Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Imagine an Apple, the podcast about inner mental experiences.
Speaker: Your hosts are Francis and Vin.
Speaker: So Vin, what have we got on today?
Speaker: Today we've got a guest to talk about emotions.
Speaker: And our guest today is Tom, who is a philosopher at Flinders University.
Speaker: And some of his books include The Emotional Mind, A Control Theory of Mental States.
Speaker: Welcome to the podcast, Tom.
Speaker: Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker: Thank you for having us.
Speaker: So the first thing I want to ask is the question of your motivation.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Can you just give us a little bit of a background about
Speaker: What got you into emotion in the first place?
Speaker: Yeah, so emotions are deeply fascinating.
Speaker: I mean, anyone who has any interest in living a good life is going to be interested in the mechanics of that.
Speaker: these mental states that seem to make all the difference between whether we're doing well or doing badly.
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.
Speaker: So they're just a perennial source of fascination.
Speaker: And they link to all kinds of other areas, not just in philosophy, but in across all the different areas of human knowledge.
Speaker: So there's just no shortage of things that you can get into via the emotions.
Speaker: Brilliant.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Before we go into the deep end and start interrogating you about the books that you've read.
Speaker: I think there's a really common distinction that most people in everyday conversation make between feelings and emotions.
Speaker: And I remember one of our Twitter interactions involving this very distinction.
Speaker: And that's probably how we first interacted with each other.
Speaker: Is there something that you want to say about that?
Speaker: Is there a distinction that you make, or at least in the literature that you're aware of, between feelings and emotions?
Speaker: Right, it is a very core issue and one that it's very easy to get confused about.
Speaker: So you're right that for most people, emotions and feelings seem virtually synonymous.
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.
Speaker: So for a lot of philosophers, analyzing feelings is the very nature of analyzing emotions.
Speaker: However, I think the states can be distinguished.
Speaker: So feelings more essentially refer to a conscious state, right?
Speaker: You consciously feel something good or bad or itchy or hungry or whatever it might be.
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.
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.
Speaker: It just feels some way in a very immediate or intrinsic way.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's more we can say, but yeah, that's just a starting point.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So just to really short recap, you say that sometimes feelings are always felt, i.e.
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?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that more or less covers it.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: Thanks for explaining that.
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.
Speaker: I'm assuming our listenership is somewhat familiar with her work on affect.
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.
Speaker: What is it tangibly?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So affect, I would certainly put closer to the concept of feeling.
Speaker: It again tends to refer to something that we consciously feel and that can be positive or negative.
Speaker: And it's that positive and negative affect.
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.
Speaker: But there's been a huge confusion about the term affect.
Speaker: Some people again treat it as synonymous with emotion.
Speaker: We also have this word affective states, which tends to confuse Malta even further.
Speaker: And I'm not sure the way that I use affect in my book is entirely standard.
Speaker: So it's still not something that's very resolved.
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.
Speaker: That's quite a relief to know because I, yeah, we're struggling to understand the common meaning across different authors.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't think we haven't got together and hammered this out, I'm afraid.
Speaker: So you're just going to have to be confused and just see how they define it in whatever text you're
Speaker: engaging with.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That seems to be a common strategy to getting around the literature.
Speaker: I mean, for me, I can tell you what I mean by affects, if you like.
Speaker: For me, it's going to be the intrinsically positive or negative qualities of experience.
Speaker: So basically the painfulness or pleasurableness of an experience.
Speaker: And you can give a quite detailed account of what exactly that involves.
Speaker: But that's, again, not going to be the same thing as emotion.
Speaker: It's often going to accompany emotion.
Speaker: But you can have emotion without affect.
Speaker: And that's something that Barrett will not agree with.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: Thanks for pointing that out.
Speaker: So you mentioned positive and negative.
Speaker: And I'm guessing that has something to do with valence, which you also happen to write quite a lot about.
Speaker: Yeah, I think valence is an easier term because at least that's a psychologically technical term.
Speaker: So it just means positive or negative.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: or something that's psychologically positive, you can get various interpretations of it.
Speaker: Like what exactly is it you're taking to be positive or negative?
Speaker: Is it the quality of an experience again?
