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Emotion with philosopher Tom Cochrane
234 Plays1 year ago
What is emotion? How’s it different from feelings? How do different people experience it?
Vynn and Francis interview philosopher Tom Cochrane, author of “The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States”, about emotion.
They unpick the sometimes confusing academic words on this topic, such as affect and valence.
How does the way the brain is a prediction machine relate to emotion? Are emotions social? What is the impact of different clothes, locations or music on emotion? What is the state of scientific experiments about emotion?
This episode has a follow-up companion episode, where Vynn and Francis talk more widely about our varying experience of emotion.
Timestamps:
00:42 Definitions - emotion, feelings, affect, valence
09:24 Meditation used to increase attention
11:21 Valent (positive/negative) representation
17:30 Predictive processing
20:03 Emotions!
26:08 Social emotions
29:38 Varying experience of emotion - bodily, cognitive, colours
33:55 Expressing emotion with clothes, music, writing
36:16 Science behind emotions - experiments
Show Links:
- “The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States” - book by Tom Cochrane
- “Your brain doesn’t detect reality. It creates it” - video with Lisa Feldman Barrett
- “The Emotional Power of Music” - book by Tom Cochrane
- “A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis” - Nature Human Behaviour
- Tom Cochrane on Twitter - @doctorcochrane
- Tom’s Website - All Writings
Contact Details:
Please follow us, get in touch, tell us about your inner experiences!
Twitter: @imagine_apple @SurenVynn @frabcus
Email: imagine@flourish.org
Theme written, performed and recorded by @MJPiercello
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Imagine an Apple'
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Imagine an Apple, the podcast about inner mental experiences.
00:00:05
Speaker
Your hosts are Francis and Vin.
00:00:08
Speaker
So Vin, what have we got on today?
00:00:10
Speaker
Today we've got a guest to talk about emotions.
Introducing Philosopher Tom
00:00:15
Speaker
And our guest today is Tom, who is a philosopher at Flinders University.
00:00:19
Speaker
And some of his books include The Emotional Mind, A Control Theory of Mental States.
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast, Tom.
00:00:27
Speaker
Thank you for inviting me.
00:00:29
Speaker
Thank you for having us.
Tom's Fascination with Emotions
00:00:41
Speaker
So the first thing I want to ask is the question of your motivation.
00:00:47
Speaker
Why?
00:00:47
Speaker
Can you just give us a little bit of a background about
00:00:50
Speaker
What got you into emotion in the first place?
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah, so emotions are deeply fascinating.
00:00:57
Speaker
I mean, anyone who has any interest in living a good life is going to be interested in the mechanics of that.
00:01:05
Speaker
these mental states that seem to make all the difference between whether we're doing well or doing badly.
00:01:11
Speaker
And you tend to find that the more you explore them, the more you see how complicated and deep and strange and subtle they are.
00:01:20
Speaker
So they're just a perennial source of fascination.
00:01:23
Speaker
And they link to all kinds of other areas, not just in philosophy, but in across all the different areas of human knowledge.
00:01:31
Speaker
So there's just no shortage of things that you can get into via the emotions.
00:01:36
Speaker
Brilliant.
Feelings vs. Emotions: What's the Difference?
00:01:37
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:01:39
Speaker
Before we go into the deep end and start interrogating you about the books that you've read.
00:01:46
Speaker
I think there's a really common distinction that most people in everyday conversation make between feelings and emotions.
00:01:53
Speaker
And I remember one of our Twitter interactions involving this very distinction.
00:01:58
Speaker
And that's probably how we first interacted with each other.
00:02:02
Speaker
Is there something that you want to say about that?
00:02:04
Speaker
Is there a distinction that you make, or at least in the literature that you're aware of, between feelings and emotions?
00:02:11
Speaker
Right, it is a very core issue and one that it's very easy to get confused about.
00:02:17
Speaker
So you're right that for most people, emotions and feelings seem virtually synonymous.
00:02:24
Speaker
You ask, you do surveys where you say which of these various possible features of emotions are most important or central and people will point to feelings.
00:02:31
Speaker
So for a lot of philosophers, analyzing feelings is the very nature of analyzing emotions.
00:02:38
Speaker
However, I think the states can be distinguished.
00:02:41
Speaker
So feelings more essentially refer to a conscious state, right?
00:02:46
Speaker
You consciously feel something good or bad or itchy or hungry or whatever it might be.
00:02:53
Speaker
where emotions tends to be more of a psychological construction in the sense that it's a term we'll use to cover characteristic emotional states like happy, sad, angry, and scared.
00:03:04
Speaker
And so they often point to a more definite functional profile, like they have some sort of input and some sort of output, whereas a feeling need not particularly have any sort of functional profile.
00:03:17
Speaker
It just feels some way in a very immediate or intrinsic way.
00:03:22
Speaker
Interesting.
00:03:22
Speaker
Okay.
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:24
Speaker
There's more we can say, but yeah, that's just a starting point.
00:03:26
Speaker
Right.
00:03:27
Speaker
Okay.
00:03:27
Speaker
So just to really short recap, you say that sometimes feelings are always felt, i.e.
00:03:34
Speaker
you have conscious access to them and emotions are not necessarily felt and feelings have functional profiles, whereas do not necessarily have functional profiles where emotions always do?
Understanding Affect and Its Confusions
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:45
Speaker
I think that more or less covers it.
00:03:47
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:03:48
Speaker
Thanks for explaining that.
00:03:50
Speaker
I guess another word that I see being thrown around quite a lot and is probably popularized by Lisa Feldman Barrett's writings on this matter is the notion of affect.
00:04:03
Speaker
I'm assuming our listenership is somewhat familiar with her work on affect.
00:04:10
Speaker
But I was just wondering if there are any similarities or differences between your notion affect and the one that is popularized by her.
00:04:17
Speaker
What is it tangibly?
