Emotion, Evolution, And Rationality contains the proceedings of a conference at the King’s College London
held within a research project "The function of the emotions". It
thus provides an overview on current research and state of the art theories of
emotion in the cognitive sciences.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first part "Neuroscientific
foundations" Antonio Damasio compares William James’ theory of emotions
with his own. Andrew Lawrence and Andrew Calder follow the continuities between
human and animals emotions and their neural basis. The second part "Emotion,
belief, and appraisal" relates emotions to the propositional attitudes.
Finn Spicer places emotions in the context of belief-desire explanations. Jesse
Prinz asks which emotions are basic. Paul Griffiths distinguishes several
levels of emotion processing. Brian Parkinson unpacks the innate versus the
acquired aspects of emotions. In the third part "Evolution and the
rationality of emotion" emotion is considered as being not a hindrance but
a facilitator of reasoning. Chandra Sripada and Stephen Stich discuss
maladaptive emotions, but Matteo Mameli sees emotional involvement as necessary
for practical reasoning. Dylan Evans puts this thesis as a new version of the search
hypothesis. Daniel Nettle shows that even emotions based on misperceptions
can lead to successful action. Christopher Badcock links the conflict between
emotion and reason to the maternal and paternal gene dichotomy. The fourth part
"Philosophical perspectives" contains a paper by Jim Hopkins
connecting the evolutionary psychology of emotions with Freudian
psychoanalysis. Peter Goldie claims that even though we are in a way not
responsible for our emotions we can be blamed for letting emotions blur our
reasoning.

Instead of going through the individual papers the following points
convey some of the topics and questions dealt with in several of the papers. Of
course not all theorist agree on the theses or assumptions presented here, but
this is one more reason for the book being an engaging overview on the field.

1. Emotions may be perceptions of body
   states. If they are such perceptions, however, there may be — as there
   are unconscious perceptions — unconscious emotions. What we commonly call
   our emotions would be the feeling of an emotion. So is it the
   stimulus that makes an emotion the emotion that it is — or is it rather
   the response, since the antecedents of an emotion can vary
   enormously?  Maybe one should
   distinguish between what an emotion ultimately is (in terms of a perceived
   bodily state) and its function. (Identifying emotions with their functions
   seems to be empty with respect to the question why they and no others
   cognitive states can fulfill this function.)
2. There is no unique neural system (like the
   limbic system) responsible for the emotions. There are several
   subsystems. For example, the amygdale is involved in the production of
   fearful responses, the recognition of fear in others, and the
   experience/feeling of fear as expressed in self-reports, but
   competitive/aggressive behavior relies on a different system. An
   evolutionary taxonomy identifies some elements that are homologous across
   several species: They have a common evolutionary origin, which sometimes
   goes beyond the mammalian species. The question which emotions are basic,
   nevertheless, is hard to answer: For those emotions which are really basic
   we may have no names, whereas those we have names for are constructed and
   culturally developed.
3. Emotions are mostly unlearned if they are
   perceptions of body states. Thus the reactions to these states may be
   automated. On the other hand the very point of having emotions in contrast
   to mere reflexes seems to be that this stage of development allows for
   more flexible reactions. Folk psychological generalizations about what one
   does when in anger are just generalizations, not conceptual entailments.
   The roles that emotions play should thus not be identified with what the
   emotion is. On one view emotions co-occur with beliefs and desires,
   on an other view emotions are rather an intermediate stage — supposedly
   shared with other mammals — on which the separation of the propositional
   attitudes has not appeared: Processing a stimulus is tied to a set of
   reactions. So one might want to have a layered model on which there is
   some mechanism of low-level appraisal, connected to automated components
   of response, and some higher level (intentional/cognitive) processing. Low
   level system need no access to other information centres of the brain, and
   only the higher levels may be available for introspection. All levels deal
   with the ecological affordances a (human) mammal finds itself in.
4. Even it the disposition to react to a
   stimulus of some type is innate, the way of reaction (the more specific content
   of the emotion) can vary culturally. Modular systems tied to facial
   recognition provide pan-cultural emotional antecedents, but the
   classification of the antecedent and the choice of the appropriate
   response depend on the wider system of beliefs and other propositional
   attitudes. They give that content to the emotion which interacts then with
   other propositional attitudes in practical reasoning. The coherence of
   emotions in relation to the environment unfolds in historic situations; it
   need not be innate. As much as biological adaptations can be disfunctional
   if the environment changed, so culturally generated emotions can be
   maladaptive if the social environment changed too fast (for the
   traditional inheriting of these emotions), say, from a culture of "honor"
   to a more flexible postmodern society.
5. Lower level emotions are rational in the
   sense of "ecologically adaptive", i.e. rational with respect to
   the consequences, successful in as much as survival-enhancing. Higher
   level emotions in distinction to moods have propositional content.
   Emotions of neither kind are a hindrance to practical rationality, but are
   a vital means to restrict the search space of possible paths to successful
   action. They have their effects via the belief and desires they
   influence/evaluate. The complexity of deliberation tasks can be well
   beyond the computational resources of the human brain. It is no viable
   option to create all the alternative paths of action at hand and then
   evaluate them by some formal system. Emotions play here the vital role of
   pruning the search tree: Paths associated with a (overall) bad feel (on
   balance) about the outcome are not explored much or not at all. Somatic
   markers thus become necessary for a computational manageable
   practical rationality. Deliberation can only become effective if the
   rationally preferred paths are connected to motivational force; patients
   with peculiar impediments are still able to reason correctly, but they
   take actions at random, since they lack the needed focus on the optimal
   paths. One might speculate that deliberation evolved as a refinement of
   emotional reaction systems, just as these evolved as refinement of reflex
   systems. And this continuity of evolution might be mirrored in an
   interdependent cognitive architecture.

© 2005 Manuel Bremer

Manuel Bremer, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology