KATE PENDOLEY

Emotions make up much of the fabric of our rich inner lives and they connect us with our social worlds. My research joins these two dimensions of emotional life by drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical work, from feminist theory to neuropsychology. My central research project sets the foundation for this work. In a series of papers that come out of my dissertation, Emotion in Mind, I argue that emotions are self-interpretations: flexible conceptual states which are in many respects more similar to thoughts than to sensory states.

My view of emotion bears on a range of important questions. What are the epistemic roles of emotions? How do emotions operate in oppressive social environments? How do emotions fit into existing theories of consciousness? How does emotional coping function in the context of mental disorders? I have developed several new lines of research on these questions from my central project.

Papers

‘Stubborn Emotions, Stubborn Beliefs,’ Synthese, 2023

This paper explains what recalcitrant emotions reveal about the structure of emotion. Recalcitrant emotions, such as fear of flying, are emotions that persist even though they are in tension with the emoter’s considered belief. A widely accepted argument against cognitivist theories of emotion purports to show that recalcitrant emotions show that emotions are more like sensory states than like thoughts or beliefs. I show that this argument—and closely related formulations of this argument—do not succeed: Empirical evidence strongly suggests that beliefs sometimes behave much like recalcitrant emotions. Moreover, emotions are usually sensitive to our changing beliefs in a way that is more akin to cognitive states than to sensations.

A paper on the nature of emotional feelings

This paper presents a new approach to the phenomenal character of emotion. We care about our emotions in large part because of the ways they feel. It seems that each emotion has its own distinctive feeling which sets that emotion apart not only from other kinds of felt states (like tasting a strawberry, touching a pinecone), but also distinguishes each type of emotion from the others (sadness from fear, joy from hope, and so on). Many have argued that the feelings distinctive to each emotion at least partly explain the epistemic roles emotions play. Moreover, the distinctive feelings of emotions seem central to explaining how emotions fit into, or challenge, existing theories of consciousness. However, this paper raises serious challenges for this picture, suggesting that the emotional feelings may not be as distinctive as they would seem and do not distinguish the emotions from one another as we would expect. This highlights the need for a new approach to explaining emotional feelings and opens up a large theoretical space to explore questions pertaining to emotional consciousness and self-knowledge. 

A paper on problems with leading constructionist theories of emotion

This paper identifies several serious problems for the most promising constructionist accounts of emotion and proposes a novel solution to those problems. I argue that while constructionism does well in accounting for some of the empirical data, in its current state the theory goes wrong in claiming that emotions are only ever conscious. I show that we can rescue the central insights of constructionism while at the same time preserving what is predictive in the core of our everyday thinking about our emotions.

Other Projects:

My central research project has given rise to an additional paper addressing the phenomenology and intentionality of ambivalent emotions, co-authored with Sarah Arnaud and published in a volume with Routledge. Arnaud and I also have a related paper outlining a strong intentionalist account of emotion published in a special issue of The Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Next Projects

I also have two new lines of work with papers in different stages of development. The first project asks what we can learn from emotions, given that they often reflect value distortions in the social environment. The second new line evaluates research in the neuropsychological literature on emotion regulation and therapies. Here’s one such paper from the first line:

Internalized Affective Oppression

Social environments oppress along many different vectors. Recently, theorists have paid renewed attention to the importance of emotional life as one such vector. Much of this discussion casts the emotions of people in oppressed positions as generally liberatory, alerting people in oppressed positions to the conditions of their oppression, and has identified the primary harms of affective oppression in the harms that arise when a dominant group refuses to see an oppressed person’s emotional expression as legitimate. This is an important part of the story, yet it overlooks another insidious form of affective oppression which this paper identifies and unpacks: People in oppressed positions sometimes fail to feel the very emotions that would help them to understand and challenge their oppressive circumstances. This form of affective oppression has distinct harms and understanding it is important for understanding the emotional dynamics and harms of oppressive systems. This paper opens up new philosophical terrain regarding epistemic practices, self-knowledge, and communities of solidarity under oppression.

Emotion Regulation

The second new line of research evaluates work in the neuropsychological literature on emotion regulation. Some authors of studies of the comparative effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies claim that their results can adjudicate among theories of emotion. I argue that the experimental design of these studies is often ecologically invalid, insensitive to the different types of emotional appropriateness that different forms of emotion regulation target, and generally assumes that emotions and reason are at odds. I have papers on two different types of emotion regulation work in preparation and have given talks from these papers in Pisa and New York.