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:19
Speaker
So affect, I would certainly put closer to the concept of feeling.
00:04:24
Speaker
It again tends to refer to something that we consciously feel and that can be positive or negative.
00:04:31
Speaker
And it's that positive and negative affect.
00:04:33
Speaker
aspect that's really essential to it, which distinguishes it from say, you know, feeling cold, which need not be either positive or negative, or it could go one way or the other.
00:04:43
Speaker
But there's been a huge confusion about the term affect.
00:04:47
Speaker
Some people again treat it as synonymous with emotion.
00:04:49
Speaker
We also have this word affective states, which tends to confuse Malta even further.
00:04:55
Speaker
And I'm not sure the way that I use affect in my book is entirely standard.
00:04:59
Speaker
So it's still not something that's very resolved.
00:05:02
Speaker
So often when you use the term, you just have to stipulate, okay, this is what I mean by affect and let's go on from that point.
00:05:07
Speaker
That's quite a relief to know because I, yeah, we're struggling to understand the common meaning across different authors.
00:05:13
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think we haven't got together and hammered this out, I'm afraid.
00:05:17
Speaker
So you're just going to have to be confused and just see how they define it in whatever text you're
00:05:21
Speaker
engaging with.
00:05:22
Speaker
Right.
00:05:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:23
Speaker
That seems to be a common strategy to getting around the literature.
00:05:27
Speaker
I mean, for me, I can tell you what I mean by affects, if you like.
00:05:30
Speaker
For me, it's going to be the intrinsically positive or negative qualities of experience.
00:05:35
Speaker
So basically the painfulness or pleasurableness of an experience.
00:05:40
Speaker
And you can give a quite detailed account of what exactly that involves.
00:05:45
Speaker
But that's, again, not going to be the same thing as emotion.
00:05:47
Speaker
It's often going to accompany emotion.
00:05:49
Speaker
But you can have emotion without affect.
00:05:51
Speaker
And that's something that Barrett will not agree with.
00:05:55
Speaker
I see.
00:05:55
Speaker
Thanks for pointing that out.
00:05:57
Speaker
So you mentioned positive and negative.
00:06:00
Speaker
And I'm guessing that has something to do with valence, which you also happen to write quite a lot about.
The Concept of Valence in Emotions
00:06:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think valence is an easier term because at least that's a psychologically technical term.
00:06:11
Speaker
So it just means positive or negative.
00:06:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:14
Speaker
or something that's psychologically positive, you can get various interpretations of it.
00:06:19
Speaker
Like what exactly is it you're taking to be positive or negative?
00:06:21
Speaker
Is it the quality of an experience again?
00:06:24
Speaker
Or is it something more behavioral, like tendency to approach or tendency to avoid?
00:06:29
Speaker
Or appetitive as opposed to aversive.
00:06:31
Speaker
These sometimes get thrown out as well.
00:06:34
Speaker
I tend to take a fairly, at least initially, a behavioral notion that it's just a tendency to increase the presence of something means positive valence.
00:06:42
Speaker
and the tendency to decrease the presence of something is negatively violent.
00:06:46
Speaker
So if you're hungry, then food is positively violent for you.
00:06:49
Speaker
You want to get some more of it.
00:06:51
Speaker
And if you're hurt, then the bodily damage is negatively violent.
00:06:55
Speaker
You want to reduce that.
00:06:57
Speaker
Brilliant.
00:06:57
Speaker
Thanks for explaining that.
00:06:59
Speaker
Sure.
00:07:01
Speaker
Francis, we're just about to say something.
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:04
Speaker
So when do you use the word affect versus when you use the word valent?
00:07:07
Speaker
Because they seem to overlap quite a lot.
00:07:09
Speaker
They're slightly different parts of speech.
00:07:11
Speaker
But
00:07:11
Speaker
Right.
00:07:12
Speaker
So you can have a bodily system, like a homeostatic bodily system that, you know, gets you food or keeps you warm, maintains your blood pressure and so on, where you don't feel anything conscious at all, right?
00:07:23
Speaker
So you don't have any intrinsically pleasurable or painful sensations whatsoever.
00:07:28
Speaker
So generally, I place affect as a higher level sort of psychological function above the more basic valence processes, which help to keep us alive.
00:07:38
Speaker
So affect has to be conscious in some way.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:41
Speaker
On the view that I'm promoting.
00:07:43
Speaker
And indeed, I think that's the majority view on that.
00:07:45
Speaker
So if I have, I know low blood sugar and that's negatively valent, I might not realize I have, and my body might be automatically converting fat into blood sugar for me.
00:07:54
Speaker
But then if I get hungry, cause I've got low blood sugar, then that becomes an affect.
00:07:58
Speaker
Right.
00:07:59
Speaker
So I tend to say that, well, I don't tend to say, I definitely do say that where a negatively valent system fails, so you're hurt and yet you're failing to manage it, you will tend also then to trigger affect as a sort of urgency signal saying, okay, this is really bad.
00:08:17
Speaker
This is really urgent.
00:08:18
Speaker
You need to deal with it.
00:08:19
Speaker
And then symmetrically for positive affect, so you have a lower level or underlying positively balanced system.
00:08:27
Speaker
You're trying to get something good.
00:08:28
Speaker
You're trying to get whatever it is you need.
00:08:30
Speaker
And then if you're also successful in doing that, so you're noticeably successful, you've managed to acquire this thing, then you get feelings of pleasure.
00:08:36
Speaker
You'll get the intrinsically positively felt affect.
00:08:40
Speaker
So affect in some sense is a higher level system for managing all our various low level
00:08:48
Speaker
homeostatic or survival maintaining or just generally our emotional systems.
00:08:54
Speaker
It really helps to distribute attention according to urgency.
00:08:58
Speaker
So, you know, our body often gets along with all kinds of functions simultaneously without us having to really worry much about it.
00:09:04
Speaker
But sometimes it needs more resources.
