Psychology Commons^™

Plant Sentience: "Feeling" Or Biological Automatism?, Andrea Mastinu

Animal Sentience

Sentience refers to the ability of an organism to have subjective experiences such as sensations, emotions and awareness. Whereas some animals, including humans, are widely recognized as sentient, the question of whether plants are sentient is still debated among scientists, philosophers, and ethicists. Over the past 20 years, many scientists such as Trewavas, Baluška, Mancuso, Gagliano, and Calvo have reported interesting discussions about memory, behavior, communication, and intelligence in plants. However, the reported conclusions have not convinced the entire scientific community. In this commentary, I would like to focus on two critical aspects related to sentience: cognition and emotion

Ethics Of Interaction: Levinas And Enactivism On Affectivity, Responsibility, And Signification, Edward A. Lenzo

Middle Voices

In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to connect enactivism with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. This essay is such an attempt. Its major theme is the relationship between affectivity and ethics. My touchstones in enactivist thought are Giovanna Colombetti and Steve Torrances’ “Emotion and Ethics: an (inter-)enactive account” (2009) and the influential concept of participatory sense-making developed by Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007). With respect to Levinas, I deploy major insights from Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. I first show that enactivist thought (thus represented) and Levinas roughly agree on …

Time To Stop Pretending We Don’T Know Other Animals Are Sentient Beings, Marc Bekoff

Animal Sentience

Rowan et al.’s target article is an outstanding review of some of the history of the science of sentience, but one would have liked to see a much stronger “call to action.” We don’t need any more data to know that many other animals are sentient beings whose lives must be protected from harm in a wide variety of contexts. It is not anti-science to want more action on behalf of other animals right now.

Emotion And Judgment In Young Women Of A Society In Transition, Maura A. E. Pilotti, Khadija El Alaoui

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The present study asked whether emotional responses to narratives of moral transgressions are shaped by the reader’s assumed relationship with the injured party (i.e., oneself, familiar other, and unfamiliar other). Its goal was to test a cultural, religious, and individualistic account of such responses in young females of a traditional society in transition towards a sustainable integration into the global economy. To this end, female college students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were asked to identify their emotional reaction to each of several moral transgressions, report its intensity and then judge the severity of the transgression. In agreement with …

A Brief Response To “Between Identity And Truth”, Terryl Givens

Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy

No abstract provided.

Between Identity And Truth: A Christ-Centered Perspective On Emotion, Mauro Properzi

Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy

Emotions are receiving a lot of attention in both academic and popular circles. In fact, our culture is increasingly characterized by emotionality in thought, expression, and personal interaction, with some positive but also many negative consequences. How should Christians respond to these developments in the secular culture? A Christ-centered approach to the emotions is the general theological foundation on which we need to ground our reflections and decisions about their nature and significance. Specifi- cally, by deepening our understanding of Jesus’s teachings on His identity, telos, life-giving reality, and sanctifying power, as aptly described in John 14:6, we may experience …

Analyzing Anger References In The Scriptures: Connections To Therapy In A Religious Context, Emily Swensen Darowski, Kristin L. Hansen, Aaron P. Jackson, Charles D. Flint, John Linford

Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy

People navigate life more successfully and find more joy when they are able to regulate emotion in healthy ways. Teaching and helping clients regulate emotion in healthy ways is an important part of many psychotherapy approaches. In this paper, we focus on the emotion of anger from a theistic therapy perspective, arguing that understanding the nature of God’s anger and human anger in the scriptures can inform theistic therapy practice. To establish this understanding, we analyzed cases of the word anger in the scriptures through content analysis (e.g., quantitative) and hermeneutic analysis (e.g., qualitative). Findings revealed that, while God was …

Inferring Emotion From Amygdala Activation Alone Is Problematic, Thomas F. Denson

Animal Sentience

Cook et al. investigated neural responses in domestic dogs in an experiment designed to elicit jealousy. Relative to a control condition, watching the dogs’ caregivers feed a fake dog activated the amygdala bilaterally. Dogs rated higher in dog-directed aggressiveness showed larger initial amygdala activation. Amygdala activity in this context is insufficient evidence to infer that the dogs experienced jealousy or even negative affect. The experimental design does not provide an adequate level of control to infer the presence of jealousy.

