Affective affordances and psychopathology

Self-disorders in depression and schizophrenia have been the focus of much recent work in phenomenological psychopathology. But little has been said about the role the material environment plays in shaping the affective character of these disorders. In this paper, we argue that enjoying reliable (i.e., trustworthy) access to the things and spaces around us — the constituents of our material environment — is crucial for our ability to stabilize and regulate our affective life on a day-today basis. These things and spaces often play an ineliminable role in shaping what we feel and how we feel it; when we interact with them, they contribute ongoing feedback that " scaffolds " the character and temporal development of our affective experiences. However, in some psychopathological conditions, the ability to access to these things and spaces becomes disturbed. Individuals not only lose certain forms of access to the practical significance of the built environment but also to its ​ regulative​ significance, too — and the stability and organization of their affective life is compromised. In developing this view, we discuss core concepts like " affordance spaces " , " scaffolding " , and " incorporation ". We apply these concepts to two case studies, severe depression and schizophrenia, and we show why these cases support our main claim. We conclude by briefly considering implications of this view for developing intervention and treatment strategies

What language does to feelings

This paper distinguishes various ways in which language can act on our affect or emotion experience. From the commonsensical consideration that sometimes we use language merely to report or describe our feelings, I move on to discuss how language can constitute, clarify, and enhance them, as well as induce novel and oft surprising experiences. I also consider the social impact of putting feelings into words, including the reciprocal influences between emotion experience and the public dissemination of emotion labels and descriptions, and how these influences depend on the power of labelling to make complex feelings visible and thus easily accessible. Finally, I address and reinterpret some psychological findings on the so-called “verbal overshadowing” effect

Psychopathology and the enactive mind

According to the ‘enactive’ approach in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, mental states are neither identical with, nor reducible to, brain activity. Rather, the mind is enacted or brought forth by the whole situated living organism in virtue of its specific structure and organization. Although increasingly influential in cognitive science, the enactive approach has had little to do with psychopathology so far. In this chapter I thus first outline this approach in some detail, and then illustrate its conceptual and methodological connections to psychopathology. I also provide some indications on how to develop a more explicitly ‘enactive psychopathology’

Enactive affectivity, extended

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via the DOI in this record.In this paper I advance an enactive view of affectivity that does not imply that affectivity must stop at the boundaries of the organism. I first review the enactive notion of “sense-making”, and argue that it entails that cognition is inherently affective. Then I review the proposal, advanced by Di Paolo (2009), that the enactive approach allows living systems to “extend”. Drawing out the implications of this proposal, I argue that, if enactivism allows living systems to extend, then it must also allow sense-making, and thus cognition as well as affectivity, to extend—in the specific sense of allowing the physical processes (vehicles) underpinning these phenomena to include, as constitutive parts, non-organic environmental processes. Finally I suggest that enactivism might also allow specific human affective states, such as moods, to extend.European Research Counci

Some Ideas for the Integration of Neurophenomenology and Affective Neuroscience

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleDraft version published by permission of the Editor of Constructivist FoundationsPlease see Journal website for published pdfContext • Affective neuroscience has not developed first-person methods for the generation of first-person data. This neglect is problematic, because emotion experience is a central dimension of affectivity. > Problem • I propose that augmenting affective neuroscience with a neurophenomenological method can help address long-standing questions in emotion theory, such as: Do different emotions come with unique, distinctive patterns of brain and bodily activity? How do emotion experience, bodily feelings and brain and bodily activity relate to one another? > M ethod • This paper is theoretical. It advances ideas for integrating neurophenomenology and affective neuroscience, and explains how this integration would allow progress on the above questions. > R esults • An integrated “affective neuro-physio-phenomenology” may help scientists understand whether discrete emotion categories come in different experiential varieties, which would in turn help interpret concomitant brain and bodily activity. It may also help investigate the bodily nature of emotion experience, including how experience relates to actual brain and bodily activity. > Implications • If put into practice, the ideas advanced here would enrich the scientific study of emotion experience and more generally further our understanding of the relationship of consciousness and physical activity. The paper is speculative and its ideas need to be implemented to bear fruit. > Constructivist content • This paper argues in favor of the neurophenomenological method, which is an offshoot of enactivis

Affective incorporation

Classic and more recent phenomenological works provide rich accounts of our experience of the body and of its relation to the world. In this chapter I pull out one thread from this literature, focusing on the phenomenon of incorporation: literally, the capacity of the body to take something else into itself. As we will see, to date this phenomenon has been discussed primarily, if not exclusively, in relation to our sensorimotor capacities. The aim of this chapter is to show that not just the sensorimotor body (the perceiving and moving body) but the affective body too is subject to the process of incorporation

The Somatic Marker Hypotheses, and what the Iowa Gambling Task does and does not show

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version (Vol.59(1), 2008, pp.51-71) is available online at: http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/59/1/51. 24 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released March 2010.Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH) is a prominent neuroscientific hypothesis about the mechanisms implementing decision-making. This paper argues that, since its inception, the SMH has not been clearly formulated. It is possible to identify at least two different hypotheses, which make different predictions: SMH-G, which claims that somatic states generally implement preferences and are needed to make a decision; and SMH-S, which specifically claims that somatic states assist decision-making by anticipating the long-term outcomes of available options. This paper also argues that neither hypothesis is adequately supported empirically; the task originally proposed to test SMH is not a good test for SMH-S, and its results do not support SMH-G either. In addition, it is not clear how SMH-G could be empirically invalidated, given its general formulation. Suggestions are made that could help provide evidence for SMH-S, and make SMH-G more specific.Cognitive Science Laboratory (Center for Mind/Brain Sciences), University of Trento (Italy); Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard Universit

Appraising valence

‘Valence’ is used in many different ways in emotion theory. It generally refers to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of an emotion, as well as to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of some aspect of emotion. After reviewing these different uses, I point to the conceptual problems that come with them. In particular, I distinguish: problems that arise from conflating the valence of an emotion with the valence of its aspects, and problems that arise from the very idea that an emotion (and/or its aspects) can be divided into mutually exclusive opposites. The first group of problems does not question the classic dichotomous notion of valence, but the second does. In order to do justice to the richness of daily emotions, emotion science needs more complex conceptual tools

Why call bodily sense making "languaging"?

Journal ArticleN/AThe European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013

Editorial: Affectivity Beyond the Skin

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Frontiers Media via the DOI in this record