Search Results

This essay surveys the range of philosophical problems that can be encompassed under the rubric, emotion in response to art. It details five such problems, according most of its attention to the nature of the emotional responses had to art, and the puzzle of emotional responses to fictional entities known to be fictional (what is often labeled ‘the paradox of fiction’). Attention is also given to the puzzle of how people derive satisfaction from art expressive or evocative of negative emotion (what is often labeled ‘the paradox of tragedy’), and to the question of how abstract works of art (such as pieces of instrumental music) manage to express or evoke emotions at all.

This chapter explores how cognition and emotion work together synergistically to produce predictable behavior, independent of its utility. It shows that in high-stakes situations, emotional response (whether automatic or cognitively mediated) ultimately drives behavior. A developmental model is presented to elucidate the ways in which maturation of the human brain supports the development of a coordinated relationship between emotional and cognitive processes—a relationship whose integrity is critical to the production of behavior in accordance with personally or socially mandated standards. Conditions under which emotion and cognition are less synchronized, such as in situations of high psychological stress and in cases involving specific neuropsychological disorders, are offered as additional support for this model. Finally, the implications for legal scholarship and policy are discussed.

How do we reconcile the insights of the judgement theorists into emotion with the empirical data from the psychologists? Following the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, it is suggested that there are two different processing systems in emotion, a very rapid instinctive appraisal system that occurs too fast for cognitive mediation and a slower cognitive system that monitors the results of the fast affective non-cognitive system. An emotional response is a process in which a physiological response caused by an affective appraisal fastens attention on events in the (inner or outer) environment that are very significant to a person's (or animal's) survival and/or well-being, and prepares the person (animal) to deal with this situation. The affective appraisal is a coarse-grained appraisal that is in turn monitored by a more-fined cognitive appraisal.

This chapter examines a possible mechanism to account for why helping behaviours might have positive health outcomes. It argues that positive emotional responses, particularly future-oriented positive emotions, form the basis of attitudes that lead to repetitive choices in one's use of time and energy. Such choices related to the arousal of positive emotions secure accompanying cardiovascular and immune physiologic responses capable of improving health and extending life. The chapter focuses primarily on the elderly population, where declining health may be a factor, and where accumulated knowledge and decreased daily demands make providing help to others personally appropriate and socially useful. It suggests that the most likely underlying mechanism linking helping behaviour and health is positive emotions, and no single activity or even class of activities will arouse positive emotions in all individuals, especially when responses must be time extended or repetitive.

A common response to music's expressiveness is a mirroring or echoing one; sad music tends to make (some) listeners feel sad and happy music to make them happy. Reflecting on the musical case enhances understanding of the listener's response. It also invites criticism and refinement of both the cognitive theory of the emotions offered by philosophers and the models for human-to-human emotional contagion proposed by psychologists. As well as exploring these matters, I defend my account of the listener's emotional response against objections presented to it by Jenefer Robinson.

William James argued that bodily changes are essential to an emotion; they are what put the ‘emotionality’ into emotion. There is good empirical evidence that some bodily responses are universal for particular emotions. Paul Ekman has demonstrated that there are universal spontaneous facial expressions for the ‘basic’ emotions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, happiness, and contempt. There is also evidence that many emotional responses are inbuilt or very easily acquired, such as the human fear of snakes. Robert Zajonc's research shows that some emotional responses happen too fast for ‘higher’ cognitive processes to be involved.

This chapter reviews theoretical accounts of the relation between music and emotion and presents a cognitive-motor framework for understanding some of its most powerful effects. We first review selected theories and investigations of emotional responses to music. We next discuss evidence that specific attributes of music are individually associated with distinct emotional interpretations, and may be manipulated by performers and composers to convey complex and dynamic emotional messages. We also describe empirical investigations that attempt to disentangle the contributions of cross-cultural and culture-specific associations between music and emotion. Finally, we introduce a body of theory and data concerning the cognitive-motor implications of music, and argue that important emotional effects can arise because music is optimally tailored to instantiate cognitive-motor processes of synchronization. This conception focuses on the capacity of music to resonate with psychological processes that function in human synchronization, and to elicit emotional effects related to these processes.

