Do recalcitrant emotions count in favour of, or against, the perceptual model of emotions?

November 23^rd 2023

1. Introduction

In this paper I will explore different models of emotionwith regards to recalcitrant emotions. I will explain what recalcitrant emotions are and make a case for why recalcitrant emotions do not pose a problem for, and can in fact support, the perceptual model of emotion. More specifically, I will berefuting the case made by Helm in his 2015 paper Emotions and Recalcitrance: Reevaluating the Perceptual Model. Here Helm argues that the analogy between emotions and perceptions does not stand since emotions are illogical in a way perceptions aren’t. He states “[R]ecalcitrant emotions involve a kind of acceptance of their contents, an acceptance that is inconsistent with the thought that they are analogous to perceptual illusions.” (Helm, 2015) I will refute this by presenting evidence undermining the veridical nature of perceptions more generally than the examples of perceptual illusions given by Helm. This will show that perceptions do in fact include an acceptance of their contents that can be illogical in an analogous way to emotions. Finally, I will consider some potential issues with this approach. To begin with, we will need a good understanding of the perceptual and judgmental models. 

2. Perceptual/Judgmental Models & Recalcitrant Emotions

There have been many attempts at understanding emotions which have resulted in a plethora of models which each attempt to makes sense of what emotion’s role is in cognition, decisions making, and behavior. The perceptual model holds that emotional evaluations are perceptions. This is opposed to the judgmental model which holds that emotional evaluations arejudgements. (Price, 2023) It can be useful to understand the perceptual model as it contrasts with the judgmental model.According to the judgmental model, emotions involve evaluations which make judgements about the world. For example, if I were to see a spider and feel scared, my emotion is making a judgement about the spider and evaluating it as a fearsome thing. There are several criticisms to this model, including the issues that arise in its application regarding babies and animals who seem to feel emotions but do not have the cognitive capacity (yet or arguably) to evaluate the judgmental aspect. Another issue comes in the form of recalcitrant emotions. Put simply, recalcitrant emotions are emotions that persist even in the face of evidence to the contrary. One example of this would be my continuing to fear a spider that I know rationally is not venomous and cannot harm me. Despite knowing this, if I still respond with fear when I see this spider, I am experiencing a recalcitrant emotion. This would mean, with regards to the judgmental model, that the judgement is irrational. Interestingly, this does not only pose an issue for the judgmental model, but the perceptual model as well. 

​The perceptual model, in contrast, does not see emotions as making judgements, as in judging the spider to be fearsome, but instead merely perceives the spider as such. The perceptual model likens emotions to a form of perception similar to seeing something as brown or fuzzy. This helps to dispel the issue that befalls the judgmental model regarding babies and children, since no judgement is made. But as I mentioned, according to Helm, the perceptual model still runs into a problem when it comes to recalcitrant emotions. According to Helm (2015) the irrationality of recalcitrant emotions separates them from perceptions and results in a disanalogy between emotions and perceptions, thus negating the perceptual model of emotion. He uses various examples which I will break down in the next section.

3. Helm’s Objection

According to Helm in his 2015 paper entitled Emotions and Recalcitrance: Reevaluating the Perceptual Model, perceptions and emotions are not the same. Specifically with regards to recalcitrant emotions, he disagrees that they can be likened to sensory illusions (such as optical illusions) because theseillusions are not irrational in the same way recalcitrant emotions are. He makes a case that when we experience something like an optical illusion, as soon as we recognize it as such, we no longer experience it as correct in a way that continues to motivate our behavior against our will. Helm argues that with sensory illusions there is no real rational conflict in this way like there are with emotions. He uses a couple examples which I will go over in more detail.

