Emotion is Essential to All Intentional Behaviors

By Walter J. Freeman. 2000

107 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emotion is defined as a property of intentional behavior. The widespread practice of separating emotion from reason is traced to an ancient distinction between passive perception, which is driven by sensory information from the environment, and active perception, which begins with dynamics in the brain that moves the body into the environment in search of stimuli. The neurodynamics of intentional behavior is reviewed, with emphasis on the limbic system that controls the autonomic and neuroendocrine systems in the brain and body, directing them for the support of the musculoskeletal system that is executing the behavior. An essential part of intentionality is learning from the sensory consequences of one's own actions. The perception of emotional states through awareness involves global states of cooperative activity in the forebrain, which have internal contributions from the many parts of the brain that join in making these states, and inevitably there are contributions from the sensory systems of the body that implement and signal emotional states. The distinction between rational versus emotional behaviors is made in terms of the constraint of high-intensity chaotic activity of components of the forebrain by the cooperative dynamics of consciousness versus the escape of subsystems owing to an excess of chaotic fluctuations in states of strong arousal.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76fa6a39a781639d425d571c070b3a29dafb1ab9

How researchers see this paper

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

In Artificial Intelligence

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling (2005, background): “However, they argue, bidirectional causation, incorporating both recruitment and regulation, coordinates the entire neuroaxis, such that functionally (and phylogenetically) distinctive levels cohere in a unitary mode of action readiness and attentional orientation (see also Freeman 1995; 2000).”
Neurophenomenology: An Introduction for Neurophilosophers (2005, background): “As a number of neuroscientists have emphasized, this core of self-awareness is grounded on bodily processes of life-regulation, emotion, and affect, such that cognition and intentional action are emotive (Damasio 1999; Panksepp 1998a, 1998b; Watt 1999; Freeman 2000), a theme central also to phenomen”
Neurophenomenology Integrating Subjective Experience and Brain Dynamics in the Neuroscience of Consciousness (2003, background): “As a number of cognitive scientists have emphasized, this primitive self-consciousness is fundamentally linked to bodily processes of life regulation, emotion and affect, such that all cognition and intentional action are emotive (Panksepp, 1998a, 1998b; Damasio, 1999; Watt, 1999; Freeman, 2000; Par”
Social dynamics in the preschool (2005, background): “…world: cycles of predator–prey populations (Murray, 1989), synchronization of basic brain-stem functions yielding higher-order cortical processes (Freeman, 2000; Lewis, 2005), coordination of limbs during walking (Thelen & Ulrich, 1991), and Xocking behavior of migrating birds (Couzin & Krause,…”
The musical art of infant conversation: Narrating in the time of sympathetic experience, without rational interpretation, before words (2008, background): “The regulation of purposes and awareness in relation to the body and to its affective concerns is a preoccupation of psychologists in the last decade (Damasio, 1999; Freeman, 2000; Panksepp, 1998a, b).”