I mentioned an article on emotions the other day, and Fredrik Graver asks "why the author doesn't reference more recent thinking on how emotions work," citing this article. It references the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett and Earl Miller who suggest that emotions play a role in categorization of sensory phenomena, where "A category is an event in which different things are treated as similar or equivalent in a particular situation." Barrett, for example, focuses on "the concept of allostasis: how an organism predictively regulates its energy use. In her view, emotion categories - fear, happiness, anger - resemble predictive 'action plans' that the nervous system generates to activate behaviors that have served us well before." I think this is plausible so long as we understand categorization as more like pattern recognition and not at all the same as attaching a word or concept to an experience. "Barrett and Miller are asking the field to move beyond a model in which categories are stored like documents in the brain's filing cabinet. From the way the brain is structured to compress sensory information, to how it predicts and prepares the body to respond, categorization is 'baked' in, the authors wrote."
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