Abstract
Our analysis starts with a definition of emotions and how they work. We illustrate our discussion with examples, primarily related to anger. We devote special attention to the feelings that characterize our emotional experience, relying on ‘alexithymia’, a clinical condition, to argue for a perceptual theory of emotion in which emotional feelings are the means by which we identify and recognize our emotions. Finally, we consider the role of valence in the mechanism of the emotions, i.e. the way in which emotions are generated, lead to the motivation to end/modify a situation that is perceived as negative or to prolong/reiterate a situation that is perceived as positive, and produce behaviours congruent with this motivation. Here we show that because emotions have multiple and ambiguous valences, one cannot rely on valence to determine, in abstraction, what motivation and behaviour a given emotion will trigger.
Authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order; this article was truly cooperative.
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Notes
- 1.
This sense of the term ‘affective’ played an important – if sometimes ambiguous – role in the psychological lexicon starting from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards (cf. Wassmann 2008).
- 2.
The overlap in notions such as ‘temperament’ and ‘character’ provides insight into the common psychological lexicon. The notion of ‘temperament’ preceded that of ‘character’ in the history of philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. It indicated innate and constitutive factors that tacitly drive individual behaviour and emotional dispositions. The notion of ‘character’ instead indicated the factors that predispose people to react in certain ways: habits, individual choices and environmental conditioning which influence temperament. In the contemporary literature, the notions of ‘temperament’ and ‘character’ have not disappeared altogether from the psychological lexicon, but form part of the construct of personality. For an overview, cf. e.g. Ewald 1924; Strelau 1998; Kagan and Snidman 2004.
- 3.
The issue of whether knowledge is always required for appraisal and of when it is/is not part of the appraisal process was the subject of a thorny dispute that exploded in the ’80s (also as a result of the publication of Zajonc’s article Feeling and Thinking in 1980) and still continues today. For a brief review cf. Prinz 2004, p. 33ff.
- 4.
In philosophy the issue of whether an emotion is or is not appropriate is most often considered in relation to a moral context, that is, whether specific emotions are or are not morally appropriate in specific contexts. For a discussion of what ‘appropriateness’ exactly means in this context cf. e.g. D’Arms and Jacobson 2000.
- 5.
Already Darwin [1872] (1965) regarded postures, movements, bodily and facial expressions as equivalent reactions to specific emotions – i.e., in more contemporary language, as equivalent behavioural patterns corresponding to an emotion. In his view, the fact that humans and animals share similar reactions to the same emotions is, on the one hand, a sign that they are innate or instinctive and, on the other hand, further proof that humans and animals share a common phylogenetic origin. Most notoriously, it was Paul Ekman who, following Darwin, Tomkins (1962, 1963) and Frijda’s line of research (Frijda 1986), argued that emotions are ‘affect programs’ (he takes this notion from Tomkins), i.e. evolutionarily determined responses to environmental situations characterized by a number of distinctive features, which include physiological changes, facial expressions, assessments, behavioural reactions and dispositions (cf. e.g. Ekman 2003).
- 6.
In fact, emotions give rise to spontaneous and immediate action tendencies that are part of an emotional episode. Skeletal and muscular signals also derive from action programs elicited by emotions.
- 7.
We get to experience our emotions through the feelings that characterize them. This does not mean, however, that we cannot have emotions in the absence of bodily feelings. Indeed, as suggested for example by Damasio, the brain centres typically associated with the bodily changes that occur during emotion episodes can also be activated in the absence of bodily signals just by remembering the bodily changes that occurred in previous occasions. This mechanism is called an “as-if-loop” (Damasio 1994, p. 155ff).
- 8.
Given their emotional impairment, alexithymics even have difficulties with tasks that indirectly involve emotions, e.g. tasks that require empathy, mindreading capacities or, more generally, social competencies. However, they exhibit normal intelligence as well as fully developed linguistic and logical capacities. Cf., i.a., Wotschak and Klann-Delius 2013.
- 9.
Cf. e.g. the list of properties that identify positive and negative emotions given by Solomon, Stone (2002, p. 418); some of the features reported in this list were omitted on purpose from the example and will be considered below.
- 10.
These criteria for assessing whether an emotion is positive or negative represent a simplified summary of the review of various conceptions of valence proposed by Prinz 2004, pp. 167ff and Colombetti 2005. These criteria are uniquely of a psychological kind. In fact, emotions can be classified as positive or negative also from a moral/social point of view – i.e. depending on whether they foster or hinder moral/prosocial actions. These two criteria can easily give rise to contradictory outcomes: an emotion that is positive from a psychological viewpoint can be negative from a moral or from a social viewpoint. On the distinction between these two criteria cf. e.g. Ben-Ze’ev (2000, pp. 103) and Kristjánsson (2003, p. 356ff).
- 11.
The mechanism of emotions as we have described it here should be considered a subpart of the ‘machinery’ mentioned by Damasio.
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Pastore, L., Dellantonio, S. (2021). Anger Issues: The Nature and Complexity of Emotions and Emotional Valence. In: Giacomoni, P., Valentini, N., Dellantonio, S. (eds) The Dark Side: Philosophical Reflections on the “Negative Emotions”. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55123-0_14
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