This focus aims at investigating eliciting conditions for self-reflective emotions, experience-related aspects, and functions in terms of their cognitive and motivational consequences. This will be done from an interdisciplinary perspective between both academic disciplines (psychology, philosophy) and orientations within the disciplines. Concerning psychology, the focus is on developmental (Paul Harris), personality-motivational (Guido Gendolla), and applied (Norbert Semmer) aspects. Within philosophy the focus is on the role of the self in emotions such as shame and guilt. Some of the questions to be asked are:
“What is the role of self-consciousness in emotional experience ?”,
“How and when do self-reflective emotions, such as pride, shame, or guilt occur in ontogenesis ?”,
“What psychological and philosophical theories of the self and of self-awareness best fit what we know about such emotions as shame and guilt ?”
The focus aims to approach answers to these question by exchange of theoretical and empirical advances during focus meetings (1-2 per year) and collaborative publications. The focus held a first meeting in 2007. During this meeting three presentations were made by three of the focus members. The following papers were presented and discussed: “The Self" (Guido Gendolla), “On Being Blinded by Values" (Kevin Mulligan), “Children and Moral Emotions" (Paul Harris). A fourth paper, by Norbert Semmer, "Stress as Offense to Self", will be presented at the next meeting of the focus and it is envisaged that it will appear as part of an interdisciplinary publication. Kevin Mulligan's presentation is being written up as a paper. It discusses the relation between philosophical accounts of the difficulty people have with introspecting emotions and accounts by psychologists of the development of children's awareness of emotions and values. Another paper Kevin Mulligan is working on, "Vocations and the Life Span", draws on work by Paul Silvia and Guido Gendolla. Moreover, Kevin Mulligan and Guido Gendolla will work on a paper in collaboration with Paul Silvia (University of North-Carolina at Greensboro). This work will deal with the role of the self in emotional experience. Paul Harris (Harvard) is conducting research on children’s moral emotions which will most likely also result in one or more publications. Finally, Guido Gendolla and Paul Silvia have written a paper on self-consciousness as a self-evaluative state that affects motivational intensity.
The work of the focus on "self-reflective" emotions will feed into the major project of the philosophy group from year 3 on, which is devoted to self-reflective emotions and the frontiers of the self. In particular this project will study the role of affective phenomena in the emergence of the boundaries between the self and the world and will draw on work by developmental psychologists on how children come to conceive of objects as distinct from themselves; and work by cognitive psychologists on the pathologies of patients who come to conceive of parts of their own bodies as alien, and similar cases involving a diminished capacity to properly draw the boundary between oneself and the world. Moreover, the eliciting conditions for self-reflective emotions, such as pride, guilt, and shame, are being experimentally investigated among other emotional reactions in project 1 of the PRN (“Emotion elicitation and perception”) in the dissertation project of Sylvia Kreibig.
Coordinators: Guido Gendolla, Psychology, Geneva; Kevin Mulligan, Philosophy, Geneva
