| SUMMARY: |
The scientific study of emotions goes back to Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals and has can be considered the backbone of research into the human psyche. A general capacity to ascribe value to events in a world seems to be the result on an evolutionary selection process and is present across phylogeny (Friston, Tononi, Reeke, Sporns, & Edelman, 1994). The concept of value would refer, in this framework, to the capacity of a living organism to interpret events in its environment as more or less desirable. Starting from this very basic capacity, emotions represent complex psychological and physiological states that closely follow the occurrences of value (Dolan, 2002). A corollary of this idea involves the fact that the range of emotions an organism can go through reflect the “complexity of its adaptive niche” (Dolan, 2002, p. 1). In humans, this translates into a wide range of demands, expressing physical, interpersonal and socio-cultural contexts. |
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