KATE PENDOLEY

Affective states such as emotions, pains, pleasures, and moods 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 affective life by drawing on theoretical and empirical work from feminist theory to neuropsychology to address a range of questions about how affectivity works both inside and beyond an individual.

My work asks: How should we seek to explain what emotions can teach us about social systems? How do emotions operate in oppressive social environments? How does emotional coping function in states like anxiety and depression? How do affective states fit into existing theories of consciousness? What capacities does a mind need to have in order to value things the way minds like ours do? What role might valuation play in even low-level mental processing?

Papers & Chapters

“Emotion and Analogy,” in Introducing Philosophy of Mind Today (Ed. Devin Sanchez Curry and Louise Daoust), Routledge, 2026

Just what are emotions, and how should we go about explaining them? A promising way to get going on these questions is to think about emotions alongside other mental states. In this essay, I put pressure on an analogy between emotion and perception. But I also draw more general lessons about the power and limitations of the strategy of explaining emotion by analogy with other mental states by showing how the choice of any analogy both focuses and skews the resulting account of what emotions are.

“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 perceptions.

A paper on the place of affective states in the science of consciousness (under review)

I argue that one of the most promising accounts of qualitative consciousness faces serious problems in accounting for the feelings of affective states such as emotions and moods. This highlights the need for a new approach to affective states in a science of consciousness and opens up a large theoretical terrain. 

A paper on internalized affective oppression and standpoint (under review)

The emotional experiences of people under oppression can be shaped to reinforce the system oppressing them, as when one feels shame rather than anger about the conditions keeping them down. This is internalized affective oppression. Given that emotions can be shaped like this, under what conditions can a person learn from their emotions that they are oppressed? I argue that this comes down largely to the interpretive resources the oppressed group and the oppressed individual can apply, and that we should accept standpoint theory’s achievement thesis over its location thesis as an explanation of the epistemic privilege of the oppressed. This paper opens up new philosophical avenues regarding the about what it takes for emotions to be channels of resistance.

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.

Two other papers published from a joint project on intentionalist theories of emotion, with Sarah Arnaud:

‘Personal Intentionalism and the Understanding of Emotion Experience’ (with Sarah Arnaud), The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2023

‘Ambivalent Emotions & Strong Intentionalism’ (with Sarah Arnaud), in Being of Two Minds: The philosophy and psychology of ambivalence, Routledge 2021

Next Projects

I have two new lines of work, with papers in different stages of development. The first new line evaluates research in the neuropsychological literature on emotion regulation and therapies. The second line considers affective valence or valuation and its role in explaining how minds work and how they might have arisen. I’m interested in which capacities a mind needs to have to be able to do the kinds of valuations that minds like ours do.

Here’s one such paper from the second, newest line of research:

What do Valuational Capacities Require? (in preparation; presented at the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology)

A growing literature places affective valence or valuation at the center of explanations of how minds work and how they might have arisen. Many of these valuationists argue that minds like ours make choices by comparing disparate options in a common currency. However, critics object that this is too computationally demanding and that minds make many choices without explicitly calculating the expected value of individual options. I argue that these objections are problematically narrow: They ask only whether common-currency valuation must be directly involved in implementing a choice model. But if we want to explain what capacities a mind must have in order to make choices—and how such minds could have arisen—we need a different set of questions. What capacities are required to implement, update, and or develop choice heuristics, and do these capacities themselves require common-currency valuation? I suggest they might.

And here’s a paper from the the other line:

Imagining Toward Hope (in preparation; presented at the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotion)

Recent work has proposed that a central deficit of depression is a lack of hope, which in turn yields a deficit in a specific form of episodic imagining: the ability to evaluate possible outcomes and make plans to pursue desirable outcomes. This proposal, while valuable, misses dimensions of episodic imagining that might be even more important for understanding depression, and which might even be prerequisite for hope. I draw on recent work on episodic memory to shed light on episodic imagining, and propose that a less restricted form of episodic imagining is central to understanding the loss of hope characteristic of depression.