Lecture 2 - What are emotions? (according to Adolphs and Anderson) Flashcards
The problem with
commonsense views
of emotions
- Familiarity with emotional
experience fuels an illusion of
knowledge that limits scientific
progress - Recognizing that this is an
illusion is necessary to
advance
Emotion according to
‘Inside Out’
- There are a few primary emotions
- joy, anger, fear, sadness, disgust
- These emotions are rigidly triggered by
specific external stimuli - Emotions control behavior
- Different emotions reside in different,
discrete parts of the brain - Emotions are homunculi
Unpacking the
assumptions: 1. ‘There are a few
primary emotions’
- ‘There are a few
primary emotions’
Many theories propose a relatively
small, fixed number of ‘primary’
emotions
For example, Paul Ekman argued that
facial expressions can be recognized
across all human cultures and that
these correspond to basic categories of
human emotion
This leads to some assumptions:
-‘Emotions are irreducible’
i.e. primary emotions (e.g. fear) are
distinct and cannot be broken down
further
In the film, this is illustrated by each
primary emotion being a distinct,
unique character with fixed & nonoverlapping identities & functions
There is not a lot of evidence for this
It’s also possible that emotions could be
composed of distinct and overlapping
collections of building blocks
This is an empirical question
Associated assumptions:
-‘Primary emotions are those that we
have names for in English’
There is an idea that our words for
emotions e.g. ‘happiness’, ‘anger’ etc
correspond to a scientifically valid
category of emotion
Words for emotions vary across
languages
Emotions almost certainly predate
language
We need a scientifically grounded
taxonomy of emotion
Questions we can ask
Are different emotion states made up of
shared features?
Are some emotions made up of
combinations of other emotions?
Unpacking the assumptions: 2. ‘Emotions are rigidly triggered by specific external stimuli’
- ‘Emotions are rigidly
triggered by specific
external stimuli’
Inside out depicts emotions as
characters waiting at a control panel
watching a projection of the outside
world. They jump into action when a
specific stimuli appears.
This suggests emotions are simple,
inflexible stimulus-response events
that could be understood by a list of
rules describing stimulus-emotion
relationships
Trigger - Emotion - Autopilot reaction
Assumption:
-Emotions are like reflexes
Emotions can be triggered by external
stimuli but there is a lot to understand
about which stimuli trigger which
emotion in which circumstances.
Reflexes are similar in all people
across all contexts
Ex: knee-jerk reflex
Whereas
Emotions vary widely across people and contexts
Ex: image of clown can solicitate fear or happiness or…
And can even vary within person depending on context
Questions we can ask
What factors influence if and how and
external stimulus evokes an emotion/
which specific emotion?
How is this influenced by learning and
development?
Is this different from a simple reflex?
Unpacking the assumptions: 3. ‘Emotions control our
behaviour’
‘Emotions control our
behaviour’
In Inside Out, the emotion characters
operate joysticks on the control panel,
controlling the little girl like a puppet.
Assumption:
-Specific emotions rigidly cause specific
behaviours
Some theories of emotion (e.g. William
James) argue that emotions are
consequence not cause of behaviour
e.g. I feel afraid because I run from the
bear
Any mapping between emotions and
behaviour is complex and depends on
context, learning etc.
Again, there is flexibility.
Questions we can ask
What is the directional relationship
between emotion and behavioral and
physiological changes associated with
emotion?
How do emotion stats map to
behavioural responses and how is this
modulate by context, development etc?
Unpacking assumptions: 4. ‘Different emotions
reside in different
discrete brain regions’
Assumption:
-Different emotions are found in
anatomically distinct modules of
the brain.
fMRI and lesion studies led to this
idea.
For example, ‘ fear is in the
amygdala’
More recent work points to
distributed networks of brain
regions.
Questions
How is emotion processed across the
brain?
Can we identify neural substrates of
specific emotion states? Are these fixed?
Could we predict the precise emotion of an
individual purely from examining their
brain?
Unpacking assumptions: 5. ‘Emotions are
conscious homunculi’
The idea that our subjective
experience is created by a little
person inside our brain that
transfers perceptions, reactions
etc. to us
Assumptions:
-Emotions are purely subjective
experiences (i.e. distinct from a
biological embodiment).
