Emotions, Qualia, and Consciousness

The following sections are included:

• PREFACE

• CONTENTS

The experience of emotion is a nearly constant aspect of the stream of consciousness, and emotional experience appears to interact with other contents and processes of consciousness in complex ways. Recent research has supported the hypothesis that important functional aspects of emotion can operate outside of conscious awareness. Such research raises questions about what conditions are necessary and sufficient for the conscious experience of emotion. Conversely, many scholars and scientists now believe that no scientific or philosophic account of consciousness can be complete without an understanding of the role of emotion. This paper briefly reviews select recent contributions to an understanding of the relationship between emotion and consciousness. Experimental psychological, neuropsychological, and neuroscientific approaches are highlighted, and the author's own recent studies of conscious emotional experience and emotion physiology in different neurological disorders are described. The paper closes with some speculations, derived from this research, concerning the role of frontal brain systems in the conscious experience of emotion.

Since at least the time of Socrates, Western philosophy has been concerned with the question “What is an emotion?” However, as Solomon (2000) has pointed out, throughout most of the history of philosophical discussion, emotion has been seen as a slave to the master of reason:…

Emotion theory is beset by category disputes. Examining the nature and function of scientific classification can make some of these more tractable. The aim of classification is to group particulars into «natural» classes - classes whose members share a rich cluster of properties in addition to those used to place them in the class. Classification is inextricably linked to theories of the causal processes that explain why certain particulars resemble one another and so are usefully regarded as «of the same kind». The need to base categories on underlying causal processes explains why mere careful definition (including operational definition) need not produce categories that are productive objects of scientific study. Because different causal processes produce different patterns of similarity there is unlikely to be a single classification that is optimal for addressing all scientific questions. Cultural categories should not be contrasted to natural categories, but should be treated as natural classes generated by underlying social processes. Our capacity to introduce epistemically optimal categories is often restricted because categories play a role in social and political, as well as epistemic, projects. This account of classification has many implications for emotion theory.

Emotions are highly complex and subtle phenomena whose explanation requires careful and systematic analysis of their multiple characteristics and components. I suggest that the typical cause of emotions is a perceived significant change in our situation, the typical emotional concern is a comparative concern, and the typical emotional object is a human being. Typical emotions are considered to have a few basic characteristics - instability, great intensity, a partial perspective, and relative brevity - and basic components: cognition, evaluation, motivation, and feeling. These characteristics provide an initial answer to the classical question of “What is an Emotion?”

People often talk about the intensity of their emotions: they tell us that their anger is overwhelming, that they feel extremely sad, or that they are madly in love. Despite the common usage of terms, which measure emotional intensity, the notion of «emotional intensity» is far from clear. In this paper I first clarify this complex notion and then discuss the circumstances in which emotions become intensified.

The functionalist claims that mental states are functional states. He therefore identifies kinds of mental states with causal roles. One objection against functionalism is that qualitative states are mental states, but cannot be identified with any causal role. An argument in support of this objection is the qualia inversion argument, which runs as follows: if inverted qualia are possible in functionally equivalent systems, then qualia are not definable in functional terms, and functionalism cannot be an account of all psychological states and properties. A parallel argument concerns absent qualia. This chapter focuses on the inverted qualia argument and discusses it with reference to emotional qualia, a case of inversion which is more difficult to pin down than the case of color inversion. One reason for this difficulty is that we can describe both the space and the spectrum of colors and indicate laws governing them, whereas emotions are more resistant to be arranged in a spectrum. Why is this so? Because there seem to be no laws connecting emotional qualia to one another and to qualia from other domains (like the visual, the tactile or the acoustic domain), whereas for phenomenal colors the opposite appears to be true. Although we sometimes describe anger as red and envy as green, there are no conceptual connections between these emotions and the corresponding colors. In fact, as it turns out, most of the a priori laws concerning emotions are about their cognitive bases.

Karl Jaspers was a pioneer in the study of consciousness but a much neglected one. His interest in the subject resulted from his practical experience as a psychiatrist as well as his philosophical interests in human identity, freedom and world-views. In a sense he bridges the gap between the phenomenological school and the hard sciences that he respected so much. His interest in emotion stemmed from his studies of consciousness but unlike some treatments of consciousness, the study of emotion must take into consideration biological factors.

