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Lofting: 'anger/fear (fight/flight)'
RKS:
This does not appear to be accurate even within your own paradigm. Anger rises in response to obstruction ~ an increased level assertiveness is needed to overcome some obstacle and move forward (in whatever domain in which the obstacle is encountered eg obstacle on the road, person obstructing progress, mathematical or programming problem encountering difficulties etc).
This does not appear to be accurate even within your own paradigm. Anger rises in response to obstruction ~ an increased level assertiveness is needed to overcome some obstacle and move forward (in whatever domain in which the obstacle is encountered eg obstacle on the road, person obstructing progress, mathematical or programming problem encountering difficulties etc).
The opposite of fear is confidence. In evaluating fight or flight one must measure confidence: low, run; high, defend. Anger would predict attack whereas fight-flight relates to a threat: you either stand and defend (fight) or run away (flight).
In nature, conspecifics are liable to attack if another individual stands in the way of a mating opportunity. It is, of course, possible that both individuals are mutually in the other's way, such as when there is one mating opportunity and two suitors.
With predator/prey there is an attacker that must overcome the life of the prey (the obstacle) to get at the food. The prey can stand and defend or try to escape. But the defender almost always attempts to drive off the attacker, not to attack it as an angry individual would.
The final problem with your dichotomy is that fear does not extinguish anger nor does anger extinguish fear. But fight and flight are mutually exclusive as is high and low confidence. An animal can stand and fight even if fear is high if fighting offers the best outcome ie an animal could stand and fight due to a high level of fear.
Joy and grief are not symmetrically opposite. They are both responses to ambient conditions, true, but not like happiness vs sadness, for instance.
The only way that specific emotions can be handled in any theoretical framework or model worthy of scientific consideration is by the descriptions of emotions that may or may not map onto one or more words used to name emotions.
I have made a start by pointing out that emotions are found in several domains eg as a direct response to stimuli (eg surprise), as a precursor to behaviour (consider the ethologist's definition of emotion: "a specific internal readiness to act"). We tend to name these domains separately eg 'emotion' is mainly used for perceptual response, 'mood' for effector predisposition and 'drive' for innate predisposition. The notable exception is 'Love', which is used to label the perceptual, effector and innate forms hence the use of 'Love' in my essay.
Love is also a feeling, which is, in fact, distinct from the other categories I named in the essay. All emotions can occur with or without feeling and some feelings can occur independently of any apparent stimulation, at least in the forms laid out above.
Emotion also plays a role in the laying down and retrieving of memory. Recency and urgency can occur without any input from other domains mentioned above (perception, expression, drive etc) but are associated with memory storage and retrieval and do eventually impact on behaviour.
Robert
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