Evaluative theories of emotions, a. A key distinction is that between constitutive and causal evaluative theories. Constitutive theories state that emotions are cognitions or evaluations of particular kinds, whereas causal theories state that emotions are caused by cognitions or evaluations of particular kinds.
The constitutive approach tends to be dominant in philosophy, while the causal approach enjoys significant support in psychology. Let us consider these two strands of cognitivism in turn. The emergence of the constitutive approach in philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century can be traced to a pair of articles by C.
These authors were not the first to emphasize that emotions are object-directed or endowed with intentionality—Brentano [] had already done so with inspiration from various medieval authors King But these mid-twentieth century philosophers were the first to articulate an influential argument to the effect that, in order to account for their intentionality, emotions must be cognitive evaluations of some kind rather than feelings see also Meinong The argument goes roughly like this.
If emotions have intentionality, it follows that there are internal standards of appropriateness according to which an emotion is appropriate just in case its formal object is instantiated Kenny But feelings are not the kinds of things that can enter into conceptual relations with formal objects.
What kinds of cognitive evaluations? The most parsimonious type of cognitivist theory follows the Stoics in identifying emotions with judgments. On a common interpretation of their view, my anger at someone is the judgment that I have been wronged by that person. To generalize, the proposal is that an emotion E is a judgment that the formal object of E is instantiated by some particular object X.
This interpretation is indeed presupposed by some of the standard critiques of judgmentalism. First, it is argued that judgmentalism does not explain how emotions can motivate, because one can hold a judgment—say the judgment that I have been wronged—without being motivated to act on it. Second, it does not explain the phenomenology of emotions, because holding a judgment lacks the bodily, valence and arousal dimensions that typically characterize the experience of emotion.
Third, it fails to account for the emotions of animals and infants, who arguably lack the capacity of assenting to propositions Deigh Judgmentalists have tried to address these critiques by clarifying what sorts of judgments emotions are and some, like Nussbaum and Neu, have explicitly rejected the label of judgmentalism.
Several objections have been launched against this strategy. The trouble with this elastic strategy is not only that it is ad hoc, but also that it creates cross-purpose talk and ultimately amounts to a pyrrhic victory for the evaluative theory, because, on a sufficiently expanded notion of judgment, the identification of emotions with judgments becomes at best trivially true and fails to shed light on what emotions are Scarantino Two more promising strategies have been put in place to defend cognitivism from counterexamples.
The first, which we call the judgmentalist add-on strategy Goldie , consists of explicitly adding on to judgments other components of emotions, rather than embedding them into judgments through the elastic strategy. For instance, the motivational dimension of emotions has been accounted for by suggesting that emotions are not just judgments, but rather combinations of judgments or beliefs and desires Marks ; Green ; Gordon Other authors have added further elements, proposing that emotions are combinations of judgments, desires and feelings, a move intended to account for both motivational and phenomenological dimensions of emotions Lyons Another strategy, which may be called the alternate cognitions strategy , consists of replacing the broad notion of judgment with a variety of other types of cognitive evaluations that can account for the intentionality of emotions while avoiding some of the critiques that have been raised against judgmentalism.
Since most of the action in contemporary philosophy of emotions focuses on which alternate cognitions are to be preferred, we will devote a whole section to the topic. First, we discuss how the Evaluative Tradition has been developed in affective science. Roughly around the time when the Evaluative Tradition became popular in philosophy, a parallel tradition emerged in affective science through the pioneering work of Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus.
What powered this development was in part the cognitivist revolution, the intellectual movement that replaced behaviorism in the s and put the cognitive processing of mental representations at the heart of the science of psychology.
Arnold argued that emotion research had neglected to explain how emotions are elicited. To shed light on the matter, she introduced the notion of appraisal , the process through which the significance of a situation for an individual is determined. Appraisal gives rise to attraction or aversion, and emotion is equated for Arnold with this.
Several authors prior to Arnold had acknowledged that emotions must be produced by some sort of cognitive evaluation of the eliciting circumstances, either in the form of a judgment, a thought, a perception, or an act of imagination. After all, it is quite clear that the same stimulus can generate different emotions in different people, or in the same person at different times, which suggests that it is not stimuli as such that elicit emotions, but stimuli as appraised.
Arnold was the first to subject the internal structure of the appraisal process to scientific investigation. Appraisals, she suggested, are made along three primary dimensions: eliciting circumstances can be evaluated as good or bad, present or absent, and easy to attain or avoid.
For example, the cognitive evaluation that causes fear can be described as the appraisal of an event as bad, absent but possible in the future, and hard to avoid; whereas the cause of joy can be described as the appraisal of an event as good, present and easy to maintain. Broadly speaking, appraisal theories of emotions are accounts of the structure of the processes that extract significance from stimuli and differentiate emotions from one another.
It is also frequently assumed that appraisal is a dynamic process: appraisals are followed by re-appraisals, which follow changes in the environment and in internal variables, and incrementally shape emotions over time. It should be noted that appraisal theories do not properly qualify as theories of what emotions are, even though individual appraisal theorists often articulate such theories as a complement to their theories of the structure of appraisal.
More specifically, appraisal theories are in principle compatible with theories of emotions that identify them as evaluations, feelings, or motivations, as long as such theories acknowledge that appraisals play an essential role in differentiating emotions from one another. This being said, a great many influential appraisal theorists—including Arnold, Lazarus and Scherer—offer theories of emotions that would best fit into the Motivational Tradition.
Scientific theories have significantly developed our understanding of the nature of appraisal, endowing it with even more structure than Arnold originally envisioned e. Lazarus b , for instance, introduced six structural dimensions of assessment, including 1 goal-relevance, 2 goal-congruence or incongruence, 3 type of ego-involvement, 4 blame or credit, 5 coping potential, and 6 future expectancy.
For example, guilt is assumed to be caused by the appraisal of an event as goal relevant, goal-incongruent, involving a moral transgression, and one for which the self is to blame coping potential and future expectancy appraisals are left open. Scherer et al. Scherer The five organismic subsystems underlie five emotion components which, when engaged in coordinated changes, instantiate emotions: an appraisal, autonomic physiological changes, an action tendency, a motor expression, and a subjective feeling.
A variant of appraisal theories has recently attracted some interest in affective computing, an interdisciplinary approach that combines insights from affective science and computer science see Picard For example, suppose you have a belief that your favorite candidate will lose the election and a desire that she win the election Reisenzein a.
Once new information that she has in fact won the election is acquired, a belief-belief-comparator system produces a belief disconfirmation signal subjectively experienced as surprise, and a belief-desire-comparator system produces a desire fulfillment signal subjectively experienced as pleasure. These signals are non-conceptual, in the sense that they do not presuppose concept use, and they bring about redirection of attention, updates of the belief and desire store, and, when above threshold, distinctive subjective experiences.
A challenge faced by appraisal theories concerns whether appraisals are causes of emotions, entailments of emotions, parts of emotions, or some combination of the above. These questions raise complex conceptual issues we cannot address here see Moors , but they are essential for assessing the evidentiary support for appraisal theory. We mentioned earlier that a popular response to the critiques received by philosophical judgmentalism has been the alternate cognitions strategy , intended to better account for their intentionality, differentiation, motivational power, and phenomenology, as well as their potential recalcitrance.
This has led to a gradual convergence of the Evaluative and Feeling Traditions, with the former now identifying emotions as evaluative perceptions with a distinctive phenomenology and the latter identifying emotions as evaluative feelings with a distinctive intentionality. As a result, the distinction between evaluative or cognitivist theories and feeling theories is increasingly blurred, with most of the dominant accounts in the philosophy of emotions now qualifying as hybrids.
Strong versions generally assume that emotions are genuine forms of perception along the lines of sensory perception; weak versions stress key properties emotions share with sensory perception, while also acknowledging important differences. For Prinz , we can speak of a bona fide perceptual system when we are in the presence of a dedicated input system with specialized transducers and mental representations.
Sensory perception clearly has input systems dedicated to vision, olfaction, touch, hearing, and taste. Thus, emotions literally are perceptions of bodily changes, either at the visceral, hormonal, or musculoskeletal levels, or in the form of changes in the somatosensory brain areas. Prinz adds that emotions are not just perceptions of bodily changes, from which it follows that two emotions can differ from one another despite involving indistinguishable perceptions of bodily changes.
To sum up, subjects literally perceive bodily changes the nominal content and indirectly perceive the formal object the real content by virtue of the fact that bodily changes represent formal objects. Weak perceptual theories take emotions to be relevantly analogous to sensory perception or proprioception. In addition, most take emotions to be direct perceptions of formal objects rather than perceptions of bodily changes with the function of tracking formal objects.
Along similar lines, Tappolet suggests that emotions are perceptual experiences of evaluative properties a. Some authors add that such evaluative properties are not available through any others means, just like color properties are not available except by courtesy of visual perception see, e. This would explain why creatures who do not possess concepts, like animals and pre-linguistic infants, can have emotions, and it would account for emotional recalcitrance, which can be understood along the lines of a visual illusion.
As we visually perceive a pencil as bent while judging it to be straight, so we emotionally perceive a transparent platform over the Grand Canyon as dangerous while judging it to be non-dangerous. Tappolet lists additional features that help explain why so many authors have come to think of emotions as perceptions: a both emotions and perceptions have salient phenomenal properties, b both are elicited automatically by real or imagined objects, c both have correctness conditions because they represent the world as being a certain way, and d both play the epistemic role of providing defeasible reasons for belief e.
