Expectancy and emotion

289 Pages·2015·2.18 MB·English

by  Maria Miceli

Expectancy and Emotion
Series in Affective Science
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Persons, Situation, and Emotions Expectancy and Emotion
An Ecological Approach Maria Miceli and Cristiano Castelfranchi
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Expectancy and
Emotion
Dr Maria Miceli
Senior Researcher
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
National Research Council
Italy
Dr Cristiano Castelfranchi
Associate Director of Research
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
National Research Council
Italy
Foreword by
Andrew Ortony
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Education, and Computer Science
Northwestern University
Chicago, USA
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DB,
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To the future. To our constant source of expectation and emotion: our respective
sons, Giacomo, and Yurij and Vania, and their children, prospective and actual—
Lorenzo, Alice, and Samuel.

Foreword
As a friend of Cristiano Castelfranchi for over 25 years, I was delighted and flattered
when he and his long-time colleague, Maria Miceli, asked me whether I would write
a Foreword for this book. I suspect that they asked me not only because of our long
acquaintance, but also because they knew that the two concepts on which they focus
have for years been of great interest to me. They also knew that I am firmly committed
to the kind of interdisciplinary cognitive science approach that characterizes their work.
All this means that they had plenty of reason to believe that mine would be a receptive
ear, and indeed, the wonderfully eclectic book that they have written, representing as
it does the culmination of over 20 years of collaborative work on their topic, is in my
opinion, masterful.
Maria and Cristiano are the perfect people to have written this work. Between them,
they are as comfortable in the realm of philosophy and linguistics, where they have
made significant contributions in the area of pragmatics and the structure of conversa-
tion, as they are in cognitive, social, and clinical psychology, where they are leaders in
the study of social communicative behavior and its relation to social emotions. At the
same time, their longstanding interest in artificial intelligence, and their development
of ideas relating to social behavior in autonomous agents qualifies them like no other to
explore even more broadly the issue of central concern in this book.
And what is this issue? It is the question of how emotional states are related to some
of the most central aspects of human mental life, namely our capacity for anticipation
and prediction, together with our ability mentally to represent future possible states of
the world. Maria and Cristiano explore the relationship between these constructs with
extraordinary analytical sophistication. They give us detailed and insightful elabora-
tions of such things as the relation between surprise and curiosity, and between discour-
agement, helplessness, and hopelessness, and they tell us how and why emotions such
as these, as well as regret and guilt, help and harm us. They identify and explain, with
powerful, illuminating examples, all manner of nuances that most treatments of emo-
tions overlook, and in some cases they discuss the real-world, clinical, implications of
the subtle distinctions that they articulate. And as though this feast were not sufficient,
in addition to their account of the role that anticipation plays in emotions, they treat us
to an account of how the anticipation of emotions influences motivation, persuasion,
and decision-making.
Emotions are ineffable. We can’t touch them or see them; we can only feel them, and
we can, at best, only clumsily talk about them. For these reasons, emotions are difficult
to study, and characterizing them in a scientifically appealing way is really challenging.
But it is a challenge that Maria and Cristiano meet with grace and rigor; grace in that
viii FOREwORD
their criticisms of the positions of those with whom they disagree are explicated with
generosity and respect, and rigor, as evidenced by their clear articulation of so many
important distinctions—distinctions that make a difference in our understanding of the
causes and consequences of emotions.
In all my years of thinking about the various types of emotions and how best to char-
acterize their differences, as well as my thinking about the nature of surprise, I have
never been able to be as insightful, as profound, and as rigorous as these two authors are
in this book. What they have done is not only unique, it is brilliant. As I read it, I stopped
worrying about whether I agreed with them that this or that mental state is or isn’t an
emotion. Instead, I realized that sometimes it doesn’t matter—that what matters is that
there is a family of interesting and psychologically important, related states that we need
to understand, regardless of how we categorize them. To make a die-hard purist like me
ignore my prejudices is quite an achievement, and yet I feel all the better for it—indeed,
almost liberated! Quite simply, this is a wonderful, compelling book for which I heartily
congratulate my friends, the authors. I loved reading it. I wish I had written it.
Andrew Ortony
Chicago, USA
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Anticipation and emotion: Basic premises 3
2.1 The anticipatory nature of the human mind 3
2.2 A cognitive-motivational approach to emotions 8
3 Anticipation and emotion: A two-way street 20
3.1 From emotion to anticipation 20
3.2 From anticipation to emotion: Anticipation-based emotions 26
4 Kinds of anticipatory representations 31
4.1 Belief of possibility 31
4.2 Prediction 32
4.3 Interested anticipatory representation (IAR) 37
4.4 Expectation 41
5 Emotions elicited by invalidated anticipatory representations 47
5.1 Surprise 47
5.2 Disappointment 58
5.3 Sense of injustice 71
5.4 Discouragement 77
5.5 Regret 88
5.6 Relief 102
5.7 Are there emotions elicited by confirmed anticipatory representations? 110
5.8 Individual differences in dealing with invalidated positive expectations or the
risk of invalidation 112
6 Anticipatory emotions 124
6.1 Fear 124
6.2 Anxiety 131
6.3 Hope 159
6.4 Trust 171
7 Anticipated emotions 184
7.1 Anticipated emotions, motivation, and decision-making 185
7.2 The accuracy of anticipated emotions 188
7.3 Is there a dichotomy between immediate and anticipated emotions? 190
7.4 Anticipated disappointment and anticipated regret 192
7.5 Anticipating others’ emotions: A means for persuasion 194
7.6 Are anticipated emotions just cognitions? 197