Commentary. © 2005 Cambridge University PressThis commentary makes three points: (1) There may be no clear-cut distinction between emotion and appraisal “constituents” at neural and psychological levels. (2) The microdevelopment of an emotional interpretation contains a complex microdevelopment of affect. (3) Neurophenomenology is a promising research program for testing Lewis's hypotheses about the neurodynamics of emotion-appraisal amalgams

Colombetti, Giovanna

Thompson, Evan

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Open Research Exeter

1Enacting emotional interpretations with feeling Giovanna Colombetti and Evan ThompsonDepartment of Philosophy, York University, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3Canadacolombet@yorku.ca    http://www.arts.yorku.ca/phil/colombet  evant@yorku.ca     http://www.yorku.ca/evantAbstract: This commentary makes three points: (1) There may be no clear-cut distinctionbetween emotion and appraisal “constituents” at neural and psychological levels. (2) Themicrodevelopment of an emotional interpretation contains a complex microdevelopmentof affect. (3) Neurophenomenology is a promising research program for testing Lewis’shypotheses about the neurodynamics of emotion-appraisal amalgams.One way to think about Lewis’s portrayal of appraisal-emotion interactions is bycomparison with dynamic sensorimotor approaches to perception and action (Varela et al.1991; O’Regan & Noë 2001; Hurley & Noë 2003). According to these approaches,perception is as much a motor process as a sensory one. At the neural level, there is“common coding” of sensory and motor processes (e.g., Prinz 1997; Rizzolatti et al.1997). At the psychological level, action and perception are not simply instrumentallyrelated, as means-to-end, but are constitutively interdependent (Hurley 1998). These andother findings can be described by saying that perception is enactive: it is a kind of action(Varela et al. 1991; Noë 2004). Lewis’s target article can be read as presenting a logically analogous way ofthinking about cognition and emotion. At the neural level, brain systems traditionallyseen as subserving separate functions of appraisal and emotion are inextricablyinterconnected. Hence “appraisal” and “emotion” cannot be mapped onto separate brainsystems. At the psychological level, appraisal and emotion are constitutivelyinterdependent: one is not a mere means to the other (as in the idea that an appraisal is ameans to the having of an emotion, and vice versa); rather, they form an integrated andself-organizing emotion-appraisal state, an “emotional interpretation.” Although the target article ends with this kind of account (see in particular the lasttwo paragraphs), the beginning seems more traditional. Lewis individuates emotioncomponents and appraisal components, and maps them onto distinct brain systems.Emotion and appraisal have some components in common (attentional systems inparticular), and their components are highly distributed. Nevertheless, some brainsystems and functions are only emotional and do not belong to appraisal (e.g., arousaland feeling), and some belong only to appraisal and not emotion (e.g., planning). Somebrain systems constitute either emotion or appraisal (or both), and some merely interactwith one or the other. 2Lewis presents the emotion/appraisal distinction as an initial heuristic for lookingat brain processes. We agree that one must start somewhere. Yet we wonder how muchconceptual change Lewis thinks his view of a deeply integrated and dynamic brainimplies for the psychological taxonomy with which he began. Consider that his dynamicapproach is consistent with other, different views of the relationship between emotionand appraisal. Scherer (2000), for instance, also believes that appraisal and emotioncomponents interact in a way best explained in dynamical terms, but he sees appraisal asa component of emotion. Freeman (2000) thinks that emotion is an endogenouslygenerated (mainly limbic) dynamic activity pattern that mediates sensorimotor loops byproviding different degrees of salience to events. According to this view, emotion is aconstitutive element of any cognitive process, so that there is no theoretical room fornonemotional appraisals. This neurodynamic account is consistent withphenomenological accounts, according to which perception and evaluation are emotiveand valenced (Varela & Depraz 2000; Thompson, forthcoming). Although we cannot argue the case here, and although we realize this view isoutside the mainstream of emotion theory with which Lewis is concerned tocommunicate, we nevertheless believe that it may ultimately prove unproductive even totry to differentiate distinct “appraisal constituents” and “emotion constituents,” whichthen “interact” in the formation of an emotional interpretation. Rather, we suspect thatthere may be no appraisal constituent that is not also an emotion constituent, and viceversa. For example, Lewis describes feeling as a component of emotion, but notappraisal. When an emotional interpretation starts to emerge, feeling plays an importantrole in modulating appraisals, but it is not itself an appraisal constituent (see whathappens to Mr. Smart in the target article). Yet there is a “feeling of appraisal,” andappraisal can be seen as constitutive of emotion experience (Frijda 1986). Hencecategorizing feeling as an emotion constituent but not also an appraisal constituent seemslimited. Although feeling plays an important motivational role in Lewis’s model, he does notexplore the phenomenology of affect (the experiential aspect of emotion) in relation tothe emergence of an emotional interpretation. Yet the microdevelopment of an emotionalinterpretation contains within it a complex microdevelopment of