EMOTIONS

In bioethics, as in ethics more generally, there is much debate about the significance of emotions in an account of moral character. Intuitively speaking, emotions are important because as moral beings we care not only about how we act but also about how we feel—what our moods are, as well as our attitudes and affects. Within the practice of healthcare, the emotions of compassion and empathy seem to have a particularly important place in a full description of decent and ethical treatment of a patient. The general point is not that emotion is internal and action external, because both action and emotion have exterior moments that point to deeper interior states, commonly thought of as character. Rather, emotions are important as modes of sensitivity that record what is morally salient and that then communicate those concerns to self and others. Thus, to grieve, pity, show empathy, or love is to focus on an aspect of self or other and to grasp information to which purer cognition or thought may not have access. Generally put, different emotions are sensitive to different kinds of salience. In the case of grief, what is salient is that humans suffer and face loss; in the case of pity, that they sometimes fail through blameless ignorance, duress, sickness, or accident; in the case of empathy, that they need the expressed support and union of others who can understand and identify with them; and in the case of love that they find certain individuals attractive and worthy of their time and attention.

In relations in which caring for others is definitive, emotional sensitivity plays a powerful role. In choosing physicians, for example, people tend to value medical skill and ability deeply, but value character and judgment as well. And part of what people look for in character and judgment is not just reliable and principled action but also a certain range of emotional responsiveness. Medical care ministered without human gesture may simply not be received in the same way as that conveyed through compassion and empathy. A physician's sensitivity to a patient's needs, worries, and fears is often also relevant to diagnosis, just as the physician's communication of emotions may be relevant to how a patient confronts illness and recovery. As in any relationship, emotional interaction is part of the exchange. In more intimate friendships, we hope that loved ones will be able to respond to our joy and suffering in more than merely intellectual ways and that they will communicate feelings through spontaneous affect and gesture as well as more deliberate action.

What Are Emotions?

In general terms, then, emotional sensitivity is a moral feature of personal interaction. But what are emotions? It is useful to first review some alternative views.

The first is the commonsense view in which emotion is thought to be an irreducible quality of feeling or sensation. It may be caused by physical states, but the emotion itself is the sensation we feel when we are in that state. It is a felt affect, a distinctive feeling, but not something dependent upon thought content or appraisals of situations. This view quickly appears faulty, however, when one realizes that on this view emotions become no more than private states—sensations such as itches and tickles that have little to do with what the emotions are about and how a person construes or represents those affairs.

A second view, associated with the American psychologist and philosopher William James and Danish physiologist Carl Lange is that emotions are an awareness of bodily changes in the musculature and viscera. We are afraid because we tremble or flee, not the other way around; likewise, we are angry because of the knots in our stomachs. This view, though rather counterintuitive, nonetheless captures the idea that emotions, more than other mental states, seem to have conspicuous physiological and kinesthetic components. These often dominate children's and adults' reports of their emotional experiences. They dominate the literary world, too. Consider in this vein the lines of the Greek poet Sappho composed around 600 b.c.e.:

When I see you,
my voice fails, my tongue is paralyzed,
a fiery fever runs through my whole body
my eyes are swimming,
and can see nothing
my ears are filled with a throbbing din
I am shivering all over …

Literary history, social convention, and perhaps evolution conspire to tell us this is love. But even here it is not hard to imagine that what is described could be dread or awe or perhaps, mystical inspiration. Even well-honed physiological feelings do not easily identify specific emotions. An awareness of our skin tingling or our chest constricting or our readiness to flee or fight do not specify just what emotion we are feeling. Many distinct emotions share these features, and without contextual clues and thoughts that dwell on those clues, we are in the dark about what we are experiencing (Schacter and Singer). The chief burden of the work of the American physiologist Walter B. Cannon was to show that many physiological affects are virtually identical across manifestly different states. While more current research suggests a tighter fit between specific emotions and specific autonomic system responses (such as skin temperature and heart rate), visceral responses such as these nevertheless have slow response times, too slow to determine what emotion one is actually feeling at a given time (LeDoux). So Cannon's general insight about the indeterminacy of the "feel" of an emotion still holds, though for different reasons than the ones he offered.