One borrowed example he gave is regarded a lemonade stand. In this example a boy gives the incorrect change to a customer along with the glass of lemonade he has sold him. Butit is not a simple mistake, since when the error is pointed out and explained to the boy, despite all evidence and reason the boy still refuses to accept that he has given the incorrect change. In this case “there is no coherent way of describing what he believes or intends, and so no single best way to understand precisely what mistake he has made.” (Helm, 2015) The boy himself cannot change his understanding of the situation or explain it to others in a coherent way, he just continues to believe his math was correct. Much like with recalcitrant emotions. 

Another example is that of a person’s harsh but accurate review from their department chair at work. The person then gets angry even though they recognize the feedback as fair and is unable to change their feelings. This is likened to the lemonade stand example in that once all potential reasons for being angry have been dismissed, the retention of the angry feelings is illogical but unavoidable in the case of recalcitrant emotions. This, Helm states, is not the same as a hallucination or illusion. When we see a “pencil being placed in a half full glassof water, we see it as bent but repudiate this as a mere appearance, and thereby reject it entirely as having any claim tobeing our own view on how the world is.” (Helm, 2015)

Some have disagreed, including Döring (2014), who counters that sensory illusions and recalcitrant emotions create cognitive conflict but not contradiction. They are not irrational as Helm claims of recalcitrant emotions but arational. I will take a different approach in the next section. I will build a case that the examples given by Helm when considering perceptual illusions do not go far enough into the nature of perception. Perception is not a passive veridical process. It has its own agenda and motives (in a manner of speaking) and can often conflict withour rational thinking in a way that could very well be considered irrational in the same sense in which Helm is claiming recalcitrant emotions to be. 

4. Response to Helm

Gone are they days where the Cartesian Theater dominated conventional thinking regarding consciousness and perception. Oddly though, that way of conceptualizing, while logically dispelled, still often unknowingly pervades how we think about the world. This issue with conceptualization of perception, I believe, is what has led Helm to claim that emotion is irrational while perceptions are not. In fact, in answer to the lemonade stand example, we do make irrational decisions all the time based on faulty sensory perceptions that, even when we are made aware, we are still unable to make the logical choice in many cases. 

There is a logic even to our perceptions. Why we see the specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum we do is due toit being evolutionarily advantageous. The colors we see represent ripe fruit or other items important for our survival. (Gerl & Morris, 2008) Contrast this with snakes who useinfrared to “see” body heat due to different biological pressures or ecological niches. There are also theories of beauty that base our aesthetic choices on this type of evolutionary thinking. (Killin, 2021) This leads to our first example of how perceptions can lead to us making illogical decisions even when we are aware of all evidence to the contrary. This involves what we find attractive in a potential mate. 

There are many factors that go into our unconscious assessment of an attractive person. Some potential factors arefacial symmetry, height, BMI, pallor of skin, etc. (Rhodes, 1998) These types of assessments, evolutionarily, served the purpose of helping us to find a healthy mate to better pass on our geneswith. We are generally aware of this, and there are many beauty campaigns that wish to dispel some of these biases in order that more people can feel accepted and beautiful in their own skin. With all this in mind, as an example, let’s say there is a man looking for a girlfriend, he does not want to have children. He may logically wish to find a partner with certain characteristics, like shared values, as his top priority but he is unable to shake the visual aspect of attraction fully. 

It isn’t only in love where perception poses an issue. We may believe, logically, that we wish to elect the most competent person to office, but another factor in our decision is their height. There is a slight advantage in elections towards the taller candidate regardless of any other factors. (Murray, 2020) There are similar biases when it comes to auditions and job interviews. Women were not even close to equally represented in orchestras until blind auditions were instated, whereby even carpets were put down to muffle the sound of heels. (Goldin, 2000) We see blue as clear, cool, and beautiful, we hear harmonic tones as pretty, we perceive a symmetrical face differently than a non symmetrical one, we see taller people as more competent. 

