Posted by Estella on May 18, 2006, at 21:22:58
In reply to Re: opinion survey, posted by llrrrpp on May 18, 2006, at 11:36:45
> I should be able to cite references and studies, but my memory fails me.
lol ditto.
when you talk about babies and cats it seems that you are basing your decision (that they do have emotion) on a behavioural criteria. so the cat has an emotion because it displays emotional behaviour and the same for the infant.
some theories of emotion... maintain that emotions are tendancies (or dispositions) to display emotional behaviour.
(behaviourism led by Gilbert Ryle).> In order to have an emotional reaction, there has to be some processing of an external stimulus...
though some emotions can be 'top down' driven. if you imagine a scarey situation... that might serve as an internal stimulus for fear.
> this processing is cognitive in nature (regardless of whether it's available to consciousness)
depends how you define 'cognitive'.
lets consider the visual system.
early levels of processing process basic sensory features such as lines and edges at certain orientations.
mid levels of processing process three dimensional objects.
if we consider the pre-conscious first level of processing...
there are populations of neurons that go haywire when and only when they are processing a line of a certain orientation.
we can't be consciously aware of the contents of that population of neurons...
does their activity count as cognitive?
on some theories of cognition... something counts as cognitive when and only when there is the possibility that it could be consciously experienced. not to say that it is consciously experienced but only to say that it could be consciously experienced if it were attended to. the brain processes that are too low level to be conscious may be described as processing information but not described as cognitive (depending on your theory of cognition).in the emotions literature cognitive theories are typically contrasted with non cognitive theories. according to cognitive theories to have an emotion requires one to make a cognitive judgement of the form 'that object poses a threat to me' or 'that is an irrevokable loss' or 'there has been a demeaning offence to me or mine' or similar.
if the cognition 'there has been a demeaning offence to me or mine' requires one to have the concepts of 'demeaning offence' and the concept of 'me' and those are the relevant judgements for anger then animals and infants cannot experience anger because they lack the concepts required for the judgement. people don't acquire the concept of self until... age three or around there? animals don't seem to (aside from arguably the higher apes). dogs and cats are incapable of it...
if the cognition can be unconscious and non conceptual then this is a lot more plausible... though then the distinction between cognitive and non cognitive theories seems to lapse.
Le Doux talks about how the amygdala can produce a fear response (in terms of behaviours) without any input from the higher cortical areas (where the higher cortical areas seem to be the areas involved in processing at the level of concepts). the amygdala can trigger a response to fairly basic perceptual processes such as a coiled object. the response is triggered before the higher visual processing where the object is classified as a snake or a garden hose. the amygdala is incapable of conceptualisation, it is incapable of complex cognitive judgement, it is capable of triggering an emotional response hence... emotions don't require complex cognitions.
unless they do by definition and startle response to snakes is too low level to count as a proper fear response. that would be what the cognitive theorist would say (and indeed that is typically what they do say).
> Well, psychologists are still defining emotion, as you know.
indeed :-)
and the matter is partly empirical...
(for the psychologists)
and partly conceptual...
(for the philosophers)
:-)> Every theory uses its own definition, in order to investigate a particular phenomenon.
yes. and that is why it is hard to work out what the significance of the findings for emotion is. because theorists define emotions differently and then proceed to talk past each other.
> For empirical investigations, the physiological response is usually taken as best evidence.
yeah. SGR and heart rate in particular.
then there is facial response (a long tradition of that beginning with Darwin)
then there is verbal report
then there is behaviour
then there is tapping into peoples thoughts about emotions by conducting surveys. for example: is it possible to feel jealous without feeling angry? if people say no then that is taken as evidence that jealousy is anger plus something else. the trouble with this is that sometimes... the folk are wrong. if you want to know about the nature of water you don't ask the folk you conduct systematic investigation. likewise if you want to know about the nature of emotion you don't ask the folk you conduct systematic investigation. on the other hand if the scientists were to tell us that actually snails have emotions and people don't have them after all then we would suspect they weren't really talking about emotions they had switched to talking about something else.> For introspective investigations, the phenomenological aspect is by far the most relevant.
well... if phenomenology is what most people mean by emotion so that one is feeling angry when one feels a certain special way and one is sad when one feels another certain special way then it would seem that emotions are phenomenological states (according to the folk).
just like sensory experiences...
just like perceptual experiences...and how the phenomenology relates to physical processes such as cognition, bodily changes, brain state changes etc is a matter of investigation... but if phenomenology is essential to emotions then if you could make a computer with the phenomenology... if you encountered aliens made of silicon (with bodies and brains radically different to ours) with the phenomenology...
> yes, many illnesses may be emotions that are not being interpreted by the conscious mind. If I have a stomachache, I might think of it as a result of my taco salad. I might experience it as a result of a stressfull conversation. In one case, it's an emotion. In another case, it's a symptom of physical illness.
hmm. that is interesting...
thanks...
poster:Estella
thread:645293
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060513/msgs/645689.html