Review: Précis of "Gut Reactions"

Reviewed Work(s): Gut Reactions by Jesse Prinz

Review by: Jesse Prinz and Jesse Prinz
Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , May, 2008, Vol. 76, No. 3 (May,
2008), pp. 707-711
Published by: International Phenomenological Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40041207

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research

This content downloaded from

82.33.133.41 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 12:33:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. LXXVI No. 3, May 2008
© 2008 International Phenomenological Society

Precis of Gut Reactions

JESSE PRINZ

University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

A lot of things happen when you are, say, overcome with grief. Usuall
there is an experience of an eliciting event (your lover breaks up with
you), a barrage of appraisal judgments (what a terrible loss!), a cascade
of changes in your body (the tears flow), an experience of those changes
(the ache in your chest), changes in attention and memory (a rapid
effort to recall where things went sour), and a suite of new behavior
and behavioral dispositions (you withdraw and sulk). Much of the work
done in emotion theory is designed to characterize these events, and t
take a stand on which of them are most essential to our emotions. Dif-
ferent theories of emotion tend to emphasize different components:
thoughts, feelings, action tendencies, and so on. Gut Reactions develops
and defends an embodied theory of the emotions. The embodied
approach emerged in the late 19th century when William James proposed
that emotions are feelings of changes in the body. Gut Reactions takes
this as a point of departure. It surveys evidence for the theory, critically
assesses other theories, and offers some important amendments. Chief
among the amendments are an account of how the embodied approach
can accommodate cultural variation, how it can allow unconscious emo-
tions, how it can be supplemented with a theory of emotional valence,
and, most importantly, how bodily sensations can have the kind of
meaning that more cognitive theories of emotion have emphasized. The
basic view is that even if emotions are not judgments, they can represent
how their bearers are fairing in the world. Emotions are perceptions of
bodily changes, but, by perceiving the body, we also perceive losses,
threats, achievements, and other matters of significant concern.
Gut Reactions starts with a survey of emotion theories and identifies
a major fault line between cognitive theories, which say emotions essen-
tially require judgments or conceptualizations, and non-cognitive theo-
ries, which say that emotions can occur in the absence of such
cognitive states. The arguments against cognitive theories begin in

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 707

This content downloaded from

82.33.133.41 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 12:33:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Chapter 2. Within psychology, the most popular kind of cognitive
approach is the appraisal theory. An appraisal is a judgment about an
organism-environment relationship that bears on well-being, such as
the judgment that there has been a great loss or that there has been an
offense against me. Following Richard Lazarus, I call the states of
affairs represented by these judgments "core relational themes." It is
uncontroversial that appraisal judgments can elicit emotions. If I con-
vince you that you are in mortal danger, you will become afraid. But
are they necessary? Many empirical findings suggest that they are not.
Emotions can be induced by changes in body chemistry and by chang-
ing posture or facial expression. Some emotions arise very rapidly in
response to perceptual episodes without any apparent intervening judg-
ment: as when we trip, or hear a blood curdling scream, or see a child
crying, or get tickled. From an engineering perspective, it seems unnec-
essary to require judgments every time an emotion is elicited, and evi-
dence from neurophysiology suggests that emotions can be elicited via
subcortical and cortical perceptual pathways, bypassing the more
advanced brain centers that are traditionally associated with judgment.
People who insist that judgments are really taking place in these more
primitive brain structures often sound like they are desperately trying
to save their theories. There is no compelling reason to think that judg-
ments are necessary for emotions. Empirical evidence used to support
appraisal theories shows, at best, that judgments are sufficient, and that
folk psychology associates each named emotion with eliciting events
that can be cognitively represented. The claim that judgments are nec-
essary is, I conclude, a mistake. And, if judgments are not necessary
for emotions, I am inclined to say on grounds of parsimony, judgments
are never constituents of emotions, even when judgments occur. They
are contingent emotion elicitors, not constituent parts.
If emotions are not constituted by judgments, what are they? Here,
the crucial insight owes to William James (and his contemporary Carl
Lange). James argues that emotions are perceptions of changes in the
body. Rage is a perception that includes muscles tensing up and blood
running to the extremities; fear is a perception that includes muscles
freezing, respiration becoming constricted, and hairs standing on end.
James argues for this conclusion by appeal to introspection: if we imag-
ine a state of rage and mentally subtract each bodily feeling, we are left
with nothing that can be identified as an emotion. Further support
comes from recent cognitive science. The brain regions implicated in neu-
roimaging studies of emotion are independently associated with body
perception; changing configuration of face and body can elicit emotions;
people with spinal cord injuries feel less intense emotions; false informa-
tion about the body can dupe people into thinking they are emotionally

