ABSTRACT This paper develops an account of basic affective beliefs. These are basic beliefs that are dominated by an affective component. Basicness encompasses several dimensions: structural (non‐propositional), format (non‐conceptual and modality‐specific), evolutionary (shared across many taxa) and epistemic (basic affective beliefs prima facie self‐verifying). We also outline a theory of content for basic affective beliefs: we argue that they have imperatival content, representing the ‘to‐be‐doneness’ of an entity or situation. Together, elements of our account allow us to challenge the widely held view that affective beliefs are irrational and unreliable. This presumption stems from the observation that they seem to resist correction, as when a person fears small dogs, while also believing that they are harmless. On our analysis, the person who fears a small dog represents it as a to‐be‐escaped thing, and this representation lacks conventional truth‐conditions because it is not propositional. Instead, it has accuracy conditions, which are often satisfied (we argue) in cases such as this. After presenting this analysis, we distinguish basic affective beliefs from related constructs: percepts, aliefs and beliefs construed as emotions. Finally, we show that our account can be applied with novel implications to a range of cases, including phobias, outlaw emotions, basic ethical and aesthetic beliefs and animal minds.

Agnes Moors challenges William James’s theory of emotions on multiple grounds. She argues that: James wrongly commits to the view that emotions must have perceptual causes; he wrongly insists that all emotions are embodied, ignoring emotions such as hope and regret; he errs in treating bodily feeling as sufficient for emotions; he cannot account for the “heat” (valence and intensity) of emotions; and he fails to account for emotions’ intentionality. This commentary addresses each of these objections, while also agreeing with Moors that James’s theory needs to be updated. An imperatival theory of emotions is proposed and compared to Moors’ response evaluation theory.

In this article we develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. After providing an overview of previous work on this topic and drawing inspiration from the more developed area of epistemic injustice, we propose working definitions of ‘emotion’, ‘injustice’, and ‘emotional injustice’. We describe seven classes of emotional injustice: Emotion Misinterpretation, Discounting, Extraction, Policing, Exploitation, Inequality, and Weaponizing. We say why it is useful to distinguish these and also to subsume them under a single concept. Our aims are both theoretical and practical: to provide a unified account of emotional injustice, while recognizing the diversity of this phenomenon; to facilitate further research on this topic; to recognize the political importance of emotions; and to outline some of the ways in which emotional injustice can be combated.

Adaptive preferences have been extensively studied in decision theory and feminist political theory, but not in experimental philosophy. In feminist contexts, the term is used to discuss cases in which women seem to accept abusive treatment and other conditions of oppression. According to one class of theories, women who accept abusive behavior are cognitively deficient: irrational, lacking autonomy, or not acting in accordance with their identity. Other theories deny this, saying that under certain conditions, accepting abuse can be a sound response, given available alternatives. We survey lay opinions about a case in which a woman endures domestic violence and find that people often attribute adaptive attitudes and tend to see them as rational, free, and reflective of identity. We also examine lay normative judgments, including options about the right course of action, and the locus of blame, finding, for example, some tendency to blame the victim in such cases. Such attitudes are impacts by gender and political orientation. We also manipulated the cultural setting of our vignette, but found no impact.

Evaluative judgments imply positive or negative regard. But there are different ways in which something can be positive or negative. How do we tell them apart? According to Evaluative Sentimentalism, different evaluations (e.g., dangerousness vs. offensiveness) are grounded on different emotions (e.g., fear vs. anger). If this is the case, evaluation differentiation requires emotional awareness. Here, we test this hypothesis by looking at alexithymia, a deficit in emotional awareness consisting of problems identifying, describing, and thinking about emotions. The results of Study 1 suggest that high alexithymia is not only related to problems distinguishing emotions, but also to problems distinguishing evaluations. Study 2 replicated this latter effect after controlling for individual differences in attentional impulsiveness and reflective reasoning, and found that reasoning makes an independent contribution to evaluation differentiation. These results suggest that emotional sensibilities play an irreducible role in evaluative judgment while affording a role for reasoning.

