Emotional Phenomenology Research Articles

Emotional gradients in autobiographical memories across the lifespan

Autobiographical memory is the mental re-experiencing of complex events from one’s life (Grilli and Sheldon, 2019). Memories are not perfect reproductions – rather, they are reconstructed to serve one’s goals, identity, and social communication. Emotions are known to modulate memory. In this study, we investigated changes in the emotional phenomenology of autobiographical memories across different life periods. 65 participants (ages 22-35) completed the Autobiographical Interview (Levine et al., 2002), in which they verbally recalled memories from childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and the past year; they also recalled a negative memory (from any period) and imagined a future memory. Recall occurred in random order across two sessions to control for state effects. Memory emotionality was scored in multiple ways. Participants self-reported the vividness and emotion (valence, arousal, and dominance) within their memory. Raters evaluated the emotion of each memory on a 1-9 Likert scale (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.90). Finally, transcripts were analyzed with LIWC-22 to determine the average emotion of words within each memory. Across scoring methods, we found participants consistently reported greater vividness in their memory from adulthood compared to childhood. We observed gradients in emotion across the lifetime: childhood memories were more negative and less dominant, while adulthood memories were more positive and more dominant. Childhood memories contained more words associated with negative emotions, especially anger. Imagined future memories were more positive compared to childhood memories. Our results extend previous findings of a negative-to-positive temporal gradient in self-selected memories (Williamson et al., 2019) by showing this gradient to apply not only when emotional memories are prompted, but also when memories are freely retrieved without special instruction. We also show the pattern to extend to future, imagined memories. We speculate that this gradient may explain why self-appraisal is typically more positive and negative for future and past selves, respectively.

Isolating primitive emotional phenomenology in the ‘lab’ of fiction

ABSTRACT There is an important debate in the philosophy of mind that has roots in the phenomenological tradition, namely: what are the primitive forms of consciousness, that is, what are the fundamental ingredients or aspects of consciousness. This paper wants to contribute to partially answering this general question by providing an answer to a required sub-question within this question: is emotional phenomenology fundamental? I will answer in the affirmative and will offer an argument focused on contemplative emotions elicited by fiction. Another type of contemplative emotions, namely, esthetic emotions, have been invoked in the literature but I will argue that the phenomenology of emotions elicited by fiction, given their continuity and sameness in kind with the phenomenology of garden variety emotions, are more dialectically efficient vis-à-vis the debate on the irreducibility of emotional phenomenology.

Emotional Phenomenology: A New Puzzle

AbstractEmotions are taken by some authors as a kind of mental state epistemically akin to perception. However, unlike perceptual phenomenology, which allows being treated dogmatically, emotional phenomenology is puzzling in the following respect. When you feel an emotion, you feel an urge to act, you feel, among other things, your body’s action readiness. On the other hand, at least sometimes, you are aware that an emotion by itself is not a sufficient reason to justify an evaluative judgment and/or an action, not even prima facie. How can a single mental state, emotion, seem to be dogmatic and hypothetic at the same time? It seems that emotions alone fall short of the justifying role in which their guiding role would be grounded. If this is true, then emotional experience cannot be epistemically akin to perception. Unless we are willing to claim that emotions cause action blindly (i.e., not rationally), we need an account of the distinctive epistemic role of emotional experience that renders its guidance role rational. In this paper I outline this new problem and its consequences for the metaphysics and epistemology of emotional experience. I also try to offer the sketch of a plausible solution.

An Argument from Normativity for Primitive Emotional Phenomenology

Uriah Kriegel has attempted to describe the varieties of consciousness, that is, the primitive elements that constitute the phenomenal realm. Perceptual, imaginative, algedonic, cognitive, entertaining, and conative are the types of phenomenology acknowledged by him. This list, though right, is incomplete. My main claim is that for it to be complete it should include sui generis emotional phenomenology. To motivate that thesis, I will highlight the characteristic normativity of emotional phenomenology and contrast it with the characteristic normativity of Kriegel’s phenomenal elements. I will conceive, by means of a mental experiment in the form of a phenomenal contrast, a felt normative clash between emotional phenomenology and Kriegel’s primitive phenomenal states. The idea behind it is that the felt normative clash is possible because emotional phenomenology and Kriegel’s phenomenal elements are metaphysically distinct.

