Dear All
This Wed 27 in The Refectory, from 3.30 to 5,30, Phil Gerrans from
the University of Adelaide will be speaking to us on the following
topic:
Abstract. Emotions and Appraisals
As usual, there will be be a pre-talk or graduate students and other
interested parties, in which the background to the talk will be
covered. Graduate students are strongly encouraged to attend,
especially if they are working in different areas from the talk, as
this is the chance to get some breadth so that you'll be able to truly
claim some diversity in your graduate education, and get it from
leading international philosophers.
The Pre-Talk takes place at 2PM in the Philosophy Common Room.
Here's an abstract:
.
It is surprising to see just how little consensus there is
about the nature of emotions. This is true within as well as
between disciplines. For example advocates of Intentional
theories, Feeling theories and Basic Emotion theories which make
entirely incompatible claims about the essence of emotion can be
found in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Typically
advocates from one discipline rely on the others for
empirical or theoretical support.
Emotions have components: cognition, motivation, action
tendencies, motor expression and feelings. The folk
psychological stereotype of an emotion is of a psychological
state which integrates these components adaptively.
Arguments about the nature of emotion turn out to depend on
whether one treats a particular component as the essential
mechanism of synchronisation.
In fact emotion components are synchronised by appraisal
networks. Distributed neural circuits which regulate
synchronisation and desynchronisation over different time
scales.
Emotions are the appraisals implemented by these
networks.
I defend this view by applying it to the case of depression
focusing on two puzzles which are opaque to other theories,
both involving the action of antidepressants. Delay and
differential placebo effects. The failure of other theories
to explain these puzzles is not epiphenomenal to them but
flows from inadequacies as theories of emotion.
Good theories should simplify (by integrating disparate
phenomena such as symptoms in both normal and pathological
cases), unify (by explaining how more fundamental mechanisms
generate surface phenomena) and make testable predictions
which are contrary to those of competing theories. Only the
appraisal theory meets these requirements for depression in
particular and emotion in general.
As usual, there will be be a pre-talk or graduate students and other
interested parties, in which the background to the talk will be
covered. Graduate students are strongly encouraged to attend,
especially if they are working in different areas from the talk, as
this is the chance to get some breadth so that you'll be able to truly
claim some diversity in your graduate education, and get it from
leading international philosophers.
The Pre-Talk takes place at 2PM in the Philosophy Common Room.
cheers
d
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