What does it even mean to 'define' an emotion? Science aims to explain, not define. Emotions don't have 'definitions', so it shouldn't be surprising that science would struggle to do so. Things which are constantly changing, are always new and unique, (which the substance or 'content' of emotions are) can't be defined, and least not in a way that isn't trivial and therefore useless.

I think it is a case of the Pendulum swinging from the failures of the Skinner Black Box. You might make a case for defining mental states generated from the Medulla -- and either call those emotions or give them some other category name, but defining emotions is like defining god. The more you look the more they recede. You end up with more and more specific mental states, but have lost what you were looking for.

"Emotions don't have 'definitions'"? Of course not. "Science aims to explain, not define?" Not really. Science seeks to define AND explain. You can't have one without the other. Emotions don't "have" definitions; scientists have them. They use definitions to explain things. It's all about our human abilities to use abstraction.

The question ‘Can we define emotions’, has two sets of answers: firstly, yes/no, and secondarily, we might have the answer ‘emotions are not a discrete category of things and therefore can’t be defined in a way that is correct’.

To me, ‘emotion’ seems to be a culturally-bound descriptor that covers a wide range of externally and internally-experienced human events. These events straddle multiple areas of cognitive and neural processes. Registering of pain occurs in spinal cord, in the most primitive part of the central nervous system, but on our face it registers as an emotion. But then our feelings, which are often unexamined, seem to be subtle and without easily determinable cause. Often we look at a person in order to try to decipher what they are thinking or feeling, and it isn’t easy. That’s not the case with pain. We may call these both emotions, functionally the role they play in human society might be similar, but that doesn't mean that science can or should define them as the same thing.

That's a little bit of symantics don't you think? How can you explain something you can't even define?

What are called emotions are nothing but cultural myths....duh

Yeah reductionist science can't say much about what it means to be human, if what it means to be human is our subjective, emotional experience.

"a deeper meaning that emerges from the constellations we create, something transformative and, ultimately, unknowable"

I think it's a stretch to say that something is unknowable if it eludes scientific inquiry. Maybe a scientist would disagree, but I'd argue that she has skin in the game. If you know what you're feeling, how is it unknowable?

I think the author was trying to be romantic.

Nothing outside the state of quantum bits is unknowable. And maybe even them...

Any one who would like to avoid looking ignorant and foolish when speaking on the subject of emotions should first read Charles Darwin's "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals." Sad that a walk through the sea of human intellects posting here doesn't even wet one's feet.

Quite frankly, Darwin's view isn't that important in contemporary emotion research. Sure, it's nice to be informed about older work in the field, but reading Darwin isn't necessary for understanding emotions.

Sounds like Wittgenstein on Aristotle. Still, it's less than enlightened to dismiss the "seminal" as just “older”.

Yes, I was shocked that Darwin's seminal work on emotions was not even mentioned in this article.

Lisa Feldman Barrett has published a couple papers responding to Darwin's work.

Emotions are a common set of programming functions derived from past experience and initial programming that weight other functions' perceived utility based on a set of values assigned to disparate stimuli.

That definition works as well for the human brain as for a newly-awakened AI.

This 'woowoo it has to be different because it's HUMAN' stuff is pure BS. The sky fairy does not exist. We do not each have a spark of divinity in us. We are meat wires - and we can be duplicated.

Nobody is yet talking about how facial expressions are part of a larger system of communication we call body language. It makes no sense to me to study any of these systems by themselves. It's easy to see - or feel - the complexity by observing a small group in back and forth conversation - it's a very fluid and complex system. Some students of language call it the most important tool we have for all our cooperative behaviors. It enables us to read each others' minds - a critical part of human behavior.

And what about tone of voice? To understand just how important it is, try to talk to someone for a few minutes without varying your tone of voice. It's like losing your soul, your center of gravity. If you are with a group, you'll find they are not amused - in fact it might provoke anger. Think about why this happens. It's an integral part of social behavior.

I suspect a lot of the disagreements in the field come focusing on different parts of our system of face to face communication. We should begin by realizing we human beings use an incredibly complex and fluid system of communication. Breaking it up into constituent parts may not be the way to go.

See Four Channel Communication.