Speaker: Or is it something more behavioral, like tendency to approach or tendency to avoid?
Speaker: Or appetitive as opposed to aversive.
Speaker: These sometimes get thrown out as well.
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.
Speaker: and the tendency to decrease the presence of something is negatively violent.
Speaker: So if you're hungry, then food is positively violent for you.
Speaker: You want to get some more of it.
Speaker: And if you're hurt, then the bodily damage is negatively violent.
Speaker: You want to reduce that.
Speaker: Brilliant.
Speaker: Thanks for explaining that.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Francis, we're just about to say something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when do you use the word affect versus when you use the word valent?
Speaker: Because they seem to overlap quite a lot.
Speaker: They're slightly different parts of speech.
Speaker: But
Speaker: Right.
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?
Speaker: So you don't have any intrinsically pleasurable or painful sensations whatsoever.
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.
Speaker: So affect has to be conscious in some way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: On the view that I'm promoting.
Speaker: And indeed, I think that's the majority view on that.
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.
Speaker: But then if I get hungry, cause I've got low blood sugar, then that becomes an affect.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: This is really urgent.
Speaker: You need to deal with it.
Speaker: And then symmetrically for positive affect, so you have a lower level or underlying positively balanced system.
Speaker: You're trying to get something good.
Speaker: You're trying to get whatever it is you need.
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.
Speaker: You'll get the intrinsically positively felt affect.
Speaker: So affect in some sense is a higher level system for managing all our various low level
Speaker: homeostatic or survival maintaining or just generally our emotional systems.
Speaker: It really helps to distribute attention according to urgency.
Speaker: So, you know, our body often gets along with all kinds of functions simultaneously without us having to really worry much about it.
Speaker: But sometimes it needs more resources.
Speaker: Sometimes you need to turn all your attention towards whatever this urgent thing might be.
Speaker: You know, you're particularly hungry or you're particularly hurt.
Speaker: And then affect is going to play a big role there in getting the conscious person at a person level to really focus their resources on this particular issue.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So this is really interesting to me because attention is something that I believe can be trained.
Speaker: And this is, in fact, like brought in certain meditative practices or maybe experiences of like
Speaker: people under psychedelics or some altered states of consciousness where their attentions can expand and contract.
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.
Speaker: And one example of this is where people
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.
Speaker: Can you speak a little bit more about this?
Speaker: I think that is an interesting observation.
Speaker: I haven't really taught very much in my work about our powers of generally increasing intention.
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.
Speaker: I think it's quite plausible that we can train that
Speaker: capacity.
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.
Speaker: So it's a very interesting area.
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.
Speaker: But it's, yeah, it's an area that's a
Speaker: not something I can speak very definitively about at the moment, I think.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Let's bring it back to emotions then.
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.
Speaker: Is there a difference between like valent representation and valence itself?
Speaker: And what do you how do you use those terms?
Speaker: Yeah, valent representation is this very core notion.
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.
Speaker: And it's basically a way of applying control theory or this notion of negative feedback loops to the mind generally.
Speaker: And then my idea is that
Speaker: we can elaborate these valent representations.
Speaker: We can create, we can get them to interact with each other.
Speaker: We can get them to reinforce each other or inhibit each other, or one knocks off the next one and so on.
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.
Speaker: So
Speaker: The ultimate claim I'm going for is that literally the entire mind is an elaboration upon the basic system of valent representation.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: So I think there's quite a movement going on in that space.
Speaker: So is valent representation another way of phrasing the idea of wanting or desiring?
Speaker: It can include also being averse to things.
Speaker: So in that sense, I would say it's closer to the term need in terms of ordinary language.
Speaker: So the most basic valent representations will be your needs, your basic needs.
Speaker: Hunger, thirst, and air, and all those kinds of things.
Speaker: But emotions, I mean, it's going to be a very broad category.
Speaker: So emotions also count as a subcategory of valiant representation.
Speaker: Social kind of interactions will also fall under this category.
Speaker: So often conscious thought you can link under this category too, in that it's also serving motivational goals and regulative ends.
Speaker: So it really, it's a very, very broad category.
Speaker: So it's kind of more easy to say what doesn't count as valiant representation.
Speaker: So we see.
