University of Connecticut

University of Connecticut (English)
How to Explain Grief and Other Sentiments of Nothingness
Class of '47 Room, Homer Babbidge Library
Friday, February 14, 2003
4:00 PM
University of Connecticut Faculty Series
Abstract

One traditional problem in aesthetics concerns why people respond emotionally to literary works when they know perfectly well that the events are fictional. This problem has many nuances. For example, a solution to the problem must explain both the similarities and differences in people's emotional responses. In previous work (COGNITION, EMOTION, AND THE ARTS Routledge 2003]), I argued that the problem can be solved using standard neurocognitive architecture. Specifically, my contention was that appraisal theories of emotion are mistaken in suggesting that appraisal itself gives rise to emotion. Rather, I maintained, the logic of appraisal is irrelevant to emotion. Emotion is generated through two means. The first is the experience of specific perceptual fragments that activate emotion centers in the brain. These fragments may be experienced either through perception or through imagination, which operates in much the same way in the brain. The second means of generation is through emotional memories (and related episodic memories). I went on to argue that the emotion triggers are too crude to be ego-centric, and that they include the various emotion expressions (e.g., cries), and thus that they entail some sort of empathy. This presents a quite successful response to the aesthetic dilemma. It also has consequences for other theories of emotion (e.g., Damasio's views on emotion and reasoning). But it seems to fail drastically in accounting for emotions that involve no perceptual triggers and that differ from relevant memories. For example, grief may be triggered by a happy memory of someone who used to be around, but isn't around now. In this talk, I will argue that a slightly more complex account of emotion triggering can account for this and related emotions of what Sartre called "nothingness." This account incorporates simple principles of habituation while viewing emotions as complex processes punctuated by activations of emotion centers in the brain, processes that involve continual alterations of attentional focus and adjustments of sensitivity to emotion triggers. The resulting explanation of emotion turns out to have further advantages, such as accounting for th! e development of expectations that contradict our inferential beliefs, or at least partially explaining Frijda's law of hedonic asymmetry.

Schedule of Events

Spring 2003 Colloquium Series

Margaret Gilbert

Patrick Hogan

Emilio Bizzi

James McClelland

Roy D'Andrade