If your work place is as stressful as a war-zone during a famine, you probably shouldn't bring your unborn baby to work.

Emotions are real events in response to the world or our own thoughts.

Questioning whether emotions are real seems to me to be a concerning mental aberration. There's a name for it, in fact-- alexithymia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

I do not think our terms for emotions are as culturally laden as might be expected, although there are cultural levels and expectations that people do often feel bound to play into. I believe an excess of this causes another problem which is called narcissistic personality disorder, in which the person has no true sense of self except as that fed to them by others.

Fortunately I live with a dog that expresses emotion on a daily basis, preventing me, at least, from falling into a cognitive trap where everything is so over-analyzed that all seems meaningless. That, I suppose, is called ennui; a form of cognitive exhaustion.

This article is remiss not to include Paul and Patricia Churchland's work on the nature of cognition and emotion

Great article!

A new human life begins at conception.

That's a good place to start.

Emotions don't develop until much later. You first need a nervous system. Even neonates don't have the sophisticated range of emotions that teenager has.

At the blastosphere stage of an embryo, it can be repeatedly twinned, giving rise to multiple human beings. Are all of those just one life, with many bodies? Or are they many lives, most of which did not begin at conception?

The lives definitely began at conception.

All but one of the lives definitely did not begin at conception, would never have been if not for the twinning of the blastosphere. You could say they started then, perhaps, but they did not exist before then.

They certainly "existed" before splitting.

Nothing comes from nothing.

Their lives began at conception.

You have a funny understanding of what it means to exist. Before splitting, the others were clearly not physically present in the universe; you would be unable to point to them. At a point in time, you have just one blastosphere, which you say is one person. Later, it has become many blastospheres, so many persons, but they were not each separately conceived, which is the event that you have claimed makes a person. Their lives could not have begun at conception, because they simply did not exist between the original conception and the splitting.

It is interesting that no one wants to actually grapple with this issue, they revert to just restating their original position. Carry on, but it won't be convincing unless you can muster some sort of substantive response to the points made here.

Nothing comes from nothing.

The fertilized egg which creates both twins existed prior to the cleavage.

Exist.

Look it up.

You maintain that if the blastosphere is split, later, 20 times, then 20 people existed before the splitting? Yet, you could not have found 19 of those people before then. Find a definition of "exist" that makes it retroactive, please.

Their DNA all combined to form their new life AT CONCEPTION.

I'm very surprised, Julie, that in researching this topic of emotions you missed discovering Dr. Manfred Clynes' work on Sentics. Dr. Clynes has already proven decades ago much of what these Johnny-come-lately pop scientists and professors are futzing around with – the exact and precise universality of all human emotions... meaning, for example, the way I biologically experience Love, Hate, Anger, Joy is EXACTLY the same way that any other human does in any other culture and in any other demographic (age, gender, etc.). Yes, an absolutely true fact and this is April 2nd so I'm not fooling around here.

Additionally, Dr. Clynes found that emotional experience is a single channel biological expression, meaning you cannot experience both Joy on the left hand while simultaneously experiencing Hate on the other. We experience only one, universal emotion that has its own fidelity expression over time at a time... Proven fact tested scientifically across hundreds of cultures and years by Dr. Clynes.

If you want to provision Eckman with a killer blow to his critics, tell him to look up Dr. Clynes research, published studies and/or read his book, Sentics and he'll easily win the debate over the less coherent, warm and fuzzy thinking contextualists like Barrett.

PS Dr. Clynes is the real deal: a contemporary researcher complemented by Einstein while at Princeton, a protege of Pablo Cassals, the man who coined the word "cyborg" and in addition to his thousands of hours of lab research and cultural contextual field testing of the principles of Sentics, discovered how humans see the color red... and that's just the tip of his prodigious, value-adding work for humanity. He has some YouTube vids of his work and lectures at Harvard. One can also check out his website for master conductor music software, based on his discovery of consistent emotional pulses as underlying signatures of the world's greatest classical composers, like Bach, Beethoven and etc. Sheer brilliance from a still unsung, interdisciplinary genius musician and scientist... and he makes it all graspable by laypeople!

There are many variables around emotions. Different cultures have different perceptions of emotions and its about coming together and putting all the information together to get a global picture of what constitutes emotions.

http://keypoints-dictionary...

