The subjective experience of emotion: a fearful view

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Highlights

  • To avoid confusion the term ‘emotion’ should be restricted to conscious experiences.

  • Several contemporary views conscious emotion are discussed in terms of fear.

  • We argue for a cognitive view of fear and other emotional experiences.

We argue that subjective emotional experience, the feeling, is the essence of an emotion, and that objective manifestations in behavior and in body or brain physiology are, at best, indirect indicators of these inner experiences. As a result, the most direct way to assess conscious emotional feelings is through verbal self-report. This creates a methodological barrier to studies of conscious feelings in animals. While the behavioral and physiological responses are not ‘emotions,’ they contribute to emotions indirectly, and sometimes profoundly. Whether non-verbal animals have emotional experiences is a difficult, maybe impossible, question to answer in the positive or negative. But because behavioral and physiological responses are important contributors to emotions, and the circuits underlying these are highly conserved, studies of animals have an important role in understanding how emotions are expressed and regulated in the brain. Conflation of circuits that directly give rise to conscious emotional feelings with circuits that indirectly influences these conscious feelings has hampered progress in efforts to understand emotions, and also to understand and to develop treatments for emotional disorders. Recognition of differences in these circuits will allow research in animals to have a lasting impact on understanding of human emotions as research goes forward.

Section snippets

Measuring subjective experiences

Before considering different approaches to subjective experiences, it is important to discuss how these unobservable private events are studied. Scientific assessments of inner experiences require some form of self-reporting [12, 13]. People can typically give either a verbal or a nonverbal report of information to which they have introspective access, but cannot provide a verbal report of information that is only processed nonconsciously [6, 14, 15]. Fractures between conscious and

Contemporary views of subjective emotional experiences in relation to brain circuits

Four contemporary approaches to subjective emotional experiences in the brain, and the historical roots of each, are described below. Included are approaches in the traditions of Charles Darwin, William James, behaviorism, and cognitive psychology.

1. The Neuro-Darwinian Approach: Subjective Fear is an Innate State of Mind Inherited from Animal Ancestors. In his treatise on human and animal emotion, Darwin defined emotions as innate “states of mind” that humans have inherited from animal

Conscious feelings in clinical assessment

A major reason why people seek the help of mental health specialists is because they feel bad and want to feel better. A treatment that reduces behavior (freezing, behavioral timidity, avoidance) and physiology (hyperarousal) but does not diminish subjectively reported fearful feelings is not likely to be viewed as a satisfactory outcome by the afflicted person.

In the contemporary cognitive therapy literature, self-reports, and the subjective experiences that these reports reflect, have not

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

Funding

Funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative in Understanding Human Cognition – Special Initiative.

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