emotional conciousness

Kevin Goldstein

I’m intrigued by the sudden reversal found in this week’s readings, namely that LeDoux’s emphasis on the emotional unconscious has been superseded by emotional consciousness. The motif which traverses these readings, save LeDoux’s, concerns the integrated character of emotion; emotion is a state of mind both affective and conceptual: “brain structures at the heart of the neural circuitry for emotion (e.g., the anygdala) impact cognitive processing from early attention allocation…through perceptual processing to memory” (Barrett, 386). As the Barrett article argues, emotions emerge at the level of psychological description with underlying correlative neurobiological processes. There is thus an evolving, continuous stream of affect and conceptual processing underway.

Here we find a shift in focus framed around a shift in definition. If emotion is not merely defined by neurobiological response but conscious representation, then how we examine the experience of emotion necessarily changes. LeDeoux argues that as emotions are primarily unconscious, introspective accounts or self-reports prove specious as a mode of analysis. If, however, we define emotions as emergent on the conscious level, then indeed self-reportage becomes nor merely valuable but invaluable to analysis.

Core affect, defined as the universal, valence-orientated neurobiological responses to a given stimulus or stimuli, is entrenched in a kind of internal dialectic—though perhaps this creates an impure dichotomy—with psychological representation, or the conceptual framework, with in turn produces a meaningful synthesis, namely emotion, “the remembered past” (Barrett, 386). This conceptual framework, characterized by conditioned—either experiential or sociocultural—notions of what constitutes an emotion, functions in unison with these neurobiological responses. In short, on the conscious level, affective responses are always mediated in a social context.

Thus, on the conscious level, the sociocultural ramifications of affective response are indeed a key facet of emotional experience. From a scientific standpoint, however, self-reports run the danger of becoming merely anthropologically significant. Emotional expression becomes a question of representation, and thus semiotics overwhelms neurobiology. In this way perhaps we become enmeshed in surface structures.

In Freudian terms, neurobiological responses constitute a kind of id response which is, in turn, met with the superego conceptual framework; herein the ego mediates to produce the emotion. Is this excessively neat? Perhaps, especially when we insist on delimiting spheres of consciousness vis-à-vis emotion. Indeed, as the Barrett article claims, the affective and conceptual blur; the pure subject is not existent, but emotes along a social continuum. Neurobiological responses are interwoven with the conceptual framework just as the self is interwoven with the community. Better said, they are neither mutually exclusive nor undifferentiated. As the Barrett-Russell article asserts, through the representation of emotional states, language maps onto affective feelings.

Meanwhile, “The Naked Face” article contests mere introspection as a limit of emotional analysis. In short, self-definition with regard to emotion is potentially misleading, as LeDoux maintains; one is not always the best judge of one’s emotional state—though the Bechara-Naqvi article would have it that at the very least we can read certain visceral sensations with relative facility. By way of the so-called voluntary emotional system, we can manipulate our emotions as a means of manipulating others, but nonetheless, we are not always in control of our emotive signifiers, namely as concerns the involuntary emotional system’s microexpressions. In other words, there is at times a discrepancy between what is said and what is signaled. Thus our conceptual framework is faulty, or at the very least orientated more towards a certain internal homeostasis. At the same time, this article reveals that emotional meaning construction is not merely of an intrapersonal but interpersonal character. As social animals, perhaps interpersonal communication often takes precedent over self-knowledge.