708 JESSE PRINZ

This content downloaded from

82.33.133.41 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 12:33:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
aroused; and emotion recognition makes reliable use of detectable bodily
changes. Unlike judgments, the bodily changes also seem to have the
same time course as our emotions (I know that the sudden sound I heard
was not a prowler, but the fear lingers). And this account sheds some
light on the link between emotion and behavior: each pattern of bodily
change corresponds to the body's preparation for action.
The Jamesian approach enjoys considerable support, but it also faces
some objections. Chief among these is that it seems poorly suited to
explain the fact that emotions are meaningful. In folk psychology, we
say that emotions are appropriate or inappropriate, and we identify the
kind of situation that each emotion represents (rage represents offen-
siveness, and fear represents danger). Some emotion researchers have
dismissed the embodied approach on the grounds that mere muscle ten-
sion, visceral twinges, breathing patterns, and heart palpitations cannot
represent such core relational themes unless they are supplemented by
judgments. This is a mistake. Contemporary theories of mental repre-
sentation are based on the assumption that a mental state can represent
in virtue of its causal relationship to the world. If some type of mental
state is reliably caused by a state in the world, and if the capacity
to have such mental states came about because they are reliably
so-caused, then, on leading psychosemantic theories, we can say the
mental state in question represents that state of the world. Fred
Dretske and others developed accounts like this to explain how our
concepts and perceptions represent, but the story readily applies to
emotions. If a particular bodily perception reliably occurs under certain
circumstances and was learned or evolved for that purpose, then that
perception represents that situation. When dangers confront us, there
are certain muscular, circulatory, and respiratory changes that take
place in order to prepare the body for fleeing, fighting, or freezing. The
mind has the ability to recognize this pattern of changes perceptually,
and to use that pattern to inform decisions about what to do next.
Thus, the perception of the patterns is, according to independently
motivated theories of content, a representation of danger. Core rela-
tional themes are represented by perceptions of patterned bodily
changes. I call this the embodied appraisal theory. James was right that
emotions are perceptions of bodily changes, but he failed to notice that
such changes can represent exactly what judgments (cognitive apprais-
als) represent. They represent via the body, rather than via the disem-
bodied, freely recombinable concepts that we use in thought.
The embodied appraisal theory overcomes the main objection to
embodied theories, but there are others. Various authors (most power-
fully, Paul Griffiths) have argued that emotions are not a natural kind:
some may have a bodily basis, but others may involve cognitive states

