You are in: Home » Research at the Unit » Emotion research
Consciousness and Emotion Experience
Anthony Marcel, CBU Attention Group, and John Lambie, Anglia Polytechnic University
Most current approaches to consciousness ignore emotion, bodily experience and self, dealing only with cognitive perceptual awareness of the external world. Considerable conceptual and review work has led us to write a substantial theoretical paper integrating empirical and theoretical work on consciousness and emotion, space and attention, cognitive neuropsychology, affective pathology and phenomenology (Lambie and Marcel, 2002). This has already had an impact on cognitive and emotion theory and among philosophers. One outcome of this paper is that we have already been invited to give plenary talks at the International Society for Research on Emotion, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society and the University of Arizona at Tucson.
|
|
|
|
In our proposals we have resolved previous disputes as to the content of emotion experience by acknowledging its varieties and by treating separately the content of emotion experience, the underlying nonconscious correspondences, and the processes contributing to conscious experience. Our analysis exposes implicit aspects of emotion phenomenology not usually revealed by conventional methods, such as the role of self, ownership, agency, and hedonics; it also emphasises physicality and spatiality of emotion and emotion experience. The proposed principled taxonomy of the content of emotion experience depends on three aspects of attention, mode (immersed-detached; synthetic-analytic), direction (self-world, distinguished spatially) and focus (evaluation-action), and is informed by a two-level view of consciousness where phenomenology (1st-order) is distinguished from awareness (2nd-order). So, for example, the experience of anger can consist in feeling tense or hot and feeling a faster heartbeat, feeling an urge to attack, being aware of someone as offensive or as 'to-be-attacked' or as 'a bastard', having conscious thoughts that one has been offended and of how one has, or simply having an integrated experience of 'anger'. Such different experiences may typically exist between different episodes, different emotions, individuals and cultures. Representation at the nonconscious and the two conscious levels can be distinguished respectively by indirect effects, expressability and ability to report. Intentional action based on a representation requires the representation to have phenomenological status, but without awareness of it appropriate explanation of one's action is impossible. These conceptual distinctions enable us to separate and account for cases of "unconscious" emotion where there is an apparent lack of phenomenology or awareness. Previously there has been no principled way to distinguish deficient phenomenal experience or awareness of one's emotion in normal cases, infancy, anger disorders, prefrontal brain damage, alexithymia, panic attacks, cultural differences, and defence mechanisms such as repression and intellectualization.
Detailed consideration of variations in emotion experience has contributed to development of theoretical aspects of consciousness. Indeed, the role of attentional mode in modulating felt ownership and hedonicity promises an approach to the "hard problem" of consciousness, i.e. phenomenal experience.
Our own empirical work in different areas contributed to the theory and the latter has led in turn to predictions which are being tested currently. One of these involves assessing effects of manipulation of self- vs world-focus and mode of attention on the content of conscious emotion experience. Another involves continuation of Lambie & Baker's initial (2001) work on repression. This confirmed that representation of something provoking anxiety has to have phenomenal status, though not awareness, if it is to be the basis for intentional action regarding it, e.g. avoiding it, but that without awareness individuals will be unable to give a veridical account of their action. The continuation of this involves use of negative priming to illuminate the mechanism of repression.
This and other related collaboration with Tim Dalgleish on affect regulation by Tony Marcel in the Attention Group and John Lambie now at Anglia Polytechnic University represent a widened integration of theory, approach and techniques within and beyond the Unit.
In the same spirit, aspects of the theory of emotion experience are being applied to understanding the bizarre behaviour and state of mind of two kinds of right hemisphere stroke patients who are apparently unaware of (anosognosic for) their hemiplegia (Marcel, Tegnér & Nimmo-Smith, in press). Their split consciousness (linked to emotion), confabulations and violations of rationality and the pragmatics of discourse appear part of an emotional attitude of extreme immersion or extreme detachment. Anosognosia is the most serious impediment to rehabilitation of neurological deficit. Tony Marcel and Richard Tegnér, in Sweden, are collaborating with Andrew Mathews and Tim Dalgleish as well as Jean-Claude Baron (Professor of Stroke Medicine at Addenbrooke's Hospital) on projects using techniques derived from work with people with affective and psychotic disorders, as well as use of MRI and metabolic PET brain imaging to throw further light on the nature of such disorders. Key references.
Key references
Lambie, J.A. and Marcel, A.J. Consciousness and Emotion Experience: a Theoretical Framework. Psychological Review. 2002, 109, 219-259.
Marcel, A.J., Tegnér, R. and NIMMO-SMITH, I. Anosognosia for plegia: specificity, extension, partiality and disunity of bodily unawareness. Cortex. In press.
Lambie, J. A. & Baker, K.L. (2001, June) Emotional behaviour and emotional self-explanation in repressors: Evidence for different functional roles for 1st- and 2nd-order emotion experience? Paper presented at Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.