Speaker: Kind of anything with a positive or negative feedback loop, basically.
Speaker: As long as it's in a living creature, yes.
Speaker: Not a thermostat yet.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: But at its lowest level, psychology and life are intimately connected.
Speaker: They're almost identical.
Speaker: The
Speaker: The bit where it gets slightly different is this term representation, right?
Speaker: So representation is a more clearly mentalistic term.
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.
Speaker: There's a very, very basic problem or issue that we have in philosophy of mind or psychology as well.
Speaker: And that's just, you know, how is it that activity inside your head can get to refer to anything outside the world?
Speaker: I mean, what is this phenomenon in which, you know, something happening inside me is about something happening outside there?
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?
Speaker: So it's getting you to approach or keep yourself at the right temperature.
Speaker: It's getting you to consume food at the right amount and so on.
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.
Speaker: How on earth do minds get to have their most fundamental feature, which is this aboutness or intentional nature?
Speaker: Yeah, sounds like you've got a lot on your plate.
Speaker: I'm guessing this reference to aboutness or the question of how we form contents of representation, this is the problem of intentionality.
Speaker: I'm guessing this is the technical term for it in the literature?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And for more than 100 years, philosophers have found the idea that intentionality is the mark of the mental.
Speaker: That's a pretty good characterization of what the mind's about.
Speaker: Of course, there's also this issue about whether there's other aspects of the mind that aren't merely aboutness.
Speaker: But that's controversial.
Speaker: I think most philosophers would still accept that intentionality is going to be the core feature of the mind.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So that's interesting.
Speaker: Just before we go and get back into valence stuff, what are some examples of non-intentional action?
Speaker: Sorry, yeah, mental action.
Speaker: Sometimes people refer to mood states as not having any sort of aboutness.
Speaker: or just basic sensations, perhaps like pain and pleasure.
Speaker: But the standard reply to that sort of claim is that moods just lack a specific object.
Speaker: They're not about, oh, this particular event that's happening right now.
Speaker: They're more generally focused on how things are going for you in the world, but still having representational content.
Speaker: And similarly for pain and pleasure, I mean, I gave an account earlier about how
Speaker: Pain is registering a kind of failure and pleasure is registering a kind of success.
Speaker: So again, these are ways of trying to say, look, these things still have representational content.
Speaker: They're just not obvious objects out there in the world.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This is just making me think about so many things at the moment, but let's get back to on track.
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.
Speaker: So this is more in the vein of the active inference that's being done.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Can you tell us more about that, or if this is something that's worth, you know, connected to your work?
Speaker: Yeah, the active inference approach is obviously huge.
Speaker: It's become quite a dominant idea in contemporary psychology and neuroscience, or cognitive science more generally.
Speaker: And yeah, it includes predictive processing as another version of that term or the Bayesian brain or things like that.
Speaker: There are points where I want to make contact with that theory and say, OK, my ideas are compatible with it.
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.
Speaker: You know, that we're always actively trying to model the world and make predictions about what we're going to perceive.
Speaker: And then surprise is going to occur when that fails, right?
Speaker: That you get a feedback signal from the world that doesn't match your expectations or your predictions.
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.
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?
Speaker: So you can fit this into a regular framework where you say, okay, we're trying to...
Speaker: We're trying to maintain our grip on the world.
Speaker: We're trying to maintain a certain accurate picture and that can fail.
Speaker: And so that's a motivating signal or impetus to go and collect some more information, go and move around and try to
Speaker: get your predictions more in tune with how things are.
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.
Speaker: But I do think that the control theoretic approach
Speaker: is better in terms of understanding what the mind is about.
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.
Speaker: But if you want the broad strokes of how our mind works, I think control theory is the way to go.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So now I suppose it's about as good time as any to ask, where do emotions fit into all of this?
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.
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.
Speaker: There really is no mind without the emotional capacities.
Speaker: They're right there at the center of the mind.
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.
Speaker: I want to particularly know what sadness and happiness and fear and those things are.
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.
Speaker: And so my answer to that is, what is this subcategory?
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.
Speaker: So for example, fear would standardly say, a bad thing is coming up in the future.
Speaker: And sadness would standardly say that, oh, a bad thing has happened in the past.
