Commentary

Valent Representations, Bodily Feelings, and Social Norms

Hufendiek, Rebekka and Christine Sievers. 2024. “Valent Representations, Bodily Feelings, and Social Norms.” 

 Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 5, no. 2: 24-29. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.Winter.3.

Abstract: In this commentary, we discuss Tom Cochrane’s theory of emotions. Cochrane offers an appealingly unified account of valent representations, ranging from simple responses to complex representations within a mechanistic framework. This offers some guidance as to how we might conceive of emotions as simple action-guiding responses in infants and animals, as well as context-sensitive evaluative states. While Cochrane argues for the centrality of bodily feelings, he does not consider his approach to be embodied in the narrower sense. We question his reasons and suggest to think of emotions as embodied action-oriented representations. We, furthermore, suggest developing the approach with regard to the multiple roles that social norms play, and delve further into the nuanced relationship between bodily self-regulation and the formative influence of social norms on emotions.

Keywords: valent representations, emotions, embodiment, social norms, action-oriented representation

VALENT REPRESENTATIONS AND EMBODIED 

ACTION-ORIENTED REPRESENTATIONS

In The Emotional Mind, Tom Cochrane (2018) provides a novel approach to explaining emotions by characterizing them as a particular form of valent representation. Valent representations, according to Cochrane, are a basic kind of mental capacity in which representational content relies on feedback from interaction with one’s surrounding environment. Valent representation combines representation, valence, and action within a single system. Such systems may be perceived as systems of negative feedback control (known from cybernetics) whose function is to detect the presence or absence of specified conditions and to trigger a direct response with the aim of either enhancing or diminishing the presence of the condition being represented.

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Paradigmatic examples of valent representations include painful sensations that directly trigger symptoms of withdrawal from food or cravings for food that motivate the individual to eat until the cravings have been satisfied; valent representations thus seek to eliminate the conditions that trigger them. While one might initially conceive valent representations as simple reflex-like responses, the notion of valent representation also aims to cover more subtle and cognitively demanding representations. The components of valent representations may gradually become increasingly elaborate through the inclusion of ever more sophisticated forms of control. The main point regarding the mind’s structure that Cochrane wishes to emphasize is “its organization for the sake of ever more sophisticated and effective self-regulation” (187). Within this structure, emotions form a subcategory of valent representations insofar as emotions are intentional, evaluative, and dispose us to respond.

In this sense, emotions as valent representations resemble Millikan’s pushmi-pullyu representations in that they are action-oriented and truth-tracking. In contrast to Millikan’s proposal, however, the content of a valent representation is not determined by its evolutionary survival value (e.g., “danger-run away”); rather, its content fulfills a homeostatic function for the organism, maintaining an internal balance. In pulling an individual toward or deterring them from an object in the environment, valent representation regulates the basic elements necessary for survival. For example, food, warmth, and air. Cochrane also draws inspiration from Ramsey’s success semantics—that is, the idea that actions depend on the accuracy of the representations that guide them. However, the valent structure of Cochrane’s representations provides a more detailed explanation of how actions become bound up with a particular representation—namely, by means of their homeostatic function. Cochrane’s proposal is thus related to the approaches from both teleosemantics and success semantics, but it also adopts its own approach in deriving its main mechanisms from cybernetics.

Emotions form a subcategory of valent representation that is distinguished from other valent representations by virtue of the kinds of objects they represent. Emotions not only represent a particular intentional object, such as a dog, but represent it in combination with a so-called “formal” object, such as “loss” (in sadness) or “threat” (in fear). Those formal objects of emotions may be characterized as relations between oneself and the emotion elicitor that have a bearing on one’s well-being, or as contextually situated concerns. When an individual is guided toward a particular object in an emotional manner, the intentional object in question (e.g., a dog) is predicated as a threat (in fear) or as a loss (in sadness). Such emotional representations may vary in intensity, whereby this intensity is correlated with disposed regulation mechanisms that prepare the individual (e.g., for flight or to cope). The key to emotional representation is the cognitive capacity for contextually oriented representation; all emotions represent the status of concerns relative to a wider context (temporal, modal, and social). This ability to represent situated concerns is what distinguishes emotions from simpler sensations, such as pain or hunger, which do not necessarily engage these abilities. This sensitivity to context does not involve the demanding cognitive abilities that infants and animals lack; rather, it requires that the creature is capable of some form of recreative thinking—that is, cognition that uses expectations, memories, or counterfactual imaginings. In fear, for instance, the avoidant concern is predicated as imminent or its presence as increasing.