Only a small fraction of research in music perception and cognition has focused on the fundamental nature of time in music and the emotion it produces. In the last 80 years, there has been the implicit assumption that musical emotion can be understood by collecting (emotional) responses or assessments after a musical stimulus has been sounded, the so-called ‘postperformance’ response. Since the first important English-language experiments on the topic, the reasons for such an approach can be identified as pragmatism and tradition. Collecting self-report responses continuously requires careful synchronization of each response with the time in the music at which the response occurred. Frequent sampling of responses over time can produce large sets of data, too. Apart from a few ingenious solutions, this methodology needed significant computational power, something that would not be widespread until the 1990s. As researchers began to explore this time-dependent mode of data collection, they were faced with the problem of how to interpret the huge data sets accumulated. Indeed, there are now several methods of data collection and analysis of continuous emotional responses to music, many of them quite recent developments. This chapter discusses some of these (measurement and analysis methods) after defining continuous response. It concludes by briefly discussing some of the current issues in continuous-response method in connection with emotion and music, and speculates on some future directions and challenges.

This chapter considers the role of arousal in emotional experience. It argues that arousal serves as one of a number of cue sources that generate some emotional experiences. Arousal is sufficient to increase anger, fear, passionate love, and their close relations. Arousal is also necessary in the somewhat weak sense that some cue sources are required. An absence of arousal will reduce the intensity of those same emotional experiences.

This chapter presents a research project devoted specifically to studying the underlying mechanisms responsible for induction of emotion through music listening. It describes a research strategy, a novel theoretical framework, and preliminary findings from ongoing studies that explore underlying mechanisms. It discusses the implications of this work for other issues in the field of musical emotions. The early parts of the chapter review findings about the prevalence of musical emotions, because a first step in developing a framework is to know what phenomena the framework is supposed to explain. The latter parts present a unified theoretical framework that can explain these prevalence findings in terms of seven distinct mechanisms, besides cognitive appraisal. This will illustrate the role of psychological theory in telling researchers where to look for ‘clues’ in their quest to unravel the mystery of emotional responses to music.

This chapter presents in greater depth the theoretical foundations of this book, grounding the concept of emotional diplomacy in the work of sociologists such as Erving Goffman and Arlie Hochschild, and drawing upon the writings of Robert Jervis on the role of images in international relation. Put succinctly, emotional diplomacy is coordinated state-level behavior aimed at officially and explicitly projecting the image of a particular emotional response toward other states. What makes emotional diplomacy significant is that it shifts political interactions to a playing field whose rules do not fit traditionally theorized logics. It does so by injecting the social meanings, expectations, and patterns of behavior associated with emotional responses into state-level interactions. Emotional diplomacy serves the instrumental pursuit of conventional goals, but it requires acting as if the standard rules of politicking are suspended. As a result, it can generate state behavior, interactive dynamics, and outcomes we would not predict given conventional accounts of international politics. In short, emotional diplomacy presents a set of strategies that constitutes both opportunities and constraints not currently recognized within the field of international relations.

What happens in the mind when we judge that an artwork is good? A growing body of evidence from neuroscience and psychology suggests that such appraisals have an emotional basis. To judge an artwork as good is to have a positive emotional response towards it. Against this, one might object that some good works evoke negative emotions or lack emotional content entirely. To address this worry, we must distinguish two stages of appraisal: a response stage in which the work is perceived, analyzed, and affectively experienced, and an assessment stage in which these responses are used to decide whether the work is good. A positive emotion underwrites positive assessment. But which emotion? There are a number of competing candidates (pleasure, admiration, interest, etc.), but here a case is made for the conclusion that positive appraisal is experienced as wonder, a basic emotion that has been neglected in recent research.

This chapter examines the psychophysiology of appreciation, an emotion that is seen as overlapping with gratitude. It analyzes the role of the heart in appreciation and other positive emotions and describes the cardiovascular contours of appreciation. It evaluates intervention studies that demonstrate the benefits of various techniques that enable people to develop a greater awareness of their emotional responses, including appreciation.

