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37Affective reactions to facial identity in a prosopagnosic patientCognition and Emotion 22 (5): 977-983. 2008.This study probes whether a prosopagnosic patient can make accurate explicit affective judgements towards faces. Patient MJH was shown photographs of faces of well-liked family members and public figures rated as “evil” by opinion polls. MJH was asked to rate each face on two 7-point scales (Likeability and Pleasantness). Since he is unable to explicitly recognise faces, his ratings were based on his evaluative reaction to the faces presented. In a second phase of the experiment, MJH was told th…Read more
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13The deep history of affect and consciousnessPhilosophical Psychology 36 (4): 734-744. 2023.I contrast two notions of cognition offered in Joseph LeDoux’s (2019) The Deep History of Ourselves toward arguing for the functional role of affect and consciousness in the evolution of matter. I argue that an emphasis on the cultural construction of emotions misrepresents the relationship between culture and biology. A more parsimonious story about the evolution of mind requires leaving behind some aspects of a cognitivist epistemology.
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11J. L. Modern. Neuromatic; or, a Particular History of Religion and the BrainEvolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 6 (2): 131-134. 2022.
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383Epistemic cultural constraints on the uses of psychologyNew Ideas in Psychology 68 (1): 100896. 2023.This paper describes some epistemic cultural considerations which shape the uses of psychology. I argue the study of mind is bound by the metaphysical background of the given locale and era in which it is practiced. The epistemic setting in which psychology takes place will shape what is worth observing, how it is to be studied, how the data is to be interpreted, and the nature of the ultimate explanatory units. To demonstrate conceptual epistemic constraints, I discuss metaphor use in psycholog…Read more
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32The pragmatic use of metaphor in empirical psychologyHistory of the Human Sciences 35 (3-4): 291-316. 2022.Metaphors of mind and their elaboration into models serve a crucial explanatory role in psychology. In this article, an attempt is made to describe how biology and engineering provide the predominant metaphors for contemporary psychology. A contrast between the discursive and descriptive functions of metaphor use in theory construction serves as a platform for deliberation upon the pragmatic consequences of models derived therefrom. The conclusion contains reflections upon the possibility of an …Read more
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172Affect, Belief, and the ArtsFrontiers in Psychology 2. 2021.The cultural project is a therapeutic melding of emotion, symbols, and knowledge. In this paper, I describe how spiritual emotions engendered through encounters in imaginative culture enable fixation of metaphysical beliefs. Evolved affective systems are domesticated through the social practices of imaginative culture so as to adapt people to live in culturally defined cooperative groups. Conditioning, as well as tertiary-level cognitive capacities such as symbols and language are enlisted to bo…Read more
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230The motivational role of affect in an ecological modelTheory and Psychology 32 (1): 1-21. 2021.Drawing from empirical literature on ecological psychology, affective neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, this article describes a model of affect-as-motivation in the intentional bond between organism and environment. An epistemological justification for the motivating role of emotions is provided through articulating the perceptual context of emotions as embodied, situated, and functional, and positing perceptual salience as a biasing signal in an affordance competition model. The motivation…Read more
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56Précis: The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and CognitionJournal of Philosophy of Emotion 2 (2): 1-7. 2021.An affective approach to culture and cognition may hold the key to uniting findings across experimental psychology and, eventually, the human sciences. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power, yet for nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason the emotional centers of the brain were running the show. To attain a clearer picture of the evolution of mind, we challenge the cognitivist and behaviorist paradigms in psychology by explor…Read more
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243Philosophical Implications of Affective NeuroscienceJournal of Consciousness Studies 19 (3-4): 6-48. 2012.These papers are based on a Symposium at the COGSCI Conference in 2010. 1. Naturalizing the Mammalian Mind 2. Modularity in Cognitive Psychology and Affective Neuroscience 3. Affective Neuroscience and the Philosophy of Self 4. Affective Neuroscience and Law.
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390The Emotional Mind: the affective roots of culture and cognitionHarvard University Press. 2019.Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at wor…Read more
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78A Theory of Autobiographical Memory: Necessary Components and Disorders Resulting from their LossSocial Cognition 22 460-490. 2004.In this paper we argue that autobiographical memory can be conceptualized as a mental state resulting from the interplay of a set of psychological capacities?self-reflection, self-agency, self-ownership and personal temporality?that transform a memorial representation into an autobiographical personal experience. We first review evidence from a variety of clinical domains?for example, amnesia, autism, frontal lobe pathology, schizophrenia?showing that breakdowns in any of the proposed components…Read more