Dr. David Anderson

Great to be here too.

Thank you so much.

The short answer to your question is that I see emotions as a type of internal state in the sense that arousal is also a type of internal state, motivation is a type of internal state, sleep is a type of internal state.

They change the input to output transformation

of the brain.

When you're asleep, you don't hear something that you would hear if you were awake.

So from that broad perspective, I see emotion as a class of state that controls behavior.

The reason I think it's useful to think about it as a state is it puts the focus on it as a neurobiological process

rather than as a psychological process.

Many people equate emotion with feeling, which is a subjective sense that we can only study in humans because to find out what someone's feeling, you have to ask them, and people are the only animals that can talk that we can understand.

That's how I think about emotion.

If you think of an iceberg, it's the part of the iceberg that's below the surface of the water.

The feeling part is the tip.

Right.

There have been people who have thought of emotions as having just really two dimensions, an arousal dimension and a valence dimension.

Ralph Adolphs and I have tried to expand that a little bit to think about components of emotion, particularly those that distinguish emotion states from motivational states, because they are very closely related.

One of those important properties is persistence.

This is something that distinguishes state-driven behaviors from simple reflexes.

Reflexes tend to terminate when the stimulus turns off, like the doctor hitting your knee with a hammer.

It initiates with the stimulus onset and it terminates with the stimulus offset.