The reason that many people engage with music, as performers or listeners, is that it has power to evoke or enhance valued emotional states. Studies supporting this general assertion are reviewed in this chapter. In the light of this one might have expected the study of emotion to be central to the psychology of music. This has not been the case. This chapter discusses conceptual issues, including the inherent variability of emotional response. It also addresses some of the methodological issues arising primarily from difficulties of measurement. Notwithstanding the difficulties inherent in research on this topic, some progress has been made, and the chapter outlines some major findings, including some evidence that a major subset of emotional responses are cued by confirmations and violations of expectancy within the musical structure, in line with the predictions arising from the theoretical proposals first articulated by L. B. Meyer.

This chapter focuses on psychological pressure in a competitive environment. It tests the hypothesis that if incentives become sufficiently large, the performance of professional players should become much less subject to the effects of anxiety, distress, and other pressures, perhaps even entirely free from psychological biases. This hypothesis is studied by taking advantage of a unique natural experiment in Argentina that was run for only one season. In the season 1988–89, the Argentine league championship decided to experiment with an unusual point system: After each drawn (tied) match, there would be a penalty shoot-out to determine which team got a bonus point.

The paper casts a critical eye over attempts to incorporate psychology into literary criticism over the past century. On this issue there was a long drawn-out tussle between the romantics and the modernists, the latter against, the former in favour of, psychological accounts of literature and literary value. Each side put up some strong arguments but in the end it seemed that the modernists had won the day. But now there is a new romanticism re-emerging, in the form of theories of emotion and literature. Prominent among these is the work of Jenefer Robinson, e.g. in Deeper Than Reason (2005). But is there enough in Robinson’s theory to make literary critics think again? The paper argues not. Robinson’s claims both about authors and readers are examined. On the authorial side, examples from romantic poetry suggest that criticism need attend only to the implied (not the real) author, i.e. emotion expressed merely in a work. From the point of view of the reader, it is argued that Robinson’s emphasis on a reader’s actual emotional responses as integral to critical understanding is not fully justified, nor consistent with standard critical practice.

This chapter begins with a number of very common movie events. They bear testimony to the hardly controversial observation that, in large measure, affect is the glue that holds the audience's attention to the screen on a moment-to-moment basis. The author mentions “affect” here rather than “emotion,” even though it might be acceptable in ordinary language to label all the presented examples as instances of emotional response. The author's reason for this way of speaking is that the ordinary notion of emotion can be exceedingly broad and elastic, sometimes ranging so widely as to encompass hardwired reflex reactions, kinesthetic turbulence, moods, sexual arousal, pleasures and desires, as well as occurrent mental states like anger, fear, and sorrow.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to present a theoretical framework for understanding the nature, significance, and consequences of state-level emotional behavior on the international stage. In doing so, it also provides scholars with new theoretical tools for making sense of what would otherwise be puzzling state behavior within international relations. Key to the arguments presented in this book is a concept new to the field of international relations, that of emotional diplomacy, defined as coordinated state-level behavior that explicitly and officially projects the image of a particular emotional response toward other states. The book focuses on three specific, ideal-typical strains of emotional diplomacy: the diplomacy of anger, the diplomacy of sympathy, and the diplomacy of guilt. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter presents findings from studies of defensive behaviors in Rhesus monkeys which are relevant to understanding fear and anxiety-related psychopathology in humans. The physiological component of these fear-related behaviors is examined to reveal the causal factors of individual differences in fearful temperament. These studies complement the basic work on rodents discussed in prior chapters. Rhesus monkeys were chosen as subjects for the experiments since they share key biological and social characteristics with humans and have shorter life spans that enable longitudinal studies. This chapter discusses the laboratory paradigm developed to characterize fearful behavioral responses in the subjects and to identify which animals have fearful and anxious dispositions. The studies presented also yield relevant findings on the development of defensive responses — its neuropharmacological regulation and physiological components. The findings cited deficiencies in the regulation of adaptive emotional and defensive behavioral responses as the causes of anxiety-related psychopathology.