unconscious emotions are emotions that

At each level of the hierarchy of such a model, prediction units issue in predictions about the input from the level immediately beneath it, with the lowest level issuing predictions about the sensory input. Prefrontal regions orchestrate suppression of emotional memories via a two-phase process. It is, rather, what Roberts calls a feeling of construed condition, that is, of taking oneself “to be in a certain condition” or “to have a certain property” (p. 185). 55, 124–134. – that is, just the kind of pattern we might expect in relation to a second-order construal that integrates the self with representations of one’s emotional state. Nevertheless, as we proceed, it is worth having both accounts in mind, as the first account, even if incorrect, will help as understand why many, like Freud, have seen the idea of unconscious emotion as paradoxical. The problem is this: How, if an agent is experiencing the bodily changes involved in the emotion, can the repression of the second-order construal be sustained? This brings us to the theory that I will be discussing in this paper: construal theory. Unexplained bodily feelings constitute prediction error – or free-energy – according to the Bayesian brain framework (see section Free-Energy and the Process of Repression). This is very much in line with my own Freud-inspired proposal about the causes of hysterical symptoms (Michael, 2018b). McDougall, J. Keywords: unconscious emotion, free-energy, psychoanalysis, repression, alexithymia, hysteria, construal, Citation: Michael MT (2020) Unconscious Emotion and Free-Energy: A Philosophical and Neuroscientific Exploration. Boag (2012) articulates this problem in his discussion of an influential account of repression based on Sullivan’s (1956) model of selective inattention, in which awareness involves intensive concentration on a target to the exclusion of other stimuli. doi: 10.1176/ajp.134.11.1211, McDougall, J. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0091846. J. Strachey (London: Vintage). About Discover which Jungian Archetype your personality matches with this archetype test. More importantly for our purposes, the highest level of processing in the LEA model, associated with the activity of the rACC, corresponds most closely with the second-order construal that constitutes the feeling of an emotion on Roberts’ account, for it is at this level that meaning is assigned to the emotional episode. I believe that doing so, though challenging, is necessary to providing a more rounded and comprehensive understanding of the present issues. 2. Unconscious emotions lack the key feature of consciousness. Moreover, as we have discussed, it is probable that the absence of the consciousness of emotion often leads to psychopathology, such as hysterical symptoms. Third, in being a manifestation of a construal account, such an account is not tied to the basic or typical cases of emotional episodes described above, but potentially has wider applicability. Thus, we may conclude that the construal that constitutes an emotion (on Roberts’ account) is (usually) just such an embodied construal. A look at common defense mechanisms we employ to protect the ego. The second possibility for why the consciousness of an emotion would elicit overwhelming affect relates more directly to my account of the consciousness of emotion as a second-order construal. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. As Kihlstrom (1999) put it, Paralleling the usage of these descriptors in the cognitive un- conscious, ‘‘explicit emotion’’ refers to the person’s conscious awareness of an emotion, feeling, or mood state; ‘‘implicit emo- tion’’, by contrast, refers to changes in experience, thought, or. The consciousness of emotion is presumably an adaptive state, providing for a considerably more flexible response to one’s emotion than one would have if the emotion were unconscious. conscious and unconscious aspects of emotions and considers their implications for social behavior. The starting point of a typical emotional episode, on this account, is a “stimulus” that “triggers” an emotional reaction6. These unconscious emotions may be critical for communication and language understanding, they may help overcome cognitive dissonances associated with hearing an unexpected word, and carry new information , . Ordinarily, conscious liking (feelings of pleasure) results from the interaction of separate brain systems of conscious awareness with those core processes of unconscious affect. Brain 135, 3495–3512. Rev. Indeed, going further, any attempt to make the emotion conscious would threaten the unconsciousness of the memory it is intimately associated with, so the policy of reducing the precision of priors associated with this traumatic memory may be extended to a policy of reducing the precision of priors associated with the consciousness of the emotion. Memory repression: brain mechanisms underlying dissociative amnesia. We can now turn to the second problem presented at the beginning of this section, recasting it in light of our free-energy model as follows: Why would the consciousness of an emotion elicit large amounts of prediction error? Translated as The Emotions (along with William James “What is an emotion?”), transl. The above ideas readily lend themselves to the following characterisation of emotional repression15. The repression of the consciousness of an emotion is an active process that seeks to reduce attention on – or the precision of one’s model of (as we will see in section Free-Energy and the Process of Repression) – how one is experiencing or responding to the object of the emotion. (1977). Cortex 23, 833––846. Are emotions really unconscious? The proposal is that this stimulus triggers a basic emotional command system, thereby setting in motion physiological changes preparing the body for a particular kind of behavioural response – possibly alongside cognitive changes, such as changes in the “style and level of efficiency of cognitive process” (Damasio, 1994, p. 163) – pertinent to the basic emotion triggered. Owing to the repression of its