New displays and new emotions: a commentary on Rozin and Cohen (2003)

In this article, the authors elaborate on 3 ideas advanced in P. Rozin and A. B. Cohen's (2003) innovative study of facial expression. Taking a cue from their discovery of new expressive behaviors (e.g., the narrowed eyebrows), the authors review recent studies showing that emotions are conveyed in more channels than usually studied, including posture, gaze patterns, voice, and touch. Building on their claim that confusion has a distinct display, the authors review evidence showing distinct displays for 3 self-conscious emotions (embarrassment, shame, and pride), 5 positive emotions (amusement, desire, happiness, love, interest), and sympathy and compassion. Finally, the authors offer a functional definition of emotion to integrate these findings on "new" displays and emotions.     

Now you see it,now you don't--the confusing case of confusion as an emotion: commentary on Rozin and Cohen (2003)

P. Rozin and A. B. Cohen (2003) contend that confusion is an emotion because it is valenced, it has a distinct facial expression, and it has a distinct internal state. On the basis of these criteria, they call for further study of this unstudied stateand challenge emotion researchers to consider "confusion" to be an emotion. The author agrees with Rozin and Cohen (2003) that confusion is an affective state, is valenced, has an (internal) object, may be expressed facially, and that laypersons may, under certain circumstances, consider it an emotion. However, its expression is likely to be an expressive component of emotions for which goal obstruction is central. Further, confusion may also not be as commonly considered an emotion by laypersons, as Rozin and Cohen contend. Finally, confusion is not unstudied, only most of the time it is not emotion researchers who do the researching.     

Genetic essentialism, neuroessentialism, and stigma: commentary on Dar-Nimrod and Heine (2011)

Dar-Nimrod and Heine (2011) presented a masterfully broad review of the implications of genetic essentialism for understandings of human diversity. This commentary clarifies the reasons that essentialist thinking has problematic social consequences and links genetic forms of essentialism to those invoking neural essences. The mounting evidence that these forms of essentialist thinking contribute to the stigma of mental disorder is reviewed. Genetic and neuroessentialisms influence media portrayals of scientific research and distort how they are interpreted by laypeople. The common thread of these essentialisms is their tendency to deepen social divisions and promote forms of social segregation.     

Confusion in philosophy: A comment on Williams (1992)

Patricia Williams made a number of claims concerning the methods and practise of cladistic analysis and classification. Her argument rests upon the distinction of two kinds of hierarchy: a divisional hierarchy depicting evolutionary descent and the Linnean hierarchy describing taxonomic groups in a classification. Williams goes on to outline five problems with cladistics that lead her to the conclusion that systematists should eliminate cladism as a school of biological taxonomy and to replace it either with something that is philosophically coherent or to replace it with pure methodology, untainted by theory (Williams 1992, 151). Williams makes a number of points which she feels collectively add up to insurmountable problems for cladistics. We examine Williams' views concerning the two hierarchies and consider what cladists currently understand about the status of ancestors. We will demonstrate that Williams has seriously misunderstood many modern commentators on this subject and all of her five persistent problems are derivable from this misunderstanding.

Nelson (1989, 67).

     

Getting from situations to emotions: appraisal and other routes

Comments on the original article by S. Siemer and R. Reisenzein regarding the process of emotion inference. When processing situational information, people can reach emotional conclusions without explicitly registering corresponding appraisals. Does this mean that appraisal cues must be guiding inference in less obvious ways? If one assumes that the emotional meaning of any situation depends on the protagonist's relation to what is happening, then emotion inference can never entirely bypass relational information. However, not all relational information is specifically appraisal-based. Further, actual emotion causation, like emotion inference, can involve explicit or implicit appraisals or even no appraisals at all. Indeed, humans do not first learn to associate emotions with situations by extracting appraisal information.     

What differentiates declarative and procedural memories: reply to Cohen, Poldrack, and Eichenbaum (1997)

CPE claim that procedural and declarative representations differ on two important dimensions: flexibility and compositionality. I have proposed that the apparent flexibility of a memory depends entirely on the transfer conditions. Any retest is, in some sense, a test of flexibility, because something has changed since the original encoding episodic. I have argued that if one changes something that does not provide support to memory performance, the memory will appear flexible, and resistant to changes in the environment. If one changes the very thing that the representation codes, the memory will appear inflexible and easily disrupted by changes in the environment. This principle is equally true for procedural and declarative memory. CPE contend that procedural representations lack compositionality. An ideal test of this claim would examine the representation of a task that is widely agreed to be procedural (e.g. that has been demonstrated to be learned normally by amnesic patients, and in the absence of awareness by neurologically intact subjects). Such experiments appear not to have been conducted, and the fact is that many tasks that are widely agreed to be procedural probably are not compositional. They appear to be, as CPE contend, biases in a processing system; it is hard to imagine how repetition priming could be compositional. Nevertheless, this is not true of all procedural memories. There is a good deal of evidence that motor behaviour is organised hierarchically and has compositionality. There is every reason to think that most if not all motor behaviour is procedural; motor behaviour might be driven by goals that are declarative, but the low-level operations that actually manipulate effectors are closed to consciousness, do not depend on the medial temporal lobe or diencephalon, and would therefore be classified as procedural. CPE framed their theory of differences between procedural and declarative memory systems as an account of the deficit in amnesic patients. They therefore predict that the learning of amnesic patients should not show flexibility or compositionality. There is already at least one study showing learning in amnesic patients that is as flexible as that of control participants (Knowlton & Squire, 1996). There are not, to my knowledge, data on whether the motor skill learning of amnesic patients shows compositionality, but one might expect that it would, given that it does in neurologically intact participants, and given that motor skill learning appears unimpaired in amnesic patients. Thus, the conception of declarative and procedural memory provided by CPE may not provide a complete account of amnesic performance. The anatomic distinction between procedural and declarative memory systems appears quite strong, and there is therefore reason to believe that there are accompanying computational differences. There does not, however, appear to be sufficient evidence to support those differences proposed by CPE.     

What Differentiates Declarative and Procedural Memories: Reply to Cohen,Poldrack, and Eichenbaum (1997)

Cohen, Poldrack, and Eichenbaum (1997; hereafter CPE) offer an account of the nature of individual items in memory and how they relate to one another. They argue that there are two separate memory systems, procedural and declarative (Cohen & Eichenbaum, 1993; Cohen & Squire, 1980). These systems differ in their neuroanatomic substrates, in their operating characteristics, and in the nature of the representations they use. CPE argue that representations in the declarative memory system are compositional, meaning that declarative representations may be composed of other declarative representations. Declarative memories are also flexible, meaning they can be accessed in contexts that differ from those in which they were encoded. Procedural memories, on the other hand, are neither compositional nor flexible. I will argue that there is not sufficient reason to argue that procedural and declarative memories have these distinct characteristics. Both procedural and declarative memories are arguably compositional, and both can appear flexible or inflexible, depending on testing conditions.     

Generalized anxiety and panic disorders: Response to Cox, Cohen, Direnfeld, and Swinson (1996)

Contrary to the contention of Cox, Cohen, Direnfeld and Swinson (1996, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 34, 949–954) that the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI; Beck & Steer, 1993, Manual for the Beck Anxiety Inventory) measures primarily symptoms associated with panic attacks rather than anxiety in general, we propose that the higher level of anxiety found in patients with panic disorders not only is not an artifact of the BAI's symptom content, but patients with panic disorders truly have more anxiety than patients with other types of anxiety disorders. Furthermore, the BAI contains symptoms present in other anxiety disorders, besides panic disorder, and specifically includes 11 symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The BAI and revised Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HARS-R; Riskind, Beck, Brown & Steer, 1987, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 175, 474–479) scores of 274 (69%) outpatients with panic disorders and 123 (31%) outpatients with GAD were found to differentiate these two diagnostic groups equally and significantly. The panic disorder outpatients had higher scores on both the BAI and the HARS-R than did the GAD patients. Thus, Cox et al.'s (1996) speculation about the BAI's yielding spuriously high levels of anxiety in patients with panic disorders revives an important issue relevant to the relation of panic disorder to GAD.     

