Pain and Pleasure

So of course my immune system reacts to the fact that I have reached the critical end-of-semester deadline and under much stress submitted all grades on time. It decided squarely that once that had been taken care of, it was time to multiply all those happy little thingies in my blood stream and do some about this and that thing that has been bothersome to my immune system all along. Three days down the road, two teeth less, and, on the upside, a good level of drugs in my blood I am sufficiently delirious to try to identify some of the big topics that have been taking up time, paper, and energy in emotion research over the last century or so. Of course, I surely have forgotten important issues when preparing this list ad-hoc and I invite comments from readers. I will use this top 10 list to pick what to write about in the coming weeks, but of course not exclusively. The issues are numbered from 1 to 10, but the sequence does not imply anything with regard to importance or hierarchy.

1. The big red herring: The definition issue: What is Emotion?
2. What is the relationship of emotion and cognition? Can cognition be a requirement, changes in cognition a consequence, and still the two be separate/separable processes?
3. Can emotion and emotion regulation be separated?
4. What is the relationship of automatic processes and conscious processes in the elicitation and the subjective experience of emotions?
5. To what degree does it make sense to separate emotion and motivation - in the sense that emotion motivates and no emotion occurs without something being at stake, i.e., having motivational relevance?
6. How do biological constraints and cultural context interact over the course of the life span in shaping our emotions?
7. How do categorical/discrete representations of emotions relate to dimensional models?
8. Does it make sense to separate emotions from moods, i.e., create classes of affective processes that can be distinguished by their time course?
9. Assuming that there are patterns of expressive behavior that occur universally - regardless of how they are interpreted in different cultures, what can we conclude from that?
10. To what degree does an analysis of emotional processes take the social brain hypothesis seriously? Do we need to work more in social contexts?
11. What should we make of the low cohesion between emotion components, such as subjective experience, peripheral and central physiological changes, and expressive behavior?
    

Eleven? Was this not supposed to be a top-10 list? Well, as a devotee to Spinal Tap, this list is better because it goes all the way up to 11! Of course.

I apologize for those readers who start to be interested in emotion science - the points mentioned on this list are often too brief to understand what issues I am referring to - this is more something for those already in the know - but as I said, I will discuss these things in the coming weeks. I will then also try to outline what the problem is, and as usual, try to put some useful references and links in there. BTW - I am open to wishes as regards which topics I should attack with preference.