In the early stages of affective neuroscience (e.g., in the era from the 1980s to the 1990s), most of the major fi gures in the fi eld were openly hostile to inquiries into the structure of emotional experience. For example, Joseph LeDoux (1998 , as cited
in Lambie & Marcel, 2002 ) wrote, “The conscious feelings that we know and love (or hate) our emotions by are red herrings, detours, in the scientifi c study of emo- tions” (p. 18). Therefore, he went on to say, “Emotion researchers need to fi gure out how to escape from the shackles of subjectivity, if emotion research is to thrive”
(LeDoux, 2000 , p. 156, as cited in Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007 , p. 374). But LeDoux and many of his colleagues are part of the old paradigm, which assumed that the study of subjectivity is antithetical to science. On the contrary, as I will argue, subjectivity is always already presupposed in any and all science and therefore must be accounted for on its own terms.
The old paradigm of affective neuroscience is built upon a dualistic understand- ing of cognition and emotion, which is one of the vestiges of the Cartesian mind- body split. In the fi eld of neuroscience, this dualistic understanding manifests itself in the tendency to situate cognitive and affective functions in completely separate regions of the brain and nervous system, in which the systems are basically in oppo- sition to one another. The earliest example is the model outlined by James Papez ( 1937 ), which has come to be known as the Papez circuit. Papez assumed that incoming sensory information was funneled by the thalamus into two separate streams—one stream being cognitive in nature and the other affective. The cogni- tive system was identifi ed with the cingulate region of the brain, and the emotion center was believed to be situated in the mammillary bodies. Not long after, Paul MacLean ( 1949 ) modifi ed the model of Papez to accommodate new knowledge about the role of the temporal lobe in emotion. He developed a triune theory of the brain, which identifi ed more primitive areas of the brain as the seat of emotion. The striatal complex and basal ganglia were thought to be derived from the reptilian brain, and the limbic system was linked to emotional processes in more advanced mammalian species. The neocortex, which was identifi ed as the seat of cognition, was thought to operate in such a way that it could, to some extent, regulate and control the more primitive structures of the brain.
LeDoux’s ( 1996 ) model of the brain mirrors and reinforces the old paradigm.
As with Papez and MacLean, emotion is identifi ed with more primitive, subcortical regions of the brain. Positive emotion is linked to the nucleus accumbens, and nega- tive emotion is thought to be generated by the amygdala, each of which receives copious input about incoming sensory information from the thalamic nuclei and sensory cortex before they project information back through the brainstem.
Cognition, in contrast, is considered to operate once affect has already done its work—so here we have a conception of cognition as a Johnny-come-lately process, which, at best, functions to inhibit affective responses via pathways to the subcorti- cal regions as a result of activity in the prefrontal cortex.
It was assumed that MacLean was correct until LeDoux built on this model, which previously suppressed the study of experiential constructs such as emotion.
The problem with the old paradigm is that the cumulative evidence does not add up. Research by Anderson and Phelps ( 2002 ) has shown that patients with damage to the amygdala are still capable of experiencing emotion, and this evidence directly contradicts LeDoux’s model, which identifi es the amygdala as the seat of negative emotion. What, then, is the role of the amygdala in emotion? New research sug- gests that “amygdala activation does not itself produce affective experience”;
rather, it appears to “set the neural preconditions… for negative feelings to arise by infl uencing how sensory information from evocative stimuli is processed in the brain” (Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, Duncan, Rausch, & Wright, 2007 , p. 73). In particu- lar, the amygdala seems to increase sensitivity to negative stimuli, which in turn reinforces and enhances current and subsequent negative affectivity. In short, this line of research shows how structures of the brain previously thought to be exclu- sively linked to emotion are closely integrated with sensory systems and serve in the process of integrating sensation into perception, especially in terms of linking sensory objects to personal values—or to put it another way, emotion appears to operate in such a way that it integrates in perception, as one unifi ed fi eld, the spatial and temporal dimensions of a person’s experience of other people and things, along with their felt value to the one who is doing the perceiving (Barrett, Bliss-Moreau et al., 2007 ).
Indeed, affect serves what were traditionally believed to be purely cognitive functions. These functions include the consolidation of memory, anticipation of the future, evaluation of the other people and things in the world, and, especially, through the integration and modulation of the process of the transduction of sensa- tion into complex perceptions, the production of a personally meaningful world—a world articulated explicitly by phenomenology but which is lived primarily at a preverbal, implicit level of awareness. (Note: A more in-depth examination of the meaning of this preverbal, implicit level of awareness is developed below in the section on Heidegger’s theory of moods).
By implication, then, cognition, emotion and perception are a well-integrated process that cannot be easily teased apart without making artifi cial distinctions that map onto neither brain function nor perceptual experience. Therefore, the thick tap- estry of emotional experience can only be adequately linked to the function of the brain by careful, richly contextualized, and nuanced descriptions of emotional expe- rience, articulated from a fi rst-person perspective. This description must be careful to bracket or set aside assumptions about the nature of cognition and affect and their relationship to sensation, perception, and action.
The state of affective neuroscience today, therefore, suggests that neither the study of neuroanatomy nor the construction of hypothesized cognitive processes, which may or may not operate behind the scenes of experience, is adequate for a complete and satisfactory science of emotion. The reductive, mechanistic approach of contemporary cognitive neuroscience is unable to account for the very construct that is central to the everyday understanding of emotion as an experience . For exam- ple, we know from rigorous studies that physiological processes are only modestly associated with the experience of emotion (Mauss, Levenson, McCarter, Wilhelm,
& Gross, 2005 ). Therefore, something more is needed for a science of emotion: a rigorous approach to the description of the experience of emotion, as it is felt from a fi rst-person perspective. That is why, today, we are seeing the fourth revolution in the history of contemporary psychology. The behavioral revolution gave way to the cognitive revolution, and then the cognitive revolution produced the affective revo- lution. Today, the affective revolution is necessitating the next logical step: a revolu- tion in the study of emotional experience.