Cochrane’s model offers an appealingly unified account of valent representations, ranging from simple responses to complex representations within a mechanistic framework. This offers us some guidance as to how we might conceive of emotions as simple, action-guiding responses in infants and animals, as well as context-sensitive evaluative states.

While Cochrane argues for the centrality of bodily feelings, he does not consider his approach to be embodied in the narrower sense. Rather, he proposes that emotional intentionality is twofold: while emotions at their core represent situated concerns (such as threat or loss), they are typically—but not invariably—accompanied by an additional layer of representational content that represents bodily feelings and fulfills a regulative function in monitoring bodily capacities. Adopting an embodied perspective, one might object that emotional feelings are

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the intense and rich experiences that they are because they are constituted by a range of bodily processes. To this objection, Cochrane responds that upon closer examination, the non-bodily phenomenology of emotions is rich and intense in itself and that once we recognize this, “we no longer need bodily feelings to add colour to a cold appraisal” (2018, 92). This is slightly confusing, however, given that the core feelings that Cochrane then describes as non-bodily emotional feelings are those “where everything seems to slow down or speed up, where the threat was looming menacingly, the world was spinning” (2018, 92). Even on a phenomenological level, (some of) these feelings may arguably be traced directly to changes in heart rate or muscle tension. Furthermore, authors who embrace embodied accounts, including Damasio (2000), Prinz (2004), and Hufendiek (2016), argue that bodily responses constitute not only feelings that may be traced, on a conscious level, to symptoms of bodily arousal (such as a pounding heart), but also plausibly enable one to conceive of an emotional experience in which “everything slows down” as a feeling constituted by changes in blood pressure, hormone levels, etc., that we are unable to trace as such, but that still constitute the phenomenological core of emotions. Cochrane’s main argument against this claim appears to be that bodily feelings themselves lack any information about the detected external situation or the situated concern: a core concern results from a sophisticated act of cognition that then triggers bodily responses (2018, 90).

Embodied accounts have developed a response to this concern, however: Hufendiek (2016) construes emotions as action-oriented representations of affordances, whereby the bodily responses in the history of a species and/or an organism have co-occurred with the relevant situated concerns so frequently that they carry information about bodily preparations (e.g., for flight or fight). Cochrane (2018) suggests replacing Millikan’s stance that representational content is determined by survival value with a homeostatic approach. A homeostatic approach regards valent representation as fulfilling a balance-maintaining function. This seems to be a compelling suggestion. From such a homeostatic approach, however, it arguably follows that emotions regulate bodily responses in the face of situated concerns. Furthermore, the bodily responses directly feed into the content of the action-oriented representation within a dynamic system. Threats are not threats to a disembodied cognizer; rather, they are threats to embodied creatures who have a history of interacting with them, both as a species and as individuals. It is hard to see why somebody would want to introduce valent representation as a representation type whose function it is to regulate bodily responses, only then to draw an artificial distinction between the core representation of a situated concern and the representation of bodily responses; but this seems to be what Cochrane is suggesting.

