Demystifying the role of emotion in behaviour: toward a goal-directed account

ABSTRACT

The paper sketches the historical development from emotion as a mysterious entity and the source of maladaptive behaviour, to emotion as a collection of ingredients and the source of also adaptive behaviour. We argue, however, that the underlying mechanism proposed to take care of this adaptive behaviour is not entirely up for its task. We outline an alternative view that explains so-called emotional behaviour with the same mechanism as non-emotional behaviour, but that is at the same time more likely to produce adaptive behaviour. The phenomena that were initially seen as requiring a separate emotional mechanism to influence and cause behaviour can also be explained by a goal-directed mechanism provided that more goals and other complexities inherent in the goal-directed process are taken into account.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• behaviour
• decision making
• goal-directed
• stimulus-driven
• appraisal

Acknowledgement

We wish to thank Eike Buabang and Massimo Koester for helpful discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Agnes Moors http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5137-557X

Notes

1 In some theories, the notions of utility and value are spelled out in terms of feelings of pleasure and pain, and hence do have an affective connotation. In other theories, however, the ambition was to define utility in non-mental (and hence non-affective) terms (Wälde & Moors, 2017).

2 Appraisal theories allow for flexibility in the step going from the raw stimulus input to the appraisals, but not in the step going from the appraisals to the action tendency (for extensive discussion see Moors, 2017a; Moors et al., 2017).

3 In this model, the goal-directed process is embedded in a control cycle starting with a comparison between a stimulus and a first goal. If a discrepancy is detected between the stimulus and this first goal, a second goal to reduce the discrepancy is activated. Reducing the discrepancy can be done either by choosing an action tendency via the goal-directed process (i.e. assimilation), by changing the first goal (i.e. accomodation), or by re-interpreting the stimulus (i.e. immunisation; see Brandtstädter & Rothermund, 2002). If an action tendency is chosen and implemented in overt behaviour, the outcome of this behaviour is fed back to the comparator as the input to a new cycle.The cycle is repeated until there is no discrepancy left.

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this article was supported by Research Program G073317N of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and Grants C14/17/047 and GOA/15/003 of the Research Council of KU Leuven.