Varieties of instrumental theories of emotional action: commentary on “a perceptual control theory of emotional action”

ABSTRACT

Eder proposes a theory of action causation based on Powers’ control theory and Hommel’s theory of event coding in which emotional feelings play a crucial role. After presenting a rough description of Eder’s theory in which I try to spell out the various steps in the control cycle, I compare his theory to my own goal-directed theory. The two theories converge in that they (a) rely on a control cycle in which different states are compared and (b) emphasise the instrumental or goal-directed nature of emotional actions. Points of divergence include the content of the representations involved in the control cycle and the meaning and role of feelings.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• action
• goal-directed theory
• perceptual control theory

Acknowledgment

Preparation of this article is supported by Grant C14/23/062 of the Research Fund of KU Leuven.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term “feelings” is typically used synonymous with experience, and experience is conscious. Admittedly, some authors have deviated from this consensus. For instance, Damasio (1999) has argued that the representation of bodily changes is already an unconscious feeling that can be made conscious. Also Prinz (2004) has explored the possibility of unconscious feelings, pointing at cases in which one feels a nagging pain when one's attention is elsewhere. However, I believe that cases like these are more easily understood as cases of phenomenal consciousness (i.e. the aspect or type of consciousness that can exist independent of attention) without access consciousness (i.e. the aspect or type of consciousness that is dependent of attention; Block, 1995) rather than as cases of unconscious feelings.

2 If this is accepted, the puzzle put forward by Eder (this issue) that emotional actions are purposive yet impulsive is no longer a puzzle. Saying that emotional actions are purposive, understood by Eder (this issue) in the sense of being caused by an action tendency, is not incompatible with saying that they are impulsive, understood by Eder (this issue) in the sense of stimulus-driven (i.e. caused by the activation of an S-R association). This is because in a stimulus-driven process, the representation of the response can be considered as an action tendency (see Moors, 2022; Moors et al., 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Onderzoeksraad, KU Leuven [grant number C14/23/062].