Reflections on the Neurobiology of Emotion and Feeling

Abstract

Abstract By the end of the nineteenth century Charles D3;rwin had made incisive observations on the expression of emotions in animals and humans and placed emotion in the perspective of biological evolution; William James had produced a scientific description of the phenomenon of emotion, thus opening the way to its experimental study; and Sigmund Freud was writing about the means by which emotion might play a role in psychopathology. Somebody freshly arrived on earth in 1994 and interested in the topic of emotion would have good cause to wonder why such groundbreaking devel opments did not lead to an assault on the neurobiology of emotion. What could possibly have gone wrong in the intervening century? The simplest answer to this question is that emotion has received benign neglect from neuroscience and been passed over in favor of the study of attention, perception, memory, and language. The not-so-simple answer would invoke the following reasons. First, in spite of the auspicious begin nings provided by Darwin, James, and Freud, there was a manifest difficulty in defining the phenomenon of emotion. What was the nature and substance of emotion? What was its scope? What were its component manifestations? William James made a brave attempt as one can see in the following passage: “If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our con sciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind-stuff out of which the emotion can be con stituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains” (James 1950).