Open Questions: Emotions
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Introduction
Site indexes
Sites with general resources
-
Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
- "An on-line bibliography in the area of emotions and
emotional intelligence, describing current research findings
and notes of interest," by Cheri A. Young.
Surveys, overviews, tutorials
-
Fear and the Amygdala
- 1998 overview article on the topic, from the
Society for Neuroscience.
-
Virtue in mind
- An interview with Antonio Damasio that deals mostly with
his book about Spinoza and Spinoza's ideas which help understand
the relationship of emotion and mind.
-
Can We Cure Fear?
- November 2005 Scientific American sidebar, subtitled
"We naturally view any risk we witness as a personal
threat--even when it is on the opposite side of the globe
and we see it only on TV. Is popping a pill the answer?"
-
If You're Happy and You Know It...
- February 2001 Scientific American news article about
the influence of personality traits on response to emotional
stimuli.
- The Nature of Emotions
Robert Plutchik
American Scientist, July-August 2001, pp. 344-350
- The systematic study of emotions has a long but confusing
history. It may be possible to construct a rigorous scientific approach
by looking for the evolutionary roots of emotions and their
adaptive functions.
[Abstract and references]
- Emotion, Memory, and the Brain
Joseph E. LeDoux
Scientific American, June 1994, pp. 50-57
- There is an increasing recognition that emotions play an
important role in cognitive processes. A reflection of this is
research into how a strong emotion like fear affects memory.
- Joseph LeDoux -- The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings
of Emotional Life
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1998
- LeDoux has written a masterful book, which is at least the
equal of Damasio's Descartes' Error. Although the two
books cover the same general subject, human emotions, there is little
overlap. With LeDoux, the emphasis is more on neurobiology,
which is appropriate, as the author has been a leader in the
investigation of the biology of emotions, especially fear.
In this story, brain regions such as the amygdala, thalamus,
hipopocampus, and several cortical areas play central roles.
LeDoux addresses how emotions and memory interact, and finally,
the relation of emotions and conscious feelings.
- Antonio R. Damasio -- Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain
G. P. Putnam's Sons/Avon, 1994
- Damasio is distinguished as both a neurologist and a neurobiologist.
Out of his long clinical experience with patients having brain
lesions affecting their emotional and cognitive lives, he has
drawn significant conclusions about the interaction between
emotion and cognition in general. His book presents lucid
arguments for three basic theses: (1) Reason cannot operate
well without guidance from the brain's emotional systems. (2)
Feelings are a part of conscious experience based on the brain's
perception of the rest of the body when emotions are triggered.
(3) Mind in general depends in an essential way on the body
as a frame of reference for neural processes that occur in the
brain. Damasio advances a specific hypothesis, which he calls
the "somatic marker hypothesis", for the manner in which the brain
makes use of emotional experience in the process of planning
and reasoning.
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Copyright © 2002 by Charles Daney, All Rights Reserved