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 709

This content downloaded from

82.33.133.41 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 12:33:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
more centrally. Consider some of our most sophisticated emotions,
such as guilt or jealousy. How can one have these without thinking
about moral transgressions or contemplating a lover's infidelity? I
respond by showing that the embodied appraisal can handle every emo-
tion, no matter how sophisticated. If we begin with a small stock of
species-typical, basic emotions, we can expand our repertoire in two
ways. First, we can combine these basic emotions together (thrills may
arise when joy and fear blend), and second we can take a basic emo-
tion or blend of emotions and "recalibrate" it to respond to a new
class of eliciting events. Here's a just-so story. Suppose that when chil-
dren violate moral rules, parents punish them by threatening ostracism
("go to your room!"), and suppose that this threat to a parental attach-
ment relationship is a biologically prepared elicitor for sadness. Over
time, a child will come to feel sad when contemplating immoral acts.
Sadness will have a new class of learned elicitors - a kind of mental
file - including a range or norm violations. When elicited by an item in
this mental file, the state originally identified as sadness (or perhaps a
blend of sadness and fear) would now be better characterized as repre-
senting moral transgression; so-caused, the state is reliably caused by
transgressions and was given that function through a learning history.
We call the resulting recalibrated emotion "guilt." Guilt is just an
embodied appraisal. In this way, a small stock of emotions can be
extended to represent new contents, and when that happens, new emo-
tions are born. The claim that all emotions are embodied is also sup-
ported by empirical evidence: for example, all are associated with the
somatic brain structures. I conclude that there is no reason to divide
the emotions into those that are embodied and those that are not.
The foregoing also helps to address another objection that has been
raised against Jamesian theories of emotion. James believed that our
emotions are the result of biological evolution, and his strong physio-
logical orientation has a reductive flavor. In particular, it is hard to see
how to square his theory with the plausible claim that emotions can
vary across cultural boundaries. Anthropologists report that different
cultures have different emotion vocabularies, and the same situation
can elicit different responses in different cultures. Moreover, the evi-
dence for a universal set of emotions is less conclusive than often
assumed. For example, cross-cultural agreement on the precise meaning
of a facial expression is far from perfect. The embodied appraisal the-
ory can accommodate cultural differences. On this approach, emotions
are individuated by perceived bodily patterns and by what they repre-
sent. The representational content depends on what a given perceived
bodily state has the function of being reliably caused by. Thus, if mem-
bers of a culture are conditioned to have a particular bodily response

710 JESSE PRINZ

This content downloaded from

82.33.133.41 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 12:33:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
under circumstances that leave members of other cultures cold, then
members of that culture will come to have an emotion that is not uni-

versal. Examples may include accidie (a negative response to repeated

religious ritual), patriotism, schadenfruede, and amae (a positive feeling
of dependency prevalent in Japan). Indeed, I argue that every emotion
we have a word for already reflects learning processes that may be cul-
turally specific. Emotions get conditioned from the start, and, by adult-
hood, our emotions may already bear the mark of culture. Infants lack
what English speaking adults refer to with words such as "anger" or
"fear," even if they have similar states.
The remainder of Gut Reactions deals with a number of other issues
that have received less attention than they should in the emotion litera-
ture. One is the question of whether emotions can be unconscious.
James argues that emotions are feelings, thus implying that they are
essentially conscious. I think this was a mistake. If emotions are per-
ceptions of bodily changes, and unconscious perception is possible,
then there can be unconscious emotions. I provide some empirical
evidence for this conclusion, and also argue that emotions come into
consciousness in just the way that other kinds of perceptual states
become conscious.

Emotion researchers have also spent too little time exploring how
emotions relate to other affective states, such as motivations, senti-
ments, and moods. I offer a typology of affective states that sorts out
these distinctions on the embodied appraisal theory. One important
implication is that moods are just a special species of emotion: they are
embodies appraisal. The difference has to do with their content. Where
emotions represent specific events that bear on well-being, moods
represent how our lives are going over all.
Another neglected topic is emotional valence. We easily classify emo-
tions as positive or negative, yet it's hard to see why some bodily pat-
terns would be good and others bad. Here I suggest that the embodied
appraisal theory needs supplementation. Emotional valence derives
from what I call "inner reinforcers," unfelt mental markers that make
us either work to sustain the mental states to which they are appended
or make us work to stop those states. Positive and negative emotions
are bound to positive and negative inner reinforcers, respectively.
The final chapter of Gut Reactions takes up the question, are emo-
tions perceptions? In particular, are they perceptions of the core rela-
tional themes that they represent? I defend a positive answer. Emotions
pick up information in a way that can be usefully compared to the way
our familiar senses pick up information. Emotions allow us to perceive
dangers and losses as such. This is one reason why they often seem to
be passive states, and it also one of the reasons why they are so useful.

BOOK SYMPOSIUM /ll

This content downloaded from

82.33.133.41 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 12:33:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms