Cognitive Conceptualism—Where Have All the Affects Gone? Additional Corrections for Barrett et al. (2007)

Abstract

Barrett et al. (2007) claim that their approach to emotions covers more of the available evidence than does my affective neuroscience approach (Panksepp, 2007b). In fact, the weight of neurological evidence indicates that raw affect, as monitored by many behavioral tasks, is an aspect of the arousal of instinctual-emotional networks. This provides an empirical approach to understanding how primary-process emotional feelings are constituted by neural activities (Panksepp, 2008). There is abundant evidence for the existence of a variety of primal emotions shared across mammalian species that are biologically ingrained tools for living and learning and that may allow higher brain regions to conceptualize what is really important in the world. Barrett et al., misrepresent my views; an accurate depiction of them can be found in this article and in Gallagher (2008). Abundant cross-species evidence of basic affective systems exists to enrich cognitive-conceptual and attributional theories of human emotions.