Emotion (in contrast to feelings and sentiment) is an affective reaction to a situation (peculiar or exceptional) differing from our expectations about the way things are normally going on. As such, it can trigger a cognitive revision, carried out in such a way as to minimise changes of our high priority expectations. Accommodation of emotion (a long-term habituation) is achieved when revision is. But when an emotion links local expectations and more fundamental ones, revision can be stuck because of the conflict between the minimisation of revision and the emotion questioning our high priority expectations. As our preferences are revealed by our choices, our “real” values are revealed by the fact that emotion resists accommodation, and our “strong” values by the fact that this resistance is the case even when cognitive revision is achieved.

This paper suggests an account of the intersubjective perception of emotion that is consistent across the disciplines of philosophy, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. It explores the relationship between phenomenological accounts of how we re-cognize others to be persons like ourselves, the absence of this kind of recognition in autism, the possibility of imitation in neonates, and the recent discovery of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex. Phenomenologists suggest that the recognition of another mind depends upon the empathetic perception of the other person's body or face. Several problems with this approach are identified, including the secondary position granted to empathy. It is well known that autistic individuals have problems with precisely this kind of recognition of other people, and some theorists propose that this problem is best explained in terms of a lack of ability to perceive emotion. Studies of neonate imitation can help to clarify these issues. These studies suggest that there is an innate, intermodal mechanism that helps to explain the perception of emotion in others. The recent discovery of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex suggests a neuronal explanation of this mechanism. One can speculate that problems with both the recognition and imitation of others in autism may be in part due to the malfunction of these neurons.

Biologic changes have long been known to be important characteristics of emotion. The second century Greek physician, Galen, clearly recognized that alterations in the pulse accompanied emotions such as fear (Reiss, Sushinsky, & Kaszniak, 1977). By 1806, Sir Charles Bell, the noted physiologist, was writing about the anatomy and physiology of emotional expression (cited in Darwin, 1872/1965), a topic which Darwin's (1872/1965) treatise on emotional expression in humans and other animals brought to broad scholarly and popular attention. Darwin's influential work was soon followed by William James' (1884) article entitled “What is an Emotion?” James' formulation of emotional experience as due to feedback from bodily responses drew increased attention to questions about biological processes in emotion. This interest was further enhanced by Walter Cannon's (1929, 1932/1963) detailed studies of the physiology of motivational and emotional states in rabbits and cats, which challenged James' hypothesis and proposed his own neural theory of emotion. Cannon's theory was based, to a large extent, upon research carried out in his laboratory by Philip Bard (1929), who performed lesion studies to determine areas of the brain necessary for rage expression in animals. Based on these experiments, both Bard and Cannon concluded that the hypothalamus was central to emotion…

Evolutionary Psychology links the methodology for cognitive science associated with the late David Marr to evolutionary theory. The mind is conceived as a bundle of modules which can be described at three theoretical levels. Each module represents an adaptation to some specific ecological problem. Evolutionary psychologists try to derive the highest level of description using a heuristic method called ‘adaptive thinking’. This paper questions the value of the official EP methodology and reasserts the value of the earlier methodology associated with classical ethology, in which the structural and comparative analysis of the products of evolution precedes the investigation of their origin by natural selection. The adaptive heuristic is shown to be unhelpful. It tends to restrict psychology to work designed to confirm our preconceptions. It is argued that evolutionary psychology must be retrodictive and explanatory, rather than predictive, and that a powerful method for testing postulated claims about the adaptive origins of traits is available in modern versions of the comparative method. Some arguments for the inapplicabilitv of the comparative method to human psychoevolution are examined and shown to be specious. These various points are exemplified in evolutionary work on emotions.

Laughter is a simple and robust indicator of joyful social affect. All too commonly it has been considered to be a unique emotional capacity of humans and perhaps a few other higher primates. If more primitive mammals also exhibit such emotional responses, it would suggest that joyful affect emerged much earlier within mammalian brain evolution than is generally believed. Evidence for the recent discovery of laughter in lower animals is summarized. We have discovered that one can evoke vigorous 50 kHz chirping in young rodents during tickling, and evidence that elevation and reduction of this response tendency can be transmitted genetically is now provided. A variety of lines of evidence suggest that a study of this response may help us decipher the neural basis of joy and positive emotional consciousness within the mammalian brain.

