Department of History and Philosophy of Science will hold the 59th Tokyo Colloquium of Cognitive Philosophy. Everyone is welcome.

Date & Time: November 3rd (Tue.), 2015, 17:00-19:00
Venue: the 14th Building, Room 708 on the 7th floor, Komaba Campus, The University of Tokyo.

Presenter: Philip Gerrans (University of Adelaide, Australia)
Title: A Processing account of emotion

Abstract:
Planning and decision making, social and moral cognition, reasoning, cognitive development and self-representation depend on emotional processes. Psychologists and neuroscientists in these fields draw on philosophical theories of emotion to interpret their results while, at the same time, the philosophy of emotion is now deeply intertwined with empirical work on emotions, ranging from molecular to psychological levels. Yet there is no established theoretical consensus about the relationship between emotions (and affective experience) and cognition. Nor is there an established theoretical framework for integrative multilevel theorizing.
This paper develops a processing account of the nature of emotions drawing on the resources of cognitive neuroscience. It integrates general principles underlying recently influential predictive coding approaches to cognitive architecture with findings about the neurocognitive substrates of emotional processing in specific contexts, including emotional disorders such as social anxiety and depersonalization. I consider which philosophical/psychological theories fit best with the evidence and show how disagreements between them can be explained. One advantage of this account is that it explains the relationship between self-representation, bodily representation and emotional experience. Another is the potential it offers for integrative theory construction.