To what extent do aesthetic taste and our interest in the arts constitute who we are? In this paper, we present a series of empirical findings that suggest an Aesthetic Self Effect supporting the claim that our aesthetic engagements are a central component of our identity. Counterfactual changes in aesthetic preferences, for example, moving from liking classical music to liking pop, are perceived as altering us as a person. The Aesthetic Self Effect is as strong as the impact of moral changes, such as altering political partisanship or religious orientation, and significantly stronger than for other categories of taste, such as food preferences (Study 1). Using a multidimensional scaling technique to map perceived aesthetic similarities among musical genres, we determined that aesthetic distances between genres correlate highly with the perceived difference in identity (Study 2). Further studies generalize the Aesthetic Self Effect beyond the musical domain: general changes in visual art preferences, for example from more traditional to abstract art, also elicited a strong Self Effect (Study 3). Exploring the breadth of this effect we also found an Anaesthetic Self Effect. That is, hypothetical changes from aesthetic indifference to caring about music, art, or beauty are judged to have a significant impact on identity. This effect on identity is stronger for aesthetic fields compared to leisure activities, such as hiking or playing video games (Study 4). Across our studies, the Anaesthetic Self Effect turns out to be stronger than the Aesthetic Self Effect. Taken together, we found evidence for a link between aesthetics and identity: we are aesthetic selves. When our tastes in music and the arts or our aesthetic interests change we take these to be transformative changes.

We define aesthetic emotions as emotions that underlie the evaluative assessment of artworks. They are separated from the wider class of art-elicited emotions. Aesthetic emotions historically have been characterized as calm, as lacking specific patterns of embodiment, and as being a sui generis kind of pleasure. We reject those views and argue that there is a plurality of aesthetic emotions contributing to praise. After presenting a general account of the nature of emotions, we analyze twelve positive aesthetic emotions in four different categories: emotions of pleasure, contemplation, amazement, and respect. The emotions that we identify in each category, including feelings of fluency, intrigue, wonder, and adoration, have been widely neglected both within aesthetics and in emotion research more broadly.

The authors discuss their work in conducting several psychological experiments to explore what they call the "moral self hypothesis": that morals matter for identity, and they matter more than many other things. They expected some of the challenges of deep integration. They note that each member of their team has been committed to combining philosophy and psychology; how, in collaboration, they have consistently needed to move back and forth between theory and experimental design. That has involved spelling out theoretical statements, operationalizing, looking at results, getting feedback, and revising theories. They also discuss the need to learn statistical modeling in more depth, as well as the need to focus on real-life events. The latter focus has induced them to delve into cross-cultural psychology, and to bring the study of other disciplines, such as history, into the ambit of cognitive science research.

This introductory chapter identifies the relationship between emotions and moral judgment, reviewing in particular the case of sentimentalism. Throughout the many studies in moral neuroscience, one common denominator in neural activations has been emotion. Again and again, areas of the brain associated with emotional response are active when people engage in moral cognition. Authors of the studies interpret these results in many ways, but one common refrain is that emotions contribute to moral judgment. This can be seen in a wide range of models that support the finding that emotional activations regularly co-occur with moral judgment. These models include the rationalist model, the dual-process model, the intuitionist model, the neo-sentimentalist model, and the constitution model.

This chapter discusses William James’s analysis of attention in the Principles of Psychology (1890). Though presented as an empirical review, it is really much more, since James offers original theoretical perspectives on attention, and attention becomes an important player in his theory of the mind, more broadly. It factors, for example, into his theories of perception, belief, and the will. The chapter then summarizes James’s treatment of attention and offers a theory of what attention is and what it does. It suggests that James postulates a kind of spontaneity in mental processes that are often regarded as merely receptive, and that this has implications for philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and even ontology.

Recent studies demonstrate a moral self effect: continuity in moral values is crucial to ascriptions of identity in and over time. Since Locke, personal identity has been referred to as a forensic' concept, meaning that it plays a role in attributions of moral responsibility. If moral values are crucial to identity over time, then perceived changes in a person's set of values may reduce responsibility for past deeds. To test this, we examined the moral self effect in parole contexts. In this empirical article, we conducted two experiments, in which participants were significantly more likely to grant parole to agents who underwent a moral change as opposed to mere behavioral change. We conclude by discussing possible objections and implications of these philosophical results for the Lockean view of personal identity.