Considerable progress has been made in elucidating the brain pathways involved in detecting and responding to threatening stimuli, and learning about novel threats. Much of this progress has come from studies of fear conditioning, in which a relatively neutral stimulus, like a tone, acquires aversive properties after being paired with a noxious event. The pathways involve transmission of information from sensory processing areas in the thalamus and cortex to the amygdala. The lateral nucleus of the amygdala receives and integrates sensory information and sends the outcomes of its processing to the central nucleus. The central nucleus, in turn, is the interface with motor systems controlling automatic or reflexive fear responses of various types (behavioral, autonomic, endocrine). Sites of plasticity within this circuitry, and some cellular mechanisms involved, have also been identified. In addition to developing fear responses to the specific stimulus that is paired with the noxious event, fear also conditions to the general context in which the noxious stimulus occurs. So-called context conditioning requires the hippocampus and inputs to the basal nucleus of the amygdala, which in turn projects to the central nucleus. An important issue is how we get rid of fear. It seems that the mesial frontal cortex and its connections to the amygdala are involved. Thus, lesions of the mesial cortex lead to an intensification of fear and an increased resistance to extinction. Given that stress can adversely affect the hippocampus and mesial frontal cortex, and that patients with psychiatric conditions often suffer from stress, it is possible that stress-induced changes in these areas contribute to the intense, therapeutically resistant, contextually free fears that psychiatric patients often have. We are thus beginning to uncover the neural mechanisms, from systems to cellular levels, underlying emotional processing, including emotional learning and memory, at least within the fear system. These findings are beginning to elucidate mechanisms that may be relevant to understanding emotional disorders.

Although lesion studies in rodents and primates have provided strong evidence of a crucial role of the amygdala in the processing of emotionally loaded information, its precise role in the human neuronal emotion-cognition network is far from being understood. We therefore studied patients with selective amygdalar damage and also normal subjects neuropsychologically (memory tests, face recognition tests, subjective emotional ratings) and neuroradiologically (fMRI) using stimuli either with high emotional value, or non-emotional content. By this procedure, we where able to show an additional amygdaloid activation in normal individuals. The functional neuroanatomical aspects connected to the neuropsychological ones are discussed in the frame of the hypotheses both of a “bottleneck” function of amygdala, and of disinhibition of CA3 hippocampal neurons.

The neurobiological systems that mediate the basic emotions are beginning to be understood. They appear to be constituted of genetically coded, but experientially refined executive circuits situated in subcortical areas of the brain which can coordinate the behavioral, physiological and psychological processes that need to be recruited to cope with a variety of primal survival needs. The various emotional circuits are coordinated by different neuropeptides, and the arousal of each system may generate distinct affective/neurodynamic states. Although these central states cannot yet be empirically monitored using neurophysiological tools, viewpoints of how they are controlled in the brain and how they may modulate consciousness can now be advanced. The aim of the following essay is to discuss the underlying conceptual issues.

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage. Neuroscience has characterized it as a predominantly or entirely sensory experience, but a review of basic mechanisms reveals that pain involves extensive limbic processes. Evidence from animal studies and human PET studies demonstrates that tissue trauma initiates a complex pattern of central processing that involves both the thalamocortical sensory pathways and the limbic brain. We suggest that pain is an emotion with sensory features rather than a sensory experience with emotional sequelae. The phenomenal experience of pain seems to involve at least two superimposed qualia: sensory and affective. Review of findings obtained from patients with damage to the insular cortex and pain asymbolia suggests that the affective quale of pain is critical in initiating adaptive/protective actions. We propose that the affective quale of pain represents the potential threat of an injurious event to the biological integrity of the individual. As such it contributes to defensive behavior and enables adaptive function.

Research collaborators at the Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention of the University of Florida have developed several standardized sets of visual, auditory, and word stimuli for the experimental study of emotional perception. Data from a large number of experiments in which these stimuli have been employed are consistent with the interpretation that behavioral, physiological, and self-report measures of emotion during perception reflect basic motivational dispositions that are either appetitive or defensive in orientation (emotional valence) and which vary in reactive intensity (arousal). These stimuli have also proven useful in studies of emotion-memory relationships, providing support for the “intensity” principle. Memory for these stimuli was found to be primarily sensitive to the arousal dimension, with differences in memory performance consistently obtained for emotionally arousing stimuli (either pleasant or unpleasant), compared to neutral stimuli.