A third view with some kinship to the James-Lange view holds that emotions are felt action tendencies (Arnold). They are modes of readiness to act or, in the different idiom of psychoanalysis, discharge impulses. Supporting this view is the tendency of people to describe emotions in terms of dispositions to concrete behavior, for example, "I felt like hitting him," "I could have exploded," "I wanted to spit," and "I wanted to be alone with him, wrapped in his embrace." Nevertheless, the action tendency view seems at best a partial account of emotion. The basic issue here is not that some emotions such as apathy, inhibition, and depression seem to lack activation modes—while others are more a matter of the rich movement of thought so well depicted, for example, in Henry James's novels. It is rather that emotions are about something (internal or external) that people represent in thought. As such, emotions have propositional or cognitive content. They are identified by that content, by what we dwell on, whether fleetingly or with concentrated attention.

According to a fourth and most plausible view, emotions are constituted by appraisals or cognitive evaluations. (This is the view the fourth-century b.c.e. Greek philosopher Aristotle developed in the Rhetoric, and a view the Stoics put forth in more radical form. It is the clear favorite of most philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—for a sampling, see de Sousa, 1987; Stocker; Goldie; Nussbaum, 2001. It is also the reigning view in cognitive psychology—see Lazarus; Oatley; Frijda; Scherer, and for an important criticism, see Zajonc.) Such an account need not exclude other features of emotion, such as awareness of physiological and behavioral responses or a particular phenomenological feel. But these, when present, are dependent on the appraisals of circumstances that capture what the emotion is about. Moreover, it is compatible with this view that emotions have complex neuropsychological structures that can be investigated by science.

To be more precise, an appraisal, on this view, is a belief or evaluation about the goodness or badness of some perceived or imagined event. Anger requires an evaluation that one has been unjustly slighted by another, fear that there is present harm or danger, grief that something valuable has been lost, love that one values a person as supremely important in one's life. On the Aristotelian view, the evaluation is experienced with pleasure or pain, and in some, but not all, cases with a reactive desire, not unlike the earlier mentioned action tendency. According to Aristotle, "Anger is a desire [orexis] accompanied by pain toward the revenge of what one regards as a slight toward oneself or one's friends that is unwarranted" (Rhetoric, 1378a30–32).

The appraisals constitutive of emotions can be weaker than strict beliefs (P. Greenspan). Thus, many of the thoughts that ground emotions are not judgments to which we would give assent, but are rather thoughts, perceptions, imaginings, and construals (phantasiai, Aristotle would say) that we dwell on in compelling ways, though without concern about "objective truth." Familiar sorts of examples illustrate the point. Juan may fear spiders, even though he knows that most spiders he is likely to encounter are harmless; or Clarissa may know that Joe is a no-good lover for her, but she still finds herself yearning for him. In these cases emotions have thought contents or appraisals, though ones that are at odds with more circumspect judgment. They are mental states that seem to lag behind what a person is ready to grasp through belief.

On an Aristotelian view, appraisals constitutive of emotions have a qualitative flavor—a feeling of pleasure or pain. The flavor may be intense or mild, present to consciousness or hidden somewhere as background noise. So, for example, a patient reflecting on her illness may have fears that all may not turn out well, even though she never feels any strong or noticeable tension when she focuses on that thought. Some emotions may be felt as a mix of both pleasure and pain. Even a quick "flash" of emotion, such as a "twinge" of envy, can seem to oscillate quickly from one affective pole to another, from pain at another's good fortune to pleasure at being in a position to slight that person.

Aristotle suggests that many emotions have a motivational aspect, that is, they involve a reason or motive for action. Again, recognition of the diversity and variety of emotions is crucial here. Some emotions, such as calmness, confidence, and equanimity do not in an obvious way involve desires for action. In contrast, anger often involves a desire for revenge, just as envy seems to involve a desire to thwart others from having various goods. These sorts of desires can go on to constitute a motive or reason for full-fledged action, although often we train ourselves not to act, and not to take as a motive for action all our impulses and desires. In some cases, we act out our emotions only in our minds, as when out of anger, we slay the object of our anger in our fantasy life. Here impulses and urgings are present, but they are not taken up as reasons for action.

At yet other times we do externally act out our emotions but in a way in which that emotion still seems to fall short of constituting a full-fledged reason or motive for action. In anger, we sometimes act impulsively, slamming doors and storming out of rooms. This is a venting, a way of letting out tension, not a strategy for sweet revenge. Defiling a photograph of an ex-lover comes closer to the mark, for here at least there is symbolic aim. Nevertheless, these cases of anger do not really aim at effective revenge. They are reactive more than purposeful. And yet, they seem to be voluntary. They are certainly not the involuntary responses of the viscera. Like stroking a patient's brow or tousling a child's hair, emotion motivates the action. These two actions are likely done out of compassion and affection. But it seems strained, at least in some of these cases, to say that one does these actions in order to show compassion or affection—which is the common pattern a demand for reasons often takes. The gesture just expresses compassion or affection. The explanation stops there. It is not like drinking in order to slake thirst, in which drinking strategically promotes that end (Hursthouse).

Emotions and the Brain

In recent years neurophysiologists have turned to an analysis of emotions and the underlying brain structures of specific emotions and emotional pathologies. Two of the leading researchers in this field are Joseph E. LeDoux and Antonio R. Damasio.

In his 1996 book, The Emotional Brain, LeDoux makes three central points. First, he contends that emotions form a two-track response system. One track involves the "low road," or fast route where information travels directly from the thalamus, a subcortical "relay station" in the brain that mediates between external stimuli and specialized parts of the brain that process information, to the amygdala, a small region in the forebrain which generates the behavioral, autonomic and endocrine responses which make up an emotional reaction. The other track involves a "high road," or slow route where information takes a detour through the cortex, the more recently evolved part of the brain which supports higher cognitive functioning, including thinking, reasoning and consciousness. The first, subcortical pathway is a primitive survival mechanism, fast but "quick and dirty" and often filled with errors. It is the basis of the human fear response not only to snakes but also to slimy, bent sticks that look like snakes. The second cortical pathway is slower, but more precise, correcting for errors in overreaction and adding the advantages of conscious judgment and more finetuned discernment. The very slowness that makes it a poor defense mechanism suits it well for leisurely appraisal.

LeDoux notes, secondly, that memories of emotional situations are laid down by a two-track memory system. One system involves implicit or procedural memory, another explicit or declarative memory. So LeDoux asks us to imagine being in a horrific car accident, in which the horn gets stuck on. Later, when you hear a horn your body may automatically have a conditioned fear response—you break out in sweats, have a fast heartbeat, and so on. Procedural memory is at work, bringing information directly from the auditory system to the amygdala and opening the floodgates of emotional arousal. But in hearing the horn you also may remember the accident, consciously remembering the intersection where it happened, who was with you at the time, where you were headed, and so on. The two kinds of memories are of the same event, though one is emotion drenched, the other, cool and calm. Research by Larry R. Squire and Daniel Schacter, among others, suggests that the two memory systems are physically housed in different parts of the brain, though the memories, in normal cases, are "seamlessly fused" as one conscious, unified experience of the moment. The fusion results in memories that are "emotional." In those moments when we have arousal without declarative memory, we may experience intense emotions without knowing why. (This may be one explanation of the notion of "objectless" emotions.) Conversely, declarative memories without the emotional arousal of implicit memory may be experienced as emotionally flat.

In his third point, LeDoux focuses on our primitive fear response, suggesting that the brain system responsible for this mechanism can bypass higher, cognitive brain systems. But this leaves to the side questions about more complex, socially constructed emotions, such as indignation, compassion, pity, or shame. Do they operate solely through the high road, or do they have low-road counterparts, which they routinely correct and educate? Again, are memories of feeling compassion or indignation marked by a two-tier system—the fusion of an awareness of a present arousal with a conscious evaluation of the situation that invoked arousal? These sorts of questions raise a more general concern about how to generalize from LeDoux's important study of the fear defense mechanism to the wide array of emotions that characterize people's waking and dreaming lives.

In his 1994 book, Descartes' Error, Damasio argues that a wide range of emotional behavior is not primarily subcortical but is a function of the frontal lobe of the brain, typically associated with reasoning and decision making. Indeed, Damasio's research suggests that the prefrontal cortex is involved in both emotional arousal and rational decision making and that the emotion centers and the reasoning centers in the frontal lobe are intimately related. Damasio begins his account with the famous case of Phineas Gage, a mid-nineteenth-century railroad worker whose frontal lobe was pierced by an iron tamping rod in an accident that occurred while Gage was blasting stone to make way for a straight rail track. To the surprise of his doctors at the time, Gage's severe brain injury (the rod exited the front of his brain and landed more than a hundred feet away) affected not just his reasoning capacities, but his emotional character as well. A calm and polite man prior to the injury, Gage became irreverent and foul mouthed, obstinate and capricious, and full of plans quickly hatched and soon abandoned. A similar pattern had been repeated in others with prefrontal lobe damage. While patients were able to generate emotional responses that travel subcortical, "low-road" paths ("primary emotions," as Damasio calls them), they could not generate "secondary emotions" that require evaluation of stimuli (LeDoux's "high-road" emotional responses). On the basis of a series of related experiments, Damasio concludes that prefrontally damaged patients are unable to have normal, automatic emotional responses. Though they may understand abstractly the emotional significance of some stimuli (such as the punitive side of the risky moves they repeatedly make), they fail to correct their strategies, Damasio argues, because they seem unable to pair that understanding with a mechanism to reenact, in this case, a negative emotional response. They lack what Damasio calls a "somatic marker" mechanism that stamps the appraisal with its appropriate emotional flavor.

Both LeDoux's and Damasio's work shed important light on the interdependence of emotion and reason in emotional behavior—LeDoux through his notion of "high-road" emotional pathways that stand ready to correct "quick and dirty" subcortical responses, Damasio through his analysis of prefrontal responses that embody pairings between representations of situations and appropriate emotional dispositions.

Control and Responsibility

Emotions are reactive responses. But in what sense are we human beings able to choose their emotional responses? How, if at all, can the will intervene in emotional behavior?

Aristotle is once again helpful here. Both action and emotion, he holds, are subject to choice in the following sense. We choose to develop a state of character that stabilizes certain dispositions toward action and emotion. Accordingly, how one feels (and acts) may be less a matter of choice at the moment than the indirect effect of choice over time. In the case of emotion, especially, there are few shortcuts. For unlike action, emotion does not seem to engage choice (or will) in each episode. At a given moment, we may simply not be able to will to feel a certain way however skilled we are at posing appropriate emotional, facial expressions, such as a polite smile or a look of interest.

Common parlance includes many expressions presuming that emotions are "up to us" in various ways. We exhort ourselves and others by such phrases as "pull yourself together," "snap out of it," "put on a good face," "lighten up," "be cheerful," "think positive," and "keep a stiff upper lip." In many of these cases, what the person is being implored to do is to take on the semblance of an emotion with the hope that it might "take hold" and rub off on the person's inner state. Practice as if you believe and you will believe. Or, as de Sousa put it, "earnest pretense is the royal road to sincere faith" (de Sousa, 1988, p. 324; also see Ekman; and Tomkins on posed expressions and facial feedback mechanisms). Similarly, we can sometimes fuel the flames of a sincerely felt emotion by allowing it bodily expression. To weep may intensify our grief or make us more conscious of its presence. The James-Lange theory, and its notion of proprioceptive feedback from the expression of emotion, may be in the background here. There are other sorts of actions a person might take that are not a matter of body language or putting on a new face. A person may try to talk herself out of love, but discover that only when she changes locales do the old ways begin to lose their grip. Other times, it is more trial by fire: staying put and exposing herself to what is painful in order to become inured. The latter process involves desensitization.

Sometimes changing one's mood may be more a matter of mental or perceptual strategy. It may be a matter of bringing oneself to focus on different objects and thoughts—trying to see things under a new gestalt or recomposing the scene. Exhortation and persuasion play an important role here. A patient depressed by the possibility of relapse might be reminded of the favorable statistics and the steady progress she has made to date. Seeing things in a new light, with new emphases and stresses, helps to allay the fear. In a different vein, anger at a child may subside when one focuses less on minor annoyances and more on admirable traits. One may work on a more forgiving attitude in general by choosing to play down others' perceived faults or foibles. In certain cases, experiencing emotions is a matter of giving inner assent—of allowing oneself to feel angry or giving the green light to a new interest or love. It is as if something grabs hold, and then it is our turn to have some influence.