00:09:07
Speaker
Sometimes you need to turn all your attention towards whatever this urgent thing might be.
00:09:11
Speaker
You know, you're particularly hungry or you're particularly hurt.
00:09:14
Speaker
And then affect is going to play a big role there in getting the conscious person at a person level to
Training Attention to Regulate Emotions
00:09:20
Speaker
really focus their resources on this particular issue.
00:09:23
Speaker
Right.
00:09:24
Speaker
So this is really interesting to me because attention is something that I believe can be trained.
00:09:31
Speaker
And this is, in fact, like brought in certain meditative practices or maybe experiences of like
00:09:38
Speaker
people under psychedelics or some altered states of consciousness where their attentions can expand and contract.
00:09:46
Speaker
And because they're voluntarily changing their the incoming stimulus that they're receiving, they're able to pay attention to what would otherwise be unconscious homeostatic ongoings in the body.
00:10:01
Speaker
And one example of this is where people
00:10:04
Speaker
are able to notice their heart rate and sometimes even their breath and their blood pressure in ways that allow them to regulate what would otherwise be unconscious homeostatic processes.
00:10:19
Speaker
Can you speak a little bit more about this?
00:10:22
Speaker
I think that is an interesting observation.
00:10:26
Speaker
I haven't really taught very much in my work about our powers of generally increasing intention.
00:10:31
Speaker
I mean, what you're generally referring to is what gets called endogenous attention, where you are deliberately focusing your attention or guiding it towards certain issues.
00:10:44
Speaker
I think it's quite plausible that we can train that
00:10:48
Speaker
capacity.
00:10:49
Speaker
I think it's quite plausible that psychedelics indeed could play a role in manipulating it or possibly even boosting it in certain regards.
00:10:57
Speaker
So it's a very interesting area.
00:10:59
Speaker
I mean, I think we're going to see a lot more about how psychedelics or other sorts of meditative practices can really cultivate our powers over our own minds.
00:11:11
Speaker
But it's, yeah, it's an area that's a
00:11:13
Speaker
not something I can speak very definitively about at the moment, I think.
00:11:16
Speaker
That's fine.
00:11:17
Speaker
Right.
00:11:17
Speaker
Let's bring it back to emotions
Valent Representation in Mind Theory
00:11:19
Speaker
then.
00:11:19
Speaker
So in your book, you've kind of layered it in such a way that you talk about valent representation, affect and then emotions.
00:11:28
Speaker
Is there a difference between like valent representation and valence itself?
00:11:32
Speaker
And what do you how do you use those terms?
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, valent representation is this very core notion.
00:11:38
Speaker
I mean, it's a term that I've introduced where I say, okay, at the foundations of the mind, we have this thing, this system called valent representation.
00:11:47
Speaker
And it's basically a way of applying control theory or this notion of negative feedback loops to the mind generally.
00:11:56
Speaker
And then my idea is that
00:11:58
Speaker
we can elaborate these valent representations.
00:12:01
Speaker
We can create, we can get them to interact with each other.
00:12:04
Speaker
We can get them to reinforce each other or inhibit each other, or one knocks off the next one and so on.
00:12:09
Speaker
And so in this way, you can construct these quite elaborate systems in which layers of valent representation build on top of each other.
00:12:16
Speaker
So
00:12:17
Speaker
The ultimate claim I'm going for is that literally the entire mind is an elaboration upon the basic system of valent representation.
00:12:27
Speaker
So it's a way of trying to ground the mind in these very simple systems of negative feedback and homeostatic regulation, which has various attractions in terms of giving you something quite naturalistically plausible and evolutionarily plausible.
00:12:45
Speaker
And it's not just me, it's quite a few other researchers in various other fields who are interested in pursuing this general control theory approach to the mind.
00:12:54
Speaker
It's quite a powerful approach that I think helps to really open up our understanding of the mind in all these different areas.
00:13:03
Speaker
So I think there's quite a movement going on in that space.
00:13:07
Speaker
So is valent representation another way of phrasing the idea of wanting or desiring?
00:13:14
Speaker
It can include also being averse to things.
00:13:17
Speaker
So in that sense, I would say it's closer to the term need in terms of ordinary language.
00:13:25
Speaker
So the most basic valent representations will be your needs, your basic needs.
00:13:30
Speaker
Hunger, thirst, and air, and all those kinds of things.
00:13:33
Speaker
But emotions, I mean, it's going to be a very broad category.
00:13:35
Speaker
So emotions also count as a subcategory of valiant representation.
00:13:39
Speaker
Social kind of interactions will also fall under this category.
00:13:43
Speaker
So often conscious thought you can link under this category too, in that it's also serving motivational goals and regulative ends.
00:13:52
Speaker
So it really, it's a very, very broad category.
00:13:55
Speaker
So it's kind of more easy to say what doesn't count as valiant representation.
00:14:00
Speaker
So we see.
00:14:01
Speaker
Kind of anything with a positive or negative feedback loop, basically.
00:14:04
Speaker
As long as it's in a living creature, yes.
00:14:07
Speaker
Not a thermostat yet.
00:14:09
Speaker
Right.
00:14:10
Speaker
But you're basically using the model of a thermostat in order to model what's happening in living creatures, and particularly the psychology of living creatures.
00:14:17
Speaker
But at its lowest level, psychology and life are intimately connected.
00:14:24
Speaker
They're almost identical.
00:14:25
Speaker
The
00:14:26
Speaker
The bit where it gets slightly different is this term representation, right?
00:14:30
Speaker
So representation is a more clearly mentalistic term.
00:14:34
Speaker
This idea that there's something going on inside you, some sort of symbolic process or picturing process that stands in place for something going on outside in the world.
00:14:45
Speaker
There's a very, very basic problem or issue that we have in philosophy of mind or psychology as well.
00:14:54
Speaker
And that's just, you know, how is it that activity inside your head can get to refer to anything outside the world?
