Emotional consciousness: A neural model of how cognitive appraisal and somatic perception interact to produce qualitative experience

Abstract

This paper proposes a theory of how conscious emotional experience is produced by the brain as the result of many interacting brain areas coordinated in working memory. These brain areas integrate perceptions of bodily states of an organism with cognitive appraisals of its current situation. Emotions are neural processes that represent the overall cognitive and somatic state of the organism. Conscious experience arises when neural representations achieve high activation as part of working memory. This theory explains numerous phenomena concerning emotional consciousness, including differentiation, integration, intensity, valence, and change.

How Brains Make Mental Models

“…I do not think that emotion is well described as a kind of abduction, as it involves an extremely complex process that combines cognitive appraisal of a situation with respect to ones goals and perception of bodily states [43,42]. At best, abductive inference is only a part of the broader parallel process of emotional reactions.…”

“…Moreover, the Thagard and Stewart [46] account of creativity also applies to emotions, which can also be understood as patterns of activity in neural populations involving multiple brain areas involved in both cognitive appraisal and physiological perception [43]. In particular, the wonderful AHA!…”

“…Many philosophers and scientists have suggested that consciousness requires representation of representation (for references see [43]), but mental models seem to require several layers: representation of representation of representation. The conscious experience of an answer to a problem comes about because of activity in top-level neural populations that encode activity of medium-level modeling populations, that encode activity of low-level populations, that topographically represent features of the world.…”

Fear-Driven Inference: Mechanisms of Gut Overreaction

“…Current emotion theories tend to divide into two camps, one that considers emotions to be akin to judgments [20], and the other that considers emotions to be reactions to bodily states [21]. This division, however, can be reconciled by considering the brain as reacting to situations in ways that take into account both cognitive appraisal of situations and perception of bodily states, as in the EMOCON model of Thagard and Aubie [22,23]. A simplified version of this model, omitting neural details, is shown in Fig.…”

Explaining Economic Crises: Are There Collective Representations?

“…At the psychological level, we can understand confidence as not simply a cognitive phenomenon such as subjective probability, but as also an emotional phenomenon that involves the brain's perception of physiological changes as well as cognitive appraisal of the relevance of a situation to a person's goals (for defense of this account of emotion, see Aubie 2008 and. Emotional overreactions to good developments can lead to what Shiller (2005) called irrational exuberance, and overreactions to bad developments can lead to irrational despair.…”