Mental training can of course follow a more methodical and introspective model. An individual can learn to take more careful note of the onset of certain emotions and of the movement of mind from one perceived object of importance to another. So Buddhists speak of a watchful mindfulness, an intensification of consciousness such that through awareness and knowledge, one comes to be more in charge (Thera).

There are other methods of effecting emotional change that depend upon so-called "deep" psychology. In psychoanalysis the recapitulation of patterns of emotional response through transference onto an analyst is intended to be a way of seeing at a detached level. The patient relives an emotional experience at the same time as he watches and interprets it. This is the putative advantage of an empathetic, clinical setting: A patient can come to see an emotional pattern in a detached way, free from judgment and accusation and from the crippling emotions that those stances often involve. In some cases, a patient tries to relieve the pain of present disabling emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or shame by coming to see their roots in primitive conflicts and frustrations that may have long been repressed. The goal is not to remove the patient from the vulnerabilities of emotion, but rather to make possible a way of experiencing emotions, including shame and anger, that is less crippling and self-destructive.

More Radical Extirpation or Removal of Emotions

Because emotions are valued as modes of attention, motivation, communication, and knowledge, we tend to put up with their messiness while at the same time attempting their reform. But there are venerable traditions in which moderating emotions through transformation and education is viewed as an inadequate therapy and an inadequate way of training moral character and agency. The Stoic view, which influenced later Kantian views and bears rough similarities to certain Eastern traditions, argues that the surges and delusions of emotion warrant their extirpation. Investment in objects and events we cannot control is the source of our suffering, and modification of our beliefs about these values is the source of our cure. In Stoic theory, virtue comes to be rooted in reason alone, for it is reason alone that is most appropriate to our nature and under our true dominion.

The attraction of the Stoic view rests in its powerful description of the anguish of the engaged emotional life. Many emotions (though not all) lead to attachment, but objects of attachment are never perfectly stable. Abandonment, separation, failure, and loss are the constant costs of love, effort, and friendship. The more tightly we cling to our investments, the more dependent we become upon what is uncontrolled and outside our own mastery. Self-reproach and persecution are often responses to lack of control. In our relations with others, the same clinginess of emotions can lead to stepping beyond what is appropriate, just as it can lead to exclusionary preferences and partialities. Provincialism can grow out of stubborn preference for what is familiar and comfortable according to class lines or other restrictive values.

This is a reasonable portrait of some moments of the life lived through emotion. Detachment and watchful awareness directed toward the emotions are important therapeutic stances in such a life. In addition, detachment and watchful awareness should be directed toward reason itself and its own tendencies toward egoism and imperious control. This is clearly at odds with Stoic practice though more in line with Eastern practices such as Buddhism. But it is difficult to see how a thoroughgoing rejection of the emotions can be compatible with what is a human life. Emotions, for all their selectivity, intensity, and stirring, enable us, through those very vulnerabilities, to attend, see, know, and experience in a way that pure cognition cannot. Some of that way of knowing and being known anguishes beyond words. Poetry and literature can only begin to express the reality. But even if at times unruled by reason's measure, emotion must not, on that account, be an outlawed feature of human life. Nor must it be an outlawed feature of morality. How we care for others, and what we notice and reveal, depends greatly on the subtlety, fineness, and often deep truth of our emotional readings of the world.

Conclusion

From the above, it should be clear that emotions play an expanded role within bioethics and within the moral practices of healthcare professionals. Emotional sensitivity is important for discerning the complexity of situations and for appreciating the competing needs and interests of various parties. A simple matter of noticing a patient's distress or displeasure, perhaps by attending to her facial expressions and bodily gestures, could figure importantly in assessing a case. But by the same token, it is important to communicate emotions and not just record those of others. Conveying compassion to a patient can be a significant part of therapeutic treatment and, in general, be an important part of establishing a relationship in which medical counsel can be trusted and followed. Again, emotions figure in deliberation of choices. Compassion toward a patient can ground a reason for telling a patient the true nature of her condition in a tone that respects the patient's fragile, emotional state. The relevant choice a caretaker faces may not be whether to withhold or not withhold the truth, but rather how to tell the truth in a way that respects both a patient's autonomy and feelings. It is here that healthcare providers' own feelings of compassion and sympathy can importantly ground the specific choices she makes. Finally, healthcare providers, as morally responsible agents, need to have ready access to their own emotions, so that emotions help rather than hinder effective care. In cases, for example, in which fears and prejudice cloud more circumspect judgment, healthcare providers must recognize such fears and prejudice as emotional impediments standing in the way of delivering quality care. In general, a reflective stance toward one's own emotions becomes an important part of caring for others.

nancy sherman (1995)

revised by author

SEE ALSO: Care; Compassionate Love; Conscience; Grief and Bereavement; Life, Quality of; Narrative; Pain and Suffering; Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Therapies; Women, Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Arnold, Magda B. 1960. Emotion and Personality, 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press.

Calhoun, Cheshire, and Solomon, Robert C., comps. 1984. What Is an Emotion? Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cannon, Walter B. 1929. Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage, 2nd edition. New York: Appleton. Excerpted in What Is an Emotion?, comp. Cheshire Calhoun and Robert C. Solomon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Cicero. 1943. Tusculan Disputations, tr. John Edward King. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books.

Davis, Wayne. 1987. "The Varieties of Fear." Philosophical Studies 51: 287–310.

de Sousa, Ronald. 1987. The Rationality of Emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

de Sousa, Ronald. 1988. "Emotion and Self-Deception." In Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed. Brian McLaughlin and Amelie O. Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ekman, Paul. 1992. "Facial Expressions of Emotion: New Findings, New Questions." Psychological Science 3(1): 34–38.

Fridja, Nico. 1986. The Emotions. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Goldie, Peter. 2000. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gordon, Robert. 1987. The Structure of Emotions. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Greenspan, Patricia S. 1988. Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification. New York: Routledge.

Greenspan, Stanley. 1989. The Development of the Ego. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

Griffiths, Paul. 1997. What Emotions Really Are. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Herman, Barbara. 1985. "The Practice of Moral Judgment." Journal of Philosophy 82(8): 414–436.

Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1991. "Arational Actions." Journal of Philosophy 88(2): 57–68.

James, William. 1884. "What Is an Emotion?" Mind 9: 188–204. Excerpted in What Is an Emotion? comp. Cheshire Calhoun and Robert C. Solomon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Lazarus, Richard S. 1984. "On the Primacy of Cognition." American Psychologist 39(2): 124–129.

LeDoux, Joseph E. 1996. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 1987. "The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions. " Apeiron 20(2): 130–175.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 1990. Love's Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Oatley, Keith. 1992. Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Parrot, W. Gerrod. 1988. "The Role of Cognition in Emotional Experience." In Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology, ed. William J. Baker, Leendert P. Mos, Hans V. Rappard, and Hendrikus J. Stam. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg. 1980. Explaining Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schacter, Daniel. 1996. Searching for Memory. New York: Basic.

Schacter, Stanley, and Singer, Jerome. 1962. "Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional States." Psychological Review 69: 379–399. Excerpted in What Is an Emotion? comp. Cheshire Calhoun and Robert C. Solomon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Scherer, Klaus R. 1993. "Studying the Emotion-Antecedent Appraisal Process: An Expert System Approach." Cognition and Emotion 7(3–4): 325–355.

Sherman, Nancy. 1989. The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sherman, Nancy. 1990. "The Place of Emotions in Kantian Morality." In Identity, Character, and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sherman, Nancy. 1997. Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Solomon, Robert. 1976. The Myth and Nature of Human Emotions. New York: Doubleday.

Solomon, Robert C., ed. 2003. What Is an Emotion: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Squire, Larry R. 1987. Memory and Brain. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stocker, Michael. 1996. Valuing Emotions. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Thera, Nyanaponika. 1986. The Vision of Dhamma. London: Rider.

Tomkins, Silvan S. 1962–1992. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 4 vols. New York: Springer.

Zajonc, Robert B. 1980. "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences." American Psychologist 35(2): 117–123.