Two questions:
1. How do you write an article on emotions with no mention of the research of Antonio Damasio?
2. Is there a destinction between emotions and feelings?

Another level of complexity: Facial expressions play an
important role in regulating mental states. There is increasing evidence that
facial expressions are not only expressions of mental states like emotions, but
also regulators of mental states through facial feedback. Darwin and James
clearly voiced similar views on this subject. More recently, injections of
botulinum toxins into certain facial muscles produce changes in neural activity
during the imitation of the facial expressions of anger and sadness in brain
structures that appear to be involved in these emotions (functional MRI study).
Furthermore, there are serious studies (published randomized, double-blind,
placebo controlled studies) from both sides of the Atlantic showing that injection
of botulinum toxin produce “a significant and
sustained antidepressant effect in patients with major depression”. I am having trouble understanding
why anybody would have trouble integrating Ekman’s idea of basic emotions with
Russell’s circumplex of fuzzier mental states. I think that even the facial
expression prototypes of basic emotions have relatively well established positions
on Russel’s circumplex. Ekman, the
collaborators and those who inspired them also deserve credit for also studying
facial behavior regardless of whether one believes in emotions or not. I would
award a Nobel prize to these guys and their friends who teach us essential
aspects of the human nature…..

How about this: an emotion is the body's physiological response to a particular thought.

---- steve

What a tortured way to speak about such an interesting topic.

you can bet the police will love this so they can arrest you for actually looking at them the wrong way. Oh yeah they do that now

Fifteen years ago, a group of us at the MIT Media Lab published a mathematical model relating emotions to learning. This paper, which debuted an innovative research project funded by the National Science Foundation's Research on Learning and Education (ROLE) Directorate, won the Best Theory Paper Award at ICALT-2001 (International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies).

Here is a succinct summary of that research on the role of emotions in learning.

Cognition, Affect, and Learning

A "mathematical" model. Didn't see any mathematics, just some graphics. The problem that we have is that the structure of "emotion-space" is simply too vague at present to be understood mathematically. We have simple models of "intelligent agents" that have scalar functions associated to their utility, and more sophisticated (normed) vector valued versions of utility functions are possible, but it is unclear what if anything these algorithms have to do with the human brain, and where the analogues of this processing are to be found in the biological strata. That's why I tend to stay away from psychological analyses like these; they are almost certainly misleading at best, and wrong at worst.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

The key mathematical idea is summarized in Table 1, in which emotions are modeled as the second and third time-derivative the learning curve. See especially the Phase Plane Diagram of Figure 6, which is adapted straight away from Newtonian Calculus.

There is also a key theorem presented in Figure 9. This theorem (named for Tom Clancy), is the extension of classical results in Game Theory to the domain of Drama Theory.

The section on Multiple Interlinked Economies adopts a model inspired by Maxwell's Equations (in which flows and fluctuations in one parameter induce fluctuations and flows in a related parameter).

Notice that all the mathematics in these models are analogies adapted directly from well-established mathematics in Newtonian Calculus, Game Theory, and Electromagnetic Field Theory.

Concerning table 1, you say that emotions are time derivatives of "learning" or second derivatives of knowledge. Really? Why do you think that? And doesn't it seem a bit odd....if I take this literally, you'd be saying that if I suddenly increased the pace at which I learn....something....I'd feel an emotion? Doesn't seem plausible to me. Unless "learning" is metaphorical. Overall, I find it hard to take this hypothesis seriously.

Concerning "Clancys theorem" my only response is....need more math. From your presentation alone, there is very little information, very few definitions, and not even the outline of a proof. So I can't really say if this is a theorem or just excited speculation.

Concerning "multiple interlinked economies"...at this point, I do have to commend you for your command of words. Every slide seems to be a reservoir of neologisms...now if only there was content to back it up. You mention a lot of "its" but it's not at all clear what you're trying to say. Is this just vague, feel good "connectioney" stuff, or is this concept critical to your theory somehow? And please beware of analogies to Maxwells equations unless you really have an analogy here. Maxwells equations have a very specific mathematical structure (far more rich than simple "flows") encoded by the U(1) lie group, so unless there's a specific correspondence, i'd avoid making the analogy.