00:14:59
Speaker
I mean, what is this phenomenon in which, you know, something happening inside me is about something happening outside there?
00:15:06
Speaker
And so the appeal to these negative feedback loops is a way to try and solve that problem, to say, okay, the thing that's happening inside your head is about the thing that's happening out there in the world, because that thing inside your head is getting you to interact in this regulative way with that thing outside in the world, right?
00:15:25
Speaker
So it's getting you to approach or keep yourself at the right temperature.
00:15:28
Speaker
It's getting you to consume food at the right amount and so on.
00:15:32
Speaker
So in some ways, it's the most foundational and important notion of valiant representation is to try and solve the problem of mental content.
00:15:39
Speaker
How on earth do minds get to have their most fundamental feature, which is this aboutness or intentional nature?
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, sounds like you've got a lot on your plate.
00:15:49
Speaker
I'm guessing this reference to aboutness or the question of how we form contents of representation, this is the problem of intentionality.
00:15:59
Speaker
I'm guessing this is the technical term for it in the literature?
00:16:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:04
Speaker
And for more than 100 years, philosophers have found the idea that intentionality is the mark of the mental.
00:16:10
Speaker
That's a pretty good characterization of what the mind's about.
00:16:14
Speaker
Of course, there's also this issue about whether there's other aspects of the mind that aren't merely aboutness.
00:16:22
Speaker
But that's controversial.
00:16:24
Speaker
I think most philosophers would still accept that intentionality is going to be the core feature of the mind.
00:16:28
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:16:28
Speaker
So that's interesting.
00:16:29
Speaker
Just before we go and get back into valence stuff, what are some examples of non-intentional action?
00:16:38
Speaker
Sorry, yeah, mental action.
00:16:39
Speaker
Sometimes people refer to mood states as not having any sort of aboutness.
00:16:44
Speaker
or just basic sensations, perhaps like pain and pleasure.
00:16:48
Speaker
But the standard reply to that sort of claim is that moods just lack a specific object.
00:16:54
Speaker
They're not about, oh, this particular event that's happening right now.
00:16:58
Speaker
They're more generally focused on how things are going for you in the world, but still having representational content.
00:17:06
Speaker
And similarly for pain and pleasure, I mean, I gave an account earlier about how
00:17:10
Speaker
Pain is registering a kind of failure and pleasure is registering a kind of success.
00:17:14
Speaker
So again, these are ways of trying to say, look, these things still have representational content.
00:17:18
Speaker
They're just not obvious objects out there in the world.
00:17:22
Speaker
Right.
00:17:24
Speaker
This is just making me think about so many things at the moment, but let's get back to on track.
00:17:29
Speaker
Another thing I've been wanting to ask you is valent control and control theory and how valence and the recent theories about control in mind relate to predictions and the actions being done by altering those predictions.
00:17:42
Speaker
So this is more in the vein of the active inference that's being done.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:48
Speaker
Can you tell us more about that, or if this is something that's worth, you know, connected to your work?
00:17:52
Speaker
Yeah, the active inference approach is obviously huge.
00:17:58
Speaker
It's become quite a dominant idea in contemporary psychology and neuroscience, or cognitive science more generally.
00:18:07
Speaker
And yeah, it includes predictive processing as another version of that term or the Bayesian brain or things like that.
00:18:14
Speaker
There are points where I want to make contact with that theory and say, OK, my ideas are compatible with it.
00:18:22
Speaker
So particularly when you talk about things like surprise, predictive processing or active inference is a really nice tool for making sense of what's going on there.
00:18:32
Speaker
You know, that we're always actively trying to model the world and make predictions about what we're going to perceive.
00:18:41
Speaker
And then surprise is going to occur when that fails, right?
00:18:45
Speaker
That you get a feedback signal from the world that doesn't match your expectations or your predictions.
00:18:51
Speaker
And so they have this notion of surprisal where it's like a matter of degree how much things fail to match your expectation.
00:18:57
Speaker
And so I really like the idea that it's a basic need of creatures like us and probably most other creatures that we want to know what's going on, right?
00:19:08
Speaker
So you can fit this into a regular framework where you say, okay, we're trying to...
00:19:13
Speaker
We're trying to maintain our grip on the world.
00:19:15
Speaker
We're trying to maintain a certain accurate picture and that can fail.
00:19:19
Speaker
And so that's a motivating signal or impetus to go and collect some more information, go and move around and try to
00:19:28
Speaker
get your predictions more in tune with how things are.
00:19:31
Speaker
So I definitely make contact with the predicting processing view in that sense, particularly in this idea that modeling the world is a kind of cognitive need.
00:19:40
Speaker
But I do think that the control theoretic approach
00:19:44
Speaker
is better in terms of understanding what the mind is about.
00:19:46
Speaker
I think that the active inference or predictive processing approach is very good at getting some of the details of how perception and cognition work.
00:19:57
Speaker
But if you want the broad strokes of how our mind works, I think control theory is the way to go.
00:20:01
Speaker
Right.
The Central Role of Emotions in the Mind
00:20:02
Speaker
So now I suppose it's about as good time as any to ask, where do emotions fit into all of this?
00:20:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I call my book The Emotional Mind because I think that you can't really understand emotions unless you fit them more generally into the mind.
00:20:19
Speaker
And there's a very good reason to think that because of their complexity and their reach into all these different areas of life.
00:20:28
Speaker
There really is no mind without the emotional capacities.
00:20:31
Speaker
They're right there at the center of the mind.
00:20:34
Speaker
But then you can also have a more narrow conception of emotion where you say, OK, I'm not interested more generally in this kind of evaluative, aversive, appetitive approach.
00:20:43
Speaker
I want to particularly know what sadness and happiness and fear and those things are.
00:20:47
Speaker
So that's where you might narrow it down and say, OK, so emotions are going to be a particular subcategory of this more valent kind of mental processing.
