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Enactive appraisal

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Abstract

Emotion theorists tend to separate “arousal” and other bodily events such as “actions” from the evaluative component of emotion known as “appraisal.” This separation, I argue, implies phenomenologically implausible accounts of emotion elicitation and personhood. As an alternative, I attempt a reconceptualization of the notion of appraisal within the so-called “enactive approach.” I argue that appraisal is constituted by arousal and action, and I show how this view relates to an embodied and affective notion of personhood.

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Notes

  1. Patočka (1998, p. 134).

  2. Prinz (2004a, p. 58).

  3. One exception is Jesse Prinz’s recent account, according to which all emotions are embodied appraisals (Prinz 2004a, 2004b). See Colombetti and Thompson (2007), for something more about Prinz’s view and the embodied–enactive approach.

  4. Note however that Hurley does not characterize herself as an “enactive” theorist.

  5. Patočka refers to the Meditations (Descartes 1988a). Descartes’ (1988b) Passions of the Soul, however, can be seen as an embodied account of emotions and their phenomenology.

  6. Lyons is aware of the problems of positing a mental state (an evaluation) as the cause of a bodily state. Following Ryle (1949), he thus attempts to account for the process of evaluation in dispositional terms. However, this attempt is problematic in many respects. It is not clear, for example, how the dispositional account fits together with the linear one; whether the dispositional account applies to evaluations or to emotions (or both); and whether or not Lyons believes that evaluation is an identifiable process. In any case, his dispositional account never explicitly acknowledges that the body plays a role in evaluation.

  7. Lazarus has recently turned to the term “appraising,” which he understands as “a set of cognitive actions” (e.g. Lazarus 2001, p. 42).

  8. The James–Lange theory had defined emotion as the awareness of the physiological changes induced by the perception of an emotional stimulus. Activation theories had identified emotions with states of increased energy in the body. Behavioral theories had described emotions in terms of possible behaviors.

  9. Someone might observe that in some cases arousal has an affective tone because, unconsciously, the subject knows the source of her own state. However, this explanation could be made only a posteriori. Also, it would not apply in those cases where an affective state is there, but there is no “emotional cause” (like in the case of mild depression caused by coffee abstinence).

  10. Categorical perception is the capacity to divide the world into objects with distinctive properties (e.g. the stream of words into phonemes, or the spectrum of light into colours).

  11. He distinguishes five mechanisms of integration in the brain: (1) positive and negative feedback among constituents (horizontal integration); (2) vertical integration across the neuraxis; (3) neuromodulation; (4) action orientation; (5) learning.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the form of funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada through a Canada Research Chair in “Cognitive Science and the Embodied Mind” to Evan Thompson. I am indebted to Evan Thompson and to an anonymous referee for their charitable and helpful comments to earlier drafts of this paper. Many thanks also to Steve Torrance for his suggestions and editorial assistance.

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  1. Department of Sociology & Philosophy, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Giovanna Colombetti

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Colombetti, G. Enactive appraisal. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 527–546 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9077-8

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