Is surprise an emotion

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• Is surprise an emotion?
• Is it a basic emotion?

2

• Whats important about facial expressions?
• Are they radically ambiguous or truly diagnostic?

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What misery!
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What joy! (Novotna, Wimbledon, 1998)
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• Are running away from a bear, or jumping up and
  down at a good outcome part of, or consequences
  an emotion?
• Are they expressions or external (behavioral)
  manifestations?

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• Are there basic emotions?
• Which? Why? How?

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Is surprise an emotion?
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Emotions must have valence - positive or
negative, they cant be neutral
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Emotions DO usually have a behavioral component
(despite OCC, p.11)They DO usually have a
motivational componentThey DO usually have a
physiological component
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They always have a cognitive component, the focus
of OCC
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Still,What is an emotion?OCC p.13 not enough
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Effective Functioning

• Optimizing fit between an organisms functioning
  and environmental conditions

• In humans, is it compromised by affect?

• Under normal conditions (affect under control)
• Under abnormal conditions (affect out of control)
• emotional disorders (depression, GAD, phobias,
  bipolar disorder)

Ortony, A., Norman, D. A. Revelle, W.
(2005). Affect and proto-affect in effective
functioning. In J.M. Fellous M.A. Arbib, Who
needs emotions The brain meets the machine. New
York Oxford University Press.
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Effective Functioning

• In biological systems, the interaction of
• what organisms do (modes)
• how they do it (levels)
• where they do it (environments)

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Effective Functioning

• What organisms do four modes

• feel
• want
• think, believe, etc.
• act

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Effective Functioning

• What organisms do four modes

• feel pure affect (value)
• want motivation (action tendencies)
• think, believe, etc. cognition (meaning)
• act behavior (action)

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Effective FunctioningHow organisms do it
three levels

• fast pattern matching Reactive
• learned automatic procedures Routine
• controlled conscious activity Reflective
• affect critical in all

• See also Sloman, Minsky, etc.

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cognition (think)
pure affect (feel)
behavior (do)
motivation (want)
GENERAL STRUCTURE OF A TYPICAL FULL-BLOWN EMOTION
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Phenomenological Component Sense of holistic
integration of somatic, cognitive, and
motivational components
COMPONENTS OF A TYPICAL FULL-BLOWN EMOTION
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elicitors
EVENTS, AGENTS, OR OBJECTS
representations
criteria
emotions
Athens 2005