Wood Adrienne, Coan James A
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA USA.
Affect Sci. 2023 Aug 30;4(3):443-452. doi: 10.1007/s42761-023-00212-2. eCollection 2023 Sep.
Affective science is stuck in a version of the nature-versus-nurture debate, with theorists arguing whether emotions are evolved adaptations or psychological constructions. We do not see these as mutually exclusive options. Many adaptive behaviors that humans have evolved to be good at, such as walking, emerge during development - not according to a genetically dictated program, but through interactions between the affordances of the body, brain, and environment. We suggest emotions are the same. As developing humans acquire increasingly complex goals and learn optimal strategies for pursuing those goals, they are inevitably pulled to particular brain-body-behavior states that maximize outcomes and self-reinforce via positive feedback loops. We call these recurring, self-organized states . Emotions display many of the hallmark features of self-organized attractor states, such as hysteresis (prior events influence the current state), degeneracy (many configurations of the underlying variables can produce the same global state), and stability. Because most bodily, neural, and environmental affordances are shared by all humans - we all have cardiovascular systems, cerebral cortices, and caregivers who raised us - similar emotion states emerge in all of us. This perspective helps reconcile ideas that, at first glance, seem contradictory, such as emotion universality and neural degeneracy.
情感科学陷入了一种先天与后天的争论之中，理论家们争论情绪是进化而来的适应性表现还是心理建构。我们并不认为这些是相互排斥的选项。人类进化出的许多擅长的适应性行为，比如行走，是在发育过程中出现的——不是按照基因规定的程序，而是通过身体、大脑和环境的可供性之间的相互作用。我们认为情绪也是如此。随着成长中的人类获得越来越复杂的目标并学习追求这些目标的最佳策略，他们不可避免地会被吸引到特定的脑-身-行为状态，这些状态通过正反馈回路使结果最大化并自我强化。我们将这些反复出现的、自组织的状态称为 。情绪表现出许多自组织吸引子状态的标志性特征，比如滞后现象（先前的事件影响当前状态）、简并性（潜在变量的许多配置可以产生相同的全局状态）和稳定性。因为大多数身体、神经和环境的可供性为所有人所共有——我们都有心血管系统、大脑皮层以及养育我们的照料者——所以我们所有人都会出现相似的情绪状态。这种观点有助于调和一些乍一看似乎相互矛盾的观点，比如情绪普遍性和神经简并性。
