The role of emotion in adaptive behaviour and cognitive robotics

One of the principal aims of emotion theory is to model the relations between appraisals (cognitive or perceptual evaluations) and the emotions with which they correspond. However, the cognitivist approach portrays appraisals as causal antecedents of emotions in a oneway progression. The neurobiology of emotion suggests, in contrast, that appraisals and emotions emerge concurrently as self-organizing gestalts, resulting from the spontaneous coordination of multiple regions of the brain. The brain does not separate the cognitive and emotional components of these gestalts, but psychologists find these distinctions useful. In this talk, I present principles of nested feedback loops, neuromodulator activity, vertical integration of the neuroaxis, phase synchrony, and circular causality, as essential ingredients for understanding self-organizing emotional gestalts in real, living brains. I then discuss some of the implications of these principles for the role of emotion in human development. Marc D. Lewis – Biographical Sketch Marc Lewis is a Professor of Human Development and Applied Psychology at the University of Toronto. He specializes in the study of personality development as it relates to emotion and emotion regulation. His work is informed by developmental psychology, affective neuroscience, and a dynamic systems perspective on brain and behavior. His research has focused on transitions in emotional development and, in collaboration with Isabela Granic, he has developed a state space grid methodology for analyzing socioemotional behavior as a dynamic system. More recent work utilizes EEG methods for identifying the neural underpinnings of emotion regulation in normal and clinically-referred children and for assessing neural changes corresponding with successful treatment. His papers on the contribution of dynamic systems theory and affective neuroscience to understanding human development have appeared in high-profile journals such as Child Development, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, and Development and Psychopathology. Page 3 of 64