Speaker: Or gratitude would be like something bad could have happened, but actually something good happened instead, right?
Speaker: So again, there's this contrast between how things are and how things could be.
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.
Speaker: So that might be the emotion of sympathy.
Speaker: Or jealousy where you get the reverse, right?
Speaker: Something good's going for someone else when you feel like it should be going on for you.
Speaker: And there's going to be all sorts of refinements on that notion.
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.
Speaker: That's super interesting.
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.
Speaker: and comparing reality to that world?
Speaker: It's going to need a bit more complexity than standard hunger or pain.
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.
Speaker: But I think that shouldn't be too demanding.
Speaker: I mean, any good theory of emotion should not exclude
Speaker: the majority of the animal species or indeed human infants.
Speaker: So you want something fairly low level.
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?
Speaker: So, I mean, that's pretty vague, but
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So one thing I'm interested in is this hierarchy that I sense is developing where you have emotion.
Speaker: We have the basic needs that most animals have.
Speaker: and then emotions which only animals with more sophisticated cognitive capacities have.
Speaker: And then you mentioned the social emotions.
Speaker: And I'm sure you're familiar with this term meta-emotions as well.
Speaker: Is there a similarity between these two things?
Speaker: Are they referring to the same thing or are you using them differently?
Speaker: So just on meta emotions.
Speaker: Yes, certainly.
Speaker: So anytime you have an emotion about an emotion, I would call that a meta emotion.
Speaker: I don't think you need particularly special theory to deal with meta emotions.
Speaker: But I do think that pretty much any emotion regulation process where you're self-consciously
Speaker: monitoring and then acting on your emotions, that would count as a meta-emotional process.
Speaker: So I link that particularly with some of our more conscious thinking strategies.
Speaker: I think the social emotions are a definite level beyond
Speaker: our regular emotional capacities.
Speaker: Of course, we have these terms, you know, these social emotional terms like embarrassment or guilt.
Speaker: So I do think, yes, you need quite another level of mental sophistication in order to be capable of social emotions.
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.
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.
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
Speaker: I'm owed some sort of response from them as a result.
Speaker: So, you know, even basic fear responses or sadness responses typically have an expressive component where they're often directed at, you know,
Speaker: achieving some sort of response from other people.
Speaker: I mean, that's why infants cry, right?
Speaker: To get some kind of response from their caregivers.
Speaker: So the sociality is definitely a layer of emotion that gives it this extra functionality.
Speaker: And it's, you know, virtually every human emotion has a sociality or social aspects to it.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's really fascinating.
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.
Speaker: Is there...
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.
Speaker: We bring our identities when we negotiate with people who we can have the reactive attitudes, as Strossen puts it.
Speaker: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
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.
Speaker: So certainly when you establish a relationship with another person, it's important that you can identify that person over time.
Speaker: That's the very same person I was interacting with yesterday.
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.
Speaker: So in that sense, identity is heavily involved.
Speaker: You can't really have certain kinds of interaction with people unless you have a very strong notion of their identity.
Speaker: And, you know, reciprocally, they have a notion of your identity.
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.
Speaker: I like to use the term sentiments to apply to these more long term relationships.
Speaker: emotional interactions with people or emotional relationships with people.
Speaker: Basically, things like what you love and what you hate.
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.
Speaker: I'm hopefully going to be feeling sad when they're sad and happy when they're happy.
Speaker: And I'm going to have all kinds of emotions aimed at promoting their well-being, not just my own.
Speaker: Or perhaps the way to put it is to say that
Speaker: My well-being and theirs are linked in some deep way.
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.
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,
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?
Speaker: I think that's a very interesting sophistication that I would only really attribute to humans, maybe certain very social animals as well.
Speaker: They're the higher primates.
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.
Speaker: Not cats, but just dogs.
Speaker: Cats just don't have the brain for it, I think.
Speaker: I don't know, lovely that they are, but they're just not so clearly in that sort of relationship.
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.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: So the next question I want to ask is, what are some of the different ways that people might experience emotion?
Speaker: So can you maybe perhaps speak about the phenomenology of it and how different people might experience it differently?
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: Some people are just more sensitive to the feelings of their body.