affect. Consider amomentary emotional interpretation, such as seeing a stranger’s angry face glaring at youas you walk by. One can point to a number of concurrent components of affect in such anepisode (see also Watt 1998): A precipitating event or trigger, which can be perceptual or imaginary, or both. Thiscomponent corresponds to the trigger phase in Lewis’s model.An emergence of affective salience, involving a sense of the precipitating event’ssignificance. The emotion/appraisal processes leading to the emergence of thisaffective salience could reflect the kind of self-amplification and self-stablizationprocesses Lewis describes.A hedonic tone, along a pleasant/unpleasant polarity.3A motor embodiment, in the form of facial and posture changes, and differentialaction tendencies or global intentions for acting on the world.A visceral-interoceptive embodiment, in the form of complex autonomic-physiological changes (to cardiopulmonary parameters, skin conductance, muscletone, and endocrine and immune system activities). Neuroscientists have recently emphasized the link between affect and “coreconsciousness” or the feeling of self (Panksepp 1998; Damasio 1999), an idea also centralto phenomenological philosophy. These two streams of neuroscience and phenomenologyintersect in the research program of “neurophenomenology” (Varela 1996; Lutz &Thompson 2003; Thompson et al., in press). Lewis’s (2000) model of emotion-appraisalamalgams at multiple time-scales, together with a richer account of the role of affect inthe development of emotional interpretations, can both inform neurophenomenologicalresearch on emotion, and also benefit from its rigorous way of linking first-personphenomenological reports and neurodynamical studies of large-scale integration (seeLutz et al. 2002). In particular, neurophenomenology provides a promising researchprogram for exploring and testing Lewis’s hypotheses about synchronous/asynchronousinteractions across gamma and theta frequency bands in corticolimbic systems (see alsoFriston 2000; Varela et al. 2001). References Damasio, A. R. (1999) The feeling of what happens. Harcourt Brace.   [GC]Freeman, W. J. (2000) Emotion is essential to all intentional behaviors. In:. Emotion,development, and self-organization, ed. M. D. Lewis & I. Granic. CambridgeUniversity Press.   [GC]Frijda, N. H. (1986) The emotions. Cambridge University Press.   [GC]Friston, K. J[PC1]. (2000) The labile brain: II. Transients, complexity, and selection.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. 355:237–52.   [GC]Hurley, S. L. (1998) Consciousness in action. Harvard University Press.   [GC]Hurley, S. L. & Noë, A. (2003) Neural plasticity and consciousness. Biology andPhilosophy 18:131–68.   [GC]Lewis, M. D. (2000) Emotional self-organization at three time scales. In: Emotion,development, and self-organization, ed. M. D. Lewis & I. Granic. CambridgeUniversity Press.   [GC]Lutz, A., Lachaux, J.-P., Martinerie, J. & Varela, F. J. (2002) Guiding the study of braindynamics by using first-person data: Synchrony patterns correlate with ongoing4conscious states during a simple visual task. Proceedings of the National Academyof Sciences USA 99:1586–91.   [GC]Lutz, A &  Thompson, E. (2003) Neurophenomenology: Integrating subjectiveexperience and brain dynamics in the neuroscience of consciousness. Journal ofConsciousness Studies 10:31–52.   [GC]Noë (2004[PC2])O’Regan, K. J. & Noë, A. (2001) A sensorimotor account of vision and visualconsciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24:883–917.   [GC]Panksepp, J. (1998) The periconscious substrates of consciousness: Affective states andthe evolutionary origins of self. Journal of Consciousness Studies 5:566–82.[GC]Prinz, W. (1997) Perception and action planning. European Journal of CognitivePsychology 9:129–54.   [GC]Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L. & Gallese, V. (1997) The space around us. Science277:190–91.   [GC]Scherer, K. R. (2000) Emotions as episodes of subsystem synchronization driven bynonlinear appraisal processes. In: Emotion, development, and self-organization,ed. M. D. Lewis & I. Granic. Cambridge University Press.   [GC]Thompson, E. (forthcoming[PC3]) Radical embodiment: The lived[PC4] body in biology,human experience, and the sciences of mind. Harvard University Press.   [GC]Thompson, E., Lutz, A. & Cosmelli, D. (in press[PC5]) Neurophenomenology: Anintroduction for neurophilosophers. Forthcoming in:. Cognition and the brain:The philosophy and neuroscience movement, ed. A. Brook & K. Akins.Cambridge University Press.   [GC]Varela, F. J. (1996) Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hardproblem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:330–50.   [GC]Varela, F. J. & Depraz, N. (2000) At the source of time: Valence and the constitutionaldynamics of affect. Arob@se. Journal de lettre et de sciences humain 4(1-2).http://www.arobase.to. Also published in S. Gallagher and S. Watson (eds),Ipseity and alterity: Interdisciplinary approaches to intersubjectivity. PressesUniversitaires de Rouen, in press[PC6].   [GC]Varela et  al. (2001[PC7])Varela, F., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991) The embodied mind. MIT Press.   [GC]5Watt, D. F. (1998) Emotion and consciousness: Implications of affective neuroscience forextended reticular thalamic activating system theories of consciousness.Electronic publication of the Association for the Scientific Study ofConsciousness. Available at: http://server.philvt.edu/assc/watt/default.htm.   [GC]

Enacting emotional interpretations with feeling

Giovanna Colombetti

Evan Thompson

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Enacting emotional interpretations with feeling

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