00:20:56
Speaker
And so my answer to that is, what is this subcategory?
00:20:59
Speaker
Is that emotions are particularly about or triggered by a kind of contrast representation that is modeling a distinction between how things are going right now and how things are going in some other situation, either in the future or in the past or for another person or potentially for a different possibility.
00:21:19
Speaker
So for example, fear would standardly say, a bad thing is coming up in the future.
00:21:24
Speaker
And sadness would standardly say that, oh, a bad thing has happened in the past.
00:21:28
Speaker
Or gratitude would be like something bad could have happened, but actually something good happened instead, right?
00:21:33
Speaker
So again, there's this contrast between how things are and how things could be.
00:21:36
Speaker
And then things like the social emotions where there's a contrast between whether things are going well for you, but badly for someone else.
00:21:42
Speaker
So that might be the emotion of sympathy.
00:21:44
Speaker
Or jealousy where you get the reverse, right?
00:21:46
Speaker
Something good's going for someone else when you feel like it should be going on for you.
00:21:50
Speaker
And there's going to be all sorts of refinements on that notion.
00:21:54
Speaker
But for me, the very core idea of emotions, as opposed to things like pains, pleasure, hunger, tiredness, or moods, emotions are going to be involving this contrast representation between how things are now and how things in some other state are.
00:22:08
Speaker
That's super interesting.
00:22:09
Speaker
So all of those require quite a lot of cognitive complexity to model a different world in the past, the future, in an alternate reality.
00:22:16
Speaker
and comparing reality to that world?
00:22:19
Speaker
It's going to need a bit more complexity than standard hunger or pain.
00:22:24
Speaker
So you're going to need an animal that's at least capable of memory or imagination and being able to retain these pictures of things that are not currently present and make a comparison between that and what they are perceiving.
00:22:39
Speaker
But I think that shouldn't be too demanding.
00:22:42
Speaker
I mean, any good theory of emotion should not exclude
00:22:47
Speaker
the majority of the animal species or indeed human infants.
00:22:50
Speaker
So you want something fairly low level.
00:22:53
Speaker
And so I do think that the appeal to contrast representation should be available to most animals, certainly mammals, probably birds, maybe some lizards, you know, or reptiles, but maybe not insects, right?
00:23:08
Speaker
So, I mean, that's pretty vague, but
00:23:10
Speaker
So you're trying to, I mean, just when you're constructing a theory, you're trying to say, okay, yeah, this is the kind of thing that could fit plausibly various other creatures.
00:23:19
Speaker
Right.
00:23:20
Speaker
So one thing I'm interested in is this hierarchy that I sense is developing where you have emotion.
00:23:27
Speaker
We have the basic needs that most animals have.
00:23:31
Speaker
and then emotions which only animals with more sophisticated cognitive capacities have.
00:23:37
Speaker
And then you mentioned the social emotions.
00:23:40
Speaker
And I'm sure you're familiar with this term meta-emotions as well.
00:23:43
Speaker
Is there a similarity between these two things?
00:23:47
Speaker
Are they referring to the same thing or are you using them differently?
00:23:52
Speaker
So just on meta emotions.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yes, certainly.
Meta-Emotions and Social Cognition
00:23:54
Speaker
So anytime you have an emotion about an emotion, I would call that a meta emotion.
00:24:00
Speaker
I don't think you need particularly special theory to deal with meta emotions.
00:24:05
Speaker
But I do think that pretty much any emotion regulation process where you're self-consciously
00:24:11
Speaker
monitoring and then acting on your emotions, that would count as a meta-emotional process.
00:24:17
Speaker
So I link that particularly with some of our more conscious thinking strategies.
00:24:22
Speaker
I think the social emotions are a definite level beyond
00:24:27
Speaker
our regular emotional capacities.
00:24:31
Speaker
Of course, we have these terms, you know, these social emotional terms like embarrassment or guilt.
00:24:36
Speaker
So I do think, yes, you need quite another level of mental sophistication in order to be capable of social emotions.
00:24:42
Speaker
But the way I like to talk about social emotions is that they're not necessarily just like these particular categories like guilt or embarrassment.
00:24:50
Speaker
There's just a layer of sociality that you can add to any emotional state where the emotion becomes part of a social negotiation.
00:24:59
Speaker
So my anger in part will have this expressive component that might be functionally aiming to signal to others that I'm in this state and the
00:25:11
Speaker
I'm owed some sort of response from them as a result.
00:25:15
Speaker
So, you know, even basic fear responses or sadness responses typically have an expressive component where they're often directed at, you know,
00:25:25
Speaker
achieving some sort of response from other people.
00:25:27
Speaker
I mean, that's why infants cry, right?
00:25:28
Speaker
To get some kind of response from their caregivers.
00:25:32
Speaker
So the sociality is definitely a layer of emotion that gives it this extra functionality.
00:25:39
Speaker
And it's, you know, virtually every human emotion has a sociality or social aspects to it.
00:25:45
Speaker
But there will be, again, there'll be animals that don't have that sort of social aspect to their emotional states, but still having emotions all the same.
00:25:51
Speaker
Right.
00:25:52
Speaker
That's really fascinating.
00:25:53
Speaker
I mean, this idea of sociality, I can see why this would be really relevant to our moral decision making and how emotions play a vital role in regulating our behavior.
00:26:05
Speaker
Is there...
00:26:07
Speaker
So in this idea of emotions being a primary regulator of our social interactions and moral interactions, that kind of implies that we have to deal with our identities.
Identity's Influence on Emotional Regulation
00:26:21
Speaker
We bring our identities when we negotiate with people who we can have the reactive attitudes, as Strossen puts it.
00:26:31
Speaker
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
00:26:32
Speaker
And I was wondering if identity plays a role in emotional regulation or if it's the other way around or if it's more like a continuous feedback loop between the two.