Emotions can best be conceptualized as action tendencies that serve immediate survival needs. Neural circuits subserving these action tendencies are largely subcortical, although connected to the cerebral cortex in humans to allow more elaborate processing of relevant information and more complex cognitive and behavioral output of emotional states. An associationist account of what more phenomenologically inclined theorists call “appraisal” is provided. This account avoids assumptions about subjective evaluation, and provides a mechanism that accounts for both the rapidity of emotional responses and their frequent “irrational” quality. In such a network view, emotions differ from other knowledge structures in being directly connected to subcortical appetitive and defense motivational systems.

Investigations of hemispheric asymmetries in representation and control of emotions have followed either the componential or the hierarchical model of emotions. After the first empirical studies, which showed that emotions are asymmetrically represented at the hemispheric level (giving rise to the first theoretical models of emotional lateralization), several studies have taken individually into account one or few specific components of emotions. Most of these investigations have focused attention on the communicative (sensory and expressive-motor) components of emotions, studying the perception or the production of facial or vocal emotional expression in patients with unilateral brain damage. Some proponents of this line of research have suggested that the right hemisphere might play a major role in functions of non-verbal communication, rather that in emotional behavior per se. However, later studies have shown that the right hemisphere superiority concerns not only the communicative, but also (and perhaps mainly) the vegetative components of emotions. These findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that the right hemisphere superiority concerns non-verbal communication rather that emotional behavior per se. In more recent years, some authors have shifted attention from the componential to the hierarchical organization of emotions, assuming that both hemispheres may be involved in emotional functions, but that each of them may be mainly involved in a specific hierarchical level of emotions. Two models, belonging to this line of thought, have been proposed. The first model assumes that the hemispheric specialization may concern two different categories of emotions. The right hemisphere might mainly subserve the most primitive (survival related) categories of emotions, whereas the left hemisphere might play a major role in phylogenetically more recent social forms of emotions. The second model, that I prefer, assumes that the hemispheric specialization concerns two different levels of emotional processing, rather that two different categories of emotions. The lower emotional level, corresponding to the level of the automatically elicited spontaneous emotions, could be mainly represented in the right hemisphere, whereas the higher emotional level, subserving the conscious analysis and the intentional control of the emotional discharge, could be mainly represented in the left hemisphere.

Independent lines of research have shown that the division of labor between the right and left hemisphere could concern not only the cognitive and emotional functions, but also autonomic activities, which are one of the main components of emotional behavior. Some of these investigations were part of research programs addressing questions about hemispheric asymmetries in representation and control of emotions. These studies have been conducted either in brain-damaged patients or in normal subjects, during tasks of selective emotional stimulation of the right or left hemisphere. Other clinically oriented studies have been motivated by epidemiological and neurophysiological data suggesting that hemispheric asymmetries might exist in the autonomic control of the heart. All these investigations have consistently shown that autonomic functions are lateralized in the human brain and that the right hemisphere plays a preeminent role from this point of view. However, both the question of the exact pattern of lateralization of the autonomic functions and the question of the relationships between autonomic and emotional asymmetries remain open and require further investigations. As for the first issue, two alternative models have been proposed. The first model assumes a right hemisphere superiority for every kind of autonomic function, whereas the second model posits a different specialization of the right hemisphere for sympathetic activities and of the left hemisphere for parasympathetic functions. As for the second issue, some authors assume an interdependence between autonomic and emotional cerebral asymmetries, whereas other authors maintain that no clear relationship exists between these two facets of brain lateralization. If we assume that asymmetries for complex behavioural activities probably emerge as a by-product of more basic interhemispheric differences, then an asymmetric representation of autonomic functions could be the prerequisite for the lateralization of the emotional system, considered as an emergency system, devised to respond rapidly and efficiently to situations relevant for the basic needs of the individual.

The ability to recognize and describe emotion in oneself and others, called emotional awareness, may be conceptualized as a cognitive skill that undergoes a developmental process similar to that which Piaget described for cognition in general. The five levels of emotional awareness in ascending order are physical sensations, action tendencies, single emotions, blends of emotion, and blends of blends of emotional experience. The first two levels are implicit in that they constitute sensori-motor representations that may not be considered conscious emotional experiences per se. The latter three levels constitute explicit mental representations of experience. These five levels put unconscious and conscious processes on a continuum characterized by progressively increasing degrees of differentiation and complexity of the schemata used to process emotional information. They are hierarchically related in that functioning at each level adds to and modifies the function of lower levels. Psychometric and behavioral data supporting this conceptual framework are presented. Next, the work of other investigators is discussed, demonstrating the role of subcortical structures in implicit processing of emotional information. Functional neuroimaging studies of the neural correlates of emotional experience are presented which suggest that subregions within the anterior cingulate cortex may play a differential role in phenomenal and reflective conscious awareness of emotion, respectively. Parallels in the hierarchical organization of function at the psychological and neuroanatomical levels are discussed.

