Brain Mechanisms Explain Emotion and Consciousness

Is love a judgment, a body process, or a cultural interpretation? Emotion theorists dispute whether emotions are cognitive appraisals, responses to physiological changes, or social constructions. That emotions are all of these can be grasped by identifying brain mechanisms for emotions, including representation by groups of spiking neurons, binding of representations, and competition among representations. Emotions bind neural representations of situations, physiology, and appraisal into unified packages that can guide behavior if they outcompete other representations. Unlike traditional theories, this theory of emotion can also explain why people have conscious experiences such as happiness and sadness.

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Reference to Dr. Thagard’s work mentioned in slides.