00:26:44
Speaker
So certainly when you establish a relationship with another person, it's important that you can identify that person over time.
00:26:52
Speaker
That's the very same person I was interacting with yesterday.
00:26:56
Speaker
And maintaining those relationships does require a level of thought where you can say, okay, this person exists from time A to time B to time C, and I can see how they're developing over time.
00:27:08
Speaker
So in that sense, identity is heavily involved.
00:27:11
Speaker
You can't really have certain kinds of interaction with people unless you have a very strong notion of their identity.
00:27:17
Speaker
And, you know, reciprocally, they have a notion of your identity.
00:27:21
Speaker
I think that our social interactions at that level, where it's not merely some random person is angering me, but my partner or my child, that requires yet another layer of sophistication.
00:27:35
Speaker
I like to use the term sentiments to apply to these more long term relationships.
00:27:41
Speaker
emotional interactions with people or emotional relationships with people.
00:27:45
Speaker
Basically, things like what you love and what you hate.
00:27:49
Speaker
So if I love my child, then I'm going to have a whole variety of emotions that track how things are going for them.
00:27:55
Speaker
I'm hopefully going to be feeling sad when they're sad and happy when they're happy.
00:28:00
Speaker
And I'm going to have all kinds of emotions aimed at promoting their well-being, not just my own.
00:28:05
Speaker
Or perhaps the way to put it is to say that
00:28:08
Speaker
My well-being and theirs are linked in some deep way.
00:28:11
Speaker
And what's kind of interesting about social relations is also that, yeah, it does apply this sort of demand upon your emotions that they can say, look, the reason for you to regulate your emotions is in order to preserve this relationship.
Emotions and Moral Decision-Making
00:28:24
Speaker
So, you know, when you're talking about the moral cases and where people having to restrain themselves and to forego various advantages that they might otherwise accrue, you know,
00:28:37
Speaker
The idea that someone else can demand upon you, oh, for the sake of this relationship, you need to not be greedy or you need to be brave or you need to clean up your act, whatever it might be, right?
00:28:49
Speaker
I think that's a very interesting sophistication that I would only really attribute to humans, maybe certain very social animals as well.
00:28:58
Speaker
They're the higher primates.
00:29:00
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm also thinking maybe dogs can genuinely love you and regulate their emotions because they're just so attuned in that way.
00:29:10
Speaker
Not cats, but just dogs.
00:29:13
Speaker
Cats just don't have the brain for it, I think.
00:29:16
Speaker
I don't know, lovely that they are, but they're just not so clearly in that sort of relationship.
00:29:23
Speaker
And so, yeah, I mean, when you talk about things like character and virtue and moral responsibility, you're talking about the capacity to regulate emotions according to these sorts of demands that you get from others.
00:29:37
Speaker
Cool.
00:29:37
Speaker
So the next question I want to ask is, what are some of the different ways that people might experience emotion?
00:29:43
Speaker
So can you maybe perhaps speak about the phenomenology of it and how different people might experience it differently?
00:29:51
Speaker
Yeah.
Varied Emotional Experiences
00:29:52
Speaker
I mean, I think what you're referring to might be this idea that some people seem more oriented towards their bodily feelings than other people.
00:30:01
Speaker
Some people are just more sensitive to the feelings of their body.
00:30:05
Speaker
And they often think of their emotions in those terms, where others tend to be a bit more situationally attuned.
00:30:11
Speaker
And they'll often decide what emotion they're having according to how they're interpreting the situation.
00:30:16
Speaker
Like, oh, this is a situation in which someone's insulting me, therefore I'm angry.
00:30:20
Speaker
Whereas the more internally attuned person might be, oh, I'm feeling this, you know, my heart pumping and my tension and my muscles, therefore I'm angry.
00:30:29
Speaker
So I do think we see this difference in people's focus.
00:30:32
Speaker
It's not that Iverkamp is lacking the area of emotion that the one is more sensitive to.
00:30:39
Speaker
It's just a difference in enfances more than anything else.
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:42
Speaker
But it is responsible for certain debates in the theories where people, some people, some philosophers or theorists will say, oh, what's really important to emotion is the situational awareness.
00:30:53
Speaker
Another philosopher is like, oh, no, what's really important is the bodily awareness.
00:30:56
Speaker
And I'm like, hey, guys, you know, you can both be right.
00:30:58
Speaker
It's just there's different aspects to emotions.
00:31:00
Speaker
Right.
00:31:00
Speaker
I can see why there would be a debate about this, because if you emphasize the bodily aspect, it's more internal.
00:31:06
Speaker
Whereas if you emphasize the situational aspect, then the cause of your emotions is more external.
00:31:12
Speaker
It's the other person who's doing it.
00:31:14
Speaker
And I can see how this might perhaps bring up issues of responsibility.
00:31:18
Speaker
Who's responsible for my anger?
00:31:20
Speaker
Is it just me who should be able to regulate it?
00:31:24
Speaker
Or is my anger just because it's coming as a response towards...
00:31:29
Speaker
an insult or injury?
00:31:31
Speaker
Yeah, it will definitely suggest different regulative strategies.
00:31:34
Speaker
Like, what's the best way for you to deal with your emotion?
00:31:36
Speaker
Is it to try and calm your body down and, or, you know, maybe take some chemical that's going to change your bodily response profile?
00:31:44
Speaker
Or is it to do something about this situation, to get out that situation or find a different situation to be in?
00:31:50
Speaker
Yeah, so it's definitely going to be relevant in those contexts.
00:31:53
Speaker
When you say situational here, do you mean like,
00:31:56
Speaker
hearing something in your inner voice about the situation that kind of thing no no i mean i mean just the literal situation so you know man running at you with a knife that's a situation right or uh you know someone's insulted you that's uh but it can sometimes be indeed yeah but your emotion is directed at your own body right that uh you know you're frustrated about your incapacity from task and you might go i like you know i hate these uh rubbish parts of my body whatever it might just
00:32:22
Speaker
B, you're aware that you're frustrated about it, but it's not a specific bodily feeling, so you're aware of the concept that you're frustrated almost.