This paper introduces an overview of mental representations and their reconstruction through experiential, creative and multimodal methods in Psychotherapy. I will emphasize the all-important role of the arousal. Arousal is assumed to be dependent upon the Reticular Activating System (RAS) lying deep in the brainstem, with its rich interconnections to all of the cortex, thalamus, and limbic system, as providing the necessary conditions to create and re-create mental patterns. It is also important to note that emotions weave their ubiquitous thread throughout this arousal system and throughout the tapestry of mental representations. I will explain how multi-modal therapy methods mirror the work of the RAS. My approach is holistic and my methods are designed to access the central nervous system as a complete unit, working not only with behavior and intellect, but with emotions, movements, senses, perceptions and interpersonal interactions. I have synthesized the theories of Jean Piaget, Alexander Luria, Donald Hebb, Karl Pribram and Daniel Stern. This paper is a compilation of their theories, joined in support of the therapy I have developed for patients in my clinical practice.

This research explores the role of the physiological component of emotional arousal. The concept of autonomic balance is presented theoretically and operationalized through measurement of heart rate variability (HRV). The role of the latter is examined in its relation to emotional arousal, as reflected in both subjective feeling and non-verbal vocal expression. Extraversion, as personality trait, and state anxiety, are included in the experimental design. The results lend support to the hypothesis that subjects with low HRV experience flattening of emotional reactions mainly in vocal expression, but also in subjective feeling. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of the influence of HRV on interoception and emotional awareness.

The purpose of this study was to examine performance and cardiovascular data in the light of parameters expressing the complexity and dynamic instability of their process, and in the context of the Stroop task attentional effort expenditure. Dysphoric emotional state was also linked with performance and cardiovascular dynamics, and with the level of attentional conflict. Results indicate that competition between conflictual dimensions of a stimulus diminishes dynamic instability of the response process. Also, the affective state preceding performance seems to act as a modulator of dynamic instability and complexity of the organismic response process.

In the burgeoning literature about the neural basis of consciousness, affect is generally relegated to the back of the bus as an interesting “coloration” to the “hard problem” of consciousness. Most current theories of consciousness neglect evidence that emotion is a central organizing process for consciousness, probably one of its necessary and sufficient conditions. There are deep and intrinsic interpenetrations of global state functions that we have largely segregated, such as pain, affect, attentional functions and executive functions (as “slices” of the consciousness pie). Without central representation of value available “on-line,” executive and attentional functions are collapsed at their base. Paralleling their extensive functional interpenetration, global state functions have vast overlap in putative neural substrates. Regarding neural correlates for emotion, broadly defined, the “limbic system” is so widely distributed that it has very unclear limits. This is derivative of the failure to clearly distinguish between emotion as a prototype or “primitive” vs. the much broader problems of emotional meaning, conditioning, and learning, as these relate to the global representation of value, which is interpenetrant with much of CNS activity. Even defining emotion in terms of its “primitives” or prototype affects yields differential but highly distributed-hierarchical neural substrates. Affect is elusively multi-dimensional, with patterned autonomic, endocrine, motor-executive, subjective pain/pleasure (valence), social/signaling, and cognitive (other/self appraisal) integrations. Emotional “primitives” are organized largely in diencephalic and midbrain structures ignored in most work on emotion, where most focus on telencephalic structures that support “valence tagging” (emotional learning and association) but that cannot underwrite valence itself. Basic connectivities between affective systems and the core systems of ERTAS underline the likely importance of these same primitive midbrain systems for consciousness: 1) connectivities between the midbrain reticular formation (MRF) and periaquaductal gray (PAG); 2) connections of thalamic intralaminar nuclei (ILN) to midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG), various limbic, and basal ganglia (BG) systems; 3) predominant limbic modulation of thalamic nucleus reticularis thalami (nRt) “gatelets” by nucleus accumbens, paralimbic cortices, BG, and dorsomedial (DM) thalamus-prefrontal regions. Severe damage to PAG (a clearinghouse in the diencephalon-midbrain for primitive value operators with crucial projections to monoamine nuclei, ILN and MRF), profoundly impairs consciousness. PAG interactions with other ventral systems in SC and deep tegmental regions may form substrates for a primitive and basic neural representation of the self. But there can be only modest specificity at this point about the fundamental relations of emotion and consciousness, and many basic questions remain. At the end, some of these are reviewed, along with suggestions for future research to outline PAG's role and the role of “valence” or primary emotion in consciousness.