Speaker: And they often think of their emotions in those terms, where others tend to be a bit more situationally attuned.
Speaker: And they'll often decide what emotion they're having according to how they're interpreting the situation.
Speaker: Like, oh, this is a situation in which someone's insulting me, therefore I'm angry.
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.
Speaker: So I do think we see this difference in people's focus.
Speaker: It's not that Iverkamp is lacking the area of emotion that the one is more sensitive to.
Speaker: It's just a difference in enfances more than anything else.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: Another philosopher is like, oh, no, what's really important is the bodily awareness.
Speaker: And I'm like, hey, guys, you know, you can both be right.
Speaker: It's just there's different aspects to emotions.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I can see why there would be a debate about this, because if you emphasize the bodily aspect, it's more internal.
Speaker: Whereas if you emphasize the situational aspect, then the cause of your emotions is more external.
Speaker: It's the other person who's doing it.
Speaker: And I can see how this might perhaps bring up issues of responsibility.
Speaker: Who's responsible for my anger?
Speaker: Is it just me who should be able to regulate it?
Speaker: Or is my anger just because it's coming as a response towards...
Speaker: an insult or injury?
Speaker: Yeah, it will definitely suggest different regulative strategies.
Speaker: Like, what's the best way for you to deal with your emotion?
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?
Speaker: Or is it to do something about this situation, to get out that situation or find a different situation to be in?
Speaker: Yeah, so it's definitely going to be relevant in those contexts.
Speaker: When you say situational here, do you mean like,
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
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.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I mean, there you're getting into this idea that you can conceptualize your own feelings, right?
Speaker: That you can look at those feelings and go, OK, yeah, that's the pattern that fits frustration.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, emotions can really direct to almost anything at all.
Speaker: You can have an emotion about anything you like, even very abstract physics, right?
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?
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.
Speaker: There's a bunch of different inner experiences you can have when you're experiencing emotion.
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?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, people can have all sorts of associations with emotions.
Speaker: Of course, our color terms are heavily linked with emotions.
Speaker: And there's interesting cultural differences in how people associate colors with emotions.
Speaker: The institution I used to work at in Geneva, we had some of our promotional material that was...
Speaker: referencing this idea that, you know, in France, blue doesn't necessarily mean sad.
Speaker: It means a different, something else.
Speaker: I can't remember the particular associations, but it's quite an interesting idea.
Speaker: But yeah, also, I think what you're starting to get at is the way in which, you know,
Speaker: Our emotions can be elaborated using these sorts of expressive qualities.
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.
Speaker: So this is something that comes under the umbrella of what's called extended cognition.
Speaker: This idea that by
Speaker: manipulating your environment, you can achieve mental functions.
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
Speaker: quite deliberately extend our emotional states or to enhance our emotional capacities.
Speaker: It's quite an interesting area.
Speaker: I don't actually talk about it that much in the book because it sort of comes at the very end.
Speaker: But it was one of the things that got me into this area, particularly, yeah, the connection between music and emotion.
Speaker: Because I've had that in both directions.
Speaker: I've recalled songs because I'm feeling an emotion and realized from the song that I must be having this emotion.
Speaker: Right, you could find yourself whistling a certain tune and go, oh, wow, that indicates something about how I'm feeling.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's definitely one way to extend your cognition.
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.
Speaker: But also people talk about how you can think through on paper, right?
Speaker: By kind of talking through it to yourself, you can help to develop, you know, actually, what do I feel about this?
Speaker: But there's all sorts of ways you can do it.
Speaker: You can do it by painting, you can do it by
Speaker: playing music.
Speaker: You can do it by dancing around.
Speaker: There's no limit really to the way that we can make these sorts of emotional connections.
Speaker: Right, brilliant.
Speaker: I think we're close to about wrapping this up, but I want to ask you about some of the
Speaker: maybe the science behind emotions and what sorts of experiments that has led to us knowing about these emotions slash affects?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty big field.
Speaker: Or is that not something?
Speaker: Some favorite ones that you know about, maybe that you find it found interesting or revealing.
Speaker: I mean, one of the most interesting ones goes all the way back to William James.
Speaker: And it's this idea that by deliberately expressing an emotion, you can arouse that emotion.