The prospects of emotional dogmatism

The idea that emotional experience is capable of lending immediate and defeasible justification to evaluative belief has been amassing significant support in recent years. The proposal that it is my anger, say, that justifies my belief that I’ve been wronged putatively provides us with an intuitive and naturalised explanation as to how we receive epistemic justification for a rich catalogue of our evaluative beliefs. However, despite the fact that this justificatory thesis of emotion is fundamentally an epistemological proposal, comparatively little has been done to explicitly isolate what it is about emotions that bestows them with justificatory ability. The purpose of this paper is to provide a novel and thorough analysis into the prospects of phenomenology-based—or dogmatist—views of emotional justification. By surveying and rejecting various instantiations of the emotional dogmatist view, I endeavour to provide an inductive case for the conclusion that emotional phenomenology cannot be the seat of the emotions’ power to immediately justify evaluative belief.

Emotional Phenomenology and Relationality: Forever the Twain Shall Meet

ABSTRACTFor more than four decades, George Atwood and I have been absorbed in rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. In the course of this work, I repeatedly made the claim that phenomenology led us inexorably to relationality, but until now I did not offer an explanation of this inexorability. In this article, I show that emotional phenomenology and relationality always already form an indissoluble unity, because relationality is constitutive of emotional experience.

The Irreducibility of Emotional Phenomenology

Emotion theory includes attempts to reduce or assimilate emotions to states such as bodily feelings, beliefs-desire combinations, and evaluative judgements. Resistance to such approaches is motivated by the claim that emotions possess a sui generis phenomenology. Uriah Kriegel defends a new form of emotion reductivism which avoids positing irreducible emotional phenomenology by specifying emotions’ phenomenal character in terms of a combination of other phenomenologies. This article argues Kriegel’s approach, and similar proposals, are unsuccessful, since typical emotional experiences are constituted by sui generis feelings towards value.

Reductive Representationalism and Emotional Phenomenology

Reductive Representationalism and Emotional Phenomenology

Il meriggio del pensiero. Fenomenologia della rivolta in Albert Camus

The article explores the role that Max Scheler’s emotional phenomenology plays in the genesis of Albert Camus’ pensee de Midi by reading L’Homme revolte (1951) in the light of the French writer’s intense intellectual dialogue with the German phenomenologist’s writings on love and its perversions, in particular L’Homme du ressentiment and Nature et formes de la sympathie. Imbued with Nietzsche’s project of a transvaluation of all values, Camus develops a personal phenomenology of revolt and, investigating its relationship with resentment, he traces in the peculiar loving attitude of the rebel the way out of contemporary nihilism.

A Comparison of Memory Bias or Selective Information Processing between Patients with Social Phobia Disorder and Normal Individuals

In recent years, researches on emotional disorders and phenomenology have been significantly improved. One of these research areas of knowledge is the process of memory bias or information processing in mental disorders. This research is a descriptive and causal-comparative study aimed at investigating selective information processing and role of cognitive attention in this process in patients with social phobia. To this end, two groups of patients with social phobia and normal individuals, each containing 20 individuals, were selected and compared through cluster and random sampling with replacement. The subjects were tested using Stroop test, Recognition test and three questionnaires including Social Anxiety Questionnaire, Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and Beck Depression Inventory. For data analysis, one- factor and two-factor variance analysis test with repeated measures and Scheffe post hoc test were applied. The results indicated that patients with social phobia disorder compared to the control group spend more time processing the sings. Further processing of phobia signs was another result of this research. A significant difference was found between the recognition scores of the two groups. This confirms that the processing has been conscious. No significant difference was observed in examining the effect of different anxiety levels. But patients with social phobia disorder who had higher depression levels spent more time processing the signs. Additionally, it was found that variables of age and education have no effect on the process of attentional bias. Considering the obtained results, it can be said that the content of signs has been effective at the time of color determination. Thus, interference effect cannot be attributed to factors such as the length of words or their difficulty or other factors. Further, factors other than anxiety have been effective in slow performance of patients. Existence of schemas commensurate with the threatening signs in memory and cognitive avoidance (attending to stimuli associated with emotional concerns) has led to bias and conscious processing. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n3s3p97