These analogies notwithstanding, several critics have rejected perceptual theories of emotions e. A prominent critique concerns their inability to account for emotional recalcitrance. For example, Helm has argued that perceptualists have ended up removing the irrationality that is distinctive of recalcitrance.
If perceiving a transparent platform over the Grand Canyon as dangerous while judging it to be non-dangerous were just like a visual illusion, then there would be nothing irrational about it, as there is nothing irrational in seeing a pencil as bent while judging it to be straight.
But there clearly is some measure of irrationality involved in recalcitrant emotions: unlike perceptual illusions, they motivate us to act. In other words, they involve a passive assent which contradicts the active assent captured by the contradicting judgment. Several authors have proposed theories that endow feelings with intentionality.
For example, when I feel fear about slipping on ice, my feeling is towards the ice as being dangerous. This sort of feeling is a matter of thinking of the ice with feeling, and cannot be reduced to a combination of a non-intentional bodily feeling and a non-emotional evaluative thought. As Goldie puts it,.
Goldie ; see also Ratcliffe , Helm This explains why emotions motivate action: feeling that something is worthy of attention and action is being motivated. It also explains what makes a recalcitrant emotion irrational. In some variants of representationalism, the emotional phenomenology that gets to be reduced is merely somatic, in the sense that the feeling is directed at bodily events e.
In other variants, the phenomenology is much richer, as it comprises somatic, cognitive, conative and irreducibly affective components directed at particular and formal objects in the world e. An alternative embraced by some contemporary feeling theorists is to argue that emotions are feelings devoid of any intentional objects. On this view, fear of the ice is a composite mental state consisting of an emotion—the objectless feeling of fear—plus a thought with the ice as its intentional object.
In themselves, emotions are merely hedonic feelings without intentionality. For example, there are innumerable things I could in principle be focusing on as I find myself face to face with a grizzly bear on a hike, but my fear focuses my attention squarely on the bear, on how to interpret its movements, and on how to infer and execute an escape strategy.
But de Sousa aims to draw attention to the broader role emotions play in providing the framework for cognitions of both perceptual varieties e. Some philosophers suggest that the directive power that emotions exert over cognitions is partly a function of their essentially dramatic or narrative structure Rorty [].
Goldie offers a particularly subtle examination of the role of narrative in constituting our emotions over the long term. It seems conceptually incoherent to suppose that one could have an emotion—say, an intense jealousy or a consuming rage—for only a fraction of a second Wollheim One explanation of this feature of emotions is that a story plays itself out during the course of each emotional episode, and stories take place over stretches of time.
These scenarios are drawn first from our daily life as small children and later reinforced by the stories, art, and culture to which we are exposed.
Once our emotional repertoire is established, we interpret new situations through the lens of different paradigm scenarios. When a particular scenario suggests itself as an interpretation, it arranges or rearranges our perceptual, cognitive, and inferential dispositions.
When a paradigm scenario is evoked by a novel situation, the resulting emotion may or may not be appropriate to the situation that triggers it.
Thus, a childhood fear of clowns may be reappraised and overcome in adult life as a result of a more realistic appraisal. In that sense at least, emotions can be assessed for rationality see section 10 for further discussion. The third tradition in the study of emotions identifies them essentially with special kinds of motivational states, where a motivational state broadly understood is an internal cause of behaviors aimed at satisfying a goal.
Members of this research tradition think that the central problem a theory of emotions needs to solve is explaining how emotions and actions are related, because it is ultimately what we do when we emote that produces significant personal and social consequences. The Motivational Tradition was anticipated by many theorists of emotions in Ancient Greece and throughout the Middle Ages who emphasized the constitutive relation between emotions and behavioral impulses King , but it finds its first modern precursor in Dewey , Dewey was unhappy with the reversal of common sense entailed by the Jamesian idea that emotions are feelings that emerge in response to proprioceptions.
If we truly were angry because we strike, Dewey countered, anger could not cause the striking, and this would deprive anger, as well as other emotions, of their explanatory importance. Let us begin from an influential evolutionary variant of the Motivational Tradition in affective science. Tomkins proposed that there are nine basic or innate affects controlled by inherited programs: interest, enjoyment, surprise, fear, anger, distress, shame, contempt and disgust.
The first was the birth of modern-day basic emotion theory, with its consuming attention for the universality of facial expressions, present especially in the work of Paul Ekman Ekman et al. The second was the emergence of the evolutionary psychology approach to emotions understood as solutions to recurrent evolutionary problems, with prominent contributions by Plutchick and Tooby and Cosmides see also Shand and McDougall [] for earlier examples of evolutionary theories of emotions.