Approaching from a slightly different direction, there are countless examples from the case studies of those with brain lesions resulting in various types of agnosia which affect perception that offer some insight into sensory processing. Some can be found in Oliver Sacks’ classic book, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. In the namesake study, a man withfacial agnosia and is unable to recognize any faces, including that of his wife. There are also cases where someone has gained sight later in life, and they are unable to make sense of the input. They did not suddenly get a window to the outside world, sight is much more complicated than that and is created in the brain, not passively received. One can have the ability to see, as with the man in Oliver Sacks’ case study, but be lacking the interpretive mechanism in the brain to process it. This shows that the brain has a say in what we see and experience to a large degree. Examples like these and many others are elaborated on in Donald Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality. Here he shows just how many assumptions are built into our perceptions and he makes a case for the Interface Theory of Perception. The specifics of the theory aren’t required for understanding the gist and how it relates to this topic, to put it simply: we only experience though our senses a kind of interface, like desktop icons on a computer, that are useful in an evolutionary context. This means those perceptions come with evolutionary baggage. 

To perceive anything is to have already made a sort of judgment about its relevance, and if one denies that judgementof relevance but still perceives the world as they do, they could act irrationally. I know I want to eat a healthy diet, but I can’t change how delicious donuts taste. I don’t want to have kids, but I still see attractive only features which signal genetic fitness. The fact that we rely on sight primarily is sometimes irrationalin and of itself. We do not, for example, have the ability to smell carbon monoxide because it was evolutionarily irrelevant. Now that we use gas in our homes, and we would generally prefer not to die from carbon monoxide poisoning, it is irrational that we lack the ability to smell it. 

Taking this back to Helm’s objections, we can clearly see with the examples I’ve given above that his statement “Such a conflict between patterns of emotions and patterns of judgments is unlike the sort of conflict at issue between sense perception and judgment. In the case of sense perception, we fail to get incoherence in cases of conflict with judgment because in such cases we demote our sense perceptions to the status of mere appearances that do not at all involve an acceptance of that appearance” (Helm, 2015) is obviously incorrect. Our sense perceptions are not mere appearances and do have a huge impact on how we behave, in ways that can in fact often be irrational. 

You may have noticed already the first issue that could arise with my argument. In describing how perceptions can in fact be illogical in the same way as emotions, I used the word “judgement” multiple times. This leads to my first potential counter argument.

5. Counter Arguments

Does describing perceptions in the way I have in the last section, while potentially resolving the Helm objection with regards to the disanalogy between perceptions and emotions, create another issue for the perceptual model by actually arguingthat emotions are a form of judgement? This is possible, and Iam not a follower of the perceptual model as I think it is overly simplistic. I will leave that for a future paper to discuss, as my primary goal here was just to contest Helm’s simplistic understanding of perception. In doing so, I believe his objection to the analogy between emotion and perception breaks down. 

A second potential issue with the theory I have laid out above is that some of my examples may arguably include baggage in the form of mental processes that go beyond mere perception. While I cannot guarantee that all my examples hold up to scrutiny, I believe the case still stands. I believe our perceptions as well as our emotions make use of evolutionary logic and are thus not unbiased. This leads to times when our logical objectives are at odds with our perceptions in much the same way as recalcitrant emotions, and they both may continue to motivate our behavior despite our attempts to dispel them.

6. Conclusion

In summary, in this paper I explored different models of emotion with regards to recalcitrant emotions. I made a case for why recalcitrant emotions do not pose a problem for, and can in fact work to support, the perceptual model of emotion. I summarized and then refuted the case made by Helm in his 2015 paper Emotions and Recalcitrance: Reevaluating the Perceptual Model by presenting evidence undermining the veridical nature of perceptions more generally than the examples of perceptual illusions given by Helm, and showed how perceptions do in fact include an acceptance of their contents that can be illogical in an analogous way to recalcitrant emotions. Finally, I considered the implications of this approach and some potential issues with it. In conclusion, the more we learn about the mechanisms of perception the more we will learn things aren’t as they seem.

Bibliography

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