The study of emotion was a core interest in the earliest days psychology's independence from its parent discipline of philosophy (e.g., Hall, 1897; James, 1884, 1890). This interest was stimulated, in no small part, by the seminal observations of Darwin (1872/1965) on emotional expression in humans and other animals. Emotion was also a clear preoccupation in the early development of psychoanalysis (Breuer & Freud, 1925/1956). However, emotion received sparse attention during the 19th or early 20th century experimental psychology, in either Germany, America, or Great Britain (see Boring, 1950). Nonetheless, by 1927 there was sufficient psychological scholarship and empirical research on emotion to warrant organization of the Wittenberg Symposium on Feelings and Emotions (Reymert, 1928), which brought together 34 distinguished American and European psychologists who presented papers to an audience of several hundred. Examination of the theoretic issues and methodologic problems addressed at this gathering shows substantial overlap with those issues and problems that psychologists continue to grapple with today…

Emotions are multicomponential responses to events that vary over time, and their duration varies from a few seconds to a day or more. The duration of the component processes also varies, necessitating a hierarchical description of the emotional responses. At the basic-process level, emotion's functionally distinct processes are to be distinguished: affect processes; appraisal processes; activated action dispositions; and regulation processes. Most specific for emotion phenomena are affect and shifts of behavioral and attentional control. Phenomenally (rather than functionally), one of the major emotion components is emotional experience. Experience, too, can be analyzed in terms of constituents. The only elementary, uanalyzable qualia are pleasure and pain, and the awareness of incomplete control over thought and behavior – the shifts in control precedence that gave rise to the very name “affect” (meaning “being affected”). Beyond that, experience includes awareness of the event-a-appraised, awareness of current state of action readiness, and awareness of bodily state. These components may be assumed to be common to animals and humans. Humans differ from animals in the richness of events-asappraised and of the cognitions attached to all components. In addition, emotional experience includes cognitions about and evaluations of one's emotion, giving rise to an emotion's “significance” and moral evaluation, with subsequent regulation and secondary emotions.

Emotions are aroused by appearance or disappearance of pleasant and unpleasant events, or by anticipation of these contingencies. Pleasant and unpleasant events are events that directly and innately evoke an affective response, or are associated or conditioned to such primary affective stimuli; and stimulus events appraised as relevant to some concern. Arousal of emotions involves appraisal, that is, some process that transforms perceived events into events with affective value. These processes are sometimes simple (as with innately valent stimuli), but most often involve some processing of information. This implies that antecedents of emotions usually include cognitive processes. The cognitions concern features of the emotion-arousing event, its relation to concerns, the subject's response propensities, and his or her coping potential. The nature of these antecedents, and the nature of emotional reactions indicate the functions of emotions: signaling concern-relevance of events; and motivating and organizing actions to do something with or about those events. These functions are primarily realized through action dispositions that benefit adaptation in various different ways.

Folk psychology maintains that consciousness plays a decisive role in the control of human behavior. This conviction, which is consistent with the Cartesian Cogito (“I think, therefore I am”), has been challenged by evidence of nonconscious mediation of psychological processes. The present article reviews this evidence with particular emphasis on our own research using the technique of backward masking to study nonconscious activation of emotion. Even though subjects do not recognize emotional target stimuli when these are followed immediately by masking stimuli, subjects nevertheless show differential psychophysiological responses to the masked target stimuli. Brain imaging studies have shown that masked emotional stimuli specifically activate the amygdala via subcortical pathways. Research further suggests that information from masked emotional stimuli may be accessible to the cognitive system through feedback from autonomic responses. These findings suggest that nonconscious processes constantly monitor the surrounding world for stimuli of emotional significance. This view is consistent with the notion that bodily feedback affects feelings in core consciousness and that the role of consciousness in emotion is to interpret and make sense of feelings.