Overall, I think this presentation is high on verbiage and low on actual content. If this is meant to be science, it verges perilously close to pseudoscience, and unintelligible nonsense. If it's just literary metaphor, then by all means, metaphorize! (is that a word?) but don't drag mathematics into this.

Your skepticism is a fairly typical response to initial exposure to this model. My colleagues at MIT were similarly skeptical the first time I presented this model at the MIT Media Lab. One of my closest professional colleagues at MIT is Professor Rosalind Picard, whom I have known for 30 years. When I first disclosed this model to her, back in the early 90s, she also thought it couldn't be right, especially given there was no prior literature supporting it.

It took almost five years before Picard became convinced that the model had merit, after which she marveled at her own process of reversal. During that time, she took the initiative to scour the scientific literature, looking for any evidence to support or refute the model (or to demonstrate that it was already present in the literature and therefore not a novel theory). She not only concluded that this was a novel model, unprecedented in the literature, but that the entire field of research on emotions and learning was largely devoid of any substantive computational models at all.

After completing her literature search, Picard wrote up a summary of what she did find in a seminal 1995 paper entitled "Affective Computing." A year later, she decided to expand that brief paper into a book (also entitled Affective Computing) which came out in 1997.

And thus the field of Affective Computing was born.

So how did I come up with this model in the first place, and why did I think it had enough merit to share with my colleagues in academia?

The inspiration for this model came in 1985, when I happened to be mentoring an adult in her mid-30s who had gone back to the local community college in Monmouth County NJ to obtain a Masters in Education, so as to advance her career. I'll call her "Nelle" (not her real name). At the time, Nelle was teaching First Grade. She disclosed to me that she had Dyslexia which seriously interfered with her ability to read. As a result, she learned very little from reading, relying mostly on direct experience and face-to-face interactions with other people. One other characteristic of this individual was that she was emotionally volatile, often exhibiting perplexing outbursts of anger that seemingly came out of nowhere.

One of the required courses in Nelle's curriculum at Monmouth College was "Statistics for Education." By my standards this was a fairly elementary introduction to the subject. But Nelle had math anxiety the likes of which I had never seen before. When she came to Chapter 4, "Hypothesis Testing," her level of math anxiety was utterly debilitating, if not downright chilling. I suggested we begin with the first problem at the end of the chapter. This was a word problem in which the Principal of an elementary school surveys the children and observes that some of the children are raising their hands to recite in class, while others are reticent and holding back. The Principal notices that the children who are willing to recite are earning high grades, while the children who are holding back are earning lower grades. So the Principal forms an hypothesis, that being verbal causes high grades. And he proposes to mandate a course in public speaking, so that the children can learn to be more verbal and thus get higher grades. The objective of this problem is to critique the Principal's hypothesis.

Nelle is utterly stuck. She has no idea how to proceed to think about this homework problem. So I begin using the Socratic Method (as is my custom when mentoring math) to help her think through the problem. In the Socratic Method, one asks carefully crafted questions to lead the student, step by step, to think their way through the problem. But I'm getting nowhere with Nelle. Now in the Socratic Method, if you ask a question that proves to be too hard for the student, you ask progressively simpler questions. In this case I got all the way down to what I call the "atomic question" where you basically lay out the possible answers in the body of the question, such that one of the answers is obviously correct.

And so I put it to Nelle, "Would you say that being verbal causes high grades? Or would you say that it's the other way around -- that getting high grades causes students to be verbal? Or could it be just a coincidence? Or could something else, like studying the night before and knowing the answer cause both?" I laid out for Nelle four plausible possibilities for the "arrow of causality" to see if I could spark her thinking on the question.

Well, I didn't just get a spark. I got a lightning bolt. Nelle suddenly exploded with uncharacteristic positive emotion, screaming, "This seems to be a very important idea!" And she furiously begins writing it down in her notebook. I started to reinforce the idea and she screamed, "Shut up! Shut up! I have to write this down before I lose it!"

Now up until that point, I had seen many comparable outbursts of negative valence emotions (typically anger), but this was the first time I witnessed a comparably intense positive emotion. And I was there at the Moment of Epiphany. Indeed I had personally midwifed the epiphany by use of the Maieutic Method of Socrates.

