Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Table of Contents - June 2012 - Volume 35, Issue 03  

Open Peer Commentary

Prime elements of subjectively experienced feelings and desires: Imaging the emotional cocktail

Ross W. Bucka1

a1 Department of Communication Sciences and Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-1085. ross.buck@uconn.edu http://coms.uconn.edu/directory/faculty/rbuck/index.htm

Abstract

Primary affects exist at an ecological-communicative level of analysis, and therefore are not identifiable with specific brain regions. The constructionist view favored in the target article, that emotions emerge from “more basic psychological processes,” does not specify the nature of these processes. These more basic processes may actually involve specific neurochemical systems, that is, primary motivational-emotional systems (primes), associated with specific feelings and desires that combine to form the “cocktail” of experienced emotion.

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