The Doctrine Of Affections: Where Art Meets Reason, Sharri K. Hall

Musical Offerings

The Doctrine of Affections was a widespread understanding of music and musicality during the Baroque era. The Doctrine was a result of the philosophy of reason and science as it coincides with music. It aimed to reconcile what man knew about science and the human body, and what man thought he knew about music. It was a reconciliation of practical musicianship and theoretical music which had begun to rise in the time. Though it is generally understood as being apart from Enlightenment thinking, the Doctrine is a result of Enlightenment-style philosophy. As the Enlightenment sought to explain why things occurred …

Are Chicken Minds Special?, Rafael Freire, Susan J. Hazel

Animal Sentience

The number of publications on chicken cognition and emotion exceeds that on most birds and is comparable to the number of publications on some more “advanced” mammals. We argue that the chicken is an excellent model for this type of research because of (1) the presence of well-established fundamental mental processes in the chicken, (2) a challenging ethological environment and (3) social pressures that may have facilitated the evolution of cognitive abilities similar to those of some mammals. Marino’s (2017) review provides an excellent foundation for the continued study of complex mental abilities in this species.

Do We Understand What It Means For Dogs To Experience Emotion?, Lasana T. Harris

Animal Sentience

Psychologists who study humans struggle to agree on a definition of emotion, falling primarily into two camps. Though recent neuroscience advances are beginning to settle this ancient debate, it cannot solve the private-language problem at the heart of inferences about social cognition. This suggests that when we consider the emotional experiences of other species like canines, biological and physiological homologs do not provide enough evidence of emotional experiences similar to those of humans. Secondary complex emotional experiences are even more difficult to attribute to non-humans since such experiences rely, by definition, on social cognition. Given the contextual differences between human-human …

Operationalizing Fear Through Understanding Vigilance, Ralph Adolphs

Animal Sentience

Beauchamp’s target article raises important questions about the features that often accompany fear. How reliable an indicator of fear is vigilance? Is it constitutive, cause, or consequence of fear? These questions force us towards a clearer definition of “fear.”

In Praise Of Fishes: Précis Of What A Fish Knows (Balcombe 2016), Jonathan Balcombe

Animal Sentience

Our relationship to fishes in the modern era is deeply problematic. We kill and consume more of them than any other group of vertebrates. At the same time, advances in our knowledge of fishes and their capabilities are gaining speed. Fish species diversity exceeds that of all other vertebrates combined, with a wide range of sensory adaptations, some of them (e.g., geomagnetism, water pressure and movement detection, and communication via electricity) alien to our own sensory experience. The evidence for pain in fishes (despite persistent detractors) is strongly supported by anatomical, physiological and behavioral studies. It is likely that fishes …

Pain-Capable Neural Substrates May Be Widely Available In The Animal Kingdom, Edgar T. Walters

Animal Sentience

Neural and behavioral evidence from diverse species indicates that some forms of pain may be generated by coordinated activity in networks far smaller than the cortical pain matrix in mammals. Studies on responses to injury in squid suggest that simplification of the circuitry necessary for conscious pain might be achieved by restricting awareness to very limited information about a noxious event, possibly only to the fact that injury has occurred, ignoring information that is much less important for survival, such as the location of the injury. Some of the neural properties proposed to be critical for conscious pain in mammals …

Animal Mourning: Précis Of How Animals Grieve (King 2013), Barbara J. King

Animal Sentience

Abstract: When an animal dies, that individual’s mate, relatives, or friends may express grief. Changes in the survivor’s patterns of social behavior, eating, sleeping, and/or of expression of affect are the key criteria for defining grief. Based on this understanding of grief, it is not only big-brained mammals like elephants, apes, and cetaceans who can be said to mourn, but also a wide variety of other animals, including domestic companions like cats, dogs, and rabbits; horses and farm animals; and some birds. With keen attention placed on seeking where grief is found to occur and where it is absent …

Modulation Of Behavior In Communicating Emotion, Martin Gardiner

Animal Sentience

King discusses many examples where two animals, as they bond, behave in ways we interpret as expressing love for one another. If one of the bonded animals then dies, signs of loving are replaced by signs we interpret as expressing grief by the animal who remains. I propose a pathway for emotional communication between an animal and an observer that can have a central role in these and other observations by King and in our overall ability to interpret observed behavior in relation to emotion. This pathway provides evidence of emotion in an observed animal by communicating evidence of emotion’s …

Connecting The Spiritual And Emotional Intelligences: Confirming An Intelligence Criterion And Assessing The Role Of Empathy, David B. King, Constance A. Mara, Teresa L. Decicco

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

A viable model and self-report measure of spiritual intelligence were previously proposed

and supported by King and DeCicco (2009). Despite such advances, evidence is needed

demonstrating significant associations with other intelligences. The current study sought to

test this criterion in relation to emotional intelligence. Among a sample of 420 Canadian

adults, results demonstrated significant associations between spiritual intelligence and two

self-report measures of emotional intelligence. Due to the suggestion by some theorists

that empathy be included in a model of spiritual intelligence, associations with empathy

were also investigated. Results bode well for the inclusion of a spiritual ability set in …