What is (an) emotion? Ana Rita Ferreira UiO, April 5 th, 2016
Upheavals of thought. The intelligence of emotions. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Damásio Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. NY: Avon Books, 1994. Emotions are forms of intelligent awareness; Emotions serve as internal guides concerning the relation between the subject and circumstances; An awareness of the self is part of the experience of any emotion.
Damásio Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. London: William Heinemann, 2010. Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking Feelings of emotion are composite perceptions of what happens in the body and in the mind when we are emoting.
Emotions are appraisals or value judgments; Emotions have a cognitive structure that is in part in narrative form; Emotions involve acknowledgment of neediness and lack of self-sufficiency (they reveal us as vulnerable to events that we do not control); Emotions focus on our own goals and they represent the world from the point of view of those goals and projects, rather than from a strictly impartial viewpoint.
- Emotions are about something: they have an object; - Emotions embody beliefs about the object; - Emotions contain a perception of myself; - Emotions appear to be eudaimonistic (concerned with the person s flourishing); - Emotions can cause physiological effects and there are possibly certain feelings characteristically associated with emotions.
- Appetites: Emotions are value-suffused and object-flexible. Bodily appetites are pushes they arise relatively independently of the world. Emotions are pulled into being by their object. Intentionality is at their very core. - Moods: Emotions always have an object, even if it is a vague object; they always invest the object with value and involve the acceptance of beliefs about the object. Moods lacks these characteristics. - Desires for action: Emotions are closely connected with action, but they are not desires for particular types of action, although they have an intimate connection with motivation. Emotions are acknowledgments of our goals and their status. Desires may contain a perception of their object as a good; but not all perceptions of good give rise directly to action-guiding desires. Emotions may not hook into the situation in a way productive of a concrete plan of action.
Features: - their urgency and heat; - their tendency to take over the personality and to move it to action with overwhelming force; - their connection with important attachments; - the person s sense of passivity before them; - their apparently adversarial relation to rationality ; - their close connections with one another.
- Emotions contain evaluative-eudaimonistic thought and rich and dense perceptions of the object; - The experience of emotion is cognitively laden, or dense; - Emotions typically have a connection to imagination; - Emotions have a dynamic relationship to one another; - Emotions need not to be rational in the sense of being, in every case, explicit or verbal; - Behaviour associated with emotion can affect the experience of the emotion itself; - Emotions have a biological basis that is likely to be common to all, but we experience emotions in ways that are shaped both by individual history and social norms.
Features of societal difference that might shape emotional life in some way: - language; - practices; - social norms; - physical conditions; - metaphysical, religious and cosmological beliefs
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