00:32:30
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, there you're getting into this idea that you can conceptualize your own feelings, right?
00:32:35
Speaker
That you can look at those feelings and go, OK, yeah, that's the pattern that fits frustration.
00:32:40
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, emotions can really direct to almost anything at all.
00:32:44
Speaker
You can have an emotion about anything you like, even very abstract physics, right?
00:32:48
Speaker
So emotions, it's more just a way of representing the world or representing what's going on and say, OK, it's going in this kind of good way or it's going in this bad way, right?
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah, because I'm certainly aware that people experience emotions in all sorts of ways, like some people see particular colours for certain emotions, or certainly an emotion can bring back a specific memory.
00:33:10
Speaker
There's a bunch of different inner experiences you can have when you're experiencing emotion.
Extended Cognition: Music and Environment
00:33:16
Speaker
Is that relevant or is it kind of just contingent on the kind of emotion and the kind of way the person's mind does those things?
00:33:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:25
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, people can have all sorts of associations with emotions.
00:33:29
Speaker
Of course, our color terms are heavily linked with emotions.
00:33:32
Speaker
And there's interesting cultural differences in how people associate colors with emotions.
00:33:38
Speaker
The institution I used to work at in Geneva, we had some of our promotional material that was...
00:33:44
Speaker
referencing this idea that, you know, in France, blue doesn't necessarily mean sad.
00:33:48
Speaker
It means a different, something else.
00:33:50
Speaker
I can't remember the particular associations, but it's quite an interesting idea.
00:33:54
Speaker
But yeah, also, I think what you're starting to get at is the way in which, you know,
00:33:59
Speaker
Our emotions can be elaborated using these sorts of expressive qualities.
00:34:05
Speaker
So the way that you dress or the environments that you are sitting in, these can have emotional connotations for you that are really quite powerful and can definitely play an important role in you maintaining your emotional life.
00:34:20
Speaker
So this is something that comes under the umbrella of what's called extended cognition.
00:34:26
Speaker
This idea that by
00:34:28
Speaker
manipulating your environment, you can achieve mental functions.
00:34:35
Speaker
And so I thought this is one of the things that I first did when I was starting to work in philosophy, was to think about the way we use music to
00:34:46
Speaker
quite deliberately extend our emotional states or to enhance our emotional capacities.
00:34:51
Speaker
It's quite an interesting area.
00:34:53
Speaker
I don't actually talk about it that much in the book because it sort of comes at the very end.
00:34:57
Speaker
But it was one of the things that got me into this area, particularly, yeah, the connection between music and emotion.
00:35:04
Speaker
Because I've had that in both directions.
00:35:05
Speaker
I've recalled songs because I'm feeling an emotion and realized from the song that I must be having this emotion.
00:35:11
Speaker
Right, you could find yourself whistling a certain tune and go, oh, wow, that indicates something about how I'm feeling.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, this notion of extended cognition, I suppose I imagine it more simply as being able to write down your thoughts and then being able to communicate that to other people with this psychotechnology, if you will, and other people reading this.
00:35:34
Speaker
Yeah, and that's definitely one way to extend your cognition.
00:35:36
Speaker
I mean, some of the very first examples where extended cognition was introduced in the 1990s had to do with things like keeping a diary as a way to extend your memory capacity.
00:35:48
Speaker
But also people talk about how you can think through on paper, right?
00:35:51
Speaker
By kind of talking through it to yourself, you can help to develop, you know, actually, what do I feel about this?
00:35:57
Speaker
But there's all sorts of ways you can do it.
00:35:58
Speaker
You can do it by painting, you can do it by
00:36:01
Speaker
playing music.
00:36:01
Speaker
You can do it by dancing around.
00:36:05
Speaker
There's no limit really to the way that we can make these sorts of emotional connections.
Experimental Insights into Emotions
00:36:10
Speaker
Right, brilliant.
00:36:11
Speaker
I think we're close to about wrapping this up, but I want to ask you about some of the
00:36:19
Speaker
maybe the science behind emotions and what sorts of experiments that has led to us knowing about these emotions slash affects?
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty big field.
00:36:34
Speaker
Or is that not something?
00:36:35
Speaker
Some favorite ones that you know about, maybe that you find it found interesting or revealing.
00:36:39
Speaker
I mean, one of the most interesting ones goes all the way back to William James.
00:36:43
Speaker
And it's this idea that by deliberately expressing an emotion, you can arouse that emotion.
00:36:49
Speaker
So it has a quite Victorian style in the way that he talks about, like how you can smooth the brow and straighten your back and put on a smile and then you'll be feeling happy.
00:37:01
Speaker
So this became known as the facial feedback hypothesis.
00:37:05
Speaker
This idea, you can deliberately stimulate emotions by means of manipulating your bodily or facial expressions.
00:37:11
Speaker
And then lots of evidence was accumulated in favor of this idea.
00:37:15
Speaker
It looks really, really robust.
00:37:17
Speaker
But then, you know, 10 years ago, it was one of the experiments that got caught up in the replication crisis.
00:37:23
Speaker
So there was a particular experiment where they got people to hold a pen between their teeth and therefore...
00:37:28
Speaker
force themselves to smile or hold it between their lips in a certain way that forced a frown.
00:37:32
Speaker
And then it would affect the way they were, they were rating the funniness of cartoons.
00:37:37
Speaker
And they found that when they tried to replicate this in a, you know, more robust way that it was failing.
00:37:42
Speaker
So this was a big worry.
00:37:43
Speaker
Like, is this really important emotional phenomenon?
00:37:46
Speaker
Not in fact the case.
00:37:47
Speaker
So my impression is that it's probably less significant than we thought it was, but I'm, I'm, I still find myself, uh,
00:37:55
Speaker
pretty convinced that by deliberately manipulating our bodily states, we can arouse the associated.
