention must not be revealed to the ruler’s vassals. The concept of heart (xin 心) in the Huainanzi, on the foundation called the “theory of cultivation” of Daoism, is influenced by the art of rulership from Legalism. (shrink)