Consciousness & Emotion

The papers in this volume of Consciousness & Emotion Book Series are organized around the theme of "enaction." Enactive emotional processes are not merely the recipients of information or the passive victims of input and learning. The organism first is engaged in an ongoing, complex pattern of self-organizational activity, for the purpose of maintaining a dynamical continuity of pattern across changes of subserving micro-constituents and environmental conditions, making use of multiple shunt mechanisms, feedback loops, and other complex dynamical features. Self-organizational structure is used to distinguish between action and mere reaction. Accordingly, the papers of this volume by leading students of emotion such as Jaak Panksepp, Luc Ciompi, Thomas Natsoulas, Farzaneh Pahlavan, Michela Balconi, Todd Lubart, Louise Sundararajan, Jordan Petersen and others address three main issues:
I. Emotional influences on perception and thought
II. Agency and choice
III. Agency and moral value

Roger Frie, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, in the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology Vol. 38, No. 2 (2007):
Overall, this is an interesting book, and for the reader who sufficiently devotes him or herself to the wealth of information and data presented, there is much to be learned about nature of contemporary accounts of conscious choice and agency.