The biological basis of conscious
experience remains largely a mystery
(but most likely doesn’t involve little
people watching screens in our heads)
Brain cells decode information but
exactly how this occurs is an active
area of research
The conscious experience of emotion
emerges from the the function of brain
systems but the experience is at the
level of the person/animal.
For example, vision, emerges from the
function of retina, thalamus, cortex but
doesn’t exist in any of these uniquely.
Questions
How do emotions arise in the brain?
Can we separate subjective, conscious
experience of emotions from emotion
states?
What is needed for a science of emotion?
- Expose and examine our intuitive ideas about emotion and separate these from scientific
insight - Develop clear questions that we can investigate with the scientific method to advance our
understanding - Develop clear and useful definitions
- Recognize that an emotion state can be described by different kinds of data
-Observation of behaviour
-Conscious self-reported experience
-Psychophysiology/endocrine measures
-Neuroscience measures
Emotions can be
inferred from
different data:
Different scientific traditions use
different methods and also different
concepts & terminology to describe
emotion phenomena
Relating different fields can be a
challenge, like translating between
languages
A functional approach to studying
emotion that is built on clear definitions
may help lead to an integrated science of
emotion that draws on insights from
behavioral science, psychology and
neurobiology
Neuroscience aims to explain emotions
through their underlying mechanisms.
Emotions are more
complex than
reflexes but simpler
than planned actions
The knee jerk reflex is a simple reflex
– tapping the relaxed knee tendon in a
specific position causes the leg to extend
A specific stimulus elicits a specific
response
Only requires an intact spinal cord
Reflexes are robust and powerful
They are also rigid and narrow
Survival requires more behavioural
flexibility
Emotions could be thought of as a layer
of control a bit like a reflex in that the
behavioural response is constrained and
has a specific function but more flexible
in that many stimuli can produce the
response
- Focusing on the function of emotion
states can help clarify this - For example, disgust served to avoid
poisonous or contaminated food - A disgust reflex ?
taste of poison → spitting out food - But there are many different poisons or contaminants
that are detected by taste, smell, look or feel - Poisons or contaminants can also be indirectly
learned about by watching other people experience
them - We can learn disgust through experience (e.g. getting
food poisoning after eating a food) - Disgust can be overcome (e.g. survival tactics)
- Disgust involves innate and learned components and
has a strong impact on behaviour that can be
(partially) overcome - There is a level of flexibility that goes beyond
reflexive control mechanisms - The emotion of disgust could be a central state that
can be applied to organize and flexibly control
behaviour in response to a wide range of disgustevoking stimuli - This has evolved beyond poisons/contaminants to
different kinds of abstract disgust e.g. moral disgust - The specific function remains: avoiding passive,
potentially harmful stimuli
Central emotion states: an
interface between stimuli and
brain function
- A flexible central state allows emotion
information to interact with many other
brain processes e.g. attention, memory,
cognition - For example, remembering where you
were and what you ate that made you
sick - Emotions profoundly influence
behaviour but also cognitive processes
Reading: What is an emotion? by Adolphs, Barrett et al.
- Ralph Adolphs & Lisa Feldman Barrett
are both human emotion researchers
and yet they have very different
perspectives - Points to the need for a unified
framework - Some of the disagreements are about
language
‘affective features of percepts’ vs ‘emotions - Some relate to explaining phenomena at
different levels
e.g. Adolphs is not concerned with
conscious experience, Barrett focuses
primarily on conscious experience - Some core differences
e.g. Adolphs: human inference identifies
emotion, Barrett: human inference
constructs emotion - Some key insights
‘All existing taxonomies that are anchored in
folk psychology categories … are not a
useful guide for scientific investigation’
(Barrett)
‘The evidence argues for homologous
emotion* circuits that are shared by humans
and many other mammals.’ (Adolphs)
(*Barret calls these ‘action circuits)
‘What we learn (or fail to learn) about
emotion in any experiment is determined by
how we define emotions in the first place.’
(Barrett)