proper representative it has been forced to become connected with another idea, and is now regarded by consciousness as the manifestation of that idea. Taylor, G. J., and Bagby, R. M. (2013). Neuropsychoanalysis 15, 5–19. Science 317, 215–219. That is, when one feels an emotion one sees oneself in terms of the way one is experiencing or responding to some object5. Thus, for example, an infant may see a stranger as threatening even though she does not have the concept of threat. doi: 10.1207/s15327752jpa5501%262_12, Lane, R. D., Weihs, K. L., Herring, A., Hishaw, A., and Smith, R. (2015). A. Haupt (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins). Henceforth I will refer to the first possibility, in which a construal and hence an emotion are constituted by the way an agent experiences an object, as a narrow account of construal and emotion, and the second possibility, in which a construal and hence an emotion are constituted by an organism’s response to an object, as a broad account of construal and emotion10. (2015, p. 603) associate this level with the activity of brainstem nuclei. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solomon, R. (1980). Accordingly, Demartini et al. Psychoanal. It is therefore tempting to see these feelings (plus related memories, fantasies, beliefs, and so on) as thereby constituting the “colouring” with which some object (e.g., a person) is experienced. According to Friston and his co-author Carhart-Harris, “the [Freudian] process of minimising ‘the sums of excitation’ is exactly the same as minimising the sum of squared prediction error or free-energy in Helmholtzian schemes” (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010, p. 1270). It is the basis of equanimity, the ability to be unaffected by any kind of stress. She sees the stranger through a set of experiences, involving perhaps various feelings, memories, imaginings, and so on, such that those experiences colour her experience of the stranger in a certain way, where this way is appropriately described as the aspect of being threatening. For, as mentioned, we may suppose that the consciousness of emotion plays an important role in the regulation of emotion, hence, if anything, would serve to reduce prediction error rather than increase it. Self-conscious emotions develop in relation to an understanding of rules, standards, and goals. First, interpreting the way one is experiencing or responding to an object (i.e., the first-order construal) requires an understanding of the situational context. All Rights Reserved, http://website.lineone.net/%7Eian_heath2/index.htm. I postulate that a roughly similar model can help explain the repression of the consciousness of emotions. Especially if she has increased bodily awareness (perhaps due to trait interoceptive sensibility, or increased body focus due to illness), she is likely to experience the bodily changes generated by the unconscious emotion while being unable to explain them. E. N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Are You Fixated? Emotions typically involve conscious experiences, but such experiences are not strictly necessary for an emotion to be instantiated, in part because some emotion terms refer to dispositions and in part because most theorists consider feelings conceptually distinct from non-dispositional emotions. For Freud, that there is a quantitative dimension to mental activity is a fundamental tenet of his metapsychology, and he sought to understand all of the mind’s dynamics in terms of this factor (Freud, 1950 [1895]/1957). So the feeling of an emotion is a (conscious) second-order construal, where what is construed is oneself in terms of a first-order construal. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. This is a motive for engaging in what analytic philosophers call “conceptual analysis,” the attempt to analyse concepts according to our most basic intuitions about their use in everyday language. A fundamental difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are experienced consciously, while emotions manifest either consciously or subconsciously. This allows us to distinguish between two forms of consciousness: the conscious experiences that (partly) constitute the emotion and the consciousness of the emotion. For example, Lacewing (2007, p. 22) brings up alexithymia as “cases in which the subject reports no particular feelings at the time of the emotional episode,” stating that: They generally disavow feeling emotions, and so they are also known as “alexithymics” (from the Greek for “having no words for emotion”). doi: 10.1080/09515080601023402, Lane, R. D., Quinlan, D. M., Schwartz, G. E., Walker, P. A., and Zeitlin, S. B. Of particular relevance is the comorbidity with psychosomatic complaints, which, as characteristic of hysteria (or conversion disorder), may be a prime example of the pathology of repression (Michael, 2018b, 2019a)18. An unconscious emotion could be represented by an emotion or a feeling, produced in the sleeping phase, during the phase in which we dream. The account, proposed by Roberts (1988, 2003), is that emotions are concern-based construals. (1990). Psychother. In a recently published paper (Michael, 2018b; building on Edwards et al., 2012), I argued that unconscious emotion may lie at the core of hysterical symptoms. “Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. It may or may not involve a cognitive interpretation of the event (i.e., a judgement or cognitive construal). Boag (2012) argues against such an account as follows (p. 195): A single mind cannot be both exclusively aware of the target and also filtering incoming stimuli. (2015) argue that this level of processing is associated with activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), a region of the brain which specialises “in the representation of emotional meaning, particularly meaning that is concept-driven, by integrating highly processed interoceptive and exteroceptive information” (ibid.). In psychoanalysis today ( Akhtar, 2013 ) applications of the ideas presented in the Standard of. R. D. 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