Hi, I don't entirely understand your ideas in their details, but for the most part it seems reasonable to me. Emotion, in science, is no longer considered a chaotic, interfering aspect of life, or (neccessarily) an irrelevant remnant of our ancient past, but a way of marking what is important and biasing our cognitions, behaviors, recall, and anticipation in particular ways to meet current needs. Emotions are important aspects of active searching and exploratory behavior. We perceive novelty, discrepancy, or interruptions, we generate visceral responses and also our cognitive systems interpret the world as threatening, fearful, or joyful. We retain the important responses to environmental signals that tell us what to pay attention to, and what class of behavior patterns is relevant. There are essentially four scientific theoretical perspectives on emotion that have significant data to support them. (1) The Darwinian perspective sees emotions in terms of their role as distinct adaptations for promoting survival in a species-typical way. The basic data of the Darwinian perspective is that there are some emotional codes that are universal across human cultures, and also some different patterns of autonomic response that distinguish some emotions in terms of their apparent functional roles. It sounds like your statements are very close to those of the Darwinian perspective for the most part, although the Darwinian view doesn't emphasize that animals move toward more emotionally pleasant circumstances. It emphasizes that behavior has to be motivated toward some things and away from others, and pleasant and unpleasant experience help to guide us. How literally we really just tend to move to more pleasant things is an open question complicated by our capacity to learn to routinely delay gratification or at least sacrifice one pleasure for something else. Some additional information ... (2) The traditional perspective of James and Lange modifies the Darwinian view somewhat with the observation (3) The cognitive perspective emphasizes the role of appraisals in emotion. The basic data here is experiments showing that emotions depend in part on the meaning we assign to the situation, especially particular patterns of appraisal. Emotional response can often be reliably predicted from the way people tend to appraise specific kinds of situations. To the extent that the appraisal process can be changed, so can the emotion being experienced. This is of course the basis of cognitive psychotherapies. (4) The social constructivist perspective is not based so much on laboratory data like the other ones, but more on anthropological observations. This perspective emphasizes the degree to which emotional expression and experience plays a role in social behavior and varies from one culture to another. ------------------------------------- "The Science of Emotion," (1996). Randolph Cornelius, Prentice-Hall. An excellent overview of the four perspectives, the data they are based upon, their strengths and weaknesses, and the potential for reconciling them. "The Emotional Brain," (1996). Joseph LeDoux, Simon & Schuster. Introduces the neurobiology of emotion in a uniquely well integrated way, although it deals with only a small subset of emotional behavior. "What Emotions Really Are," (1997). Paul Griffiths, University of Chicago Press. A difficult but worthwhile coverage of the Darwinian perspective, its limits, and what is wrong with some of the alternatives, especially the "propositional" theories of emotion. "Why We Feel," (1999). Victor Johnson, Perseus Press. A readable version of the Darwinian perspective that lightly touches on the roots of "good" and "bad" subjective experience and the role they play in approach and avoidance behavior.
that we experience emotions differently depending on certain specific kinds of physiological feedback of the circumstances we are in. That is the way we interpret physiological signals from our own body sometimes plays a role in what emotion is being expressed. Do we cry because we grieve, or grieve because we cry ? The answer seems obvious but it isn't. Remarkably, there is data showing that both are true to some exent. Ultimately, this factor does not seem to be fundamental to the way emotion works, but it is a modifier under some conditions. The most interesting examples are experiments showing how facial feedback influences emotion, and those showing how people find each other more attractive when under a higher general arousal state.
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