Dissertation Defense: Emotional Assessment and Emotion Regulation: A Philosophical Approach

Daniel Jacobson (Chair)
Sarah Buss
Peter Railton
Chandra Sripada (Cognate: Psychiatry)

Suppose that you are anxious about some future threat, sad about some loss or setback, or angry about some perceived injustice. What should you do while in the grip of this emotion? Should you allow it to guide your thoughts and actions? Or should you regulate this emotion? But if you do choose to regulate, how should you do so? What sort of emotion regulation techniques should you rely upon? In order to properly answer such questions, one must address a number of philosophical issues concerning emotional assessment and emotion regulation. You might worry, for instance, about what you could lose in regulating your emotion: a fitting response, a response that might promote your evaluative understanding, a response that, although painful, may help you to feel the importance of some concern, or to express how much you care about it. You might also wonder whether there are certain forms of emotion regulation that are, in light of such worries, more epistemically or morally responsible. In my dissertation, I examine these issues in order to clarify the value and wisdom of emotion regulation, in its various forms.

In Chapter 1, I investigate the nature of fittingness. When we endorse an emotion as fitting, what is the nature of this endorsement? I argue against the standard view in the philosophy of emotion, according to which an emotion is fitting if and only if it correctly represents its target - call this the recognitional view of emotional fittingness. This view fits in nicely with a more general ambition to understand the fittingness of a response in terms of a correct mental representation. However, I consider two problem cases that lead me to reject this type of view. First, I argue that in order to be fitting, emotions must do more than correctly represent their target values. In order to be fitting, emotions must also correctly mobilize us to respond to these values. Second, I argue that, perhaps surprisingly, even action-responses can be assessed for fittingness. Just like emotions, beliefs, and desires, action-responses can be supported by the wrong kind of reason. But this suggests that the fittingness of a response is not essentially about the correctness of mental representations. Instead, fittingness is a distinctively narrow form of assessment that can be applied to any response. I suggest that we can understand fittingness either as a normative primitive, or in terms of reasons.

In Chapter 2, I investigate the relationship between emotions, emotion regulation, and evaluative understanding. Emotions can enhance our evaluative understanding by mobilizing directed reflection: by worrying about some threat, ruminating about some loss, or simmering about some injustice, we can enhance our understanding of the threat, loss, or injustice in question. But notoriously, emotional reflection can also lead us astray. If our goal is evaluative understanding, then, we must make room for emotion regulation. But which forms of emotion regulation should we rely upon, if our goal is evaluative understanding? In this chapter, I distinguish between engaged forms of emotion regulation, which keep us engaged with our emotional concern (e.g. certain forms of reappraisal), and disengaging forms of emotion regulation, which regulate emotional experience by leading us to direct attention away from the emotional concern in question (e.g. many forms of meditation). I argue that both forms of emotion regulation are vital for the enhancement of evaluative understanding, and I propose a practical model that can help us to decide when to rely on engaging forms of emotion regulation and when to rely on disengaging forms of emotion regulation, if our goal is evaluative understanding.

In Chapter 3, I investigate the final value of painful negative emotions. A number of philosophers argue that painful negative emotions, when fitting, possess a distinctive final value, for epistemic or moral reasons, that calmer mental states cannot possess. For example, it is argued that only by being angry at injustice, only by grieving over significant losses, and only by feeling appropriately guilty about personal wrongdoing can we fully appreciate the relevant concerns (injustice, loss, and personal wrongdoing), or fully demonstrate that we care about them. Call this the distinctive final value thesis (DFV). In this chapter, I argue that DFV is false, though I also explain why we might nevertheless find it difficult to resist. Now, I do not deny that painful negative emotions, when fitting, possess final value for epistemic or moral reasons. But I argue that this value is not distinctive; calmer mental states can possess the very same final value. The outcome of this debate has important practical implications for emotion regulation. If DFV is true, then we always have at least a pro tanto reason not to regulate our painful, yet fitting negative emotions. If such reasons are at all weighty, then it may be that we ought to regulate our emotions far less often than we might have thought. By contrast, if DFV is false, then an important normative obstacle for emotion regulation is removed, and the way we think about our emotions may have to change.

I conclude the dissertation by briefly discussing the implications these chapters have for when and how we should regulate our emotions. I then briefly describe the structure of a practical, normative model for emotion regulation that is informed by these considerations. This model will emphasize the importance of emotion regulation for 1) enhancing our evaluative understanding and 2) helping us to act in accordance with our understanding.