VALENT, EMOTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS, AND SOCIAL NORMS

The role that social factors play in relation to emotions has been the subject of extensive discussion. Inarguably, emotions play a central role in social interactions, but the degree to which and in what ways social context shapes emotions remains the subject of dispute. The debate spans multiple research fields: in psychology, for example, cross-cultural differences in emotional expression are cited as evidence for the influence of socio-normative factors on emotional expression (e.g., Crivelli et al. 2017). Meanwhile, researchers in the developmental sciences claim that emotional responses are learned ontogenetically through caregivers’ regulative responses, which, in turn, are themselves based on socio-normative factors (e.g., Chaplin et al. 2005). Hufendiek (2020) has similarly argued that emotions, such as anger, are constituted by a pattern of bodily responses that need not be universally identical, but rather are goal-oriented and shaped by the process of habituation. Caregivers, according to this view, can use different social practices to interact emotionally with their children, and the children thereby acquire emotional habits.

In particular, social norms are increasingly discussed in connection with emotions and their behavioral responses and expressions. To cite an example from social psychology, Dezecache et al. (2021) claim that social norms determine responses linked to fear in situations characterized by immediate danger. In a study that reconstructed

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the behavior of survivors and victims of the 2015 terror attacks at the Bataclan theater in Paris, interviews with the survivors were conducted. The interviewers focused particularly on the survivors’ described reactions to the immediate danger and their observations of other people’s behavior. They expected that the survivors would report unsupportive, competitive behavior characterized by flight and other typical fear responses, given the extreme and immediate character of the situation with extremely few means of exit. However, the results indicated that the survivors’ and victims’ reactions were more complex, having been influenced by social norms. For instance, people exhibited cooperative behaviors, such as helping others to negotiate obstacles, holding doors open for others, warning them of the attackers’ location, and making ad hoc democratic decisions in small groups about what to do next, rather than simply running to the nearest exit. The study had several limitations, given its methods and subjects, but nonetheless hinted at the strong influence that social norms exert on seemingly simple emotions such as fear.

This tendency of social norms to hijack emotional responses is also discernible in other species: contrary to the narrative often promulgated in philosophy, animals display highly elaborate and flexible fear responses. Cooperative and organized mobbing behavior in response to approaching predators is observed in many mammal and bird species (Caro 2005), and numerous studies have observed selective alarm calling in chimpanzees and other primates to warn the group’s naive individuals of imminent danger (e.g., Dezecache et al. 2019; Sievers and Gruber 2016; Crockford et al. 2012). The suppression of fear vocalizations to protect other group members has also been investigated in orangutans, for example (Lameira and Call 2018). These cases demonstrate that social purposes across species, such as supporting the group in a situation of immediate danger, influence fear responses. Rule-like elements appear to underlie this process, potentially related to human social norms, according to which fear responses tend to serve the good of the group rather than merely ensuring a single individual’s survival. That is not to say that fear does not trigger adaptive responses in other species; but, for social animals, the triggered responses may be harnessed for social purposes and may therefore be subject to social influences (such as socially normative regularities).

These observations raise several questions for the emotion theorist: it is not controversial to state that emotions may be triggered by social scenarios that are relevant to the individual and that certain social scenarios may be of more urgent concern than basic needs, such as hunger, and may thus override them. To what degree, however, are emotions felt, valued, regulated, and enacted in different ways in different social contexts and cultures? Observable differences emerge, for example, in US-American expressions of anger and Tibetan expressions of lung lang, but also in how people of different genders or who occupy different levels within workplace hierarchies tend to express anger. One means of theoretically accounting for these observations is to conceive of such different expressions of anger as habitual and skillful responses that largely result from different processes of habituation in different social contexts (Hufendiek 2020). Such accounts may explain how social norms–and, more generally, social influences–may determine what potential or kind of emotional response we display and in which situations, as well as how our bodily responses are attuned to that which is considered socially adequate in such contexts.

Another question to be raised concerns animal emotions and the extent to which stereotypes concerning basic, almost hardwired emotional responses, such as fear responses, may be queried in light of a potential socio-normative relatedness between human and non-human emotional displays: animal emotional responses appear to be far more flexible in terms of social influences, and therefore may require more elaboration regarding explanations of the involved proximate and ultimate mechanisms.