The experience of emotions and affects is a pervasive aspect of our life. We all feel well or moody on a particular day, are impatient or pleased with something we are doing and experience happiness at a compliment or anger at a slight. The present paper discusses the social context influences on the elicitation and experience of emotions from the point of view of appraisal theories. Appraisal theories of emotions posit cognitive evaluations of such aspects of the emotion eliciting event as its novelty and pleasantness, the degree to which it helps or hinders ongoing plans and goals, the degree to which individuals believe themselves able to cope with the event, the degree to which what happened appears just and unjust, etc. Yet, the outcome of these appraisals as well as the behavioral consequences of the outcomes are not the same for everyone and a number of situational influences have been found to be of importance in this context. In this paper I argue that these factors not only exert influence on the display and labeling of emotions but also modulate the appraisal process.

The ability to well communicate emotions is important for both the encoder, who would like to be understood, and the decoder, who strives to understand. The present paper focuses on the communication of emotions via facial expressions. In this context, the notion that emotional expressions also communicate information about the encoder's view of the world, their perception of emotion antecedent events, as well as their behavioral intentions and even aspects of their personality such as affiliation and dominance are discussed. Specifically, I focus on the role of social emotion norms, which guide both the overt expression of emotions and the attribution of emotions to others based on nonverbal behaviors. These norms vary with such social aspects of the interaction partners as their gender, power, and culture and influence not only the encoding but also the decoding of emotional expressions. Evidence from our laboratory regarding the communication of emotions between members of different social groups is discussed to illustrate this point.

The chapter describes the humor response; i.e., the perception that something is funny as a distinct qualia. Cognitive models of humor are presented that define the minimal conditions for humor. The relevance of detection of incongruity and its resolution, but also the limitations of this two-stage model are discussed. Techniques for the experimental variation of key ingredients of humor are presented and a major paradigm, the weight-judging task, is introduced. The ascribed role of surprise as a mediator between perceiving and enjoying incongruity is examined. It is argued that the perception of humor is highly individualistic, and the presented summary of findings based on the 3 WD humor test suggests that humor appreciation is primarily affected by personality traits that refer to the individual's general tendency to seek out or avoid stimulus uncertainty. Due to its complexity and central role in human life, the study of humor is recommended for the study of consciousness.

Laughter as a vocal expressive-communicative signal is one of the least understood and most frequently overlooked human behaviors. The chapter provides an overview of what we know about laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action, and body movement and attempts to illustrate the mechanisms of laughter and to define its elements. The importance of discriminating between spontaneous and contrived laughter is pointed out and it is argued that unrestrained spontaneous laughter involves inarticulate vocalization. It is argued that we need research integrating the different systems in laughter including

This paper compares two ways of representing the two-dimensional structure that emerges from a factor analysis of self-report inventories of emotional experience. The first and dominant representation is produced by rotating the two factors to simple structure. The result is two (apparently) unidimensional, relatively independent factors termed positive and negative affect. The second is the less commonly used unrotated structure that treats each emotion as a complex measure of two dimensions: valence–a bipolar continuum with positive emotions loading at one end and negative emotions loading at the other—and arousal, a unipolar continuum on which both positive and negative emotions load positively. Since rotation changes the pattern of correlations between the factors and any criterion variable used to test its validity, judgment of the relatively validity of the two structures requires the comparison of the two sets of correlations generated by the two structures. To this end, I report the results of two structural equation models of survey data from two different data sources: emotional responses to Carter and Reagan in the 1980 American Election Survey and three surveys of quality of life that use the Bradburn affect-balance scale. The results, I argue, provide compelling evidence for the validity of the unrotated solution.

It would appear that emotions, (inner brain states), must be expressed as feelings not only in the somatic body, via autonomic change and possibly facial expression and gesture, but also communicated to others for their full effect. Channels for this communication include gesture, vocalization and the focus of the present work, facial expression. This has developed further levels of complexity in man, compared with non-human primates, with the development of subtler emotional states as man's ancestors developed and regulated more complex social groups. Such regulation required knowledge not just of others' likely behavior but their thoughts and emotions. This development of a theory of mind and interpersonal relatedness may have required the development of an area of the somatic self which was visible - the face. The development of such “theories” of mind, (and the emergence of consciousness of others), may therefore have paralleled the development of a mobile emotionally eloquent face. Such models are considered in parallel with biographical narrative accounts of the affects that clinical problems with the expression of emotion on the face, or its interpretation, have on the development of self and social esteem. These cases include those with congenital and acquired blindness, and those with Mobius Syndrome, (a congenital absence in the movements of facial expression). Any consideration of the qualia of emotion and of consciousness must, I believe, include some subjective account of what it is like to live without normal emotion expression on the somatic self, or to live without the ability to perceive this in others. Those with facial differences describe a loss of social relatedness leading to profound social isolation and to an impoverished sense of self. But there are additional and more specific problems. Some with Mobius Syndrome described difficulties in experiencing emotions not expressed on the face, and talked of “thinking emotions” rather than experiencing them. Without facial expression they also have some problems calibrating and controlling emotion. They may, therefore, lack an aspect of the qualia of emotions (they don't have the qualitative experience, they don't know what it feels like) and so they think it or conceptualize it. If that is so, then for those of us without visibly different faces facial expressions, (our own and others'), and the to and fro facial exchanges which are conversations may be an element in the way that we generate emotional qualia, or experience the emotional expression of others.