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.
Speaker: So this became known as the facial feedback hypothesis.
Speaker: This idea, you can deliberately stimulate emotions by means of manipulating your bodily or facial expressions.
Speaker: And then lots of evidence was accumulated in favor of this idea.
Speaker: It looks really, really robust.
Speaker: But then, you know, 10 years ago, it was one of the experiments that got caught up in the replication crisis.
Speaker: So there was a particular experiment where they got people to hold a pen between their teeth and therefore...
Speaker: force themselves to smile or hold it between their lips in a certain way that forced a frown.
Speaker: And then it would affect the way they were, they were rating the funniness of cartoons.
Speaker: And they found that when they tried to replicate this in a, you know, more robust way that it was failing.
Speaker: So this was a big worry.
Speaker: Like, is this really important emotional phenomenon?
Speaker: Not in fact the case.
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,
Speaker: pretty convinced that by deliberately manipulating our bodily states, we can arouse the associated.
Speaker: And it is a pretty good clue that emotions have this essentially bodily nature to them.
Speaker: that they are in part bodily phenomenon.
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.
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.
Speaker: But that's such an experiment from sticking a pen in your lips.
Speaker: They have to find ways to trick people, right?
Speaker: So that's what the psychologists are all about.
Speaker: You need to try to manipulate people without their awareness.
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.
Speaker: You might then embrace those associations or you might reject them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So consciousness, conscious awareness of the technique tends to complicate matters.
Speaker: But I do think this is one of those techniques that does work with conscious awareness.
Speaker: Any other experiments that immediately come to mind from that you reference in your book or?
Speaker: I mean, the only other one that leaps to the top of my mind is these studies about consciousness of emotion.
Speaker: So, you know, it's a very tricky question to answer, like whether emotions are essentially conscious states.
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.
Speaker: And yet you are then seeing certain differences in their behavior as a result, which indicate that they are feeling some emotion.
Speaker: But what's really interesting is that you can then ask them, are you having an emotion right now?
Speaker: Or what are you feeling?
Speaker: And they don't report anything.
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.
Speaker: And so that's a very important piece of evidence, if that indeed is robust.
Speaker: So you're not completely sure if they replicate?
Speaker: You literally can't be sure of anything in this area.
Speaker: We've had too many disasters and failures of these things.
Speaker: Do you think it's something we can get better at as the whole of humanity at doing these kinds of experiments?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, do more science.
Speaker: The solution is not to give up.
Speaker: It's just to keep doing it and do it more carefully.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So obviously there's an intimate link between psychology, science and philosophy when it comes to emotions.
Speaker: Why did you approach emotions from this philosophical perspective as becoming a psychologist and studying it that way?
Speaker: I mean, that's partly just my background.
Speaker: I did a degree in philosophy because I wasn't just interested in the mind.
Speaker: I was interested in the whole universe.
Speaker: And the lovely thing about philosophy is that you can flit from one area to another quite happily.
Speaker: where a psychologist will be bogged down in following certain experiments over many, many years.
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.
Speaker: So I certainly don't want to do any philosophy independently of psychological research.
Speaker: I think it's absolutely essential to what we're doing in philosophy in this area in particular.
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?
Speaker: And, you know, sometimes the psychologists, they're just moving from one puzzle to the next.
Speaker: They're not really taking the time to think about how all this stuff is supposed to fit together.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I guess a big picture approach is what you're all about.
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.
Speaker: But where can people find your work?
Speaker: You have a book and you have a Twitter.
Speaker: Is there any other place that you can... I have a website where you can download pretty much everything I've ever written.
Speaker: So no one should ever be wanting to read something I've written and not able to do so.
Speaker: If they want to read it, they should always just email me and ask.
Speaker: And in general, you know, researchers like to be contacted by people who are interested in their work.
Speaker: So don't feel shy.
Speaker: Always get in touch.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Any last thoughts on words, Francis?
Speaker: Yeah, we'll link in the show notes to lots of Tom's things.
Speaker: He's got a lot of content online about this.
Speaker: It's really good.
Speaker: Cool, cool.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker: Thanks, Tom.
Speaker: That was fantastic.
Speaker: Thank you.
