Passive fear

“Passive fear” denotes a certain type of response to a perceived threat; what is distinctive about the state of passive fear is that its behavioral outlook appears to qualify the emotional experience. I distinguish between two cases of passive fear: one is that of freezing in fear; the other is that of fear-involved tonic immobility. I reconstruct the explanatory strategy that is commonly employed in the field of emotion science, and argue that it leaves certain questions about the nature of passive fear unanswered. I subsequently propose an account of passive fear that builds upon a phenomenological theory of emotions, placing emphasis on the interpretation of current research into human tonic immobility. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

The demanding world of emotion: A Gestalt approach to emotion experience

Psychology is biased towards thinking of emotions as feelings rather than as an experiences of the world. But they are both. World-focused emotion experiences (WFEE) are how the world appears or is consciously perceived in one's emotion experience. For example, when happy the world may seem welcoming, or when sad the world may seem barren of possibilities. What explains these experiences? This article discusses explanations of WFEE from phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. Influenced by Lewin, I propose an “emotional demand model” of WFEE. The emotional demand character of objects (e.g. bear-to-be-run-from) is distinguished from their expressive character (e.g. angry bear). It is a mistake to think of emotion faces only as expressions—they are also demands. This distinction explains some anomalous findings in infancy and autism research. The model highlights another tool for recognizing our own emotions: noticing when we feel “demanded of” by the world, with implications for emotion regulation

In Search for the Rationality of Moods

What it is about mood, as a specific type of affect, that makes it not easily amenable to standard models of rationality? It is commonly assumed that the cognitive rationality of an affective state is somehow depended upon how that state is related to what the state is about, its so called intentional object; but, given that moods do not seem to bear an intentional relation to an object, it is hard to see how they can be in the offing for rational assessment. In the first part of the paper I outline three ways of attributing intentionality to moods, raising for each one of them a series of problems, thus casting doubt on the viability of an intentionalist grounding for the rationality of moods. I then move to an examination of the view of moods as background feelings, which are intimately related to how we perceive the world; however, in my view, that approach fails to provide standards of assessment that would permit appraising the mood itself as rational or irrational. Finally, I look at an account of moods as mechanisms whose function is to monitor the balance between environmental demands and one’s physical or psychological resources. That is a promising way to proceed in our exploration of mood states; it faces though some formidable phenomenological challenges. All in all, defending the rationality of moods calls for a rethinking of the assumptions that are prevalent in the current literature over the representational dimension of affective states

Representationalism and the Intentionality of Moods

It seems hard to comprehend how, during mood experience, the ‘inner’ meets the ‘outer’. The objective of this paper is to show that a currently popular attempt at providing a neat solution to that problem fails. The attempt comes under the heading of representationalism, according to which the phenomenal aspects of mood are exhausted by its representational content. I examine three accounts of intentionality developed within the representationalist camp, and I show that they incur phenomenological and metaphysical costs. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht