Nick wrote: "This way of looking at emotions identifies them as Situation/Response relations. Just as experienced features of the environment can lead to responses, [E1 -> R1], so these feature response patterns can themselves be patterns that constitute new experienced features that, in turn, can lead to new response [E2 -> R2], where E2 = [E1 - > R1]. In the New Realist thought, the experience of William James's charging bear is just the fact that one's flight behavior highlighted the bear. In this sense, being fearful is normally an experience of the environment, not an experience of an emotion."
This approach to understanding fear seems to require that the individual modulating a response learn to re-interpret stimuli, as opposed to processing their feelings before making an evident behavioural response. With fear in the form of anxiety, the environment will be not be obvious aspects of the environment, but recollections of past environments, or models of new ones (in both cases possibly exaggerated but not evident). Is it known from functional imaging or other experiments whether memories and imagination must be routed through the amygdala (or other relevant structures) in the same way that direct perception is? From an evolutionary perspective, it's not obvious to me why it would have to be. If I go to a suspenseful film, I may or may not engage in the story, and thus experience emotions or not. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