Within Cochrane’s framework of valent representations, social norms could potentially play a role with respect to the representation’s content and the concrete emotional responses–that is, it may not be simply via memory and other contextual factors that social factors come to matter. However, Cochrane may also be suggesting that

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we become ontogenetically attuned to social norms in a way that shapes our bodily response patterns and the representational content; the content of guilt or shame responses, for instance, appears to presuppose a learned understanding of social norms. Situations such as described above, in which we experience fear but behave in a manner that is seemingly “brave”–for example, helping others instead of running away–may be precisely the kind of example that highlights this additional, important role of social norms: this scenario may be interpreted as one in which the individual feels fear and exhibits the emotion of fear, but the actual fear response (as part of the valent representation) is determined by social norms of cooperation. That is, the response is not related to bravery on a representational level, but rather the content of the valent representation is harnessed for social purposes through the influence of social norms. In light of current empirical research on emotions and social norms, it would be interesting and significant to determine whether and how such an interpretation might be discerned in Cochrane’s account.

Where Cochrane does mention the influence that social norms exert on emotions, he is primarily concerned with the regulation of our emotional display—for instance, we ought to feel sad at the funeral of a family member, and we ought to be happy and smile at a friend’s wedding, and so on. However, such claims merely amount to our potential judgment of the emotion as inadequate relative to social norms or as “fall[ing] short of one’s own ideals” (Cochrane 2018, 153). In the case of fear, according to Cochrane, we may experience fear “when we ought to be brave” (153). Social norms, following Cochrane, influence whether our exhibition of the emotion and our response thereto align with how we feel. However, social norms appear to influence considerably more than bodily self-regulation.

In principle, therefore, Cochrane’s theory provides the requisite tools for an approach that closely links bodily self-regulation and the formative power of social norms within a broader approach to emotions; however, he misses the opportunity to unpack the details. While it appears that Cochrane’s account may be largely compatible with an account that construes emotions as skillful and socially situated responses, it is difficult to be certain what that would entail precisely.

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References

1. Chaplin, Tara M., Pamela M. Cole, and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler. 2005. “Parental Socialization of Emotion Expression: Gender Differences and Relations to Child Adjustment.” Emotion 5 (1): 80–88.  https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.5.1.80. 

2. Cochrane, Tom. 2018. The Emotional Mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

3. Crivelli, Carlos and Maria Gendron. 2017. “Facial Expressions and Emotions in Indigenous Societies.” In The Science of Facial Expression, edited by James A. Russell and Jose Miguel Fernández Dols, 497–515. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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6. Dezecache, Guillaume, Jean-Rémy Martin, Cédric Tessier, Lou Safra, Victor Pitron, Philippe Nuss, and Julie Grèzes. 2021. “Nature and Determinants of Social Actions During a Mass Shooting.” PloS One  16: e0260392. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260392. 

7. Dezecache, Guillaume, Catherine Crockford, and Klaus Zuberbühler. 2019. “The Development of Communication in Alarm Contexts in Wild Chimpanzees.” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 73 (8): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-019-2716-6. 

8. Hufendiek, Rebekka. 2020. “Emotions, Habits, and Skills. Action-Oriented Bodily Responses and Social Affordances.” In Habits. A Pragmatist Approach from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory, edited by Fausto Caruana and Italo Testa, 100–119. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108682312.005. 

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10. Lameira, Adriano R. and Josep Call. 2018. “Time-Space–Displaced Responses in the Orangutan Vocal System.” Science Advances 11 (4): eaau3401. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau3401. 

11. Prinz, Jesse J. 2004. Gut Reactions. A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

12. Sievers, Christine and Thibaud Gruber. 2016. “Reference in Human and Nonhuman Primates: What Does it Take to Refer?” Animal Cognition 19 (4): 759-768. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-016-0974-5. 

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Rebekka Hufendiek and Christine Sievers © 2024

Author email: rebekka.hufendiek[at]uni-ulm.de

Author email: christine.sievers[at]uni-ulm.de