The role of emotions has been underestimated in the field of robotics. We claim that emotions are relevant for the building of purposeful artificial systems from at least two perspectives: a cognitive and a phenomenological one. The cognitive aspect is relevant for at least two reasons. First, emotions could be the basis for binding between internal values and different external situations (the somatic marker theory). Second emotions could play a crucial role, during development, both for taking difficult decisions whose effects are not immediately verifiable and for the creation of more complex behavioral functions. Thus emotions can be seen, from a cognitive point of view, as a reinforcement stimulus and in this respect, they can be modeled in an artificial being. Inasmuch, emotions can be seen as a medium for linking rewards and values to external situations. From the phenomenological perspective, we accept the division between feelings and emotions. Emotions are, in James' words, the body theatre in which several emotions are represented and feelings are the mental phenomenological perception of them. We could say that feelings are the qualia of the body events we could call emotions. We are using this model of emotions in the development of our project: Babybot. We stress the importance of emotions during learning and development as endogenous teaching devices.

Some jealousy researchers have argued that the term “jealousy” is simply a label for the anger, sadness, and/or fear produced by an appraisal of threat to one's relationship from a romantic rival. I argue here that “jealousy” refers to a particular organization of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that is distinct from other emotions. In the present study, subjects were able to distinguish changes in the intensity of a fictitious person's jealousy from changes in his or her anger, sadness, and fear. This happened despite the fact that the statements used to characterize the person's emotional state were all prototypic jealousy features. Although anger, sadness, and fear commonly occur during jealousy episodes, they appear not to be the essence of what people understand to be jealousy.

Alexithymia is a cognitive-affective disturbance of the experience and expression of emotions. The cognitive and behavioral effects of alexithymia are strikingly similar to disruptions of consciousness reported in the cognitive science literature. Just as blindsight and prosopagnosia may allow covert object and face recognition without report to awareness or other domains, so alexithymia appears to disconnect emotional knowledge and the rest of mental life. This construal of alexithymia in information-processing terms motivates our subsequent analysis: a preliminary relational network of shame. This in turn allows us to make interesting conclusions about the nature and representation of emotions and the use of such representations to determine interventions in affective disorders.

The evidence that the conscious experience of emotion plays a functional role in higher cognition is reviewed. A variety of functions of emotion have been posited in the literature. These include: emotional experience as a motivator of cognitive processing, emotion as a mechanism for attentional bias, and emotion as a determinant of distinct processing styles or modes. Similarities and differences in these proposals are examined. Some implications for research and application are suggested. Problem solving and decision-making can be highly emotional processes. Gearing up to tackle difficult tasks, coping with the frustrations of failure, balancing competing attractive or unattractive options - each of these experiences belies the notion that problem solving is a purely rational process. Feelings, sometimes very strong emotional feelings, frequently come into play. Are these emotional experiences mere epiphenomena to the cognitive functions they accompany? In what follows I review evidence to the contrary, evidence which suggests that the experience of emotion itself may play a functional role in directing the way we solve problems and make decisions in a variety of domains.

The papers in this volume demonstrate the significant progress that has been made over the past decades toward understanding psychological, biological, and social aspects of emotion. The present paper focuses on two areas of recent research that appear to hold particular promise for providing future answers to questions about emotion and consciousness: (1) the interrelationship of emotion, consciousness, and embodied cognition, and (2) the life-span development of expressive, physiological, and experiential aspects of emotion. Recent research in these areas is selectively reviewed, with suggestions for future research directions.

The following sections are included:

• List of Participants