Starting in the s, the two approaches have progressively merged, although evolutionary psychologists are more inclined than basic emotion theorists to conclude that a given emotion solves an evolutionary problem merely on the basis of plausibility arguments. They have adaptive value because they quickly mobilize and coordinate resources needed to successfully deal with life tasks, and because they communicate socially relevant information via bodily expressions.
As soon as a basic emotion program is activated, a. From this follows the central empirical hypothesis of traditional BET: there should be bodily signatures for each basic emotion consisting of highly correlated and emotion-specific changes at the level of facial expressions, autonomic changes and preset and learned actions.
More specifically, Ekman defined basic emotions in terms of a distinctive universal signals, b distinctive physiology, c distinctive thoughts, memories and images, d distinctive subjective experiences, e predictable developmental appearance, f homologous presence in other primates, g automatic appraisals tuned to distinctive universals in antecedent events, h quick onset, brief duration, and unbidden occurrence Ekman a: 5.
Some basic emotion theorists have also suggested that basic emotions are associated with distinctive hardwired neural circuits e. Scientifically-minded philosophers often restrict their discussions of emotions to the basic affect programs, since these are argued to be the only natural kinds so far discovered in the affective domain Griffiths ; DeLancey The main source of evidence for basic affect programs arguably comes from cross-cultural studies on facial expressions that use a recognition technique first described by Darwin As reported by Ekman b , experiments of this sort have so far been performed with observers from dozens of countries, revealing significant agreement on which emotion is portrayed the recognition rates are strongest for happiness, sadness and disgust.
This being said, membership to a given culture increases recognition of expressions from that culture, which has led some to argue that emotional expressions are a universal language with different dialects Elfenbein et al.
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Any relatively brief conscious experience characterized by intense mental activity and a high degree of pleasure or displeasure. Emotion is often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation.
In some theories, cognition is an important aspect of emotion. Those acting primarily on the emotions they are feeling may seem as if they are not thinking, but mental processes are still essential, particularly in the interpretation of events. For example, the realization of our believing that we are in a dangerous situation and the subsequent arousal of our body's nervous system rapid heartbeat and breathing, sweating, muscle tension is integral to the experience of our feeling afraid.
Other theories, however, claim that emotion is separate from and can precede cognition. Emotions are complex; they are a state of feeling that results in physical and psychological changes that influence our behavior. Theories and hypotheses about emotions date back centuries. In fact, basic or primary emotions are referenced in the Book of Rights , a first-century Chinese encyclopedia.
Emotion is much harder to measure and properly define than many other human responses. Much of the study that has been done in emotional psychology is about basic emotions, our psychological and behavioral responses, and the role of emotional intelligence in our lives. Basic emotions are associated with recognizable facial expressions and tend to happen automatically. Charles Darwin was the first to suggest that emotion-induced facial expressions are universal. This suggestion was a centerpiece idea to his theory of evolution, implying that emotions and their expressions were biological and adaptive.
Basic emotions are likely to have played a role in our survival throughout human evolution, signaling to those around us to react accordingly.
Emotional psychologist Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions that could be interpreted through facial expressions. They included happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. He expanded the list in to also include embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride, satisfaction and amusement, though those additions have not been widely adapted.
Similarly, in the s, psychologist Robert Plutchik identified eight basic emotions which he grouped into pairs of opposites, including joy and sadness, anger and fear, trust and disgust, and surprise and anticipation. This classification is known as a wheel of emotions and can be compared to a color wheel in that certain emotions mixed together can create new complex emotions. More recently, a new study from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow in found that instead of six, there may only be four easily recognizable basic emotions.
The study discovered that anger and disgust shared similar facial expressions, as did surprise and fear. This suggests that the differences between those emotions are sociologically-based and not biologically-based.
Despite all the conflicting research and adaptations, most research acknowledge that there are a set of universal basic emotions with recognizable facial features. Complex emotions have differing appearances and may not be as easily recognizable, such as grief, jealousy or regret. Basic emotions, on the other hand, are unmixed and innate.
Other complex emotions include love, embarrassment, envy, gratitude, guilt, pride, and worry, among many others. Grief looks quite different between cultures and individuals. Some complex emotions, such as jealousy, may have no accompanying facial expression at all. Thus, many theories of emotion exist. While some theories directly refute others, many build upon each other.
Here are some common theories of emotional psychology that have helped shape the field and how humans view emotions. The James-Lange Theory of Emotion is one of the earliest emotion theories of modern psychology.
Developed by William James and Carl Lange in the 19th century, the theory hypothesizes that physiological stimuli arousal causes the autonomic nervous system to react which in turn causes individuals to experience emotion.
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