Nicole RustJun 22

I'm writing up a few things on the big debate around "What is an emotion?" and I'm crowd sourcing wisdom. I see two big axes. Am I missing any?

1) Arguments that we should reserve "emotion" words for cases in which we have evidence for subjective experience (ie humans). ala Joe LeDoux. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35079126/

2) Arguments about the criteria that differentiate emotions from other feelings (like hunger and tiredness). These relate to the Q: Does an airpuff to the eye evoke an emotion? (and all the discussion around this): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt3971
One argument that it does not: "emotion" should be reserved for situations that trigger cognitive appraisal. Emotions are not just triggered by stimuli, but also depend on context. An air puff to the eye will always be irritating.

In sum, in these debates, there's the 1) "evidence for subjective experience" dim. and (even when that evidence exists) the 2) "criteria to be an emotion" dim., which includes criteria like those in the science paper (valence, persistence, generalization) and cog appraisal.

Have I missed anything?

That is to say: I don't believe there are debates about the reality of the phenomena, just when to call them "emotion" versus some other type of "feeling" (or "affective state"). Often, defining the "phenomena of interest" is diff. from theories about it (eg the thermometer versus thermodynamics). These are a bit more intertwined in emotion research. In my description, does anything jump out at you as missing from debates about the phenomena (not the theories)?

Thanks!

Putting the "mental" back in "mental disorders": a perspective from research on fear and anxiety - PubMed

Mental health problems often involve clusters of symptoms that include subjective (conscious) experiences as well as behavioral and/or physiological responses. Because the bodily responses are readily measured objectively, these have come to be emphasized when developing treatments and assessing the …

PubMed
Show threadRedish LabJun 22

@NicoleCRust

I look forward to reading your write up. Some thoughts.

1. I think that a large axis is how emotions are categorized within themselves. This especially arises when you start to differentiate immediate and future events. (For example, do all cultures separate anxiety and fear? I know that rage (immediate) and anger (seething) are sometimes differentiated and sometimes not.) There's some really nice work from Jackson and Lindquist on this.

2. I think one should be careful with terms like "cognitive appraisal". What allows us to determine that something is cognitively appraised?

2a. Is it that the event is in the future? (Rats definitely "worry" about future dangerous events from things they can't currently see. We know they respond behaviorally to hidden dangers. We know that they represent that hidden future in neural activity in hippocampus and elsewhere.)

2b. But also, an airpuff to the eye may always be irritating, but all mammals can "push through it". So I don't think immediacy is sufficient to reject cognitive appraisal. All mammals can, under sufficient motivation, push through an immediately negative event (shock, airpuff) to get to something in the future. Is that cognitively appraised?

2c. To get to cognitive appraisal, do we need neural data? What neural data would be sufficient to provide for cognitive appraisal?

Further (3): I think a third axis is the cross-species axis. I think we need to consider how the definitions interact with the data that we can collect from a given species. (Personally, I don't think we have any better evidence for "subjective" experience in humans than in many other mammals. We always over anthropomorphize the humans because we believe them when they talk to us. I always bring up referred pain - a human who says they have a pain in their arm is not correctly assessing the situation. Similarly, a human who says they are doing X because they are anxious about Y is often wrong about their reasons. We should not assume that humans can tell us their subjective experience any more than rats and mice can.)

Truth be told - I think that there is great evidence that mammals at least (including rats, mice, cats, dogs, monkeys, and humans) all have subjective emotional experience through activation in ventral frontal cortices. But I think the debate about "what is an emotion" needs to address the cross-species complexity.

In line with that, I just got back from a conference where several human-oriented researchers argued that humans have better visceral feedback than non-human animals and that this was a big key to "subjective experience", but when pressed they basically said that the non-human data hadn't been collected yet.

Show threadRedish Lab

@NicoleCRust

Also, as a follow-up, I wonder if it would be worth pointing out to people like Joe that we've been trying to do mental health treatment at the mental level for over a century (probably closer to 150 years now) and it's really not worked. (I mean if it's all "conscious" and "mental", then talk therapy should be enough, right?)

Interestingly, at this conference, several researchers showed data supporting successful mental health treatment (particularly for certain stress conditions) via changing physical symptoms through exercises that changed physical phenomena.

I wonder how much the "mental" health is actually a brain-body separation problem. 🤔

Jun 22 at 12:43pmWeb
Show threadAndrew PapaleJun 22
@adredish @NicoleCRust Eran Eldar (@HUJI) and my current PI Alex Dombrovski have a great study on how emotion (mood) influences evaluation of future rewards. Look for some preprints soon!
Show threadNicole RustJun 22
@adredish
These are terrific points - thank you for them!