Form perception at birth: Cohen and Younger (1984) revisited

Cohen (1988; Cohen & Younger, 1984) has suggested that there is a shift in the perception of form sometime after 6 weeks of age. Prior to this age infants can remember the specific orientations of line segments, but cannot process and remember the angular relations that line segments can make. Experiment 1 used simple line stimuli with newborn infants to test this suggestion. Following habituation to a simple two-line angle the newborns dishabituated to a change of orientation but not to a change in angle, confirming Cohen and Younger's suggestion that orientation is a powerful cue in early shape perception. In Experiments 2 and 3 newborns were familiarized either to an acute or to an obtuse angle that changed its orientation over trials. On subsequent test trials the babies gave strong novelty preferences to a different angle. Alternative interpretations of the results are discussed, but these experimental findings are compatible with the suggestion that newborns can quickly learn to process angular relations, and that rudimentary form perception may not be dependent on a lengthy period of learning and/or maturation for its development.     

Theoretical accounts of spatial learning: A neurobiological view (commentary on Pearce, 2009)

Theories of learning have historically taken, as their starting point, the assumption that learning processes have universal applicability. This position has been argued on grounds of parsimony, but has received two significant challenges: first, from the observation that some kinds of learning, such as spatial learning, seem to obey different rules from others, and second, that some kinds of learning take place in processing modules that are separate from each other. These challenges arose in the behavioural literature but have since received considerable support from neurobiological studies, particularly single neuron studies of spatial learning, confirming that there are indeed separable (albeit highly intercommunicating) processing modules in the brain, which may not always interact (within or between themselves) according to classic associative principles. On the basis of these neurobiological data, reviewed here, it is argued that rather than assuming universality of associative rules, it is more parsimonious to assume sets of locally operating rules, each specialized for a particular domain. By this view, although almost all learning is associative in one way or another, the behavioural-level characterization of the rules governing learning may vary depending on which neural modules are involved in a given behaviour. Neurobiological studies, in tandem with behavioural studies, can help reveal the nature of these modules and the local rules by which they interact.     

An ostrich on a rock: commentary on Christie and Barresi (2002)

There are problems with both the theoretical logic and the interpretation of data in Christie and Barresi's (2002) interesting article. The general pattern of results (described as Orwellian) is easily incorporated into an information-processing framework compatible with Dennett's analysis. In particular, different aspects of the illusory motion event are queried at different times and these aspects (line extent and manner of appearance) are not in conflict, so no revision of conscious content is necessary. Second, too much interpretive weight is placed on an anomalous pair of data points (described as Stalinesque) that do not seem fully interpretable within the author's framework and are probably susceptible to one of several alternative interpretations proposed here, though further investigation is necessary.     

Felt emotions,and verbally communicated emotions: the case of pride

Potential discrepancies between felt and verbally communicated emotions elicited by two Pride events (‘selected for a job among a large group’ and ‘being congratulated for one's own new partner’) were studied by means of a structured questionnaire. Italian male (n = 88) and female (n = 107) university students attributed felt and communicated emotions to the event protagonist P, choosing from a list of 14 emotions; the communication occurred with P‘s partner or friend, or with an acquaintance. Statistical analyses of subjects’ attributions confirmed the hypothesis that felt emotions are regulated in verbal communication to others: pride, triumph, self-satisfaction and excitement were de-emphasized in communication; joy, satisfaction, happiness and surprise were intensified; other emotions were communicated as felt. Event type, and to a lesser extent sex of subject, significantly influenced the direction and extent of regulation. The results are interpreted as showing that the verbal communication of emotion is influenced by emotion-related social norms and beliefs.