![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Some perceptual experiences seem to have an emotional element that makes both an affective and motivational difference in the content and character of the experience. I offer a novel account of these experiences that is inspired by related work on pain that I call the ‘Affective-Motivational Account’. Like typical sensory pain, perceptual experience should be understood as a complex state generated by both a sensory-discriminative component and a functionally distinct affective-motivational component. It is this latter system that provides such experiences with their emotional character. Such a view is strongly supported by the available empirical evidence, and has the potential to address several longstanding philosophical puzzles about the relation between perception and emotion.
KEYWORDS:
Notes
1 Many terms can be used here, including ‘valence’, ‘hedonic tone’, ‘drives’, ‘urges’, ‘pulls’, and ‘rewards’. For the purposes of this paper, I will always use ‘affect’ to refer to the felt positive and negative character of sensory experiences, and ‘motivation’ to refer to the positive and negative behavioural and epistemic pulls exerted by those experiences. In previous work (e.g. Fulkerson [Citation2014: ch. 7]), I have used contrast cases like these to support the claim that perception has affective content; here I am deploying such cases to argue for a much stronger claim about the emotional character of perception.
2 Some of these elements are more natural for ‘perceptual’ models of the emotions—views that take emotions to be a kind of perception, or at least to share enough similarities with perception to warrant being modelled as being such [Prinz Citation2004; Tappolet Citation2005]. Still, even the most cognitivist accounts of emotions involve felt affective and motivational elements.
3 Michael Tye [Citation2008], for instance, offers an intentionalist theory of emotional experience that explores the connection between perceptual episodes and outwardly directed emotions.
4 Obviously, I’m stipulating this now to mark a contrast. In actual instances there will be many intersecting interactions and overlapping elements. We’ll consider some of these complications below.
5 Why call this aspect emotional when it’s tied to the stimulus in this way? For one, this is the standard term for such experiences in the psychological literature (i.e. ‘emotional vision’ and ‘emotional touch’). In addition, the term best captures the affective and motivational functional roles of these elements. If one prefers to reserve the term ‘emotional’ only for self-standing emotions, then in what follows one can simply replace ‘emotional perception’ with ‘affective-motivational perception’ without loss of meaning.
6 Although, of course, it is not fully immune to influence; there are many known top-down influences on emotional processing, even within perception. The contrast here is thus a relative one. These effects seem akin to other cases of cognitive penetration of the non-emotional components of sensory experience [Rolls Citation2010].
7 Of course, strong emotional perceptual experiences can indeed set off self-standing emotional reactions. Exposure to extremely disgusting foods can make one upset, afraid, angry, or sad, as the case may be. In addition, as mentioned above, expectations and background beliefs can modulate emotional responses within perception. These interactions complicate the simple story of dissociation in the artificial cases, but don’t undermine the utility of the distinction. Indeed, the positive account to come offers a robust explanation for these effects.
8 Neither Akins nor Matthen describes these elements as emotional or as supplied by a distinct affective-motivational system. Indeed, accounting for such features from within a traditional theory of perception has proven to be difficult. A positive feature of the present view is that it can plausibly explain perceptual experience as performing both an objective and an evaluative function, in a way that reinforces rather than undermines each.
9 To give one example, Stone’s otherwise excellent book Vision and Brain [Citation2012] makes no mention of visual emotional processing.
10 I say ‘at least partially’, because there seems to be some variability in the strength of the emotional presentations from modality to modality, and even from feature to feature within a modality.
11 This allows us to sidestep inessential debates about the strength and nature of the transparency. For more on transparency, see Kind [Citation2003] and Molyneux [Citation2009]. I am grateful for the helpful advice of an anonymous referee on this point.
12 This is not to deny the possibility of a unified account of both kinds of perception. A modified projectivist view could give a single account of both the emotional and descriptive contents [Egan Citation2010]. Similarly, a fully committed relationalist could easily expand the view to include emotional properties. What matter for my purposes are the clear dissociations that occur between emotional and descriptive contents, even for a single stimulus, which suggest that these contents are generated by distinct elements within perception. The important point is that such views would still purport to explain two different aspects of perceptual experience, rather than to collapse them into a single thing.
13 As we’ll see, it is important that we not cleave off emotional perception as some outlier case involving unusual emotional reactions; on my view, emotional reactions are a central function of all perceptual experience.
14 It follows from this connection that, on my view, we should think of typical pain experiences as having an emotional component. I embrace this conclusion inasmuch as the word ‘emotion’ just picks out the affective, motivating, component of these experiences, and not self-standing emotions. It also does not imply that some emotions, like so-called ‘social pains’, are literally pains [Corns Citation2015].
15 I focus here on the two-factor view for emotional perception, but in pain research it’s common to build in a third component, the cognitive-evaluative system, that appraises and evaluates sensory pains [Aydede and Güzeldere Citation2002]. While the possibility of applying such a third layer to perception seems promising, especially as a means of bridging emotional perception and emotion proper, it does not immediately affect the present account of emotional perception.
16 To be sure, there are many important differences between pains and exteroceptive perception. I believe that these differences are best explained by features other than the possibility that pains have, and perceptions do not, an affective-motivational component.
17 Indeed, if anything, pains seem to have their balance tipped in favour of affective-motivational processing at the expense of discriminative detail, whereas the relative priorities in, say, vision, are tipped the other way. These differences might explain why pains seem less transparent, revealing only locations and minimal sensory qualities, whereas the other modalities, having more robust sensory-discriminative inputs, will naturally be more detailed.
18 The papers in Olausson et al. [Citation2016] detail nearly every aspect of CT channel function. I discussed the nature of this channel elsewhere [Fulkerson 2014: ch. 7].
19 There is a separate system involved in aversive touch, suggesting that the affective-motivational elements of each modality might in turn be composed of multiple subsystems.
20 See Pessoa [2013: ch. 2] for a detailed discussion of these pathways and their functional architecture.
21 A key difference is that my view proposes a dedicated faculty, an affective-motivational system, that functions alongside discriminative perception. This is in tension with the constructivism favoured by Russell, which rejects dedicated modular approaches. There is considerable evidence in favour of my approach, however, suggesting that these ‘systems’ have as much coherence and unity as the senses themselves do.
22 On Russell’s view, ‘core affect’ is a summed average of one’s arousal and affective state. Roughly then, for him, the affective quality is grounded in the capacity of the stimulus to change these values.
23 Of course, I am assuming that many if not all of these views can be characterized in broadly relational terms. For particular versions of these views, this might not be plausible.
24 See the papers in Aydede [Citation2005] and the recent literature on painfulness (e.g. Klein [Citation2007]; Cutter and Tye [Citation2011]; Bain [Citation2012]) for an extended illustration of how such debates have proceeded in that area, despite the widespread agreement that typical pains are composed of distinct functional systems and content types.
25 I would like to thank Mohan Matthen, Murat Aydede, Jonathan Cohen, Kevin Connolly, and Lana Kuhle for comments and feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful for the feedback from various audiences at the many places where I presented some of this material, including at meetings of the SSPP and APA, in several reading groups and graduate courses at UC San Diego, and workshops or colloquia in York (Canada), UC Merced, and Toronto. Finally, I am especially grateful to the two anonymous referees for this journal who supplied an extremely helpful set of comments.