00:38:04
Speaker
And it is a pretty good clue that emotions have this essentially bodily nature to them.
00:38:11
Speaker
that they are in part bodily phenomenon.
00:38:14
Speaker
But yeah, it's precisely one of those cases where you'd want the social psychologists to really figure it out, what the hell's going on, and whether there's different experimental paradigms where this thing works or what kind of variations might be going on.
00:38:28
Speaker
So that's a very artificial experiment, and it's very different from, I don't know, when people say, go out in the fresh air and you'll feel happier, and it feels like that is the case.
00:38:38
Speaker
But that's such an experiment from sticking a pen in your lips.
00:38:42
Speaker
They have to find ways to trick people, right?
00:38:45
Speaker
So that's what the psychologists are all about.
00:38:47
Speaker
You need to try to manipulate people without their awareness.
00:38:50
Speaker
But I do think in this case that you can perfectly consciously manipulate your bodily condition and it will start to create emotional associations for you.
00:39:00
Speaker
You might then embrace those associations or you might reject them.
00:39:03
Speaker
Right.
00:39:03
Speaker
So consciousness, conscious awareness of the technique tends to complicate matters.
00:39:08
Speaker
But I do think this is one of those techniques that does work with conscious awareness.
00:39:13
Speaker
Any other experiments that immediately come to mind from that you reference in your book or?
00:39:18
Speaker
I mean, the only other one that leaps to the top of my mind is these studies about consciousness of emotion.
00:39:24
Speaker
So, you know, it's a very tricky question to answer, like whether emotions are essentially conscious states.
00:39:32
Speaker
But there's a nice experiment by, I think it's Winkelmann and Berridge, where they are flashing up pictures of emotional faces so quickly that people don't consciously recognize that they've seen those faces.
00:39:46
Speaker
And yet you are then seeing certain differences in their behavior as a result, which indicate that they are feeling some emotion.
00:39:53
Speaker
But what's really interesting is that you can then ask them, are you having an emotion right now?
00:39:57
Speaker
Or what are you feeling?
00:39:58
Speaker
And they don't report anything.
00:39:59
Speaker
And so you're seeing these very subtle behavioral effects, which indicate look like they're having an emotion, but they're not aware of this happening to them.
00:40:07
Speaker
And so that's a very important piece of evidence, if that indeed is robust.
00:40:12
Speaker
So you're not completely sure if they replicate?
00:40:14
Speaker
You literally can't be sure of anything in this area.
00:40:16
Speaker
We've had too many disasters and failures of these things.
00:40:20
Speaker
Do you think it's something we can get better at as the whole of humanity at doing these kinds of experiments?
00:40:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, do more science.
00:40:29
Speaker
The solution is not to give up.
00:40:30
Speaker
It's just to keep doing it and do it more carefully.
00:40:32
Speaker
Right.
00:40:33
Speaker
So obviously there's an intimate link between psychology, science and philosophy when it comes to emotions.
Philosophical Approach to Emotions
00:40:39
Speaker
Why did you approach emotions from this philosophical perspective as becoming a psychologist and studying it that way?
00:40:46
Speaker
I mean, that's partly just my background.
00:40:47
Speaker
I did a degree in philosophy because I wasn't just interested in the mind.
00:40:51
Speaker
I was interested in the whole universe.
00:40:53
Speaker
And the lovely thing about philosophy is that you can flit from one area to another quite happily.
00:40:59
Speaker
where a psychologist will be bogged down in following certain experiments over many, many years.
00:41:05
Speaker
So I did find that once I was trying to get serious about how the mind works, that I'm reading a lot of psychology and I'm reading a lot of neuroscience and trying to get to grips with how they model things.
00:41:15
Speaker
So I certainly don't want to do any philosophy independently of psychological research.
00:41:22
Speaker
I think it's absolutely essential to what we're doing in philosophy in this area in particular.
00:41:27
Speaker
But, you know, sometimes philosophy has the advantage that it allows you to think a bit more broadly and sometimes a bit more deeply about, OK, what are the, you know, the basic principles of the mind that are at work here?
00:41:40
Speaker
And, you know, sometimes the psychologists, they're just moving from one puzzle to the next.
00:41:44
Speaker
They're not really taking the time to think about how all this stuff is supposed to fit together.
00:41:48
Speaker
And that for me, you know, part of what makes this area interesting is that you are, you know, we can build these quite big pictures of how the mind works.
00:41:55
Speaker
Right.
00:41:56
Speaker
I guess a big picture approach is what you're all about.
00:42:00
Speaker
And I think that should be a pretty good place to end this since we're coming up to the 15 minute mark now.
00:42:08
Speaker
But where can people find your work?
00:42:11
Speaker
You have a book and you have a Twitter.
00:42:13
Speaker
Is there any other place that you can... I have a website where you can download pretty much everything I've ever written.
00:42:18
Speaker
So no one should ever be wanting to read something I've written and not able to do so.
00:42:24
Speaker
If they want to read it, they should always just email me and ask.
00:42:27
Speaker
And in general, you know, researchers like to be contacted by people who are interested in their work.
00:42:31
Speaker
So don't feel shy.
00:42:32
Speaker
Always get in touch.
00:42:33
Speaker
Wonderful.
00:42:34
Speaker
Right.
00:42:35
Speaker
Any last thoughts on words, Francis?
00:42:39
Speaker
Yeah, we'll link in the show notes to lots of Tom's things.
00:42:41
Speaker
He's got a lot of content online about this.
00:42:43
Speaker
It's really good.
00:42:44
Speaker
Cool, cool.
00:42:45
Speaker
Right.
00:42:45
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah, thank you.
00:42:48
Speaker
Thanks, Tom.
00:42:48
Speaker
That was fantastic.
00:42:49
Speaker
Thank you.