A Framework for Studying Emotions Across Phylogeny

By David J. Anderson, Ralph Adolphs. 2014

560 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the 19th century, there has been disagreement over the fundamental question of whether “emotions” are cause or consequence of their associated behaviors. This question of causation is most directly addressable in genetically tractable model organisms, including invertebrates such as Drosophila. Yet there is ongoing debate about whether such species even have “emotions,” since emotions are typically defined with reference to human behavior and neuroanatomy. Here we argue that emotional behaviors are a class of behaviors that express internal emotion states. These emotion states exhibit certain general functional and adaptive properties that apply across any specific human emotions like fear or anger, as well as across phylogeny. These general properties, which can be thought of as “emotion primitives”, can be modeled and studied in evolutionarily distant model organisms, allowing functional dissection of their mechanistic bases, and tests of their causal relationships to behavior. More generally, our approach aims not only at better integration of such studies in model organisms with studies of emotion in humans, but also suggests a revision of how emotion should be operationalized within psychology and psychiatry.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems, Social Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

  1. Kent C. Berridge
  2. Morten L. Kringelbach
  3. Yoshinori Aso
  4. Gerald M. Rubin
  5. Pietro Perona
  6. Nobuhiro Yamagata
  7. Toshiharu Ichinose
  8. Guha Balakrishnan

In Sensory Systems

  1. Kent C. Berridge
  2. Morten L. Kringelbach
  3. T. Préat
  4. Yoshinori Aso
  5. P. Plaçais
  6. Gerald M. Rubin
  7. Pietro Perona
  8. Nobuhiro Yamagata

In Social Psychology

  1. Pietro Perona
  2. Morten L. Kringelbach
  3. Kent C. Berridge
  4. Joseph E LeDoux
  5. Peter S. Dayan
  6. J. Krichmar

Citations in the corpus