From emotion concepts to embodied cognition

Here’s the first chapter of Taking Heart and Making Sense.

If you’re new here, you might like to read an intro article about the book. I also recommend listening to the book’s Introduction first.

I’m uploading it as a podcast. The text doesn’t automatically come through in the email but a transcript is available if you listen through the website.

Alternately, if you’d like the full text, paid subscribers receive the entire ebook (even if you only subscribe for one month).

Happy listening!

Quick overview:

This chapter asks us to begin to consider feeling as something different from emotion. I also suggest that feeling seems to be different from (and more meaningful than) affect, the term that scientists often use to describe feeling.

This chapter then provides an overview of a recent theory of emotion in psychology, by Lisa Feldman Barrett, including its treatment of interoception, or how we sense and represent the internal state of the body.

I remain uncertain about some of the details of this theory, particularly the relationship between the brain and the body. This leads me to ask how Barrett’s theory of emotion might relate to a field of cognitive science called embodied cognition, and its view of the relationship between the brain and body.

It seems to me that these two theories have a lot to say to each other and should be brought together in some way. That is a major theme of the book and leads into the next two chapters, which explain some relevant theories in embodied cognition.