This anecdotal observation, linking an intense emotional outburst to an increment in learning was so startling to me that I reflected on it for days and weeks, wondering why I had never before noticed (or hypothesized) a systematic link between emotions and learning.

Eventually, I translated that singular observation into an evolving theoretical model relating emotions to learning, building up the details of the model for the next 15 or 20 years, and testing it by a variety of methods which I won't delineate here, as they are comprehensively documented elsewhere.

Last week, Leonard Nimoy died, reminding us of his iconic character, Mr. Spock, who was commonly considered to be without emotion. Although Spock was nominally portrayed as logical and unemotional, he demonstrated the classical emotions of a scientist: curiosity, fascination, puzzlement, skepticism, and insight.

And that brings us full circle to why I (and many of my professional colleagues in academia) think this model has merit. On page 93 of her seminal 1997 book on Affective Computing, Rosalind Picard invokes the fascinating character of Spock to introduce her chapter on Applications of Affective Computing and the role of emotions in learning.

Today there is a substantial body of literature on all aspects of Affective Computing, including a fairly modest section on a variety of models relating emotions to learning. I invite you to dive into that literature if you wish to dig deeper than the level of summary found in the article that I originally crafted for Google Knol, where it became a top-rated article on the site.

I'll point out that the work summarized in that article won 7 years of funding from the National Science Foundation, during which time our team at MIT collaborated with similar teams from Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Memphis. And you will note that our very first paper, presented in 2001 at ICALT (International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies) won the Best Theory Paper Prize.

Love and despair are indeed inconvenient. Once we find a way around that, we'll truly be somewhere. Or not.

The idea of "higher order concepts" (LeDoux), like emotions, that are just subjective experiences expressed using everyday language and cognitive models violate pretty much all the findings of biology, medicine and animal ethology. But they support cultural myths so are easy to sell an market. Just modern magical thinking, ho hum...

all animal behavior is instant, 140 ms, completely unconscious and automatic...feelings, thoughts, etc. are epiphenomenal and silly cultural beliefs...

I suspect that is exactly how a psychopath views other beings, humans and other animals alike.

"take common sense categories that people use in everyday life and try to treat them like scientific categories.”

I agree. The field is shooting itself in the proverbial foot by insisting on using half-baked concepts like emotion (is surprise a thought, or a feeling or a mixture)? The imprecision of language would never be allowed into the lab, let alone used as the foundation of study in the physical sciences. Imagine trying to land a rover on mars with words like "a little more to the left" (whose left, how much?) rather than precise numbers and algorithms. You'd be lucky to get agreement on any design and luckier still to build something that would even stay off the ground for a few seconds.

Another great example of this attempt to squeeze understanding out of fuzzy words is a book, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. It is an interesting collection of scholarly articles/papers with at least 8 different definitions of Empathy and no agreement in the end on a common definition.

I'd be curious to see the outcome of Ekman's research and the technology in this article being combined: http://www.newyorker.com/ma...
I wonder if we'd be able to draw more concrete conclusions about emotions

Seems like the biggest obstacle in seeing emotions for what they really
are, is due in part to our great prejudice of confining everything and
subjecting it to the kind of rigid and abstract Boolean logic upon which
the entire West has learned to see as the "scientific" reality,

This
because it is a form of algebraic rationalising in which all values are
reduced to either TRUE or FALSE or Boolean logic: especially important
for computer science because it fits nicely
with the binary numbering system, in which each bit has a value of
either 1 or 0.
What
most don''t know, is that the mathematicians who sat down in Austria to
develope it, decided there and then never to utter the word "God".
And
thus eliminating the Spirit and the human soul, and interestingly
enough, consciousness. Which of course, could not possibly be a
construct of the physical universe.As it is instead, the living
personality of the God-given spirit animating the human soul. Which
expresses itself by genuinely real emotions.
This human spirit
intangibly expressed in human emotions, is like watching the moving keys
on a player piano. its sure playing a nice little ditty alright, but
there's just no piano player to be seen to sitting at the keyboard.

however close we are to scientifically defining emotions, we will probably understand them better in 10 years when the human brain has been fully reverse engineered.