Autonomic "portrait" of different signs emotions subjective experience

Purpose - to identify the specificity in objective autonomic manifestations of different signs emotions of healthy persons in relation to subjective emotional phenomenology. When benchmarking subjective self-reports of experienced emotions and values autonomic in the process of laboratory simulation in 30 subjects negative and positive emotions found that the degree and sign of subjectively evaluated emotional experiences did not always correspond to characteristics of emotion-generating stimulus, and "autonomic portrait" did not associated with the severity and the "sign"of emotional subjective experiences. Students, subjectively experienced vividly expressed strong negative emotions, did not display adequate autonomic activation, but in modeling of positive emotions they retain the negative emotional background and prolonged sympathetic overactivation in cardiovascular functions. In subjects with dominance of positive subjective assessments of their emotional status in modeling of psychological stress and in relaxation minimum shifts to parasympathetic autonomic regulation were observed.

Feeling emotional: the amygdala links emotional perception and experience

Feeling emotional: the amygdala links emotional perception and experience

The Cognitive and Emotional Phenomenology of Depression and Anxiety: Are Worry and Hopelessness the Cognitive Correlates of NA and PA?

The study attempted to integrate the cognitive content-specificity and tripartite literatures to create a more holistic model of the emotional, physiological, and cognitive phenomenology of depression and anxiety. In addition, the constructs of hopelessness and worry were used to clarify ambiguous findings in the cognitive content-specificity research and to identify possible cognitive correlates of high NA and low PA. The results from 124 clients at a university counseling center supported this attempt at integrating these literatures. Overall, there was good evidence that worry is a cognitive correlate of high NA. Consequently, we view worry and high NA as features of a constellation of correlated indices that are shared with both depressed and anxious mood states. Alternatively, the results also support the position that hopelessness is a cognitive correlate of low PA. These features—low PA and hopelessness—define correlated indices that help discriminate depressed from anxious states. We view this integration of the cognitive and emotional literatures as providing evidence for a comprehensive map of the emotional and cognitive phenomenology in depression and anxiety.

From Countertransference to “Passion”

Bion’s ideas may be extended to describe an emotional phenomenology of the analyst’s subjectivity and a methodology which helps differentiate countertransference enactments from fuller emotional participation. Bion called the process of integrating and utilizing one’s most basic and important emotions to make meaning, “passion.” The analyst’s primal feelings—of love, hate, and curiosity—serve as a central organizer of meaning in the analytic interaction. These feelings involve pain, and to the extent the analyst unconsciously decides to evade or foreclose the evolution of the feelings, such that they remain unintegrated in the thinking process, the analyst is liable to become mired in repetitive transference-countertransference experiences without establishing fresh meaning. A case example illustrates the relevance of “passion” to contemporary relational theory and practice.

How We Can Be Moved by Anna Karenina, Green Slime, and a Red Pony

From Colin Radford we have inherited the ‘fiction paradox’: How can we be moved by creatures of fiction? Answers recently offered by aestheticians presuppose a false theory of emotion and are inconsistent with emotional phenomenology as well as facts about human evolution, physiology, and anatomy. I argue that Kendall Walton's ‘Charles’ can genuinely fear the slime and yet avow that he does not consider it dangerous—all without being irrational. The solutions offered by Morreall, Moran, Hyslop, Boruah, Lamarque, and Neill are rejected as inadequate. Knowledge of how we can be moved probably lies outside philosophy altogether—in cognitive neuroscience.