KATE PENDOLEY

Affective states such as emotions, pains, 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 a range of theoretical and empirical work, from feminist theory to neuropsychology.

My view of affectivity bears on a range of important questions. What are the epistemic roles of emotions? How do emotions operate in oppressive social environments? How do affective states 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 on emotion.

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 place of affective states in the science of consciousness

This paper presents a new approach to the phenomenal character of emotion. We care about our affective states, such as pains and pleasures, emotions and moods, in large part because of the ways they feel. It seems that each affective state 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 affective from the others (sadness from fear, joy from hope, and so on). Moreover, the distinctive feelings of emotions seem central to explaining how emotions fit into, or challenge, existing theories of consciousness. However, this paper raises suggests that the most promising accounts of mental qualities face serious problems when it comes to affective states. This highlights the need for a new approach to accounting to affective states and opens up a large theoretical space to explore questions of affective consciousness. 

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.

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.

Next Projects

I also 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 explanations of how minds work and how they might have arisen. I’m interested in what 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 first line:

Imagining Toward Hope

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 then propose that a less restricted form of episodic imagining as central to understanding loss of hope.